Miguel recently had an excellent post on “Jump Kick Man” from Kenosha.
We both covered the criminal history of the three men Kyle Rittenhouse shot.
If you follow Andy Ngo on Twitter, he has extensively covered the criminal records of the Antifa members arrested in Portland and elsewhere.
The common theme is these people are overwhelmingly violent scumbags.
Yes. That should be obvious.
In a civil society such as ours, violence is discouraged. It’s possible to live a happy, successful life never having gotten into a physical fight. I’d go so far as to say that except for professional pugilists, a key feature in being a happy and successful person in modern society is not having gotten into a physical fight after grade-school.
We are so conditioned to be peaceful people that most good people are hardly capable of engaging in serious violence.
I have talked about the 80/20 rule, where studies conducted by the military after WWII showed that 80% of soldiers could not consciously line up their sights and kill an enemy. To get good people to kill, they either can’t see their targets (such as artillery or aerial bombardment) or you have to break them psychologically and recondition them to be shooters (such as the military’s reflexive shooting training).
What we know about violent crime is that the vast majority of violent crime is conducted by a small percentage of people.
It’s those who have the propensity for physical violence due to mental aberrations (such as a lack of empathy, i.e. sociopathy or psycopathy) or conditioning (such as being raised saturated in violence).
So, when you find a group that engages in public destruction, violence, and anti-social behavior, naturally that group is going to be a magnet for people with a proclivity for violence.
Most of the violent actors are there for the violence and the social movement is cover for that.
As these movements have gone on they have become more distilled. The people who come out night after night are the die-hard ideologues and the people who want an excuse to indulge in their violent desires.
So it is no wonder that when these violent actors in the mob are identified they have a long history of violence. That long history of violence is what attracted them to the moment in the first place.
Kyle was the odd one there. The good guy who applied controlled violence. Generally the good people stay away from the violence because they are repelled by it. When he started to cry on the stand you could see that he was a person not used to violence who was pushed to having to use it three times and that caused him emotional trauma.
This is the same thing we see with PTSD in soldiers. Interestingly, some of the highest rates of PTSD are among drone pilots. One theory is that a large contributor to PTSD is not violence done to a person but violence done by them. Drone pilots may not have been shot at but they saw the faces of people they snuffed out in HD on a big computer monitor. Engaging in targeted killings as a 9 to 5 job, then going to their kid’s soccer game after work is severely traumatizing.
It should also be noted that throughout the 20th century, despots recruited from prisons in their rise to power. The best way to guarantee that one of your political thugs was a true pipe hitter was to recruit experienced pipe hitters, which generally meant criminals.
The point being, it should be no shock to us that the people in Antifa or at other political riots who are violent have a history of violence. Those with a proclivity for and desire to do violence are always attracted to opportunities to do violence. The Social Activism simply legitimized their violence by the media and pop culture.
The last two days where I’ve had online conversations with others has been prefaced with ‘no moral, sane, prudent people are out rioting, burning, looting, attacking, etc.’ This must be the baseline from which we draw further inferences and policy.
True Words!
There are questions about the accuracy of the claim that 80% of soldiers didn’t fire their weapons. This article is very long but documents many serious questions about the original author’s scholarship.
https://www.americanheritage.com/secret-soldiers-who-didnt-shoot
Yeah, no. Throwing the b.s. flag on pretty much all of that.
Those “studies” were numbers pulled solely out of S.L.A. Marshall’s hindquarters, and so is all extrapolation based on them, most particularly the eructations of the blithering idiot Grossman who wrote the book On Killing, which in actual scientific (and military) circles is regarded as a dorm room bull session that got out of hand, and should have been printed on toilet paper to be functionally useful.
Humans have been knocking each other off with little compunction since Cain and Abel’s time, and anything that ignores that fact is quite simply counter-factual wishful thinking.
80% of WWI soldiers didn’t find themselves unable to pull a trigger, nor those in the Civil War, nor the Revolutionary War, nor any other war before and since, and they were obviously standing far closer to their targets the farther back in time we travel, until we get to Romans in ranks with pointy gladii. The reality is that 80% of soldiers in WWII weren’t combat troops to begin with, and didn’t need to shoot at anyone, ever, not once, nor had much firsthand experience with actual war, let alone the shooting part. The fact that most of the defenders at Bastogne on the front lines were down to a few rounds, or just bayonets, puts the lie to all that “didn’t shoot” nonsense. On the contrary, all military training and logistics supply – since ever – was geared towards getting soldiers to shoot less, not more. That’s why they didn’t want repeating rifles in most armies at the outset, FFS, and why the British were slaughtered at Isandlwana – because of rules expressly trying to limit ammo expenditure. You could look it up.
Kyle Rittenhouse had no military “reflexive shooting” training, yet capped three bad guys in seconds, with a 66% kill rate, and other than a few minutes on the witness stand, appears none the worse for wear. The actual “trauma” is the guy with his heart blown open, or the idiot minus a bicep now, both much wiser, and one happily too late for it to matter. Good riddance.
Ditto for the guy (in OK? IIRC) who knocked off a mess of home invaders with his AR as well, and then dialed 911 to report the fact, in a similar manner. People fight, and kill, when they have to, and it requires overcoming nothing but the switch in the head saying “It’s okay to do this” at a given moment.
The entire idea that it’s hard to get people to kill each other has only been contradicted by all human history since ever, and by the most elegant expedient negative feedback loop ever devised: those who feel thusly are dealt with rather harshly and brutally by Darwinian de-selection from the future breeding pool. Forever. The kill-hesitant gene was crib strangled some millenia ago. The only people left are those least hesitant.
And as any foole knows, “vegetarian” was an Indian word for “lousy hunter”.
The biggest change in modern times is the fact that one’s dinner is pre-loaded onto trays at the butcher shop, rather than needing to be harvested by hand with rifle, shotgun, bow, or a hatchet out back of the chicken coop, but to listen to the ninnies, that lack of experience is more than made up for by Tom and Jerry, Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd, and Call Of Duty blasting away. Yet the overall societal murder rate has plummeted like a stone even as pretend violence has multiplied like rabbits on Spanish Fly, which undermines their whole silly thesis.
Wise people curb those urges until it’s legally justified, foolish people “just do it” for the lightest of slights. But the idea it’s a hard barrier to cross, for anyone, is quite simply recockulous, based purely on the statistics. People don’t follow through on the urges, for good and prudent reasons and enlightened self-interest, but those urges are in our DNA, and always have been. The actual divide is between high IQ and low, and prosperity vs. hardship, not stable vs. psychotic, but it’s overwhelmingly been politics that have turned most people into killers, and the politics that lead the parade is one of the stupidest ideas and forms of government yet devised. Even religion can’t hold a candle to Marxism, and when you combine the worst of both worlds, you get the political-religious abortion that is Islam.
People are not pacifists salad-eaters, outside of Berzerkley (and look what happens to that plan, in five minutes in Kenosha). They’re bloodthirsty omnivores.
If it were otherwise, Catholics would be the small cult, and vegan Quakers and Buddhist pacifists would be the worldwide norm.
The actual miracle is that we chose to kill so rarely, rather than every day being a Killing Fields obstacle course. If life were consequence-free, just going to work would be an amalgamation of The Purge and The Walking Dead, and you’d find that Rick and Darryl were the arch-types in life, not the outliers. Thank a merciful deity or blind chance that it isn’t so. Yet.
So please, let’s bury that bullsh*t about killing being aberrational in humans in the compost heap it should have stayed in, please. It’s good for nothing but rose fertilizer.