As a result of a police officer having knelt on the neck of a black man who was handcuffed who subsequently died, people in Minneapolis have been rioting. This means that a Target that I occasionally shopped at nearly thirty years ago has been looted and presumably destroyed. A photo I saw suggests it will be some time before they re-open, and I really don’t know why they should bother. I am very glad not to be in Minneapolis anymore.
Looting businesses in your neighborhood may bring some short-term satisfaction, but as far as I know, no neighborhood that experiences looting ever recovers. Businesses will flee, for understandable reasons.
Moreover, as I understand it, the looting has spread from the rather lower-class area it was in last night to Uptown, the hipster area, and even to St. Paul and to the suburbs.
So, is Trump to blame? Of course not. This happened in a Democratic-run city. If this police officer is some kind of white supremacist, what does that say for the Democrats in charge? They are the ones who hired him, and they are the ones who should have been screening to check for the occasional fascist, Nazi, white supremacist, or whatever. Somehow he slipped through. Why? Was that because they didn’t do any screening? Here’s what they might have been thinking: background checks are fascist. (I was told this by some leftist friends once.) If they think of background checks as fascist, then they will think that a progressive city shouldn’t do background checks on police officers. But that means that the occasional fascist will end up on the police force. On the other hand, if they do do background checks, then they are fascist simply for doing them. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t, but that is their problem.
Anyway, the Democrats are to blame, if anyone other than the officer in question is to blame. They are the ones in control of the city, and it is completely unfair to blame Trump for this incident. In fact, it seems more likely that Amy Klobuchar is to blame. See here. Oops. She could have prosecuted him for other complaints against him, but didn’t.
In a much larger sense, Democrats generally are to blame. What I mean is that as society opened up to blacks in the 1960s, they could have rushed into the prestigious positions that whites were willing to let them have, so long as they did what whites had been doing to get those positions. What whites did was to work hard and to educate themselves and to just in general show that they were worthy of such positions. But blacks chose a different path. They decided they didn’t like the idea of education. Some of them seem to think that prestigious positions are just some kind of sinecure that doesn’t require that one have special abilities, but rather are simply handed out to white males. Such people start demanding that society give them good jobs, even though they aren't qualified; they then declare that society is racist if they don't get such jobs. Worst of all is the way that so many blacks have chosen a life of crime. And Democrats have been perfectly happy with those choices because it allows them to claim that racism still abounds in America. "You say blacks don’t do as well on standardized tests? It must be because the tests are racist. And they turn to crime because they have so few other choices" (which is complete nonsense, but that is too long to get into). Accordingly, any encounter between the police and blacks that ends badly just shows that the police are out to get blacks, but of course what they ignore is that the police encounter blacks quite often during the course of their time on duty. They are used to encountering them as criminals and occasionally go overboard in dealing with them. And that may be what happened in Minneapolis.
To put all this in different words, the Democrats could have said to blacks, “We aren’t going to support you if you don’t work hard in school. We aren’t going to support you if you turn to a life of crime.” But they didn’t. Democrat elites have all seemed perfectly happy with what has happened to blacks during the last fifty years.
Maybe some won’t like what I am saying, but blacks have been free to make choices, and I am also free to notice things. And what I noticed most of all was the way that foreign blacks who came here to America were so much more impressive intellectually than blacks who grew up here. They came from cultures which hadn’t made those awful choices that American blacks have made, and they were the ones who ended up in the prestigious positions that American blacks could have had, if they had made better choices.
Sadly, I have heard that the children of these foreign blacks often end up making the same bad choices that other American blacks do.
Well said. In addition, the Democrat mayor ordered the police to surrender. The police removed weapons and most other sensitive material from 3rd precinct HQ yesterday (May 28) and took down the flag at 11:30 AM in preparation for surrendering the building to rioters that evening. Police and Fire Dept. abandoned 3rd precinct to antifa and Black Lies Matter thugs. This destruction is a political tool for Democrats. Note that Twitter is using this disaster to article Trump, and mainstream media still refers to “peaceful protestors” while mass looting and arson continue under watch of Dem governor and mayor, who do nothing.
Posted by: Charles N. Steele | 05/29/2020 at 05:55 AM
Your point about cities vs. backwaters is interesting and important. Modern cities have the potential to collapse into chaos quickly, because they are complex networks and products of modern civilization. Backwaters less so. Hence it is easier for the uncivilized, or for natural disasters, to disrupt a city. What backwaters lose in wealth of opportunities in normal times, they gain in resilience in bad times.
Posted by: Charles N. Steele | 05/29/2020 at 06:04 AM