A partial explanation of black crime

With ethically vacant parental attitudes like this, young blacks have little to tell them that they should not commit crimes




The parents of a dead armed robber are very angry over his death, and are demanding to know why his innocent victim was allowed to be armed.

It’s been a difficult week for parents Temia Hairston and Michael Grace Sr. Their son, Michael Grace Jr., was shot and killed during an attempted robbery early Sunday morning.

Police said Grace Jr. and two other people tried to rob a Pizza Hut in the 3200 block of Freedom Drive. During the incident, an employee fired his own handgun and killed Grace Jr.

Hairston said she learned of her son’s death on social media, and only got confirmation from police after contacting them first. The grieving mother said she has been left with dozens of questions about the situation that have thus far gone unanswered.

“If there was to be a death, it was not the place of the employee at Pizza Hut. That is the place of law enforcement,” said Hairston

The parents are angry that their son was shot and killed by an employee. They don’t believe the full story has been released to the public.

“Why in the hell did this guy have a gun?” questioned Hairston about the employee who shot her son.

She said her son was shot in the head, and she thinks the shooting may have even been personal, citing past conflicts Grace Jr. had had with other employees at the restaurant.

“This wasn’t a body shot. This was a head shot. My son was shot in the left side of his head just behind his ear. A head shot is personal,” said Hairston.

Even though their son was in the process of committing a crime, the family thinks his death was undeserved and unjustified.

Hairston said she thinks the employee who shot her son needs to be in jail, and wants all parties involved in the situation to be honest about what happened.

You want honesty, Temia Hairston? I’ll give you honesty.

The honest truth, Temia Hairston, is that every human being is born with the natural human right to arm themselves for the defense of their lives from both rogue governments and violent criminals. Your dead thug of a son was one of three vile human predators who obtained deadly weapons and put the lives of innocent people at risk—and likely would have ended their lives without a second thought—over the petty contents of a restaurant cash drawer.

Here’s some more honesty for you.

It is not the role of law enforcement to protect individual lives. This is immutable truth that which is also both a practical fact and a legal reality. One person and one person alone is responsible for defending your life against violent predators, and that person is the individual.

This Pizza Hut employee respected his own life enough to arm himself, and it proved to be a wise decision. Your son Michael Grace Jr. and his accomplices were committing a violent armed felony when the employee drew his (lawfully) concealed weapon and opened fire to defend not only his life, but the lives of other employees in the store.

Ms. Hairston, you then complained that the bullet that struck your son behind the ear during the ensuing firefight was “personal.”

Ma’am, preying on your fellow human beings is incredibly personal, even if armed robbery seemed to be your son’s idea of business. Would you have been mollified if the Pizza hut employee had put a controlled pair through his heart instead? I think not. At the core of it, your complaint is that your son was killed committing a crime, and you don’t seem to think that he deserved it, even as he callously and intentionally put numerous other lives at risk.

You’re wrong. This Pizza Hut employee had the right to defend his life and the lives of others against the violent actions of your predator son.

Your son chose to be a violent criminal, and earned the bullet that ended his life.

SOURCE






Is #MeToo Anti-Men?

Ignoring fundamental differences between men and women while demanding that men behave differently is no solution.  

The #MeToo movement, spurred on by the alleged desire to expose and fight against men who sexually abuse and harass women, has, for some, already become yet another feminist tribal battle cry in their ongoing obsession of pitting women against men. An unintended consequence of any serious movement is that it devolves into a kind of pop-culture fad, where the promotion of an image or idea is more important than the telling of truth.

One of the unintended messages from the #MeToo movement is the promotion of the extreme feminist idea that all men are essentially predators due to the so-called “patriarchy” within mainstream culture. This message follows that cultural “maleness” must be resisted, and put down because it produces unjust things like inequality and sexual harassment.

So while the movement recognizes the problem of sexual harassment and abuse it refuses to accept commonsense cultural safe guards that help to protect women against abuse. For example, Vice President Mike Pence has been much maligned over his long-time practice of refusing to be alone one-on-one with a woman who is not his wife. Feminists complain that this standard may hamper a woman’s ability to move ahead.

The Miami Herald recently reported that female lobbyists and staffers have found that “many male legislators will no longer meet with them privately.” Jennifer Green, a lobbyist, noted, “I had a senator say, ‘I need my aide here in the room because I need a chaperone,’” She elaborated, “I said, ‘Senator, why do you need a chaperone? … Do you feel uncomfortable around me?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘anyone can say anything with the door shut.’”

Of the #MeToo movement, Claire Berlinski recently wrote that it is “a frenzied extrajudicial warlock hunt that does not pause to parse the difference between rape and stupidity.” In fact, she added, “It has become a classic moral panic, one that is ultimately as dangerous to women as to men.”

It makes both logical and common sense for men who find themselves in positions of power to protect themselves from even the perception of indiscretion. The truth is that men and women have always played different roles within society, and no amount of cultural manipulation or denial of fundamental differences will remove this reality. Men are men and women are women, no matter how much the transgender movement may claim otherwise. To deny this is to deny both biological and experiential truth. Sexual attraction and tension are facts of life. No amount of politically correct social reengineering will remove this from either the workplace or society at large. If men feel they are being targeted, why would they not act to protect themselves?

SOURCE





In Defense of Evangelicals Who Support Trump

Dennis Prager
   
It is usually easier for an outsider to defend a person or a group that is attacked than for the person or group.

In that vein, this Jew would like to defend evangelicals and other Christians who support President Donald Trump. They are regularly attacked as religious hypocrites who give Christianity in general, and evangelical Christianity in particular, a bad name.

The people writing such things are often Christians, including evangelicals.

Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist, wrote: “Whether the subject is the debauched pagan in the White House, the mall-haunted candidacy of Roy Moore or the larger question of how to engage with secular culture, there is talk of an intergenerational crisis within evangelical churches, a widening disillusionment with a Trump-endorsing old guard, a feeling that a crackup must loom ahead.”

Jared Wilson wrote on The Gospel Coalition website: “From the same believers who raised us to believe that standing for the truth was more important than anything, that being persecuted for your integrity was better than compromise, that morality was not relative, that ethics are not situational. And now these same teachers are wanting us to believe that a little ‘R’ by a man’s name covers a multitude of sins.”

Robert P. Jones wrote in USA Today: “White evangelicals … are, in many ways, a community grieving its losses. … Thinking about the white evangelical/Trump alliance as an end-of-life bargain is illuminating. It helps explain, for example, how white evangelical leaders could ignore so many problematic aspects of Trump’s character.”

Shortly before the election, Marvin Olasky and the editors wrote in World magazine: “Glorifying God by honoring His standards is worth more than political gain.”

Jay Caruso, a Dallas Morning News editorial board member, wrote a column titled “Evangelical Leaders Expose Their Hypocrisy By Playing Palace Guard to Trump.”

In The Arizona Republic, Jon Gabriel, an evangelical, wrote a column titled “Evangelicals Are Hypocrites to Support Donald Trump.” In it he wrote, “As an evangelical myself, one of the strangest developments of the Trump era has been the abandonment of moral character as a political essential.”

I could give dozens more examples of attacks on evangelical Christians who support President Trump.

I believe these attacks are not biblical, moral or wise.

Religious Christians and Jews who support Trump understand that the character of a public leader is quite often less important than his policies. This is so obvious that only the naive think otherwise. Character is no predictor of political leadership on behalf of moral causes. I wish it were. Then, in any political contest, we would simply have to determine who the better person is and vote accordingly.

Therefore, I would like to pose some questions to critics of evangelicals who support Trump:

Former President Jimmy Carter has been married once (virtually all critics of Trump note that he is thrice married, as if that were ipso facto a character defect), and to the best of anyone’s knowledge, he has been faithful to his wife all those years. If you are conservative, religious or secular, would you vote for Jimmy Carter over Donald Trump?

Do you believe that Hillary Clinton has a finer character than Donald Trump? For the record, I believe his character is superior to hers. And the choice in the 2016 was between Trump and Clinton. A Republican who voted for anyone else or didn’t vote voted for Clinton.

Who should pro-choice voters support: a pro-life activist of fine character or a pro-choice activist of dubious character?

Who should pro-Israel voters support: an anti-Israel activist of fine character or a pro-Israel activist of dubious character?

If they were to have cancer, would any of the evangelicals’ critics choose an oncologist based on character? If not, why not?

One of the few moral heroes of the Holocaust was the German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party Oskar Schindler. He personally saved more than a thousand Jews’ lives. He was also a serial philanderer. I suspect many leading Nazis never cheated on their wives. Character is a complex issue.

I have spent my life making the case for good character: that God wants us to be good more than anything else; that our children’s character is way more important than their grades; and that the most important question a society can ask is how to make good people (since we are not born good).

Evangelicals realize that the moral good of defeating the Left is of surpassing importance. It can feel good to oppose the president, but religious supporters of the president are more interested in doing good than feeling good. On issue after issue — religious liberty, the unborn, Israel, the American flag and free speech, to cite just a few — the president and religious Americans have made common cause.

Like evangelicals, I look to the Bible for moral instruction. I also look for wisdom. And in that book, God chooses, of all people, a prostitute (Rahab) to enable the Israelites to enter the Promised Land.

There’s a lesson there.

SOURCE





Who's Afraid of Jordan Peterson?

When a British interviewer tried to shut him up, I knew he had something interesting to say

Peggy Noonan
   
When I speak with young people beginning their careers I often tell them that in spite of the apparent formidableness of the adults around them — their mastery of office systems, their professional accomplishments, their sheer ability to last — almost everyone begins every day just trying to keep up their morale. Everyone’s trying to be hopeful about themselves and the world. People are more confused, even defeated by life, than they let on; many people — most — have times when they feel they’ve lost the plot, the thread. So go forward with appropriate compassion.

This flashed through my mind when I saw the interview between British television journalist Cathy Newman and clinical psychologist and social philosopher Jordan Peterson. It burned through the Internet, in part because she was remarkably hostile and badgering: “What gives you the right to say that?” “You’re making vast generalizations.” He seemed mildly taken aback, then rallied and wouldn’t be pushed around. It was also interesting because she, the fiery, flame-haired aggressor, was so boring — her thinking reflected all the predictable, force-fed assumptions — while he, saying nothing revolutionary or even particularly fiery, was so interesting. When it was over, you wanted to hear more from him and less from her.

I wondered when I first read the headlines: What could a grown-up, seemingly stable professor (former associate professor of psychology at Harvard, full professor for 20 years at the University of Toronto) stand for that would make a journalist want to annihilate him on live TV — or, failing that, to diminish him or make him into a figure of fun?

He must have defied some orthodoxy. He must think the wrong things. He must be a heretic. Heretics must be burned.

I had not known of his work. The interview was to promote his second book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Mr. Peterson is called “controversial” because he has been critical, as an academic, of various forms of the rising authoritarianism of the moment — from identity politics to cultural appropriation to white privilege and postmodern feminism. He has refused to address or refer to transgendered people by the pronouns “zhe” and “zher.” He has opposed governmental edicts in his native Canada that aim, perhaps honestly, at inclusion, but in practice limit views, thoughts and speech.

This is unusual in a professor but not yet illegal, so I bought his book to encourage him.

In it he offers advice, much but not all of it based on decades of seeing patients as a psychologist, on the big eternal question: How to Live.

He is of the tough school: Know life’s limits, see and analyze your own, build on what you’ve got and can create. And be brave. Everything else is boring and won’t work.

Deeper in, you understand the reasons he might be targeted for annihilation. First, he is an intellectual who shows a warm, scholarly respect for the stories and insights into human behavior — into the meaning of things — in the Old and New Testaments. (He’d like more attention paid to the Old.) Their stories exist for a reason, he says, and have lasted for a reason: They are powerful indicators of reality, and their great figures point to pathways. He respects the great thinkers of the West and the Christian tradition.

More undermining of the modernist project, Mr. Peterson states clearly more than once that grasping at political ideology is not the answer when your life goes wrong. There’s no refuge there, it’s a way of avoiding the real problem: “Don’t blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

That is a dangerous thing to say in an ideological age.

What should we do instead? Admit life ain’t for sissies. You will die and on the way to death you will suffer; throughout you will be harassed by evil, both in the world and in your heart: “Earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer — we’re tough enough to take on all of that. But human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world.”

The only appropriate stance: “Stand up straight with your shoulders back” and “accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.” Literally: “Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind.” Competitors and predators will start to assume you’re competent and able. Moreover, it will “encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.”

“Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.” Respect yourself, take part, keep “the machinery of the world running.”

Don’t be arrogant. “Become aware of your own insufficiency. … Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. And above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the death of millions of people.”

He’s suggesting here the personal is political, but not in the way that phrase is usually meant.

If I were of the radical established Left, bent on squelching contending thought, I’d hate him too.

Success is a mystery, but failure is not: “To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits.” Drugs, drinking, not showing up, hanging around with friends who are looking to lose, who have no hopes for themselves or you. “Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated,” he writes. “Surround yourself with people who support your upward aim.”

The past is fixed but the future is not. You can learn good by experiencing evil. “A bullied boy can mimic his tormentors. But he can also learn from his own abuse that it is wrong to push people around.” Your future is not preordained by experience; don’t be cowed by the stats. “It is true that many adults who abuse children were themselves abused. It is also true the majority of people who were abused as children do not abuse their own children.”

“Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.”

It is a good book, blunt and inspiring.

We live in a time when so many young (and not so young) people feel lost, unsure of how they should approach their lives, or life in general. Mr. Peterson talks about the attitudes that will help find the path. It is not a politically correct or officially approved path, but it is an intensely practical and yet heightened one: This life you’re living has meaning.

Back to the hostile interview, and the labeling of Mr. Peterson as “controversial,” which is a way of putting a warning label on his work. When people, especially those in a position of authority, like broadcasters, try so hard to shut a writer up, that writer must have something to say.

When cultural arbiters try to silence a thinker, you have to assume he is saying something valuable.

So I bought and read the book. A small thing, but it improved my morale.

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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