What are those leftist DAs thinking?
You might think it’s rather simple: their goal is chaos and suffering, the better to demoralize people and make them amendable to more power grabs.
Perhaps. But I think it’s more complex than that.
I think those “progressive” prosecutors are true believers, and my experience with true believers on the left is that theory is all and reality can be talked away by theory. Suffering and crime is the result of their policies? No, don’t believe your lying eyes; believe us when we say it’s not what it seems.
And I don’t even think they perceive themselves as lying. They are that far into their immersive dedication to a theory of human behavior, crime, poverty, and societal rather than personal wrongdoing that it cannot be given up in this lifetime.
Part of this theory is that criminals are victims. Even if that is sometimes true – after all, many criminals have had hard lives and especially hard childhoods – it explains little because most people with hard lives don’t become criminals. Most poor people don’t become criminals. Because we know little about causes and because we have yet to be able to prevent crime except by locking people up who commit crimes, such efforts at releasing criminals in some supposed flow of kindly goodwill is doomed to only encourage criminal predation. Until we really can prevent crime, there is no alternative to locking criminals up in order to protect the innocent.
Those prosecutors don’t believe that. Race is part of their belief system: because black people are highly overrepresented in the criminal population, that must be because of racism. No need to prove it; it’s just an obvious fact to them, and their remedy is to pretend that allowing such criminals to roam free doesn’t hurt the black communities of inner cities more than it hurts anyone else.
You might disagree with me and say no, these prosecutors don’t really believe in what they’re doing. And maybe you’re correct. But I learned long ago that the capacity of a leftist to believe, believe, believe and to deny actual reality is vast.
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
Larry Krasner (Philly’s Soros-funded DA, and one of far too many, including NYC’s Alvin Bragg) recently lied, blatantly and outrageously, about crime in his city; the former (black) mayor, Michael Nutter, accused him, amusingly, of inhabiting a delusional world of “white wokeness.” What is not at all amusing is the number of these crazed radicals deliberately releasing violent recidivists onto the streets of cities across the country, resulting, with all too predictable frequency, in dire consequences for the local citizenry, not to mention the lamentable fact that a foreign-born and highly unethical financial speculator can use his ill-gotten billions to subvert the legal system of our declining republic.
That’s silly: we are going to find a way to prevent crime? And blacks are disproportionally jailed because of racism? Just look the the FBI data: young black males are a violent, murderous criminal lot.
And from the “Because-You-Only-Get-One-Chance-To-Make-A-First-Impression” files…
“Meet the new US attorney for Massachusetts” — Rachael Rollins:
https://twitter.com/mikesacconetv/status/1468695255448961034
H/T Jeff Carlson twitter feed.
Related:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-us-attorney-rollins-rebuked-reporters-video
I believe you Neo.
I see it in my own family. Facts or logic that run counter to the belief system are either ignored completely, or are not synthesized.
It is not an original thought to compare many on the Left to religious fanatics. Dare I say similar to some Muslims? If that is the case, then the faith justifies the means.
Neo. One would think that the capacity for self-delusion and inability to notice reality would spill over to other areas of life. Such as how to breathe without instructions. How does one stay on the established path to DA-hood while one’s brain is doing donuts and jam stops?
H. Sap didn’t spend a million years coming up the hard way while bringing along such deficiencies in hunting bands of maybe a dozen adult males.
It would be a form of compliment to presume they’re doing evil for evil’s sake and doing so coldly, competently, and with full knowledge of the results.
No. They hope the rest of us are stupid enough to believe. And they get elected….
Richard Saunders:
Perhaps you don’t have as much experience with leftist true believers as I do.
I think there are true believers, but I also think there are unethical politicos happy to make a million off the naivete of others. Most of these DA’s have taken over a million from Soros funded campaigns.
I intended to note this in the Smollett thread, but once you decide to lie like that big, then you must continue to go big or, well note home, but jail. I think this is also what happened with Russian Collusion Hoax. We all know it is hoax, but the perpetrators continue to lie, because not lying is just a ticket to jail.
I have no idea of the Leftists believing the bull they talk, it could be in a Leftist bubble it has become their reality.
But also know the Leftist elites are using crime to sow fear and decent into the population just as Leftist movements have in French Revolution, Russian Revolution, and the Nazi takeover of Germany. The Gulag system the Soviets let the criminal element rule the gulag.
neo writes, “You might think it’s rather simple: their goal is chaos and suffering,” but assures us that “I think it’s more complex than that.”
For what it’s worth (that and a subway token gets you a ride on the subway), I didn’t think that [immediately above] for a microsecond. I knew/know that it’s a question of having to put up with “true believers.” Neo’s explication is, I think very on-target: “the capacity of a leftist to believe, believe, believe and to deny actual reality is vast.”
But I do need to offer a supplementary nod in Leland’s (5:07 pm) direction: “there are unethical [Soros-funded] politicos happy to make a million off the naivete of others.”
For “amendable” read “amenable”. Good post as usual but I have nothing to add. Please delete this comment.
“I think there are true believers, but I also think there are unethical politicos happy to make a million off the naivete of others. “ Leland
Yes, whatever the ratio, the poltically active progressivists has its Stalinists along with its Trotskyists.
“their goal is chaos and suffering, the better to demoralize people and make them amendable to more power grabs.” neo
Above all else, the Stalinists seek power for its own sake. Whereas, the Trotskyist seeks power because they have seen The Truth.
“my experience with true believers on the left is that theory is all and reality can be talked away by theory.” neo
Agreed, which raises the question, how much suffering and death must we endure before they are held to account? Is there no limit? These progressive DA’s and judges are acting as accomplices to the criminals.
Clearly the less radical on the left and their liberal enablers are preventing the true believers on the left from being held to account.
Given that so far legally immovable obstacle and absent rebellion and revolution, Venezuela’s fate awaits.
It’s very easy to abstract real humans away. You direct your good intentions to “humanity” in abstract and away from real humans.
Or so Screwtape says.
The great thing is to direct the malice to his immediate neighbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know. The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. There is no good at all in inflaming his hatred of Germans if, at the same time, a pernicious habit of charity is growing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train. Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart.) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they may make him more amusing when he gets there.
Mostly True Believers.
But don’t forget that True Belief allows for a lot of sublimated aggression to be directed at certain groups (generally some class of BadWhites ™) whilst bathing publicly in the Blood of the Lamb. Wokeism attracts many who simply don’t have the moral courage to admit to themselves that they like to hurt people and ought really to do something about this — like jump off the nearest bridge.
A certain John Brown comes to mind. As do the nameless and formless individuals and judges who, to pick one random instance, famously integrated Boston’s public schools back in the day. Thereby righteously blighting the lives of a very large number of Irish who didn’t count and anyway deserved it.
I have often wondered what George Soros’ reasons are for his efforts to destroy civilization. Maybe it has something to do with his attack on the British pound, although that made him rich.
I have a daughter who is a committed leftist. No use arguing with her. Sadly, she is an FBI agent.
The Bible tells us that the love of money is the root of all evil.
Life tells us that the love of theory is the root of all folly.
Neo. I think you mean me. I know mush heads. They vote for guys like the DA you describe.
My question is can a person get through all the hurdles to DA office and be that divorced from reality.
Separate question.
Geoffrey Britain
Given that so far legally immovable obstacle and absent rebellion and revolution, Venezuela’s fate awaits.
Which reminds me of Chesa Boudin, the DA for San Francisco.(His parents named him for Che as in Guevara, and SA as in South America.) In his backpacking trip in Latin America, he ended up in Caracas.(see his book, Gringo. Yes, that’s the title.) Within 24 hours of arriving in Caracas, he was invited to Miraflores, Venezuela’s equivalent of our White House, to meet President Hugo Chavez. How many backpackers get invited to see El Presidente? In Chesa’s case, his leftist royalty pedigree got him the invitation. He spent a year translating for Hugo Chavez.
Out of his year in Venezuela came a book,The Venezuelan Revolution: 100 Questions-100 Answers, which Chesa co-authored. From memory, here are 2 questions and answers, as best I can remember.
Chesa made no mention of Hugo’s hero-worship of Fidel Castro and other dictators like Gafaffi.
Those scare tactic claims came true. While the opposition won two thirds of the Assembly seats in the December 2015 elections, Maduro dissolved the Assembly and rules as a dictator. Maduro disqualified opposition candidates in the 2018 Presidential “election.” Regarding fears of losing what little economic well-being they might have had, that is one fear that definitely came true.
Thanks a lot, Chesa.
SF DA Chesa Boudin has gotten some flack for having let out on bail or parole some people who went on to kill others.
Mike K,
Have you ever asked your FBI leftist daughter what she thinks refusing to prosecute shoplifting will do to a city?
Just as the 2020 summer riots began, I saw a mother I knew on Facebook having a public conversation with her 30 ish year old white social justice son . The mother had dared to post a MLK quote on her own page, to which the son publicly declared that she was enabling racism.
I had worked with this mother ministering to kids in a group foster home. She had gone to great lengths, over numerous years, to arrange Christmas parties, fun events, lake days, religious studies, etc for black, white, and hispanic kids stuck in the foster system. She loved those kids, regardless of race, and poured herself into serving them. Then her woketard son publicly accused her of enabling racism.
My blood boiled.
I pointed out to numbskull that it was likely many of the businesses that were being destroyed were black owned. Numbskull’s answer was that it was “worth the cost” for social justice. Numskull had his own little business, but nobody was burning it down, but it was ok with him if a black owned business got attacked to supposedly fight racism against blacks.
I hoped I would cross paths with him at some point after that. Perhaps by the grace of God I have not.
Oh how I have fantasied about publicly calling him out in front of a group of blacks in a restaurant and telling them how he supported attacking black owned businesses!
In the social justice religion, group right triumph over individual rights.
jon
I’m sure you know he’s not alone.
Richard Aubrey:
Yes, I meant you. Not sure where I pulled “Saunders” from. There was a commenter here who was a regular, named “Richard Saunders,” but he hasn’t commented in over a year.
Hope he’s okay. Wonder what happened to him.
You do share a first name and quite a few letters in your last names, though.
Gringo,
“SF DA Chesa Boudin has gotten some flack for having let out on bail or parole some people who went on to kill others.”
I’m a bit surprised that these DAs like Boudin and Gascon are still breathing. If one of my relatives or friends was murdered by one of these released criminals, I’d be doing some heavy thinking about appropriate compensation.
In effectively enabling the murderer’s to deny the victim’s right to life, these DAs have voluntarily forfeited their own right to life. The only proportionate consequence for that enabling is that they pay the same price that was extracted from the victims.
In a nation in which the rule of law prevailed, I’d be content with “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord”. But as the rule of law is increasingly absent, justice must be served as best it can. History has repeatedly demonstrated that evil will prevail until it is stopped… permanently. There’s only one cure for rabid dogs.
neo,
I agree with your estimation. I know people who believe disparate outcomes must mean a systemic flaw. Also, far too many seem unwilling to accept the simple fact that having a mother and a father in the home (especially a mother and father who are at least somewhat interested in a child’s well-being) is extremely important for human development. Its absence leaves a tremendous hole and the data prove that. Yet folks refuse to accept that so they continue to tilt at windmills.
Richard Aubrey,
Yes, a person can get through all the hurdles to DA office and be that divorced from reality. I am stunned at what law schools teach these days, as well as the attitudes of many of the professors. Do some googling on Ivy League U Penn Law Professor (and neurologist!) Amy Wax and how her colleagues and students treat her and her very sound words.
jon baker,
What a sad story. I hope that young man matures and apologizes to his amazing mother.
Rufus. Never contemplated law school. But surely there are some things that will get you kicked out. Delusions of a narrow political matter are one thing. The ability to actually have them and believe them must, it seems to me, be the result of a deficient ability to deal with reality which can cost one in nearly any involved activity or aspiration.
So they must be able to hide the delusions which presumes some controlled ratiocination. Which, reversing the process, means they must know they’re wrong.
Not like the mush heads who vote for them.
Richard Aubrey,
… a deficient ability to deal with reality…
Reality is a tricky thing.
There are plenty of atheists walking about believing that organized religion is the root of tremendous evil in the world. And one can look at the number of major wars where a difference in religion was a catalyst, or the past 2,000 years in the Middle East, or Muslim Jihad or Christian Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition… and understand their perspective.
There are plenty of Christians who believe the root of most of the evil in the West is a lack of healthy families and a devolution of family values.
There are plenty of Muslims who believe the root of most evil in the West is a lack of morality. The Taliban believe they are protecting women.
There are plenty of Leftists who believe archaic, Western values causes children to develop shame and feelings of inadequacy, which leads to them not reaching their full potential.
We all create little stories everyday about what we see in the world around us. I try hard to keep my version of reality consistent with actual reality, but I think most everyone else thinks they’re doing the same thing.
@ Frederick – in re Screwtape’s advice to Wormword to push virtues outward to the circle of fantasy, and vices inward to the circle of friends and family.
I love Lewis’s book and believe that every chapter can be footnoted with a series of examples “ripped from the headlines.”
However, I also like Charles Schultz’s TL;DR version in Peanuts:
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.eHYUs0WmPi1FH3mp9kgVPgHaHa%26pid%3DApi%26h%3D160&f=1
I do not discount evil at the helm in utilizing the foolishness of the average citizen, resulting in the assent to vote these people into office. I highly recommend the series EWTN produced A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing if you want to discover the deliberate intentions of key people and groups in the western world that over a considerable period of time have worked to bring about their aims. One would have to deny the existence of evil to surmise that goodness is the goal. I agree that our fellow citizens that embrace these illusory notions and vote in these monsters are well-meaning but sadly are useful idiots to the real cause. Episode 2 that exposes the transgender weapon is particularly chilling. Not taking evil seriously is the most pernicious of mistakes.
https://www.ewtn.com/tv/shows/wolf-in-sheeps-clothing
Rufus. I get that. Point is, if you’re that stupid, are you smart enough to hide it when it counts?
To use your example: If the Taliban think they’re protecting women, and they execute a woman in public for being….on the women’s soccer team or something…they think they’re convincing the rest of us that they’re protecting women. It doesn’t occur to them that others might not able to reconcile the issue.
An aspiring DA has to get through law school, take the next steps, whatever they are, without alarming a number of people who are in a position to stop him cold. And if they’re actually this deluded, how do they manage to get past those hurdles? Are they smart enough to hide these monstrously destructive delusions? Can they hold these delusions and simultaneously hide them? If yo’re that dumb, you’re too dumb to deliberately hide the delusions.
My point is, nobody’s that dumb. They bloody well know what they’re doing and they’re not going to cop to it until it’s too late for anybody to do anything about it.
Part of this theory is that criminals are victims.
I don’t buy that as a defense of the leftist prosecutors. The people targeted by crime are also victims, and the leftist prosecutors have made it abundantly clear that they don’t give a damn about those people. So it’s not concern for victims that motivates them.
Just as the 2020 summer riots began, I saw a mother I knew on Facebook having a public conversation with her 30 ish year old white social justice son . The mother had dared to post a MLK quote on her own page, to which the son publicly declared that she was enabling racism.
It’s no coincidence that I deactivated my Facebook account in June 2020, and later deleted it entirely. In my case, the tipping point was my daughter, who was mindlessly reposting BLM/Antifa slogans. I value my relationship with her, which is why I need to avoid exposure to her political opinions. We avoid politics in face-to-face conversation, but on Facebook, her opinions were in my face every day.
I could have muted or unfriended her, but I had already been doing that with lots of other people for similar reasons. The business with my daughter convinced me that it was futile. Facebook had become toxic to me. So I pulled the plug. I haven’t missed it.
Just look the the FBI data: young black males are a violent, murderous criminal lot.
Some of them are, and some of them aren’t. Certain dispositions and behaviors are more common and intense in certain subpopulations than others. No need to engage in group libel. Just let the chips fall where they may.
the tipping point was my daughter, who was mindlessly reposting BLM/Antifa slogans
At least in regard to the younger Millennials, their parents as youths tended to be skeptical of utopian thinking and of inchoate social antagonism, and voted Republican more often than not. As we speak, the peer cultures of most Millennials are just silage and the succeeding cohorts are worse. No clue how this cultural disaster came about.
My question is can a person get through all the hurdles to DA office and be that divorced from reality.
He’d been a public defender and criminal defense lawyer his whole working life. He fancies a society that indulges criminals is better than one which does not, and he’s been doubling down on this stupid idea for 35 years. The question is why is Philadelphia’s electorate so feckless as to tolerate his stupid ass in a consequential public office.
They’re sick bigots in power, and they’re acting on their bigotry.
They hate white people. They mostly hate Asians. Also any other minorities that get in the way.
They hate those that live outside cities, are gainfully employed in anything but the government and non profits. And that hate police.
They particularly hate those that believe in a religion, except for Islam. They’re afraid of Muslims.
Richard Aubrey,
I think doctors in the 18th century were typically smart people. Had to at least be adept at memorizing large amounts of information. There weren’t as strict standards then, but one would assume the Doctor assigned to the former President of the U.S. and hero of the Revolutionary War would have been well educated and credentialed. When George Washington fell ill his Doctor bled him to death to remove the “bad humours” that were afflicting the General.
Look at the current debates among very well educated virologists and medical doctors. The truth is easier to perceive when looking in the rear view mirror than when looking through the windshield.
Yes, some very well educated people with high SAT, ACT and LSAT scores who scored in the upper quintiles on the BAR exam believe there are 57 genders, children have a right to puberty blockers, all white people in the U.S. have privelege and are naturally racist… I know some. I think most of us here know some.
Carpy,
They hate. Always.
The target of the hate changes at times. But the hate remains. The hate is the constant. The hate is what animates them. The hate is what makes them feel alive. The hate, strangely enough, is what makes them feel good about themselves.
If they didn’t pick some group to slander and hate, some group that they could use to assure themselves of their superiority, they’d be left with no one to hate but their own unhappy selves.
Dr. Chaotica,
Is your posting name, “Dr. Chaotica”, a reference to the Hollodeck character from “Star Trek Voyager”?
Rufus: I know people like that. I just don’t think they “believe” what they peddle. I think they know better and their goal is how many stupid lies they can force others to pretend to believe. And thence to a New Society.
I’m not so sure we can ever find people who can claim truth—from a physics objective real world sense. The problem is that all that is out there is probably best described by what is called quantum field theory. And if we scale down our view to this dimension we are going to be faced with paradoxes of tunneling, before and after points of time, difficulties in determining causes and effects…and we will be flooded with emergent properties arising from fields in space. These are realities that are exquisitely difficult to put into words or thoughts or pictures. And, if we use math only, can our brains ever really understand this reality, beyond its description?
Wet cells in great apes skulls probably can’t this close to ultimate truth, ie what is really out there in the objective world.
}}} because black people are highly overrepresented in the criminal population, that must be because of racism.
No, it’s because they are fucking idiots.
I once had a FB friend who was black. I often took issues with things he posted, but he did not ban me for disagreeing with him, so I did continue to express reasoning.
Then he posted some idiocy about how police putting an unlocked truck full of Nike’s in a mostly black neighborhood was “entrapment”.
I told him he was full of shit, that you could do the exact same thing with, say, a truck full of Xbox’s in poor white neighborhood, and, while there would be some people caught, there would be far fewer of them.
I assert that Black people, as a group — and this guy clearly agreed with it — seem to think that they have the right to grab anything they can get away with that isn’t nailed down… that there is no shame or dishonor in doing it, the only “bad” thing is getting caught.
I assert, also, that, while there are certainly white people with the same attitude, they represent a much smaller percentage of the white population. I don’t think this has anything whatsoever to do with skin color.
I argue that it’s culture
Anyway, there was a back and forth between me, him, and another friend of his (also clearly black). At some point he “decided” that “what I said was so idiotic” that he deleted it. At that point, I did something I’ve only done twice, and both times for the same reason, I unfriended him. Censoring me is unacceptable. I’ve had people ask me to modify something I said because of language, and I’ve freely complied. But I won’t tolerate overt censorship if I don’t make an “unacceptable” comment (like cursing someone out — even for just cause).
And this guy wasn’t some poor black kid, either, he was, by his own description, college educated middle class. But he bloviated the same ludicrous “it’s never the black man’s fault — it’s always racism” bullshit all the time.
As long as they swallow that crap, they will always be “highly over-represented in the criminal population”…
More simply, “if you don’t like the way the police treat you, stop doing so many stupid things that are against the law: Police yourselves“
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