Liberal Media Types Advocate Riots in #Ferguson
Would they do the same if conservatives were burning cars?
Back in the good old days, the left loved to lecture us about civility. That time is over.
Remember when Sarah Palin's target map shot Gabby Giffords? NYTs prints Darren Wilson's address http://t.co/f45nadLfsu
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 25, 2014
In the course of the last few days, at least two writers from liberal outlets have tried to justify and even advocate for the violent rioting in Ferguson.
First, we have Darlena Cunha of Time:
Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting
When a police officer shoots a young, unarmed black man in the streets, then does not face indictment, anger in the community is inevitable. It’s what we do with that anger that counts. In such a case, is rioting so wrong?
Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society. Unfortunately, we do not live in a universal utopia where people have the basic human rights they deserve simply for existing, and until we get there, the legitimate frustration, sorrow and pain of the marginalized voices will boil over, spilling out into our streets. As “normal” citizens watch the events of Ferguson unfurl on their television screens and Twitter feeds, there is a lot of head shaking, finger pointing, and privileged explanation going on.
We wish to seclude the incident and the people involved. To separate it from our history as a nation, to dehumanize the change agents because of their bad and sometimes violent decisions—because if we can separate the underlying racial tensions that clearly exist in our country from the looting and rioting of select individuals, we can continue to ignore the problem.
Next up is Matt Bruenig of Gawker:
Actually, Riots are Good: The Economic Case for Riots in Ferguson
Smirking St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch took his robes off long enough on Monday to announce to the world that the killer of Mike Brown would face no criminal charges. In lieu of the usual grand jury process wherein the prosecutor says it wants an indictment and then the grand jury automatically gives it to them, McCulloch clearly did everything he could to make sure officer Darren Wilson would never face a trial. In the wake of such transparent rigging, Ferguson quite naturally exploded into fiery riots…
There is, of course, the historical case to be made for rioting: the past is replete with examples where rioting gets the goods. But there is also, I’d submit, an even more straightforward case for rioting: at the right levels, rioting is economically efficient.
One need look no further than famous economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker to see how this is true. According to Becker, punishing bad behavior increases the costs of engaging in such behavior and thereby reduces the amount of it. This is the underlying theory of most criminal justice schemes. Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.
According to this logic, conservatives and Tea Party groups should have rioted violently after the passage of Obamacare. Liberal writers might have come to our defense instead of calling us terrorists.
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Comments
“In lieu of the usual grand jury process wherein the prosecutor says it wants an indictment and then the grand jury automatically gives it to them,”
I thought the prosecutor had to present actual evidence to the GJ before they would decide on indicting? Maybe that’s the way Grand Juries work in Chicago and NYC. Prosecutor walks in says “indict this man” and walks out minutes later with it.
Ah, yes! Social Justice is so fair since it targets the ones “we,” the Collective. want to target. The Salem Witch hunters must be so proud of their descendants, literally into Hell, since that affirms their well known, dunking, approach; those accused shall die, by drowning if innocence, by fire or hanging if guilty. That is the unstated, sometimes, goal of social justice in all regards.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/11/will_justice_department_charge_darren_wilson_supreme_court_gutted_civil.html
That’s for those of you who have not quite yet wallowed in enough loopy, self-contradictory, ignorant BS from people pretending to know a damn thing about the law, the facts in this case, and plain ol’ right and wrong.
But I can tell you that’s what it is.
One good take-away…the DOJ won’t charge Wilson. Not because they don’t want to. But because they just can’t legally.
Under the legislation they cite, the AJ would still have to prove a racist intend. Something even the slate writers should know they don’t have the evidence for. That’s why the FED GJ for Zimmerman fell through after the only witness admitted he didn’t know who he talked to that made the racist comments.
Interestingly, the DOJ writes on its website…
“It is not necessary that the crime be motivated by animus toward the race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin of the victim.”
But they ALSO carefully truncate their citation of the law.
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/242fin.php
THAT is quite intriguing….
What I have never understood is why the Screws Decision has never been used as the impetus for clarifying Section 242. It would still be near impossible for a jury to find Office Wilson guilty under a revised 242 trial based on the facts, but a revision to remove this ambiguity would be helpful in some other cases. Or so it appears to me.
Perhaps most revealing of the root of the problem, an Ivy League prof teaches the religion of racist hate.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/11/25/after-you-read-ferguson-column-penned-by-ivy-league-prof-youll-see-why-its-being-called-shameful/
Some condemned that, but few recognize it’s in perfect harmony with Obama’s twenty years at the Farrakhan supporting Chicago church of “God Damn America” Rev. Wright (Obama’s mentor).
Rev. Wright told O’Reilly to read Rev. Cone (founder of that black liberation theology stuff) to understand their church. Cone says if Jesus is white, they better kill him. It’s just one more front of the war on traditional America.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Black_liberation_theology
That isn’t how I read what’s quoted from the piece. Here’s the key: “Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.”
It’s a badly written sentence and thus ambiguous. But what could “doing those things” mean? It’s unlikely that the sentence was intended to mean “rioting imposes costs on rioting,” so “those things” must mean “gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses.”
Bruenig thinks he’s being clever in turning the tables on the idea that strict law enforcement raises the cost to criminals of doing crime. He’s apparently saying that rioting raises the cost of (alleged) police misconduct, and therefore rioting is good if it reduces such misconduct.
This is supposed to be a response to the idea that Bruenig is echoing the “broken window fallacy.”
As someone who loves economics (like a beautiful woman he does not always understand), I think we’re confusing the “broken window fallacy” with another fallacious argument.
The “broken window fallacy” holds that destruction can be a net economic good. That is true regardless of where the destruction originates. If it is a riot, a tornado, or an earthquake, the destruction’s result is an uptick in economic activity. Of course, that part is true. The part that IS NOT true is that that is a net good.
Here, the author was arguing that rioting is a societal net good, because it raises the cost to “da man” for his oppressive conduct. It teaches the bad, oppressive “system” not to egregiously hurt the puuurrr, puuurrr people of color (disregarding the various colorful people who were directly devastated by the rioting and looting).
It’s a stupid, apparently contradictory argument on its face. “Da man” has been getting many, many hours of overtime since this started. There was no police or legal misconduct here. And, again, the people paying the REAL DIRECT price for this lawlessness were the law-abiding people of the community and those who had an investment in offering them goods and services.
So, unlike the “broken window fallacy”, this one never argued that there was a net economic good by destruction per se, only that the destruction taught a societal lesson to “da man”.
That was my point exactly.
“Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.”
And THOSE are the false, crazy premises on which his thesis is based.
Was there “gross police misconduct” here? No. There was NO kind of “police misconduct” according to the evidence.
Were there “gross criminal system abuses” here? Hell, no! Wilson was subjected to a grand jury inquiry some say he should not have. But there is a valid point to be made that this was appropriate discretion on the part of the prosecutor. But there is NO valid point to suggest that the conduct of the grand jury inquiry…while NOT always what is done…was an abuse of the “criminal system”, much less a “gross abuse”. It was totally within the norms.
“if we can separate the underlying racial tensions that clearly exist in our country from the looting and rioting of select individuals, we can continue to ignore the problem.”
But Darlena, it is the gangs trying to run black neighborhoods that are the problem, and their threats to black witnesses that sought justice by testifying honestly in support of Wilson.
It is the nasty racial slurs used by “SJW” blacks and their appeasers, against blacks that become successful and conservative, like Condi, Sowell, and Clarence.
For six years Obama has OVERTLY used the bully pulpit to call traditional America racist. The party of Lincoln is tired of being called racist by the Democrat party that spawned the KKK, and that still thinks they “own” the black vote, despite failing to lead them out of inner city violence and poverty.
Ferguson mobs are incited to demand an innocent man’s head on a social justice platter, based solely on racist animus. But dummy Darlena can only see underlying (white) racial tensions.
Come on Darlena, go full appeasement and stop being coy … just call white traditional America racist, and demand a public hanging. Wilson may be innocent this time, but you know he is guilty of something, why else would Holder still be probing without evidence?
that wasn’t meant as a response to Ragspierre … oh well
Some how, IMHO, we’ve gotten off track. Rudi’s use of the Broken Window theory was that allowing those broken windows was indicative of allowing crime and other such anti-social behaviors to flourish. And, he used that idea to fix that problem by boarding up those broken windows as a way to send a message. Rudi’s and Bratten’s concept worked fairly well.
Then, somehow, Bruenig and other Marxists twisted it around into an economic theory of a kind. Still Bruenig is reinforcing the idea that allowing broken windows are a sign of a community willing to distort and degrade the moral backbone of itself; very much a suicide of a group.
BTW: If Bruenig walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, he is a duck, only in his case he’s a Marxist Duck; oops, well to salve his feelings, we can label him a Progressive.
Right. ANOTHER example of confusing two completely different ideas.
The “broken window fallacy” in economics is as I described above.
The “broken window policy” that Hiz Honor instituted was a CIVICS policy. It held that even minor infractions of the laws, if left unenforced, would TEND toward a general decline in the civil cohesion of a neighborhood. Small infractions with no consequence would TEND to larger infractions with no consequence. This was both true and intuitive if you grew up in a neighborhood during the 50s. If you were misbehaving, either the neighbors themselves or your parents after learning about it from the neighbor would bring you to task.
So, all Rudi really did was use the police powers to do what used to be done by people in their neighborhoods. Little stuff was addressed, and big stuff took care of itself. Kinda magical…like how markets work.
Liberals: “Look, if we don’t allow people to riot, burn, pillage, and kill when their righteous anger reaches intolerable levels, we run the risk of something bad happening.”
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