The Other McCain

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Nika Holbert, the ‘Drug War’ and the Importance of Penalizing Stupidity

Posted on | April 22, 2021 | Comments Off on Nika Holbert, the ‘Drug War’ and the Importance of Penalizing Stupidity

We have talked before about this case (“Nika Holbert and the BLM Myth”), but I must again address the death of Nika Holbert because one of the YouTube channels I watch regularly has featured it.

John Correia’s Active Self Protection channel is both entertaining and educational. If you want to see real-life violent confrontations analyzed by a specialist in self-defense, this is the channel for you. Seldom do I ever disagree with John Correia, but in analyzing the shootout between Holbert and Officer Josh Baker, Correia suggest that the way to prevent such incidents is to end “the drug war.” Watch the video:

 

John is just wrong on this issue of “the drug war,” and I’ll explain why.

Narcotic use is a proxy for stupidity. Yes, there are people at Harvard with drug habits, and plenty of folks with high SAT scores might enjoy the occasional tab of ecstasy or toot of coke, but in general — as a sociological statistic — dopeheads are not valedictorians. Beyond that simple fact of life, an important but less-appreciated aspect of the “drug war” is that the way you get busted for dope is by being stupid.

When I was a teenage dopehead, the importance of avoiding interactions with the law-enforcement community was obvious enough. You didn’t want to be caught “holding,” as we said, especially when you were involved in the, uh, commercial distribution of illegal substances.

A smart dopehead would not be driving around with dope in the car. Leave your stash at home, dude. But if you are going to carry dope with you, maybe you shouldn’t be driving a car owned by a drug dealer with six felony warrants. That was Nika Holbert’s stupid mistake, followed by the even more stupid mistake of pulling a gun on a cop.

Think of this in terms of incentives. As a society, it behooves us to reward intelligence, to make sure that the smartest people get into positions where their intelligence can be most usefully employed. Without clever people to design computers and so forth, our civilization’s technological advancement would be impaired. But the obverse this principle is also true — stupidity must be penalized. Why? Because stupid people, if left to do as they please, will screw things up for everybody.

Who Broke the Milkshake Machine?

Everything wrong in our country — from traffic jams to lousy restaurant service to the presidency of Joe Biden — is the fault of stupid people.

Think about all the ways stupid people make your life worse. Say you pull into the drive-thru line at McDonald’s. You’re going to wait longer than necessary because, somewhere up ahead of you in the line, there is a stupid person who can’t get their order right. Instead of ordering something simple — “Give me a Number Three meal” — they have to do it all complicated, and not communicating very clearly. Because they’re stupid. When you finally get to order your large chocolate milkshake, they tell you, “Sorry, the milkshake machine’s broken.” Why? Who broke the milkshake machine? A stupid person, that’s who.

Excuse me for digressing into a gripe about my pet peeves, but my point is, there is a shortage of intelligent people in America, whereas we have a vast surplus of stupidity. Why? Incentives.

As a society, we are no longer sufficiently penalizing stupidity. Among the potential penalties for being stupid is a loss of income, but apparently you can’t fire people for being stupid nowadays, because they’ll sue for “worker’s rights” or whatever, which is why McDonald’s keeps hiring idiots who don’t know how a milkshake machine works.

This same basic problem is why a fat idiot thinks she can drive around with dope in her purse and a pistol in a car owned by a drug dealer, but starts shrieking like an innocent victim when a cop tries to put the handcuffs on her. And then gets killed because she is apparently too stupid to know what happens when you point a pistol at a cop.

According to online records from both Metro and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, Nika Holbert’s criminal background includes several repeat misdemeanors, including driving with a revoked license and theft under $500.
Holbert also had a felony drug charge from 2010.
Her last listed interaction with law enforcement was a public indecency charge in 2017.

“Live and learn” as the old adage says, but stupidity is incurable. The only way to protect society against the harm caused by stupid people is by quarantine — put them behind bars so that they can’t make life miserable for the rest of us. Alas, however, stupid people are voters, and they tend to vote for the kind of politicians who think the answer to every problem is to make life easier for the stupid people who elect them.

“Let’s decriminalize drugs,” say the stupid people, who are statistically more likely to be dopeheads, and also more likely to get caught. Then the politicians who pander to such people get elected, and when their stupid policies turn communities into nightmare wastelands, everyone pretends to be surprised by this predictable outcome. Oregon legalized dope, and Portland is a lunatic hellscape. Coincidence? I don’t think so.

While we’re at it, let’s discuss the role of technology in what happened to Nika Holbert. You see, the reason she got pulled over was because he ran the license plate number on the Camaro she was driving and learned it was owned by a drug dealer with six outstanding warrants. Cops now have computers in their patrol cars that make it much easier to do this and, in many jurisdictions, police cars are equipped with automatic scanning devices that alert cops to vehicles that are stolen, or with other issues including outstanding warrants. You will perhaps not be surprised to learn that the Democrat-controlled city council in Nashville considered tag-scanning technology to be “controversial”:

License plate reader technology was previously banned in Metro Nashville back in 2017.
After street racing problems caused public safety concerns, the conversation has been brought back into focus for the Metro Council. At the start of 2020 three different bills looked to address how LPRs could be utilized properly in Nashville.
“We need some more tools in our toolbox in order to help completely eradicate this dangerous activity,” District 26 Councilmember Courtney Johnston said.
Johnston, whose legislation was deferred until February 2, said she listened to people’s concerns on how the technology would affect policing and privacy.

Who are the “people” who have these “concerns”? The same people, I suspect, who got tag-scanners banned in Nashville in 2017.

Stupid people, that’s who. You see, stupidity is a hereditary trait, and so there are a lot of people out walking around on our nation’s streets — voting for Democrats, and attending city council meetings — who have stupid relatives in prison. When you see a story in the media talking about how the “community” is concerned that police are being too successful at putting criminals behind bars, this “community” sentiment comes from the stupid relatives of stupid criminals.

This is where all those “family demands answers” headlines come from whenever police shoot a stupid criminal. Your teenager daughter is living in a foster home and trying to stab people, but you’re too stupid to understand why she got shot? “FAMILY DEMANDS ANSWERS.”

Man, if I’d been stupid enough to get myself shot by cops back when I was a teenage dopehead, my family wouldn’t have been “demanding answers.” My kinfolk are smart enough it would have been obvious to them that I’d simply suffered the predictable consequences of stupidity.

“No, sir. I have nothing to say. I understand that I have the right to have my attorney present during questioning.”

Never went to prison, because I’m not stupid.

Also, eventually, I realized the error of my ways, and one of my youthful errors was hanging around with losers and troublemakers.

This is another reason why I’m against John Correia’s idea of surrendering to stupid people in what he calls “the drug war.”

Some People Should Ride the Bus

Stupid behavior leads to bad consequences, and smart people eventually notice this pattern, either in their own lives or by observing the lives of others. It is only the truly stupid among us — the hopeless dimwits — who are repeatedly in trouble with the law.

Did I mention that Nika Holbert’s criminal record was released by officials? As evidence of incorrigible stupidity, it’s quite conclusive. She kept getting caught for driving without a license, or driving with fake tags on the car, or possessing small quantities of marijuana, which are exactly the kind of things that stupid people get caught doing.

Stupid people should not be allowed to drive. That’s why we have public transportation, for people who are too stupid to drive. What part of “Nika should have been riding the bus” do I need to explain here?

America’s problem is not merely our failure to penalize stupidity, but also that intelligent people are far too polite for their own good. We have been taught that it’s wrong — “insensitive” or too “judgmental” — to make stupid people feel ashamed of their stupidity. This is an unfortunate consequence of the “self-esteem” cult that took root in our education system decades ago. The emergence of this cult was a typical example of what happens when mediocre minds (think, education majors) are exposed to sociology statistics without proper adult supervision.

Some education professional noticed that (a) successful people tend to have (b) high self-esteem, and concluded that (b) was the cause of (a).

This is like the “Think System” in The Music Man.

Notice how I just assumed that the reader is (a) capable of understanding analogies and (b) familiar with Broadway musicals. This is because I understand that 1,500 words into a blog post is not where you find people who should be riding the bus, IYKWIMAITYD.

No, the kind of people who are still reading after 1,500 words are extraordinarily intelligent. So smart are my blog readers, in fact, that some of them are designing space robots for NASA.

And driving German cars. I don’t know if there are any sociological studies on this, but based on a small sample of space-robot engineers, I have observed a distinct preference for German automobiles. However, correlation is not causation, and simply buying a Volkswagen won’t turn you into a NASA engineer, the same way that high self-esteem won’t make you successful. This is the error of the Cult of Self-Esteem, which has ruined our school system because teachers think they can make kids succeed simply by telling them how wonderful they are.

That’s why no one ever told Nika Holbert she was too stupid to be allowed to drive a car. And she ended up getting shot for it.

Oh, and pulling a pistol on a cop.

The Darwin Awards Committee could not be reached for comment.




 

Category: Crime, Racism, Tennessee

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