I didn’t watch very much of the horrific YouTube tape of four inner-city “youths” of color tormenting a special needs white kid a tape that was all over the alternative media last week, and miracle of miracles, even made it to the national media, where incidents of black-on-white violence usually get to be covered, like with a pillow until they stop moving. It goes without saying that if the skin colors of victim and perpetrators had been reversed, just about every other national news story would have been driven off the front page and out of the first twenty minutes of national news for weeks. (Save perhaps one of the Kardashians bursting out of her dress like an overstuffed sausage in the middle of a top-drawer celebrity event.) I know that, you know that, we all are most tiresomely and cynically aware of that. Many would have been the chins tugged, NPR would have been consulting their golden rolodex for the most plummy-voiced commentator with an air of spurious authority over matters racial, CNN anchors and the correspondents of main-line news broadcasters over the world would have been hyperventilating in their efforts to keep up with the currently-fashionable expressions of condemnation of American racism, brutality, racism, cruelty to the ‘other’, white privilege, racism, the center-city of places like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit (aside is there anything left in Detroit to burn?) would have been going up in flames … so on and so forth, und so weiter.
Only this was the other way around, and so noxious and horrific a brutality to an inoffensive and harmless young person; attention must be paid, no matter how the usual plummy-voiced commentators drag their metaphorical heels. Here it was the perps filmed it themselves, and posted their nasty, deed on-line … for what? A brag to their friends, a trophy … seemingly unaware that a recording of their actions would be used against them. Did they not expect law enforcement to somehow, magically not see? Or did they just not care, assuming they would be untouchable. There has been a long, long, long series of horrific black-on-white atrocities the Newsom-Christian torture/rape/murders in Knoxville ten years ago, come to mind as one of the most brutal and the most little-reported, outside of local media, plus any number of flash-mob attacks, of white or Asian pedestrians suddenly attacked on city streets through the “knock-out” game, of organized looting of retail venues and white visitors to mid-west state fairs threatened as they try to leave the venue.
It’s a soulless brutality demonstrated through these incidents. In the mug-shots of the perpetrators their eyes are dead. They seem to have tormented the kid for fun and no other purpose than that of showing off to peers akin to pulling the wings off of flies, I suppose. I also suppose this kind of game is encouraged by inner-city thug culture, excused and rationalized away by intellectuals and politicians who one would have expected to know better. Such incidents are hastily covered up by the very same national establishment press, who break out the headlines and commentary by their pet race relations experts ad infinitum when it comes to a Black Lives Matter-manufactured storm in a teacup. I have no idea why it should be this way, but I have read suggestions that secretly the national news establishment are afraid that white flyover country would go all indiscriminately punitive on the ‘hood in the manner of the 1921 Tulsa race riot or something of the sort.
It is ironic, isn’t it that the current inner-city black thug culture is demonstrating itself to be as feral, brutal, and ignorant as the 19th century KKK considered that blacks were. There are no chains quite as binding as the ones that you hang on yourself.
Discuss.
I didn’t watch the video, but I read that the girl filming the incident accidentally posted it on Facebook. She was so high on pot that she didn’t realize that she had Facebook Live set up to post her video. So much for those arguments that marijuana is harmless.
Crime is out of control in Chicago and now it’s spilling over. I don’t believe the news establishment or the political establishment are afraid of white America. I think they’ve always tried to harness the degenerate ruthlessness of urban crime and poverty but never found the right formula until all this fake news came along. Now they can finally fulfill their long sought after dream of punishing the deplorable bourgeoisie, religious, productive, etc.
Dog bites man, no story.
Mom,
Your very accurate description of the reaction to this horrendous incident and the likely reaction if group identities had been reversed certainly captures the racism of our cultural elites. They readily accept sociopathic violence from members of the blacks, latinos, Muslims and other protected groups and are ready to project the causation to the non-protected victims. That is the narrative through which they filter every event and color every account of such events. Next is the perverse recommendations and demands for remediation. Such things as ending “profiling”, increasing financial assistance for the “poor”, reining in police operations, mandatory minimum sentences, open admission to higher education with free tuition, racial quotas, reparations….
Never will individual accountability and responsibility be considered.
Death6
It will all make conditions for the black under-class so very much worse, Death6 – their neighborhoods more awful, more crime-ridden, and the murder-rate in them to sky-rocket.
And yet – all that the usual spokesholes for those communities can do – is demand more of the same and blame everyone else but themselves for the resulting disastrous outcome. The racism card is close to being – if not already – overdrawn.
Infantilization of evil? The shows discussing this often tried to talk around responsibility. Or bring Trump up. Our nation requires citizens who are more than grown up, are moral. I’m not sure that is what we are nurturing.
Our short lives and even shorter memories deceive us: Wichita Massacre, sixteen yeas ago. Zebra Murders, fifty years ago. Want to include the Black Panthers’ killing field or other Black Panther murders; e.g. George Jackson, Edward Brooks…. “Soul on Ice,” or raping white women is good.
How iconic? paradigmatic? is an event such as the assassination of Kennedy or this torture by (as Obama might put it) typical Chicago Democrat Rappers. I think the lines of casualty go the other way. The event is significant not because it reveals something about a society, but because a faction can put the crime to use in its struggles for power.
IIRC, are you aware there was a similar event in Nampa or Boise, which wasn’t streamed to Facebook and drew less attention. Oh, and the races were reversed. My memory and Google-Fu aren’t up to finding a URL.
I didn’t watch the video. The still were appalling enough. If I want to see torture and murder by psychopaths, I prefer “Game of Thrones” or “Westworld.”
demand more of the same and blame everyone else but themselves for the resulting disastrous outcome
There is a segment of the black urban population that realizes this is suicide. They want to live “normal” lives. They want their kids to go to school and study.
I was in Chicago on a visit a few years ago and stopped by my parents house where I grew up. The neighborhood is now one of the worst in the city for crime but it was an almost idyllic place to grow up in the 1950s. Last spring, I posted an update on that area.
The blacks are now leaving as it has become a hellhole.
Now a multitude of black residents have called it quits with their hometown, searching for safety and prosperity beyond the city limits ”” my own friends and family among them.
It’s been a humbling experience watching as those worlds, those communities filled with stable families and businesses, crumble into the dust.
Outsiders and former residents read headlines describing violence on the South Side and wonder what has gone wrong in the largely black neighborhoods. But few discuss the toll that black flight is having on Chicago, long a beacon for progress and employment for African-Americans stretching back to the days of slaughterhouses, steel mills and Pullman porters.
Chicago, the city that had once been home to the most prominent African-Americans, from Joe Louis and Mahalia Jackson to Michael Jordan and Oprah, lost 181,000 black residents just between 2000 and 2010, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The guy who owned our old house wanted me to send him photos of what it looked like when we lived there. I could feel his desire for that life to be his own.
These people may be a minority or even a small majority but we don’t read about them.
I wonder if they will give up on the Democrats if Trump and Carson and DeVos give them enough reason.
I’m sure there are soul-less sociopaths of every race. I imagine it correlates more closely with IQ. The more mindless animals you have about, the more mindless predation you get.
Permissive social signalling just encourages them. Oh yes, I blame oZero.
I’m afraid the hunt approaches unabated, Trump notwithstanding.
The Charleston church shooter is an example of a white kid with dead eyes.
A first world country, well a normal one anyway, will have universal healthcare, heavily subsidized education, a moderate universal welfare program, adequate pensions, and a pretty serious weapon control program.
I hope this helps, with what you obviously have wrong. Desperate people do desperate things, you want to avoid that where you can.
The eyes are supposed to be the window to the soul. In regards to “hate crimes” it is amazing how one-sided they seem to be.
As long as we’re listing attributes: a first-world country would have no concept of “hate speech,” or “hate-crime;” it would have freedom of religion and association; it would have a well-revered military with strongly protected borders and a single official language; in times of peace the government would have a surplus; few politicians would be lawyers since holding elective or appointive office wouldn’t be path to vast wealth; it would have an unofficial national beer; ….
Having studied the USSR, it appears to me most countries are second-world countries, at least in part.
How much will this incident change anyone’s minds? Not much, I predict. The MSM will continue to minimize and deny such events, per Sgt. Mom’s conjecture that the MSM fears a white backlash-or whatever you want to call it. Those who have believed the MSM up to now will continue to believe the MSM. Those who were previously not fooled will continue not being fooled.
The MSM narrative does not take into account that most of us who do not believe its race narrative already realize the complex, many-sided nature of white/black relations in this country. For example, Sgt. Mom has served in the military, which has done a better job than most institutions on racial integration.
A classmate in my hometown of several thousand is the offspring of a Tuskegee airman. Our friendship spans a half-century. I had a rather different experience with black/white relations when I was a hippie eco-activist in Berserkeley. I took over a lease on a room that a friend vacated. I was an innocent bystander to a kitchen conversation when I got a gun put to my temple. The person who whipped out the gun had asked to use someone’s “rig” -the first time I had heard the term. A rig is another term for hypodermic needle. As he put the gun to my temple he asked, “Are you prejudiced?” – for being denied use of the rig/hypodermic needle. Again, I was a bystander. He had us all lie down on the kitchen floor while he trashed the house. A black guy lived in one of the rooms he trashed, so he was an equal-opportunity trasher.
My teaching in a black school did not make my views any less complex. I will merely point out that few people of any race who have been teachers or administrators in a black school believe the Obama administration’s claim about “disparate impact” on school discipline relating to black students. Disparate behavior results in disparate discipline. Funny, that.
PenGun,
You define “first world” as the typically stale Progressive utopia; universal health care, subsidized education, weapon control, etc., without any nod to who will pay for this universality. You are free to define “first world” for yourself any way you choose, but last I looked, no one died and left you as the ultimate arbiter of civilization.
I have a neighbor who worked in Juvenile correction facilities here in the Northeast for many years. He’s a soft spoken, gentle kind of guy. But he has the “cop” sense for who is trouble or who is not. This comes in handy when you need to decide if one of your charges is going to knife your or just needs someone to talk to. At block parties he would always be able to peg the teenagers who would get into trouble and those who were putting on a show. He said he had seen more kids who had no human empathy (if not quite sociopaths on the way) than in the past. The moderating influence of fathers in the family was not present and no amount of grandparent care could fill in. When neighborhoods have no positive male example it is a great loss. I give credit to Obama to provide an example of a good family life after the screwed up childhood he had. (See this months City Journal for a great summary of his youth and how it affected his worldview). Trump offers a different history, and it would help if he sincerely apologized for his locker room banter. It’s not just blacks but whites as well in crappy economic areas. Good examples and aspirations matter more than we remember.
>It’s not just blacks but whites as well in crappy economic areas.
Balls. If that were true red-state rural America would be a sump of violent crime. It isn’t — and not just because we own most of the guns.
>Good examples and aspirations matter more than we remember.
Culture counts for all. When we saw on YouTube was another manifestation of a dysfunctional tribal subculture that comprises 1/5th of 13% of the population that commits more than half of all violent crime in the damn country. Drugs and single mothers and poverty only explain so much.
I hope this helps,
Yes, it does help identify you as a budding Venezuelan.
Canada lives in peace because you are next door to us. Mexico could live in peace but they have the curse of Spanish heritage,
I do wonder about the lack of serious authority figures in the lives of juvenile and teenage men … young women, too. My daughter had the example of her uncles, grandfather, a number of other significant male role models, so my own situation worked out for us.
We live now in a racially mixed neighborhood – which I believe breaks down pretty close to the national racial averages, amazingly enough. Working to middle-class, fairly affordable, as these things go; almost a hundred percent home owners, very few renters. I have watched the grandsons of the elderly retired neighbor next door grow up. Miss Irene is AA, a retired civil servant and observant church lady – her grandsons are all hard-working, ambitious and have been employed since they were sixteen. The oldest grandson worked at a local fast-food place all throughout his teenage years – he had such a good credit rating that he went out and was able to buy a new car (a practical little Mitsubishi sedan) a year or so ago. Surprised his mom and grandmom, when he brought it home. He and his brothers would never dare get involved in the thug-life; when his parents got tired of whupping his *ass, Miss Irene would have taken over. His mother’s opinion of Section 8 renters would peel the paint of walls, BTW. They all are in no state of delusion about the dysfunctional AA community.
Diagonally across the street is another AA family – note family. Father is employed, house-proud, contentious. His two teenage sons have a small lawn-mowing service in the neighborhood. Straight across the street – the house owner is also AA: military veteran. He moved to a larger house when he married, but his starter house is a rental, which he rents to only people he knows personally. (House never comes on the rental market – strictly personal connection.)
The dysfunctional 1/5th of the 1/13th are a horrific trial to the hardworking and aspiring of that 1/13th. This I know. And from more than I have listed here.
Culture counts for all. When we saw on YouTube was another manifestation of a dysfunctional tribal subculture that comprises 1/5th of 13% of the population that commits more than half of all violent crime in the damn country. Drugs and single mothers and poverty only explain so much.
What’s different about the culture now vs. before the 1960s?
Before the welfare state American blacks had low illegitimacy rates by current standards. Since the 1960s not only have black illegitimacy rates shot up but white illegitimacy rates have followed. Perverse welfare state incentives seem more likely causes of the problem than culture is. Drugs, poverty and dysfunctional behavior go together with an underclass of single-parent households run by young unmarried women on the dole. This outcome results ultimately from govt-imposed disincentives to work and marry.
I think one cannot overestimate the effects of growing up in fatherless families has had on society. Growing up I was more afraid of my father then whatever the police would do. That kept me in line even in the late 60s going to school in the bay area
And talk about the law of unintended consequences. Lyndon Johnson’s “great society” that was the beginning of the runaway illegitimacy rate
Jonathan Says: “What’s different about the culture now vs. before the 1960s?”
The 60s happened. The cultural Left (which is different from and sometimes at odds with the Red Left) won the war against the binding force of traditional culture.
This was seen at the time (in many respects, justifiably) as a victory for personal freedom and against oppressive practices and beliefs.
For instance, arbitrary, prudish, and often hypocritical sexual mores were abolished. No one was ever supposed to have sex outside of marriage (especially women – the infamous double standard). There were laws against contraception. Men philandered with tacit excusing. But any woman or girl who had a baby out of wedlock was disgraced.
Or take another area: clothing. Before the ’60s, even everyday dress was much more formal (and uncomfortable). Now casual dress is the norm except for special occasions. It took generations just for women to be able to wear pants.
Race: there are some counterexamples, but by and large, racial prejudice and discrimination was embedded in traditional culture, and often defended by political conservatives. (When William F. Buckley started National Review in the 1950s, NR defended the white supremacists of the South. Buckley later admitted they had been wrong.)
Women’s liberation: As late as the early 1960s, there were whole categories of work where women were presumptively excluded or admitted only in rare cases. Simply opening a bank account could present special difficulties. And I believe there were still legal presumptions granting husbands control of family assets.
The 60s smashed all this; but the 60s also saw the triumph of the Left’s idea that all traditional culture was wrong. The entire social order was corrupt; all rules, all mores were oppressive. Abolish it all! Some of the reforms championed by the Left had been right. The Left now believed that everything they wanted was right. And having enjoyed power and victory against some deserving enemies, they insisted those enemies were still present. Thus the madness of today’s “crusades against racism”.
Things the 60s made acceptable and even fashionable: casual obscenity and profanity; sexual promiscuity and casual bastardy; rejection of work; use of illegal drugs; defiance of conventional authority (police, teachers). Does this sound like the black underclass?
White Americans were also affected. But middle- and upper-class whites had enough cultural capital to indulge these failings and still (mostly) recover to functional lives. Blacks did not.
IMO, “the 60s” were the worst thing white America ever did to black America.
Phil Ossiferz Stone Says: “…a dysfunctional tribal subculture that comprises 1/5th of 13%…”
Would that it were so. 70% of black children are bastards. About one-third of black men are convicted felons. My sense is that about 30% of the black population are in the lawless, wholly dysfunctional “underclass”, and that another 40% are borderline underclass/working class.
A culture built on a belief in work, respect for private property, taking personal responsibility (setbacks are challenges rather than discrimination) – surely that is as important as marriage – as important as marriage is. I can’t shake the image of life on the reservations as Naomi Schaffer Riley describes it. But, of course, it is the same story in Palestine. Something dies in us when we don’t grow up, when we see our failings as someone else’s fault. Given the whole broad world to live in, we accept our own vision of our own limitations and think of others as our jailers rather than ourselves as people with choices – and we do have choices, even the poorest of us. That lousy mindset dominated the last eight years. This is the mindset of “you didn’t build that” and of constantly seeing others in racial (or class or . . . ) terms only.
It embitters. Sure, there are sociopaths in any culture and some will have trouble making a good life. But we turn bitter when we don’t become conscious, aware, responsible. And we turn that bitterness either upon ourselves (drink & drugs) or upon others (riots and murder). The disgusting four are evil – and they had choices not to be. They are responsible for their evil.
I don’t think I’m expressing this well, but we can see what makes for a productive and healthy life; these aren’t secrets. But they often appear beyond the thinking of those making social policy. I would bet that those four think of themselves as victims – but then sociopaths usually do.
“I don’t think I’m expressing this well”: on the contrary, you expressed it rather well.
“This was seen at the time (in many respects, justifiably) as a victory for personal freedom and against oppressive practices and beliefs.”
A significant number of those “oppressive, traditional” values dismissed served to encourage socially responsible patterns of behavior. The license that resulted from the self-serving and irresponsible behaviors coming from the indiscriminate rejection of many of the traditional cultural norms were both individually and culturally damaging, especially in the long term. When the bad outcomes came home to roost, the baby boomers birthed the victimology coping strategy. They passed this disease on to succeeding generations by both word and more importantly deeds where it has morphed into the rise of the real living dead. So we have group identity substituting for individual identity and group blame for other groups’ outcomes. Most of what the 60’s gave us was not freedom properly understood as including responsibility, but a self absorbed hedonistic pursuit of shallow comforts.
I believe any meaningful and advisable changes to traditional cultural values can and do come about in the natural course of trial and error and common sense observation of causes and effects. Provided the basis of judgement is individual accountability. As was noted, there were many of the traditional values that the barbarians threw down to our individual and collective disadvantage. My view is that there were far more discarded with high and continuing social costs than those with net social benefits.
Cultural norms are by nature hard and slow to change. If not, they wouldn’t be of much use in passing down the collective wisdom to the less experienced and likely less wise newer generations. Not say that they are infallible or do not change. They are the glue that holds the body together under common understanding rather than force.
“Does this sound like the black underclass?”
No, not exclusively or even primarily. It sounds like the current American pop culture. None of those celebrated behaviors I find useful or optimum and most I find repugnant and corrosive. I find any implication that these are largely genetic or distinct based on racial genetics unsupported. Witness the similarity of the self destructive behavior patterns among the white underclass in Britain compared to hispanic and black underclass in the USA.
I am also in agreement with Ginny.
Death6
I wonder also if the sociopathetic tendencies are being multiplied and amplified by conditions within the black inner city communities. Essentially, it’s approved, or at least tolerated by authority figures … so there goes more of the same.