This story is so mind-meltingly stupid that it actually makes me angry.
I am not going to be kind. When woke delusions get this serious, innocent people are going to be hurt. That’s Jennifer Angel above, a small business owner and Oakland baker. She was an anarchist and extreme social justice advocate, as if anarchy doesn’t lead directly to injustice. I’m sure she was a nice person, just permanently crippled by living too long in California and hanging out with aging hippies. Jennifer didn’t deserve to die, and die horribly, but she did: when a thief broke into Angel’s car while she was in it, grabbed something and jumped into a getaway car, Angel chased the thief—after all, that’s what you have to do when there are no police, as Angel wished. Sadly, she got caught in the door of the fleeing vehicle was dragged down the street, her head smashing against the pavement repeatedly. She was pronounced dead at the hospital.
Angel’s family and friends issued a statement, and it is utopian claptrap for the ages. here is most of it, and when I can’t stand by without commenting, I will interrupt:
“It’s with very heavy hearts that we announce that Oakland baker, small business owner, social justice activist, and community member Jen Angel has been medically declared to have lost all brain function and will not regain consciousness…..We know Jen would not want to continue the cycle of harm by bringing state-sanctioned violence to those involved in her death or to other members of Oakland’s rich community….”
Wait, what? Yes, Jen regarded enforcing the laws as “state-sanctioned violence.” Apparently she preferred that the community she loved (I think by “rich” her family means “fulsome”) to be subjected to criminal violence. Much better.
“As a long-time social movement activist and anarchist, Jen did not believe in state violence, carceral punishment, or incarceration as an effective or just solution to social violence and inequity…”
Did she believe in gravity, a spherical Earth, or that matter is composed of atoms? How about unicorns, pixies, and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer? I bet Jen believed in abortion! Violence is in the mind of the beholder. Thus speaketh The Great Stupid!
“The outpouring of support and care for Jen, her family and friends, and the values she held dear is a resounding demonstration of the response to harm that Jen believed in: community members relying on one another, leading with love, centering the needs of the most vulnerable, and not resorting to vengeance and inflicting more harm….”
Rama-lama-ding-dong!
“Jen believed in a world where everyone has the ability to live a dignified and joyful life and worked toward an ecologically sustainable and deeply participatory society in which all people have access to the things they need, decisions are made by those most directly affected by them, and all people are free and equal….”
Did anyone try to explain to Jen that what was just described isn’t “anarchy”? What it sounds like is communism, after the state has withered away, which it never will.
“Per Jen’s wishes, her organs will be donated, and her committed medical team has informed the family that those organs will serve to lengthen and improve the lives of up to 70 people.”
Well, heck—70 lives for one is a great trade-off! Those thugs who dragged Jen down the street should be rewarded. A parade, maybe.
“If the Oakland Police Department does make an arrest in this case, the family is committed to pursuing all available alternatives to traditional prosecution, such as restorative justice. Jen’s family and close friends ask that the media respect this request and carry forward the story of her life with celebration and clarity about the world she aimed to build….”
Laws and laws enforcement exist to protect the community, not to carry out the eccentric wishes of victims and their families while endangering everyone else. Did Jen understand that? Probably not: her family and friends clearly don’t.
“Jen’s family and friends ask that stories referencing Jen’s life do not use her legacy of care and community to further inflame narratives of fear, hatred, and vengeance, nor to advance putting public resources into policing, incarceration, or other state violence that perpetuates the cycles of violence that resulted in this tragedy. We wish for Jen’s legacy to be one of deep commitment to safety and dignity for everyone…”
Jen clearly was brain-damaged long before her tragic death, and her condition was communicable.
It is ironic that that statement went out in the midst of progressives arguing for the censorship of “hate Speech” and “misinformation.” Nice, pleasant, virtuous-seeming people promoting idealistic formulas unmoored to history, human nature, common sense and accumulated knowledge probably cause far more harm than any hate speech. The whole West Coast is evidence.
Ethics Alarms 
Jen believed in a world….
that does not exist. She chased down the perps to give them extra treats because they clearly did not understand that all they had to do was ask, and she would have handed over her bank account. Truly terrible that her desperate act of generosity coupled with her lack of understanding of how the others would interpret her actions resulted in their own fear of imminent attack, exercising their right to flee and her death.
Who taught her that such a world existed or could exist? They are complicit in her death, and maybe the impending death of a lot more.
You could probably start with Karl Marx and his greatest disciples Lenin and Stalin. Then you could move on to Eugene Debs, John Reed and the other useful idiots who proclaimed they had seen the future and it worked. After that you could point to Abby Hoffman, Ira Einhorn, and the other radicals who tried to tear society down without giving any thought to what they’d build up in its place. Then would probably come Bernie Sanders and his mentors and supporters, plus a generous helping of Khalid Muhammad and Amiri Baraka the elder. But they’re just responsible for the existence of the idea that such a world existed or could. You need to look to her teachers, her friends, and most especially her family to ask who pointed her to these bad ideas in the first place, who encouraged her to internalize them, and who taught her to try to put them into practice. You also need to look to her environment. This is not the California of orange groves, movie studios, emerging universities, Jack Webb, and Ronald Reagan signing the Wentworth-Townsend Act to create that new animal called a paramedic. This is the California of democratic schools where no one actually learns anything, of flaky prosecutors more interested in putting cops than criminals in prison, and of streets and towns ceded to anarchy. People raised in that aren’t going to grow up and join the John Birch Society.
And the humanists who believe we are gods or can become them.
And Robert Reich.
Who taught her that such a world existed or could exist?”
H. G. Wells? Which democrat enclave will be the first to drive out all those with the means to decamp, and leave only the Eloi and the Morlocks?
Why did she even chase thieves who were simply trying to even out society’s inequities?
That’s my question. Jen would be alive today if she hadn’t tried to protect her possession. And it was her possession, not the thief’s.
Somewhere in that stupid woke-addled mind of hers, Jen recognized that what had happened to her was wrong and she was right to want her belonging back.
I had the same thought:
Why try to take back what was yours if you really are an anarchist?
What she espoused in theory was apparently not what she believed in practice.
It is unfortunate that the beliefs she espoused were exactly the sort of beliefs that would create the conditions that led to her death.
What annoys me even more is that those conditions leave all of us less safe. It is one thing if she wants to live in some sort of Anarcho-Syndicalist Commune, but I prefer that the State have a monopoly on force (subject, of course, to Constitutional restrictions).
Having said all of that, I take her family’s statements with 2 grains of salt. On the one grain, they are likely grieving and not necessarily thinking straight. On the other grain, they are likely romanticizing what they expect this woman’s position would be in some effort to find peace (which is kind of related to the first grain—so maybe it is really one grain of salt, but like a bigger grain of salt; maybe Kosher salt).
Of course, I don’t know how accurate those suppositions on my part really are. The whole lot of them might be batshit nuts.
-Jut
Jut, your admirable ability to go long on benefit of the doubt is way beyond mine.
“issued a statement” is a bad link.
Link is broken.
Argh. I’ll fix that.
Jack wrote, “a thief broke into Angel’s car while she was in it, grabbed something and jumped into a getaway car, Angel chased the thief—after all, that’s what you have to do when there are no police, as Angel wished. Sadly, she got caught in the door of the fleeing vehicle was dragged down the street, her head smashing against the pavement repeatedly.”
From that description of the encounter it sounds like Jen got out of her perfectly fine car to chase after the criminal that jumped into a get-away vehicle and she chased them on foot – to do what – forgive them in person? Was she really in the car or not? I’m sure as her head was smashing into the pavement she was hoping that the criminals had what they thought they needed and was yelling sweet “I forgive you’s” at the car that was killing her.
In the end, it sounds to me like Jen had a more than slight change of heart or she was a hypocrite; why the heck would a social justice warrior that thinks that everyone should have what they perceive they need even if they have to steal it and is opposed to policing, incarceration, or other state violence that perpetuates the cycles of violence chase after a criminal that stole something from her, wouldn’t such a social justice warrior stand their ground and condone the thief for their creative thievery?
What I’ve seen over the years is that most of these kind of social justice warriors are brazen hypocrites when it comes to their stuff or someone inflicting violence upon them, those social justice rules to follow are for everyone else especially those that have more then they do.
Your last paragraph is spot-on correct.
Well written!
I thought most of the aging hippies moved to upstate New York (home of Ithaca, the City of Evil according to many conservatives) and Vermont (the land of gray ponytails). 😀
All silliness aside, this statement makes me want to yawn, not get angry. One of the ending themes I return to in my writing, both historical and fictional, is that evil always returns, although it may wear a different name or a different face, and it falls to a new generation to fight and defeat it. Yesterday it might have worn a hammer and sickle, the day before that it might have worn a swastika or a rising sun, today it wears a crescent or a double-headed eagle. But the underlying idea, that it is going to impose its will and its vision by force, never changes.
The foolish idealism that often supports it keeps returning also, though it too wears a different name and face in every age, actually often many different names and faces in each age. Today it wears the pan-African colors of Black Lives Matter and the rainbow colors of militant abnormal sexuality. Yesterday it wore the tie-dye of the hippies and the ragged habit of Christian anarchism. There have always been the black-clad true anarchists to spur the idealists along or take the action the idealists balk at. The underlying ideal is always the same: a perfect society with no coercion and perfectly good people, obtained by resistance to the current order. Yesterday the anthem was John Lennon’s “Imagine,” today it’s Brett Dennen’s “Heaven.”
Beyond the rules of religion
The cloth of conviction
Above all competition
Where fact and fiction meet
There’s no color lines caste or classes
There’s no fooling the masses
Whatever faith you practice
Whatever you believe
Oh Heaven, Heaven
What the hell is Heaven?
Is there a home for the homeless?
Is there hope for the hopeless?
Throw away your misconceptions
There’s no walls around Heaven
No codes you gotta know to get in
No minutemen or border patrol
You must lose your Earthly possessions
Leave behind your weapons
You can’t buy your salvation
And there is no pot of gold
Heaven, Heaven
What the hell is Heaven?
Is there a home for the homeless?
Is there hope for the hopeless?
Heaven ain’t got no prisons
No governments, no business
No banks or politicians
No armies and no police
Castles and cathedrals crumble
Pyramids and pipelines tumble
Failure keeps you humble
Leads us closer to peace
Oh Heaven, Heaven
What the hell is Heaven?
Is there a home for the homeless?
Is there hope for the hopeless?
Is there hope for the hopeless?
It all sounds good, especially when set to music and sung…until you actually think it through. A world with no businesses, banks, governments, houses of worship, armies or police would be a world of anarchy, sloth, and failure. We already got a taste of it in Seattle and Portland, where adherents of this new anarchy who got ripped off were encouraged to just believe whoever took whatever had greater need of it than they did. Seattle sort of came to its senses. Portland still hasn’t. That’s the kind of world you’d be looking at if we followed this path all the way to its logical end.
You can glean little about Jen herself from this article, but if you look on the bakery website you can read:
“Jen Angel created Angel Cakes in 2008, and our retail shop opened on 5th Street in Oakland in March 2016. Jen learned practically everything she knows from her mom, Pat. Although Jen has always been a baker, before cupcaking full time she worked as an independent media and community activist. Her favorite flavors are chocolate peanut butter and Meyer lemon with the passion fruit fiilling (though secretly she loves chocolate chip cookies the most).
Angel Cakes is a small shop and as the owner, Jen strives to create an environment where everyone (staff AND customers) feels included, valued, and respected. She believes that Black Lives Matter and that every person has the right to choose their own gender identity and gender expression. As a shop we strive to reduce waste through limiting use of plastics and choosing products that are gentle on the environment. We do our best to be a good neighbor and community member through donating to and providing desserts for various social justice efforts, particularly in the areas of environmental justice, housing, and criminal justice reform.”
There you have it. She was a lifelong superlefty and virtue-signaler who also baked. Maybe the local criminal element left her alone, because supposedly she saw a lot of thefts and robberies, which she chalked up to economic injustice. Someone broke into her car, though, and instead of letting it go since who took it needed it more than her, instead of perhaps more sensibly deciding that life and limb were more important than whatever got taken, she tried to grab the getaway car and got her head repeatedly bounced off the pavement. Now she’s dead, and are her family and colleagues trying to help bring whoever did this to justice? Are they even asking for privacy while they grieve? No, instead they are saying they hope whoever did this escapes anything like conventional justice. Restorative justice? This isn’t a broken window that can be replaced or a defaced wall that can be cleaned. This is manslaughter at the very least. There’s no bringing her back, and there’s no fixing the lives of her family and friends who now have to deal with this supremely ugly event that nothing good can come of. Yet they’re worried that her murder might be used to rally the public to support the police or that someone might actually draw jail time for this?
I’ve seen a lot of weird places in fiction, but the place typified by this and these beliefs is one of the scariest. This is the inmates running the asylum.
These are some of the same people electing the Soros-backed prosecutors who are making a mockery of the criminal justice system in their jurisdictions. I’m just wondering how long it will be before victims and/or their families start exacting justice on their own. I would think that many of them are not far from slipping into vigilante mode.
Few thoughts (may be a bit cruel):
1) I wonder if this poor sap, for the very brief time she probably was still conscious as she got dragged, if she had any second thoughts about her commitment to “social justice” and wokeness;
2) generally speaking, while I wish no harm on anyone, I don’t really mind when stupid lefties suffer the consequences of their stupid lefty beliefs; I only care and hate when their stupidity affects other people who don’t share their insanity (like what’s happening to people like me in Chicago);
3) I’m fine with those lefties not wanting to subject those thugs to state-sanctioned violence as long as they’d be fine with me approving and asking for state-sanctioned violence (incl. capital punishment) being applied to those who wrong me or people I care about.
“I don’t really mind when stupid lefties suffer the consequences of their stupid lefty beliefs”
Nor do I; play STOOPID games–win STOOPID prizes, am I right?
This kind of philosophy comes out of the belief that humans are naturally good and that all that is required to make them eternally noble is meeting their basic needs by providing free food, shelter, clothing, education and medical care. Providing these needs will, ostensibly, end poverty which will, ostensibly, end crime and war.
They think they can educate people into rejecting wants, ignoring the example of every Socialist country in the 20th century that failed to prevent people from wanting cars, designer jeans and meat.
It is the philosophy behind “Star Trek” and every other utopian futurism that has secular humanism at the core of its philosophy.
Human beings are not good at heart. No one has to teach a toddler how to draw on the wall or run into the street. It’s in our nature to be selfish. We have to discipline ourselves to be kind, to be moral, to be ethical.
This is easier for some than others.
Compared to the populations of many countries, citizens of this country have one of the highest standards of living in history.
Even the poor of our country have four walls, a real floor and ceiling, indoor plumbing, running water, electricity, enough food to make one fat, Medicaid and a free public education through high school. The quality of above said benefits may not always compare favorably to what others have but they are far better than what is available in third world countries…which is why people are desperate to come here rather than stay where they are.
Yes, we do have very poor people in this country that are homeless. Some of those people are homeless due to the consequences of their own choices (and some of them aren’t). Some are mentally ill and cannot be committed or treated without their consent ( and some of them aren’t).
But we still have a high standard of living. Despite the welfare state and free public schools, however, the war on poverty has failed. Not because it lacked money but because it didn’t acknowledge human nature.
Abe Lincoln could have continued to slave for his father, split rails and ignored books, taking only the paltry education he was offered, but he wanted more. He read as much as he could and educated himself. Lincoln was ambitious, aspired to better himself and we are the beneficiaries of that improvement.
Most people aren’t like that.
Which is why all the free public education in the world hasn’t stopped graduating classes of increasingly ignorant students, Medicaid has not produced a healthy population and neither has stopped crime.
Why?
Because human nature was ignored. Students don’t learn if there’s no work ethic instilled. People don’t get healthy by making poor food and exercise choices and choosing to skip free doctor appointments for themselves or their children. And they don’t get out of poverty by being given taxpayer dollars that incentivize staying at home and spending money profligately.
Devoid of instilling morals, values and ethics, among which are respect for the law and other people, all the taxpayer-funded programs in the world won’t improve the human condition. All the restorative justice will not stop incarceration.
Some people don’t want to improve.
Which is why Jen was a crime victim and why she is dead.
There have been some powerful thoughts in this discussion thread. Yours was nuclear. A tour de force!
It has always disturbed me that the show never explained how humanity managed to get rid of poverty.
Here was something Jeff Jacoby wrote in 1997.
http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/1997/03/27/a_message_to_my_newborn_son/
There’s a reason Earth itself is rarely shown on Star Trek, and that the history is rarely explained in any level of detail. One reason is that their past, our future, is constantly changing and the writers don’t want to look like fools later on, but another is that some of what’s supposedly happened would be hard to explain in a way that made any kind of sense.
To their credit, the creators of Babylon 5 handled futuristic science fiction in a MUCH more realistic way. They even got into faith quite a bit, even though creator J. Michael Straczynski is himself an atheist and could have easily gone the secular humanist route of Gene Roddenberry. That universe saw current faiths evolving, new ones sprouting, and implications that some of them might have some basis in fact somewhere in the universe. Earth was also definitely NOT a place of peace, prosperity and plenty. The same problems that plague us today: government corruption, power lust, corporate greed, prejudice, still plague the world then. There’s also a very dark aspect of anti-freedom in the form of the Psi Corps of mind readers.
If nothing else, it made for a hell of a lot more interesting stories than Roddenberry’s preaching and preening, especially in The Next Generation. In fact, not everyone knows this, but Roddenberry had actually banned interpersonal conflict among the crew members on TNG, believing that petty and ego-driven problems would be a thing of the past by then. In effect, he decreed that humans in the future were no longer human, but closer to the logic-based species like the Vulcans. Unfortunately, Straczynski did not get to tell the story he really wanted to tell, as he kept running into issues with actors and having to modify things, including the replacement of pivotal character Jeffrey Sinclair due to actor Michael O’Hare suffering from serious mental health issues.
The fact is that humanity has made tremendous progress since Menes in ancient Egypt (the first identifiable historical figure), but it’s made it on both sides of the moral spectrum. The same humanity that moved toward the Constitution also moved toward the democides of last century. There’s always going to be that potential in the human makeup for wanting to take a shortcut to getting one’s own way through force, through trickery, or through corruption. There’s always going to be that red line, although it’s different for every person, where you get so angry or so triggered that you throw everything else out the window and let somebody have it. There’s always going to be the desire to “get even” with those you believe (justified or not) have done you wrong. There’s always going to be the potential for hating others for any reason or no reason. We now have the potential to take any of these things up to eleven, which is why we have to teach morality, ethics, respect for others as well as self, and so forth from early on. That’s also why we have to be ready, if necessary, to take decisive action to stop those who give in to these darker impulses. If we intend to stop doing either or both of these things, then we might as well pack it in, because those impulses can’t be educated or reasoned or talked out of people.
My husband watches “Babylon 5” and has been moved by some of the storylines involving religion.
The thing about “Star Trek” is that, even in the 24th century, there is conflict. During the weak 1st season of ST: TNG, largely supervised by Roddenberry, we had the scientist Kosinski taking credit for the work done by the Traveler in the episode “Where No One Has Gone Before” and an aged admiral who armed both sides of a conflict when he was young and then took a potent youth serum when he is called to negotiate with one of the former aggressors again in “Too Short a Season”, Clearly, humanity still has flawed members in this idealized society.
We continue to meet flawed humans in TNG, DS9 and Voyager eras. Like Harry Mudd and Cyrano Jones from the Original Series, human characters that value profit or an edge over another person still exist. A good example is the archaeologist Vash Picard hooks up with on his vacation. She’s intelligent, ruthless and has no moral qualms about looting sites for treasure and selling them for a price.
Clearly, education and free replicated food is not enough to satisfy everyone.
After all, even Quark the Ferengi pointed it out in DS9:
” Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people… will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon. You don’t believe me? Look at those faces. Look in their eyes.”
And Quark was just talking about the friendly humans who would ordinarily espouse all of the Roddenberry-esque idealism. Human nature doesn’t change. Taking advantage of those desperate humans will be other humans who are looking after themselves.
It’s my understanding that, in the Star Trek future, the technological developments that created food and matter replicators ended hunger.
Picard said that the desire for money is no longer the driving force in the lives of people.
My guess is that taxes are such (high) to give everyone basic food and clothing from the replicator, shelter with sufficient power to provide light and energy to regulate temperature and provide for sanitation.
Of course, all medical care and education are free.
But, if you want more, you pay for it. Since people are supposedly in jobs they love, it would appear that there is no income disparity (every job pays a small income). People become doctors because they have a genuine desire to help others, not because they want mega bucks.
Real food, like in restaurants, or clothing made with real fabric will cost you. And it’s probably not cheap.
But…almost…everyone is been educated to accept that this is the better way. They are probably told all the horror stories about the past when humanity was barbaric, fighting wars caused by religion, selfishly denying their neighbors an equitable lifestyle by their materialism and thoughtlessly wasted natural resources to the detriment of the entire world.
Or something.
Agreed!
COTD, AMG!
yup!
Brilliant observations, AM. It reminds of that inane ethos uttered by Robert Kennedy, quoting George Bernard Shaw: “Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?”
jvb
I’ve always hated science fiction. It’s just always struck me as sinister.
Valkygrrl would like a word…
I know. Among the Sci-Fi faithful, my take is indicative of a deep character flaw.
Some of it is. Like any other genre it can be pointed in a sinister direction. Some of it is not so much sinister as it is a warning as of what can happen if science is misused, abused, or used in a way no one expected but maybe should have. Captain Nemo’s technology was not sinister, but his unbridled desire for revenge was. There was nothing sinister about the Traveler’s desire to see the future, but what he found certainly was, humanity divided into those sapped of the desire to achieve and those who had lost any kind of heart or ethics.
Readers, please consider the possibility that there is more nuance to anarchism than some seem to acknowledge, and that there has been some drift into setting up straw men around here. For instance, none of this encompasses the mutualist views of Kevin Carson at all well – or those of Tolstoy, come to that. I will not enlarge upon my own views just yet.
Somehow, I suspect that the late baker, like John Lennon, was not up on utopian nuance, but that it all seemed really cool to her. I mean, just imagine!
This and the other replies here are adding to the straw man drift. For instance, “utopian” is something you are reading into things, since much (not all) of anarchism carefully sidesteps that temptation. That is, you are tarring all anarchism with that one brush. It all seems to mirror the one sidedness you see perfectly clearly in woke criticisms of Thomas Sowell in another post, that read him as shallow because they don’t rest on actual research of his position.
I think I’ll comment more fully against the comment of the day derived from this, later and if I get the chance, and if it seems that anyone will take it seriously.
adjective
adjective: utopian
modeled on or aiming for a state in which everything is perfect; idealistic.
“a utopian ideology”
“Jen believed in a world where everyone has the ability to live a dignified and joyful life and worked toward an ecologically sustainable and deeply participatory society in which all people have access to the things they need, decisions are made by those most directly affected by them, and all people are free and equal….”
?
“But pure [fill in the blank] has never been tried!”
A good friend of mine, an actor, actually said to me in one argument,”Pure Communism has never been tried!”
That’s because pure Communism has never been achieved. People forget the so-called Communist countries only aspired to Communism. They were working toward it but never could get to it because the Socialism they started off with didn’t work.
After all, it wasn’t called the Union of Soviet Communist Republics, was it?
Man. This story struck a nerve in the readership and commentariat!
See? And you were worried about EA participation!