A small reflection on the Leftist sympathy for criminals

Caution: This article contains a picture that is very disturbing

The emblematic example of Leftist sympathy for criminals is probably the release from prison of the murderous Willie Horton under the sponsorship of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis. Dukakis had vetoed legislation that would have kept gross offenders such as Horton in jail. When Horton immediately began violent offending again it hit the reputation of Dukakis and contributed to his defeat in the 1988 Presidential election. Democrats were of course outraged that Republicans raised the matter at all. They are good at outrage.

And the execution of "Tookie" Williams in 1995 was another conspicuous example of misplaced sympathy. Stanley Williams was a murderous brute who helped found the notorious "Crips" street gang in Los Angeles -- and who refused to the end to help authorities investigate the gang -- but Leftists pulled out all the stops to prevent his execution. Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor of CA at the time however so their efforts were in vain.

The Left however consistently referred to him by the affectionate nickname of "Tookie" and put up pictures of him that suggested a gentle scholarly nature for him. See below:


Williams in his own eyes


A Williams victim


As the Left portrayed him

And the sympathy for illegal immigrants that mostly obstructs effective action against them can be seen not only in the USA but also in Britain and Australia. In Australia, a conservative government had stopped dead the flow of illegal immigrants but as soon as it came to power a Leftist government abolished the conservative policies and restarted the flow.

So why? Why do Leftists sponsor crime? They say it is because of their "compassion" but where is the compassion for the victims of Horton or Williams? It makes no sense as compassion. There is clearly something else going on.

And what that is, is clear. Leftists hate the world they live in and want to tear it down -- something Obama has been doing to America with considerable effectiveness for nearly 4 years now. So a sympathy for criminals flows readily from that. Criminals too are attacking the existing order. They are in a way doing what Leftist would like to do. So Leftists just can't find it in their hearts to see much wrong with criminals. "A bit misguided but understandable" would be the implicit Leftist judgment of criminals. That judgment costs us dear -- JR.

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"You didn't build that" as a disincentive to enterprise

In any endeavor, individual effort generally plays only a small role in achieving the desired result, when compared to the contribution of all other relevant causal factors. Still, the success or failure of most human endeavors depend critically upon the supply of effort, and most endeavors will fail if too little effort is supplied. In some circumstances, a realistic assessment of the effect of greater effort on the odds of success will be demoralizing, leading to less effort and even lower odds of success. But this doesn't mean that successful people need to be systematically deceived about the efficacy of volition. It means that people need to internalize norms that stigmatize, at least some of the time, the rational withholding of effort.

Of course, people aren't generally self-destructive, and this sort of thing (i.e., morality, culture) only goes so far, even if it does goes pretty far. Incentives matter, as the economists like to say. You won't write try to write the Great American Novel if you don't think you can. But, even if you think that there's some small positive probability you could succeed, it may not be worth trying unless the payoff for success is really huge. Do the math. Which is why winner-take-all markets and the vast wealth and status inequalities they entail may not be so bad for the commonweal. A more egalitarian distribution of money and status for novelists would result in a decreased overall supply of novel-writing effort, and thus to fewer and fewer really valuable novels. (The stats quo also leads to a lot of wasted effort, but so what!) If widespread false belief doesn't work, try inequality!

That said, a smart culture can probably limit wealth inequality while maintaining the possibility of huge inequalities of status, which is why I suspect Ed Conard, whose book I have not read, overstates the case for economic inequality. Successful cultures produce individuals who try hard, because that's what one does, and who dream of riches and/or glory.

More HERE

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For the Marxists Ye Have With You Always

by DANIEL HANNAN (MEP)

I was involved in a revealing exchange yesterday. Something I had Tweeted - a diffident question about whether pushing more and more people into university was necessarily desirable - prompted a series of responses along the lines of ‘Typical: like all capitalists, you don't like poor people'.

The criticism came in such a blizzard that I felt some sort of reply was in order, so I took to the keyboard again: ‘I love all these "capitalists don't like poor people" Tweets. It's true: we want to turn them into rich people. It's socialists who need their client groups.'

What happened next got me thinking. One after another, the Lefties on Twitter lined up to argue that capitalism couldn't survive without poverty, that its essence was the widening of inequality, that it concentrated more and more power in the hands of fewer and fewer plutocrats, that its days were numbered. I won't bore you by quoting them all. One - from the prolific Labour blogger Sunny Hundal - might stand for many: ‘In fact capitalism (by definition) needs more poor people and prefers poor bargaining rights and gross inequality'.

What's fascinating here is not just that Sunny's proposition is wrong; it's that, like all the other responses just cited, it is lifted directly from Karl Marx.

Marxism, uniquely among political philosophies, defined itself as a science. To its adherents, its propositions were not speculative but empirical. As a good Hegelian, Marx saw his forecasts as part of an inexorable historical process. Yet every one - every one - of them turned out to be false.

Capitalism was supposed to destroy the middle class, leaving a tiny clique of oligarchs ruling over a vast proletariat. In fact, capitalism has enlarged the bourgeoisie wherever it has been practised. Capitalism was supposed to lower living standards for the majority. In fact, the world is wealthier than would have been conceivable 150 years ago. The whole market system was supposed to be on its last legs when Marx and Engels were writing. In fact, it was entering a golden age, hugely benefiting the poorest. As Schumpeter put it, the princess was always able to wear silk stockings, but it took capitalism to put them within reach of the shop girl. The living standard of a Briton on benefits today is higher than that of a Briton on average wages in the 1920s.

I don't know how many of the people parroting Marx are aware that they're doing so. But, whatever name we call it by, his doctrine has proved stunningly impervious to events. You'd have thought - I did think - that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact regimes in 1989 would have definitively refuted revolutionary socialism. Yet successive generations continue to fall for it.

The more I read of behavioural psychology, the more I think that ideologies are as much a product of people's nature as of observed experience. The perverted doctrines that actuated the Bolshevists may be immanent in a portion of humanity. Some people are determined to see every success as a swindling of someone else, every transaction as an exploitation, every exercise in freedom as a violation of some ideal plan, every tradition as a superstition. How delicious that, as we approach the bicentenary of his birth, Karl Marx should have turned into the thing he loathed above all: the prophet of an irrational faith.

SOURCE

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Black "useful idiots"

"Useful idiots" was Stalin's term for Western Communists

For expressing the opinion of the majority of voters in the 31 states where gay marriage was put to vote Chick-fil-A’s President Dan Cathy is accused of “hate speech” by D.C. Mayor Vernon Gray. Such is the mayor’s revulsion that he threatens to mimic Lester Maddox circa 1962 and stand at his city gates wielding an ax handle to bar restaurant Chik-fil-A’s entry into his municipal domain.

Washington D.C’s black mayor is a prominent patron of his hometown restaurant/bookstore Busboys and Poets, billed by its owner as “The Cultural Hub of the Black Community,” and known as “a haven for writers, thinkers and performers from America's progressive social and political movements.”

This restaurant features posters of Che Guevara on its walls and Che Guevara’s books in its adjoining bookstore. Busboys and Poets also sponsor tours of Cuba in partnership with Castro’s Stalinist regime. Every penny spent by Mayor Gray’s starry-eyed constituents on these Potemkin tours lands in the pockets of the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to herd thousands of men and boys into forced labor camps at Soviet-bayonet point for the crime of fluttering their eyelashes, flapping their hands and talking with a lisp. Every penny spent in Cuba by these progressive writers and artists enriches the only regime in the Western Hemisphere to fuel bonfires with Orwell’s Animal Farm, The UN Declaration of Human Rights and the writings of Martin Luther King.

"Work Will Make Men Out of You" read the sign at the Cuban prison-camp’s gate where tens of thousands of Cuban gays, suspected gays, “longhaired heepees”s and religious youths were jailed and tortured for years. The sign as prominent right over the barbed wire and next to the Soviet-trained machine gunners posted on the watchtowers. The initials for these camps were UMAP, not GULAG, but the conditions were quite similar.

When patronizing Busboys and Poets black Mayor Vernon Grey and his black and “progressive” constituents also reward a purveyor of the following sentiments:

“The Negro is indolent and spends his money on frivolities and drink, the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent…The negro has maintained his racial purity by his well known habit of avoiding baths.” Che Guevara wrote these lines in his famous “Motorcycle’s Diaries,” which is prominently displayed in Busboys and Poets bookstore.

“My nostrils dilate while savoring the acrid odor of gunpowder and blood,” also appears in this popular book for peace activists. “Crazy with fury I will stain my rifle red while slaughtering any surrendered enemy that falls in my hands! With the deaths of my enemies I prepare my being for the sacred fight and join the triumphant proletariat with a bestial howl!”

Among the sites omitted by Busboys and Poets Cuba tours are the prisons and torture chambers that held the longest-suffering black political prisoners in modern history. Prisoners were often taunted with racist epithets – “we pulled you down from the trees and cut off your tail!” Eusebia Penalver’s Castroite jailers would yell at him. Eusebio Penalver suffered longer in Castro and Che’s prisons than Nelson Mandela in apartheid South Africa’s.

Given the veneration by Washington D.C’s Busboys and Poets of the racist- Stalinist who craved to nuke Washington D.C. we have to think they also carry Che’s Message to the Tricontinental Conference in Havana 1966. Chik-fil-A “tastes like hate,” Mayor Gray? Well, then chew on this:

“Hatred is the central element of our struggle!... Hatred that is intransigent….Hatred so violent that it propels a human being beyond his natural limitations, making him violent and cold- blooded killing machine…We reject any peaceful approach. Violence is inevitable. To establish Socialism rivers of blood must flow. The victory of Socialism is well worth millions of atomic victims!” (thus spaketh the icon of flower-children)

Had the icon of Busboys and Poets prevailed in October 1962, today the incinerated remains of many of the restaurant’s patrons, and those of practically all of their parents and grandparents, would fit in one Cappuccino cup.

More HERE

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ELSEWHERE

A new barrage of Leftist lies greets Paul Ryan: "Democrats believe fervently in the folly of Paul Ryan’s ideas, yet somehow can’t speak about them truthfully. They are confident they can destroy Ryan — not because they think they can win the debate over his proposals on the merits, but because they are certain they can distort those proposals with impunity. The battle of ideas will be as unsightly and dishonest as the battle over Bain Capital. If Democrats will lie about Mitt Romney killing a woman, it’s only a matter of scale to lie about him unloosing a near-genocidal assault on America’s seniors."

Drug caravan to visit more than 20 US cities: "A coalition calling for an end to the war on drugs began its monthlong campaign Sunday in San Diego that will take it to more than 20 U.S. cities. More than 200 people gathered at a park on the U.S.-Mexico border as part of a movement known as the 'Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity' that includes nearly 100 organizations."

VA: Pitchfork-wielding Virginia farmers rally against birthday party fine: "Pitchfork-wielding Virginia farmers rallied to support a woman who claims local officials came down on her for, among other things, hosting a children's birthday party on her spread. Martha Boneta, owner of Liberty Farms in the northern village of Paris, was threatened with nearly $5,000 in fines for selling produce and crafts and throwing unlicensed events, including a birthday party for her best friend's child. She told FoxNews.com she wasn't doing anything farmers haven't done for generations, and at a recent zoning board meeting, her agrarian friends literally showed up with pitchforks to express their support."

The wealthy also serve: "Wealthy individuals do not bury their money in their backyards. Savings become the capital that powers new business ventures. A maximum income punishes those most likely to invest savings in new business ventures, limiting job creation."

Obama is breaking the law: "As I’ve noted before, the Obama administration violated the text, structure, and purpose of the 1996 welfare reform law, in claiming the authority to waive its work requirements, which were specifically designed not to be waivable, in its July 12 HHS memorandum. (Contrary to the administration’s claims, that memo did indeed strike at the very heart of welfare reform.)"

When wage gaps are fair: "When I and my wife first got married, she worked shorter hours than I did, and used her additional time outside the workplace for activities like grocery shopping and preparing dinner. So there was nothing unfair about the fact that her employer paid her less than I was paid. I was getting the benefit of these activities, not her employer -- a benefit reflected in the fact that I paid most of the rent (while my wife did most of the family consumer spending, using financial contributions from me -- I reimbursed her for three-quarters of each grocery bill)."

Unbalanced Violence Against Women Act: "Since its beginning in 1994, VAWA has been beset by a host of problems. Although some 286 studies from the mid-70s to the present show women to be as violent in their intimate relationships as men or more so, VAWA funding goes overwhelmingly to services for female victims and male perpetrators. Less than 2% goes to help male victims or treat female perpetrators. As with most government largess, VAWA’s suffers from being misspent."

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My Twitter.com identity: jonjayray. I have deleted my old Facebook page as I rarely accessed it. For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, EYE ON BRITAIN and Paralipomena

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The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialist) and the full name of Hitler's political party (translated) was "The National Socialist German Workers' Party" (In German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

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