Error Theory

Nobody else seems to have noticed yet what was caught by the helicopter camera as it flew by the other side of the SUV from where Mr. Crutcher's is standing. Terence Crutcher's body is momentarily visible through the SUV's moonroof and right at that instant he can be clearly seen reaching inside the SUV.  His entire forearm is visible inside the SUV.

The clearest video seems to be from CNN. Here is a screenshot at the 47 second mark (click image for full resolution):


Surrounding video frames show the movement of Crutcher's arm inside the SUV. Once you know where to look you can watch the video at normal speed and be able to see Crutcher's arm pull out from inside the SUV as he falls away from being shot. No doubt about it. So it looks like Officer Betty Shelby will be cleared.

Tulsa police must already know that the window of Crutcher's SUV was down, since they would have pictures of the crime scene that have not been released yet, but Tulsa prosecutors must not have realized there is video that verifies Shelby's claim that Crutcher was reaching into the SUV when she shot him. Otherwise it is hard to see how they could possibly have charged her with anything, never mind manslaughter.

I hope D.A. Kunzweiler's reaction to this proof of her veracity is a glad one, instead of wishing it would go away, but given how fast he charged her I suspect the latter. It looks like prosecutors are hoping that throwing her to the mob will reduce racial tension but appeasement only whets the appetite of the appeased. Kunzweiler needs to listen to President Reagan. "No Danegeld":



Note that it is Crutcher's right arm that reaches in, not his left, so Officer Shelby's lawyer Scott Wood got that detail wrong (at the CNN link), but otherwise Shelby's story is borne out, and possibly the left-arm bit too. Video from several seconds earlier, when the helicopter is behind Crutcher, does seem to show him reaching in with his left arm, so maybe Shelby should have shot him then, but the actual shooting occurred when he reached in with his right arm, which makes sense, as that reach-in would have been more visible to Shelby.

Every category of anti-gun activist needs to be hit where its members are most vulnerable. I have gone after the Newtown Mothers group for angrily demanding that all of America's school children be just as thoroughly stripped of protectors as their own slaughtered children were. Last week Ted Nugent did the same for Jewish anti-gun leaders, who he slammed for betraying their own history.

Gun control enables genocide, so how can the group whose victimization gave rise to "never again" be so heavily represented among those who would let it happen again? That is a paraphrase. Nugent was less gentle, writing "Jews for gun control are nazis in disguise," but the substance is the same. These Jews are advocating the Nazi policy of civilian disarmament that enabled the slaughter of European Jewry.

It is fine to take issue with Nugent's execution. There is a reason I didn't call the Newtown Mothers "Adam Lanza in disguise." That hyperbole would just create more sympathy for these women whose moral perversity already gets a pass because everyone has so much sympathy for them.

But flawed execution does not alter the legitimacy and importance of Nugent's critique, so how about we edit the execution a little and see if we can find some common ground? Consider this an exercise in alternate history.


If Ted Nugent knew how to use Photoshop



The photo-collage of leading anti-gun Jews that Nugent used to illustrate his initial post (the center portion of the graphic above) contained elements that people familiar with anti-Semitic propaganda recognize as impugning the loyalty of American Jews. In particular, the little American flags were originally little Israeli flags with the Star of David in the middle.

Most people would only see those flags as an indicator of Jewishness and it is quite clear that Nugent did not intend any imputation of loyalty to a foreign power. His issue was strictly these people's anti-gun idiocy. So change the flags, do a little editing to the commentary on the individual anti-gun honchos (in red), and make the graphic self-contained by including a toned down version of Nugent's explanation for why and how anti-gun Jews warrant their own special critique (but not too toned down).

So how did I do? Is this about right?
Ted??
What do y'all think?

Nugent has angrily denied that he intended anything anti-Semitic and there is no reason to doubt him. A normal person does not see an Israeli flag as anti-Semitic and if you don't have Photoshop skills you have to go with what is available. Bloomberg, Feinstein, Shumer + 9 more? That's a pretty good start. Just really does need that little bit of editing.

Some critics think it is anti-Semitic to single out anti-gun Jews at all. No it isn't, any more than it is anti-mom to criticize anti-gun moms for wanting all children to be undefended, and it is important to single them out. It is important to go after each of these groups where they stand.

Moral error has no authority and no amount of victimization can change that. Point out the most personal and blatant moral perversity of our various anti-gun groups and their moral authority can be shattered. They want to impose on everyone exactly what got their own loved ones killed. How perverse is that?

Ted Nugent deserves credit for recognizing the validity of this response. There is a special critique that can be leveled anti-gun Jews and kudos to Nugent for stating it.


Turning the moral authority of the Newtown Mothers back against themselves

The reason I immediately recognized the validity of Nugent's attack on anti-gun Jews (while many others accused him of doubling down on anti-Semitism), is that I have already been down this road. When the Demanding Newtown Mothers put out a one-year anniversary video their ticking-clock motif powerfully evoked the pro-gun understanding that when seconds count it is doesn't help that the police are only minutes away (fifteen in the Newtown case), so I reversed it back onto them by adding a pro-gun voice over:



Finally the urgent dread on the Mothers' faces directs an obviously necessary course of action: get those children some armed defenders! Turning their story back onto them works.

So I'm right with you Ted (and glad to have the company). Now we just need a few thousand more. In the meantime I hope people can realize that jettisoning Nugent over THIS of all things, something he is insightfully right about, would be a disastrous and unpardonable mistake.

NYT's "modern man" is obviously gay. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but he seems to think that everyone else should be gay too, or else they are not modern, or not a man? You have to be gay to be a man? Really?

But this is perfectly in line with the double-standard supremacism that the various groups who make phony claims of victim status are all demanding these days as their due redress. It is no longer enough to tolerate homosexual behavior. Now everyone must approve it (marriage being society's stamp of approval), and those who only tolerate without approving are not themselves tolerated, but are severely punished by the power of the state. The small tolerated minority hops directly into a new position as an intolerant power.

By this standard, then of course you have to be gay to be a man. Gays are no longer a minor group relying on and receiving the tolerance of the majority, they are an intolerant group, out to marginalize and destroy all who do not approve of them, and this has become the standard for all of the victim-cliamant groups. The suppression of disapproving but tolerant majorities is the payment that intolerant minorities are receiving for joining the Democrat's 51% tyranny of the majority.

I live in Palo Alto where the high school just ended its tradition of selecting a homecoming king and queen with male and female courts on the grounds that this tradition might be uncomfortable or offensive to transgender students or staff. You know, like when Morgan Hill banned American flags from school property on the grounds that it might offend the large percentage of students whose loyalty is to Mexico, not the United States.

But wait a minute. If anyone expresses discomfort about transgender students they are immediately subject to severe re-education demands if not expulsion, so why is discomfort about heterosexuality on the part of hypothetical transgenders not only presumed but validated and placed as a controlling interest? Again, majority views are not tolerated while minority views are not just tolerated but are imposed on all.

People of Mexican heritage are presumed to be offended by the American flag in the same school where any student to took offense at the Mexican flag would subject to extreme corrective measures by the state. Tolerance for majority views is denied and approval for minority views is required.

Same on race. The vast majority of interracial crime in America is black on white yet the only news stories in which race is raised as an issue are the rare man-bites-dog cases where a white attacks a black. Brutal intolerance by blacks is swept under the rug while tolerant disapproval of the manifest perversities of black American culture are not tolerated.

This monstrous inversion of the necessary priority of tolerance over approval is virtually total within every institution that Democrats control: the news media, entertainment, academia, K-12, the professional societies, most philanthropies, most social media and the Democratic Party. To the extent that this ideology is enforced it is the absolute destruction of liberty to the very last brick, a complete totalitarianism.

The only saving grace is that Democrats only have partial power. They control all of our information industries but they have not achieved a secure majority of political power, so we are not done yet, but we are very close, and the K-12 brainwashing of the next generation will make the identity-group left's destruction of liberty hard to stop.

The NYT's gay "modern man" is a ludicrously bad joke, but it is also a very dangerous joke, like finding a single Lionfish where invasive species had not been previously found. It tells us, oh no, the infection has spread all the way to this far corner of the globe,  which means it is everywhere, and as idiotic as this Lionfish looks it will be hard to push back.

These perverts are raising YOUR kids, six hours a day, plus television time, plus social media time. They are very close to winning/destroying everything.


UPDATE: It is obviously not necessary to the theme of this post that Brian Lombardi, the author of the NYT's "modern man" lunacy, actually be gay instead of just a pajama-boy type anti-man. Either way, the theme of the NYT piece is that to be a "modern man" you have to be at extreme odds with the majority view of manliness. And yes, the NYT piece is written very much in a bossy, "this is how it's done guys," way, ridiculously so, as in Lombardi's "way to be a modern man" #7:

7. The modern man buys only regular colas, like Coke or Dr Pepper. If you walk into his house looking for a Mountain Dew, he’ll show you the door.

That's a caricature of a spoiled eight year old. Did Lombardi come up with his examples of manhood by using George Costanza's "opposite" method? Whatever you think an actual man would do, say the opposite?

Writer In Black offers a full fisking where 25 out of Lombardi's 27 are seen to be pretty much the polar opposite from manliness. Black's non-opposite response to #7:

The modern man drinks whatever he wants. If it's Diet Cherry Mountain Dew, it's Diet Cherry Mountain Dew. The modern man does not apologize for his choice of beverage. 

If a guest asks for something the modern man does not stock the modern man says something like "I'm sorry but I don't have that. Would you perhaps like..." and then offers a selection of what the modern man does have. If a modern man knows in advance that a guest has a particular preference, the modern man will insure that he has a supply of it.  See "courteous" above. 

The modern man's guests never leave hungry or thirsty unless it's by their own choice. 

1. When the modern man buys shoes for his spouse, he doesn’t have to ask her sister for the size. And he knows which brands run big or small.

It isn't just that no heterosexual man would deprive his wife or girlfriend of her favorite shopping activity by buying shoes for her (unless it be with the express idea that they won't fit, so she can return them and get what she wants). It's that revealing bit about knowing which brands run big or small. To know that a man would have to be trying on his own feet the same styles and brands as he is looking to buy for his spouse, which means the spouse must also be a man.

Then it makes sense. They both have girl brains, they both love shoe shopping and they can think of sharing what they know about how certain brands fit, but that is only even possible for homosexuals.

Yeah yeah, Lombardi says he has a wife named "Linda" and that they have three children, but that is what the gays are doing now, right? They are calling themselves husband and wife and adopting children. I just hope the kids come out okay.

17. Does the modern man have a melon baller? What do you think? How else would the cantaloupe, watermelon and honeydew he serves be so uniformly shaped?

Can you say "that's so gay"? Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's gayer than Saint Patrick's Day in San Francisco.

Okay, here's one that isn't gay, unless a person wants to put a nasty negative spin on gayness:

25. The modern man has no use for a gun. He doesn’t own one, and he never will.

That is a wussified, pantywaist, icky-ew type flaming, which is really an unfair caricature of homosexuality. Homosexuals are not morons.

But that's the only contra-indication to Mr. Lombardi being gay. His list finishes strong on the female-brained theme:

26. The modern man cries. He cries often.

Like, at that time of the month?

27. People aren’t sure if the modern man is a good dancer or not. That is, until the D.J. plays his jam and he goes out there and puts on a clinic.

Dancing is neither gay nor straight, but if ever there was a sentence that reads with a lisp...

At the very least, Brian Lombardi is a definite putths.

Two years after George Zimmerman’s acquittal widespread pre-trial misinformation about Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin remains set in media stone. It’s as if the trial never happened. After the last spate of coverage for Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin I started rounding up a survey of the coverage. That was back in February when the DOJ announced it would not file civil rights charges against Zimmerman.

As documented below, almost every news report summarized Zimmerman’s shooting of Martin as occurring while Martin was on the way back to his father’s house from a nearby 7-Eleven. That is a direct contradiction of the testimony from Martin’s friend Rachel Jeantel who had been on the phone with Martin when Martin and Zimmerman first saw each other. Martin initially started to approach Zimmerman, then decided to run away, at which point his phone call with Jeantel disconnected. She said in court that when they reconnected a short time later Martin sounded tired and told her that he was back by his father’s house (first reported by Andrew Branca at Legal Insurrection).

The fatal confrontation occurred a couple of minutes later about a hundred yards back in the direction where Martin and Zimmerman had first seen each other. Thus the best and only evidence we have says that the beating of Zimmerman by Martin and the shooting of Martin by Zimmerman occurred, not when Martin was on his way home, but shortly after he left home, apparently in search of Zimmerman, who he called a “creepy ass cracker” according to Jeantel.

Of course that changes everything. It strongly suggests that Martin went back out to find Zimmerman, which strongly supports Zimmerman’s claim that it was Martin who initiated the confrontation and Martin who attacked him.

This best and only evidence about the actual sequence of events doesn't tell the story that our Democrat-dominated media wants to tell. They believe that stories of black victimization are advantageous for their political side so that is what they publish, the facts be damned.

When civil rights charges were not filed against Zimmerman most news reports explained this result by emphasizing the difficulty of proving that the reason Zimmerman shot Martin is because Martin was black, and their counter-to-evidence statement of the facts allowed them to create the impression that it was likely that the shooting of Travyon Martin was a race-motivated execution. Thus was the utter lack of any case against Zimmerman presented as yet another re-victimization of the black community.

Several major news reports went so far as to assert another strongly counter-to-evidence claim: that it was Zimmerman who initiated the fatal confrontation, and The New York Times fixed blame further by reporting that Zimmerman “got out of his car — ignoring the advice of a police dispatcher.” Anyone who is willing to listen to the recording of the call can verify for themselves that it was only after Zimmerman was already out of his car and could be heard getting winded that the police dispatcher advised him not to follow, at which point Zimmerman immediately replied “okay.”

The claim that Zimmerman declined to follow police advice is just a flat lie, which is no surprise. The Grey Lady is always the worst violator of journalistic ethics. Every lie that fits in print, if it serves the Democratic party’s perverse conception of its own interests.

This is obviously never going to stop so the second anniversary of Zimmerman’s acquittal seems a good time to lay out the actual evidence from the trial as it contradicts the media’s ongoing narrative. To keep this post manageable I am putting a lot of documentation (full survey results, etcetera) in a set of five addenda.  The body of the post focuses on the evidence that Martin made it home before the fatal confrontation, and the front page coverage that this revelation received during the trial.

All the reporters know about it! Which makes their counter-to-evidence statements of fact all the more damning. Here are the first three summaries of the shooting incident that I came across when the DOJ announced there would be no civil rights charges against Zimmerman.

It's a huge error, and one that just lost us the battle for Islamic hearts and minds. The appeal for tolerance is moral and right. A demand that society approve of homosexual relationships is morally insane, and will destroy whatever moral standing we had to appeal on the world stage for tolerance of homosexuality.

Homosexuals have a right to be tolerated but no one has a right to approval and marriage is society's stamp of approval, thus the only legitimate path to gay marriage is through majority support, a path that SCOTUS has now cut off with their Obergefell v. Hodges decision. To do it they annihilated the distinction between tolerance and approval, which is the foundation of all of our liberty. Five half-educated lawyers who don't even grasp the distinction between tolerance and approval are completely oblivious to the magnitude of the pillar that they just removed from our system of liberty.

It's like knocking out a bottom corner of the Empire State building to make room for some extra parking. They have absolutely no idea what they have done, and homosexuals, who will always be a very small minority, utterly dependent on the tolerance of society, will suffer as much as anyone by the Court's destruction of the principle of tolerance. Do homosexuals think that their need for tolerance is past? Have they looked at the world recently?

Tolerance is in for the fight of its life and yet our system of law, at the very highest level, has suddenly wadded it together with approval, which is a near opposite. It is not tolerance to abide what you approve. Tolerance is abiding what you don't approve, and that is the one thing necessary for pluralism to exist. So we have this stab at the heart of pluralism, just as the totalitarian communists, feminists, and other groupists in the U.S., and the totalitarian Islamofascists everywhere, are ascendant in their power.

Tolerance has taken a huge hit, with implications far beyond this one issue. We now no longer have a coherent legal concept of tolerance to defend. How are we going to sell tolerance to the Islamic world when we have just declared that it means approval, that to be civilized according to our understanding of natural right Muslims don’t just have to stop throwing homosexuals off of rooftops but that they have to give their blessing to homosexuality and consecrate homosexual relations with their rites of social and religious commitment?

Sorry, but that declaration is wrong, and the Court’s assertion that it is right just lost us the battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim world. If the Court was right then losing Muslims would be okay. If we have to have WWIII with these people then we have to have WWIII. Follow right and let the chips fall where they may, but we followed wrong. Natural right demands tolerance, not approval, and nothing could be more basic. The violation of our own fundamental principles here is immense and will be debilitating.


Scott Walker's facebook post on the Supreme Court's sudden invention of a right to gay marriage

My remarks above were composed as a comment on Walker's post, which I think is very good. Here is Governor Walker's opening paragraph:

I believe this Supreme Court decision is a grave mistake. Five unelected judges have taken it upon themselves to redefine the institution of marriage, an institution that the author of this decision acknowledges ‘has been with us for millennia.’ In 2006 I, like millions of Americans, voted to amend our state constitution to protect the institution of marriage from exactly this type of judicial activism. The states are the proper place for these decisions to be made, and as we have seen repeatedly over the last few days, we will need a conservative president who will appoint men and women to the Court who will faithfully interpret the Constitution and laws of our land without injecting their own political agendas. As a result of this decision, the only alternative left for the American people is to support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to reaffirm the ability of the states to continue to define marriage.

Yes, the issue must be left to majority rule. As Governor of Wisconsin it is fully appropriate for Walker to assert the primacy of state majorities. National majority-rule could also be legitimate, and given our Constitutions's "full faith and credit" clause (that "Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state), a national majority decision may be required, but when decisions can be lived with locally then the more local majority rule affords more liberty and is preferable on that basis.

Walker also correctly identifies one of the key legal points: that what the Supreme Court has done is change the definition of marriage. This fact vitiates the Court's equal protection argument. Homosexuals have always had an equal legal opportunity to marry someone of the opposite sex (the millennia-old definition of marriage), but what they wanted was something else entirely new, something that no one else had ever had before: legal sanction for marrying someone of the same sex (a new definition of marriage). But the equal protection clause cannot redefine marriage. It can only require equal treatment for the same activity engaged by different persons, not between different activities engaged by different persons.

I'm surprised to find myself agreeing with Huckabee about anything, but he also nails this one:

This ruling is not about marriage equality, it’s about marriage redefinition.

This is the difference between gay marriage and the old laws against interracial marriage, which the Court rightly struck down in Loving v. Virginia. In Loving interracial couples were being denied the ability to marry a chosen mate of the opposite sex. They were not seeking to redefine marriage, only seeking equal access to marriage as it had always been defined. Redefining marriage is something altogether different which goes beyond the scope of the simple concept of equal protection.

Loving does deserve some of the blame for the current debacle, but only because the Supremes were not prescient in that case about how liberty rights to engage in intimate relationships were about to become dis-entangled from the institution of marriage.  I come back to this history in the last section of this post.


The distinction between tolerance and approval derives from John Stuart Mill's distinction between "direct" and "indirect" interests

My 2009 essay, "Gay marriage is not a right," explains how the principle of maximum equal liberty (arguably implied by the "inalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence) give rise to John Stuart Mill's famous principle of liberty, where "direct interests" (interests that impinge physically on a person's liberty or security) must take complete priority (what modern moral philosophers might call "lexical priority") over indirect interests (vicarious interests in what other people are doing or in what others think about what you are doing).

This distinction between direct and indirect interests gives rise in turn to the distinction between tolerance and approval, so the lexical priority of direct over indirect interests (necessary for the securing of maximum equal liberty) becomes in turn a lexical priority for tolerance over approval.

Approval interests (such as the homosexual interest in gay marriage) are to be given zero weight against the need for tolerance (or direct liberty interests). Thus for instance, even if homosexual marriage were to be granted social approval via legitimate means (by majority decision), it still could never justify punishment for those who refuse to participate (by baking cakes, conducting ceremonies, etcetera). Toleration of that personal preference must take absolute precedence over anyone demands for approval.

The connection to Mill's distinction between direct and indirect interests is well worth going into (the link above) if you are interested. Legal analysis does not get to these moral-philosophical fundamentals, thus is no surprise that five Supreme Court justices, who know nothing but legal analysis, and clearly do not care very much about even its principles and warnings, would turn out to be so incompetent when they start trying to identify unenumerated rights. They need to know a lot more than they do and have a lot more circumspection, but the relevant moral philosophy is clear, and shows the right answer, if we follow it.

Ideally we should seek to articulate the maximum equal liberty implied by the inalienable rights of the Declaration, but if it is adopted as a legal protection it should be adopted by amendment.  In very limited fashion and only when necessary it might be legitimate to use the inalienable rights of the declaration to help discern the unenumerated rights of the Ninth Amendment. What the courts should obviously never do is proclaim unenumerated rights that go directly against the maximum equal liberty implied by the Declaration, as the Supreme Court has done by conflating tolerance and approval (direct and indirect interests) in its Obergefell decision.


Indications are that the Court, after wadding tolerance and approval together, will next get the priority between tolerance and approval backwards

Without understanding the lexical priority of direct over indirect interests, and the lexical priority of tolerance over approval that derives from it, the Court going forward will have no basis for getting this priority right, or even recognizing that a distinction between tolerance and approval needs to be made. Indeed, given all they have gotten wrong, we can be pretty sure that the follow-on questions are going to be decided just as egregiously.

And so here we are, where support for the tiny minority of homosexuals, who are utterly dependent on the tolerance of society, has been transformed into a political-legal war of extreme intolerance for those who do not approve of their relationships. It is a complete inversion of the necessary priority of tolerance over approval, led now by the Supreme Court of the United States, and if it is not reversed it is going to destroy this country, which had until now been the leading light of liberty in the world. Suddenly we are looking more and more like just another fount of unprincipled illiberalism.


As so often happens, Justice Thomas is the only one who gets the basic issue right

Thomas's Obergefell dissent does not make the distinction between tolerance and approval but he does makes a closely related distinction, noting that protected liberties have never been taken to include rights to government provided entitlements, as the particular emoluments of legal marriage status (and the government provided stamp-of-approval), can properly be classed.

Tolerance (liberty) takes absolute priority over all other concerns, be they claims of entitlement or demands for approval.


Statement by Grant Starrett on the Obergefell v. Hodges decision

Grant Starrett, now running for Congress in Tennessee, also has a nice statement on the Supreme Court's terrible decision:

If we desire to live in a constitutional republic, we ought to start recognizing its boundaries. The Constitution has power because the sovereign American people affirmed a particular interpretation at the time that its language was passed. I challenge the notion that any drafter of the 14th Amendment, much less the Framers of the Constitution, possibly imagined, in their wildest dreams, that what they were writing would require that every state give marriage licenses to same sex couples. Unfortunately, five unelected lawyers have overridden the will of the 80% of Tennessee voters who approved a constitutional amendment guaranteeing traditional marriage. I fear the vast implications of activist judges, unmoored from the original meaning of our Constitution, imposing their agenda through reinterpretations of our founding documents.