Friday, July 13, 2018



Making the police afraid to do their jobs is not a good idea

The heavy attacks on police under Obama are now bearing fruit -- with escalating crime.  Note that the cops accused in the Freddy Gray case were all eventually exonerated

BALTIMORE – Just before a wave of violence turned Baltimore into the nation’s deadliest big city, a curious thing happened to its police force: officers suddenly seemed to stop noticing crime.

Police officers reported seeing fewer drug dealers on street corners. They encountered fewer people who had open arrest warrants.

Police questioned fewer people on the street. They stopped fewer cars.

In the space of just a few days in spring 2015 – as Baltimore faced a wave of rioting after Freddie Gray, a black man, died from injuries he suffered in the back of a police van – officers in nearly every part of the city appeared to turn a blind eye to everyday violations. They still answered calls for help. But the number of potential violations they reported seeing themselves dropped by nearly half. It has largely stayed that way ever since.

“What officers are doing is they’re just driving looking forward. They’ve got horse blinders on,” says Kevin Forrester, a retired Baltimore detective.

The surge of shootings and killings that followed has left Baltimore easily the deadliest large city in the United States. Its murder rate reached an all-time high last year; 342 people were killed. The number of shootings in some neighborhoods has more than tripled. One man was shot to death steps from a police station. Another was killed driving in a funeral procession.

“In all candor, officers are not as aggressive as they once were, pre-2015. It’s just that fact.”
Gary Tuggle, interim Police Commissioner of Baltimore

What's happening in Baltimore offers a view of the possible costs of a remarkable national reckoning over how police officers have treated minorities.

Starting in 2014, a series of racially charged encounters in Ferguson, Missouri; Chicago; Baltimore; and elsewhere cast an unflattering spotlight on aggressive police tactics  toward black people. Since then, cities have been under pressure to crack down on abuses by law enforcement.

So has the U.S. Justice Department. During the Obama administration, the department launched wide-ranging civil rights investigations of troubled police forces, then took them to court to compel reforms. Under President Donald Trump, Washington has largely given up that effort. "If you want crime to go up, let the ACLU run the police department," Attorney General Jeff Sessions said at a gathering of police officials in May.

Whether that scrutiny would cause policing to suffer – or crime to rise – has largely remained an open question.

In Baltimore, at least, the effect on the city's police force was swift and substantial.

Police typically learn about crime in one of two ways: either someone calls for help, or an officer sees a crime himself and stops to do something. The second category, known among police as an “on-view,” offers a sense of how aggressively officers are doing their job. Car stops are a good example: Few people call 911 to report someone speeding – instead, officers see it and choose to pull someone over. Or choose not to.

Millions of police records show officers in Baltimore respond to calls as quickly as ever. But they now begin far fewer encounters themselves. From 2014 to 2017, dispatch records show the number of suspected narcotics offenses police reported themselves dropped 30 percent; the number of people they reported seeing with outstanding warrants dropped by half. The number of field interviews – instances in which the police approach someone for questioning – dropped 70 percent.

“Immediately upon the riot, policing changed in Baltimore, and it changed very dramatically,” says Donald Norris, an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who reviewed USA TODAY's analysis. “The outcome of that change in policing has been a lot more crime in Baltimore, especially murders, and people are getting away with those murders.”

Police officials acknowledge the change. "In all candor, officers are not as aggressive as they once were, pre-2015. It’s just that fact," says acting Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle, who took command of Baltimore's police force in May.

Tuggle blames a shortage of patrol officers and the fallout from a blistering 2016 Justice Department investigation that found the city's police regularly violated residents' constitutional rights and prompted new limits on how officers there carry out what had once been routine parts of their job. At the same time, he says, police have focused more of their energy on gun crime and less on smaller infractions.

"We don’t want officers going out, grabbing people out of corners, beating them up and putting them in jail," Tuggle says. "We want officers engaging folks at every level. And if somebody needs to be arrested, arrest them. But we also want officers to be smart about how they do that."

The change has left a perception among some police officers that people in the city are free to do as they please. And among criminals, says Mahogany Gaines, whose brother, Dontais, was found shot to death inside his apartment in October.

 “These people don’t realize that you’re leaving people fatherless and motherless,” Gaines says. “I feel like they think they’re untouchable.”

SOURCE







Dr. Peterson and the Reporters

One ingredient in the astounding fame of Jordan Peterson is his capacity to show just how lazy, obtuse, unprepared, smug, knee-jerk, and prejudiced are many journalists at leading publications.

In a tendentious New York Times profile, for example, Peterson is held up for ridicule when he cites “enforced monogamy” as a rational way of fixing wayward, sometimes violent men in our society. If men had wives, they’d behave better, Peterson implied, and they wouldn’t “fail” so much. The reporter, a twenty-something from the Bay Area, has a telling response to Peterson’s position: “I laugh, because it is absurd.”

Her condescension is unearned. With no background in social psychology or cultural anthropology, she doesn’t get the framework in which Peterson speaks. But that doesn’t blunt her confidence in setting Peterson’s remarks into the category of the ridiculous. And the category of the sexist, too, as the subtitle of the profile makes clear: “He says there’s a crisis in masculinity. Why won’t women—all these wives and witches—just behave?”

By “enforced monogamy,” though, all Peterson means is a society that prizes stable one-to-one relationships, not a society that forces women into domestic servitude. It’s a term drawn from sociology (hardly a right-wing, patriarchal zone). But the reporter, Nellie Bowles, casts it as pernicious nonetheless. She didn’t bother to do any homework in the fields in which Peterson works.

Another blatant case of ineptitude is an interview a Vox reporter did with a feminist philosopher, the subject being Peterson’s recent book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The reporter, Sean Illing, displays his integrity with one of his first questions.

    Peterson has been called a “sexist” and a “misogynist.” To be honest, I’m not sure this is a fair characterization of his work, but I haven’t read his book and I haven’t listened to all his lectures. I’m curious what you think.

What is one to say about a journalist who not only doesn’t bone up on the central subject of an interview, but also doesn’t realize that admitting this destroys his credibility? (Peterson has a rebuttal to the Vox interview here, where he points out the astonishing professional irresponsibility of the professor.)

A few weeks ago, Peterson sat down with the Economist for a long interview largely on the issue of male-female relations. At one point (around minute 43), Peterson notes that everyone in society is “controlled” in one way or another. The conversation shifts into the ways in which women sometimes get out of control, acting in a “bullying, detestable manner” (Peterson’s words) toward other women. It’s hard to “cope” with that, he observes, because it can be “unbelievably vicious,” and it usually takes the form of “reputation destruction, innuendo, and gossip.”

It isn’t hard to imagine the interviewer, a liberal female, growing irritated at a man talking about women behaving badly. When Peterson concludes that women engage in those kinds of tactics much, much more than men do and states, “That’s what the data indicate,” she has to interrupt.

“Where is that data on innuendo and gossip?” she asks, in a tone blending mockery and annoyance.

Clearly, she thinks that no such data exist. Peterson pauses for a moment, as if he has just understood that she has no awareness of the context of his remarks. The area of adolescence studies has probed these tactics thoroughly, he tells her, and “it’s a well documented field.” Researchers have studied aggressive behavior and found clear differences in male and female expression. Women prefer verbal forms of it, men physical forms.

“There’s a whole literature on that,” he continues.

But the interviewer still has a hard time accepting it: “Just to be clear, you think that is predominantly a female modus operandi.”

Peterson rightly picks up on her choice of words. “It’s not that I think it. It’s that the clinical literature indicates that. … I’m not  making this up!”

She still acts as if the whole outlook is new to her, and rather offensive, too. Once again, we have a journalist who didn’t read anything of the background material when she prepared for this interview.

These three cases typify what we might call the Peterson Effect. Peterson brings social science findings to bear on thorny matters of men and women. Those findings run against the progressive goal of eliminating male-female differences. The journalists are unaware of the science, but they are steeped in the ideology. It’s an obdurate mix of ignorance and certainty.

Peterson fans like his interviews because they have experienced that smugness before. To watch someone stand up to it, to hear him cite clinical data and hold firmly against a party line they know is dishonest and coercive—that goes a long way to explaining the Peterson phenomenon.

SOURCE





CNN Has Complete Meltdown Over Kavanaugh Decision, Cannot Believe He Is a White Male

It’s not as if the media didn’t have enough reasons to melt down over federal Judge Brett Kavanaugh being picked to the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump. But did you know he’s a white, cisgendered male?

… Oh, you did? Well, this is apparently a shocking fact inside CNN, and they’re not taking it well at all.

An article that may truly break new ground for inanity even for the fine folks at CNN reports that most justices have been white males, and this is apparently an incredibly bad thing.

“Since the Supreme Court first convened in 1790, 113 justices have served on the bench. Of those, 107 have been white men,” the article reads.

“On Monday night, President Trump announced his nominee to succeed Justice Anthony Kennedy is Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the US Court of Appeals. If confirmed, he would be the 108th — and wouldn’t shift the diversity of the current court.”

The six exceptions, just in case you weren’t keeping track, are Thurgood Marshall, Sandra Day O’Connor, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.

“The first appointment — when Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Marshall — wasn’t until 1967. When Johnson announced the nomination, he said he thought it was the right thing to do and the right time to do it. Thomas’s appointment happened decades later, in 1991 under George H. W. Bush (the first Bush),” CNN reported, the parenthetical apparently for the kind of low-information reader CNN loves.

“Sotomayor, one of the four female justices, is also the first and only Hispanic justice in history. (Some say Justice Benjamin Cardozo, who was Portuguese, was the first Hispanic member, but he doesn’t qualify under current census standards.)”

“No justices so far have identified as Asian, Native American or Pacific Islander.”

Now, wait a minute — I didn’t think one could identify as being a different race. Didn’t some NAACP chairwoman get in trouble for this? I can’t seem to remember her name (probably because she changed it).

Of course, two different minorities are overrepresented on the court, and you may not be surprised to know what they are (at least in a CNN article).

“We’ve never had a Jewish president, but eight Jewish justices have sat on the bench, including current justices Ginsburg, Kagan and Stephen Breyer,” CNN reported.

“At its founding, the court was made up of almost entirely Protestant members, and a majority of the 113 justices throughout history have been Protestants.

“The court today, which also has five Catholics, is more diverse. Neil Gorsuch, who Trump nominated last January, was raised Catholic but now worships at an Episcopal church.

“Most of the US population isn’t Catholic or Jewish. Of those who are religious in the US, about 23% identify with one of these sets of beliefs, according to the Pew Research Center.”

The clear intimation is predictable for CNN. White males = bad. Not white males = good. Religious minorities = probably not that good, especially if they’re overrepresented.

SOURCE





Australian Men's rights activists have a new hero: David Leyonhjelm

This is from a Leftist source but there may be something in it. It is written from a feminist and hence unmoored from reality perspective. Evidence of that is seen in the words below: "women have gained access to a measure of equity in education and the workplace". That's just paranoia. "A measure of preference" would be more like it.

Women these days make up roughly 60% of university admissions and get extensive job preference.  "Most new Australian jobs were filled by women over the last three years ".  Women have by now got it all -- to the disadvantage of men. Reality sure beats believing in myths, doesn't it? The writer, Jason Wilson, is just clinging to old hates. 

Wilson is also a bit of a nong in his usage of "dogwhistle". Dogwhistle refers to something understood by only one side of politics.  What Lion Helmet said was as clear as crystal to anybody



Senator David Leyonhjelm threw out a dogwhistle to the men’s rights movement, and it appears to have been answered.

First, Leyonhjelm made crude comments about Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s sex life in the Senate. Then, he reiterated those comments on the Sky News program hosted by Ross Cameron and Rowan Dean. Now, Hanson-Young is promising to sue her Senate colleague for defamation.

Leyonhjelm’s explanation for his comments tapped into a long-standing concept beloved of men’s rights activists, “pick up artists”, incels, and assorted antifeminists in all corners of the “manosphere”: misandry.

 This is Australian-style sexism brought to you by a senator and Sky News

The context was a debate arising from the murder of Eurydice Dixon, where Leyonhjelm was among those who were proposing that the right solution was to arm women with mace and other personal defence technologies

Hanson-Young voted against the motion and told the Senate on 28 June that during the debate, Leyonhjelm told her to “stop shagging men”. Interestingly, he told Sky that “what I was objecting to was the misandry, the blaming of men for the actions of individual criminals”, saying she had accused all men of being rapists, a claim she denies.

When Malcolm Turnbull called on Leyonhjelm to apologise, he said that the prime minister should call out Hanson-Young’s alleged misandry, which is “equally as bad” as misogyny.

By last Wednesday, on A Voice for Men, one of the foremost blogs of the men’s rights movement, Mark Dent had written of Leyonhjelm: “I have a new hero”. One of A Voice for Men’s tagline’s is: “Humanist counter-theory in the Age of Misandry”, and its mission statement says it exists to raise boys and men “above the din of misandry”.

Dent’s article on Leyonhjelm was titled, “A man takes a stand”.

Dent praised Leyonhjelm’s abusive characterisation of Turnbull as a “soft cock” and a “pussy”, saying “these words could not be more appropriate”. And he thanked Leyonhjelm for spotting Hanson-Young’s comments as “attack on all men which it clearly was”.

He also published the email Leyonhjelm sent in response to his fan letter, wherein it was explained that: “Apologies are only appropriate when there is fault. I am not the party at fault – misandry is not something that can be excused.”

It’s a neat trick – a debate over a murder with misogyny at its core gets turned into a petulant and stubborn insistence on the victimhood of men at the hands of women. And it plays into the hands of the large, reactionary political movement built on male victimhood.

“Misandry” is a word that means a hatred for men. It arose as a neologism in the late 19th century, modelled on the word misogyny, which has more ancient roots. As Australian sociologist Michael Flood puts it, misogyny is “an ideology or belief system that has accompanied patriarchal, or male-dominated societies for thousands of years”.

“Misandry” has been employed in antifeminist discourse as an inversion, and a kind of parody of the politicised understanding of misogyny that arose in the feminist movement. Some men saw, and still see, the gains made by women as attacks on their own rights and privileges.

So as women have gained access to a measure of equity in education and the workplace, reproductive rights, no-fault divorce, and a measure of personal and sexual autonomy, some men have seen only an attack on their prerogatives as husbands, fathers, privileged employees, etc.

For some antifeminists, the concept has extraordinary explanatory power. They see it as the motivating force for a feminist movement which, they allege, exists mostly to persecute men. And they believe it to be so powerful and widespread that it can explain not only the problems that they say affect men as a gender, or social class, it is also at the root of personal tribulations of individual men struggling with romantic problems, marital breakdown, or professional failure.

A vast ecosystem of blogs, websites, forums, subreddits, and social media accounts promote this topsy-turvy vision of gender hierarchy. Misandry, and the accompanying narrative of male victimhood, are their currency.

So it was that Leyonhjelm was praised on the Men’s Rights subreddit, the MGTOW (men going their own way) subreddit, and on Braincels (which sees itself as the intellectual end of the incel movement).

In turn, Leyonhjelm responded to the controversy – entirely created by him – by inviting antifeminist Bettina Arndt to parliament to address the topic of misandry.

Many have wondered why Leyonhjelm has kept this story alive with his own media appearances, even in the face of clear legal risks.

Part of the answer may be in the way in which his citation of one of the key concepts of organised misogyny has been noticed in key forums of that subculture.

Leyonhjelm’s ostensible core ideology, libertarianism, is not popular. He was fortunate to be elected at all in 2013. He will need to fight another election soon.

But misogyny has a constituency. His fights with mainstream media interviewers resonate powerfully among a group of men who are alienated by, and bitterly opposed to, gender equality.

By speaking to them, and being boosted in their media ecosystem, Leyonhjelm might become the men’s rights candidate.

SOURCE 

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here

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