The ladder of evil

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Unfortunately, it seems as though it’s always a timely subject, and right now even more timely. So I thought it could use another go-round, very slightly edited.]

Commenter “Ymarsakar” once made an interesting observation:

When the world declares Jews, Republicans, and whites to be non humans that need to be exterminated to get rid of a threat to humanity, most people will Obey.

Most will. They have nothing in their spine that can resist the Power of the World and its numbers. Nothing.

I have a slightly different take on it. I’ve long conceptualized the whole thing as a hierarchy of evil and the resistance to it, a sort of ladder with many rungs. Here they are, in order from most evil to most dedicated to fighting evil:

–Some people will conceptualize, plan, and implement it as leaders.

–Some people will actively cooperate with vigor.

–Some people will support it but not actively participate.

–Some people will be indifferent (or even unaware) unless it directly reaches them or their family.

–Some people will be somewhat disturbed by it, but manage to put it out of their minds most of the time and go on with their lives.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and contemplate various forms of resistance, but will be too frightened to act.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to act in small ways to resist it, ways they consider lower risk.

–Some people will be disturbed by it and will decide to take great risks in order to resist it, but could be stopped by threats (not necessarily threats to themselves, but threats to friends and family).

–Some people will risk all to actively resist it in every way they can.

An example of the latter would be those Poles who continued their rescue efforts and resistance despite this type of retribution from the Nazis:

Poland was the only place where German law rendered any assistance to Jews punishable by death. That punishment was severe and collective: It was meted out not only to the rescuer but also to his entire family and to anyone else who knew about such activities and did not report them. Almost 1,000 Poles were killed this way, including entire families whose children were not spared.

When we talk about the prevalence of evil in humanity, and whether people are “good at heart,” this is what I think we’re actually discussing. What percentage of the population belongs to each group? I don’t know, but if I had to guess at the shape of a graph, it probably would be a normal distribution—that is, the biggest bump would be in the middle groups, with much smaller numbers for the beginning and ending rungs of the ladder of evil.

So what causes the difference among the groups? Why is a person in one rather than another? Darned if I know, but I have ideas. Some of it probably has to do with devotion to something beyond oneself, which could be religion (in certain circumstances it could even be Communism—in Poland, for example, many of the resisters to the Nazis were Communists). This can lead to good or to evil (such as the 9/11 terrorists, for the latter).

Many of the differences among groups almost certainly involve personal traits that are some combination of nature and nurture, such as the extent of the devotion to liberty. And although psychopaths/sociopaths (the ladder’s first couple of rungs) are often born, certain societies in certain times can be especially effective at fostering and encouraging and promoting them, and using them most fully to further goals of the group rather than just goals of the individual psychopath/sociopath.

In the end, though, there is something mysterious about it all: the problem of evil, with which humankind has been wrestling for aeons.

It’s roundup time

The New Neo Posted on by

Lots of depressing news, too many stories to cover in depth. So here’s another roundup. Wish I could be more cheerful, but here goes:

(1) Another case of anti-black hate graffiti turns out to be a hoax perpetrated by a black student. Business as usual.

(2) New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers are giving illegal aliens some hefty COVID relief. I wonder whether most New Yorkers think this is just fine:

New York lawmakers struck a deal this week to establish a $2.1 billion coronavirus relief fund for undocumented immigrants and other unemployed workers who were ineligible for federal aid during the pandemic.

The fund, which was announced as part of a broader $212 billion state budget agreement, will offer one-time payments of up to $15,600 to undocumented immigrants who lost their jobs during the virus-induced crisis.

(3) As promised, Biden appoints a commission to “study” the Supreme Court and with an eye to future Court-packing – otherwise known as “reform.” No surprise there, although I suppose some poorly-informed people will indeed be surprised by this move from Joe the Moderate Healer. I also wonder whether it’s cricket (that is, constitutional) for the executive branch to appoint a commission to study and aim to “reform” another supposedly co-equal branch.

(4) RIP Britain’s Prince Philip, dead at 99. He and the Queen were married for 73 years, and apparently it was very much a love match.

(5) You can read Andrew Branca’s summary of yesterday’s testimony in the Chauvin trial here. It sounds as though there was a lot of very strange medical testimony, and for some of it the defense counsel wasn’t given related documents until last night. How on earth could the defense properly prepare for cross-examination on it, then? The testimony’s strangeness involved, among other things, supposed analyses of precise oxygen levels for Floyd on the basis of viewing the videos. That seems delusional on the face of it, but this testimony was allowed. I can only hope that when the defense gets to present its own evidence, its witnesses will address these issues.

(6) Let’s hear it for Britain’s Daily Mail, which often reports better on American news than the American media does. Of course, that’s a very low bar. And speaking of low, the paper has a detailed story, with photos, about Hunter Biden’s laptop. It includes the fact that they had forensic experts authenticate the laptop as being Hunter’s, which I think was clear anyway even before this – although American media and social media has been doing its level best to cover that up, as well. Ace writes about some of the sordid details here, as well as describing the process by which the laptop was authenticated as being Hunter’s.

One of the many things becoming even more clear is that Hunter lied on his firearm application, which is a crime. It’s the sort of crime the left professes to care about, but I think we can safely say they don’t care about it when Hunter Biden is the perpetrator. The Biden story and photos remind me of certain Fellini movies, the story is so sordid and grotesque in its debasement. But the left says nothing much to see here; move along.

When I was reading at that link about the reception the 1969 Fellini film “Fellini Satyricon” received, I was struck by this quote from Italian reviewer Giovanni Grazzini: “These ancient Romans who spend their days in revelry, ravaged by debauchery, are really an unhappy race searching desperately to exorcise their fear of death.” It seems to me that could be a description of Hunter Biden himself.

The anticipated aftermath of the Chauvin trial

The New Neo Posted on by

Everybody knows that one of the clouds hanging over the Chauvin trial, tainting it even further, is the threat of violence if he isn’t convicted of some major crime.

As commenter “J.J.” points out, however:

If the mayor of Minneapolis and the governor of Minnesota would take charge, tell the citizens that no violence will be tolerated and then back those words up, justice could be carried out in an unbiased fashion. Why are these officials, who swore an oath to protect and defend the citizens of their city and state, not doing their jobs? Because they are part of the Woke Supremacy or cowed by it.

I would add that this is hardly limited to Minneapolis or Minnesota. I am virtually certain that the violent wing of BLM, and Antifa and other organizations who rioted for months in many cities of America after Floyd’s death, are primed and ready to riot when the verdict is announced if it isn’t exactly to their liking. Maybe even if it is.

I agree with J.J. that leaders in blue cities and states have for the most part abdicated two of their foremost duties as elected officials: to defend the rule of law, and to keep their citizens safe from mobs and other violence. More than anything else, their refusal allows mob violence of the left (not of the right; that sort of violence is treated quite differently) to flourish.

In turn, that abdication and the resultant threat has probably corrupted the legal process utterly, both in the case of Chauvin and in the cases of any similar accusations going forward. And that in turn leads to police officers either quitting the force or turning their backs on stopping crime, in order to protect themselves from such charges. The chaos that the mayors and governors have enabled therefore leads to more chaos in an escalating feedback loop.

The other day I read or heard – I don’t remember where – someone say that he thought that mayors and others on the left were allowing this sort of violence in order to argue for more gun control in its wake. That certainly could be one of the factors operating, as well.

On political hating and virtue

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “stan” writes:

Neo wrote: “I expect that most people will go on believing that Chauvin was indeed a cold-blooded murderer, and a racist one at that.”

More importantly, they will feel morally superior because of that belief and have absolutely no desire to listen to any facts that will challenge that belief.

I think this is true, and an important observation. It is at least a significant part of the reason that challenges to such people’s worldviews are so often met with denial and anger and cutoff rather than a calm back-and-forth about the truth or veracity of whatever the claim might be.

For example, if belief in the guilt of someone like Derek Chauvin is labeled not as something correct or incorrect but as something morally good, then his guilt or innocence often cannot be debated in a rational manner by those who believe it is a test of moral worth rather than rationality. If “Chauvin is guilty” is defined as something that good people believe, and “Chauvin is not guilty” is defined as a belief that is bad and racist, that takes the argument out of the realm of logic and makes it nearly impervious to being challenged with facts. In fact, such a challenge is often also labeled morally repugnant on the face of it.

The left’s triumph is to have normalized such reactions to argument, making them both more common in terms of the number of individuals functioning that way and also applied to a wider variety of topics.

Commenter “stan” then follows it up with this:

The intense desire to hate, to slander, to stereotype while simultaneously deriving great satisfaction and feelings of moral superiority because of that very hatred is frightening to watch. It’s not just morally depraved, it’s evil. They enjoy hating. They enjoy their slanders and stereotypes. They revel in them. They marinate themselves in hate.

Evil.

This is where I disagree. Yes, there are indeed people like that. They actually exist on both sides, and I’m not just saying that to be evenhanded; I’ve seen it. However, I think they are more common on the left than right, but I still don’t see them as the majority of the people on the left who take the path I’ve been discussing in this post.

The majority of such people are not natural haters – at least not the ones I know, and I know quite a few. They’re not seething with hatred, happy to be hating. What they think they are hating is hate itself. What they think they are hating is evil. And isn’t the task of a good person to hate evil? Orwell knew what he was talking about when he described the Two Minutes Hate. Many of those who purposely whip people up into this frenzy of hatred in order to increase their own power might well be described as “evil,” but I see the vast majority of the others as followers succumbing to an all-too-human failing.

It seems that lately we’ve reached critical mass with this phenomenon. It’s become utterly common, and the two halves of America are locked in a bitter and vicious embrace, like spouses who have come to hate each other and yet cannot seem to separate. That doesn’t mean the hatred is equal on both sides; as I already said, I see much more of it on the left. But I think that’s because people on the left are fed a steady diet of it and they see it commonly displayed even (or perhaps especially) by people who supposedly are leaders, both moral and political.

And most people have a tendency to follow the leader.

Although I continue to believe that most people who exhibit this behavior are not themselves evil, I do believe that such behavior can and ordinarily does strongly enable evil. I think that’s where we’re at right now.

Have you noticed that Biden and company are acting like rebellious kids doing the opposite of whatever Trump did…

The New Neo Posted on by

…whether it makes sense or not.

When therapists work with children, teens, or young adults who are acting up, it’s often useful to point out that doing things just because they are the opposite of what parents do is still a form of being controlled by those parents. It’s not thinking independently and it’s not being smart.

Of course, for the Biden administration, there are also huge differences in ideology and goals between them and Trump, and this is a large part of what drives their decisions. Trump put America first; they did not. Trump tried to thwart the left; they are the left. Trump was a friend of Israel and a foe of Iran; they are not. Trump wanted to discourage illegal immigration; they want to encourage it. Trump was anti-woke; they are in league with woke. Trump was against the racism of anti-racism; they are for it.

In my youth, the two parties used to have some differences but were united on many of the basics. No more.

The Chauvin trial so far: perceptions of guilt and innocence

The New Neo Posted on by

John Hinderaker of Powerline has written a summary of the Chauvin trial so far; you can find it here. It’s well worth reading.

I’ve followed the trial (mostly Branca’s daily summaries at Legal Insurrection) and watched a bit of it, and a couple of things strike me. The first is that, even though I’ve done more research on the Floyd incident than most people, there are still new things being revealed as the trial goes on. The first is that Floyd had sustained several dangerous overdoses not all that long before his drug ingestion of a fatal level of fentanyl the day of his fateful encounter with Chauvin and the other officers. The second is the fact that the man in the car with him that day was his drug dealer. The third was that there were some clearly visible pills in Floyd’s car and the squad car that were not tested till the defense noticed them on inspecting the cars, pills that were found to contain both fentanyl and Floyd’s DNA. The fourth is that the crowd watching and videotaping that day was also quite threatening to the officers and potentially the EMTs, which is apparently the reason that the EMTs removed Floyd quickly from the scene before treating him (I had long wondered why they hadn’t administered CPR then and there).

This new knowledge introduces a lot of irony. For example, the contributory killer of Floyd may actually have been his drug dealer (and/or the crowd) rather than the police. The dealer may have even encouraged Floyd to ingest the drugs when the police came; after all, dealers ordinarily face higher penalties than users. The dealer was asked to testify in the trial but said he would be taking the Fifth if that happened, and so he won’t be called and the jury will almost certainly not hear his role fully explored, nor will he have to answer for it. He may be tried later, of course, although I doubt it if the state manages to convict Chauvin. In addition, the state seems to have been shockingly negligent (either purposely or accidentally) in not testing those drugs in the car. Also, how long ago did the press know about the multiple previous overdoses? I would guess that the police knew almost from the start, and yet it took a trial for this information to be available to the public – and meanwhile, multiple cities burned.

Would any of this truth have changed anything had it been widely known shortly after Floyd died? At this point, I’m cynical enough that I doubt it. After all, even without those facts being known, enough was known to cast grave doubt on Chauvin’s guilt. I wrote about that this past summer, in particular after the bodycam transcript was released (see this July post, for example). That transcript, which I read very carefully, convinced me that there was a strong likelihood that Chauvin and the others were not guilty (something I had already begun to suspect about three weeks after Floyd’s death, based on my research and readings).

And still another surprise was how few people – even those on the right – were writing about that transcript and how much it favored Chauvin when studied carefully.

One person who was writing was Sharyl Attkisson, and another was George Parry. For a link to some of Parry’s work and a discussion of it – as well as a discussion of my own thought processes in the weeks and months after Floyd died – please see this August post of mine. In it I wrote this:

I want to re-emphasize that all of the research in the above quote was done by about three weeks after Floyd’s death, which is two months ago. And it wasn’t hard to do – it was all readily available online at the time. We know more now, of course – a lot more. And it all falls on the side of the exoneration of Chauvin and the others rather than their guilt.

I forget why I didn’t publish the post at the time it was written. I think it was because it was very long and unorganized (the above is only an excerpt), and so many dramatic events were happening at the time that I think it just got lost in the shuffle. But my point isn’t about me; it’s about how easy it was, early in the proceedings, to find out a lot that was relevant to the guilt or innocence of Chauvin and the others.

Very few people even tried. Their minds were already made up, either because the video convinced them or because it was ideologically necessary for them to spread the word that Chauvin was a cold-blooded murderer.

Does the trial have the power to change those minds? In terms of the jury, if it changes only one person’s mind the result will be a hung jury. Whatever happens, though, I expect that most people will go on believing that Chauvin was indeed a cold-blooded murderer, and a racist one at that.

Criticizing woke academia: here’s a letter to praise

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip:”AesopFan.”]

Many of you are almost certainly familiar with some of the signers of this letter (for example, Shelby Steele, Glenn Loury, and John McWhorter), written on March 22 and addressed to the president of Smith College [emphasis mine]:

We, the undersigned, are writing as Black Americans to express our outrage at the treatment of the service workers of Smith College in light of the incident of alleged racial profiling that occurred in the summer of 2018.

Before investigating the facts, Smith College assumed that every one of the people who prepare its food and clean its facilities was guilty of the vile sin of racism and forced them to publicly “cleanse” themselves through a series of humiliating exercises in order to keep their jobs. When an investigation of the precipitating incident revealed no evidence of bias, Smith College offered no public apology to the falsely accused and merely doubled down on the shaming of its most vulnerable employees.

Many of us participated in the Civil Rights Movement, fighting for equal treatment under the law, which included due process and the presumption of innocence. We didn’t march so that Americans of any race could be presumed guilty and punished for false accusations while the elite institution that employed them cowered in fear of a social media mob. We certainly didn’t march so that privileged Blacks could abuse working class whites based on “lived experience.”

More at the link.

Of course, letters from black intellectuals aren’t enough. Colleges must feel the financial heat or nothing will change – and I’m not even sure that anything will change if they do feel the financial heat.

And you know that push from the left to make college free for everyone? I see that as (a) a possible way to prop up colleges that would otherwise have financial difficulties; and (b) a way to further expand the number of people colleges can indoctrinate at taxpayer cost.

The death of Roseanne Boyland at the Capitol on January 6th: not what had been previously reported

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve previously written about the use of the phrase “deadly riots” to describe the Capitol incursion on January 6th, and how it has been employed in order to make it seem as though it was the rioters killing people or causing those deaths in some way. The death of Officer Sicknick has been covered at length here and elsewhere, and the original NY Times story that the crowd hurled a fire extinguisher at him, causing a head injury leading to his death, has been thoroughly discredited. The death of Ashli Babbitt is known to have been a result of her shooting by a Capitol Poiice officer, but we have learned very little of the details around that in the over three months since the incident.

But as I wrote on January 26, there were three other deaths either near the Capitol or among the demonstrators at the Mall that day. Two were reported as having been due to heart attacks, and another person – Roseanne Boyland, who was 34 years old – was considered to have been trampled to death by the crowd.

Now we finally have official medical word on cause of death for these three. The first two, Kevin Greeson, 55, and Benjamin Phillips, 50, have now officially been described as having died of natural causes from cardiovascular disease. Ashli Babbitt died by gunshot wound, as we already know – in this case, the word “homicide” simply means that she was killed by someone, not that the person who fired the shot has been judged guilty of wrongdoing.

None of that is a surprise. But the word on Roseanne Boyland’s death is quite unexpected: she is reported to have died by accident from “acute amphetamine intoxication.” I had previously researched her death as best I could, and although it wasn’t 100% clear that she had been trampled, there was no particular reason to doubt that it had happened just that way. Now it seems that her death wasn’t even a result of unintentional crowd action, and that she was not trampled at all.

No further word has been released on the death of Officer Sicknick.

Conrad Black on America today

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not going to go through this article by Conrad Black point by point, except to say that I disagree with a great deal of it and agree with quite a bit of it.

This is the paragraph on which I want to focus:

The United States now has an official regime of lies, supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media, and scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country. This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.

Let’s take that phrase by phrase.

“The United States now has an official regime of lies” – I would add that, although there have long been some lies dispensed by American “regimes,” it was during the Obama years that we saw much more lying than ever before, and the lies then began to be of a different quality and magnitude as well.

It is my contention that Obama was the first president we have ever had who lied not just about commonplace things like this fact or that one, or this detail of his history or that one, but about his basic political position and his plans for what he wished to accomplish during his presidency. He didn’t fully reveal those things although there were hints for those paying really close attention. Instead, Obama took refuge in vague phrases such as “fundamental transformation” and “hope and change,” reassuring people with his calm demeanor and soothing voice, and letting them fill in the blanks as they wished. Many voters considered him to be much more of a centrist than he ever intended to be as president, and the fostering of this impression was purposeful on Obama’s part. The MSM fully cooperated in protecting and defending Obama’s lies and that most basic lie, and the MSM was perfectly okay with lying for him when necessary.

Biden is a very different person, but one commonality is that a basic lie about intent, character, and purpose was a big part of his campaign and is still part of official campaign rhetoric. His lies are so blatant now that they are easily disproved, and yet for the most part the MSM is still covering for him. In addition, now social media and corporate America, as well as sports organizations, are fully onboard with it all.

“supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media” – “Worthlessly dishonest,” that is, if you think the media measures its own worth by its veracity. It certainly does not. It measures its own worth by whether it helps to accomplish the desired partisan results, and I’m going to assume that – with the temporary exception of the surprising election of one Donald Trump (unperson-in-the-making) during the presidential election of 2016 – the MSM is very satisfied indeed with those results so far. But it strives to reach onward and upward to greater heights, and the greatest height of all would be the permanent installation of a leftist government and the elevation of members of favored identity groups and their white leftist allies to the leadership of every facet and aspect of government and society.

“scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country” – I would add that, although there are many older people who adhere to the idea that America is indeed evil, an even greater majority of people under forty and especially under 30 are convinced of the truth of that evaluation of American history and essence. I think that proportion of believers will only increase over time, as that “narrative” of American evil makes further inroads into elementary education and all facets of American life. However, unlike Conrad Black, I don’t think I’d use the word “brainwashed,” although perhaps I’m just nitpicking here. I’d say instead that they’ve been indoctrinated.

“This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.” – Well, obviously not everyone; that’s hyperbole. But how many, and when might enough of them see it to matter, and will it be too late if and when they ever do? I don’t have Black’s optimism on that score. Maybe I know an atypical sample of people, but I’m acquainted with a lot of people who have always seemed to me to be smart, kind, and well-meaning, and who have no obvious dysfunction in personality or lives, and yet who now fully subscribe to the notion that America is evil and must atone for its sins. They believe that it’s the people who say otherwise who are lying and/or ignorant.