Even a bracing cup of Italian Roast in the morning can’t quite get your juices flowing and your mind ready for the day like a good old-fashioned head explosion! This is what triggered mine today:
Item: “Illinois is moving forward with a bill that would reclassify some “offenders” as “justice-impacted individuals“…House Bill 4409 changes the word ‘offender’ to ‘justice-impacted individuals.'”
The bill has passed both state houses, and awaits Democratic Gov. Pritzker’s signature. Don’t worry, though: he’s such a sober, rational, reasonable elected official that I’m sure he’ll veto this nonsense…
…right?
What’s going on here? Are panicked Democrats even pandering to the convicted felon vote? Have they become so addicted to “it isn’t what it is” deceit—illegal immigrants are “migrants,” killing unborn children is “reproductive freedom,” letting children decide to mutilate themselves because switching sexes is “in” is “gender-affirming care,” discrimination against white males is “equity,” Joe Biden is “competent”—that they can no longer discern when one of their deceptive cover-phrases is insane? And that it might finally alert even the semi-conscious that this entire party has lost its grasp of what responsible government is?
There is actually a reason Democrats in Illinois did this. The new law will add new members to the state’s Adult Redeploy Illinois oversight board who have been convicted of crimes and have been incarcerated. So the deceptive (and ludicrous) euphemism was put there by its sponsors (Illinois State Reps. Kelly M. Cassidy and Lindsey LaPointe and Democratic state Sens. Robert Peters, Mike Simmons, and Adriane Johnson) to both make the presence of criminals on the board look better and to sneak the provision by state citizens who might not understand why felons are allowed to participate in public policy at all.
“There seems to be this rush to take away all accountability for people who commit crimes. If a person is going to get on the right path, they have to know they did something wrong. This apologizing for the criminal, the person who chooses to commit crimes to the detriment of our victims, the people who don’t choose to be victims of crimes, is absolutely incredible,” state Sen. Steve McClure (R) said during the floor debate. There doesn’t seem to be a rush to make criminal activity seem less destructive and take away all accountability, there is one, thanks to The Great Stupid and the aftermath of the George Floyd Freakout. A disproportionate number of blacks commit serious crimes, and attributing the damning statistics to systemic racism isn’t fooling enough voters, so the DEI party calculates that maybe calling criminals something that sounds benign will fool more of the people enough of the time.
As a side issue, I’m curious about whether “justice impacted individuals” are the same as “justice involved individuals.” Woke World has already been flogging the latter, especially in, naturally, progressive- and black activist-dominated agencies and academia. “HRSA offers funds to aid care transitions for justice-involved individuals” announces the National Association of Counties. California, no surprise there, has a Justice-Involved Initiative. Kansas’s government announced a new “Employment Pathway for Justice-Involved Kansans.”
From Western Michigan University: “Doctoral student launches new program to support justice-involved.” From the University of Nebraska: “UNO Report Illuminates Employers’ Experiences with Hiring Justice-Involved Individuals.” From Big Brother: “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength” —I’m sorry, that’s from “1984,” not 2023 Democrats. It’s easy to get them mixed up.
Ethics Alarms 
Two can play this game: Slaves = travel limited migrant workers.
No, they have already taken care of that, “slaves” are now “enslaved persons.” The rationale apparently being that “slave” should not define the person. The person is a person, but “enslaved” is just an adjective for the person.
It is really kind of a stupid rationale. I call myself a lawyer. That does not define me, but is is one of my attributes. And, it is something we do with all kinds of attributes: teacher, mother, politician, homosexual, activist.
But, for certain things, usually things carrying some kind of stigma, they want to separate the undesirable quality from the person, so it is not seen as a defining characteristic.
The allusion to Orwell is perfect.
-Jut
I prefer “time sheet enslaved person” to “lawyer,” Jut. Twenty-five years after I submitted my last one to accounting, I still have the same dream where I’m in a law firm’s offices and it’s the end of the month and I have absolutely nothing written down on my time sheet and I’m not having any luck reconstructing it. Remarkable.
I still have nightmares that I forgot to take my ConLaw final exam.
jvb
This really should not come as a surprise to anyone that’s been paying attention to what’s been happening in our culture and society.
For years, the “progressive” left has been coddling to those that choose to break our laws except for really extreme cases and even then they have a tendency to try to plea bargain to lower offenses that won’t incarcerate people as long, usually making claims of some kind of victimhood. We’ve got to remember that the apparent irrational and immature reasoning of the “progressive” left is that the people who choose to break our laws are actually victims of the system, the laws, and a justice system that’s out to criminalize them as individuals, after all, if the laws weren’t there then they literally cannot be “criminals”; therefore, it’s the law that at fault. It’s perpetual victimhood.
So if “progressives” have a tendency to lean towards coddling the criminals then how the heck do they think they can stop criminal activity; it’s simple, they shift legal responsibilities away from the criminal and towards law abiding citizens. They try to create new laws and new regulations to intentionally restrict/limit law abiding citizens in an effort to curb the illegal actions of criminals. That’s right, punish the law abiding citizens because criminals, oops, “justice impacted individuals” choose to violate the existing law. Here’s the “logic”; it’s your fault that you have something a criminal wants, if you don’t have it or have it available to the criminal then there wouldn’t be a crime. That’s right, you are not a responsible citizen and should be regulated by law because criminals choose to break the law, it’s the irrational lunacy of shifting responsibilities and it’s coming to your back yard, if it’s not there already.
A lot of “progressives” are delusional which is defines as, holding false beliefs or judgments about external reality that are held despite incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
“Progressive”, in a political ideology sense of the word, is truly an oxymoron. Most of the “progressives” I’ve seen or heard are immature social regressive anti-Americans that didn’t psychologically mature beyond adolescence. These people are being intentional scourges (persons or things that causes great trouble or suffering) to our culture and society.
This explains their support for gun control laws.
It is not about stopping the street thug or the gangbanger; it is about punishing the White male conservative. They associate guns with the White male conservative.
“Victimhood” is the right word. Notice how it all is moving to passive voice; they didn’t do anything to be in that situation, something was done to them. It’s never their own fault, it’s the man or society or patriarchy or white people doing them wrong.
To be honest, it’s rarely ever been their fault, prisons are full of innocent people.
The problem is that the bleeding hearts of progressive ideology are not only going along with it now but they’re trying to ram it down the throats of law abiding citizens and our culture is rapidly shifting towards absurdity.
And they will punish law abiding citizens for imagined crimes.
Yep, and Michael Cohen “rebalanced” his Trump bonus to the tune of an additional $30k.
jvb
“Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.”
-Thomas Hobbes
Of course it is Illinois that’s doing this — don’t they have a whole stable of convicted governors, mayors, and the like that probably need jobs?