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Samizdata quote of the day – Juryless trials edition The SNP’s plan should worry us all. Juryless rape trials will set a dangerous precedent. This elite suspicion of the public could erode the right to trial by jury in other cases, too. After all, if members of the public are assumed to be incapable of taking jury duty seriously in rape trials, then why allow us to be jurors at all?
Scotland’s lawyers are right. This is indeed ‘a deeply troubling attack’ on the criminal-justice system. Women must not allow justice to be destroyed in our name.
– Ella Whelan
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In my experience, removing juries from rape trials will result in more acquittals. This is going to backfire on them badly, unless they can also closely control who gets to become a judge.
And if they can do that, juries won’t matter anyway.
In theory, the judge is supposed to protect the rights of the defendant as well as act as a neutral controller of the case. Can’t the Scottish judges and prosecutors simply say “no. That is not how we are going to do business because the defendant has rights too”?
As far as I understand it here in the USA you can request a jury-less trial, a bench trial, if you want. I’m not sure how common it is.
However, did they consider that the lower rate of rape conviction is due to an excess of false, or at least grey area allegations rather than an excess of bad men getting away with it?
That we should be talking about getting rid of trial by jury just tells you how far the west has come. It is like they take a list of civil rights as targets to be eliminated rather than treasures to be preserved. Ten years ago had you been told some of the things that seem to be taken for granted today, you’d have called it an exaggerated dystopian future. I guess that is what we got. Mark my words, January 2020 was the zenith for western civilization.
Fraser – in the US a criminal defendant has the right to a jury trial, but can waive that right an request a bench trial. Unfortunately for defendants, in federal and some state courts the prosecution must agree to a bench trial as well, and given the adversarial nature of US courts that consent will commonly be refused in cases where a jury is more likely to convict than the judge.
Bench trials are most common in cases where the defendant has a strong case legally, but is for whatever reason unsympathetic (most commonly due to prior convictions in cases where the defendant’s testimony is necessary). The other reason would be if the trial hinges on legal technicalities that a judge is more likely to apply correctly.
Rape is one of those crimes where you really and truly “just do not know…” a lot of the time.
When I was in the Army, one of the guys in my platoon came up on charges for rape; I’ll freely grant that he was a problem child, but I didn’t think he was a rapist then or now. The situation was shady as hell, and the “victim” equally shady.
The Criminal Investigation Division investigator came in, did all the investigation necessary to prove that while my guy was both a cretin and a cad, the accusations of rape were entirely unfounded. Basically, the girl in question was perpetrating a fraud as a “good girl”, and when her roommate walked in on the two of them unexpectedly, she cried “Rape” rather than own up to consensual fornication.
In the course of the investigation, I had to talk to the extremely jaded investigator, who casually dropped the bomb that roughly 90-95% of the cases he and the other investigators at our local CID office dealt with wound up being similarly “unfounded”. The number of actual stranger-based stalk-and-rape crimes he’d run into were vanishingly rare, like maybe one or two ever couple of years, and they mostly happened to military members who’d wandered off-post into civilian neighborhoods. As you might imagine, the level of cynicism was extremely high, when it came to that crime.
I have to admit, however, that they gave it an honest look, and did try to make the case. My idiot would have made a wonderful person to put up on charges, and many of his supervisors thought it was a shame that we wouldn’t be getting rid of him that way, but in the end, they couldn’t make a case. He shortly provided us with ample other reason to shed the Army of his services, when he stole a car and wrecked it driving drunk… Boy had a genius for making trouble for himself.
Nonetheless, that experience really made me wonder about the conventional wisdom when it came to rape; if the guys at CID had as much trouble as they did in gathering sufficient evidence so as to make a case for prosecution, let alone successfully getting someone convicted? In the military, with all the ease that they had gathering evidence and all the rest? Yikes… Something is way off with the reported stats, in my opinion.
I also had one of my female soldiers return to me after going through her outprocessing briefings, wherein she described being “encouraged” to report sexual assault so as to be able to “enhance” her veteran’s benefits… Which flatly outraged her to the point where she reported it to all and sundry among the leadership, which led to certain counselors getting in a bit of hot water.
I don’t doubt that rape happens, and that a lot of isn’t reported, but I am also pretty damn sure that there’s a significant amount of false reporting going on all over the place.
This is one of those areas of life that is entirely ambivalent and not at all one-sided; I suspect that there are quite as many victims of false accusations as there are victims of actual rape, and that the few times that the actual perpetrators of these heinous acts find each other, that’s just unfortunately uncommon karma happening.
I did see a guy who I’m fairly sure did a bit of “I’m your boss; sex me…” sort of things over the course of his career have a run-in with a girl who was notorious for making what were certainly exaggerated claims of sexual harassment and coercion. That mutual implosion was a thing of wonder, to observe. From afar…
People use the weapons that are on their belt. The epidemic of false accusations of rape isn’t due to the badness of women; it’s because the State has placed a potent weapon at their disposal. Of course they use that weapon. If men could accuse women of witchcraft to “get” them there would be an epidemic of witchcraft accusations.
There is a reason that the statue of justice is wearing a blindfold; the demographics of the parties before the Court are not supposed to matter in any way. That the left has pulled us away from that ancient and sensible principle is one of the tragedies of our age.
Let’s not fool ourselves; that is a fine ideal but has never been a reality. We have always treated some defendants better or worse than others based on race, religion, class, economics, national origin, and sex. Lady Justice’s thumb has always been on the scale.
That’s true; but in the last few decades we have moved further away from, instead of nearer to, that ideal.
And we have started celebrating the defiance of that ideal as well; whereas before, when we failed to meet it, we were at least embarrassed enough about it to deny our failure.
@Kirk
I don’t doubt that rape happens, and that a lot of isn’t reported, but I am also pretty damn sure that there’s a significant amount of false reporting going on all over the place.
What I can say is that I have a lot of female friends and I am shocked what a very large number of them have been sexually assaulted in one way or another at some time in their life. And I don’t mean a smack or the ass or a look down the dress, I mean all women suffer from that regularly and just have to put up with it unfortunately. I mean serous and forceful assault. Not all actual rape, but certainly a spectrum including childhood traumas that would make your hair curl. Having said that, I don’t think I know of any of them who actually report it to the police. The humiliation and life altering consequences, often the untenable imbalance of power, along with the almost impossible difficulty of proving it is more than enough of a barrier that most women will put up with it, or just get a counselor to talk through their trauma.
Of course there are many false allegations — for some people with nothing better to do it. It is one of those crimes, like chomo or fraud where the stench of the accusation is almost as bad as the guilt of conviction.
But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Rape is, and always has been, a horrible, common and very injurious crime which is generally extremely hard to prove. And to your point, for sure very few rapes are “jogger in the park pulled into the bushes”, but that doesn’t make the anything other rape circumstances somehow better. Why do “date rape” and “marital rape” really need the qualifiers? TBH I think probably the most common type of rape is little girls being abused by their relatives, and that is about as horrific as it gets.
I should also ride my other hobby horse on this. Another EXCEPTIONAL common form of rape in the US is men being raped while incarcerated in prison. And that form of violence is almost accepted in society as “prison justice”. The police use the promise of it to extract confessions out of suspects and we all, when hearing of some horrific criminal, seem to relish its promise when they end up in the pokey. Me? I don’t sign on. I think “prison justice” is a horrible oxymoron, and the prison systems that allows it in our name bring shame to our justice system. And for us to use it as the butt of a joke doesn’t speak well of us. If criminals deserve some form of corporal punishment let’s mete it out by the prison system, not leave it up to the caprice of the gang bangers, murders and miscellaneous thugs in gen pop.
Scots Law continues to be destroyed – but people (at least people in politics) are not allowed to suggest that “Devolution” has been a disaster.
And this is part of a wider international movement – the protections of traditional justice (such as jury trials) are to be swept away in favour of “Social Justice” or “Equity” (not Equity in the traditional legal sense) – of which Frankfurt School “Third Wave Feminism” Marxism is the source, if “all men are rapists” then the natural consequence is to convict men, even men who have not met the women they are the “rapist” of. Thus the dying West continues to die.
Alternatively there is the American approach – where city juries are so corrupted (sorry I mean “educated” – by the schools, universities and media) that they take perverted pride in finding guilty people they know to be innocent, whilst finding innocent those people they know to be guilty of various crimes.
Remember the goal of the international system is not just to corrupt the elite, the objective it is to corrupt ordinary people as well – including juries.
@Fraser Orr,
I have had a few run-ins with fabulists whose concocted stories of rape were incredibly convincing. Until I found out facts that made the stories not only impossible, but entirely insane. I’ve also seen more than a few false accusations in the military context, because the reporting is so easy, and the paternal culture always took the woman’s side. Horror stories aside, it’s been my experience that even the most incredible tales of rapine, pillage, and sexual depravity were taken seriously by the chain of command, and it was damn difficult to convince anyone that the assault hadn’t actually happened.
Which is why the lurid tales of “one in four women in the military are raped” tends to fall on my ears as serious exaggerations, if not outright falsehoods. There are actual rapes happening, but they’re not happening in the numbers claimed, unless there’s some US Army installation out there where they’re running rape camps 24/7.
This is one of those perennial things that people hear anecdotal accounts of, and then make projections based what they’ve heard. Meanwhile, a lot of the people telling them these things are, sadly, quite nuts. It’s a sad fact, but there are a lot of women out there who have taken up rape and sexual assault as a part of their tragic backstories, and the reality is… The things they use as a justification for their behavior never happened. It’s not universal, but it does exist sufficiently that the whole genre of “Ah wuz raped!!!!” begins to raise questions.
I have an unfortunate life skill: Listening to people, which for some damn reason means that they want to tell me things about their lives I really don’t want to know. Through this, I’ve developed a decent ear for veracity; the one thing I’ve noted? Genuine, honest-to-God rape victims? They don’t tell you about it. Period. The chick who gives you lurid chapter-and-verse about her horrible experiences at the hand of some man? She’s almost always lying her ass off. Why they do this? No idea; but I do note that the victim is often rewarded in our society.
I question the entire issue, TBH. There are way, way too many things in our society across the West that encourage women to make up these tales of rape, and the alacrity and sheer exuberant joy with which many of these supposed victims tell you their inmost secrets? Yeah. I have questions, about that.
It’s like with war veterans; the fakers, the Stolen Valor types? They’ll tell you all about the huge numbers of men they killed, the things they did under fire. The guys who actually did those things? Never, not in a million years. Killing has an intimacy to it; you don’t share it casually. You only talk about it, if you ever do, with other veterans who you trust and who’ve done their own killing. If some guy tells you all about his Walter Mitty fantasies of killing dozens of Afghan terrorists, you can pretty much count on the fact that he’s lying out his ass. I’ve only ever run into one exception to that rule, and he was such a massive outlier that it ain’t even funny. I’m pretty sure that that guy had a whole shelf full of dissertations waiting to be written about the head-plumbing he had, and how aberrant it was.
Rape and killing? Lots of similarities, there: The real deal won’t talk to anyone about it. The guys who did the most killing in combat? Ain’t nobody going to know, until they’re in the grave. Same with a lot of rape victims… The fact that they can talk about it, at all? That’s a sign you really ought to be questioning the veracity of their story. Sad fact, but true.
Not that there’s no real problem with false accusations – of course there is, the evidentiary burden for proving rape is nebulous and the “winner” is usually the one who the jury ends up liking – but in my defense life, a few of my rape charge clients denied rape entirely, a few more candidly admitted they had committed rape, and the bulk admitted doing the acts complained of in the complaint but were amazed someone thought of what they did as rape. There are many valid cases, some charged and some not.
We go through cycles. For a period, prosecutors and judges will strongly protect the criminal-system rights of the accused, and since proving rape is hard to begin with, fewer charges will be brought, and then everyone switches over to “believe all women”, and it gets easier and charges multiply. Rinse and repeat.
(I remember Corrections people saying that, if we decided as a society tomorrow to begin spending 20 times what we currently spend on our prison systems, we’d start making some progress against prison rape. But that’s what it would take, just to begin. Prisoner density would need to drop by a factor of three or four, and guards would need to be increased similarly, to allow for enough control to stop it. We’re never going to fund an effort like that.)
Given the staggering US incarceration rates, that would be a lot of money.
Will jury less rape trials lead to an SNP initiative of a quota of guilty verdicts in order to please the tartan sisterhood? Any judge not reaching their quota of 4 guilty verdicts a month, irrespective of the evidence, being out on their ear? Why don’t they go the whole haggis and introduce inquisitions and star chambers?
bobby b. wrote:
‘(I remember Corrections people saying that, if we decided as a society tomorrow to begin spending 20 times what we currently spend on our prison systems, we’d start making some progress against prison rape. But that’s what it would take, just to begin. Prisoner density would need to drop by a factor of three or four, and guards would need to be increased similarly, to allow for enough control to stop it. We’re never going to fund an effort like that.)’
I’m afraid I must (partly) disagree. You could spend 100x what we currently spend on our prison systems and make absolutely zero progress against prison rape, because it doesn’t have much to do with the kinds of things you can throw money at, it is almost-entirely the result of the attitudes and motivations of the corrections officers and their management. In many places, and under many regimes, (and ESPECIALLY those places where the business is heavily-unionized) the CO’s and their leadership do not give one single f**k what goes on between the inmates, so long as the count is right and they have a quiet shift. Rape, robbery, drug-dealing, anything up to and including homicide, is more-or-less immaterial to them, especially since the chances of any of them being held to account for failing to prevent these things usually approaches zero. I prefer to think that this is because many of them have become jaded through dealing so long with people who habitually lie to, mislead and sometimes attack them, but the more-realistic side of me has learned by observation that many COs, (and, by extension, their management) have become subsumed into a culture of more-or-less complete indifference to the fate of those in their charge – which sometimes spills over into more-or-less overt hostility and patterns of behaviour which encourage and enable harm.
JMHO, my observations are only within the US and your mileage may vary.
llater,
llamas
It must be stressed that this is not “just” getting rid of juries – the new sort of judges are not supportive of the principles of justice that are common to both the Common Law and the Roman Law tradition.
Indeed the new sort of judges (such as the judges who make up a “right” to kill babies – in relation to Northern Ireland and many other places) have nothing but hatred and contempt for the traditional principles of justice, no man accused of rape can expect a fair trial before the new “Social Justice”, “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” judges.
Sadly some juries are also infected with these Frankfurt School of Marxism “Woke” doctrines – and thus take a perverse delight in convicting the innocent and finding criminals “not guilty” (all on political “equity”, “social justice” grounds).
These doctrines are NOT an alternative social system – so it is certainly NOT a matter of preferring Putin’s Russia or the People’s Republic of China to the dying West.
The “Woke” (Critical Theory, Frankfurt School – DEI) doctrines are not designed to be an alternative social system – they are designed to destroy society.
@bobby b
I remember Corrections people saying that, if we decided as a society tomorrow to begin spending 20 times what we currently spend on our prison systems, we’d start making some progress against prison rape.
Perhaps that is true. But a good starting point would be to stop talking and thinking about it as if prison rape, “prison justice” is a good thing; a desirable bug in the system. Or to put it another way, to be at least a little bit embarrassed by such an abomination of injustice in the justice system under our name.
And it is worth pointing out that, AFAIK this is mainly a feature of American prisons. It isn’t nearly as present in European prisons. So apparently it is a solvable problem. (I don’t have actual data on this, but that is the impression I have, so please correct me if I am wrong.)
https://reason.com/2023/04/19/georgia-jail-officials-resign-after-inmate-found-dead-and-covered-with-insects/
This is what you have to deal with – the culture of complete, total, systemic, institutional indifference as to whether inmates live or die.
llater,
llamas
The problems with prison rape start with the people we’re putting in prison. Nowhere else.
At the root of it is the reluctance we feel to acknowledge the fact that most of these creatures are human in form only; they’re not amenable to “reform”, being irredeemably evil in the first damn place. Putting the people who are capable of reform in with them is pure stupidity. Why?
Let’s be brutally honest, here: The majority of the people that are committing these crimes in prison are entirely irredeemable. You let them out, they’re going to victimize even more innocents; while they’re in, they’re a threat to other, reform-capable prisoners. Not to mention, the guards.
So, why do we bother? Because they look human? Is that the sole criteria we have for “that which is human, deserving of consideration”?
I’d submit that that isn’t a workable theory of the world. You cannot have these things-on-two-legs running loose, so why are they alive in the first place?
The astounding thing to me is this: People who suggest that culling these creatures of the night is unthinkable tell me that I lack compassion and concern for other human life. I look right back and wonder where the hell all their compassion and concern for human life is when these vermin are killing their victims, and where is there respect for human life when they suffer these creatures to live past the point of their discovery and conviction?
How many lives did John Wayne Gacy take, again? Here’s a man who committed his first violent sexual assault in 1967, was caught, “punished” for it (including an attempt at having the victim silenced via murder-for-hire) and then was released onto an unsuspecting public by 1971. When he was caught again, in 1978, he’d killed 33 more times. They then put him in prison, where he lived fairly well, until 1994 when he died “naturally”.
Tell me again, how that comports with a respect for human life and decency? 33 young men, murdered and violently sexually assaulted, just so a bunch of well-meaning hypocrites could say “We are decent people…”.
Frankly, I find that reasoning to be the height of irrationality and viciousness; you’re keeping a dangerous creature alive, just so you can feel good about yourself. Unless you are willing to guard someone like Gacy, take responsibility for him never committing another crime? Your refusal to deal with his kind forthrightly and permanently makes you complicit in all the future crimes he commits.
You ask me? The entire mob of irresponsible cretins that let Gacy go free after his first sexual assault should have been up there on the dock next to him, answering for his crimes.
Wherever you look, these days, what you see is the direct result of squeamishness and reluctance to do the necessary and unpleasant thing: You have someone sh*tting on your sidewalk? Oh, let’s feel sorry for him, it’s not his fault… Let’s defund the bad, bad policeman who is harassing him. Look: There’s a man beating and raping a girl… It’s not his fault; he was raised that way. Let’s put him into treatment, which has a near-zero rate of success, and then let him loose again so he can rape again and again.
If you ask me, it’s the lot of you who have these asinine ideas and who refuse to accept your bounden duty as citizens in a society to properly police your fellows who are actually responsible for this crap. The reason you have rising crime rates? These are the causes: Zero repercussions for offending. There aren’t any penalties, because you refuse to enforce them. Why? Because you’re morally degenerate cowards who refuse to accept your responsibility.
I used to wonder how these things happened. Then, I worked for a commander who was a literal pussy, a pusillanimous little coward who wanted everyone to “like” him. That jackass refused to punish anyone for anything at all, which turned a working and somewhat rowdy company-sized unit into a total wreck within 18 months that everyone was fighting to get out of. All through malign neglect of his duties; it got so bad that all of his senior NCOs quit, taking retirement or demanding transfers, and then his peer commanders started making demands of the battalion commander because his company was so far out of control. It was a microcosmic version of what’s going on across society; you don’t have consequences demonstrated and enforced, then there are people who will take advantage of that fact to literally destroy the fabric of society around you.
And, whose fault is it? The people who refuse to enforce the standards, and deal with the malefactors. You can see the result of this in Portland, San Francisco, Seattle… All around you.
I’ll tell you where it ends, too: Summary capital punishments, delivered a la Judge Dredd. You either punish effectively and rationally when the problem is small enough to be humane, or you wind up having to go full-on Vlad Tepes. Your choice, whether you like it or not.
I have no moral qualms about putting all kinds of criminals at the end of a rope. Murderers, rapists, child pornographers, left lane campers, the lot of them can swing.
What I do have is a real problem with the state as we know and love it today having that power. We all know a ton of stories of people who have sat on death row for decades just to find out the DNA says they didn’t do it, or the people in prison because a prosecutor didn’t turn exculpatory evidence over to the defense, or a cop who lies on the stand, or some poor schmuck gets IDed when he was a couple hundred miles away, or because his girlfriend was mad at him and filed a false police report, so on and so forth. Execution is a bell that can’t be unrung, the person can’t be made whole again, there isn’t a check big enough the state can write to fix killing the wrong guy.
And now that we have an environment where #believeallwomen is a thing and women know they can file a rape charge and if it comes out that they lied, absolutely nothing will happen because prosecutors want women to come forward and are afraid that putting liars in prison for trying to destroy a man’s life will keep assaulted women quiet. It’s the same thing in the family court system where a woman and mother divorcing a man can just say “he molested the kids” with absolutely no evidence and she gets the kids, alimony, child support, gets to live in the house with her boyfriend while the ex-husband gets to work two jobs to pay for it all. Or why in .mil a female can simply say her male superior sexually harassed her and his career comes to a screeching halt and if the JAG is looking for trophies to hang on his wall our unlucky NCO can enjoy Leavenworth for a while, to say nothing of his marriage. And no one can say “hey, this is a problem and needs addressed” if he wants to be promoted.
It’s a system and needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the bottom up but the Left and Right are too far apart on what they want out of such a system and how to get it. Short of a Henry II showing up and just saying “here’s the new legal system you’re using. Learn it, live it, love it” we’re stuck with this one.
@Steven R,
Oh, I fully agree with you. The issue of false accusation is a real one, and a large part of why people are “reluctant to judge”.
I personally feel that if you’re going to make a false accusation, then you ought to be punished with the maximum penalty under law that your false accusation risked for your victim; only difference being that you get to do the whole thing, without parole or leniency.
Likewise, you’re a prosecutor or part of the investigation team? Break your oath to be impartial and fair, convicting someone who was actually innocent? You do the time they would have, all of you, from the cop who hid the evidence on the scene to the prosecutor who ignored it to make his bones for political gain.
It’s all down to standards, again. You don’t have them, you don’t enforce them? You don’t have a civilization, after awhile.
The whole of civilization is a con game, the act of a jongluer, keeping all the balls in the air at the same time so as to create the illusion of civilization. Start to drop the balls, and the illusion fades; along with it, civilization as we know it. You can see the effects in the major West Coast cities of the US. The “system” we had as a legacy from the “bad old days” is going away, because we found it wasn’t perfect in the ideal sense we demanded. Observe what replaces that “imperfection”; see if you like it any better, if it produces any better results for the general weal.
I remain dubious of the proposition. I think we’ll see an interregnum of epic violence akin to the old days of England, when the theft of a loaf of bread led to hanging.
@Steven R
Execution is a bell that can’t be unrung, the person can’t be made whole again, there isn’t a check big enough the state can write to fix killing the wrong guy.
That is right to some degree, but let’s also remember putting a person in prison for twenty years, subjecting him to the constant life threatening danger of severe unaccountable assault, and the utter boredom of twenty years with nothing to do is also a bell that can’t be unrung too. If I had the choice of spending the rest of my natural life in such a place I’m not sure that death isn’t the easy way out. Sure they can let you out of prison, but they can’t give you back the twenty years, or heal the PTSD that any decent person thrown in that hellhole is going to suffer.
It’s a system and needs to be torn down and rebuilt from the bottom up
I did read your next sentence, so I’m not disagreeing with you as such. But just to say the older I get the more conservative I get. When I was a young libertarian I was all for raising it to the ground. Rewriting the constitution so that it actually works, throwing it out with a new, clean better system. But now I think the best we can hope for is a gradual evolution to a slightly better system. Why? Because you are not king, so you don’t get to set the whole thing up the way you want. And frankly, if we had, for example, a new constitutional convention in the USA I dread to think what would come out of it. Second, because you are not omniscient. The law is a distilation of a thousand years of case law considering a billion things that you and I would never think of. So, when Madison put in that General Welfare clause he would surely never have anticipated that it would mean “anything goes.”
Remember, most revolutions are like the French one not the American one.
Oh, and BTW, I was thinking again about the 2022 election here in the USA. I have concluded that the worst election result we had that year was when Ronna McDaniel was re-elected as chair of the RNC. Her leadership left the Republicans flat footed against the DNC, and she has been losing elections for a very long time. The fact that she is in charge for 2024 means that the RNC will not make the many, many changes that are needed to try to restore some competitiveness. Re-electing Ronna McDaniel (rather than the excellent Harmeet Dhillon) guarantees a disastrous 2024 election season, something from which the USA and Western democracy will never recover.
I think the right in this country thinks that the Republicans will save them. Which they won’t because they are almost as bad as the Democrats. They are both the party of the Establishment, which is evident in McDaniel who, despite the fact that the groundswell of Repubs wanted her gone she was the Establishment candidate of the R powerbrokers in Washington, and so we are stuck with her.
These “Woke” doctrines are designed (designed by the Frankfurt School “Critical Theory” Marxist thinkers) to destroy society.
This is not about creating an alternative society – this is about destroying society “period”.
What is happening in such cities as Portland or Chicago is deliberate – it is intentional. And it is (to a lesser extent – so far) happening generally in much of the Western World, including in these islands.
Back when “Dr Who” was a good show (many years ago) the character called “The Doctor” met the Dark Guardian (a character of great power – but also great evil).
The Doctor explains that what the Dark Guardian is doing will not give this being rule over the universe (which the Doctor believes is the objective of the being), but will DESTROY the universe.
The Dark Guardian laughs – revealing that he already knew that, and that destruction (not power) was his intention, his objective.
@Paul Marks,
Having talked to a bunch of these Antifa and Black Bloc types, I have to agree with you. They don’t have any vision for “what comes after”, nor do they have any care that what they’re doing is destructive to society. They don’t see “society” as something worth saving, or fixing. They want the anarchy of pure license, and never mind the consequence.
Most of these people that I’ve dealt with are mentally deranged children, outraged that anyone dare impose constraints on their desires. That’s why so many of them are also sexually deviant; their rebellion is deeply rooted in their psycho-sexual identities, a reaction against the norms that others try to impose on them for the sake of decency. That’s why so many of them gravitate towards the most outrageous things possible, and get extremely upset when people are accepting of their transgressiveness. They actively want the opposition, and when they don’t get it, they keep on escalating until they find a hard stop at something like pedophilia.
You cannot make these people happy. No matter what; they’re like the Committee of Public Safety in Revolutionary France; they are without the capacity of restraint or feeling satisfied. They will always, always go further and further, seeking that next hit of the dopamine they get whenever they “triumph” over their perceived enemies.
Best thing to do with these people? Being as there is no pleasing them, and they are miserable when they’re not dominating others? Put them down like the diseased vermin that they are. In the end, it’s either them, or us.
The urge to Karenism is the opening stage of this. Karen must die, in order for the rest of us to know peace. You say “There ought to be a law…”, and that ought to be the leading indicator for your neighbors to band together and burn your ass at the stake. If they don’t stop you then, it won’t be too long before the sheer mass of your stupidity and avarice for power over others results in the gulag and the death camp.
Kirk,
it all makes sense once we realize the people on the left simply live their life by the “the end justifies the means” idea. They don’t mind destroying cities to get graft at the top and a sense of self-satisfaction at lower levels (like BLM and and how the leaders took all that money and blew it on McMansions for themselves), or how Dems are perfectly content weaponizing government agencies to silence their enemies (the IRS being turned on the TEA Party or the FBI covering for the DNC). Destroying what little credibility existed in those agencies as impartial was worth it because Orange Man Bad. Or how filling public schools and now privates schools with every manner of political nonsense but not teaching kids the Three Rs is fine despite ended up with kids who can’t read or write or engineers who can’t design bridges that don’t collapse, like that one in Miami a few years back. New indoctrinated drones and changing professional demographics is more important. Or purging the military, because making sure women are in the infantry is more important than winning wars. Sailors crashing ships because the officers spend more time on SHARP training is more important than teaching seamanship.
The ends always justify the means, and they, and they alone, know what is best for us.
It’s a game called “tweaking the normies”, and it’s indirectly caused by the tolerance of the normies themselves.
The object of the game is to get outrage as a response, and they will push and push until it works.
They want the power to make us notice them and fear them, and every time we all say “oh, the poor dears just need love and coddling”, they need to go further for that rush. If we had put on that hard stop three or four steps back in escalated outrages, we’d still have exactly the same number of frustrated nuts, but the rest of the world would be far less stressed. Sort of a Win/Not Lose situation.
But then the people who are emotionally fulfilled by declaring their supreme love and tolerance would be less happy, I suppose.
phwest – May 21, 2023 at 11:50 pm:
Or when the defendant can count on an acquittal or wrist-slap from a corrupt judge. A fairly common scenario here in C[r]ook County, where many judges are creatures of the Democrat party organization. The fix isn’t always in, but when a flagrantly guilty defendant shows up with a prominent ward committeeman as his lawyer, even a usually well-meaning judge knows what has to happen. (It was only a drunk-driving case, but quite egregious.)
Much more serious was the Rekhiah Boyd case. She was shot in the back of the head by an off-duty Chicago police detective. At trial, the judge summarily acquitted the defendant on the grounds that he should have been charged with murder, not manslaughter.
Ask your BLM-supporting friends what BLM had to say about this. The answer is nothing (no inflammatory video, the cop was latino, no way to cash in).
RR –
This is one of those pedantic objections everyone hates.
Judge Porter was one of those judges who read and respected black-letter law, and then expected the people who went into his court to do the same.
The prosecutors didn’t in this case, and screwed up the charges. They didn’t bother to amend the complaint when they could have. There were some tactical reasons for this, IIRC. At trial, they couldn’t prove all of the elements of the charge they presented, and tried to fudge it with an element from another crime definition. You can’t just mix and match. You have to prove all defined elements of a specific crime.
It was a complicated situation, and he arguably issued the proper ruling for questionable reasons, but it was technically correct.
@bobby b
They want the power to make us notice them and fear them
I sometimes wonder if they are just taking the piss, as we Brits would say. I mean right now the big push is to let men into women’s locker rooms walking around with their junk hanging out, and anyone who objects is a loathsome something-ophobic?
I don’t understand why there isn’t a groundswell of Dads rising up and saying “pull out your dick in front of my daughter and I’m going to cut it off.” But there isn’t. Instead we all cower in fear. And there is a LOT to be fearful of. My daughter is not “sporty” so doesn’t really inhabit that world, but if she did I would be in full blown freak out mode.
But the position is so insanely crazy that if you told us just five years ago that that would be the cultural zeitgeist then you’d have been laughed off as a tin foil wearing nut. Just five years ago. I mean I have known that the US was spiraling into oblivion for a while, but it is breathtaking how far down it has gone in such a short time.
I am not at all advocating violence against trans folks. They can live their lives however they want. I am passionately against sexualizing and fetishizing children, or robbing little girls of their private “girls only” spaces.
Chicago is it’s own special hell. The city government has been corrupt since the days of Al Capone, run by the Democrats as a sinecure.
The black population is paying the price for having gone along with it all for generations, selling their votes ever so cheaply to the machine. In return, what have they gotten?
I used to live and work on the periphery of the city. Lots of Chicago PD cops lived out there with me, because they refused to live where they worked, and maintained two residences: One tiny apartment to meet the requirements of residency inside city limits, usually rented from their supervisors or some official in their ward’s government, and another out in the “countryside” where the crime rate was low. The black officers I met were the worst racists I’ve ever encountered, anywhere. The things coming out of their mouths were bad enough that I suspect that a Grand Dragon of the KKK would have been going “Hey, now… That’s going too far…”, upon hearing them.
The city is a mess, has been a mess for generations, and ain’t coming back anytime soon. If ever; Detroit is actually a best-case scenario for Chicago. My guess its going to tank far harder and far faster than Detroit did, and it will bottom out far below what Detroit became. It’s an economic wasteland, one that everyone is leaving.
End state of Democrat governance? The evidence is there: Detroit, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland… Vote Democrat and watch your city die around you.