Monthly Archives: June 2020

Tough on Crime?

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Not Progressive-Democratic Party Presidential candidate Joe Biden.

A Critical Item in dealing with crime is that the criminals need to be punished. And that punishment must be meted out swiftly, consistently, and commensurate with the crime.  Joe Biden?

However.

A Critical Item in dealing with criminal behavior is rehabilitation of the criminal and opportunities for his redemption. Absent those, the criminals will repeat their criminal behavior, others will see less, if not in absolute terms, little incentive not to do the crime.  Joe Biden?

Here’s Joe Biden’s position on those two Critical Items (patience; it takes a bit for Alphabet’s YouTube to grunt through their errors and load the video).  This is Senator Joe Biden:

It doesn’t matter whether or not they’re the victims of society. The end result is that they’re about to knock my mother on the head with a lead pipe, shoot my sister, beat up my wife, take on my sons. So I don’t want to ask, “What made them do this?” They must. be taken. off. the streets.

Indeed, he favored—has long favored—increased and broad incarceration.

You must take back the streets. And you take back the streets by more cops, more prisons, more physical protection for the people.

Here is Joe Biden explicitly on rehabilitation;

So you cannot make rehabilitation a condition for release. I don’t care why someone is a malefactor in society, I don’t care why someone is antisocial, I don’t care why they’ve become a sociopath. We have an obligation to cordon them off from the rest of society.

With Joe Biden explicitly rejecting one Critical Item in dealing with crime and with criminal behavior, he cannot truly be supportive of the other Critical Item: the two stand or fall together.

Joe Biden’s claim that rehab can’t be a criterion for release is a cynically offered non sequitur. Whether prisons or separate facilities are the optimal place for rehab and for opportunities for redemption is a separate question entirely, and one that he will not even consider. Joe Biden does not believe in the ability of a man to rehabilitate or to be rehabilitated, and he rejects the possibility of redemption.

Joe Biden cannot be tough on crime because he cannot accept rehabilitation or redemption. He cannot support programs that reduce recidivism, that enable a criminal, once punished, to find a legitimate place in society.

Joe Biden’s current “evolution” in his thinking and his pious calls for criminal system reform are nothing more than insulting pandering to blacks and Hispanics and insults to the intelligence of all of us Americans of any skin color or gender.

 

H/t OANN.

Some Speech Rights are More Equal than Others

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A college newspaper, following in the footsteps of the tabloid New York Times, has fired a columnist for not complying with the paper’s, or its University’s, thoughtcrime avoidance requirements.

Syracuse University student Adrianna San Marco was fired from her gig as a columnist at a local paper, The Daily Orange, when she dismissed the notion of “institutional racism” in an opinion piece for a separate, conservative website.

And she wasn’t even writing for the ex-employing paper; her piece was published by LifeZette. Here’s Daily Orange Editor-in-Chief Casey Darnell:

We aren’t afraid of controversial views, but we have a responsibility to avoid promoting harmful ones. We don’t censor conservative columnists[.]

Not afraid? Yet he and his organization censored speech. If he doesn’t understand that, his journalism professors have failed him badly. If he doesn’t understand that suppressing speech is precisely the promotion of harm then Syracuse has failed him badly. His parents should demand their money back.

Syracuse University did not respond to a request for comment.

Of course not.

Free Speech for Me

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…but not for thee.

‘Course, we’re all perfectly free to speak approved messages. This is demonstrated by Facebook’s overt, deliberate censorship of a political ad. Days after Mark Zuckerberg so piously said his company would not censor political ads (even though he considered all other speech of which he disapproved freely censorable), he had his Facebook pull a Trump campaign ad because he didn’t like what it said.

The ad in alleged question was a call-out of the dangers of far-left radical organizations, including antifa. The ad used one of antifa’s several symbols as part of the call-out, but Zuckerberg decided that even using the symbol to symbolize hate groups was too “triggering.”

Not only is Zuckerberg committing censorship—and illustrating one of the points of the campaign ad—he’s insulting ordinary Americans, insisting we’re all too stupid to evaluate speech on our own: we have to be instructed by our Leftist betters.

A carefully anonymous Facebook spokesman had this:

We removed these posts and ads for violating our policy against organized hate…. Our policy prohibits using a banned hate group’s symbol to identify political prisoners without the context that condemns or discusses the symbol.

The only hate in this incident is Zuckerberg’s and his Facebook’s organized contempt for Americans, claiming as this Anonymous One does, that ordinary Americans are too stupid to understand the plain context of a political ad taken in its entirety.

Errant Satrap

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That’s how the European Union views Great Britain as the EU continues to demand that Great Britain accede to demands they wish to impose on a sovereign nation—solely to bring that subordinate polity to heel. Examples of the EU’s demands:

  • post-Brexit sovereignty to make Britain more competitive via deregulation, environmental rules or tax reform—these must not occur
  • UK’s ability to subsidize industries in line with EU state-aid regulations—this must be curtailed

The first must not be allowed explicitly because of that competition. The second may be bad business overall, but it’s a domestic matter.

And this, regarding tariffs:

new tariff schedule London published last month eliminated levies on some 2,000 goods, or 17% of goods in the schedule, and simplified tariffs on another 40%. Measured by value, 70% of Britain’s imports from other World Trade Organization members will now be tariff-free, compared to 52% under the EU-wide tariff schedule.

Here is the EU’s attempt to prevent British competition.

And the EU’s demands regarding fishing:

bind the UK permanently in EU fisheries rules governing where British and other fishermen can cast their nets. The UK instead wants the same level of sovereignty other coastal countries enjoy to negotiate fishing rights annually.

And that’s the rub: the EU continues to demand to reach into—deep into—British national sovereignty to impose EU governance imperatives on British domestic matters. The EU does not accept Great Britain’s sovereignty.

Every one of those demands individually are deal breakers, and their aggregate demonstrate the EU’s (continued) bad faith in its “negotiations.”

The Brits should walk away from Brussels today and stop wasting their time and effort on the EU’s sham. They have better and more pressing things to do with their resources than negotiating with those who will not.

Bigotry of the Left

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Within hours of each other, these happened.

A Philadelphia family court supervisor was fired after a video posted to Facebook shows him tearing down signs in support of Black Lives Matter.

Because it’s entirely appropriate to support a racist organization that prioritizes some black lives above all other lives, including other black lives. BLM doesn’t even give a rat’s patootie about all the black babies whose lives are aborted in the womb. But it’s forbidden to presume to criticize such a mob of thugs.

This, from a Progressive-Democrat Congressman:

Representative Sean Patrick Maloney (D, NY) accused conservatives of using the “bogus” term “religious liberty” in order to hide their desire to discriminate.

Because protecting—I’ll say it—religious liberty of individual Americans is dishonest, but trashing the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment of our Constitution is just fine.

This is what we can expect, in spades, with a Progressive-Democratic Party administration ruling over us.