[KaiserJeep]

The Terrorism We Refuse to Fight
By Ben Stein December 30, 2016, 12:04 am

Forget ISIS — we’ve got Chicago.

If you open the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or turn on your TV or Internet, you are guaranteed to see stories of terrorism in Germany and France and England, in North Africa, in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Nigeria, the Caucasus, the Philippines, all over the earth far away from here.

And you’ll read stories about what the leading statesmen and politicians of the USA are doing and plan to do to keep terrorism from slamming our shores again: “extreme” vetting, water boarding, keeping out immigrants from turbulent Muslim regions. These are all huge stories, and the subject of keeping terror far away from these United States is a vital subject.

There is one giant problem though. Terrorism is already here. Right here. In America. Every day. Every night.

There is terrorism by gun violence in the big cities and small cities throughout this nation. It’s not a threat for the future. It’s happening right now.

In Chicago, the murder capital of the industrial world, there were over fifty — not fifteen, FIFTY — shootings just over the Christmas holiday. Eleven of these resulted in deaths and more may be coming from the ICUs. The number of shootings and deaths in Chicago has risen by very roughly double just since last year. In dangerous neighborhoods, children hide in their rooms. People in cars ride by quickly with faces down, so as not to provoke anyone in the neighborhood by having the wrong look on their faces — which could easily get them killed.

In my beloved Los Angeles, almost every night’s newscast has stories of gun deaths by shooting in gang-infested areas. Even in beautiful Palm Springs and its suburbs, death by shooting of gang members or innocent bystanders has become commonplace.

The son of our housekeeper at our home near Palm Springs was just murdered by being shot in the back, as he stood in his driveway. He was 23. Our housekeeper, of course, is in shock.

Even in Sandpoint, Idaho, our summer home, we get the newscasts from Spokane, about ninety miles away, and it’s a rare night when someone has not been shot in that city.

In D.C., my home town, gang killings are a cruel fact of daily life.

This is not coming from ISIS or Al Qaeda. This is coming from American young men, almost always black or Hispanic, organized in gangs or as individual murderers. They kill for sport or to make themselves feel big or to claim turf for selling drugs or just because.

I’m not Hillary Clinton. I don’t blame the guns. Guns don’t kill people. People kill people. But the situation is totally out of control. I like the ability for decent people to own guns, but it’s just nonsense that people can buy guns who cannot fly on airplanes.

It’s also insane that we have demonized and humiliated the main weapon we have to save lives in the domestic terrorism that terrifies our non-white neighborhoods: the cops. We have allowed utterly confused groups to give the totally false impression that it’s the police who are at war against young black men. That’s a complete lie. The police are the ones who offer up their lives to keep black and brown neighborhoods safe. It’s the young black men who are killing the other young black men. More and more aggressive policing is the answer to the problem. It’s not the problem.

Our outgoing President did not lift a finger to fight gang gun violence. He was too PC to go up against Black Lives Matter and other entities who libel the police. Our new President is not afraid and has sworn to uphold the law — not to exalt the law breakers.

Mr. Trump won partly on a pledge to be strong against terrorists from Mexico and Syria. That’s fine. It’s great. But the real terrorism in real time is coming from a few miles from where I’m talking to you, in almost any city and town USA.

Non-white people were liberated from institutionalized racism by a civil rights movement decades ago. Now, it’s time to take action to liberate this generation of minorities from the oppression of gang terror. The time to start is today.

Original is at https://spectator.org/the-terrorism-we-refuse-to-fight/

[evilgenius]

Here's a suggestion: no high school in the US should have more than 500 students. Think about it, and the knock on effects.

[KaiserJeep]

Here in Silicon Valley, we have gangs. "Poor" is a relative term, in our barrios and ghettos the poor drive Honda/Nissan/Subaru/etc instead of BMW/Mercedes/Acura/Lexus/etc. The school system bends over backwards and feeds two meals a day and counsels kids who have substance abusing parents. Everybody including non-citizens can get a basically free ride at a UC school. Nobody starves and no one sleeps in cardboard boxes unless they want to do so. You live in this state too, pstarr. You know I speak the truth. Our gangs carve out turfs from middle class neighborhoods, there are no blighted inner cities in the whole SF Bay Area, the nearest we come is the Castro district, recently reclaimed and scrubbed clean by wealthy gay and lesbian couples.

The gang warfare still chills your teeth. I have been a juror on three gang violence cases, all involving multiple perps and multiple homicides. Gang violence is not produced by economics. I believe the primary cause is a lack of stable home life and good role models, another cause is that those who get an education are harassed unmercilessly from elementary to high schools.

Consider your silly assertions disproved. The race baiters are now targeting the police with their verbal vitriol, and this is the most destructive thing that they have done in over 50 years. Martin Luthor King would call them out, but not you - you mindlessly spout the DNC talking points without even thinking, and you mindlessly name anybody who disagrees a racist.

We've got your number. I don't know why you have been such a PITA lately, but you seemingly have to pour your vitriol in every thread. For <insert favorite deity name here>'s sake, get some more fiber in your diet.

[Cog]

Chicago homicide data 2016. Most victims are in the lower age group. This website tracks a lot of information on demographics, age of victims, police shootings, race of victim, race of perp, etc.


http://heyjackass.com/

http://heyjackass.com/2016-age-of-victim/

[KaiserJeep]

KJ, about the dead children and grieving mothers in the ghetto? Have data?

BTW KJ I hate the DNC and the RNC.

What about what? I don't think either of us believes for one moment that this violence is acceptable or desirable behavior. I just pointed out that the standard Democrat BS about poverty is just that. This problem is behavioral, from kids without positive role models, and cultural, arising in turf wars. Silly Valley has Chinese, Vietnamese, Filipino, Korean, and Indian gangs, not to mention so many flavors of Hispanic gangs I can't even count them or understand why. Oakland has a dozen different black gangs, since that is where the majority of black people live.

Nobody is broke. Nobody is starving. Heck, many on Welfare have enough food that they have heart disease and diabetes and other dietary diseases from eating too much. Nobody has to live on the street.

Obama did absolutely nothing to make the situation better. BLM and CAIR and PUSH and occupy this thing and that thing, they were all fine with him. His stooge Rahm Emmanuel serves as mayor in what is deservedly called the murder capital of the world, and says nothing when the Chicago cops are verbally and physically attacked and even shot at.

I knew when he was first elected that we had a useless POTUS for all normal purposes, so far to the Left that he was simply dis-functional. But I comforted myself with the thought that a black POTUS would at least help to heal the racial divide in this country. Instead, everything he did, every decision he made, and every directive he wrote on the topic, made things worse.

In the end, he was in fact totally useless.

[KaiserJeep]

-snip-
I forget. What is worse in the ghetto?

As I have said twice already, we have no ghettos in the SF Bay Area. I believe that Watts in LA might qualify, and I have seen South Chicago.

What is worse in these places - and in non-ghetto areas of Silly Valley - is the number of single-parent households, and the lack of positive role models for (mostly) young males. The problem is worsening, and the only effective thing we have ever managed to do to reduce crime in such areas is to intensify policing and to incarcerate larger numbers of juvenile and 20-30 year-old criminals.

The ramped up policing is the very thing that Rahm Emmanuel and Obama and the BLM crowd - and apparently you - are objecting to. Got a better idea?

[evilgenius]

I think the number one reason for gangs is a sense of belonging. The argument is not very much different than what is going on in business management over empowering employees as opposed to being a nut cutter that scares them into compliance. You can use the police and the prisons, but that is nut cutting. Alternatively, you can cut the school sizes down to a size that fosters individual contact between teachers and students. And provides for a manageable case load for counselors etc. Small is also better when talking about the critical mass for certain complaints. If you fed it into a civic sense as well, where the size of the civic body was also more in line with a proper size for such bodies rather than the too large and unresponsive bodies of today, you might get interactivity past school age.

One of the things that really struck me about Ferguson, MO was that the people there didn't vote. There they were, claiming that they were being picked on, and yet they had the power to put an end to it in their grasp. I've talked to a lot of people about that, and they always point to a sense of hopelessness at how overfacing it is to get going and take back a community through the ballot box. It's probably the only way, though. I think it's doubly hard when the law has been about revenue generating over justice in a particular community.

There is a sense of disenfranchisement that comes from getting on the wrong side of an unresponsive civic body. An average citizen can become encumbered with a plethora of fines and other debts to the civic body that they simply can't get out from under. Combine this with the sort of anti-intellectualism that is perpetrated in minority communities towards any kind of organization that doesn't promote said minority first, or honor it in some way, and you have the beginnings of a stew that will turn out poorly. The nature of these gang's adhesion is derived from this in large part. A good manager might be successful in bringing about experimental changes, if they could convince the people that it was, at least in part, their idea.

[KaiserJeep]

Schools, prisons, gangs, etc. are simply no substitute for a stable home life and positive role models. I told you that Silly Valley has no ghettos, slums, or barrios. Just a half mile from my home is a huge low income housing complex. Fairly new building, seemingly in good repair, and full of minority peoples from everywhere. Appalling things happen there - rampant child abuse, assaults, substance abuse of all kinds, violence, and crimes of all kinds.

Similarly the houses around me are full of middle class people from everywhere, from India, Russia, England, Germany, Norway, and three different Asian countries and two different Latin American countries, and those are just the ones I know from the Homeowner's Association meeting - more people stayed away than attended. The nearest black family is two blocks away. We have in the past had very little crime - anyways it was so until the homeless encampment in the nearby county park got so large. Now we are troubled by the mentally ill, drunken revelry, and people disturbing the peace, stealing mail, burglarizing and vandalizing cars, etc. etc.

Understand that anybody in that encampment could go to a shelter, no further away than the Catholic Church on the corner. But they would have to behave, stand in line, obey the rules - most would rather live on the hill without rules.

But we all share the same stores and services, the same police, the same streets, the same laws, the same polling place (that same church). I can't remember a time in over 25 years when our mayor and town council and most of the police and other services have not been mostly Hispanics. More Spanish and Portuguese is spoken than English in some stores.

Yet still the Middle Class homes and neighborhoods are the safest. We are the ones paying painful taxation and being victimized the most as well. My wife now calls me as she approaches and has me watch her exit our car and get the mail and enter our home. Two nights ago, somebody opened all the mailboxes and tossed all the paper mail all over the street. The Russian next door must have irritated some homeless person, about twice a week somebody urinates on his car, and inside his car if he forgets to lock it.

Multi-culturalism, it's just great (not).

[evilgenius]

I used to spend a lot of time with the homeless when I lived in California. It began one Christmas when I decided to go down to where they were, in Santa Ana, and feed them. Along the way I met other people who worked with them full time. I met homeless people from all walks. There were a fair number who wanted off of the streets. But there were a lot of takers as well. Let's just say that it's not wrong to be generous, but you don't want to turn your back on them either.

One thing that came of it was that they don't only stay away from the centers where they can get help because they have to behave. They stay away because there are usually too many other homeless people there. They don't want to turn their backs on those people either. Those kinds of situations make them vulnerable because they make them behave in ways that drop their guard. They deal with them in groups.

Many of the people on the streets need the kind of mental health care that even the most gold standard of health care plans don't offer. They need life coaching because they are usually either too abused or too stupid to learn from the lessons that life presents them. They can't see how adopting a set of behaviors can bring success. Mind you, there are a lot of abused people living in homes who can't see that either.

This brings up another point, which sort of runs parallel to the school size issue. Family planning is essential to the health of any community. When conservatives oppose family planning they are not only ignorantly shooting themselves. They are also condemning these other communities we have been talking about. Family planning is not a Trojan horse laid in there by the 'man.' It is an essential tool, like school size changes and voting, for gaining back a community. There are two ways to look at it, from the minority perspective, that it is too much like being like 'Whitey' to adopt these things, or that Whitey has been successful because he adopted them before they did, but they can be just as successful if they adopt them too.

[C8]

I know a lot of people may not want to hear this- but nothing can fix a life that is empty. Throughout this discussion there is the implied belief that poverty or injustice could or should naturally lead to violence and crime. This is an incredibly damaging false logic.

Too many people in the US simply don't have a life giving view of their existence. It doesn't have to be religion or spirituality- but you have to find value in being virtuous, caring for others, being responsible. Something has to matter more than getting high, making money, being popular, beating others, living forever.

In olden days people often debated Epictetus or Aquinas- or talked a lot about something called virtue. Today we ignore all this as irrelevant and debate policy as if only materialistic solutions work. But more stuff and more justice will never lead to peace. Someone will always be perceived as having more and the definition of justice is always changed. Today's killers are well fed and offered free tuition. Today's junkies are the most privileged generation in history.

Low income empty kids do crime and violence to sell drugs to high income empty kids.

As long as issues related to life philosophy or spirituality or religion remain forbidden in public discourse then we will just endlessly argue with each other over which failed policy to adopt.

We are embarrassed to admit that real wisdom does not come from our generation or technology. How laughable it is to suggest that the ancients knew something we gods do not know today with all of our powers.

Ours is the age of the smirk.

[evilgenius]

You are essentially talking about the difference between a loved child and an accident. Overlooking the preparation needed to love, it is loving a child that lays the foundation for understanding ethics. Love isn't just about fawning, but also order. Family planning is essentially about people waiting to have children until they can love them properly. While it is true that accidents can be welcomed, it is disingenuous to assert that it can work out even a majority of the time.

At this point, facing the flood waters, it's far too pie in the sky to talk about ethics, or purpose intervening. Abuse is something that gets passed on from generation to generation. It takes conscious thought and application to overcome it. You gotta stop the cycle first. I get it, why stop it unless you realize it ought to be stopped? The thing is, it shouldn't be this terrible level of reaping what we've sown that points it out to us. We ought to see it because of our sense of ethics. But look how it is the so called sense of ethics connected to religion on the part of conservatives that actually serves to help perpetuate the crisis. We only have the high water mark of the flood to tell us we are doing something wrong. When that is what does it there is a huge temptation to stop before we actually get there. Just take away the pressure, but don't completely drain the swamp. Which is to say that religion maybe ought to get back in touch with what repentance really is.

[KaiserJeep]

You are pretty close to the mark, I believe. I remember the 1950's and 1960's and there were two main differences then:

First, more people lived in smaller towns and rural areas than cities. If you can see a building higher than 4 stories tall, you are living in a savage urban jungle, very much unlike the wide open grasslands where your species evolved. It is an unhealthy and unnatural environment to be in, and it inevitably has an adverse impact on your behavior and your interactions with other people.

Secondly, the various religious organizations and churches played a major role in shaping our lives. Note that I hated church, didn't want to go, hated especially that my Mother's idea of quality child care was called "Bible School", four hours per day of church, all Summer long, as both she and Father worked to afford the new home we were building.

As both C8 and evilg have noted, spirituality has been replaced by technology, and worship by mobile gadget usage. In our secular world, the morality that was taught by both Church and schools is considered obsolete and useless by most.

They of course are wrong about that. I have to note as well, that those stick-in-the-mud Conservatives are correct about the roles of Church and State, and the Liberals with their "it takes a village" are completely wrong. We did largely live in villages 50 years ago, I was there and I remember it. But I also remember this:

...the 2016 electoral map by county. Note the blue counties, festering sores on the nation, clustered in urban areas. Note also the red counties, increasingly deserted as the people move to the dangerous and dirty urban environments. The best summary of what is happening boils down to one simple statement: Liberal policies foster crime and violence.

[Shaved Monkey]

If you are going to run a Darwinian, survival of the fittest, dog eat dog free market society with minimal safety nets,you are going to have winners and losers
As long as the losers mainly kill each other and dont kill middle class white folks or the rich they are a manageable self regulating problem.
As long as they all want to be rich and part of the system, rather than trying to destroy the system they also arent a problem.
There is no solution other than revolution.
To provide hope, education and opportunity needs more resources and a more empathic tax payer, voter and government, its easier to just keep doing BAU.
The PONZI scheme cant afford to have everyone achieving the American Dream, it just needs everyone chasing the carrot.

[C8]

The best summary of what is happening boils down to one simple statement: Liberal policies foster crime and violence.

But doesn't out of control materialism also foster crime and violence? If a suburban swindler cheats a bunch of old people out of their life pensions- how is that much different than a drug dealer robbing a liquor store? Its still money and stuff over something called virtue. And what of the CEO that sends entire factories to China and leaves a "village" wiped out?

I do not think the answer is necessarily a religious doctrine which says "these people are going to hell" - I think our religions are too tribal and petty. The human race has advanced to a point of material prosperity but we are stuck with primitive religions- so the alternative is bleak atheism and annihilation (which leads to horror and abuse).

Materialism is just a colorful form of atheism. Both rot the spirit.

I think the world is suffering from inadequate religion.

[Plantagenet]

I think the world is suffering from inadequate religion.

That's what ISIS thinks as well.

Cheers

[KaiserJeep]

The best summary of what is happening boils down to one simple statement: Liberal policies foster crime and violence.

But doesn't out of control materialism also foster crime and violence? If a suburban swindler cheats a bunch of old people out of their life pensions- how is that much different than a drug dealer robbing a liquor store? Its still money and stuff over something called virtue. And what of the CEO that sends entire factories to China and leaves a "village" wiped out?

I do not think the answer is necessarily a religious doctrine which says "these people are going to hell" - I think our religions are too tribal and petty. The human race has advanced to a point of material prosperity but we are stuck with primitive religions- so the alternative is bleak atheism and annihilation (which leads to horror and abuse).

Materialism is just a colorful form of atheism. Both rot the spirit.

I think the world is suffering from inadequate religion.

Very few people acquire religious faith past childhood, save for a few who claim to believe when they notice that their aging selves will soon be dead. We are in a secular world, aside from some murderous terrorists killing for the glory of <he who shall not be named>.

I'll not dispute the rotting influence of too much wealth, more than one needs. But that is not the topic here. The vast majority of serious and violent crimes are being committed by young, minority, inner city youths and young men. They comprise the majority of our prison populations.

Barack Obama is turning thousands of these back onto the streets by commuting sentences and granting pardons. I fear his solution will only subject us to more crime. I personally have plans to move away from my present environment (the Silicon Valley) to a more rural setting. That solution amounts to moving away from the problem, not fixing it.

Is there a solution to be had that is more satisfying than arrest and incarceration? I'd prefer to prevent the problems rather than award punishments, but so far, just throwing money at the inner cities in multiple forms is not working.

I don't know how one instructs kids in morality and decent behavior. My personal solution was to take my kid out of a useless and overcrowded public school and put her in a private school run by a Episcopal Church. In addition to more rigorous academics, she attended religious services daily and I told her she was free to believe or not as she wished, not being particularly religious myself. All that remains to be said is that she and her classmates (who attended public middle and high schools) are all good people, we are still in touch with most of them.

The Episcopal Church is one of the Anglican sects that arose when Henry the 8th split off all the English Catholics in what was subsequently dubbed the Protestant Reformation. Call it Catholic Light. But the Catholics and Protestants and Jews together are still the majority religions on this planet, with the Muslims gaining ground.

I don't know whether religion is the answer, but religious people, by and large, seem less violent and more law abiding. (With a few extremists who chant the name of <he who shall not be named> as they commit mass murder.)