Tags
antifa, BLM, D/S/Cs, Defund the police, Executive branch, policing, The Constitution, The social contract, the thin blue line, the tip of the spear, Use of force, violent felonies
The social contract. We’re born into it no matter where we’re born. The American social contract has features no other nation can claim, because no other nation has the Constitution and its recognition of the natural, unalienable rights of man. One may consider the Constitution a list of limitations on the powers of government, or a list of the rights of individuals. In a sense, it is both, but in America, the individual is sovereign and government derives its powers from the consent of the people. Please, gentle readers, keep in mind I’m speaking of the ideals of this nation, not the way some politicians have so callously trod on them.
Every contract is a matter of tradeoffs. We agree to surrender some degree of absolute sovereignty in order to live in peace with others. My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins. My right to hold an exuberant party ends when the normal peace of the neighborhood is breached. My right to have consumer goods requires payment of the asking price. My right to satisfying sex requires the consent of a partner of lawful age. My right to absolute freedom of movement and action is constrained by the law, written by representatives I have a hand in electing.
And so we arrive in America, circa summer, 2020.
I am often inspired to write by the writings of my favorite Bookworm, whose work should be on your daily “must read” list. I am particularly inspired by her recent article: Defund The Police: the speed of degradation. An excerpt:
The above is a long-winded way of saying that it takes energy to hold systems together. Take away the energy and things fall apart.
I first became aware of this principle when I was in Bogata, Columbia, on a long-ago cruise. The city sat on the edge of a jungle and it looked as if it was losing the battle. It was clear that the people lacked the will (and, I’m sure, the money) to push nature back and keep the city relatively pristine. Coming from a fairly well-maintained United States, it suddenly occurred to me that it’s not a given that cities will chug along. If people stop making the effort, the cities fall apart.
As I got older and became responsible for more things — a business, a home, a family — I realized that it requires constant energy to maintain minimal function. If you don’t do the family laundry for a few days, the effort of getting back on the laundry track is overwhelming. The same is true for cleaning, shopping, paying bills, weeding the garden, etc. [skip]
At bottom, falling apart happens quickly. Any subsequent efforts to resurrect whatever entered an entropic state happens slowly, with great effort and expense.
What we’re seeing in American cities that are defunding, or simply demoralizing, the police is entropy on a massive scale. The riots quickly destroyed the infrastructure, with buildings burned, stores looted, and history and other aesthetic touches destroyed. Now, the cities are facing the long haul, which is a reversion to pre-modern conditions. Before the modern era, cities were dirty and very, very dangerous. Highwaymen went after vehicles and cutpurses, robbers, muggers, and murderers went after everyone.
Lately, the news is filled with stories of mobs attacking drivers in the cars. The mobs block roads — often with approval from Democrat mayors — and any drivers unlucky enough to get caught are at serious risk of getting dragged out of their cars and beaten, robbed, or killed. Up until recently, Americans understood that this behavior was in the more dangerous parts of third world countries, not in their own towns and cities. This change has happened over the course of six weeks.
Communities that were once relatively safe are now terribly dangerous.
This is true mostly, for now, of larger cities ruled—not governed—by Democrats, in most cases, continuously for a half-century or more. This perilous state of affairs–the early stages of the complete dissolution of the social contract–is largely caused by the fraying of the thin, blue line. I refer, of course, to the Police.
America’s police are members of the executive branch of government. They are the tip of the spear, the enforcers of the social contract, because no legislator should ever write a law they’re not willing to kill to enforce. When a citizen decides the social contract no longer applies to him, and is willing to use force to assert that belief, it falls to the police to apply the law and restore law and order, which may be understood as the necessary condition for a functioning social contract.
The only reason the police can function and survive is most people are willing to obey most laws most of the time. They tend not to think “by not running this stop sign, I am consciously upholding my part of the social contract,” but that’s what they’re doing just the same. Americans are willing to honor the social contract because it provides them substantial benefits, such as the sanctity of private property (except in St. Louis), life in a state of law and order where all are equal before the law and people aren’t disappeared in arbitrary, televised raids, unless of course they have some association with President Trump. By honoring the contract, they enjoy a life of relative peace, quiet and safety, unless of course they live in the aforementioned cities.
Unlike the movies and TV, most police officers are not expert martial artists, nor are they highly proficient with their handguns or other firearms. Most are not 6’2” and 250 pounds of raw, highly trained muscle and reflexes. Fortunately, until recently, they didn’t need to be Chuck Norris, though if they were, they’d be in trouble.
Police officers, unlike what one sees in the fake news, Democrat/Socialist/Communist Party propaganda arm media, do not like to use violence. They do all they can to avoid it. They are comprehensively trained to try to talk their way through every situation possible. And again, this works much of the time because most people are willing to obey most laws most of the time. They’re willing to do what police officers tell them to do because they think it’s the right thing to do, because they know police officers represent the ultimate, use-of-force end of the government, because they know if they resist arrest, or more stupidly, attack police officers, they’re going to end up sore, sorry and in jail.
Or at least they used to know that.
In the past, decades ago, criminals knew that if they gave officers lip, if they were stupid enough to try to fight them, they were going to get an epic beating, and they felt they deserved it. It was all part of the contract. That hasn’t been true for, well, decades.
When a police officer can no longer depend on the authority of the blue suit, on the willing, or even the grudging acceptance of their authority by the public, what choices do they have left? Give up—let people do whatever they please–or use force—violence. Actually put hands on people and through restraint, pain, incarceration, and consequences of the criminal law, force them to honor the social contract.
When thugs know they can ignore the police, even attack the police with impunity, all bets are off.
We see this in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta, Baltimore, and other cities like Buffalo, as Forbes.com reports:
All 57 members of the Buffalo Police Department’s Emergency Response Team resigned Friday from the unit in an apparent show of support for two officers who were suspended without pay after being filmed pushing a 75-year-old man to the ground Thursday night.
In that case, the “75-year-old man” was a D/S/C “activist” revolutionary, with an arrest record stretching back decades. He got in the faces of armored riot police, and was ordered to back away. He refused, was pushed back, lost his footing as 75-year-olds often do, and fell. When police are armored for a riot, they’re not kidding around. They’re indicating they’re prepared to use force, more force than usual, and they have the manpower to back it up. What they don’t have in too many cities, is the backing of the judicial, legislative, and even executive branches.
When officers know criminals can’t be arrested, even when they’re committing violent felonies in the presence of the police, they become dispirited. When they know the “mostly peaceful protestors” they arrest will be out as soon as the paperwork is done, and charges against them will be dropped, they wonder why they bother. When they know any attempt to use force to arrest criminals, particularly members of favored victim groups like BLM, Antifa, and other racist, socialist, communist, anarchist organizations, is more likely to result in their arrest and prosecution than the arrest and prosecution of the criminals, they become disgusted—and afraid. When they know the politicians that issue them orders are actively encouraging thugs to ambush, harm, even kill them, they have to make decisions, like the Buffalo officers did.
Without the police, without the lawful, reasonable use of force to uphold the social contract, there is no social contract. The thin, blue line snaps, and society descends, rapidly, into a state of nature where the most violent and brutal rule, where no man’s life, liberty or property are safe. But before the line snaps, police officers enter into a state where they do the minimum. They answer emergency calls when they have to, and when there are sufficient available backup units, but otherwise, they do little or nothing, and they absolutely do not try to arrest the kinds of people that commit most crimes. That’s too dangerous on every level. That’s the state of the social contract in a growing number of cities, and elsewhere, police officers keep a very close eye on politicians and judges and prosecutors, and how woke they are and are likely to become, and they act—or don’t—accordingly. Many, rationally, simply leave the profession.
Defund the police? Cut police budgets by 50%? What that means is cutting blue suits. The overwhelming majority of police budgets is frontline personnel and benefits. There is little or no fat to trim. Cut the budget and even 911 calls won’t be answered, because there will be no one to answer them.
Back to Bookworm:
Right now, the only thing between America and the abyss is an overwhelming victory for Donald Trump and the Republicans. If Biden is elected, the Marxists behind Black Lives Matter, Defund the Police, the de-incarceration of prisons, the end of bail, and every other entropy causing initiative will be in the driver’s seat in America. People will be amazed, in a terrible way, about how fast the road is to becoming the Mogadishu of the northern hemisphere. The end will come only when true totalitarianism appears on the scene because the strength of totalitarianism is the only thing that will stop the violence — and so the American people, ultimately, will embrace the tyrant that comes to claim them.
Ernest Hemingway, in The Sun Also Rises, wrote:
‘How did you go bankrupt?’
‘Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.’
It must be remembered that most Americans, the Normal Americans living in Flyover Country, are alarmed by the destruction of the social contract and by the dissolution of law and order. They recognize the necessity of professional policing. When that’s crippled, or gone, they understand they have to protect themselves, thus do we see the current run on gun stores. Should they be forced to uphold some semblance of law and order themselves, the restraint of the police will become a thing of the past. They will do whatever is necessary to restore some semblance of order, because there will be no one else to do it, and Americans are not going to live under the rule of thugs.
The social contract, the thin blue line, has been gradually unraveling for some time. When it goes entirely, it will be sudden indeed, and the D/S/C media will blame Trump, Normal Americans, everyone and everything but what they see in the mirror. The police, that thin, blue line, are our societal trip wire, and for the time being, we’re letting the worst of us run at them with every imaginable weapon.
If the Democrats win in November, they will turn this country into Mogadishu.
If Trump wins, there will be widespread “peaceful protests,” i.e., riots, looting, assaults, and arson.
Either way, honest citizens will need guns.
Only Trump can win. If any other is elected it is either Trump threw the election or due to massive fraud.
When does the nation win? Cause since January, 2017 the nation hasn’t won a thing but our current state of affairs.
Dear Doug:
Just a few examples of winning:
1) Lowest black unemployment in–pretty much forever
2) Incredible economic growth with all that provides
3) Dramatically decreased federal regulations
4) Decreased illegal immigration
5) NATO allies forced to pay a higher share of their legitimate defense burden
6) The destruction of ISIS
7) IRAN prevented from going nuclear
8) Greater individual liberty…
We can all agree… we live in separate realities. The true effectiveness of all that on your “short” list is as over-estimated as it’s original importance as a priority to begin with. But the one item I took notice…. greater individual liberty. I’m sure Portland and other cities would appreciate that one. Please share what “greater individual liberty” he bestowed upon the land. If there is one single thing I do not feel since Trump came down that escalator.. is liberated, by any definition.
You do realize… he’s already setting up transition delays and legal challenges if he loses, before anything has even happened to suggest an impropriety. Mary Trump’s book makes for some good reading, by the way. Keep your powder dry, Mike… he’s going to call on you in November.
The very people saying that Trump won’t accept the results in November are the ones, including you, who haven’t yet accepted the 2016 election results. It’s pure projection. Seek professional help.
Sadly, we’ll see, Phil. Quite honestly I truly hope you are correct because anything less will not be any good for an already chaotic nation. The man’s mental state, which I have been presenting since Jan, 2017, and has been displayed by him since then, and all the pysch professionals publications, doesn’t support he would “surrender” lightly. You can shrug that off all you want because in the end all that will matter is what actually occurs in the next 100 days.. as he carries out his “scorched earth” knee jerk to the polls. His Portland secret police is just the beginning… and I do not one bit mean he is going to “take over” anything. He’s an authoritarian by… well, by being raised in a dysfunctional home. He will do as he pleases.. and will care less if anyone, any institution, takes him to court to challenge anything he does between now and election day (and after).
My more immediate concern as the Covid threat gets closer to the White House is that if he gets it his supporters will automatically presume/assume Liberals/Deep State weaponized it, or some staffer “turncoat traitor” used himself as a delivery system (since we can NEVER presume his not wearing a mask contributed).
Grab a beer.. a case of beers… kick back, Phil… and embrace the horror to come.
Dear Doug:
Nonsense. Suggesting you’re reserving judgement about the outcome of a future election where the potential for fraud is great is not at all saying one won’t abide by the result of a fair election.
Maybe for your average normal person like you or I.
I agree. Given the level of distrust, I can’t see how either side will accept a loss in November.
Glad to you you guys are starting to come around to the idea that there’s chaos in the land and this isn’t a Trumpian Utopia.
Dear Doug:
Uh…one instance, please, of where I’ve ever claimed we’re living in a utopia, let along a “Trumpian” utopia.
You’re a liar. No one EVER said that we’re in a utopia.
Sorry.. I guess I misinterpreted “Trump can do no wrong, has done no wrong, and everything he has done has been good for the nation.. and anything outside FOX is fake Liberal conspiracy” as being a sort of Utopia for you folks.
Dear Doug:
You know better. I’ve never made such claims, nor have I implied them.
Are you sure he does?
Dear karllembke:
Good question.
Doug, you must be quoting the voices in your own head. Get professional help.
Pardon my apparent stuttering.
When you’re tired lamenting about the “poor me” cop-isn’t-respected-anymore like some Judge Dredd “I am the law!” wannabe, you might try figuring out the “why” of it all in human terms. And.. no… it’s not all about Liberal, commie, socialist.. whatever-fills-your-paddy-wagon political group of laws passed down through all administrations that let bad guys go free. There are social reasons, socio-economic complex causes and effects.. and certainly this year we can toss onto that problem heap of civil stress the racial issues over alleged excessive police violence, and a full fledged health pandemic that Trumipans refuse to admit is even happening. Yet you are running with this police de-funding issue like it alone is the plague of plagues… when it’s hardly a priority in anyone’s political collection of campaign goodies. There’s going to be no universal accolades jumping on board in any major way using the “de-funding” buzzword as meaning getting rid of cops. Given all politics are local there might be some rural communities who might try the concept under a greater social plan of “civil enforcement” social programs…. but I am quite sure it will be rare if at all where some small municipality town council will vote for no more police on a Friday and Saturday there’s dancing in the streets.
I personally think that the idea of universal police enforcement needs a complete and thorough review on it’s overall goals and objectives as it relates to the society in which it serves. I tend to believe we ask the impossible of law enforcement, and given the people who make up law enforcement are only human… mistakes have and will continue to happen along the entire process. Whether someone drags out a calculator and plugs out a .5 mistake rate nationwide that results in a poor judgement or bad process call thereby giving cops a 99.5% success rate, that still literally spells out in the thousands, and some of those result in deaths. Likely most of those situations end up being somehow justified even though it resulted in a tragic unintended death. I find that unacceptable that a family member has to accept the accidental death of a loved one at the hands of the police as an “Oh well, sorry… but that the price of the social contract.”
Don’t feed the troll. TLDR. Doug is a troll, who can’t get any attention at his own pathetic blog.
Dear Doug:
Ah. So because no human endeavor, such as policing, can ever be error-free, we must what? Do away with all necessary and worthwhile human endeavors?
Inasmuch as you are probing for an instance of you, et al, having specifically proclaimed America a Trump World utopia with your devotion toward enabling all he does (or doesn’t)…. are you suggesting we don’t seek to improve our endeavors and just assume their end justifies the means?
Dear Doug:
You’re evading the question, but of course we seek to improve, which is why we don’t abolish or cripple the police because a tiny number misbehave.
You’ve got me confused with the Conservative alarmist imaginary persona they assign to Liberals, commies, yada yada they imagine are going to “shred the Constitution” in some way and take over come January. I’ve never once said.. or implied.. that I want to abolish or cripple law enforcement (kinda like what you said about “Trumpian-Utopia? Not me!”)
All I am saying is… 1. Don’t sweat it… it will largely pass (per history). 2. If there can be a social review across the land as to what society wants to see regarding 21st century policing to save cops’ lives… enhance their ability to serve and protect… and minimize violations (mistaken or otherwise) of social liberties) I see nothing wrong with that. Maybe using a hammer to enforce the law can at least be reduced to a rubber mallet.
I mean, c’mon. When you and I were kids there was “Officer Friendly”. My kids.. not black… regardless, I gave the “if you’re ever pulled over by the cops” speech to my kids from the context that you don’t want to give the cop some excuse to do something, especially trying to talk your way out of whatever got you pulled over. That’s not respect.. that’s fear… because a cop has a gun. Hell, I got pulled over about a week ago for an expired sticker on my plate (rightly so). I told my GF to keep her hands visible and don’t rummage for the paperwork (the state is late sending them out because of Covid closures), and I kept my hands at 10 & 2 position. The cop recognized me from working with the county and understood the dilemma and was perfectly nice. Point being… he had the gun and the law on his side to use it.
Honestly… nothing is wrong with this picture to you?
dear Master Troll Doug,
I was a bit worried about you after you began to
act decently in previous posts, as though
you had red-pilled, but I see that it was
only another trollish tactic, kind of a
scorpion-frog thingy.
Here all of a sudden you’re stinging iabout
incoherently and you’ve not been tumped over
to sink into the slime. What a good thing
free speech is! I must always remember that
America’s greatest weaknesses are its virtues for
they allow “scorpions” like us to participate.
Operation Scorpion promises to bear fruit, Oh
Master Troll Doug, as its late stages are appearning
nightly in the streets of cities controlled by our
political arm.
Onward to chaos and fire, for this is how a new
forest is created! As a wise Democrat recently
explained.
O Master Troll Doug, you are a thing to behold!
Your little trollop Dug
Back in the ’70s de-policing in big cities pushed businesses and high earning individuals out to the ‘burbs. Nobody with money means no tax revenue to pay for all those big government boondoggles people like Bill De Blasio love so much. In 1975 a bankrupt New York city hit up Uncle Sam for a bailout. A request to which then President Gerald Ford memorably replied “Drop dead!”
Seems like a little bit of history repeating.
Not too sure about how far any 70’s de-policing extended to big cities. Being from Chicago and still living there then I was not overly aware of any de-policing going on. Actually the reverse seemed to be taking hold when the ridiculous new “mandatory” drug laws came about and the prisons started to fill up.
Businesses and people moving out to the burbs during that period was due to many different socio-economic, and political, decisions and cannot be attributed alone to some intentional de-policing.
Sadly, on top of the current problem image of police in general in America Dear Leader is now making it all look worse with sending his “secret police” all over the place. The guy just loves shooting himself in the foot.
I don’t think there’s much doubt that money fleeing cities was driven, in large part, by crime. America’s urban renaissance began in the 1990s when crime rates fell. Of course plenty of stuff aside from criminal justice policy effects the crime rate. We’re about to find out how big a factor aggressive urban policing was in the drop in crime in the ’90s because big city cops are going to adopt the Chinatown philosophy for at least a few years.
The violent crime rate increased throughout the 70s and 80s, then peaked in 1991, and have been going down ever since. That trend is only now being reversed in a handful of democrat-run cities.
Reagan won in a landslide in 1984, and Bush in 1988, in part by promising to be tough on crime.
Doug, perhaps putting criminals in prison actually helped to REDUCE the crime rate. Duh!
Don’t feed the troll, Phil.
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Dear .357 Magnum:
Very kind of you to link to this article.
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Dear Doug:
Thanks for the link!