Wednesday Morning Rant [Joe Mannix]

The routine excusing of violent crime depending on the race, sex, political motivations or other grievance category of the perpetrators and the same conditions among the victims is in fact blaming the victim or - even better - getting the victim to blame himself.

JJ's essay this morning has numerous examples of this. There are even more, and they're trivially easy to find. The excuse-makers started to come out of the woodwork after yesterday's subway shooting in Brooklyn almost immediately. The suspected perpetrator complained about the city's mental health services. Before that even came to the fore, a woman who worked for the city immediately blamed "mental health care" in an ABC news radio snippet I heard yesterday evening. Even before anything is known, the excuse machinery spins up.

There is an interesting undercurrent in all of this, in that by making excuses for the perpetrators (alleged, in the case of the Brooklyn subway shooting), the blame is transferred to the victims - so long as the victims are in the majority or are "adjacent" to the majority. By the tenets of Critical Theory in its various forms, the people who commit crimes do so because they're oppressed. Their oppression is because of the existence of oppressors. When the victim happens to be in an oppressor group, the victim is in fact himself to blame. If he hadn't been so white or so male or so otherwise privileged, he wouldn't have made a world that turned him into a provocation.

The pathology comes fully into focus when the victim or his survivors hold a rally or a protest march or go on television to do interviews wherein they, too, blame the victim and absolve the perpetrator. When this happens, the victim or his survivors don't blame the person who did the evil deed and call for justice, but they call for fixing "systemic issues" or somesuch. Whether they know it or not, they just accepted the blame for the incident. If it hadn't been for their privilege or historical oppression or whatever, then the crime wouldn't have happened. It's the "short skirt defense" writ large, and laundered through an intermediary. It's even somewhat more awful than that because in many cases, it's equivalent to the woman herself saying, "I had it coming because I was dressed provocatively."

This has to stop. People make their own choices. People who choose to open fire in subway stations own that decision. Crazy or not, obsessed or not, the person who committed that crime did an evil deed and must be punished. We already have different punishments for the insane than we do for the sane. The crime is not undone simply because of "historical oppression" or inadequate "mental health" schemes. Perpetrators of serious violent crimes must not be excused because of woke interpretative frameworks.

Laundering blame and responsibility through Social Justice in order to frame the victim or make the victim blame himself is grotesque.

posted by Open Blogger at 11:00 AM

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