accounting for accountability

sorting the correct fight out of the false one

this is a pattern with which many will be familiar.

one sees it everywhere. once you enshrine legally, ethically, and functionally through selective prosecution, charging, and sentencing, ideas like “disparate impact” or the empathy traps of “well they are just poor unknowing <insert whatever here> that cannot be expected to know better so it’s not fair to hold them accountable” or “we cannot blame marginalized people” it’s sort of amazing how rapidly “cultural enrichment” and “empathy” turn into widespread crime, cultural dissolution, and outright intolerable atavistic recursion to behaviors that are, not to put too fine a point on it, actually insane to the point of outright horror.

this is not about race or class or whatever in the manner the intersectionality rabble rousers seek to claim: it’s about accountability vs feckless feral narcissism and about a society of high trust peaceful people against a small group of highly dysfunctional barbarians being given run of the town.

and we need to start realizing it and calling it by its proper name.

a society finds itself unable to grasp or even grapple with these issues because everything has been inverted and weaponized to be anti-function anti-social, anti-civilization and called “racist” or “sexist” or “anti-trans” as a smokescreen to occlude the real fissure.

those seeking to act badly have been granted not only full, unaccountable license, but actual justification and even congratulations and apology.

because that’s what happens when you fetishize marginalization, mistake it for virtue, and teach it as entitlement.

and that center does not hold.

the useful idiot shock troops unleashed here are past unaccountable and into outright oblivious.

it’s just astonishing to watch.

this new genre of internet videos of women seeming sure that if they just say “no” enough times they will be free from arrest or consequence is kind of awesome. they are so sure that if they just ask for the manager stridently enough, they can get out of this.

really watch this, look at her posture.

it looks like a cartoon.

the entitled crazy is smoking off of her.

“because you’re under arrest.”

“no i’m not! no!”

it’s wild stuff.

the idea that real consequences might be coming appears utterly alien.

and there are dozens, probably hundreds of similar videos online. obviously, you can never quite tell what on the internet is frequency bias and “summer of the shark” fad reporting, but that fact that so many of these videos exist at all is, in and of itself, telling, no?

i mean, how do people get like this?

here’s my theory (and pardon my french) but we have basically not only removed all consequence for acting like a total asshole, but we have created huge sets of consequences for trying to stop anyone from acting like a total asshole.

and this is not a good plan.

you scream at pregnant women on the subway or loot a walgreens in broad daylight, and you’re all good. try to stop it? guantanamo for hate crimes.

the rest is just people responding to incentives in predictable ways.

this has elevated and empowered the most absurd 1-2% of every group and pushed them to the fore of all social and political movements. they were always crazy, unreasonable, narcissistic, anti-social, mis-calibrated nightmares but they were held in check by fear of consequences. you fucked around, you found out. now you fuck around you get called so stunning, so brave.

so many of these people literally have no idea how awful they are.

they think they're awesome.

half of them have mistaken it for celebrity.

pretty soon you have morbidly obese “stars” going nuts because they cannot fit in a subcompact lyft car and blaming the world for it, suing people, and claiming persecution.

the idea that they might be the problem simply never occurs to them. no one ever told them or if they did, they were in no way going to listen.

this is a sort of hideous inversion from sound ideas like “society and a just state exist to protect the negative rights of the individual” and turn them inside out into “society exists to allow the least reasonable to make positive demands of everyone and anyone and to live aggressive, oppressive lives consequence free.”

it’s like they have been mind wiped of the basic ideas of cause and effect and accountability.

this is, i fear, the point. it’s the exact goal of ideas like the soros “open society” movement that has been so prolific in taking over DA and AG and prosecutor offices. these turned out to be cheap ways to grab large swathes of societal power because it does not matter one whit what the law says if those who enforce it do so selectively. the selfsame screechers bawling “no kings” have placed unaccountable authoritarian power in the judiciary elevating it to a position of societal dominance as “keeper of what’s allowed” and the determinant of who gets held to account for what.

there is a quite substantial subset of humans who are not fundamentally capable of abstract morality and such structures essentially turn them in to civilizational WMD’s. when all you understand is consequence, its removal uncorks one helluva bottle and it can get pretty crazy pretty fast.

the US is not even the worst of it. in germany and the UK, gang rapists are going free while those who criticize this outcome online are being jailed.

and then they come for those who criticize that injustice, even as satire.

imagine how this world looks to a person who thinks only in terms of “i want” vs “immediate personal consequences.”

yeah.

not exactly a recipe for “good neighbor” is it?

how does it get like this? it gets like this by starting very, very young. it starts in “public schools” which are a badly misnamed idea. change that name to the far more apt “government schools” and proper perspective is easier to acquire.

government school has become insane, pushing outlandish ideology and entitlement and, perhaps worse, banning any and all consequence for misbehavior.

little jaden can yell right in the teacher’s face and call them grievous insults that, when i was a kid, would have been instant expulsion and nothing happens. the whole education system is about defending the worst and most anti-social behavior and it teaches nothing but “fear the power of the state” and “use it to abuse others” by giving the most marginal and misbegotten endless turns with the whip hand and telling everyone else they need to deal with it.

far from “removing bullying from schools” this has made it twice as bad, it’s just tyranny of the other side run by the more mentally ill kids. it’s being cultivated and fostered.

parents have been disempowered to help or even resist. once parenting was stricter, more hands off, less accommodative, and more demanding of children. you mess around in a restaurant? car. go sit by yourself and cry all you want. no one cared. totally normal. and it taught useful social lessons. now? parents get arrested for that.

police, child protective services, schools, counselors, dodgy mental health “professionals” have all been elevated over parents neutering them and preventing the basic, time tested practice of child-rearing with consequences from taking place.

the whole system from cradle to grave has.

it’s an endless jubilee for the worst 1-5% at the expense of all of the rest of us.

it’s being used to pit group against group, black against white, men against women, trans against basically everyone and everything.

and people are, frankly, exhausted with all of it.

none of this is the correct fight. it’s not class on class or race on race or gender on gender: it’s those who would live in peace respectful of the rights of others vs those who would not and who take advantage of high trust systems to protect low trust activity, those who would endlessly defect in a prisoner’s dilemma while demanding to escape consequence.

this is the real battle line and if the state would array itself against we the people in this, then it must be pulled down or end run.

at the end of the day, sound societies must police themselves.

this is the only way. even if they could be trusted to do it, police cannot do this.

they are not everywhere.

courts cannot do it.

it needs to be in the society.

this is why the mass removal of all these rights to self-defense and self-determination has been so damaging.

it short circuits the societal immune system against pathogens.

it removes the right to stand free and stand up.

and this leaves only bad decisions in its wake.

consider this:

you’re in a car, perhaps with your kids. violent rioters start smashing your vehicle and hitting it with things. this is obviously an incredibly unsafe situation.

what do you do?

this driver (in riverside CA) is apparently now being charged.

sure, flight or self-defense is absolutely justified here, but when you run over people who were not attacking you, suddenly it’s far more complex. the simple fact is that once this situation exists, there really are no good choices or outcomes, just different kinds of bad.

the real crime here is having allowed this situation to exist in the first place.

americans did not used to have to make choices like this.

they should not have to make them now.

we need to get ahead of this and head it off.

once it’s happening, you’ve already lost.

cultures must defend themselves and establish their norms around positive law and cultural practice that has worked.

it’s painfully obvious that what we’re doing right now is not working. it’s producing broken people, breaking society, and approaching a point where too few possess the agency to sustain high-trust, high-function civilization.

and that’s a thing worth fighting to stop.

children raised without agency become parents without agency and when those parents feed their own children into broken institutions, what possible result may emerge save a great unraveling?

civilizations decline by forgetting the obvious things and forgetting how to raise children and enforce and require basic rights-based law and order are about as basic as it comes.

focusing on a few “long tail” bad outcomes like one kid who got heatstroke in a car is causing FAR more harm than good. if that happens, sure, blame the parent. but that’s not reason to assume that no parent can do this simple thing that 20 million parents did before them.

it is not the role of the state to shield its citizens, even its children, from accountability for their actions. however “empathetic” it may feel, that’s a dystopian road to ruin.

either get the state out of this process and let humanity start managing itself once more, or get used to a free lifetime supply of things getting worse…