MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘Minneapolis Police’

Can We Survive Our Collective Stupidity? – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on June 10, 2020

As kids we used to say, “sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  Today for the woke weaklings the wrong word is like a nuclear weapon. They collapse in tears and recriminations. NY Times Staffers claimed that by publishing Sen. Cotton’s article, the opinion editor had put their lives in danger by not validating looting and rioting as a valid exercise of free speech.  Somehow it did not occur to Sulzberger that the protesters must not be so innocent if NY Times staffers are in fear of their lives because of a few words from a US Senator.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/09/can-we-survive-our-collective-stupidity/

Paul Craig Roberts

I have come to the conclusion that collectively Americans are mentally and emotionally stupid.  On any given day there is endless evidence that this is the case.  Just a few selections from news of the last couple of days should suffice to establish the point.

Instead of reforming police training as a rational response to George Floyd’s death from an aggressive restraint technique, the Minneapolis city council voted to disband the Minneapolis police. Council woman Lisa Bender responded to a citizen’s question what she is supposed to do if she faces a threat in her home and there are no police to call:  “Yes, I hear that loud and clear from a lot of my neighbors. And I know — and myself, too, and I know that that comes from a place of privilege.”

In other words, the Minneapolis citizen’s concern is not legitimate and merely reflects her privileged assumption that she is entitled to protection by police. The valid concern is to protect blacks from the police by disbanding the police.

Kristina Roth of Amnesty International wrote to me in a fundraiser that “Police must stop killing black people.”  What about white people, Kristina?  White lives matter, too. The police shoot to death far more white people every year than black people— https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/03/all-races-suffer-from-police-violence/ .  Shouldn’t Kristina be demanding that “police must stop killing people?”  Why does Kristina blame racism instead of police training? Kristina needs to read and reflect upon this:  https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/06/08/the-sociology-of-police-violence-racism-isnt-the-real-problem/ .

The top editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer had to resign because of the headline on a reporter’s article. The article was very sympathic to the black rioters but didn’t quite see the point of blacks destroying historic buildings in Philadelphia because of what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis.  The editor was done in by the article’s headline: “Buildings Matter, Too.”  This incensed the woke morons, and despite his groveling apology the editor was removed— https://www.rt.com/usa/491122-philadelphia-editor-resigns-headline/ . So much for “white privilege.”  White newspaper editors cannot even exercise freedom of speech in the choice of headlines.

Not even editors at the New York Times, which grovels at the feet of blacks and self-righteous woke, can survive their exercise of freedom of the press—https://www.rt.com/usa/491143-nytimes-oped-editor-resigns-cotton/ . The opinion editor and his deputy had to resign for publishing Senator Tom Cotton’s call to deploy the military to protect people and property from the rioters and looters. I am confident that the NY Times published Sen. Cotton’s article with the intention of damning Cotton for not being more sympathetic to black looters. But the woke creatures and the NY Times publisher A.G.Sulzberger removed the editors because of “the pain they inflicted.”

Pain inflicted on who?  The pain inflicted on owners of businesses, buildings, and cars destroyed by rioters using violence to express their disapproval of violence? No. As Lisa Bender put it, these concerns don’t matter as they come “from a place of privilege.” Only  the pain of those privileged to riot and loot counts.

As kids we used to say, “sticks and stones might break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”  Today for the woke weaklings the wrong word is like a nuclear weapon. They collapse in tears and recriminations. NY Times Staffers claimed that by publishing Sen. Cotton’s article, the opinion editor had put their lives in danger by not validating looting and rioting as a valid exercise of free speech.  Somehow it did not occur to Sulzberger that the protesters must not be so innocent if NY Times staffers are in fear of their lives because of a few words from a US Senator.

JK Rowling is in trouble again from the transgender freaks who reject the word “woman” as transphobic. Rowling took exception to the term “people who menstruate.” and caused “unimaginable pain” by remarking that there used to be a word for “people who menstruate”—women. https://www.rt.com/news/491077-rowling-trans-women-row/

A professor of criminology at the University of North Carolina has been denounced by the university administration for “vile and inexcusable comments,” such as “Don’t shut down the universities; shut down non-essential majors like women’s studies” —https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/us/professor-controversy-tweet-university-north-carolina-wilmington-adams/index.html . The UNC administration says “we are very carefully and assertively reviewing our options in terms of how to proceed.”  The hypocritical administration went on to say “Hateful, hurtful language aimed at degrading others is contrary to our university values and our commitment to an environment of respect and dignity. Its appearance on any platform, including the personal platforms of anyone affiliated with UNCW, is absolutely reprehensible.” What nonsense!  Everyday on the UNC campus black studies professors teach students that white people are racists and slavers, and women’s studies professors demonize men as misogynists and rapists.  The hypocrites that comprise university administrations never do anything about this “reprehensible, hateful, and hurtful language” aimed at white people and at men.

A retired US Navy captain had to resign from the US Naval Academy Alumni Association board after a private conversation with his wife was accidentally streamed on Facebook. The captain used the n-word and said that white men “can’t say anything.” His wife complained of Chinese who “steal all of our intellectual property.”  The couple are mortified and deeply sorry to have spoken in derogatory terms “about our fellow man,” a regret that black rioters and intellectual property thiefs do not reciprocate.  The alunmi association said that these private comments are “not consistent with our leadership mission.”  The couple have committed themselves to “using this experience as an opportunity to grow, listen, learn, and reflect . . . and being better people”—https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/07/us/navy-captain-racial-slurs-facebook/index.html.

The groveling of Sulzberger at the NY Times, the groveling at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the groveling by the Minneapolis city council and by submissive police officers will only encourage the black violence that decades of being taught to hate white people has unleashed. As I have said so many times, a diverse, multicultural society cannot be built on hatred.  If blacks today had a real leader like Martin Luther King, Jr., that leader would be protesting police violence against people irrespective of race. Such a protest would be a unifying act instead of a divisive one.  People such as myself could again see hope for American society.

Perhaps women could also find a leader, and men and women could get back together in loving, mutually supportive relationships.  When I read that feminists have created men who prefer plastic “sex dolls” to a flesh and blood woman with emotions and a brain, I put “#Me/Too” in the catagory of bioweapons—https://www.rt.com/sport/484358-kazakh-bodybuilder-sex-doll-marriage-coronavirus/.  The body builder who is marrying a sex doll might be on a public relations trip to boost his following, but his “marriage” to a piece of plastic is credible only because relations between men and women have been so badly damaged by feminists that it is believable that he prefers a sex doll to a real woman. According to beastiality advocates, some women prefer their dog to a man.

Western civilization is collapsing because allegations from the least credible sources carry more weight than facts.  Emotions have displaced facts as the basis for understanding.  Emotion routinely shouts down facts.  It has become commonplace in universities for distinguished authorities to be shut down because the facts are unacceptable to the ignorant woke students, backed up by a roster of administrative thought police.

Universities have abandoned their mission of searching for truth. They have become propaganda ministries that spew the acids that eat away foundations of civilization.

In Western Civilization today, the best way to destroy yourself is to stand up for truth. I am getting tired of it as support for the defense of truth is declining away.

There is a lesson for the warmonger neoconservatives in the extraordinary weakness that is now the core of Western Civilization, a civilization that is a discredited concept in every American university and is being damned again by the NY Times’ 1619 Project. It is hilarious that neoconservatives proclaimed a people as divided as the US, with the majority white population on the defensive, to be an exceptional and indispensable people.

The US armed forces are a hodgepod of men, women, lesbians, homosexuals, a racial medley, and every element in it has been instructed by Identity Politics to hate and distrust the other.  Armies devoid of the homogeneity that gives unity are useless.  Only a fool would put an American or any European army against Russia and China. What will be our fate if the aggressive bombast that the neoconservatives and fellow travelers such as Liz Cheney —https://www.newsmax.com/politics/liz-cheney-germany-troops-withdrawal/2020/06/06/id/970894/?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=mixi&utm_campaign=newsmax —keep pumping out of Washington results in concerted Russian/Chinese action against the threat that the West is determined to portray itself to be?

The hope for humanity is that the Russians and Chinese remain patient as the West continues its collapse under the weight of its own self-hate.

Be seeing you

 

 

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Maybe We Should Stop Giving the Minneapolis Police Military Equipment | The American Conservative

Posted by M. C. on May 30, 2020

What will it take to end the militarization of police?

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/state-of-the-union/maybe-we-should-stop-giving-the-minneapolis-police-military-equipment/

The death of George Floyd reminds us how easy it is to kill and why law enforcement and the armed forces must remain separate.

A protester holds a sign, showing an image from the video of George Floyd’s arrest, outside the Third Precinct Police Station on May 27, 2020 in Minneapolis,Minnesota. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)

The death of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Monday demonstrates how easy it is to end a life. Floyd wasn’t shot with a firearm, as was Philando Castile during a traffic stop four years ago. He wasn’t even tossed in the back of a police van, as was Freddie Gray before that. The weapon was a simple knee to the neck. The video of his arrest is chilling precisely because it’s casual, quotidian almost, just another day on the job for his badge-bearing assailants, a stark contrast to the victim gasping on the ground.

Floyd’s killing has touched off yet another of that most depressing of sequences: a video emerges showing a black man being brutalized by police; his community protests peacefully; those demonstrations are hijacked by rioters and professional anarchists; Molotov cocktails fly; flames erupt. An act of harm by the authorities is followed by a city-wide act of self-harm.

Afterwards the question is always: now what do we do? And certainly there are plenty of good policy reforms that can help restore trust between law enforcement and local communities. Donald Trump in 2018 signed into law the First Step Act, which ordered changes to the prison and sentencing systems. In the meantime, though, how about we start with some low-hanging fruit? How about we stop arming police departments with military-grade equipment?

Philip V. McHarris writes at the Washington Post:

Such protests have become common in a country where more than 1,000 people annually are killed by police, with black people three times as likely as whites to be the victims. Also common is what happened soon after demonstrators gathered to protest Floyd’s death: Police in riot gear shot tear gas canisters into the crowds and fired stun grenades and “nonlethal projectiles” at demonstrators, injuring many. It was stunningly easy to point to the same department’s gentle treatment weeks ago against white anti-lockdown protesters while those protesting against police violence were met with militarized violence.

But this too should not surprise us. Police departments have come to resemble military units, contributing to deadly violence disproportionately against black Americans. While many policies related to policing and mass incarceration happen at the local level, the militarization of police has been promulgated by federal policies.

At issue is the Pentagon’s so-called 1033 program, which allows police to obtain military surplus equipment from the Defense Department. Among the gear that’s been transferred over the years are grenade launchers, armored troop carriers, M16 rifles, and helicopters. And while it’s difficult to find data on the Minneapolis PD specifically, the Star Tribune reported six years ago that police in Minnesota had received about $25 million in defense hardware. (It’s worth pointing out that not all of the military-grade equipment used by law enforcement comes from the Pentagon—some of it is privately purchased by the departments themselves.)

The result has been the creeping militarization of our police. This trend made national headlines in 2014 after cops in Ferguson, Missouri, used armored vehicles to suppress riots sparked by the death of Michael Brown. That next year, President Obama signed an executive order that stopped the Pentagon from transferring some hardware to police departments. This forced Ferguson to send back, among other things, two Humvee armored trucks.

Alas, President Trump reversed Obama’s order in 2017, allowing Pentagon equipment to proliferate once again. So now we have another episode of police brutality, this one courtesy of a simple knee to the neck. But that only raises the question: if police are human like the rest of us, and if all it takes for them to kill is a little bodily force, shouldn’t we refrain from upping the ante with, say, grenades? Shouldn’t the balance between guardian and ward be evener than that, lest it instead become a balance between bully and victim? Isn’t an armored truck a barrier to the kind of involved community policing we should be encouraging? And can anyone seriously say that the presence of military equipment in Ferguson all those years ago did more good than harm?

The looting and burning that took place in Minneapolis last night was senseless, no question. But the solution is not to turn the police into an occupying army. Such powers of last resort force are better left to an impermanent force like the National Guard, which Minneapolis’s mayor said he was calling in.

After Reconstruction, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which provided that it “shall not be lawful to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress.” That law has plenty of loopholes and blurs. It doesn’t cover the Navy or Marines (though other statutes do); it also doesn’t restrain the lawful deployment of the National Guard. Yet its spirit is worth preserving. The military and the police should be kept distinct, one for overseas combat, the other for domestic enforcement. To give the latter the destructive potential of the former is to vault over a very important line.

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