Legal, Stupid, and Deadly
Just because you have the right to do something doesn’t mean you should. Just because something isn’t illegal doesn’t mean it’s safe. Just because you find a loophole in the law that allows you to behave badly doesn’t make it right.
In many cases, we understand this intrinsically. Hopefully, you’ll be fine hang gliding, bungee jumping, or jumping out of an airplane, but people do die that way. It’s a possibility.
Last night, I just got back from a night tour of Alcatraz. Despite the fact that Alcatraz is famous for having dangerous currents around it, a lot of people have made the swim from the land out to the island as part of triathlons or just for the fun of it. Some of them have died in the attempt.
Climbing Mount Everest would certainly be an incredible accomplishment for anyone, and somewhere between 6,000-7,000 people have managed it so far. However, your chances of dying during the attempt are about 1-1.5%. It can be worse than that as well.
If you want to read a truly horrific book, Into Thin Air is one of the most depressing things I’ve ever read. A group of climbers got a little behind schedule ascending the slope, got hit with a massive storm on the way down, and died like flies. People fell to their deaths, froze to death in the snow, and had their brains glitch from the altitude, while other people who could have helped them were so exhausted, they couldn’t get up to look for them or bring them back to safety. Imagine surviving, but having to live with that for the rest of your life.
Speaking of brain glitches, in modern America, particularly in liberal circles, there are lots of people who suddenly see no problem with doing incredibly stupid and dangerous things once they start mixing those concepts in with politics. It’s like they do the most foolish things imaginable because they’ve decided they have a right to do them.
For example, many of the complaints of the BLM movement revolved around people getting shot by police while doing extraordinarily dumb and dangerous things. We’re talking about people attacking cops, acting aggressively with a weapon, refusing to follow orders while acting erratically, and then, when something happens, there’s a big debate about whether the cop was too quick on the trigger, while the foolish behavior of the person that got shot is completely ignored. Very rarely do these shootings happen in a vacuum, but the entire conversation revolves around the conduct of the police, while the person who initiated the whole problem gets a pass.
Some questions also came up over Kyle Rittenhouse. I heard liberals ask, “Why was he out there? What reason did he have to be there?” Of course, you could ask the exact same question about the rioters. Why were they there? Why did they attack him? He wasn’t looking for trouble. They were literally attacking a guy with a gun who pretty clearly wanted to get away from them. “Did he do the right thing?” A better question: “What the hell were they doing?”
The same kind of things happen when you get liberals deliberately blocking the roads during protests. They panic someone, and that person guns it through them. Then, the coverage revolves around whether the person was right or wrong to floor it. Telling someone to “go play in traffic” is the equivalent of telling them to go kill themselves, yet that’s what they’re doing. Playing in traffic and daring someone to drive through them. So, why are we supposed to feel sorry for them when it happens?
For example, here’s one of those incidents that just happened in Minnesota:
Of course, the obvious question few people seem to be asking is, “Why are they walking in the middle of the road if they don’t want to get run over?”
You’ll notice that these loons immediately attack the car, as if the car is doing something wrong by driving down the road, instead of them. They’re not “victims.” They’re the ones creating a problem and playing victim.
What happened with Renee Good is another great example of this.
ICE has been around for more than 20 years, and a big part of their job is deporting illegals, which has been a practice in the United States since the 1880s. Yet, the second Democrats decided it was bad for their election prospects, they started treating it like some outrageous new infringement on people’s rights as opposed to the norm for more than a century. Since then, they’ve attacked ICE officers, thrown themselves in front of their cars, and perhaps most idiotically, have taken to trailing them in their cars and blocking them in, which puts them at risk of being ambushed.
Renee Good was an anti-ICE activist. She was blocking traffic, her lesbian wife was filming her, and when ICE came to confront her, she gunned her car with an ICE agent in front of it. He shot her through the windshield. Was she trying to run over him? Did she just panic? Was she trying to be cute and screwed up? Who knows, but liberals are outraged and have nothing negative to say about her insane behavior that created the whole incident:
This is a woman who was somewhere she shouldn’t have been, doing something she shouldn’t have been doing, and was shot while she was driving her car into another human being. You can say what she was doing was legal before she tried driving over an ICE agent, which seems dubious, but even if it was, it was also inherently irresponsible and dangerous. Yet the discussion is about the ICE agent. Was he too fast on the trigger? How seriously would he have been hurt? Did he have an obligation to try to figure out her intentions before firing… and it’s like, “what about her?” There’s no way to slice this where she isn’t mostly responsible for everything that happened. Even if she were going to miss him and he shouldn’t have shot her – neither of which is true – it would have STILL been mostly her fault.
The whole point of this is not to absolve law enforcement agencies of their responsibilities. Yes, they need to be trained. Yes, they have strict rules they need to follow. Yes, they need to be punished when they don’t obey the rules. However, they’re also human beings, and they have to make split-second, life and death decisions in the real world, with huge consequences. If you’re a person doing everything possible to make those decisions as difficult as possible, you’re not blameless when they make the wrong call, and you deserve very little sympathy when they make the right one.
Spot on! Accountability is lost in a lot of these situations, and largely ignored in favor of narrative control.
Good, her wife, and the officer are all accountable but made martyr or murder depending on news source.
But the context will be lost in favor of galvanizing an emotional response.
The popularity of movies like The Hunger Games, and the Korean series Squid Games, I think tell us something.
My oldest son quit college and went into the military. At his graduation from basic he told us how disappointed he was that the challenges were not hard enough... that they had dumbed down the requirements for mental and physical challenges to accommodate overweight, poorly educated and female recruits.
I believe there is a psychological need, probably with some evolutionary biology explanation, for people... especially young people... to face some danger in their lives in order to feel alive.
Historically life itself was more dangerous. Just working for a living one would face risks of harm or death. During school we all got picked on and there were more fist fights.
But here comes the matriarchy. No more bullying. No more fighting. Everyone gets a trophy. Everyone gets an A on their paper. Empathy is delivered in buckets... except, ironically, to those that actually face the risks of harm and death.
I think we are seeing a psychological breakdown of society being too mothered. I think this is all a result of The Great Feminization.
I really worry about AI making this worse. People without struggle and threat as part of a productive system will seek it in other pathways that will be destructive to the system.
The 9-11 Islamist were part of a Saudi cult that developed from the children of oil-rich families. They were shipped to Western universities to get a fine education and then came back to their home country that lacked an economy to provide them challenging work. So, other than mothering, automation combined with over-educating is another catalyst to this breakdown.
I believe that the Romans were brilliant until they were not. The gladiator games were an outlet for people to at least mentally participate in life-and-death struggles while their regular lives progressed to having fewer and fewer life-and-death struggles.
I think one idea would be mandatory one or two years of military service after high school... where the requirements are such that young people would really struggle and have some risks of harm or death. That might be enough to eliminate the otherwise reckless adult behavior we are seeing, or the alternative of years of cognitive behavior therapy.