Archive for category Law and Order
In a Courtroom, Who is Human?
Posted by Bob in Law and Order on 08/05/2004
The judge says to a repeat felon, “Willy, you have been before me five times.” Willy knows the judge, his defense attorney knows the judge even better.
How about the prosecutor? He knows Willy, he works with the judge and the defense attorney all the time. He is trying to get something on his record to get him or his boss reelected.
What looks good? Well, a ninety percent conviction rate looks good. All the prosecutor needs to do is get Willy convicted of something. And he has very little time to do it. He needs to clear the docket. The judge needs to clear the docket. The defense attorney is in a hurry if Willy is pro bono and can’t pay him. If Willy is pro bono he wants a quick deal, too.
But if the defendant has money the defense attorney is the one person in the court who has time. He will appeal until Judgment Day. So he can make a deal with the prosecutor that gets another conviction on the record and gets Willy back on the streets as soon as possible so the judge can say, “Willy you have been before me six times.”
So what about the “members of he public” Willy may have killed and the ones he terrorizes?
They are “members of the public.” They are not human.
A person who is wrongfully executed is a Victim of the System. The hundred “members of the public” who are innocent and get killed today by the Willys are not considered human by the judge. His job is Justice, and he believes it. To the judge, it is Willy who is human, not the people who pay his salary.
So you have just spent one clock minute seeing how American Justice works. That’s all the time you’ve got. You’ve got other things to think about. The prosecutor knows that. The judge knows that. The entire legal system is based on the assumption that Willy and his defense attorney have all the time in the world, while “members of the public” have one minute.
That is why, to a judge, you are not human.
Woody Allen said, “Ninety percent of life is showing up.” Willy shows up. The judge shows up. The prosecutor shows up as little as he can. He’s a busy man. “Members of the public” have thirty seconds to listen to a television sound bite where the guy running for Attorney General says he got ninety percent convictions.
That’s why, to the legal system, you are not human.
Why the Past Seems so Nice
Posted by Bob in Law and Order, Musings about Life on 07/30/2004
One reason the past seems so nice is because you know how it came out.
You think, “I arrived in the new city, and it thrilled me! I saw so many interesting things.”
Actually what you had on your mind at the time was how irritated you were about something. You were worrying about where you would stay that night and how you would find the place and would the taxi driver cheat you. In a new town, nothing looks the same as it does once you are used to it.
I sure don’t miss my youth because I remember so much of it.
Ah, the old Christmas songs! They remind me of comfort and home! But they also remind me that I was counting the hours of my Christmas vacation until I had to go back to school and wander around at recess trying to avoid the white trash bully I was scared of.
When you think of youth, you don’t remember that each and every tooth had to pulled out as the new ones came in. Do you remember walking around trying to decide to pull it out?
Do you remember the measles? Mumps? Just lying there with nothing at all to do but feel bad?
Do you remember boredom, boredom, and more boredom?
And the DECISIONS! It’s cute now to laugh at what you were afraid of and how little you knew. It wasn’t funny then.
There is a very important point here that relates your own personal history to history in general. It is contained in one very wise saying:
“You are not studying history. You are studying other people’s PRESENT.”
You see that guy looking at you from an 1880 photograph? To you, he is in the time of Garfield and Arthur, when the telephone was brand new. You see the past behind him and the future in front of him. You are seeing him as a part of history.
Actually that guy is sitting there in a time as modern as today. He is not a part of history. He is Modern Man, just like you are. The only difference is that you have the cheat sheet. You know what is coming next. You have tomorrow’s newspaper.
When you were young you didn’t have the cheat sheet. What drove you nuts then is cute today.
It’s the cheat sheet that makes all the difference.
Slaveholding Presidents
Posted by Bob in History, Law and Order on 07/29/2004
Abraham Lincoln was the first president to be reelected who was not a slaveholder. Until Lincoln only the two Adamses, Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Pierce and Buchanan did not own slaves, and none of them were reelected.
Until 1851, the presidency was pretty much a monopoly of slaveholders. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Jackson owners of slaves who served two terms as president. Harrison, Tyler, Polk and Taylor were owners of slaves who were not reelected, and Harrison and Taylor died in their first term.
When Lincoln was reelected in 1864, Union commander Ulysses S. Grant owned slaves while General Lee had freed his many years before the Civil War. Grant kept his slaves until slavery was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment in December of 1865. Grant served two terms as president, and he was the last slaveholder president.
I Love You, Man
Posted by Bob in Law and Order, Musings about Life on 07/23/2004
It has become fashionable for one man to say to another, “I love you, man.”
That takes some getting used to for us old-timers, but not because we didn’t always tell our male friends that we loved them. We just did it in a different way.
At our recovery club, we had an old guy who died recently, and everybody misses him enormously. He would rather have died than say, “I love you, man.” But he said it all the time in his own way.
In fact, he had a separate-but-equal way of saying it.
When an old white buddy of his would come in, he would get around to looking at him for a minute and then say, “You know, you are the ugliest white man I ever saw in my life.”
On the other hand, when an old black buddy came in he would usually look at him a minute and say, “You are the ugliest man of color that was ever born.”
And what this meant was, “You don’t mind me saying that because you know I think the world of you.”
And he didn’t discriminate against women either. He referred to them as “You old bag.”
My brother will say, “Bob, comb your damned hair.” I’m 63 years old and he is older, and he is the only person who has the right to say that. He’s my brother.
It all means, “I love you, man.”
I just like the old way better.
We Need Sergeants!
Posted by Bob in Bob's Book, Law and Order on 07/21/2004
In every army, the sergeants are the ones who make the rubber meet the road. Everything is just paperwork until the sergeants get hold of it.
I doubt that there has ever been a serious army that didn’t have more generals than it needed.
Often there is not even a shortage of privates. At the beginning of the Civil War, so many men volunteered that most of them had to be turned away. This happens a lot, though usually there is a shortage of privates.
But every army always has a desperate lack of sergeants.
Sergeants are the backbone of every army, and not just the less important armies that wear uniforms. When you have to get the military into action, the more important armies have failed. War is hideously expensive in every way, and every war is a direct result of the failure of the thinkers and doers who should have prevented it. Those are the far more important armies.
Sergeants are the people who keep the forces in hand. Sergeants are the ones who make orders real. Nothing really happens until the orders get to the sergeants and they make it happen.
I desperately need sergeants for my book, Why Johnny Can’t Think.
In the important armies, you say, “We need to get the book out.” You do not have to tell the sergeants that they need to read the book, then put quotes for it in news groups, contact their friends, find contacts.
I keep begging whitakeronline readers: “Please look at readbob.com”
People keep asking me what they can do. I say, “Please look at readbob.com”
They then ask me, “What can I do?”
I repeat: in the important armies, you say, “We need to get the book out.” You do not have to tell the sergeants that they need to read the book, then put quotes for it in news groups, contact their friends, find contacts.
We are trying to reach millions of young people, private schoolers, home schoolers, the millions of young people who are paying off their college debts and know they have been cheated. We could win over millions of young people rather than waiting for a bloody revolution in the future. We could be the important army.
But we need sergeants!
No officer tells the sergeant, “Now you go out and get your men together and you tell them to get their guns” That is what they do. They know how to do that better than I do.
Are there any sergeants out there?
The Man in the Mirror
Posted by Bob in Law and Order, Musings about Life on 07/20/2004
This will sound like a cliché. But for me it has been basic to survival:
There is one friend you need in the world, and that is the one who looks back at you in your mirror. That is the person you are going to have 99% of your conversations with.
Level with him.
Everybody else is going to present a front to you. When you are about to do something dangerous, all the people around you are going to look brave compared to the quivering mass of jelly you know you are. But this macho crap is the least of it.
I have known war heroes who died because they could not live with themselves – many of them. After they won their medals they died of drugs or alcohol or suicide or killed themselves in other ways. It is a very common thing among war heroes. They have the kind of physical courage it takes to win medals but their weak point was moral courage.
There was a German who wrote, “If we treated anyone else the way we treat ourselves, we would be sadists.” That is very Germanic trait, and there is a lot that kind of German in people like those who read this blog. There is a hell of lot of it in me.
The reason psychopaths have such a huge advantage in our society is because a psychopath never blames himself for anything. You and I are the exact opposite, we blame ourselves for everything, no matter how hard we try to believe the “excuses” we make up.
They aren’t “excuses.” You don’t have anything like the power and wisdom you demand of yourself. You are being cruel to a person who screws life up in exactly the same way anybody else does. But since that person is you, you can’t excuse him.
You are surrounded by people who can explain to you how, though they like to make modest jokes about how they are merely human and are sometimes ridiculous, they are never really cruel or really wrong. You see me do it all the time. I know it is a form of self-defense, and the only difference is that I know I am being self-defensive.
One of my many psychiatric diagnoses is that I have a lot of “offensive” worries. This means exactly the opposite of what it sounds like. An “offensive” worry means that you are overly concerned about having hurt someone else. It would be better for me if I were more of a psychopath. A psychopath is incapable of “offensive” concerns.
Obviously if I had the answer to this problem I wouldn’t be writing this. Some things are incurable. But if you have something that is incurable you are going to have to live with it for the rest of your life, so you damned well better be aware, ALL the time, that you have it.
Forgive yourself, over and over and over and over.
You will be told that this is a license for you to let yourself go. I wish it were. The real fact is that no matter how hard people like you and me try, we will never forgive ourselves enough.
The Man Who Shot the Tiger
Posted by Bob in Law and Order on 07/14/2004
Have you heard the one about the man who shot the tiger?
One of the tigers owned by Steve Sipek, the Tarzan actor, escaped. When he lunged at a game warden he was shot. Sipek has been screaming about how that tiger was his brother and he is at war with man who shot him.
Good publicity, BAD move.
You see, if you have a dog that gets off its leash or runs away, you are legally responsible, even if the dog is a tiny one. If you have a snake or a lion, this puts you in much greater legal, not to say moral, danger.
If I had a tiger, even if I had been vicious enough to declaw it (that is a horrendous procedure, you are taking off a part a cat’s foot. It is never really a cat again), your legal danger is MUCH greater.
If you ever have such an animal escape, let me tell you what you DON’T Do, You don’t get on national television and announce, “That tiger was my brother. That tiger was my responsibility. There is no way I can confuse anybody by blaming this on the keeper or somebody else. This was my brother.”
Nobody can tell if a tiger is declawed when it lunges at you. The man who has the lawsuit is the man who was terrified and had to shoot the tiger. That man is also a public official, which could mean jail time for the person responsible for the animal.
Sipek should go to jail.
Crime and Punishment
Posted by Bob in Law and Order on 07/11/2004
Last night I attended a little meeting, six people, which was about decent treatment for prisoners. This seems odd, given that I am a raging right-winger. We are supposed to HATE all prison inmates.
My reason for being at that meeting can be summed up in three words:
I hate cruelty.
When I say I hate cruelty, this does not fall into a general Christian philosophy of Respect for Life or something. I just hate the idea of anyone being hurt if there is not a damned good reason for it.
I am not a generally nice person when it comes to punishment.
I do not value life all that much, if by “life” you just mean a beating heart and the ability to experience pain. That is for preachers to rave about. They make their living on stuff like that.
I do not have A Respect for All Life. I would cheerfully kill a Ted Bundy with my own hands. But I am not capable of hating him.
There is an old saying, “A man should shoot his own dog.” So if someone says, “You believe in the death penalty, but could you do the killing yourself,” I reply “Yes.” I know myself very well by now and I would do it myself.
I do not even believe in Justice, if that means hurting people just for the sake of getting them back because they have done bad things.
I do believe in PREVENTIVE cruelty. Preventive cruelty is the only thing that will scare bad people into not hurting others. And yes, I will do it myself.
I know a lot about the nastier sides of life. Most of what I know is better left unsaid.
But I can say this on the record: I have worked in prisons and many of my sponsees in alcohol and drug recovery were ex-cons and I have conducted recovery meetings in prisons and so forth. I have been there, I have done that.
The fact is that bad people need to be frightened into line. This is not abstract justice, this is a matter of protecting people.
There is inexcusable sadism in the prison system. Yet the term “prison reform” sticks in the craw of decent people for a very good reason.
“Prison reform” has been used as a cover by those who hate white gentiles and want to help anyone who is a criminal in our society. In his trilogy, “The Gulag Archipelago” Aleksander Solzhenitsyn described the Soviet concentration camps he was in, but he did more than that. Solzhenitsyn went back and did an entire history of those camps and the tens of millions who died in them. They were agonizing deaths, not as merciful as gas chambers.
In one chapter Solzhenitsyn describes “the thieves,” career criminals who lorded it over all the political prisoners in those camps. The career criminals were given the right to beat up other prisoners, to steal from other prisoners, to torture political prisoners, to kill other prisoners.
Since the book was written for Russians, the chapter on these career criminals in the camps had a title Solzhenitsyn never explained. It was called “The Socially Friendly.”
Here is why he used that title. It is an explanation every person familiar with Marxist theory already knows:
To a Marxist, the people of a country are the enemy. The enemy of the people, the career criminal, is described in Marxist ideology as “the socially friendly.” To a leftist, the enemy of society, the murderer, rapist or thief, is “socially friendly.”
Leftists use “prison reform” for their own purposes. They have given it a bad name. They are the friends of our enemies, the bad guys, the career criminals and psychopaths.
On the right, the reaction against this leftist type of “prison reform” has been used just as cynically.
In prisons, the easiest way to prevent hardened criminals from making trouble is to make sure each hardened criminal inside the prison has his own young sex slave. This is standard practice and anybody who objects to it is said to be “soft on criminals.”
So dedicated people try hard to get this sort of inexcusable abuse into the public eye. They keep trying to get people to pay attention to it and are ignored. The minute they succeed in finally getting this sort of outrage into the public eye, professional “prison reformers” grab hold of it for their own purposes. The people who fought so long to get attention on the real abuses are then pushed aside by those who make their living on this sort of thing.
The professional leftists make it a part of their political agenda and “prison reform” is discredited once again.
Then the professional rightists take back over and prison authorities are given free reign once again.
I told you before that the Council of Conservative Citizens is being taken away from the inarticulate people who fought so hard to make it successful. Now that it has some potential due to their hard work, the screaming preachers are taking it over. The same thing happened to “prison reform.”
The same thing happened to environmentalism. When hard-working grassroots people defied the industrialists and got the runaway pollution of America into the public eye, they were shoved aside by the leftists who wanted “protecting the environment” to be their battle-cry for turning the entire economy over to the bureaucrats.
So “environmentalism” got discredited for people on the right and the polluters get a free ride under Bush.
Anyway, that’s the way I see it.
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