Enough

Watching what’s going on now, I’ve had just about enough of two responses:

“It’s just property”

Let’s say you’ve worked hard, and spent $40,000 on a car. Since the average median income is about $40,000, that’s a year out of your life (your math may vary; If you make $100,000 a year, imagine you bought a Range Rover). You can spread that out over 4 to 7 years with a loan – but it’s still got to get paid, which means you are still going to spend a year of your life to pay for that car.

Somebody steals or destroys it. That means they have taken the work from a whole year of your life.

Without paying you.

And saying “it’s covered by insurance“ is a copout; instead of appropriating the life and labor of one person, you’re spreading it out across everyone. Insurance against accidents and the vicissitudes of life is one thing; assuming insurance is there to pay for someone’s looting or crime spree is the same as saying “this group of people is entitled to that group of people’s labor, without compensation.”

Stealing and destroying things, and saying “someone else will pay for it“, whether it’s one person or hundreds of thousands, is no different than making them work for you for free.

If someone openly talked about forcing a group of people to work for them for free, what would you do?

If someone were coming at you with the explicit purpose of forcing you to work for them for free, what would you call it?

Hint: we fought a Civil War over it at one point.

The other saying: “Complaining about destruction of property is privilege”

Your G___damn right it is. It’s a “Privilege“ you, and I, and every chump Of every race, religion, gender and orientation who pays taxes to any level of government, earn, in full expectation that government will carry out its absolute minimum legitimate role.

Which is not “building bike paths” or “running resiliency departments” or even “making life happy and equitable”.

It is “ upholding the rule of law“.

Which all sounds very square, like the John Lithgow character in “Footloose”…

…until you remember that without some minimum standard of order – for example, knowing that the home you work to pay for and the business you work to build, and the community that you work to create, aren’t going to be stolen and destroyed arbitrarily – prosperity [1] is impossible.

And without prosperity, “freedom“ is irrelevant. What difference does it make if you can vote, if you are working from sunup to sundown to stave off famine and don’t have time to keep up on the news?

It is the same level of “privilege“, by the way, that leads one to legitimately expect the justice system to which we lend some of our freedoms to work, fairly and impartially, no matter who the defendants are.

I’m done with taking either of these arguments as anything but the abominations they are. Our entire society needs to be done with them both.

Excusing looting, whatever its motivations, is an attack on everybody’s freedom. It’s time to treat it as such.

[1] and by “prosperity“, I don’t mean “Jay-Z driving around in a Bentley“. I mean “most of us aren’t out working in a field from the sunrise until sunset, to earn a famine prone subsistence living, so we have time to read books and raise our kids and think about things other than trying not to starve“. Which, throughout millions of years if human history, has been the rule, not the exception. That is mankind‘s natural state, not this relative utopia we are living in today.

19 thoughts on “Enough

  1. [T]he John Lithgow character in “Footloose” was both underappreciated and misunderstood. In other words, he was depicted as a cartoon character.

  2. Does insurance really cover goods lost to looters & rioters? Insurance assumed a working law enforcement environment.

  3. Looting is the “gateway crime” to other, more serious crimes. People with a certain “moral flexibility” (as John Cusack put it in Grosse Point Blank) will steal from a business or person if there’s a bunch of other morally flexible people doing it. Not being punished or only being lightly punished only emboldens them. Just ask David Dorn.

    So glad I sold my house in Brooklyn Park years ago, but I feel for those of you still living in the worker’s paradise of the People’s Republic of Minnesota. Stay safe.

    P.S. Any word on whether Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson has arrived in the Cities yet?

  4. Did anyone else catch the lamestream mediots yelling at the cop spokesperson to not call them riots? Mediots telling the interviewee what to say.

    They aren’t even trying to pretend anymore.

  5. The new edition of the AP stylebook says it can only be called a “riot” or “insurrection” if an unarmed group of protesters break into the Capitol. Destruction of property, arson, and even murder are to be labeled “mostly peaceful protests”. /sarc

  6. Insurance only covers what’s insured, and that after the deductible is met. Beyond that, you’ve got to find those who destroyed your property and sue them. With friends like these, residents of those neighborhoods sure don’t need any enemies.

  7. I asked my insurance agent. She says my homeowner’s coverage does include riots up to the limits of my coverage, subject to my deductible. I also carry an umbrella policy which extends the limits upwards.

    I don’t know if that answer applies to every policy, or every company, and I’d be particularly anxious if we were discussing business insurance since I believe the ordinary CGL may have low limits on business interruption, loss of inventory, government refusal to permit rebuilding, etc., that might not be enough to cover your business debt (see Uncle Hugo’s ongoing problems in Minneapolis).

    Check with your agent.

  8. I’m glad the rioters actually met a police force that made arrests before half the town was burned. I’m all against police violence, but this antifa nonsense disgusts me. One of these days, residents and store owners are going to go Leonidas on them if the police don’t start making arrests.

  9. As my brother in law likes to say to me: “why don’t you tell me what you really think?”
    I love how the shooting of Daunte has turned out to be an execution by a rogue cop. I saw but didn’t read a piece with an interview of Emmet Till’s cousin. Ok, tell me how a franked up police shooting is anything like the murder of a kid by some KKK goons 65 years ago? Other than the skin color of the corpse? And how does undocumented shopping provide justice for the slain?

  10. I shared an incident I had recently, wherein a fellow broke into my machine shed, and was trying to steal my brand-new-to-me hotrod. As I said, when he crawled out from under the dash, he was holding a screwdriver; my screwdriver. I live in America, and that is a weapon in anyone’s book out here; I could have blown that punk the rest of the way out of his pants with 100% assurance there would be no legal consequences. But I’m not a savage, so I didn’t…this time.

    It’s like Berg said; it’s more than “stuff”, first of all, it’s MY FUCKING STUFF, and that’s all you need to know. But secondly, that car cost damn near as much as my first house, and I’m not going to find another like it at any price.

    These garbage people out there croaking “It insured, it insured!” are not smart enough to realize insurance doesn’t get you back into business. It doesn’t cover the replacement costs by a long shot. Not that they’d give a shit if they could understand that.

    The reprobates out there suggesting you need to let shoplifting go to keep the savages quiet know that won’t work, but like the savages they are protecting, they don’t give a shit. It’s not their store; it’s not their house. They can get a cop to come protect them in a jiffy, because they hold the keys to the pension box.

    It’s us against them, boys.

  11. BTW, not one word from fake news about poor little Dindu’s felony arrest warrant for illegal possession of a stolen firearm. Fucks up not one, but two of the bullshit narratives they have going.

    Also, it looks like the best way to get black daddy to come home is for shorty to get killed by a cop…EVERYBODY’S family when there’s greenbacks to be had. I bet those photo ops are the closest that dude has been to his baby mamma for 15 years.

  12. Pingback: In The Mailbox: 04.13.21 : The Other McCain

  13. Kinlaw and JDM,
    I’ve seen from several sources that that press conference including a lot of community activists, not just reporters. (I’ve also heard that the Strib is alleging that their reporter wasn’t allowed into the Presser). I haven’t seen any video myself, and I haven’t heard that those particular disruptive individuals have been identified, but I don’t think the assumption that those yelling at the Chief were activists, not media. When I assumed that they were journalists, I was merely surprised by the behavior, not shocked and disbelieving, though.
    It would be nice if someone could definitively identify the interrupters.

  14. I thought after the May riots, we heard insurance only covered if businesses had riot coverage, of which most did not. Also, didn’t seem to matter in St Paul for the businesses in Midway Shopping whose landlord used the opportunity to evict them all per contract.

    Most of the people screaming “It’s just property” and “respect life over property” seem to be people that either rent and can’t afford a car thus don’t really care about ownership or are the type of people who think John Lennon’s Imagine is actually a lifestyle to aspire to. And all of them seem to be the type of people who see no problem with abortion on demand.

  15. The connected developers and property owners around Allianz Field were thrilled at the opportunity to redevelop after the existing businesses were burned out. Similarly, the city of West St. Paul tried for over a decade to force out a mom & pop bakery near me so they could implement their grand new vision. Mom & Pop wouldn’t sell, so the city tried everything it could to make it as difficult for customers to get into the store, but the place was so popular the customers still came in droves despite the hassles. And then came COVID and the shut-downs. Mom & Pop finally sold out about three months ago, and the corner where their business was located has already been bulldozed, and construction has started.

  16. Those who say “it’s just property” when riots destroy someone’s business ought to be invited to bring their property out for the riots. I’m guessing they won’t be so blase when it’s their work and memories that are being destroyed.

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