Liberal Media Types Advocate Riots in #Ferguson
Would they do the same if conservatives were burning cars?
Back in the good old days, the left loved to lecture us about civility. That time is over.
Remember when Sarah Palin's target map shot Gabby Giffords? NYTs prints Darren Wilson's address http://t.co/f45nadLfsu
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 25, 2014
In the course of the last few days, at least two writers from liberal outlets have tried to justify and even advocate for the violent rioting in Ferguson.
First, we have Darlena Cunha of Time:
Ferguson: In Defense of Rioting
When a police officer shoots a young, unarmed black man in the streets, then does not face indictment, anger in the community is inevitable. It’s what we do with that anger that counts. In such a case, is rioting so wrong?
Riots are a necessary part of the evolution of society. Unfortunately, we do not live in a universal utopia where people have the basic human rights they deserve simply for existing, and until we get there, the legitimate frustration, sorrow and pain of the marginalized voices will boil over, spilling out into our streets. As “normal” citizens watch the events of Ferguson unfurl on their television screens and Twitter feeds, there is a lot of head shaking, finger pointing, and privileged explanation going on.
We wish to seclude the incident and the people involved. To separate it from our history as a nation, to dehumanize the change agents because of their bad and sometimes violent decisions—because if we can separate the underlying racial tensions that clearly exist in our country from the looting and rioting of select individuals, we can continue to ignore the problem.
Next up is Matt Bruenig of Gawker:
Actually, Riots are Good: The Economic Case for Riots in Ferguson
Smirking St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch took his robes off long enough on Monday to announce to the world that the killer of Mike Brown would face no criminal charges. In lieu of the usual grand jury process wherein the prosecutor says it wants an indictment and then the grand jury automatically gives it to them, McCulloch clearly did everything he could to make sure officer Darren Wilson would never face a trial. In the wake of such transparent rigging, Ferguson quite naturally exploded into fiery riots…
There is, of course, the historical case to be made for rioting: the past is replete with examples where rioting gets the goods. But there is also, I’d submit, an even more straightforward case for rioting: at the right levels, rioting is economically efficient.
One need look no further than famous economist and Nobel laureate Gary Becker to see how this is true. According to Becker, punishing bad behavior increases the costs of engaging in such behavior and thereby reduces the amount of it. This is the underlying theory of most criminal justice schemes. Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.
According to this logic, conservatives and Tea Party groups should have rioted violently after the passage of Obamacare. Liberal writers might have come to our defense instead of calling us terrorists.
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Comments
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/393584/actually-riots-are-not-good-patrick-brennan
Yah, no. These writers are simply idiots. But you can read their stuff and make that determination. Note the premises from which they begin.
I thought the piece linked above was pretty incisive.
I will say this; the rioters and looters have not paid anything like a equitable price for their conduct, thanks in large part to Nixon and his St. Louis government equals. It may yet transpire that we’ll see some prosecutions, but I’m not impressed thus far.
… but you missed the point.
The next time there is a injustice, we are now free to go down and burn the offices of TIME
When even Paul Krugman subscribes to the “broken window fallacy” I suppose it is not a surprise that a Gawker blogger might also.
‘Ferguson quite naturally exploded into fiery riots’. I love that. It isn’t just the hypocrisy, which is glaringly obvious. It is the enablement – refusing to condemn unacceptable behavior only encourages it.
But what bothers me the most is the implicit racism. Blacks cannot be expected to look at the facts of the case and draw the obvious conclusions, and blacks cannot be expected to do anything in response except riot. And the MSM and liberal politicians from the President on down have told them that this is the case.
I’ll put things as tactfully as I can (sarc). If you hold blacks to a different standard from whites, you are a racist. The Democrat party has never really shed its racism from its Jim Crow days. They pretty much think of blacks the same way as they did back then. They just use different methods to keep them on the plantation.
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Almost 50 years ago, the were riots all over the country for various reasons.
The city of Newark, NJ was one city that experienced at least one of these riots. For decades, there were empty blocks in the middle of the city as a result.
One of the legacies of the riots of the 1960s is that much of what was destroyed was never rebuilt. And I am not just referring to physical destruction.
Just thinking more about what I posted.
Slavery was typically justified as follows: blacks are not really capable of taking care of themselves (being so backward and all), so it is better to have a benevolent master who takes care of their basic necessities in return for their submission, cooperation and labor. I’m just wondering how the Democrats relation to blacks today (in the political sense) is any different?
“… a benevolent master who takes care of their basic necessities in return for their submission, cooperation and labor. I’m just wondering how the Democrats relation to blacks today (in the political sense) is any different?”
Well, they certainly submit to and cooperate with the Democrat party. What they do NOT do is provide labor. They get free money, free housing, free food, free phones, and a free pass on bad behavior, but they don’t have to do a lick of work in return.
I was going to mention that labor was no longer required, but didn’t want to get too tedious.
Sigh. What bothers me the most is that only a relatively small minority of Ferguson blacks are rioting, and if the poll numbers are correct, some blacks that voted for the Democrats actually think that the Grand Jury was correct. This in spite of the President implying that the Grand Jury was wrong and lots of reporters and talking heads explicitly saying the Grand Jury was wrong.
0 really disgusts me more and more. As in multiple cases before, he could have used this occasion to reduce the racial divide and instead he widens it. Of course, I expected nothing else. But I hoped that there would be a change in his approach. I must remember that he is not doing this by himself. The MSM is 0’s biggest enabler.
Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.
This supports one hypothesis of the Great Riot of Monday evening after the verdict was made public. The view that ‘gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses’ were part of this event is known to be held by one Eric Holder, who has used Federal muscle to chastise other local jurisdictions such as Seattle for pro-active policing, using verbiage similar to that quoted above.
Holder, and his boss Obama, don’t seem like the types to allow themselves to be impeded by process and Constitutional procedures like trials and Congressional votes and stuff. Why not dispense with investigations, and just punish Ferguson right away for that Wrong Verdict? He certainly had the means – a carefully prepared mob primed since August with a relentless narrative of police injustice from the Administration’s media allies. All it would have taken was a strategic phone call to the Governor, nixing the use of the National Guard for that first night, to mete out ‘justice’ to all those small business owners who served as the broken eggs for the flaming visual omelette disseminated by the media allies.
As ‘mete’ also means ‘measure’, the one-night punishment was deemed by its instigators sufficient as an example to encourage the other cities who might agree with that Wrong Verdict not to take that path in future. So another phone call, and the National Guard was duly released for the following evenings, toning down the worst of the looting and pillaging. One night, guys, that’s enough.
That’s the hypothesis.
I sense Valerie Jarrett’s stink permeating this event.
They do not want to be be viewed as racists. They will torture facts and the English language to get attaboys from the Sharptons and Jacksons. The alphabet channels and other liberal media outlets have this same mindset, which is why Obama and his cohorts act with impunity as he continues to degrade our country.
Oops, didn’t mean to thumb down you, Gasper. Just wanted to say: peel another layer off.
Question to the “unarmed teenager” crowd. How many people are murdered each year by one who is by your definition unarmed?
“In such a case, is rioting so wrong?”
Yes.
I guess it would have been a much shorter column if he had told the truth.
Brown had arms. Two of them. One of which he used when he assaulted the store owner. And when he tried to take Wilson’s firearm…his arms were involved.
Not having a gun doesn’t make you “disarmed.”
I guess these Libs don’t understand exactly how people get killed all the time by someone beating them.
Liberals seem to think you are supposed to be in a “fair fight” for some reason when it is criminals against cops.
Bull. If you find yourself in a “fair fight” and you aren’t in a sporting event ring, you are doing something wrong.
Wilson gets to go home to his family after being physically assaulted and threatened by a big young man who had just committed a crime. Brown wasn’t “yes sir, no sir” by any stretch. (See Chris Rock’s “How to not get your ass kicked by the police” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj0mtxXEGE8 )
Rock’s sketch should apparently be mandatory viewing, it seems, in middle school these days. With annual refresher viewings.
Yeah, the cops can be bad. But I’d not cross the street when I saw a cop coming towards me while, like Jesse Jackson, I’d probably do that if I saw Brown and his buddy coming down the street towards me.
Rioting over at Slate is a “good thing economically” … obviously they missed out on taking Econ 101 and the lesson on “broken window fallacy” in particular.
What a bunch of maroons. But then, Liberals….bless their hearts…are on immature bunch of ignorant people, in spite of their pretensions to being educated and intelligent.
Education is no good unless that person has the common sense to apply said education towards ends to which it may prove useful.
Too many people use education as a cudgel to beat down “ignorant” people in order to lift themselves above their own perceived level of inferiority. Too often, in their desire to “be the smartest person in the room” the self-proclaimed “educated” actually destroy those whom they seek to enlighten.
Hence, the whole Left-wing mindset, “We’re more educated, which makes us smarter than you, so we MUST be right!” Double fallacy, that.
Funny, I was trying to expand on that broken window debunking earlier this morning (in my head). The scene from “The Fifth Element” comes to mind, where the bad guy breaks something, and the little robots come out to clean it … he says look how good that is (economically).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tt1W0F0yObg
I’m a thinkin’ … we need a little broader version of the debunking. The gangs think they (and their drug/vices economy) run their neighborhoods, while evil white man world is there to prey on (welfare inputs, healthcare, stuff to steal, Obamaphones). Sharpton and drug kings, gangster rappers, and pimps indicate that is economically true, which is a problem.
As Brown eloquently puts it “Fluck what you say”. The first five shots made Brown reconsider briefly, (and Wilson paused shooting), but then he decided white cop had no right in his neighborhood.
Broken window theories are not really much in play here, because the burning is from outsiders and is a message to (mostly white) cops, FROM people like Obama/Holder/Sharpton. But the neighborhoods of Ferguson (and most white flight areas of inner cities) are usually thick with gang influence, and crime, organized to some extent.
The “making” of young thug Trayvon, and class 2 robber Brown, into national martyrs, is coordinated enemy action. It ties in with the open borders policy of escorting in lawbreakers (illegal entry, illegal working, underground economy, etc.).
Anyway, what I’m working on is how to expand the “broken window” to the illegal worker, and the economies of the gangs, the human trafficking, etc. Those are all variations of “breaking glass”, but are accepted, even promoted in Hollywood, video games.
Then there is the lobbying and the bailouts, collectivist redistribution, which also breaks windows, and makes working, law abiding America pay. A lot of “window breaking” is being RICHLY rewarded under the “progressive/social justice” label.
WE need to get back to “first principles” of guys like our founders, or “The Law” of Freddie Bastiat. Promoting rioting is (economically) like the French demanding the bakers sell their bread at a “fair price”, but buy their inputs at the inflated price. (iirc) And as I understand (a little of) Bastiat, he wrote “The Law” right after the French Revolution, developing argument on how their socialism always turns to communism in the end.
The aristocracy was at fault for their inflation, but they blamed the bakers (small business). So our overlords will demand taxpayers repair broken Ferguson. Gruberists break healthcare for the 85%, to remake it as Marxist. And what does Alinskyite Obama ever do to build? He only breaks things, and encourages looting, even across borders. But the Obama hostile takeover (window breaking) is still being richly rewarded. We hope to prove it wrong without becoming Venezuela, but that outcome is still in doubt.
“When a police officer shoots a young, unarmed black man in the streets, then does not face indictment, anger in the community is inevitable. It’s what we do with that anger that counts. In such a case, is rioting so wrong?”
_____________________________
When a police officer shoots a young, 300-pound black robbery suspect who has attacked the officer, twice punched him in the face, and tried to take his gun and shoot him with it, should there even be a grand jury to consider charges against the cop in the first place?
No, of course not. And there wouldn’t have been one in this case, but for the races of the cop and the suspect. That’s the real problem here; not that the grand jury returned the “wrong” verdict, but that a grand jury was ever assembled to consider an indictment against the cop in the first place.
That was the first official act of appeasement to the mob, the mob that was riled up by a grossly irresponsible media that kept interviewing known liars and presenting their made-up versions of the shooting events as undisputed fact: “He was shot in the back.” “Big Mike was on his knees trying to surrender.” “He had his hands in the air, begging for his life.” “He was shot execution style.”
When the “anger in the community” is generated, and sustained, by deliberate lies told by members of that same community, then yes the subsequent rioting is wrong. It is very wrong.
On the Left, “We want justice” simply means, we want you to subvert the facts, ignore the law, violate the policeman’s universal and inalienable rights and give us a show trial, where the only acceptable verdict will be “Guilty!”.
Insanity.
Wr, Trooper Smith, in Ferguson Justice = Revenge. Simple.
And truth? Why truth is just a nasty bump on the road.
Allow me to reiterate a point I made very recently…
Eric HOlder and Barracula knew at least the essential facts of this matter months ago.
They could have…and certainly SHOULD have…made statements that would have discredited the really inflammatory BS that was the media narrative. There was no doubt that the whole “Hands Up…Don’t Shoot” meme was false.
But both men, our highest law-enforcers, knowingly and deliberately have kept all this tumult alive when they could, carefully, have dispelled much of it.
If that isn’t a text-book case of evil, I dunno one.
If the Liberals weren’t lying, they’d have nothing to say.
Why would anyone want to take a job where their lives are going to be placed at risk and they are tied up by so much red tape that they are not allowed to defend themselves?
The core goal of these people is to eliminate policing completely. They do not want law enforcement and if they do want some measure of law enforcement, they want it for appearances only.
I gained an immense respect and admiration for both the military servicemembers and LEOs at roughly the same time I fully grasped, understood, and started living the concept of personal responsibility.
I think that is the dividing line in that those that have an internal locus of control and take personal responsibility for their thoughts, behavior, and actions are nowhere near as hostile as those that do not.
With these “protesters”, it is always something else, it is never them. They will find something, anything to blame for their acting out. The police just happens to be the most convenient scapegoat.
I wish I could go over there and protest too. Protest by standing in front of the officers against the rocks, the molotovs, the bullets, the threats, the insults, all of it. Don’t gotta be a cop or a soldier to do that.
All I can do is thank them and that frustrates me. It frustrates me so damn much.
See, I’m deaf, so I can’t be one.
On this day in particular, this military retiree is thankful for people such as you! Thank You!!
ditto.
not a retiree, got hurt in last year of contract and not allowed to reup but still appreciate statements like that.
So, our so-called Liberal, or perhaps we should label them as “Progressives,” or perhaps something slightly more provocative like “Marxist,” friends want there to be more riots as a way to enhance our, the USA’s, economy, thus providing a great benefit to all?
That must mean that Rudi’s “broken window” philosophy was in error and that the current NYC’s mayor’s approach is better?
Well, so now pigs can fly, and Islam is not pleased, yet our current batch of “progressives” didn’t consider that! Shame on them, those terrible Progressives! May they go straight to re-education camp!
One issue “they” haven’t considered is that often reality sucks, still not accepting it sucks even more so.
Would these liberals approve of riots happening in their own neighborhoods? Their own businesses, homes and cars burned? They themselves beaten, robbed and even murdered? /rhetorical question
The really sick, strange answer for some of them would be, “Yes!”
See, for instance, the Georgetown student who all but thanked his armed robbers, so warped was his “thinking”.
Others are not nearly so deep in that sink-hole. They’re just your garden-variety hypocrites of the Collective.
“In lieu of the usual grand jury process wherein the prosecutor says it wants an indictment and then the grand jury automatically gives it to them,”
I thought the prosecutor had to present actual evidence to the GJ before they would decide on indicting? Maybe that’s the way Grand Juries work in Chicago and NYC. Prosecutor walks in says “indict this man” and walks out minutes later with it.
Ah, yes! Social Justice is so fair since it targets the ones “we,” the Collective. want to target. The Salem Witch hunters must be so proud of their descendants, literally into Hell, since that affirms their well known, dunking, approach; those accused shall die, by drowning if innocence, by fire or hanging if guilty. That is the unstated, sometimes, goal of social justice in all regards.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2014/11/will_justice_department_charge_darren_wilson_supreme_court_gutted_civil.html
That’s for those of you who have not quite yet wallowed in enough loopy, self-contradictory, ignorant BS from people pretending to know a damn thing about the law, the facts in this case, and plain ol’ right and wrong.
But I can tell you that’s what it is.
One good take-away…the DOJ won’t charge Wilson. Not because they don’t want to. But because they just can’t legally.
Under the legislation they cite, the AJ would still have to prove a racist intend. Something even the slate writers should know they don’t have the evidence for. That’s why the FED GJ for Zimmerman fell through after the only witness admitted he didn’t know who he talked to that made the racist comments.
Interestingly, the DOJ writes on its website…
“It is not necessary that the crime be motivated by animus toward the race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status or national origin of the victim.”
But they ALSO carefully truncate their citation of the law.
http://www.justice.gov/crt/about/crm/242fin.php
THAT is quite intriguing….
What I have never understood is why the Screws Decision has never been used as the impetus for clarifying Section 242. It would still be near impossible for a jury to find Office Wilson guilty under a revised 242 trial based on the facts, but a revision to remove this ambiguity would be helpful in some other cases. Or so it appears to me.
Perhaps most revealing of the root of the problem, an Ivy League prof teaches the religion of racist hate.
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/11/25/after-you-read-ferguson-column-penned-by-ivy-league-prof-youll-see-why-its-being-called-shameful/
Some condemned that, but few recognize it’s in perfect harmony with Obama’s twenty years at the Farrakhan supporting Chicago church of “God Damn America” Rev. Wright (Obama’s mentor).
Rev. Wright told O’Reilly to read Rev. Cone (founder of that black liberation theology stuff) to understand their church. Cone says if Jesus is white, they better kill him. It’s just one more front of the war on traditional America.
http://www.conservapedia.com/Black_liberation_theology
That isn’t how I read what’s quoted from the piece. Here’s the key: “Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.”
It’s a badly written sentence and thus ambiguous. But what could “doing those things” mean? It’s unlikely that the sentence was intended to mean “rioting imposes costs on rioting,” so “those things” must mean “gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses.”
Bruenig thinks he’s being clever in turning the tables on the idea that strict law enforcement raises the cost to criminals of doing crime. He’s apparently saying that rioting raises the cost of (alleged) police misconduct, and therefore rioting is good if it reduces such misconduct.
This is supposed to be a response to the idea that Bruenig is echoing the “broken window fallacy.”
As someone who loves economics (like a beautiful woman he does not always understand), I think we’re confusing the “broken window fallacy” with another fallacious argument.
The “broken window fallacy” holds that destruction can be a net economic good. That is true regardless of where the destruction originates. If it is a riot, a tornado, or an earthquake, the destruction’s result is an uptick in economic activity. Of course, that part is true. The part that IS NOT true is that that is a net good.
Here, the author was arguing that rioting is a societal net good, because it raises the cost to “da man” for his oppressive conduct. It teaches the bad, oppressive “system” not to egregiously hurt the puuurrr, puuurrr people of color (disregarding the various colorful people who were directly devastated by the rioting and looting).
It’s a stupid, apparently contradictory argument on its face. “Da man” has been getting many, many hours of overtime since this started. There was no police or legal misconduct here. And, again, the people paying the REAL DIRECT price for this lawlessness were the law-abiding people of the community and those who had an investment in offering them goods and services.
So, unlike the “broken window fallacy”, this one never argued that there was a net economic good by destruction per se, only that the destruction taught a societal lesson to “da man”.
That was my point exactly.
“Rioting that occurs in response to gross police misconduct and criminal system abuses imposes costs on doing those things.”
And THOSE are the false, crazy premises on which his thesis is based.
Was there “gross police misconduct” here? No. There was NO kind of “police misconduct” according to the evidence.
Were there “gross criminal system abuses” here? Hell, no! Wilson was subjected to a grand jury inquiry some say he should not have. But there is a valid point to be made that this was appropriate discretion on the part of the prosecutor. But there is NO valid point to suggest that the conduct of the grand jury inquiry…while NOT always what is done…was an abuse of the “criminal system”, much less a “gross abuse”. It was totally within the norms.
“if we can separate the underlying racial tensions that clearly exist in our country from the looting and rioting of select individuals, we can continue to ignore the problem.”
But Darlena, it is the gangs trying to run black neighborhoods that are the problem, and their threats to black witnesses that sought justice by testifying honestly in support of Wilson.
It is the nasty racial slurs used by “SJW” blacks and their appeasers, against blacks that become successful and conservative, like Condi, Sowell, and Clarence.
For six years Obama has OVERTLY used the bully pulpit to call traditional America racist. The party of Lincoln is tired of being called racist by the Democrat party that spawned the KKK, and that still thinks they “own” the black vote, despite failing to lead them out of inner city violence and poverty.
Ferguson mobs are incited to demand an innocent man’s head on a social justice platter, based solely on racist animus. But dummy Darlena can only see underlying (white) racial tensions.
Come on Darlena, go full appeasement and stop being coy … just call white traditional America racist, and demand a public hanging. Wilson may be innocent this time, but you know he is guilty of something, why else would Holder still be probing without evidence?
that wasn’t meant as a response to Ragspierre … oh well
Some how, IMHO, we’ve gotten off track. Rudi’s use of the Broken Window theory was that allowing those broken windows was indicative of allowing crime and other such anti-social behaviors to flourish. And, he used that idea to fix that problem by boarding up those broken windows as a way to send a message. Rudi’s and Bratten’s concept worked fairly well.
Then, somehow, Bruenig and other Marxists twisted it around into an economic theory of a kind. Still Bruenig is reinforcing the idea that allowing broken windows are a sign of a community willing to distort and degrade the moral backbone of itself; very much a suicide of a group.
BTW: If Bruenig walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, he is a duck, only in his case he’s a Marxist Duck; oops, well to salve his feelings, we can label him a Progressive.
Right. ANOTHER example of confusing two completely different ideas.
The “broken window fallacy” in economics is as I described above.
The “broken window policy” that Hiz Honor instituted was a CIVICS policy. It held that even minor infractions of the laws, if left unenforced, would TEND toward a general decline in the civil cohesion of a neighborhood. Small infractions with no consequence would TEND to larger infractions with no consequence. This was both true and intuitive if you grew up in a neighborhood during the 50s. If you were misbehaving, either the neighbors themselves or your parents after learning about it from the neighbor would bring you to task.
So, all Rudi really did was use the police powers to do what used to be done by people in their neighborhoods. Little stuff was addressed, and big stuff took care of itself. Kinda magical…like how markets work.
Liberals: “Look, if we don’t allow people to riot, burn, pillage, and kill when their righteous anger reaches intolerable levels, we run the risk of something bad happening.”