Earlier this year I wrote about some new categories that would become regular features in my columns, including headings like “Unexpectedly!,” “We Don’t Hate the Media Enough,” “Schadenfreude Corner,” and “Stupid Criminals.” Since I haven’t returned to them in a while, I’ll do so now:
Stupid Criminals
Nowhere do political theories show up more clearly than in crime stories. Most everyone makes room in their thoughts for both punishment and rehabilitation, but conservatives believe that you get more of what you reward and less of what you punish. So their laws tend more toward punishment.
For example, in red states like Texas and Florida, our stance on the death penalty can be summarized by the saying, “If you kill someone around here, we’ll kill you back.”
Meanwhile in blue states, there’s a lot more focus on rehabilitation, and assigning responsibility to anyone or anything rather than the criminal. E.g. criminals aren’t moral agents with free will, but the helpless pawns of the system, institutional racism, or capitalism.
Therefore, in NYC, the judicial system doesn’t look at Jordan Neely and see a habitual drug abuser and violent recidivist terrorizing the citizenry, but a charming Michael Jackson impersonator unjustly attacked by a so-called “Good Samaritan.” Because: racism.
But those two examples are extremes, and many stories fall in between them, at least in part because denizens of some blue cities are starting to realize that their earlier views might have been AOC-level stupid.
Take the case of two armed robbers in New Orleans named Cecil Batiz and Teony Juarez, two teenaged Mensa members who decided to terrorize a clerk and rob a convenience store on December 3rd. After pointing pistols at the clerk and grabbing a bunch of cash, they both demonstrated that they’d forgotten one of the prime rules of robbing people: keep your head on a swivel.
Because while the morons were paying attention to their take, the clerk pulled his own pistol and demonstrated that he knew the prime rule of both suppertime and shooting criminals: everybody gets a first serving before anybody gets seconds. So he shot Cecil in the abdomen, and then Teony in the arm, as he was returning fire before bravely running out the door.
Then the clerk gave Cecil seconds, as he lay on the floor trying to get his gun up. Cecil took the room-temperature challenge, while Teony was only wounded, and later arrested. And the good citizens of New Orleans, upon watching the video of the clerk getting the drop on the criminals, cheered like the Saints had just hit a game-winning field goal.
New Orleans’ DA is a George Soros-funded jerk named Jason Williams, so you’d think that the store clerk is in trouble. But it turns out that in October of last year, Williams and his mom were carjacked, after which Williams said that he had changed his thinking about crime and punishment.
When asked about the robbery gone wrong, Williams noted that “it’s painfully obvious to anyone who saw that video what those two people were doing in the store” and that “once somebody puts a gun in your face, the rules change.”
Yes! Even a once-blind lefty can sometimes see the light!
But not so fast, cautious optimists! Consider the opposite case of Darcie Bell, over in…
Schadenfreude Corner:
Darcie is a leftist right out of central casting: lives in San Francisco; wears Rachel Maddow glasses and a face mask (because of course she does) in her social media pic; has posted many times calling for the police to be defunded.
But now she’s decided to move out of San Fran, as she shares in a X post: “I’m like moving out of my house because I can’t afford to live here anymore.” Even though she’s got graying hair, note that she still includes the superfluous “like” as if she were an annoying teenager.
But with even less excuse, since teens do that as an unconscious verbal tic when they speak, and Darcie actually wrote the word out in a tweet!
Anyway, the poor dear has been priced out of her feces-caked liberal paradise. But that’s not her only complaint: “My kid just broke his femur at one of your many, underfunded SFUSD schools, and there was no nurse present to help him.” Not one our OUR schools, Darcie, one of YOUR schools.
And did you ever wonder why, when you are paying such high prices and taxes, your schools are still underfunded and sub-par? Which party has been running those schools for the last century or more, sweetheart?
She concludes thusly: “Lmao. WTF is this city?”
Answer: This is exactly TF what you voted for this city to be!
But the funniest part of Darcie’s story is yet to come. Because when she loaded all of her belongings into a U-Haul truck to make her move… wait for it… and put down your drink …some low-life scumbags stole the U-Haul!
Cue Nelson Muntz, pointing at Darcie Bell: “HA! HA!”
She turned to social media and asked for people to look for the stolen truck. But apparently there are a few wise guy conservatives still left in San Francisco – Christopher Silber, I’m looking at you! – because many people pointed out that she could call the police. Except, oops, she hates the police, and wants them defunded.
Ms. Bell didn’t appreciate that viewpoint, because her next post sounded a little more like angry Joy Reid or sulky Sunny Hostin: “I haven’t found my sh*t! The cops didn’t do sh*t! U-Haul made me file a f-ing police report! There’s cameras all over this city. They haven’t done sh*t! I just want my stuff back!”
Cue the sad trombone, followed by Nelson Muntz saying, “HA HA!”, followed by Sean Connery saying, “Suck it, Trebek!”
And lest you think that Darcie may finally have learned something…
Cue Doctor Evil: “How about NO!”
Because her last post before “muting” her X thread said, “I don’t care about the people who stole it, people steal sh*t, I just hope they take the stuff they need and I can recover the personal stuff.”
Darcie, Darcie, Darcie. Thieves don’t steal a U-Haul because they need it! They steal it because they are thieves, and because they have the work ethic of Hunter Biden, and because boneheads like you allow and excuse theft.
But here’s a thought that should comfort you. In your leftist theology, private property is theft. So you really didn’t have any right to your “personal stuff,” and those thieves were really just redistributionists, following Obama’s commandment to “spread the wealth around.”
I mean, you don’t want to be an evil capitalist, greedily clutching your precious “private” property, do you?
Finally, we have a couple of blue states clocking in with entries in the “Unexpectedly!” column:
First up is California, where Ken-Doll Newsom signed a bill mandating a $20 minimum wage in September of last year. Ten months later, data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show that CA had lost 6,166 fast-food jobs.
But those losses were worse than meets the eye, because they followed the same period a year earlier, when CA had added 17,528 such jobs, for a net comparative loss of nearly 25,000 jobs.
So a leftist politician substituted his arrogant judgment for that of the millions of free citizens participating in a voluntary free market…and thousands of people lost their jobs.
UNEXPECTEDLY!
Meanwhile, my late, great, home state of Illinois has been suffering under the governance of a succession of far-left goofballs for many decades. The latest party boss is Governor “Goodyear” Pritzker (D-irigible) – #putdownthatcomicallyoversizedturkeyleg – who has managed to add to a pension shortfall that has now reached $172 billion!
That’s right. Illinois Democrats have managed to over-tax their citizens and over-promise pension windfalls to their government workers to produce “the worst public pension debt bomb in the country.”
Illinois’ debt is almost twice as much as that of the six surrounding states combined, and it’s more than the shortfalls of the 33 best-performing states, COMBINED.
So a state presided over by a far-left governor, dominated by a giant city presided over by a string of far-left mayors, has produced an economic disaster.
UNEXPECTEDLY!
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 
Per usual, a brilliant read.
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Thanks, Joseph — I appreciate that!
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