The banality of US evil

Vox Day, quoting 'ESR': The banality of US evil --

"... Eric Garner died in a New York minute because “soft despotism” turned hard enough to kill him in cold blood. There was no anger there, no hate; the police simply failed to grasp the moral disproportion between the “crimes” he wasn’t even committing at the time and their use of force. And an investigating grand jury did no better.

Violent racists, as evil as they are, generally understand on some level that they’re doing wrong. That understanding is written all over the excuses they make. These cops didn’t need an excuse. They were doing their job. They were enforcing the law. The casual, dispassionate, machinelike brutality with which Garner was strangled reveals a moral vacuum more frightening than mere racism could ever be."

Douglas Wilson (at Blog and Mablog) has a number of very good essays about the case, but the comment Vox Day quotes really gets to the heart of the matter: "We were simply doing our jobs -- following orders -- for your own good."

Something I've often said applies here: if there is ever a coup (*) in America, it won't be the military supplying the bully-boy muscle to enforce it, it will be the civilian police doing that.

Something else to keep in mind: most of the people "protesting" the grand jury decision, and thereby disruping or even endangering others' lives, don't give a damn about the real issues (and outrages) involved -- they care only that there was a white cop involved.


(*) assuming we aren't already living with the after-effects of a "soft coup" engineered by the self-selected elites.

Murdered by reality ... will others learn anything?

Vox Day: Sic semper cæcis

Generally, leftists like to ensure that the price of their fatal delusions is paid by others, and the more removed and innocent, the better. Sometimes, they pay the price themselves.

Leftists don't like it

... when you hold up their contemptible tropes and attitudes to public contempt -- Read the ‘hostile’ column that got student writer suspended by campus newspaper

What Women Never Hear

Here is a blog some persons may find of interest -- What Women Never Hear -- I forgotten about this blog (I never carried over my bookmarks when I last switched computers). I was reminded of it just now because Blogger reports that a page-view on my blog originated there.

Mugged by reality ... learned nothing

Ed Driscoll: Student Mugged, Says He Deserved It Because of His ‘Privilege’ -- "To mash-up George Santayana and Irving Kristol, a leftist is someone who refuses to learn from history, and is thus doomed to get mugged by it, but refuses to press charges afterwards."

Senior Oliver Friedfeld and his roommate were held at gunpoint and mugged recently. However, the GU student isn’t upset. In fact he says he “can hardly blame [his muggers].”

“Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people.’ I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay,” wrote Friedfeld in an editorial featured in The Hoya, the university’s newspaper. “The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine.”

Friedfeld claims it is the pronounced inequality gap in Washington, D.C. that has fueled these types of crimes. He also says that as a middle-class man, he does not have the right to judge his muggers.

“Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’” asks Friedfeld. “It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.”

Actually, it's holier-than-Thou (*) damned fools like this who "fuel the problem" ... and have been deliberately doing so for a good 60 or 70 years.

Another thing about these rich white "liberals" and their mind-set to which I think normal people don't give enough consideration is that what they are saying is that if *they* weren't rich and/or "privileged", they'd consider themselves justified in mugging others (**).

(*) not only do they imagine themselves holier that you and me, but also than God

(**) that is, in person in contrast to their perferred method of mugging others through State violence

Self-opacity

Today's chuckle comes from Kathy Shaidle: "Here’s the thing: I have ... an almost psychopathological indifference to criticism."

Please excuse my eyes rolling across the floor.

Someone has to

Someone has to ... do the jobs Americans won't do

Never saw that coming

Wintery Knight: Human Rights Campaign co-founder Terry Bean arrested for sex crime with 15-year-old

Look, America: "sex education" is about grooming your children to make them more susceptible to sex-predators. And the 'Human Rights Campaign' is about grooming you to make you more susceptible to the mainstreaming of NAMBLA.

'Even-handedness' vs 'moral equivalency' Is there a difference?

Answer: almost never.

Whether we're talking about alleged-President Obama reacting to the murder of Israelis by Arab terrorists by "counseling" both terrorists and Israelis to "be calm" (*), or whether we're talking about the police arresting and charging with disorderly conduct both the man who is attacked and the violent woman who attacked him (**), or whether we're talking about the school administrators who do nothing for weeks or months as you are daily physically bullied, but immediately implement their inane "zero-tolerance policy" the minute you defend yourself, it's all the same: the "authorities" almost never care about justice; they care about keeping things quiet, and if the cost of keeping things quiet happens to be your limb ... or your life ... they'll generally gladly pay it.



(*) as 'Wintery Knight' observes, this is like telling both the rapist and the victim of the rapist to refrain from raping one another in future.

(**) Fortunately for him, he is 'hispanic', and so the charges were eventually dropped

Trees ... and Flowers ... and 'Evolution'

'News' at Uncommon Descent recently made a post drawing attention to an evolutionist's statement that "... we don’t know much about how speciation happens in trees."

This prompted me to drop a note to Denyse O'Leary (who is frequently, though not always, 'News') mentioning a Darwinist conundrum about trees and flowers -- well, it would be a conundrum to DarwinDefenders were they not so highly skilled in ignoring everything that needs to be ignored so as to protect their metaphysical speculations disguised as 'Science!' from rational critical evaluation.

The initial note I sent Mrs O'Leary was:

Except for their mode of reproduction, flowering trees and non-flowering trees are more like than flowering trees are to flowering non-trees. However, by their mode of reproduction, oak trees are more like tulips than like pine trees.


It's a great mystery ... if your religion is evolutionism.

A follow-up note to explain in more detail was:

You may recall Darwin's "abominal mystery".

So far as I know, he, nor his followers, never even thought about it in these terms, though they should be doing so: but flowering plants are "abominable" from the DarwinDefender point of view not just in their origin, but also in the fact that flowering plants are so diverse in all ways but the flowers themselves. A tulip blossom and an apple blossom (*) are both "perfect flowers" (**) (see here, as mentioned at the bottom of that page, so is an oat blossom) and also "complete flowers" -- the flowers have the same structures, which, according to evolutionists, are always descended/modified from the same parts (***). But other than the flowers, apple trees and tulip plants have few, if any, similarities in their gross characteristics.

Think about it: for Darwinistic evolutionism to be consistent, the apple and the tulip *must* be more closely related by descent than the apple is to the pine, despite that both being trees, apples and pines grow/develop and maintain their health and lives in very similar ways. The "permanent" part of an apple or pine is the layer of actively growing cells just below the bark (including the roots). But the "permanent" part of a tulip is the little disk at the bottom of the bulb, from which disk (re)grows the roots (it's a yearly affair) and leaves and flower stems. This point is even more ovbious with daffodils and onions. A pine or an apple overwinters by storing food in its roots, which persist, and continuously grow similarly to the branches, year ro year. A tulip sheds its roots as part of its overwintering strategy and instead stores food in the bulb, which has no counterpart in the apple.


(*) I changed my tree example from oak to apple. I had initially picked oak because ‘mighty oaks’ are such exemplar trees in our language; but oak flowers are not “perfect” and are so inconspicuous that most people don’t realize they have flowers.

Perhaps, for the irony of it, I should have picked tulip trees to contrast with tulips.


(**) Apparently, botanists have changed the definition of "perfect flower", for I used to see the term used for what it seems is now called a "complete flower".

Also, it *used* to be that a "perfect flower" (now a "complete flower") had FIVE parts, not four. Goodness, I wish they'd make up their minds!

(***) Flower petals, for instance, are claimed to be modified leaves.