Contributors

Thursday, December 31, 2020

Defund the Police Is a Bogus Slogan: Let's Fire Bad Cops! Instead

A while back Barack Obama made many Democrats and liberal pundits angry by criticizing the Defund the police slogan employed by many activists after Minneapolis cops murdered George Floyd in cold blood.

Obama said:

“You lost a big audience the minute you say it, which makes it a lot less likely that you’re actually going to get the changes you want done,” Obama told Peter Hamby, who hosts Good Luck America, a Snapchat political show. “The key is deciding, do you want to actually get something done, or do you want to feel good among the people you already agree with?”

Obama is right: Democrats would have done better in House and Senate races if activists had come up with a better slogan, one that didn't require a long drawn-out explanation.
 
The problem with Defund the police is not that it's a snappy slogan, it's a totally stupid slogan. It doesn't really get at the root of the problem, which is arrogant racists who, under color of authority, assault and murder the citizens paying their salaries.

Clearly, someone has to respond when burglars, rapists, muggers, and wife-beaters commit crimes. These responders are called police. These responders have to be paid. 
 
When you say Defund the police you immediately have to explain that you don't mean that police departments will get zero dollars, you really mean that their various functions should be redistributed among other departments, there should be better citizen oversight, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
 
Defund the police as a slogan is therefore stupid, self-contradictory, meaningless and totally impractical from the get-go.

A good slogan is clear, concise and requires no explanation. A good slogan is one that no reasonable person can disagree with. Make America great again doesn't require explanation, and it's not all that disagreeable except through its connection to that loser Trump.
 
Black lives matter requires no explanation. Some disagree with it, thinking that it somehow elevates Blacks above others, and respond angrily with, All lives matter.
 
No justice, no peace, a slogan from an earlier era, is viewed by some as threatening, but it's completely in line with American traditions like the Boston Tea Party, and echoes the words of Martin Luther King Jr.

A better slogan would address the real problem with policing, which is police who aren't held accountable when they abuse their authority. Something along the lines of Fire bad cops, or the rhyming variant No justice, no peace, no racist police.

There's a lot of talk about dismantling the "systemic racism" of police departments, but these days there aren't many laws on the books that explicitly target Blacks, like the old segregation laws.
 
Th real problem is that laws are selectively enforced by officers who act with impunity, protected by corrupt police unions. They target Black and Hispanic kids for smoking weed, while letting white kids off the hook. They patrol "high crime areas" (i.e., Black neighborhoods), stopping Blacks for loitering, vagrancy, and minor traffic infractions like rolling stops, improper lane changes and and burnt-out taillights, while ignoring the same violations in white neighborhoods.
 
Take a couple of recent examples: Breanna Taylor, a Black woman, died when cops broke into her apartment and killed her. Meanwhile, the Nashville bomber's girlfriend told police he was making bombs in his RV, and when cops politely knocked on his door, they just gave up he didn't answer. Is there any doubt that they would have crashed in right then and there had he been Black or Muslim?

Cities pay millions upon millions of dollars each year to citizens whose rights have been violated by bad cops. And these bad cops stay on the job because the police department can't fire them: they have numerous civil service protections and union contracts that tie the hands of city officials.

All too frequently police unions are the problem, rather than police departments. One example is the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) in Englewood, NJ. It kicked out several Black cops after they supported the police chief who cracked down on racist cops who sleep on the job.

The president of the Minneapolis police union, Bob Kroll, illustrates how corrupt some police unions are:

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing by now-former Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officer Derek Chauvin, few have been inclined to defend Chauvin or his colleagues who stood by and watched as he suffocated Floyd to death. Few, that is, except Bob Kroll.

In a letter to membership, Kroll — the president of the MPD’s police union — referred to protesters outraged by police brutality as a “terrorist movement” and defended the officers who killed Floyd and were subsequently fired, arguing they were “terminated without due process” and lamenting, “What is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd.” (Floyd had a criminal record, but mostly for nonviolent drug and theft charges.)
 
Hey, Bob: it was actually George Floyd who was terminated without due process.
 
Scott Walker destroyed the public sector unions in Wisconsin, but not police unions. That's because Republicans, who constantly do everything they can to undercut the power of the working man by dismantling unions, have made an unholy alliance with the police. 
 
Republicans depend on the police to enforce the racial hierarchy -- that's the real "order" Republicans are referring to when they say "law and order."

So, to all you sloganeers out there: come up with a snappy way to say Eliminate Corrupt Police Unions!

Wednesday, December 23, 2020

The Religion of the Right

The conservative of 2020 has turned worship of ME into a bona fide religion. They don't get the concept of WE or what it means to be in a society where we have to depend on each other. They have tapped into their inner adolescent rage against authority and made any sort of group work into communism. 

They are the ultimate teenager who DOESN'T WANNA! And BLOWS EVERYTHING OUT OF PROPORTION WITH EXAGGERATION!! Working together as a society becomes slavery in totalitarianism. 

To get a clearer picture of this selfishness on steroids, read this

And this. 

This would be why the rest of the world looks at us and wonders what FREEDUMB is...

Tuesday, December 22, 2020

Do The Hard and Tedious Work

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the outrage crowd on social media and how they consistently are counterproductive to their goal of equity (gender, race, sexual orientation). And, of late, public health. They employ strategies that never work. Why? 

Because their goals are different from what actual woke people want and are willing to sacrifice for. That’s why I call them fake woke. Their core goal is similar to an actor putting on a play. They want to turn out a good performance to impress like-minded people on social media. 

The right chastises this as “virtue signaling” but I think it’s far worse. It’s demonstrably corrosive to the causes I’ve dedicated my life and career to. So, to the “actors” out there, turn your passion into the work you are avoiding that our country needs you to do. 

Become a teacher, run for office, organize a group to lobby and petition the government. It won’t be easy and it will be long and sometimes tedious. But it’s what works.

Tuesday, December 08, 2020

Election Fraud in Federal Court

Re: Kevin Baker's latest post about election fraud.

If you are someone like Kevin who believes the myth that Democrats stole the 2020 election, please kindly cite your evidence that you would be willing to use in federal court to support your assertion. Remember, you can get in very serious trouble lying in a federal court. It's not a little blog that allows you to spout irrational nonsense. It's where grown-ups do business. 

No evidence? Nothing? Bueller? 

Then you are lying merely because you are butthurt about your guy losing. There is nothing more to this election than this:

Trump was an incompetent buffoon who literally killed Americans and the people voted him out.  

Now, go read Leon Festinger's When Prophecy Fails and learn from your cognitive dissonance. 



Tuesday, December 01, 2020

The Conservative Case for Abortion

It is high time the Right takes back the abortion issue and stops letting bleeding heart liberals like Pope Francis dictate our agenda.

First and foremost, Big Government should not be dictating what people do with their bodies. Government bureaucrats shouldn’t be able to prevent women from having abortions any more than they should take our guns away.

Second, let us dispense with the idea that an unborn fetus is “innocent.” The doctrine of Original Sin is well-established in Christianity, and it states that all descendants of Adam are as guilty as he was for eating the forbidden fruit. The unborn are guilty as sin, just like everyone else.

Now let us get down to cases.

Pregnancies resulting from sins should be freely terminated.

In instances of rape, you cannot allow a rapist to get away with impregnating a woman and forcing her to bear his child. It’s tantamount to slavery. Children born of such demonseed cannot be loved by their mothers, and society cannot be forced to support such children. And do we really want the children of rapists roaming the streets, destined to repeat their fathers’ sins?

Similarly, in pregnancies resulting from fornication, abortion must always be allowed. You cannot have Big Government forcing your daughters to bear the children of low-life boyfriends who can’t keep their dicks in their pants. And again, do we really want more children in our schools who are genetically predisposed to having casual unprotected sex, seducing our sons and daughters?

This is especially important in “urban America.” We have far too many welfare queens getting knocked up and then coming to Big Government for handouts to support their bastards.

People should be held responsible for their actions, and if they can’t afford to support their children, they shouldn’t have them. There’s a strong case for requiring abortions for unwed pregnancies, but we don’t want Big Government having too much control.

Pregnancies from adultery are even worse. No husband should be forced to support the bastard of a man who banged his wife. It would pile insult upon injury. The husband must be able to demand an abortion if the child is not his. This is literally in the Bible! (See below.)

And even if the child is the husband’s, an unexpected child can totally decimate a family’s finances. Liberals want everyone to have health insurance, but that’s just a Big Government pipe dream. The reality is that not everyone can afford the expense of nine months of pregnancy, which often prevents the wife from working and results in lost income in addition to the expenses, and then an expensive hospital delivery, perhaps requiring cesarean section and a lengthy hospital stay.

Bearing a child to term is far more dangerous than having an abortion: a woman is 14 times more likely to die in natural childbirth than to die from complications of an abortion. It is immoral for Big Government to risk killing a woman — leaving her husband bereft and her children motherless — for an unwanted child. 

Also, bearing children does a number on a woman’s body. It is excruciatingly painful, often requires procedures such as episiotomy, and can cause weight gain and stretch marks. Do you really want Big Government forcing you and your wife to go through that for a kid you never wanted? 

And then there are the expenses of having a child. It costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to house, feed and clothe a child for 18 years. We can’t let Big Government force us to do that if we don’t want to. It is an unfair tax. 

You know, accidents happen. Condoms break. Women forget to take their pills. The rhythm method ain’t perfect. 

Unwanted pregnancies put a huge strain on marriages, often resulting in divorce. Children change everything in a marriage. If a couple isn’t ready for a child, why should Big Government get involved and force them to have it right then and there?  

Another way of looking at an accidental pregnancy is as an assault on your property rights. If a vagrant randomly wanders into your house and starts eating your food and taking your money, you have the right to shoot them.

It’s the same with an unwanted pregnancy: it’s an invader in your wife’s womb, threatening your entire economic future, eating your food and taking your money. You have the right to defend your property from such an invasion with any necessary force, even if it happened by accident. 

Conservatives used to support abortion rights. But then that phony Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan — who was a Democrat and president of SAG, the liberal actors union — conned conservatives into opposing abortion so that they could leverage single-issue Catholic and evangelical voters. 

Do conservatives really want to abandon their principles for a few votes from papists and religious nut jobs who think the Second Coming is just around the corner? 

Because even the Bible doesn’t prohibit abortion: Exodus 21:22-25 makes it clear that the fetus is not a person, but the property of the husband: “If people are fighting and hit a pregnant woman and she gives birth prematurely but there is no serious injury, the offender must be fined whatever the woman’s husband demands and the court allows.” 

That is literally the passage immediately preceding “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” 

In fact, the Bible prescribes abortion in cases of adultery: Numbers 5:16-22 describes how a priest should curse a suspected adulteress to force a miscarriage with “bitter water.” The ancients knew how to induce an abortion and approved of doing so.

For too long conservatives have let liberals dictate what we stand for, by our automatic inclination to oppose everything that liberals support. 

Conservatives stand for the right to bear arms. We stand for the death penalty. We have the right to assassinate terrorists wherever we find them. We have the right to defend our homes and property with deadly force. We can’t let Big Government whimper about innocent unborn lives and dictate what our wives and daughters do with their bodies. 

If we can defend our property with deadly force from living, breathing burglars who have wives and children, certainly we can protect our marriages and economic futures from zygotes nobody wants that aren’t even real people.

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Clearly I do not agree with most of the sentiments outlined here. What this argument demonstrates is that conservative opposition to abortion is not about principle, it's about opportunism.

There is no morality or ethics in modern conservative thought. Their arguments and mindset can be used to justify pretty much anything. 

Conservatives' rabid support for Donald Trump, a man totally lacking in honor, loyalty and concern for the public good and the future of this nation, demonstrate how utterly corrupt they have become.