You seem to misunderstand statues of limitations in the first part of your essay (unless I am misreading). A statute of limitations is a timeframe in which a charge must be filed. The case does not have to be disposed prior to the SOL running. A timely filed charge can theoretically remain open without reaching a disposition for quite a while unless the defendant affirmatively asserts his speedy trial rights.
It's time to stop hiding behind the insanity/mentally unstable routine. In the old west, that was no excuse. Once they found you guilty, they hung you, period. Maybe it's time to put criminals to death. Having the body swinging would deter others from doing the same thing.
I get the sense that Max has no actual experience with people who are psychotic. Psychosis does not relieve a person from culpability for his criminal actions. Also, the state has a responsibility to protect the innocent from the violence, aggression, and injury which the psychotic sometimes cause. However the criminal justice system - including its prisons - are constructed on the assumption that everyone who interacts with it has a brain that can tell reality from illusion, and has at least the ability to distinguish ordinary cause and effect. This assumption is manifestly untrue for somewhere (as far as I understand it - I’m open to correction) between 2 and 2.5 million adult Americans. It’s a lot of people.
Most of these people are not violent; they’re just plainly unable to take care of themselves. Their care is a massive problem, because our civil rights laws also assume that everyone has a brain that can distinguish cause from effect, and that it can therefore be said that the choices everyone makes are, by definition, meaningfully “their” choices. Unfortunately, because there aren’t any institutional structures left to compel care, many psychotic people end up living on the streets.
Some of the psychotic are, unhappily, violent and dangerous, and sometimes predictably so. Society has a duty to protect innocents from these poor souls, and to some degree to protect them from themselves. The criminal justice system is a miserable institutional structure to do this. I have no idea whether Jesus Alaya is a schizophrenic. But neither, based on the paucity of facts supplied in this article, does Max Remington. Maybe Alaya is a big faker, trying to use the system to get away with a cold-blooded murder. That’s certainly possible. The system, as it turns out, is pretty good at separating the truly criminally insane from those who are just pretending to be. But it’s a near certainty that the judge has more facts to contend with than Max Remington. If Alaya is psychotic, then justice requires two seemingly contradictory things: he must be separated from society for as long as justice for murder ordains and, if he cannot be compelled to medicalized sanity beyond that term, possibly forever. But he also must be treated humanely by the state, never more so than when he is incarcerated. Like it or not, insanity is probably the most cursed of all human afflictions. No one chooses it. You cannot discern it from a smirk. And though it is hard to hear, even those psychotics who commit the most horrific crimes are victims of tragic circumstances themselves. We need to make sure that they can no longer do harm; but we should also not confuse them with rational criminals.
This comes down to the feminization of society that writers like Arnold Kling have referred to in their own Substack posts. Societies that prioritize feminine values over masculine ones seem more likely to look for exceptions for criminals or to prioritize leniency in sentencing and attempt to "reform" the criminal justice system through "restorative justice." A masculine criminal justice system, on the other hand, would prioritize holding individuals accountable and ensuring everyone receives impartial but also appropriate punishments for their crimes.
Ideally, you'd have a balance between the two, but we know in life that a balance is extremely difficult to maintain. You need to have a bias for one over the other. I'd rather have a bias towards masculine values.
The major problem facing society is the erosion of the sanctions that are imposed by the state especially in our urban areas. The areas of civic life where this erosion is most clearly seen is in crime and homelessness. Progressive prosecutors have raised the minimum value to prosecute shoplifting to $1000 in many cities with the obvious result of gangs of criminals taking full advantage of that ridiculous limit.
The ending of stop and frisk policing has resulted in a flood of black on black, black on Asian, and black on white violence including homicides. Anyone in an urban area who watches the nightly news knows this is true but no one mentions it.
The homeless, largely drug addicted and/or mentally ill are also allowed to degrade the quality of life of productive citizens because no one will say: "no, you can't camp anywhere you want", "no, you can't shoot up and leave your used needles lying around", "no, you can't shit in our streets". Someone has to start saying NO to both groups backed up by real action if we are to survive as a civilized society.
I watched some videos yesterday about how clean and safe Japan is. Their success is due in large part to the zero-nonsense policy of the justice system. Of course, the liberal journalists/narrators were appalled at how strictly Japanese laws were enforced. Exhibit #10999 of how liberals don't understand cause and effect or how the world works.
In a country that has more firearms than people, and arguably more crazy violent people than can be counted, gun handling (carry/safety/marksmanship)should be offered at the high school level in public education. Maybe before. It WILL save lives.
Our culture seems to think that teaching someone to shoot opens up the gates to hell or something, that tragedy inevitably results. Keep in mind most criminals never actually learned how to shoot. They just got their hands on a gun and pulled the trigger.
"The same way video killed the radio star, police bodycam footage may very well have killed the Black Lives Matter movement."
Bad metaphor (music went downhill terribly once it began being viewed as being primarily about the eyes and not the ears.) Valid point.
One of the biggest flaws of Left/Marxist interpretation is the notion that there's no such thing as "oppression from below." Of course there is. It isn't the sort of oppression that's filtered through several layers of indirect consequence, either; it's as plain as getting thrown to the concrete and mugged. In that regard, the only real flaw in your photo essay is the way the photos and video give the mistaken impression that these crimes are emblematic of some terror campaign overwhelmingly directed against white victims by black/nonwhite perpetrators. Because the people who are most commonly terrorized by these violent don't-give-a-fuck nihilists are other black people, often the neighbors or family members of the perpetrators. And since it's often the case that the victims are unable to move away (as many of them would surely prefer), they're also often unable to act as witnesses, or even to call in a complaint. Because in crime-plagued lower-income working class/"post-working class" neighborhoods, the real power and control resides in the hands of the most ruthless and violent residents who rule the local streets as oppressors--with threat, intimidation, mayhem, and murder.. With consequences that play out in all sorts of directions, so that even the most upright residents are under a condition of chronic low-level stress that's subject to spiking without warning. A condition that we're now also beginning to see in the wider society. I have my own theories about how the situation got so out of hand--and then stayed that way--but someone will have to ask me about the specifics. I can only say that my hypothesis is NOT a "racial" or "race realist" just-so story.
I really respect Noah Smith. His economic analysis, particularly of Japan and China, is absolutely superb. And he's willing to change his mind in response to new data, which most progressives are not.
He's like Matt Yglesias: a stupid person's idea of a smart person. Not calling you stupid, of course, but he's very much in the tank, he's paid to be the "sane" one. He also blocked me once, so he can't really take the heat.
Interesting. He and I really got into it during the election. I told him his TDS had rendered even his economic coverage almost useless and unreadable. We were civil, but only barely. I respect his willingness to admit his own errors since the election though -- too many Leftists are doubling down and Noah is not.
Noah certainly hasn't changed his mind about postmodernist, progressive ideology, but he's a businessman with an audience is almost certainly mostly male, BA/BS+, professionals. When Trump's voters were all deplorable hicks in trailer parks, smearing them as Nazis was a good business plan. Now that Trump has made inroads (especially among men) with the "smart people" (thanks JD Vance for that), Noah realizes he has to be more careful.
I won't pay him (giving money to people who admit they hate you is dumb) but his life experience is unique and I'd love it if his economic and foreign policy analysis got back to its old level of quality again.
I never considered that Noah's audience is mostly the educated, professional male. Given that, I'd also bet his audience is predominantly White. Too bad for him. LOL
I have no stats to back this up, but I have a feeling the audience for political commentary skews heavily male. I feel like women are overall more ambivalent about politics and social media makes it seem like they care more than they actually do.
There was a conversation going on earlier today about Neil deGrasse Tyson over his appearance on Bill Maher's show on Friday where Maher literally flayed Tyson over transgenderism. The whole thing is an exhibition on why people whose name is built off credentials and expertise need to stay in their lane. Peter Zeihan is another great example. Far too many of these people think that because they're experts in their field, they can apply that same mindset to other areas and speak authoritatively on them.
I find Tyson engaging when he talks physics. When he talks about anything else, he comes off as fake, not to mention just plain wrong.
There are several things I want to say. First, the police bodycam may be the superweapon which chokes off the Left's cri de couer about police brutality. Thank God for its invention. Second, the woman who stabbed the child may be demon possessed. If not, then she certainly is among the 1% of criminally insane, and like the mentally retarded neighbor of mine who beat his mother and caregiver to death twenty years ago, should be in a state hospital for the rest of her life.
I've seen the video of the monsters who hit the bicyclist. If I were King, I'd have them shot without a qualm.
What grates on me is any invocation ever of traumatic brain injury as a mitigating factor in a criminal case. I'm a childhood moderate to severe TBI survivor, so trust me that one of the two or three close to universal effects of TBI is what doctors call "inability to initiate." Essentially, this means that it's too much trouble for us to do much of anything. I've thrown out skillets rather than clean them because it was just too damned much trouble that day for me to clean them. TBI survivors are unlikely to be anyone's assailant.
A lot of police departments were leery about bodycams early on. The concerns were reasonable: it's another piece of equipment atop already a dizzying array of equipment the cops were expected to carry, not all of it particularly effective or useful in most situations. Second, bodycams means everything's on record. The trade-off is that cops have to follow procedure even more; they cannot be caught on official record deviating. This sounds like a good thing, but a common complaint from the public was that cops weren't showing enough "flexibility" in how they handled certain situations. In other words, they weren't Andy Griffith. Well, if you want everything on official record, expect everything to be handled strictly in accordance with procedure. Smart-ass.
That said, in the world of policing today, I feel like cops have more to fear from their own employer and the ruling class than from criminals. Guns serve as a defense against the latter, bodycams against the former.
I think what you're seeing in the killing of Andreas Probst is the "I'd rather free 100 guilty men than convict one innocent man" principle taken to logical extremes. Obviously, nobody wants to convict an innocent man, but I also don't think people realize what it means to let 100 guilty men go free. We should - look at how many criminals out there have long rap sheets - but in our decadent stage, people have forgotten that civilization is an exercise is cold-hearted pragmatism: sacrifice one to save many. We seem instead to be willing to sacrifice many to save one. Clearly, it's easier on the conscience. Amazing how many lives need to be destroyed so a relative few of us can sleep easily at night.
Sorry to hear about your TBI. Even more sorry that your injury is being leveraged disgracefully to justify murderous behavior. I, too, often thought the same. It's like TBI is being conflated with insanity. But anyone with even a high school understanding of science knows that brain damage inhibits function, not enables it. I can't remember the last time someone with Down Syndrome, for example, murdered someone. They're literally incapable of violence.
Thank you. I've gone through life with an awareness that I had to inhibit my conduct, that I didn't dare to do ordinary things, such as being friendly to a child in the quotidian ways which have always been a part of society, that if something was ambiguous, it was probably a clue that I was guilty of something. My mother also died of a traumatic brain injury, when she blacked out for a second and fell. State law demands an autopsy in all fatal TBI cases, and of course, the pathologist found that she had gotten the injury as I had told the doctors she had. Yet, I could tell by the tone of the questioning of an aunt and uncle that they wondered if in a TBI induced outburst of temper, I might have hit her and knocked her down.
Oh, they didn't. But they were suspicious. I compare it with distant, not too bright relatives who think they're giving you a treat by sending you The Complete Sherlock Holmes for Christmas, not imagining that you'd read through all of the Sherlock Holmes stories before you were sixteen, and that you might be interested in The Complete Borges as a gift: they haven't kept up with you, they haven't considered that at thirty you're a considerably different person than you had been a decade and a half earlier.
When I was fifteen, I had an imperial Irish temper, and could be provoked by general adolescent frustration kindled with the frustration which comes with a TBI to take after a collapsed old chair in my bedroom with a baseball bat, but I didn't hit people.
It amuses me in the way bleak things can that their son, my first cousin, is a sociopath.
Makes me wonder if any police are going to start going "off the record" and simply destroy known problems. Kind of like what happens to convicted pedophiles in prison, but proactive.
I've known several drug houses that police were painfully aware of but "had their hands tied" legally. One molotov and things would be much quieter.
Given the failure of a system of enforcement and justice, why isn't "vigilante justice" actually justice? Of course, it is justice.
I wonder how many people have seen or even heard of the 1972 movie, "Deliverance?" It was justifiably a hit at the time, and may be the most suspenseful movie ever made. I've seen it a half dozen times, and despite my knowing, one, that as Hitchcock said to calm an overwrought Kim Novak, "Kim, it's only a movie," and two, what is going to happen, I can't watch it without getting caught up by director John Boorman's brilliance and ignoring that I know that ultimately, the menaced characters in the movie do survive.
Jon Voight was already a star when the movie was made, and Burt Reynolds shows the acting chops which might have made him into a major serious actor if he hadn't been contented to piss the 1970s away with a series of movie roles which were written to appeal to dolts.
At the moment, I'm reading Quentin Tarantino's book, Cinema Speculations, and agree with his assertion that "Deliverance" contains the single most unexpected and shocking movie scene since Marion Crane had gone to take her shower at the Bates Motel a dozen years earlier. As truly great and important a movie as "Deliverance" is, and as coarse and generally pornified a society as ours has become, I really would be cautious about showing the movie to a kid.
It's an important movie because it poses the following question: exactly what should innocents who have been attacked and survived by killing the attackers do in a situation in which the survivors realize that reporting to the authorities what they have been forced to do to survive has a possibility of getting them killed? Burt Reynolds' character, Lewis, argues passionately they will be made to disappear by the local sheriff's department if they obey the law. They don't, and survive.
You seem to misunderstand statues of limitations in the first part of your essay (unless I am misreading). A statute of limitations is a timeframe in which a charge must be filed. The case does not have to be disposed prior to the SOL running. A timely filed charge can theoretically remain open without reaching a disposition for quite a while unless the defendant affirmatively asserts his speedy trial rights.
It's time to stop hiding behind the insanity/mentally unstable routine. In the old west, that was no excuse. Once they found you guilty, they hung you, period. Maybe it's time to put criminals to death. Having the body swinging would deter others from doing the same thing.
Thomas Szasz predicted this.
I get the sense that Max has no actual experience with people who are psychotic. Psychosis does not relieve a person from culpability for his criminal actions. Also, the state has a responsibility to protect the innocent from the violence, aggression, and injury which the psychotic sometimes cause. However the criminal justice system - including its prisons - are constructed on the assumption that everyone who interacts with it has a brain that can tell reality from illusion, and has at least the ability to distinguish ordinary cause and effect. This assumption is manifestly untrue for somewhere (as far as I understand it - I’m open to correction) between 2 and 2.5 million adult Americans. It’s a lot of people.
Most of these people are not violent; they’re just plainly unable to take care of themselves. Their care is a massive problem, because our civil rights laws also assume that everyone has a brain that can distinguish cause from effect, and that it can therefore be said that the choices everyone makes are, by definition, meaningfully “their” choices. Unfortunately, because there aren’t any institutional structures left to compel care, many psychotic people end up living on the streets.
Some of the psychotic are, unhappily, violent and dangerous, and sometimes predictably so. Society has a duty to protect innocents from these poor souls, and to some degree to protect them from themselves. The criminal justice system is a miserable institutional structure to do this. I have no idea whether Jesus Alaya is a schizophrenic. But neither, based on the paucity of facts supplied in this article, does Max Remington. Maybe Alaya is a big faker, trying to use the system to get away with a cold-blooded murder. That’s certainly possible. The system, as it turns out, is pretty good at separating the truly criminally insane from those who are just pretending to be. But it’s a near certainty that the judge has more facts to contend with than Max Remington. If Alaya is psychotic, then justice requires two seemingly contradictory things: he must be separated from society for as long as justice for murder ordains and, if he cannot be compelled to medicalized sanity beyond that term, possibly forever. But he also must be treated humanely by the state, never more so than when he is incarcerated. Like it or not, insanity is probably the most cursed of all human afflictions. No one chooses it. You cannot discern it from a smirk. And though it is hard to hear, even those psychotics who commit the most horrific crimes are victims of tragic circumstances themselves. We need to make sure that they can no longer do harm; but we should also not confuse them with rational criminals.
Above all Men not doing their own dirty work and calling the police.
And Cuz women vote
Cuz rights n stuff
Cuz laws .
This comes down to the feminization of society that writers like Arnold Kling have referred to in their own Substack posts. Societies that prioritize feminine values over masculine ones seem more likely to look for exceptions for criminals or to prioritize leniency in sentencing and attempt to "reform" the criminal justice system through "restorative justice." A masculine criminal justice system, on the other hand, would prioritize holding individuals accountable and ensuring everyone receives impartial but also appropriate punishments for their crimes.
Ideally, you'd have a balance between the two, but we know in life that a balance is extremely difficult to maintain. You need to have a bias for one over the other. I'd rather have a bias towards masculine values.
The major problem facing society is the erosion of the sanctions that are imposed by the state especially in our urban areas. The areas of civic life where this erosion is most clearly seen is in crime and homelessness. Progressive prosecutors have raised the minimum value to prosecute shoplifting to $1000 in many cities with the obvious result of gangs of criminals taking full advantage of that ridiculous limit.
The ending of stop and frisk policing has resulted in a flood of black on black, black on Asian, and black on white violence including homicides. Anyone in an urban area who watches the nightly news knows this is true but no one mentions it.
The homeless, largely drug addicted and/or mentally ill are also allowed to degrade the quality of life of productive citizens because no one will say: "no, you can't camp anywhere you want", "no, you can't shoot up and leave your used needles lying around", "no, you can't shit in our streets". Someone has to start saying NO to both groups backed up by real action if we are to survive as a civilized society.
XXX
I watched some videos yesterday about how clean and safe Japan is. Their success is due in large part to the zero-nonsense policy of the justice system. Of course, the liberal journalists/narrators were appalled at how strictly Japanese laws were enforced. Exhibit #10999 of how liberals don't understand cause and effect or how the world works.
Remember “shop class?”
In a country that has more firearms than people, and arguably more crazy violent people than can be counted, gun handling (carry/safety/marksmanship)should be offered at the high school level in public education. Maybe before. It WILL save lives.
Our culture seems to think that teaching someone to shoot opens up the gates to hell or something, that tragedy inevitably results. Keep in mind most criminals never actually learned how to shoot. They just got their hands on a gun and pulled the trigger.
Guns are a tool. A hammer can kill or construct. The result of any tool comes from intention.
It used to be.
"The same way video killed the radio star, police bodycam footage may very well have killed the Black Lives Matter movement."
Bad metaphor (music went downhill terribly once it began being viewed as being primarily about the eyes and not the ears.) Valid point.
One of the biggest flaws of Left/Marxist interpretation is the notion that there's no such thing as "oppression from below." Of course there is. It isn't the sort of oppression that's filtered through several layers of indirect consequence, either; it's as plain as getting thrown to the concrete and mugged. In that regard, the only real flaw in your photo essay is the way the photos and video give the mistaken impression that these crimes are emblematic of some terror campaign overwhelmingly directed against white victims by black/nonwhite perpetrators. Because the people who are most commonly terrorized by these violent don't-give-a-fuck nihilists are other black people, often the neighbors or family members of the perpetrators. And since it's often the case that the victims are unable to move away (as many of them would surely prefer), they're also often unable to act as witnesses, or even to call in a complaint. Because in crime-plagued lower-income working class/"post-working class" neighborhoods, the real power and control resides in the hands of the most ruthless and violent residents who rule the local streets as oppressors--with threat, intimidation, mayhem, and murder.. With consequences that play out in all sorts of directions, so that even the most upright residents are under a condition of chronic low-level stress that's subject to spiking without warning. A condition that we're now also beginning to see in the wider society. I have my own theories about how the situation got so out of hand--and then stayed that way--but someone will have to ask me about the specifics. I can only say that my hypothesis is NOT a "racial" or "race realist" just-so story.
I really respect Noah Smith. His economic analysis, particularly of Japan and China, is absolutely superb. And he's willing to change his mind in response to new data, which most progressives are not.
He's like Matt Yglesias: a stupid person's idea of a smart person. Not calling you stupid, of course, but he's very much in the tank, he's paid to be the "sane" one. He also blocked me once, so he can't really take the heat.
Interesting. He and I really got into it during the election. I told him his TDS had rendered even his economic coverage almost useless and unreadable. We were civil, but only barely. I respect his willingness to admit his own errors since the election though -- too many Leftists are doubling down and Noah is not.
Here's a really good example of this from today: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-cda
Noah certainly hasn't changed his mind about postmodernist, progressive ideology, but he's a businessman with an audience is almost certainly mostly male, BA/BS+, professionals. When Trump's voters were all deplorable hicks in trailer parks, smearing them as Nazis was a good business plan. Now that Trump has made inroads (especially among men) with the "smart people" (thanks JD Vance for that), Noah realizes he has to be more careful.
I won't pay him (giving money to people who admit they hate you is dumb) but his life experience is unique and I'd love it if his economic and foreign policy analysis got back to its old level of quality again.
I never considered that Noah's audience is mostly the educated, professional male. Given that, I'd also bet his audience is predominantly White. Too bad for him. LOL
I have no stats to back this up, but I have a feeling the audience for political commentary skews heavily male. I feel like women are overall more ambivalent about politics and social media makes it seem like they care more than they actually do.
There was a conversation going on earlier today about Neil deGrasse Tyson over his appearance on Bill Maher's show on Friday where Maher literally flayed Tyson over transgenderism. The whole thing is an exhibition on why people whose name is built off credentials and expertise need to stay in their lane. Peter Zeihan is another great example. Far too many of these people think that because they're experts in their field, they can apply that same mindset to other areas and speak authoritatively on them.
I find Tyson engaging when he talks physics. When he talks about anything else, he comes off as fake, not to mention just plain wrong.
I am not a fan of vigilante justice but no justice is much worse.
There are several things I want to say. First, the police bodycam may be the superweapon which chokes off the Left's cri de couer about police brutality. Thank God for its invention. Second, the woman who stabbed the child may be demon possessed. If not, then she certainly is among the 1% of criminally insane, and like the mentally retarded neighbor of mine who beat his mother and caregiver to death twenty years ago, should be in a state hospital for the rest of her life.
I've seen the video of the monsters who hit the bicyclist. If I were King, I'd have them shot without a qualm.
What grates on me is any invocation ever of traumatic brain injury as a mitigating factor in a criminal case. I'm a childhood moderate to severe TBI survivor, so trust me that one of the two or three close to universal effects of TBI is what doctors call "inability to initiate." Essentially, this means that it's too much trouble for us to do much of anything. I've thrown out skillets rather than clean them because it was just too damned much trouble that day for me to clean them. TBI survivors are unlikely to be anyone's assailant.
A lot of police departments were leery about bodycams early on. The concerns were reasonable: it's another piece of equipment atop already a dizzying array of equipment the cops were expected to carry, not all of it particularly effective or useful in most situations. Second, bodycams means everything's on record. The trade-off is that cops have to follow procedure even more; they cannot be caught on official record deviating. This sounds like a good thing, but a common complaint from the public was that cops weren't showing enough "flexibility" in how they handled certain situations. In other words, they weren't Andy Griffith. Well, if you want everything on official record, expect everything to be handled strictly in accordance with procedure. Smart-ass.
That said, in the world of policing today, I feel like cops have more to fear from their own employer and the ruling class than from criminals. Guns serve as a defense against the latter, bodycams against the former.
I think what you're seeing in the killing of Andreas Probst is the "I'd rather free 100 guilty men than convict one innocent man" principle taken to logical extremes. Obviously, nobody wants to convict an innocent man, but I also don't think people realize what it means to let 100 guilty men go free. We should - look at how many criminals out there have long rap sheets - but in our decadent stage, people have forgotten that civilization is an exercise is cold-hearted pragmatism: sacrifice one to save many. We seem instead to be willing to sacrifice many to save one. Clearly, it's easier on the conscience. Amazing how many lives need to be destroyed so a relative few of us can sleep easily at night.
Sorry to hear about your TBI. Even more sorry that your injury is being leveraged disgracefully to justify murderous behavior. I, too, often thought the same. It's like TBI is being conflated with insanity. But anyone with even a high school understanding of science knows that brain damage inhibits function, not enables it. I can't remember the last time someone with Down Syndrome, for example, murdered someone. They're literally incapable of violence.
Thank you. I've gone through life with an awareness that I had to inhibit my conduct, that I didn't dare to do ordinary things, such as being friendly to a child in the quotidian ways which have always been a part of society, that if something was ambiguous, it was probably a clue that I was guilty of something. My mother also died of a traumatic brain injury, when she blacked out for a second and fell. State law demands an autopsy in all fatal TBI cases, and of course, the pathologist found that she had gotten the injury as I had told the doctors she had. Yet, I could tell by the tone of the questioning of an aunt and uncle that they wondered if in a TBI induced outburst of temper, I might have hit her and knocked her down.
Goodness. Sorry to hear. It's not fair your aunt and uncle blamed you for her death.
Oh, they didn't. But they were suspicious. I compare it with distant, not too bright relatives who think they're giving you a treat by sending you The Complete Sherlock Holmes for Christmas, not imagining that you'd read through all of the Sherlock Holmes stories before you were sixteen, and that you might be interested in The Complete Borges as a gift: they haven't kept up with you, they haven't considered that at thirty you're a considerably different person than you had been a decade and a half earlier.
When I was fifteen, I had an imperial Irish temper, and could be provoked by general adolescent frustration kindled with the frustration which comes with a TBI to take after a collapsed old chair in my bedroom with a baseball bat, but I didn't hit people.
It amuses me in the way bleak things can that their son, my first cousin, is a sociopath.
Makes me wonder if any police are going to start going "off the record" and simply destroy known problems. Kind of like what happens to convicted pedophiles in prison, but proactive.
I've known several drug houses that police were painfully aware of but "had their hands tied" legally. One molotov and things would be much quieter.
I've heard that in some large cities in the U.S., 80-90% of crimes go unsolved and unprosecuted.
Given the failure of a system of enforcement and justice, why isn't "vigilante justice" actually justice? Of course, it is justice.
I wonder how many people have seen or even heard of the 1972 movie, "Deliverance?" It was justifiably a hit at the time, and may be the most suspenseful movie ever made. I've seen it a half dozen times, and despite my knowing, one, that as Hitchcock said to calm an overwrought Kim Novak, "Kim, it's only a movie," and two, what is going to happen, I can't watch it without getting caught up by director John Boorman's brilliance and ignoring that I know that ultimately, the menaced characters in the movie do survive.
Jon Voight was already a star when the movie was made, and Burt Reynolds shows the acting chops which might have made him into a major serious actor if he hadn't been contented to piss the 1970s away with a series of movie roles which were written to appeal to dolts.
At the moment, I'm reading Quentin Tarantino's book, Cinema Speculations, and agree with his assertion that "Deliverance" contains the single most unexpected and shocking movie scene since Marion Crane had gone to take her shower at the Bates Motel a dozen years earlier. As truly great and important a movie as "Deliverance" is, and as coarse and generally pornified a society as ours has become, I really would be cautious about showing the movie to a kid.
It's an important movie because it poses the following question: exactly what should innocents who have been attacked and survived by killing the attackers do in a situation in which the survivors realize that reporting to the authorities what they have been forced to do to survive has a possibility of getting them killed? Burt Reynolds' character, Lewis, argues passionately they will be made to disappear by the local sheriff's department if they obey the law. They don't, and survive.