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Good grief! "Lucretia" and I take a week off, and everything goes to hell. Minneapolis starts rioting again, and Democrats in Washington start their own riot over court-packing. Meanwhile, the officer who mistook her service revolver for a taser and shot Daunte Wright was publicly identified within 48 hours (Kim Potter), lost her job, and now faces criminal charges, while we have passed Day 100 since Ashli Babbit was shot in the U.S. Capitol on January 6 without learning the identity of the person who fired on her. Although the DC Coroner ruled that Babbit's cause of death was a homicide, the Justice Department says no charges will be filed, and our supine media seems to have forgotten their own question about "the public's right to know." Strange times.
Anyway, we look at the riot question through the lens of Edward Banfield's classic chapter in The Unheavenly City, "Rioting Mainly for Fun and Profit," and end this episode with the suggestion that classic rock may yet save us all.
Steve Hayward
"Lucretia"
Discussion (11)
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Corporate America does NOT get organized pushback by being WOKE but...when they're not....the much BETTER organized Left is migraines on steroids. Hence, the path of least resistance is to jump on the Woke-wagon. No?
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I think that Lucretia is correct about the guy shot in Minneapolis. A criminal thug who got what he deserved.
I think she is wrong about Ashli Babbitt, a criminal rioter who also got what she deserved, in my opinion.
I disapprove of the tribalism that seems to explain Lucretia’s different conclusions in the two cases.
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There may be tribalism at work here, but it goes much deeper than the fact that the Minnesota guy was an armed (illegally) criminal thug who had contributed nothing to either society or his family (he would not/could not even support his young son, born of course, out of wedlock), and Ashli Babbitt was an Air Force veteran with no weapon and no criminal record. To call someone who harmed no one, who destroyed no property, and who was "occupying" what has (now euphemistically) been called the "people's house" a criminal rioter who deserved to by murdered in cold blood is to accept the false narrative of the left that what occurred on January 6 was an "insurrection," qualitatively different because our precious elites "felt" threatened. These same elites cheered while their toadies on the left engaged in months of genuine, destructive riots that were violent and destroyed millions in property. Pelosi, Harris, et. al., encouraged those riots under the specious justification of fighting against "systemic racism." On the other hand, the FBI, the DOJ, and the Capitol Police have charged dozens of protestors (none of whom were armed) from the incidents on January 6, keeping many locked up and even in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. Very little property was damaged on January 6, while the only actual fatality that resulted from violence on that day was the murder of Ashli Babbitt.
So if refusing to see a moral equivalence between the accidental shooting of an armed, resisting, lifetime criminal thug (for which the officer involved has and will continue to pay a heavy price) and the cold-blooded, purposeful murder of an unarmed "trespasser" (for which the officer involved will pay no price--not even to his reputation) qualifies me as tribal, I guess I can accept that. And knowing the context in which this is all occurring, I might even say I embrace it.
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Lucretia needs to relax. The world is ending and all that we value as good and decent is decaying but there is no need to be so high-strung all the time.
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