News item: As of this morning, at least 61 people had been arrested in connection to widespread looting over two days in Philadelphia. The looting began Tuesday night with at least 30 people arrested for crimes including burglary, theft and participating in rioting. Those arrested included Dayjia Blackwell, aka. “Meatball,” a Philadelphia social media influencer who helped organize and then live-treamed the looting barrage. The viral lawlessness continued for two more days, with shoe stores, pharmacies, beauty parlors and liquor stores being attacked, among other businesses. At least 25 people were arrested for the looting that took place the nextt evening, Wednesday.. Thursday night businesses across the city hired private security. Police officers were stationed outside several establishments, including drug stores and liquor stores. Claudia Silmeas, the owner of the beauty supply shop that was targeted, told reporters, in tears, “I just want them to stop. Stop. Just stop. We are innocent of all of this. I just want them to stop.”
Someone ask Claudia if she voted for a city government that has emphasized the de-criminalization of non-violent crimes and has enabled hostility to law enforcement to flourish in the wake of the demonizing of police following the Black Lives Matter pathogen. If the answer is yes, she is assuredly not innocent.
News Item: Target announced this week that it will close nine stores in major cities across the country because of increasing violence, theft and organized retail crime. One store in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood is going, two in Seattle, three stores in the San Francisco-Oakland area and three more in Portland, Oregon. All of the stores will be closed permanently as of October 21. “We cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime are threatening the safety of our team and guests, and contributing to unsustainable business performance,” Target said in a news release.
New York City…Seattle…Portland…San Francisco. Does anyone see a trend there? What do those cities have in common?
Ethics Alarms 
Already underway. Just watched PBS news hour, which presented a young woman who has studied this “phenomenon” and asserts that the thefts are included in “shrinkage” stats kept by the retail association, and that shrinkage is not increasing much: only from 91B last year to 120 something this year; and that’s not much of an increase because it’s in line with increases I. Retail sales. Retailers are using these incidents to “blame for their bad performance” on their monthly calls, etc. Yup. Clearly not a problem.
Ugh.
A general statistic doesn’t mean much to the specific shops/chains that get hit the most as the looters’ favorites, especially in the jurisdictions that enable it. It just means that Apple’s distressing stats are watered down by little to no theft of water heaters, table saws, and house plants from Home Depot.
Did Claudia even have a choice of governments to vote for? A lot of these cities do not even have meaningful elections. There’s the established government…and the fringe people. Most city dwellers pay little attention to policy or whatever, and just vote for the establishment Democrat, few or no questions asked.
If you were to even suggest they vote for another party, they’d look at you like you had three heads. In a lot of these cities there simply is no other party, and in more than a few of these cities there are no term limits, so either you get the established mayor until he decides the wants to move up or wants to retire, or you get his handpicked successor, and his handpicked successor, and so forth. The only way things change is if they become untenable.
We already talked about this. Chicago had a chance to change, they chose not to. Portland had a chance to change, they chose not to. Once is a mistake, twice is a choice, ergo these cities must prefer this approach. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t believe there is one. Apparently this kind of disorder, danger, and abuse is preferable to giving those icky Republicans a chance.
Here’s the thing: the business of business is business, and companies like Target have to make business decisions. They see the looting, they see the assaults, they see the organized theft, they see how it hurts their bottom line, they see the authorities do not a damn thing to stop it, and they say forget it, this is unprofitable. So they pack up and leave. Anyone with ordinary intelligence whose brain is not polluted with BLM and other liberal rhetoric sees the sense in that. However, those whose brains are polluted don’t see it. They see a racist company run by racist plutocrats who believe taking money away from rich white people is a cardinal sin pulling a needed resource out of a black or brown neighborhood.
Few will say the quiet part out loud, but the quiet part is that these people think white working America owes them a living. These big companies can afford to lose a few tubes of toothpaste and a few bars of soap here and there, they’ll just make the money back some other privileged way. These ordinary folks need to catch on to the idea that them losing some inventory is a lot less important than the young black man stealing it losing his life if they call the cops. In effect, they want ordinary people to learn to be helpless. If ordinary people learn to be helpless, then the criminals get to steal and deal drugs, the police just have to take reports after the fact and say they’ll follow up when they can (i.e. never), and the elected officials stay in power and keep getting another term to work on the problems, but never solve them, so they can campaign on them next time again. Everybody wins…except the average folks, who just get to work away and pay taxes. Now and then someone “colors outside the lines,” and a kid gets hurt in a crossfire, or an old person gets beat up and robbed because the pickings are slim and they don’t want to give up their wallet, or a store owner or would be robber gets killed when a robbery goes bad, and the lines need to be enforced, but it would be just so much easier if people would just give up their wallets or stand back as the robbers punch open the cash register and scoop out the money. Unfortunately, Target didn’t want to play by those rules.
This is why Final Five voting is so important. With Final Five, people don’t have to be afraid of voting for the candidate they think is the best, rather than just the lesser of two evils. Instant runoff happens until one candidate has a majority.
With just five candidates to vote for, I’m fairly confident that mathematically impossible for strategic voting to make a difference. I’ve run the scenarios a few times and worked out the algebra: If you have two frontrunners and three others, it doesn’t seem to matter what order the three others are eliminated in; the same frontrunner will win, because the runoff only stops when someone has a true majority. Strategic voting won’t work; the best course is to vote honestly. Who do you like most, second most, and so on?
It’s probably not a perfect solution, but given how many problems it solves and how minor any flaws seem to be, I think it’s unreasonable to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. For those who are apprehensive about Final Five for some reason, I would argue that it’s, ironically, the lesser of two evils.
The one danger there is that you can get a de facto jungle primary situation.
I don’t recognize the danger you refer to. If by “jungle primary” you mean more than two candidates in the general election, then yes, that’s the point of the Final Five system. There will be five candidates in general election, and an incentive to vote honestly. There’s no way that someone without majority endorsement can win, so there’s no real downside compared to the current system. Is there some aspect of that you think will cause worse people to be elected than what we’ve got now, with the “lesser of two evils” system?
By jungle primary I mean a situation where the top two vote getters will be from the same party so the voters don’t really get a choice.
I don’t see the problem. If the two leading candidates are from the same party, that means that they were the most popular with the most voters, and then voters get to choose which one of them they like better. That means the same-party candidates have to differentiate from each other and compete on things like integrity and trust. They have to appeal to voters outside of their party, because the second choices of those voters decides who gets the majority.
Part of Final Five voting is that it changes the incentives of the candidates and politicians. So far, all the criticisms I’ve heard of it are a) things that it doesn’t actually cause, b) things that don’t actually harm the democratic process, or c) problems that first-past-the-post voting already has.
I like note C. I have a preference for approval voting over IRV, because violating monotonicity, even in mostly hypothetical situations bugs me. I’d still take IRV over FPTP.
… that to secure these rights, governments are … Oh, Fuck it! That’s not at all why governments are established.
Maybe originally, but if you still believe that, I’ve got a bridge to sell you
Someone ask Claudia if she voted for a city government that has emphasized the de-criminalization of non-violent crimes and has enabled hostility to law enforcement to flourish in the wake of the demonizing of police following the Black Lives Matter pathogen. If the answer is yes, she is assuredly not innocent.
Huh? Looting and breaking into stores is illegal in Philadelphia and isn’t decriminalized.
Yeeeah. Philly DA Krasner is one of the George Soros supported progressive DAs who has deprioritized prosecuting various crimes. He has stated that heconsiders some of the perpetrators to be victims themselves.
Last year, the Pennsylvania state House voted to impeach Krasner over a failure to prosecute various crimes and no-bail policies. Meanwhile, police exhibit the Ferguson Effect and do not police proactively.
My analysis was accurate.
I know all about Krasner.
How is it accurate to say the “DA deprioritized prosecuting various crimes…decriminalized various crimes…a victim of looting who may have voted Democrat isn’t innocent” when they immediately investigated and arrested the looters and never decriminalized looting?
It’s a specious argument that doesn’t make any sense in this context.
1) To be technical, they arrested the looters they could identify.
2) The other comments here sufficiently explain why the looting is a natural consequence of government and law enforcement officials pronouncing lawbreakers “victims.”
3) Of course they arrested the lawbreakers this time—because the tipping point was reached, and the part feels the heat. Most of the Democratic-dominated city governments that endorsed defunding the police are also reversing course…now. Your argument is like seeing that reversal and claiming, “See, these cities never restrained the police!”
The other comments here sufficiently explain why the looting is a natural consequence of government and law enforcement officials pronouncing lawbreakers “victims.”
Their arguments aren’t convincing at all and don’t follow any logical sense.
If they weren’t arresting looters and charging them, then they would maybe have a scintilla of a point. Otherwise, it’s just bloviating against liberal governments.
Or, to rephrase, “My mind’s made up, don’t confuse me with facts.” A remarkable number of previous fans of “restorative justice,” elimination of bail, minimal sentences for non-violent crimes and de-funding the police have finally started abandoning your delusion. I’ll be fascinated how long it takes you.
Jordan apparently doesn’t want to engage in actual debate, he just wants to make statements to support an ideological position.
If you believe that you won’t be prosecuted for a behavior for any reason, that nullifies any law against the bad behavior.
Of the 61 arrested how many will be null processed because they cannot prove the value of the goods stolen by any one person exceeded some progressive prosecutor’s arbitrary amount?
You know who never loots again?
A looter that’s been shot.
When the looting starts, the shooting starts.
It’s the frustrating problem of letting problems go on and get worse. Because when the inevitable fix happens, the fix looks drastic and brutal and intolerant. When all along small doses of rightful response to problems would keep the problems small and isolated. Now, rampant and out of control- the fix will be bad or society will get worse and worse and worse.
It’s almost by design.
Similar principles.
https://www.ammoland.com/2023/09/jury-finds-man-not-guilty-after-shooting-youtube-prankster/#comment-2999379
I mean. As cold as it is, I’m less and less troubled by this being an ok response in a culture increasingly comfortable with violating personal space.
Sorry.
Only certain personal space, Michael. Violating a woman’s personal space is a no-no. This was an ordinary white guy. Harassing him is perfectly ok.
The way this behavior is incited, encouraged, enabled, excused, and minimized exclusively from one side of the aisle, I believe that this sort of rampant lawlessness needs to be understood as a form of political violence.
Throughout history and around the world, political powers have used “unofficial” forces to commit political violence when they wish to maintain plausible deniability of their involvement. Think of the Brown Shirts, the Klan, Interahamwe in Rwanda, the Chavista street gangs of Venezuela. These groups typically operate with impunity or near-impunity. The powers behind them seem to disarm the groups’ targets in the name of public safety. Meanwhile, they either arm their own thugs themselves, or simply turn a blind eye as they arm themselves illegally.
If private retailers can’t operate safely or profitably, government-run stores will need to be brought in to provide the needed stores. The goofball in Chicago has already talked about the need for city-run grocery stores. Think of all the patronage that will flow from city-run retail outlets. Thousands of jobs to give out and not show up for, budgets to inflate and squander and pocket. Contracts to award. And the stores will perform on a level that will make public schools look like … well … I was going to say, “the Ivy League,” but never mind.
Their groups are always “mostly peaceful”, and sometimes; like Antifa, “don’t even exist “.
Evidently the retailers are being stupid as well.
https://nypost.com/2023/09/28/the-fall-of-lululemon-how-stores-surrendered-to-looters/
I know (or think I do…again, not a lawyer) that a citizen has no legal duty to stop a crime. I wonder if forbidding employers to report crimes, or worse, firing them for doing so, could be considered some form of accessory after the fact or enabling conspiracy on the part of the ones creating and enforcing those policies?
“EmployEES”, not “employERS”.
If these 61 that were arrested (and others doing the same things arrested in the future) weren’t seen around the neighborhood for several years, that might be seen as showing people that criminal behavior does indeed have consequences.
But we all know as long as there are Soros stooge DA’s and leftist mayors, this will never happen. In fact, I would speculate that most, if not all of those arrested will soon be back on the streets. Another consequence of the no bail policy.
Often I think of this article.
It may be an elaboration of H. L. Mencken’s quip
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
Thanks to “Goodreads” for helping me look up the Mencken quote.
Anyway, here’s the serious article, about 3 years old, from the highly useful “Law and Liberty” web site, written by the prolific John O. McGinnis
https://lawliberty.org/holding-voters-accountable/
cheers!
Charles W. Abbott
Rochester NY