Cat Report

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blacklistednews/hKxa/~3/w_l8GAXA-M4/jeffrey-epstein-case-judge-has-ties-to-cops-who-want-to-keep-records.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email

Source: The Left’s Coming War on Cops

Defund the police?

Sure, and everything else the state does.

And there’s the problem.

If you want to defund the police, but still expect 64,722 victimless crimes to be punished, well, violent enforcement is going to have to be reintroduced somewhere.

I pointed this out to a libertarian academic who is enthusiastic about the “defund the police” phenomenon. He replied that the citizen patrols that some are recommending in place of traditional police don’t seem to be concerned about victimless crimes.

He evidently thought I was talking about prostitution and drugs.

No, I’m wondering who enforces — for example — the (literal) 39 new regulations on restaurants in Georgia (you remember Georgia, the state that was supposed to have opened so irresponsibly).

For that matter, who will enforce minimum-wage laws, FDA regulations, coronavirus “shelter-in-place” orders — all the things the left is absolutely convinced are necessary for our health and well-being despite mountains of evidence to the contrary?

We can call them the bolice, I guess, if that makes people feel better, but when so many peaceful activities are prohibited there has to be a violent enforcement agency somewhere.

Most of the activists advocating this approach, remember, are the same people who just got done telling us that we could bury our family members only with 10 or fewer people present — no exceptions.

Your mother doesn’t matter, you see.

Only George Floyd and their political cause matter.

And suddenly it’s quite all right for thousands of people to be packed together, even though we’ve been told for months that this would have catastrophic health results and kill everyone’s grandmothers. I guess the message is: old people matter, just not when protecting their lives interferes with our important plans.

Gotcha.

So it’s quite all right to be a grandma killer — on a massive scale even — as long as it’s for a politically approved reason. At that point, watch out, Grandma: it’s open season on you.

(Disclaimer: I’m not even slightly worried about the spread of the virus via these protests; I’m just demonstrating their inconsistency.)

Are we to believe that people who won’t let you properly honor your own deceased family members — remember, not observing social distancing became “racist” soon enough — are going to leave you in peace once the police are “defunded”?

Some libertarians think I’m unnecessarily throwing cold water on a positive development. I just prefer to know what precisely they have in store for me once they get their way.

So far they haven’t exactly been known for their live-and-let live philosophy.

For that matter, have they changed their minds on gun control, or will I have to rely for my safety on the bolice or whatever ad hoc replacement they cook up?

If you favor a Jacobin-style revolutionary transformation of society you’ll need some kind of enforcement mechanism.

Can we at least find out what it will look like?

If this turns out to be a great libertarian victory I’ll apologize for my skepticism.

For now, I persist in my crazy notion that when it comes to securing life and property we ought to have serious answers, not airy-fairy ones.

If you want to defund the police, defund it already, and let’s see about its private-sector replacement.

Anything short of that, we need the details.

Amidst all this turmoil, I recommend you seek the smarts, the camaraderie, and the not-assuming-you’re-a-terrible-person-if-you-disagree-with us disposition of my exclusive group, The Tom Woods Show Elite.

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Tom Woods

Identity Politics and Class Guilt

One of the most awful elements, I think, is the idea that individuals should be defined in terms of their group identity at all. This is one of these weird inversions that’s so characteristic of this chaotic state that we’re in.

When people originally started fighting against unfair discrimination… the initial idea was to eliminate the proclivity for people to be categorized according to their group identity, because that was interfering with everyone’s ability to view them as competent individuals. But that got flipped, probably in the 70s after the Soviet state so self-evidently was revealed as a catastrophe. That got flipped so that the world was turned into one group against another—a power struggle from one group against another. And then the social justice warrior types and the lefties, even the Democratic Party, started categorizing everyone according to their ethnic or sexual or racial identity, and made that the canonical element of their being.

That’s an absolutely terrible thing to do. In the Soviet Union when that happened, they introduced that idea along with the notion of “class guilt.” So, for example, when the Soviets collectivized the farms, they pretty much wiped out or raped and froze to death all of their competent farmers. They called them “kulaks,” and they attributed class guilt to them because they were successful peasants, and they defined their success as oppression and theft. They killed all of them, pretty much—shipped them off to Siberia and froze them to death. And they were the productive agriculturalists in the Soviet Union. And then in the 1930s in the Ukraine, because of that, about 6 million Ukrainians starved to death. The Soviets were big on collective guilt.

And all of these things you hear about now, like “white privilege” for example, are variants of collective guilt. I pick your bloody identity, whatever it happens to be, and then I make you a guilty member of that category, and then you and the rest of the guilty members of that category are judged as a unit. It’s murderous, pushed to its extreme. And we’ve seen that many, many times.

for more go to Thinkspot

Don’t kid yourselves, this isn’t 1968

The Cave
In book seven of Plato’s The Republic, he tells us about some people chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows across a stone wall.

The group of prisoners has been living there in chains since their birth. They have never seen the outside world, only shadows of it. They have no knowledge of anything beyond their miserable lives in the cave.

The prisoners are chained facing a wall and can’t turn their heads. There’s a fire behind them which produces some light. Occasionally people pass by that fire with animals and objects or figures that are cast in the wall, and the prisoners can see their shadows.

All that the prisoners know are those shadows. They name them and believe they are real entities. They talk about the shadows with enthusiasm and are fascinated by them, thinking that if you pay attention, you can succeed in life.

One day, a prisoner manages to free himself from the chains and step outside the cave to see the outer world. At first, the sun burns his eyes, but then they adjust, and he finds everything so colorful, exciting, full of life. He sees the real forms of the things he knew as shadows, like rabbits, birds, flowers, people, objects, he even sees the sky and stars.

“Previously, he had been looking only at phantoms; now, he is nearer to the true nature of being.” – Plato

People explain to him that everything he sees is real, and the shadows are just mere reflections. Although he cannot understand this at first, he then adjusts and sees how the sun is responsible for light and producing the shadows.

The prisoner gets back to the cave and tells everyone what he had just witnessed, but no one believes him. His eyes had adjusted to the sun, and now he can’t see the shadows clearly as he did before. They tell him he’s crazy, and violently resist while he tries to free them.

The cave signifies ignorance.