The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Arson, Looting, Aggravated Assault and Attempted Murder Are Not ‘Protests’

Posted on | May 31, 2020 | 6 Comments

 

Rioting across the nation leaves
cities reeling as hundreds arrested,
National Guard called in,
businesses damaged and at least 3 dead

pretext (noun) — a reason given in justification of a course of action that is not the real reason.

Watching city after city go up in flames — stores looted, innocent people attacked, arsonists and criminals running wild — I had difficulty thinking: “What do I want to write about this?”

The first and most obvious thing is that this spree of criminal actity had nothing at all to do with what happened to George Floyd. People ransacking stores in Los Angeles, brutalizing people in Dallas and setting fire to City Hall in Nashville were not “protesting” against a violation of civil rights. The businesses and institutions targeted by these criminals had nothing to do with what police officers did in Minneapolis.

“Let’s loot a liquor store, because social justice!”

George Floyd’s death was not a reason for these riots, it was a pretext.

Hateful people do not need a reason to hate. Destructive people do not need a reason to destroy. They just need a pretext. Some people in the media want us to believe that rioters are like werewolves; they are normal, law-abiding citizens until the full moon rises — or there is a “racial incident” — and then they magically transform into monsters.

You can prove the falsity of this common liberal belief by asking them to apply the same kind of thinking to earlier riots. Were the participants in the 1921 Tulsa Massacre just ordinary people who were magically transformed into a lynch mob by a “racial incident”? No, the liberal will insist, the perpetrators of that atrocity were always evil racists. Stipulating this, why can’t we be allowed to say something similar about the criminal mobs engaged in lawless violence in 2020?

The Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York says it is filing federal charges against an upstate New York woman with four counts of attempted murder after she allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at a police van on Friday during anti-police brutality protests.
The NYPD says Samantha Shader, 27, threw the Molotov cocktail at the rear window of a van while it was parked near Prospect Park, around 10:40 p.m. on Friday. Officers were able to get out of the car before it caught fire.
Shader also allegedly bit one of the officers in the leg while she was being taken into custody.
Her sister, 21-year-old Darian Shader, tried to interfere with the arrest, police said. She was taken into custody and charged with obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest.
Samantha Shader is charged with four counts of attempted murder of a police officer, attempted arson, criminal possession of a weapon and reckless endangerment.
Both women are from Catskill, New York, which is roughly 130 miles from Prospect Park.

Why would a white girl from upstate travel more than 100 miles to Brooklyn to participate in a riot, and try to murder New York police officers, because of something that happened hundreds of miles away in Minneapolis? If enthusiasm for the #BlackLivesMatter movement is inherently good, as liberals would have us believe, does this mean Samantha Shader is morally superior to anyone who didn’t participate in this kind of “protest”? You see that there is a certain logic behind this kind of craziness: Racism is bad, and therefore . . . whatever.

There are many bad things in the world. Gluttony and sloth are bad, but that doesn’t justify murdering people for being fat and lazy. Why, then, do so many people think that they can justify criminal violence simply by saying that they are protesting against racism? Are there any limitations to such a syllogism? Is there anything you “cause” cannot justify?

Once upon a time, you had to study grammar, logic and rhetoric to be considered truly educated, yet despite the vast expansion of our educational system, we have a lot of allegedly educated people — including many journalists — who can’t construct a valid syllogism or spot a fallacy. These people seem to think that slogans are an acdeptable substitute for argument, and their reaction to criticism is always some kind of ad hominem attack, an attempt to “kill the messenger” rather than to refute the opposing argument. Because so many intellectuals in our society are now utterly irrational, there are no “adults in the room” with the necessary authority to correct the errors of the reckless mob.


 

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6 Responses to “Arson, Looting, Aggravated Assault and Attempted Murder Are Not ‘Protests’”

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