Category Archives: FRED REED
FRED REED: Bads, Wads, And The Unlikelihood Of Reason: Thoughts On Two Verdicts
Crime, Critique, Ethics, FRED REED, GUNS, Justice, Law, Race, The South
In both the Rittenhouse and Arbery cases, we have Black Advocates, and White Advocates (Bads and Wads to avoid typing fatigue) squalling at each other
Oh God, oh God. Can we humans not contract out our governance to, say, cephalopods and stop trying to manage our own affairs? I mean, really. Girl octopodes are both smart and leggy. They aren't crazy. What more do we want?
Recently we have had the verdicts in the Rittenhouse and Arbery trials, with which I assume the reader to be at least broadly familiar. If you are not, I congratulate you for avoiding the grocery-store tabloid intellectual level regnant in America.
Today, everything is identity politics, emotion, and herd instinct. Loyalty to one's herd trumps all else, to include truth. Outside the courtroom, treatment of both trials was racial, ideological and, often, disingenuous if not dishonest. Inside the courtroom, neither was. This pack-instinct politics is an embarrassment.
In both cases, we have Black Advocates, and White Advocates (hereinafter Bads and Wads to avoid typing fatigue) squalling at each other. The Wads have never seen a white man who was guilty and the Bads, one who wasn't. I don't think I have ever encountered so much tendentious twaddle in one place, and I have lived in Washington.
But the juries got both right. For a practicing curmudgeon, this is devastating. There may be a hidden underlying vein of reason in the country.
In the Rittenhouse matter, the case, that the kid shot in self-defense, is obvious on the facts. The jury agreed. In Arbery, the defense of the killers is weak, contrived, and illogical. The jury agreed.
Now, Arbery, briefly: Arbery was a black man who on at least five occasions (is said to have) entered a suburban house under construction, walked around, sometimes on surveillance video, and left without stealing anything. In Georgia, this is called "criminal trespass," and is a misdemeanor, like littering. No theft, no vandalism, no burglary, no felony.
On the day of his death, Arbery, a known jogger, came out of the house, carrying nothing, not anything stolen, not a weapon, not a cellphone, and ran down the street. The three killers, assuming on no evidence that he must have committed a crime, began chasing him in two pickups. They ran him down in a chase lasting five minutes, used the trucks to force him in desired directions, trapped him on a street between the trucks. Apparently Arbery, exhausted and desperate, cornered, attacked the guy who had a twelve-gauge pump, who killed him with it. One of the three took video during the chase.
They later said they killed him in self-defense and claimed that they were conducting a citizen's arrest. The latter claim, farfetched and not occurring until well after the event, was the only possible defense a lawyer could come up with. I suspect a lawyer did come up with it.
The self-defense approach doesn't fly. If you are the aggressors, as for example chasing with pickups a frightened man, and you kill him when he finally fights back, in law you cannot claim self-defense. And when the odds are three men and two guns against an unarmed defender, self-defense is not persuasive.
Here the story becomes sordid. When I heard shortly after the killing that there would be no indictments, I thought, uh-huh, the fix is in. And the fix was indeed in. One of the killers who had worked in law enforcement called his friend, Brunswick District Attorney Jackie Johnson, and got her to prevent an investigation, for which she was later indicted on a felony charge. The investigation and arrest came months later and only after the video went viral.
The jury found all three guilty of murder, whereupon white advocates called the proceedings a show trial, political, with the jury being intimidated, anti-white, and the like.
None of this is true. (If you have the interest and spare time, here is the prosecutions case in its entirety. Judge for yourself.) In identity politics, a show trial is one in which the verdict is not the one one's herd wants. The jury is then said to be woke, corrupt, left-wing, right-wing, suborned, racist, white-hating, what have you It can't be that the jury even-handedly pondered the facts and came to a considered conclusion.
Wads, as much as Bads, just make up evidence. Various WADs stated as fact that Arbery, who frequently jogged through the neighborhood, did so "casing" it for future theft. Since there is no evidence that Arbery committed burglary, ever, this is invention. There is much innuendo, as for example stating that many thefts had occurred in the neighborhood and inviting the reader to conclude that Arbury was the thief. There is exactly no evidence for this.
In libel law this sort of thing is called "actual malice" or "reckless disregard of truth." But the dead can't sue.
Why the desperate attempt to find a felony for Arbery to have committed? Because without one, the defense of making a citizen's arrest doesn't fly. That leaves them having hunted Arbery down and killed him with no authority to do so. This is called "murder."
Citizen's arrest: A private person may arrest an offender if the offense is committed in his presence or within his immediate knowledge. If the offense is a felony and the offender is escaping or attempting to escape, a person may arrest him on reasonable or probable grounds of suspicion.
The claim of making a citizen's arrest smells to high heaven. There was no felony. Arbery came out of the house carrying nothing, as the killers could see. No felony had been committed in their presence since none had been committed at all. Further, statements by the three themselves show that they didn't think Arbery had stolen anything, or didn't know whether he had. These gut the defense of citizen's arrest.
When the sheriff showed up, they would certainly have told him approximately, "We thought he was a burglar and so we wanted to hold him until the police came." They didn't. They didn't tell Arbery they were making a citizen's arrest.
Many seem not to understand the importance of this. The only question in the trial was whether the three were conducting a legitimate citizen's arrest. If not, then with no right or authority whatsoever they had chased down a man who had not committed a felony, and killed him. That, ladies and gentlemen, is called "murder."
Let us consider events from Arbury's standpoint. He was out for a jog, as he had been many times before. He poked around the building site, as he and others had done before. He stole nothing. He didn't know that he was a burglar in the eyes of the three paladins of justice. He didn't know that they were planning a citizen's arrest. Suddenly, armed white men in a pickup accost him, trying to cut him off. This is terrifying. They don't tell him why. One says, or later claims to have, "I want to talk to you," probably not in a chirpy voice with a broad smile. From Arbury's point of view, this is not promising. Remember, he lives in Georgia. Arbury doesn't reply, as why should he? He tries to evade, which is exactly what I would do. It is, I suspect, what a white person would do if cut off by armed blacks.
What should he have done, trapped, probably scared witless, with a white man pointing a shotgun at him? What does a black man in these circumstances believe to be the intentions of his pursuers? A beating? A rope? Burning? Death? To a white advocate in northern suburbs these may seem silly questions. To a black in Georgia, they don't. His decision, to fight, got him killed.
It is interesting here to ask what the identity groups would have said had the races been reversed. For example, if three blacks had run down a white college student in otherwise identical circumstances. Or, if Rittenhouse had been a black kid attacked by Republicans, saying that his intent was to protect the right of BLM to hold lawful demonstrations. I think we all know the answer. And, when a nearly all-white jury in the Deep South convicts three white men of killing a black man, you can bet they believe it.
Guilty as charged.
FRED REED: Stop Lawlessness And Looting Before It's Too Late … For Blacks
Crime, English, FRED REED, Law, Media, Race, Racism
If an eruption comes, it will be bad for whites but worse by far for blacks who, whether they like to admit it or not, depend on whites for much
"A country deserves what it tolerates, and will assuredly get more of it," said my favorite political commentator (me).
He has also asked, "And this is supposed to help blacks?"
Across the country the rabble rampage—Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and mobs sacking stores. They are by no means all black. Whites participate in the vandalism, blacks do the looting and beatings of whites. Both are out of control. Anger over this quietly grows. A spring is being wound, methinks, a hammer cocked, the scene set for a grisly outbreak of racial bloodshed.
The backdrop will be the hatred between Elites and Deplorables, exacerbated by a declining economy, financial anxiety for the future, anger over immigration, the epidemic, and so on. Yet it is race that will provide the spark.
Does this sound like unbalanced raving? If I had told you the day before the Floyd incident that in a few days cities across the country would be in flames with looting and vandalism, would you have thought me unbalanced?
For whatever reason, catastrophic racial realities exist, disguised and hidden by the White House and the media. Maybe these think they are preventing, or postponing an explosion that might occur if people knew what was happening. Maybe they are stroking their voters. This video, of actual events, catches the straits in which America finds itself. The degree to which it shocks you is a measure of the effectiveness of the journalistic suppression.
The political landscape is of course complex. In a curious twist the white Elites use blacks against their Deplorable enemies, claiming and perhaps sometimes believing that they are opposing racism. To this end, they eliminate bail, defund the police, hide crime by blacks, order the police not to use tear gas and rubber bullets. Police resign in droves, not wanting to be the next Chauvin. Homicide rises sharply. Looting flourishes.
Crime by blacks is now barely restricted, and reported as little as the big media can manage. For example, Thirty-two Black-on-White Homicides, for October. These typically appear for a couple of days in local papers but are never picked up by the majors
The results of the unpolicy?
Seattle has become so dangerous that police have to walk the city's employees to transportation after work.
The great majority of blacks do not do these things, but the great majority of those who do these things are black. The white and Asian victims will notice this. People remember who did, not who didn't. Anger will grow, grows. This is a very bad thing.
We now see stores selling expensive goods attacked by organized flash packs, windows smashed and wares stolen, in minutes. The looters are not Japanese school girls. In San Francisco, where shoplifting is virtually legal, store after store leaves for friendlier climes, unable to withstand the losses. Chicago's Magnificent Mile, a region of stores selling prestige goods, now has many empty stores because of looting. Goodbye tax base. Shortly, goodbye middle class. There is no reason for these robberies to end since they are profitable and almost free of risk.
How can the spreading lawlessness be stopped? Easily, but not nicely. Throwing a brick at a policeman is at least ADW, assault with a deadly weapon, and arguably attempted murder, twenty to life. Apply it! Lighting buildings or cars is arson. So charge it and throw the book. Allow store owners to shoot looters. But this we will not do, or at least not yet, and nothing else will work.
The brighter among the woke worry that if ever whites develop a racial consciousness like that of blacks, things will get very, very ugly. Thus the hysteria over White Supremacy. Unfortunately, the best way to promote white consciousness is exactly what the woke are doing–to encourage crime by blacks, allow the beatings, and endlessly pummel whites for racism. The woke are working hard at getting exactly what they don't want. They are not doing blacks a favor. If an eruption comes, it will be bad for whites but worse by far for blacks who, whether they like to admit it or not, depend on whites for much. The country would never recover.
Journalists, perhaps lacking the wit to understand what they are doing, labor to intensify racial hostility. In particular, they relentlessly tell blacks that they are victims of whites, that they are being killed in large numbers by white police, while suppressing the fact that far more whites are killed by blacks. This understandably enrages blacks who, emotional, less educated than whites, reading little, believe it.
Having worked in the scrivener's trade, I partly blame the joy of shared indignation and a diminishment of the former belief in fact-checking. (It used to be said, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." No more.) Wild partisanship adds to the problem. The journalists of Washington read each other, write for each other, talk to each other and, finding that they all think the same things, assume that they must be right, because they all think the same things.
Further, networks run by people of a particular view hire people who agree with them. Reporters, too, seem gripped by the free-floating anger that afflicts America as a whole. Bingo.
Remember that the strongest human proclivity, stronger than the sex drive, is to avoid information working against ardently held beliefs. Liberals do not, will not, read Fox News or American Renaissance, and conservatives avoid Salon and NPR. It is curious that reporters, whose job is to know what goes on in America, largely don't.
Remember also that that the networks have limited news-gathering ability compared to freelance websites. During the Floyd riots, hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with smartphones recorded video of looting, vandalism, and beatings. These were posted, and circulated, freely on the net, but not on CNN. They showed the looters to be almost entirely black. The vandals no, but the looters, yes. In my (now limited) acquaintance with the media in Washington, they really don't know what is happening.
The upshot? It would be a very good idea to stop the lawlessness, the racial attacks, and the mob robberies before those targeted decide to take things into their own hands.
For the literally inclined, perhaps worth contemplation:
THE WRATH OF THE AWAKENED SAXON
by Rudyard Kipling
It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.
They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.
Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
It was not suddenly bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.
*Image Thanks
FRED REED Tells About An LGBTQ Legal Landmark And Other DC Porn. For Real.
America, Comedy & Humor, FRED REED, Homosexuality, The Zeitgeist
Fred tells me this is a true story. My male acquaintances will tell you I'm truly gullible. Judge Abraham Offalhaouser's name makes me suspect otherwise. But who am I to argue with Barely A Blog's Hunter Thompson, as he recounts the "kinks and dinks" of his beat for the Washingtonian magazine.—ilana
My name's Bond…Fred Bond. I'm a freelance news weasel in Washington DC, the heart of a darkness that would have made Conrad slit his wrists. Before, I worked as the gas-warfare editor for Soldier of Fortune magazine, but the demand for down-market extinction porn dried up and DC looked to be the best available gig. I write a column called Under the Table for the Washingtonian, the city's suburban coffee-table magazine. The column was the sort called in the trade a bullshitter, combining mendacity and the scurrilous with a keen eye on the libel laws. It was clearly distinguishable from the Washington Post in that it had a glossy cover.
The editors wanted grotesquery about the urban blasted heath, tales of scams and fraud, and what lovely secretary was suspected of sharpening what pol's pencil. I wasn't sure why anyone would read it, but the Washingtonian paid me and at least it wasn't boring. Journalism is a ticket to ride, said Hunter Thompson, but ticket to a freak show would have been as accurate.
My beat was the weird and embarrassing, tidbits shocking enough to stand out against the backdrop of national politics. This wasn't always easy. It was a time of sexual liberalization. All sorts of kinks and dinks were seeking legitimacy—gays, S&M freaks, TVs—and I was supposed to chronicle their antics. There were lots. At night in the Shaw district, you could see cute little blonde twinky-boys in not much more than jockstraps trying to pick up drive-by federal accountants cheating on their wives and there was a huge black guy who looked like an NFL running back in a thong bikini and size-eighteen high heels.
Then there was Bobby Genovese, a geeky video-game designer with bad skin who worked at a gay computer-repair shop called Stack Overflow in Arlington, in the Virginia suburbs. One day he announced that he wanted to marry his dog Mosfet. No one took him seriously. For the times it seemed unimaginative. It was assumed that he was just looking for publicity for his new video game, Fido and the Wolf Priest of Nifflheim. Fido had a laser cannon mounted on his back and there was a castle of some sort and beautiful boys who looked like Tim of Finland who apparently couldn't afford clothes. I think they turned into wolves or something. Anyway, the magazine ran it as a two-graff throwaway piece in Under the Table. It seemed fairly routine. Anyway he was turned down for a marriage license.
Then Bobby showed up at the courthouse with Henrietta Kamen-Ruggler, a recent grad out of Georgetown Law apparently looking to jumpstart a career. DC has a lot of lawyers and to get on the gravy train, you have to get attention some way or else steal something big and not get caught. She argued that the state had no mandate to determine the scope of marital affection. Given the atmosphere of extreme liberalism prevailing in the city, and the lack of case law, the court was baffled, but finally ruled that Mosfet and Bobby were both male, and same-sex marriage was legal if not yet mandatory. However, ruled judge Abraham Offalhaouser, Mosfet was underage and under Virginia law would need his parents' permission. Whether he was kidding wasn't clear but, though it sounded strange, the statute was clear in the Virginia code. This produced memorable testimony about admissibility of kennel records and DNA.
I wrote about this with as much apparent sanity as I could muster. Bobby wanted to appeal to the Supreme Court but by then Henrietta had been hired by Mother Jones to cover the struggle to liberate transphylum love, whatever the hell that meant. Maybe it involved cucumbers or something. Anyway, I supposed that he and Fido would have to live in sin, though I tried not to think about it.
Then for a while nothing spectacular happened. I interviewed Bribona Corona -Gonzalez about her book, Snuff: The Problem of Lasting Relationships. She said she wrote the book because people looked at her like some kind of nut and she wanted to improve the image of the snuff community, which seemed to have considerable turnover. Later, needing a story, I went to the Eagle, an S&M bar on the Hill. I hoped for something garish and horrifying but aside from smelling like my catcher's mitt when I was eleven it was boring. When the bartender in a leather bar wants to talk about subcommittee appointments in the Senate, something is wrong with the world.
Some time later I sold the editor on a series about the police. It involved ridealongs in places that might change your view of the world you live in. It was a class gig because all I had to do was ride around with the cops at night and write about murder, degradation, and sordidness. These fascinate a voyeuristic public bored to the point of suicide with pointless federal jobs and athirst for something garish and grotesque. Writing about the garden-seed industry—that would be tough. But I was getting bored myself. I mean, one dead body is pretty much like another. They don't do anything, just lie there. Not too dynamic.
One night I rode with a cop I knew who probably doesn't need his name in print. We went to a topless joint called The Northern Exposure to see a really great stripper who danced under the stage name of Noodles Romanoff. Our concern was that without police presence violence might break out. You can't tell about strippers. They can become violent at any moment. Her history according to the manager was that she had been born Bahrain Goebbelsstrudel, daughter of a German tire heiress and a minor Arab fixer. Supposedly she had been working in a bar in Seattle when the police came looking for her on charges of being a nurse-poisoner in an earlier life and she had fled to DC. It was rumored on the Hill that she had been secretly dating John Bolton but with that scratchy codpiece mustache he looks like an ambulatory toothbrush so I didn't think the story had much credence.
Later it turned out that Noodles was a medical student at Johns-Hopkins who wanted some extra money. Anyway I wrote about her for Under the Table. The publicity made her dye her hair and change her name to Kandy Barr, and keep dancing until she had to quit to study for her medical boards.
There were a lot of strippers. One called herself Persimmon Sighing Cloud and danced as a lineal descendant of Crazy Horse. Her real name was Urethra Warren or Veronica Warren or something like that. She talked about her childhood on the reservation and had a large following of guys who said they just watched her to support indigenous peoples.
I was going to tell you about Mike Pompeo and the size-fifty red-sequinned miniskirt with pompoms but we are out of space. Some other time.
FRED REED: The Possible Virtues Of A Salutary Distance
Affirmative Action, Conflict, Crime, Education, English, FRED REED, Intelligence, Law, libertarianism, Multiculturalism, Race
Most of the profound anger and apparent actual insanity afflicting the United States stem from racial antagonism: The Floyd riots, the tearing down of statues, affirmative action, the renaming of buildings, hostility to everything Confederate, racial attacks on whites by blacks, critical race theory, the fury over trials. Racial policy isn't working and isn't going to. America had better find another approach before, one day, the guns come out.
Sez I, a massive step toward racial reconciliation could be achieved simply by deregulating the schools. The races have very, very disparate cultures and want different things. In the integrated schools, either blacks must be forced to learn things of interest only to whites, or whites must be prevented from learning these things. It is hard to see why black students or their parents would have any interest in Jane Austin, Mark Twain, Shakespeare, or Beowulf. Nor is it clear why whites, of either generation, would care more than passingly about Africa. Why, unworkably, force each to do something both alien and of no interest to it?
Many object that the study of mathematics constitutes racism, or is a means of oppressing blacks. Why force math on blacks or, more importantly, prevent white kids from learning them? Similarly, English grammar is now said to be racist. Why should black young of a background having no interest in such things have to be burdened with it?
These difficulties could within an administrative district be remedied by allowing different groups to establish such schools as they chose, for such students as they chose, teaching such material as they chose. Charges of discrimination could be avoided by requiring by law that all students be subsidized at the same per-pupil rate. Further, allow schools to select such students as they choose. If some schools wanted only white students, or black, or racially mixed, so be it. As long as they were given equal resource's, it would be their business. If some parents preferred schools of mixed race, it would be their business. Evangelical schools? Fine. Jewish? Equally so. Chinese? Equally.
The right of schools to choose teachers without governmental bureaucracy—most importantly, certification—would be crucial. Certified teachers are often of low quality and always carriers of industrial-strength political correctness. The teachers unions are just that—unions, interested chiefly in the good of the membership, not the students. I would not be allowed to teach either writing or journalism whereas a half-literate political hire would be.
This would also allow parents of very bright kids to use such tests as they chose to find the extraordinarily smart and then to teach them at their level. Those opposed to testing could avail themselves of schools not engaging in testing. Forcing kids of IQ 140 or better to agonize in classes at the level of "Mommy Beaver had two sticks and Daddy Beaver had two, how many did that have in all" is child abuse. A child in that range in the second grade is reading at the ninth-grade level and school is nothing but an obstacle. Why do this?
In aggregate these measures—we could call them "freedom"—might go far to reduce hostility.
Smaller and seemingly less important matters count in racial relations. Blacks often deprecate other blacks for "acting white." This is not unreasonable. People naturally want to be around others who share their culture, manners, and ideas of consideration and propriety. I don't want my children, or people around me, "acting black." I don't know what "acting white" means and I don't care. I don't want my children wearing their pants below their knees and saying "muggafugga" every second word. These practices do no actual harm, but are extremely disagreeable to most whites. While I do not want to dictate the culture of blacks—it isn't my business—neither do I want them transgressing mine. Would not separation be the comfortable solution?
Housing is another matter in which less government would be of use. Here again, policy is disastrous. The races obviously do not want to live together. When blacks move into white neighborhoods, the whites leave. When whites move back into the city, "gentrifying," blacks are enraged. Upon reaching university, blacks often demand dormitories only for blacks, courses only for blacks, student centers only for blacks, and graduations only for blacks. If whites had the same privileges, friction would diminish. By (again) providing these things on a rigid and transparent basis of equal money per student, discrimination could be avoided.
Since the races usually want to live apart, why not simply let them? Those who wanted to live in mixed neighborhoods could, but if a black neighborhood wanted to avoid gentrification, it could vote to do so.
The voluntary separation of races would greatly reduce the very high rates of crime against whites by blacks, and the fear and intensifying hostility caused by this crime. I don't know how to end crime, but reducing the fear of blacks would go far to encourage racial reconciliation.
Blacks say that white police discriminate against them. Whether this is true would make no difference if blacks policed black neighborhoods and whites, white. Cities typically burn because white policemen have beaten or shot a black. The blindingly obvious solution is, in racially homogeneous regions, to have the local race do the policing. Friction might in some degree continue between police and policed, but at least it would not be racial.
Further, though it will at first sound strange, I suggest that black and white neighborhoods be permitted to decide what laws to enforce, at least in those matters affecting only the neighborhood. If blacks chose to ignore use of marijuana, drinking in public, selling crack, or driving without a license, why should they not? Do they not know their neighborhood, its needs and problems, better that I? Why are these things my business either way? The result would be vastly fewer arrests of blacks by whites and fewer blacks in prison, both of these contributing greatly to hostility between the races.
I am not recommending the abandonment of black neighborhoods to crime, but rather letting those affected decide. For example, blacks often hate stop-and-frisk policing. Why not let those affected make the decision? This would reduce the impression of the police as an occupying army, often white.
Nor am I suggesting the subjection of blacks to a punitive regime. I believe that all citizens should have access to good medical care, that providing schools with textbooks of their choice is a proper function of government, as is maintenance of streets, water supply, and electric supply. If a black university wants microscopes or a computer, it should get them. And universities should be free to hire any staff they choose, depending only on the willingness of the staff to be hired. The various forms of welfare should be continued as there is no choice other than causing great hardship–even hunger.
Since the races are in America, and none is going to leave, finding a workable approach to amity would seem a good idea. What we have hasn't worked, is not working, shows no sign that it ever will, and indeed things are getting worse. A little distance might go a long way. If there is ever an explosion of the very real, very deep anger in the country that the media are hiding from themselves, it might make Floyd's uprising seem trivial. In the Floyd riots, the guns didn't come out.