Tag Archives: ethics

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.

Are They Serious?

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The (individual) bad cop events in Minneapolis and Atlanta, and the ensuing hoo-raw has prompted badly needed discussion of how we handle bad cops and their events, even overshadowed as the discussion is by the overarching hysteria of demands for cop-free zones and the Left’s larger demand to do away with all police forces everywhere forever.

This has prompted the editors of The Wall Street Journal to wonder:

…suddenly Democrats say public-union labor agreements are frustrating police reform. We’re delighted to hear it—if they’re serious.

Of course, they are not remotely serious. This is an election year, and I’m shocked, shocked to find that vote pandering in this season.

Police unions have many shortcomings, no small per centage of them very serious, but this is just another example of Progressive-Democrats vote pandering, throwing a temporarily inconvenient constituent under the bus, and blaming everyone but themselves for the problem.

Private employers often use arbitration to resolve complaints by and against employees, but cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Minneapolis allow police unions essentially to select the arbitrator.

It’s those city governments’ carefully deliberated decision to surrender their responsibilities to the counterparty of any negotiation or disciplinary action.

Progressive-Democrat-run city governments. But it’s not their fault; it’s those nefarious cop unions. Watch for the Progressive-Democrat anti-police union opprobrium disappear from 4 November on.

Progressive-Democrats Sue

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Progressive-Democrats, in particular the Democratic National Committee the Arizona Democratic Party, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, are suing the

Arizona secretary of state and a gaggle of county officials over a rule in the state that automatically rejects mail-in ballots without signatures, whereas voters whose mail-in ballot signatures do not match their voter registration are given five days to remedy the situation.

This might seem, superficially, a valid beef.

However.

Mismatched signatures and missing signatures aren’t close to the same thing. Voting monitors are not handwriting experts; it’s easy for them to mistake signatures and think there’s a mismatch.

It doesn’t take a handwriting expert to see the difference between a signature and no signature at all.

Nor would it be difficult functionally to stuff ballot boxes with deliberately pre-marked and unsigned ballots followed by operatives of any party using the “remedy” facility to sign those ballots—with no proof available that the Johnny-come-lately signers actually are the ones who filled in the ballots. Or even that each ballot was individually marked by separate individual voters.

The parties to the suit claim, with wide-eyed innocence, that automatically rejecting those unsigned ballots would disenfranchise voters. This is nonsense. Allowing these pre-marked, unsigned ballots to be signed later, with no way of knowing that the signer is the person who voted a particular ballot—and only that ballot—would disenfranchise the legitimate voters by having their votes diluted, if not canceled altogether, by all those illegitimately cast false votes.

The DNC, ADP, DSCC suit can be read here.

Censoring the Media

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The censors have expanded their operation from the Facebooks, Alphabets, Twitters of our nation to our newsroom simulacra. Daniel Henninger noted the latest examples of the invasion:

In the past week, the editorial page editor of the New York Times, the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the editors of Bon Appétit magazine and the young women’s website Refinery 29 have been forced out by the staff and owners of their publications for offenses regarded as at odds with the beliefs of the current protests.

It’s more than mere censorship, though. It’s George Orwell and Franz Kafka in the press room collaborating on the press’ editorials.

The…news…outlets and the society gossip magazines cited by Henninger are canonical examples.

Henninger, though, is mistaken in one respect. These editors may have been forced out by the institutions’ owners, but staff played virtually no role—it was those editors’ abject cowardice in the face of opprobrium from their subordinates that assumed that character’s place in the tragedy.

A Misunderstanding

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In an article centered on reports that President Donald Trump is planning to withdraw 9,500 troops from Germany—relocating at least some of them to Poland—Bernd Riegert had the following:

[T]he US personnel [to be removed from Germany] essentially work within the framework of NATO for the Pentagon’s European and Africa Commands. They operate the Ramstein airbase, a military hospital and a military training facility. They are important pillars of NATO infrastructure, but they do not, strictly speaking, contribute much to Germany’s national defense.

Wow.

At least some of those reassigned soldiers would be sent to Poland. Shoring up Polish defenses, militarily and politically (as that reallocation also would signal), against Russian aggressions doesn’t contribute to Germany’s defense? Again, wow.

If the troops allegedly to be removed work in important pillars of NATO infrastructure, but they’re not supporting Germany’s national defense, if those important pillars—Ramstein AB, European Command, Africa Command, training, hospitals—don’t contribute to Germany’s national defense, then in what way does NATO contribute to Germany’s national defense?

It’s already clear that Germany has chosen to not fulfill its obligations to NATO and therewith to not support the (mutual) defense of the other member nations. If Germany does not believe that NATO contributes to Germany’s defense, then what’s the point of any NATO forces in Germany?