The 20th episode of the LocoFoco Netcast is up:
The podcast is accessible via LocoFoco.net, and using podcatchers such as Apple’s and Google’s, Pocket Cast and Spotify. It is also available as a video on BitChute, Brighteon, and YouTube:
Archives for category: Criminology
I am halfway through the four-part Netflix documentary series on Jeffrey Epstein. It is very good. I think all girls should watch it, perhaps everybody should.
Epstein was an Enchanter. He behaved like an Archon: manipulative, resting much of his power on being charismatic and very smart. He not only got about a hundred teenage girls to service him sexually, he gained their compliance as recruiters, and as “hostesses” to service others — Mata Hari harlots — and he used both fear and benefits to ape legitimate contracts, which means, also, the threats and enticements functioned as post-transactional loyalty inducements.
I call him an Archon not just because he reminds me of the Principalities and Powers of ancient lore — the angels, devils, Fallen Ones, Anunnaki — but also the charismatic leaders of States, indeed of the State itself. States behave almost exactly like Epstein did, combining abuse with benefits, in a context of fake contractual arrangements.
But Archon in a third sense, too: Epstein was almost certainly in the employ of some state spy group, or two, or more. He operated a sophisticated sexual Honey Trap to catch illustrious men and blackmail them for … information? influence? So, Epstein was a Deep State player, and thus the worst kind of Archon.
Alas, I do not think the series will go on long enough to cover all of this. One episode has to be devoted to his last few months alive, right? Which means that there is only one episode to delve into most of what I discuss here. Episodes one and two make the case against him that was developed in Florida and by the DBI up to the mid-2000s.
Preparing to be disappointed.
Still, this is must-see TV.
twv
How Lines of Inquiry Get Shut Down
Finally, someone smart and not a coward asks the obvious questions and expresses the requisite incredulity:
The lack of professional curiosity among journalists about the Jeffrey Epstein case is astounding. Eric Weinstein is speaking truth — to power, even (for the Fourth Estate is indeed a power) — here, simply by denying the lies commonly used to smother public interest and coverage of the subject.
But I have a conjecture. I may know why.
Indeed, I suspect everybody knows why: for everybody knows that at the highest levels of government, and feeding around The Giant Pool of Money, the institutions and people are fantastically corrupt. No, that is too light. Everybody knows that at the top, there is profound evil.
You know it, your neighbor knows it, and the media mavens know it.
But the knowledge is suppressed, quite willingly, by nearly everyone. Why?
Well, most people depend upon — and even obtain their sense of “identity” from — the governments that are evil. Everyone is morally compromised, “journalists” most of all . . . because they seek to be the manipulators of public opinion, and they (for the most part) want the power of the State to grow. Everyone has dirty hands and compromised consciences, so the knowledge of the evil at the heart and mind of the modern state is rarely spoken of, and those who do speak of it are scorned or derided or ignored.
We pretend it isn’t knowledge, and because we all speak of it so rarely, the knowledge ceases to be public, and thus not testable. And this, in turn, discourages tests.
It is a feedback loop of corruption, and it extends from the pinnacles to the barnacles.
Of society.
And Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself.
Everyone’s got troubles. But what separates personal and family difficulties from “social problems”?
Social problems, as a genre of concern and topic of discussion, form in at least two ways.
One is when a specific variety of troubles experienced by individuals and sub-groups in society appear salient because of their sheer number, called to our attention by their similarities. When extreme problems are of the same type and shared by many people, then we regard them as “social” even if non-similar and widely varied personal problems far outnumber the similar ones.
Another is when government, spurred by activists or politicians or both, try to solve these problems with policy, by heeding politicians’ hortatory to “come together” and present a united front, etc. And use the threat and application of force to redistribute wealth, set up bureaucracies, and regiment people’s behavior.
The second usually only happens after the first.
An example of this trend can be seen in suicide. My neighbor’s suicide may very well be a family and community tragedy, a cause for sorrow and anguish. But only when seven or seven hundred unrelated people in the community kill themselves do we have a social problem that politicians and activists exploit with some plausibility.
Another example would be drugs. If I overdose on an obscure prescription drug, that is a personal and family matter. But if I overdose on a common prescription or recreational drug that other users also abuse to the point of tragedy, then it sure seems social.
That is how we get “mental health” crusades and the War on Drugs.
But in both cases other troubles suffered by individuals far outnumber these troubles. The disparity of reaction should be clear, however, We only publicly focus on what we can easily identify. That makes the difference. Indeed, we must find a pattern to see a problem worth solving; similarities provide the most obvious pattern.
Thus, what we have here is a focusing problem. Because we tend not to even see the most common pains and sufferings of most people most of the time, we do not regard them as social problems worth collective action: they are too disparate, not fit to be organized against with a blanket “solution.”
This blindness to the bulk of would-be “social problems” is probably a blessing.
Most people solve most problems personally, locally. And considering the common failures of most public programs — as in Prohibition and the War on Drugs — it may very well be that the real tragedy is the diversion of our attention away from personal and local problem-solving to public policy and politics and government.
So, social problems are identified by means of cognitive short-cuts that do not appear soberly rational. And, considering the usual policy outcomes, we should ask the next question: isn’t governments’ overstepping their zones of competence the real social problem?
twv
The great liberal insight was that social order need not depend on submission to hierarchy but on reciprocity, instead — a reciprocity of peace and liberality and tolerance.
When the Other refuses to reciprocate on those grounds, however, then we have a state of war, where we must reciprocate belligerence for belligerence.
This is clear in the writings of Herbert Spencer — what with his distinction between the militant and industrial forms of coöperation and social cohesion — but it is even clearer among today’s evolutionary psychologists (EP) and sociologists (sociobiologists).
Liberal theory — and, after it, libertarian theory — sidetracked the reciprocity issue by reifying rights into a metaphysical realm, and positing their inalienability. This had some political advantages in its heyday, but nowadays prevents people from dealing with the actual advantages of liberal solutions. It rigidifies thought, of course, turning libertarians into philosophical dogmatists. But, worse yet, it throws the problem of conflict resolution to the authoritarians.
Hence the modern impasse. Libertarians are still trapped by inalienability theories, and progressives are locked out of access to the basic notions of conflict avoidance, which makes them crazed. And conservatives and “liberals” waffle between reciprocal and authoritarian solutions depending on the issue, or the politics of the moment. This makes their policies incoherent at best.
And the people, in general, have become utterly disenchanted with all sides.
twv
A few notes I wrote down somewhere, years ago, spurred by someone’s suggestion that parenthood should be licensed.
- Bringing a child into the world that you cannot raise is certainly a moral failure, if not an injustice. I suspect it is an injustice.
- The current policy of subsidizing the children of the improvident — and thus improvident parents — has huge social burdens: taxes, crime, etc. And it encourages more improvidence by reducing the risks
of improvidence. - If one believes that parents have a duty to take care of their children — a positive duty, not merely a duty of forbearance — then parents who unleash upon the world uncared-for children are abusing those children’s rights, as well as placing a burden upon others.
- Freedom without responsibility is an evasion. One common evasion of responsibility is to demand and even assume a “right to reproduce,” but to fob onto others the duty to feed, clothe, and educate those children. What moral argument can justify that?
- People concerned about these issues sometimes suggest parental licensing . . . a peculiarly statist reaction to these problems and challenges. It could be that a parent who is too poor to feed or educate his/her child might better lose rights to protect his child as his/her own, after demonstrated lapse. There might even be remedies in an imagined competitive government society. (But most likely charity would be the norm. And disincentive enough . . . charity being something different from “entitlement.”)
- There is a difference between bringing children into the world when healthy and in secure finance (while later falling on hard circumstances), and conceiving and bringing a child into the world while already in hard circumstances. I know at least one case where doctors sterilized a mother on government assistance, saying it was for medical reasons but which I suspected was for other reasons entirely. (Even the woman in question had this suspicion.) It may very well be the case that physicians occasionally engage in a little social engineering like the one I am mentioning, in cases where a woman repeatedly unleashes onto the world children that will burden the taxpayer. And certainlythis policy has at least surface merit. Were I a benefactor of unmarried mothers, I can imagine insisting that the “price” of subsidy would be voluntary sterilization, for the “social good.”
- These concepts were freely discussed in the early Progressive Era. Unfortunately, the standard of responsibility was social eugenics, not eugenics by sexual selection. Those old statists, such as the vile economist Richard T. Ely, had no pieties about the great virtue of a free lumpenproletariat spawning unwanted and underfed and undereducated children, for it is from the ranks of such offspring that the criminal class solidifies.
- Individualist theories of children’s rights tend to fall into three categories: the Baby Burners, the Baby Starvers, and the Parent Coercers.
- The Baby Burner position was taken up by Benjamin R. Tucker, who argued that children were the property of their parents, who (therefore) had the right to dispose of them. Tucker compared the burning of a baby to the burning of a Titian painting: He might prevent someone from doing such a horrendous-but-lawful thing, but he would be, technically, in the legal wrong.
- Anarchist-Communist writer Viroqua Daniels (writing in the Firebrand) was a Baby Starver, though she evaded that extremity. In response to Tucker, she demanded that “children shall be free.” Well, thanks. But does that mean that parents may starve their children, maliciously? Or, out of shame, not tell anybody as their children starve along with the rest of the family? If children have only and exactly “the same rights that adults have” (the official position of the Libertarian Party when I followed its platform), then parents almost certainly have the right to starvetheir children. This is an ugly position.
- Finally, many individualists hold to a more common sense notion: Parents are obliged to feed, clothe, and educate their children — and should be legally obliged to do so. A parent has no right to starve his or her child. A parent who fails in this obligation faces some sort of criminal or tortious liability. Thus parents may be coerced for the benefit of the rights of the child. From this latter position it does not follow, contra current prejudice, that “society” is obligated to feed or clothe or house or educate children, though this can get murky.
It seems to me that a division of responsibility could better handle “children as a problem” than would a top-down regulatory system. But what amazes me is not that someone would suggest licensing parentage, but that the reasons one might argue for such a policy almost never get discussed. Licensing seems obviously wrong to me. But letting children starve — or pass through their formative years without any instruction that could lead to responsible adult status (by some contractual employment, either wage/salary, or performance contract, or truck-and-barter) — strikes me as nuts, too.
Recent discussions in which free migration — well, immigration — is compared to population growth by sexual reproduction are on point. It is worth noting that in both cases unregulated population change is less a problem when taxpayer subsidy is out of the picture. Contemplation of these issues would, I hazard, lead people to demand less subsidy not only for immigrants, but also natural-born children by natives.
As it is, with subsidy, demands for regulation will likely grow.
twv
Atheists: Suppose there is a zero chance of being caught—why wouldn’t you cheat or steal if the Abrahamic God can’t judge you?
…the title question answered (by Yours Truly) on Quora*:
Ask a different question: suppose there is zero chance of State government from catching you or even noticing you, why wouldn’t you cheat or steal?
Utilitarians and criminologists have long known that for a punishment to work as a deterrent, what counts is not the severity of punishment, but the swiftness and certainty of punishment. And yet each one of us has hundreds, thousands of situations each year to cheat and steal without being noticed, yet few of us commit the worst acts. Why not?
Is it the Abrahamic deity?
There are an amazing number of believers in prison. Why did they commit their crimes?
If any Deity exists, His/Her/Its punishment be obviously neither swift nor certain. Similarly, the State is a mere instrument of fallible man, and is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. And yet most folks don’t commit much substantive crime.** Why is this?
One possible answer: Because we live by a variety of enticements as well as by threats. Among those enticements are rewards accruing to those who practice the habits of sociality and morality. Further, the rewards of long-term thinking and broad-wise (social) consideration are many, especially in a society where the dominant form of coöperation is voluntary, as trade is. Besides, we simply do not have the brainpower to choose to be good in some situations and bad in those (few?) situations where we could get away with it. Finally, we empathize with each other, and this empathy broadens our sphere of consideration, directly dissuading us from harming others, and even nudging us to imagine our and others’ future selves. So, even sans direct punishment by the State, or punishment by a deity, we tend to do right by others.
Indeed, criminals usually fall into two of the following three categories:
- young male
- low inteligence
- poor education/few work skills
The first indicates high testesterone, which is associated with risk-taking and violence. The more testosterone, the more your passions are likely to work against empathy and long-term self-interest. The second and third predicaments limit one’s ability to gain through coöperation with others, thus tempting a person to get ahead by cheating or stealing.
Were the Abrahamic Deity to wish us to be less criminal, He might have made us all smarter and regulated our hormones better.
But, the truth seems to be that we are products of evolution; we stumble on as best we can. Which, it turns out, is surprisingly well, considering our strange heritage and all our psychological and somatic disadvantages.
When you start looking at the facts, and at more complicated networks of incentives and disincentives, you should not be surprised to learn that atheists tend to be smarter and less criminal than most other of what one pollster calls “the seven faith tribes.” They even can boast of longer marriages . . . that is, fewer divorces than believers.
They are, perhaps, the True Blesséd of the Deity. It might behoove believers to emulate them.
Another question to ask is Why do believers in an Abrahamic Deity do so many horrid things? Or: why would they act so badly if they believe eternal punishment is a necessary factor in making people better?
twv
* Minor edits have been made from this answer’s original publication on Quora.
** We all commit infractions under the current manner of governance, of course. Why? Well, there is so much regulation, such a proliferation of laws — but that is another story.
Interesting. The National Review excoriates American media avoidance of an obvious truth, the Islamic roots of today’s terrorism. Or, more exactly, last year’s Pulse nightclub shooting. In “Why can’t people face the fact that the killer was an Islamic extremist?,” the august conservative magazine’s editorial intern Tiana Lowe makes a clear case:
One year ago yesterday, Omar Mateen went into a gay nightclub in Orlando and murdered 49 people. While on the phone with a 911 operator, Mateen made his motive clear: “Yo, the air strike that killed Abu [Waheeb] a few weeks ago – that’s what triggered it. They should have not bombed and killed Abu [Waheeb].”
There we have it. A radicalized jihadist self-identified as “Mujahideen” and an “Islamic soldier,” American born and raised, committed the deadliest mass shooting in American history, directly targeting the LGBTQ+ community in the name of a murdered Islamic State militant.
After briefly relating the results of official investigations, which disproved convenient “homophobia” explanation, Lowe goes on to identify a pattern of media avoidance, fantasy and prevarification on the subject. “With only an ‘Islamophobic’ narrative remaining after those pesky facts, the media have decided to pay tribute to the barbaric murder of 49 infidels with a ‘senseless violence’ narrative.”
“Pulse gunman’s motive: Plenty of theories, but few answers,” read an Orlando Sentinel headline.
The Washington Post referred to the night 49 people “died” as having been “upended by gun violence.”
The New York Times equated the terrorist attack with “a year of racism,” with the insinuation that Donald Trump spearheaded the latter.
It didn’t matter that Mateen intentionally targeted the Pulse Nightclub as an attack on liberal values; his true crime was gun violence. An uptick of fear of Wahhabism and non-Westernized Islam is not a product of observation and inference; it’s irrational, a blanket Islamophobia.
The truth is just an inconvenient narrative.
While nothing in Tiana Lowe’s argument strikes me as obviously untrue, as near as I can make out, she veers off the truth by doing what she accuses others of doing.
That is, while arguing that others miss the primary and plainly true story, our author herself misses the primary and plainly true story: the terrorist terrorized as retaliation against a bombing strike by the United States military and allied forces.
What we make of this may surely be debated. But cannot we agree that, by not emphasizing or interrogating at any length the act identified by the terrorist himself as the inspiration for his retaliatory strike — instead identifying his behavior as merely an example of “Islamic extremism” — a crucial element of terrorism has been elided?
Note what, precisely, is missing. This fact: The United States is at war. Innocent civilians routinely pay the price, in their very lives, in the cause of that war.
And not just “over there” — here too.
Ignoring this aspect of the conflict surely dissuades us from consideration of the concept of blowback, and insulates our military adventures from criticism on the grounds of unintended consequences.
twv
One of the more interesting arguments for socialism is the argument from sectoral successes, that is, with particular socialistic enterprises, the prime example being roads. As libertarian economist Walter Block chided Milton Friedman once, Friedman’s support for public roads amounted to a “road socialism.” And most folks, upon hearing that, would raise an eyebrow and pull out of the driveway and say, “if this be socialism, make the most of it.” That is why socialists bring up the roads as an example of how all-sector socialism could work.
And they have a point: our road system is awfully socialistic. Of the main features of socialism, it has all but two*: the economic good, road access, is not now provided on an egalitarian or needs basis, but instead (1) to all permitted drivers as much as they want, (2) funded by a fairly efficient set of use taxes, on fuel and licensing, etc.
Now, Professor Block has done important work showing not only that private roads do work and have worked, here and there, and could work if universalized. But, let us admit it, his (and similar) writings notwithstanding, road socialism has not been a complete disaster, and is widely popular, unquestioned.
Does road socialism provide a good blueprint for generalized, all-sector socialism? No. But instead of providing the many usual reasons given, I will suggest another way to look at it.
Road socialism in America is an excellent example of how we tend to “regulate a commons”: ruthlessly and with special attention to prosecution (and overburdening) of the poor.
Have you ever been to a traffic court? It is apparent: every unwanted or slightly dangerous behavior is criminalized. The cops are oppressive. The rules are numerous. And the system is exploitative, often nothing more than a shake-down operation. Pleading before the court, the general run of those who challenge the system tend to be abject in their petitions. And the general theme of oppression stinks up these venues, as the states and municipalities nickel-and-dime the least successful in our society.
Think of that system writ large!
On the private roads, there is a perceptible tendency for road owners to provide help, not deliver beat-downs and stick-ups. Road service is more useful than cops, in most cases. Suggestions and highway engineering that encourage safe driving have been found to be more effective than patrolling, but our commons regulators insist upon tickets, property confiscations, and even prison terms.
So there you have it. Road socialism provides a blueprint for social tyranny.
For the good of society at large, the roads should be privatized, just to make life more peaceful and less deadening. Driving need not be regulated by fear. The fact that our most socialistic sector of society is run along authoritarian and exploitative lines should indicate what a bad idea imitating public roads would be for yet more sectors of society.
Go to traffic court, and come to your senses: no more of this! No more socialism. Please.
twv
* Not counting sector limitations, of course.
