DC home rule, madhouses, and choices

the hard tasks of hard men making soft times

DC home rule by the federal government has become a hot topic this week. i would argue that it’s basically not even a radical idea. when faced with such outlandish circumstances, it’s a normal idea, a simple, run of the mill rocks are hard, water is wet obvious idea.

up until quite recently, even the notion of tolerating a city working as municipal DC does would have been an unusual conception in any sort of modern society.

merely allowing it to get there much less trying to sell that as a good thing would have gotten you run out of town on a rail by most prior generations.

and yet today it’s astonishing how many people suddenly need to be scraped off the ceiling when presented with the idea of “we need to get control of this place so that the streets are safe.”

this sudden eruption of “what do you mean!?! DC is fine, it’s lovely!” is just nonsense and invites obvious parody.

“it’s totally safe if you just keep your eyes down, and don’t wear any headphones or jewelry, never walk at night, keep your head on a swivel, cross the street if you see certain people, never take a nice bag out of the house, walk with a rottweiler, and never go to these 5 or 6 neighborhoods even with a security detail. oh and god, no, don’t ever park a car on the street.”

stores get looted then people complain about “retail deserts” and ask “why can’t we have a CVS?”

the more allegedly serious of the disputants are saying things more like “crime is down! it’s all OK.” but this is fallacy.

the crime stats are fake. like, really, profoundly, deliberately fake. (this has become common all over the US especially in blue cities)

“When our members respond to the scene of a felony offense where there is a victim reporting that a felony occurred, inevitably there will be a lieutenant or a captain that will show up on that scene and direct those members to take a report for a lesser offense,” Fraternal Order of Police Chairman Gregg Pemberton said. “So, instead of taking a report for a shooting or a stabbing or a carjacking, they will order that officer to take a report for a theft or an injured person to the hospital or a felony assault, which is not the same type of classification.”

command staff is also accused of changing the crimes in the databases to things like “felony assault,” which is not a category tracked in databases or reported to FBI. it’s just defined out of sight and out of mind.

when the police are sidelined and compromised and the mayor and city council are either complicit or ignorant, it’s not a radical idea that you need some adults in the room. the basic safety of citizens and their property is the highest purpose of government. it’s the whole point.

in the 1930’s or 1950’s, this sort of robbing, stealing, and murder would have been met with massive, immediate, and severe response.

no one would have said “differential impact” or “poor wittle baby wobber who doesn’t know better,” they would have scooped them up or shot them down and prison or morgue would have been the destination list.

it’s not complicated, it just takes commitment.

strong men. good times.

this is what’s happening to the DC homeless encampments right now.

again, not complicated. the only reason they would not have done this in 1930 is that they had not invented bobcat scoop trucks yet.

homelessness and crime in america are a choice, not some exogenous fact.

enforcment stopped crime in the 90’s and 2000’s. “disparate impact,” where “arresting people for auto break ins is racist!” changed that. they stopped prosecuting. 13 year old kids in DC brazenly kill and steal then look right at cops and say “you can’t do anything to me, i’m a minor.” and they are often right. it’s a slap on the wrist. this leniency is repaid with a punch in the face.

they will keep doing this until consequences stop them.

same with homelessness. most of these people are mentally ill. not having a house is not their core problem. they cannot manage things like that. give them a home, they wreck it. give them money, they buy street drugs to try to quiet the voices. it’s crime and violence and filth and sexual assault. it’s poop and needles in parks and emergency rooms and paramedics trying to pick up the pieces.

so the choice is stark.

america gets much maligned for how many people we put in prison, but this really became a thing starting in the 80’s. homelessness too. that was when we closed the mental hospitals and made it very difficult to forcibly commit someone.

eric raymond was speaking about this the other day.

in a nutshell, when you add up the populations of the big house and the mad house, the US does not look that different from most other developed nations. we just closed the asylums and shunted the crazies to the streets and then on to the prisons.

like eric, i too struggle with the idea of "involuntary mental health commitment," and it has certainly been abused at times in the past, but it does seem like an idea we need to revisit with seriousness because the alternative is neither working nor kind.

giuliani made a huge difference in NYC by making it illegal to sleep on the streets, in parks, etc. shelters had to provide a bed for all who asked. those who did not ask got arrested. in either case, they all got seen by mental health professionals and were often forced into care.

perhaps this creates thorny rights issues, but it does work.

it along with zero tolerance, broken windows policing turned NYC from gross to lovely and dangerous to safe in nothing flat.

it’s a choice.

it’s about having the will and the strength to make it.

it’s the hard men (and women) making hard calls.

and this is what the leftist leadership fears most and what they have been preparing against.

success stories are kryptonite for hallucination campaigns and gaslight government.

they know damn well it’s going to work which is why they are so desperate to deter and vilify it.

they have been attacking society for decades. and when you push back, they cry and play the victim.

the coming playbook has been carefully laid out and planned.

the whole left has been prepared and pre-bunked for years to see any resurgence of traditional american values as “fascism.”

of course they see the reintroduction of basic policing as “a police state.” the whole worldview is a special form of delusion and reality denial.

every last bit of it is inversion because this group has so utterly lost the plot.

the reality is that "you annoyed the average american into resisting fascism."

the very fact that you are such fascists who insist on projecting your own oppressive and controlling instincts onto anyone who seeks to resist you is pretty much exactly what is so annoying about you.

it's one endless, tiresome game of "always accuse the other side of that which you are guilty."

and you overplayed the hand and finally forced the people who just wanted to be left alone to stand up and fight to restore a reasonable and reasoned society and restore a social contract under which peaceful people may live peaceably.

this interminable game of "punch, no punchbacks" where a totalitarian and authoritarian left gets to hit everyone else while playing the victim is over.

the age of the crybully has ended.

you won't understand this because, if you could, you would not be as you are or able to inhabit such a profound hallucination in which you are always the good guy, but it's coming just the same.

you will think you are the victim, but the reality is that you’re the abuser and always were. you have not been peddling empathy and inclusion but rather tyranny of the other side.

you brought this on yourselves by being unwilling to leave others alone to live their lives.

magic words like "fascist, racist, sexist, phobic, and structural-ism" have all lost their power and inverted into self-indictment and self-clown. they reveal the vapidity of the prog-left and their astonishing misconceptions about the world and about themselves.

but, by all means, keep projecting your pathologies onto everyone else. it's just going to help this end more quickly.

people are now raging about trump stepping in to impose some different themes on the national museums.

“fascist! totalitarian! cultural attack and enslavement!” they cry.

“they are changing history! this is literally orwell!”

but let me remind you of what got added to the museums under “progressive” curation:

(this was in the smithsonian)

(i truly love “cause and effect relationships” being cast as “whiteness.” i’m honestly curious, what is the alternative? stuff just happens and there is no predicting it?)

was this the “true history” of these united states? seems more like a bunch of fantasyland level race-baiting projection and “bigotry of the other side” masquerading as inclusive pluralism.

i think the posters above got taken down some time ago over the outcry they generated, but the rest of the DC museums carry content in much the same vein. it’s all racial politics, made up history, climate hysteria, and “critical theory.”

marx would feel right at home in these places. increasingly few americans do.

if having these sorts of capture driven content taken down looks like “fascism” to you, i suspect you are the one projecting. it’s wild, ahistorical, counterfactual bias.

again, of course they see rollback as violence. it’s going to end the crybully way of life and the thought that any sane human could hold a different belief than they do is impossible to conceive, much less countenance.

and it’s fricking exhausting.

the real problem that has emerged in america is the same one that arises in all totalitarian societies:

everything has been made political. nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

your shoes, your breakfast cereal, your car, your jeans: it’s all political.

every eco-utterance, personal interaction, friendship or sexual choice: it’s all political.

lift weights? that’s right wing extremism.

it’s immiserating and demoralizing.

everything feels like a trap, like a danger.

people have lost sight of the fact that life can just be simple, sane, and reasonable, that politics need not join us at the breakfast table nor in our dating lives or schools.

i do not remember a single instance of politics in my whole elementary education and certainly not any sort of sex and sexual identity talk. as far as we were aware, teachers did not even have personal lives. for all we knew, they got wheeled into closets and plugged in to recharge or hung upside-down like bats until morning. and that was good.

even high school was absent politics and college mostly so. no one was ramming doctrine down your throat.

you could joke about race and gender. we were friends. and that was good.

i posted this on twitter the other day and it caused a bit of controversy but got a lot of spread and approval. (~500k views, 12k likes and rising)

clearly, it resonated.

i suspect that this is because it is, at core, simply true.

the path to this lies in retaking speech and civilization. the best protector of free speech is speaking freely.

this is how a group comes once more to know its own mind.

this was a study of undergrads. it shows you exactly how perception control by preventing expression of true preference works.

77% thinks A and yet everyone says “B.”

this is how a minority rules a majority.

and this stretches far beyond the university.

blue states and cities are cancel culture societies where the "inclusive progressives" will gang tackle and silence anyone who disagrees with them.

to even open your mouth in opposition requires being ready for an instant fight.

that's the point. it's how they preserve the illusion that everyone agrees with them: they simply make it so unpleasant to express a differing opinion that large swathes of the population are cowed into silence.

this creates an abilene paradox where the fact that many people disagree cannnot easily be discovered and further causes people to publicly falsify their preferences to avoid attack and "stay in the group."

it's the asch conformity experiment.

so, if you are still espousing right wing doctrine in a deep blue bastion, you are, by definition, someone ready to argue and fight all the time, someone not cowed by social pressure.

when isolated, it makes you look extreme.

but you aren’t.

you can see this in the studies above. the students are not nearly as "left leaning" as they publicly profess. they just do it to "go along to get along" because they think everyone else is far left (because those are the only views spoken aloud) and the professors demand it as regurgitated doctrine in exams and papers and deans impose it as dormspeech.

the key to breaking this is freeing speech and realizing that the seeming ubiquity of this hard left doctrine was always a cultivated illusion. once you realize you're not alone, it gets easy to break away and resist.

this is why all hard left regimes rely on censorship and cancelation.

it's why they come for speech rights, publication channels, and call anyone who disagrees racist, sexist, and phobic. they say “extremist” and “fascist.”

they need to make that which is not actually popular look like a majority view and invent a false moral dimension to vilify heretics.

nothing else can keep the proles in the fold.

speak your mind and this all dissolves in short order.

it's likely why the left is so keen to cast "words as violence."

honest speech is the revolution that overturns their regime.

the left winds up seeing all of “the right” as extremists both because of its own shift to extreme positions being mistaken for movement of the other side and because only the most extreme of the right is willing to speak to them. they see it as some small fringe group of non-representative individuals.

but it’s not. it’s just the tip of a huge iceberg that has been hidden from view.

and that vast volume is rapidly coming to the fore.

too many have said too much and the words gain currency and focus.

it’s like waking up from a bad dream where you were the only kid at school who wasn’t insane.

and the more we speak, the less they control.

calling things by their true names and describing them as they are carries profound power to shape the world.

the time of the soft men making hard times must end.

now is the time for the strong to remake sense, civilization, and social contract.

speak your mind.

live your morals.

up the volume.