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Rutgers student found guilty of “hate crimes”
(See follow-up entry here.)
Here is the latest instance of liberalism accelerating into hyperspeed. Dharun Ravi, the 20 year old former Rutgers freshman, has been found guilty of most counts in the peeping-Tom “hate crimes” case in which his roommate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. I opined last month that the case seemed very weak. The application of the still-new category of “hate crime” to Ravi’s behavior, under the even more questionable sub-category of “bias intimidation,” seemed so strained that I thought the jury would reject the charges.
I was wrong. The jury’s verdict shows that what seemed like a merely elite view that would be shunned by ordinary citizens, has been accepted by them. As has also become evident with regard to the birth control mandate, the nation that began with an appeal to the sacred principle of liberty has entered a new dimension of blatant, comprehensive tyranny. Women’s sexual freedom is sacred, therefore other people must pay all the birth control costs of sexually active women. Blacks are sacred, therefore any true statement that the cause of black failure is not “white racism” but blacks’ own disorderly behaviors and intellectual limitations will destroy a person’s career. Homosexuals are sacred, therefore a college prank aimed at your homosexual roommate makes you a felon.
As I wrote last month:
To any rational person, a main lesson coming out of the Rutgers case is that non-homosexual college students should not be forced to be roommates with homosexual students, as this is likely to lead to the sort of tensions and troubles that occurred between Clementi and Ravi. The latter, after all, had to abandon his own room to allow Clementi to use it for a homosexual encounter, which annoyed him and led to his engaging in the prank for which he is now facing ten years in prison. But of course the lesson homosexualist public opinion has taken is the opposite: that everyone must be forced to associate with, share the same dorm room with, share the same army sleeping quarters with homosexuals, and must be completely cool about whatever homosexual expressions and behaviors are then manifested in that shared space, as Dharun Ravi was expected to be.
But Ravi was not cool with it. He was bothered by it. And, further, it was the fact that he was bothered by it which proved he was guilty of a hate crime. The above linked New York Times article reports:
Mr. Ravi’s lawyers argued that he was “a kid” with little experience of homosexuality who had stumbled into a situation that scared him. M.B., who was 30 at the time, had made him nervous, the lawyers argued, so he set up his webcam to keep an eye on his belongings. Mr. Ravi, they argued, was being sarcastic when he had sent messages daring friends to connect to his webcam, or declaring that he was having a “viewing party.”
But prosecutors argued that his frequent messages mentioning Mr. Clementi’s sexuality proved that Mr. Ravi was upset about having a gay roommate from the minute he discovered it through a computer search several weeks before they arrived at Rutgers in fall 2010.
Meaning Ravi was hostile to Clementi over his sexuality, and therefore Ravi’s peeping-Tom prank was a “hate crime” for which he can go to prison for ten years.
And remember—all this happened within three weeks of Ravi’s entering Rutgers as a freshman. Fresh out of high school, he was delivered into the maw of modern liberalism.
Here is the New York Times article (VFR comments begin here):
Defendant in Rutgers Spying Case Guilty of Hate Crimes
By KATE ZERNIKE
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J.—A jury on Friday convicted a former Rutgers University student, Dharun Ravi, of hate crimes for using a webcam to spy on his roommate kissing another man in their dorm room.
The jury also found Mr. Ravi guilty of tampering with evidence and witnesses for trying to change Twitter and text messages in which he had encouraged others to watch the webcam.
Mr. Ravi’s roommate, Tyler Clementi, jumped to his death from the George Washington Bridge three days after Mr. Ravi viewed him on the webcam. The case became a symbol of the struggles facing gay, lesbian and bisexual teenagers and the problem of cyberbullying in an era when laws governing hate crimes have not kept up with evolving technology.
Mr. Ravi looked down but did not seem to react as the jury forewoman read the verdict on Friday. Mr. Clementi’s parents and family sat with arms around one another, leaning forward as they listened to the forewoman speak. Jane Clementi, Tyler’s mother, appeared to cry as the verdict was read. Afterward, Mr. Ravi’s mother clutched his arm as he left the courtroom in a swarm of television cameras.
Mr. Ravi, 20, was not charged in Mr. Clementi’s death. He faced 15 counts of invasion of privacy, bias intimidation, tampering with evidence and a witness, and hindering apprehension. The jury found that he did not intend to intimidate Mr. Clementi the first night he turned on the webcam to watch. But the jury concluded that Mr. Clementi had reason to believe he had been targeted because he was gay, and in one charge, the jury found that Mr. Ravi had known Mr. Clementi would feel intimidated by his actions.
The jury of seven women and five men deliberated for about two days, following more than three weeks of testimony. Judge Glenn Berman set a sentencing date of May 21, and told Mr. Ravi’s lawyers they had six weeks to file papers in any appeal. Mr. Ravi’s passport has been surrendered; prosecutors had said he could face possible deportation to his native India.
The case was rare because almost none of the facts were in dispute. Mr. Ravi’s lawyers agreed that he had set up a webcam on his computer, then gone into a friend’s room and viewed Mr. Clementi kissing a man he had invited to his room three weeks after arriving at Rutgers in September 2010. Mr. Ravi sent Twitter and text messages telling others what he had seen, and urged them to watch a second viewing, then deleted messages after Mr. Clementi killed himself.
That account had been established by a long trail of electronic evidence—from Twitter feeds and cellphone records, dormitory surveillance cameras, dining hall swipe cards and a “netflow” analysis showing when and how computers in the dormitory connected.
What the jury had to decide, and what set off debate outside as well as inside the courtroom, was what Mr. Ravi and Mr. Clementi were thinking at the time.
Did Mr. Ravi set up the webcam because he had a pretty good idea that he would see Mr. Clementi in an intimate moment? Did he target Mr. Clementi and the man he was with because they were gay? And was Mr. Clementi in fear?
Without Mr. Clementi to speak for himself, that last question was perhaps the most difficult to determine, and questions the jurors sent from their deliberation room suggested they struggled with it.
The prosecution had pointed out that Mr. Clementi had checked Mr. Ravi’s Twitter feed—where Mr. Ravi told others he had seen his roommate “kissing a dude”—38 times in the days after the first webcam viewing. Records showed that Mr. Clementi had gone online to request a room change, and a resident assistant testified that Mr. Clementi had complained to him.
But the defense argued that if Mr. Clementi had felt intimidated, he would have accepted when the resident assistant offered him another place to stay, and he would not have invited his boyfriend back to the room.
Mr. Clementi’s suicide came up only in passing during the trial, when a lawyer asked the boyfriend how he had learned of Mr. Clementi’s death. The man, who testified under tight cover and was identified in court only as M.B. because he was considered a victim in the case, testified that he had read about it in a newspaper, as the suicide prompted international attention.
Still, the death defined the trial, turning what might have been a peeping Tom case or, as the resident assistant said, “a roommate issue” into something far more grave.
Mr. Clementi’s parents, brothers and a huddle of friends sat on one side of the courtroom. On the other sat Mr. Ravi’s parents, who brought him here from India when he was young, and their friends, including several who had served as character witnesses for Mr. Ravi, testifying he was not biased against gays.
The testimony painted a picture of two college freshman, both from top performing high schools in well-off suburbs, who could not have been more different. Mr. Clementi was shy and reserved, an accomplished violinist who had only recently told his parents he was gay. Mr. Ravi was a boastful computer wizard and ultimate Frisbee player who communicated with friends constantly via Twitter, text message and iChat.
Mr. Ravi’s lawyers argued that he was “a kid” with little experience of homosexuality who had stumbled into a situation that scared him. M.B., who was 30 at the time, had made him nervous, the lawyers argued, so he set up his webcam to keep an eye on his belongings. Mr. Ravi, they argued, was being sarcastic when he had sent messages daring friends to connect to his webcam, or declaring that he was having a “viewing party.”
But prosecutors argued that his frequent messages mentioning Mr. Clementi’s sexuality proved that Mr. Ravi was upset about having a gay roommate from the minute he discovered it through a computer search several weeks before they arrived at Rutgers in fall 2010.
- end of initial entry -
Ian T. writes:
If Ravi and/or his parents had stayed in India, he wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. I can’t get worked up about this case seeing as the defendant shouldn’t even be in America. As a Brit, I’ll always side with a native British victim over any third-worlder, even if the victim happens to be a militant homosexual or leftist (but I repeat myself).
LA replies:
Ravi’s race and national origin have nothing to do with this case. If he had been a white American, the charges and the verdict would have been exactly the same. But you are the type of amoral tribalist for whom race and nationality are so important that you can’t see anything else. Because the defendant in this case happens to be an Indian, you don’t care about the injustice being done here, an injustice that threatens all of us.
Ian T. replies:
I assure you, virtually all non-white peoples are “amoral tribalists” as you put it. The fact that even alt-righters such as yourself are holding onto these oh-so-noble principles is the reason the West is pretty much finished. “They” won’t be reflecting the high-minded sense of trans-racial justice when the time comes. A third-worlder has indirectly (depending on your view pont) caused the death of a young white man. That’s what I care about and I won’t pretend otherwise. Yes, it could have been a white man in the dock, but I’ll deal with that scenario when it comes up. right now, I’m more concerned with the existential threat of non-white, mass immigration to be bothered about trivialities such as militant homosexuality.
LA replies:
The commenter’s statement exemplifies the immoral idiocy that take over people when they reduce all issues to one issue. And such immoral idiots, it goes without saying, are totally incapable of maintaining or defending the civilization they say they want to defend. They are more suited to the way some anthropologists describe the hunter-gatherer stage of human development. Mankind was divided into clans of no more than about 150 each, and each time one clan met up with another, they would engage in genocidal warfare until one of the groups had wiped out the other.
I would also point out that one of the aspects of the commenter’s primitive tribalism is that he believes that anything short of his primitive tribalism amounts to suicidal liberalism.
LA continues:
Also, VFR has certain rules for commenting, based on the idea that participants in discussion must have some minimal beliefs and principles in common. One of these is the belief in right and wrong. The commenter proudly declares he does not care that an injustice is being done to Dahrun Ravi (even though the same injustice threatens all of us), because Ravi is an Indian. Because Ravi is an Indian and Tyler Clementi was white, the commenter sides with the homosexualist persecution of Ravi for that reason alone. The commenter should post at white nationalist sites, which, like him, explicitly reject the belief in right and wrong.
Karl D. writes:
This decision is an utter travesty. Here is a young man who probably had a very bright future ahead of him which is now pretty much over. If he even manages to survive hard prison time, psychologically he will be changed forever. The chances of a young intelligent kid like him with no street smarts committing suicide in prison is high as well. Although I suppose some evil people would see that as poetic justice. When one considers the disgusting fraternity hazing practices that take place on campuses across the country that are given a blind eye, it boggles the mind that this case came out as it did. And if and when he does get released what opportunities will be around for him with a criminal record and the scarlet letter of “Homophobe” forever tied around his neck? This just makes my blood boil. I hope this gets overturned on appeal. There is no way this kid should be doing hard time for this.
Ken Hechtman, VFR’s leftist reader in Quebec, writes:
This is yet another case of wanting to have it all ten ways at once. Either homosexuality is completely OK and everyone ought to be and for the most part are completely cool about it. Or else “outing” someone as gay is a crime worth ten years in jail. I don’t see a way to hold both thoughts in my head at the same time.
Here’s the question I’d ask anyone who supports locking Dharun Ravi up for ten years: “Assume there was no suicide. That wasn’t under Ravi’s control anyway. Without the suicide, what penalty makes sense for the thing he actually did?” At most, at the absolute most, it rates evicting him from the dorm and making him get an apartment off-campus.
I’m going to keep saying this every time you post one of these stories: Everyone on the left and everyone in all of our designated mascot groups needs to grow thicker skins starting now. We’re not the victims anymore. We’re not the outcasts of society. We’re mainstream society now. We need to act like it.
Forta Leza writes:
Fundamentally this is no different from a situation where you go to jail for insulting the King in Thailand. Or get lashed for insulting Islam in Saudi Arabia. Every society has its taboos. If you violate one, you can expect punishment far in excess of what is appropriate.
On college campuses in the U.S., blacks and gays are the sacred cows. This needs to be explained to college freshman.
LA replies:
Absolutely right. Instead of telling entering freshmen, “We are a campus devoted to diversity, we are so diverse, we celebrate our diversity,” the school should tell the students in straightforward language: “We have a rule here. Pay careful attention. If you say anything negative about, or do anything which is considered offensive to, homosexuals, women, blacks, or other designated nonwhite groups, you have violated our Prime Directive, and we will cause you serious harm, ranging from social disapproval and shunning, to exclusion from academic honors and advancement, to expulsion from the school, to prosecution and imprisonment as a hate-crimes felon.” And if a school does not give such an honest freshman orientation, the parents of students should explain this to their children before they send them off to school. Not in terms of, “This is right,” but in terms of, “This is the reality. So exercise extreme caution when saying anything. Keep your true thoughts to yourself and to tested friends you know you can trust.”
Kilroy M. writes:
I think your opening comment was a little unfair. Perhaps in American courts things are different, but a general principal of common law is that a jury determines only matters of fact. It’s up to the judicial member to determine matters of law. Moreover, in more enlightened times it was not a judicial member’s prerogative to ignore a law he did not like that was constitutionally passed by a legislature.
Thus, if there is a law that states: “where a certain matrix of facts exist in time, then this law is breached,” a jury has no option but to decide whether or not in its opinion that matrix of facts has been proven according to the relevant standard of proof. They may all think the crime that the law creates is itself a dud, but that’s not their province. The judicial member may think the law is a dud too, but that is not his province either.
Obviously, the jury found this individual was guilty of “bias intimidation” on the basis that the defining characteristics of this perversity were proven. The judicial member was then bound to pass sentence on the basis of the jury’s guilty verdict. Nobody here had a choice but to follow the recipe created by a sick and twisted legislature.
LA replies:
You may be right about the jury, but I don’t know what you mean by a judicial member. In America, a prosecutor—whether the district attorney of a county, or a state attorney general, or a federal prosecutor—has very wide discretion as to whether to prosecute or not in a given case and what charges to make if he does prosecute. It’s not as though there is some rule book which simply tells a prosecutor what to do. The decision to charge Ravi with the “hate crime” of “bias intimidation” was purely a matter of prosecutorial discretion. Further, as I pointed out in the linked entry from last month, the general view among legal observers was that this was a weak and questionable case.
Beth M. writes:
Over the years, a number of people have asked me for advice about sending their kids off to college. I always tell them that no matter how expensive it all seems, and how much they are taking out in loans, ALWAYS to have their child start off in a private room for the first semester rather than accept a random roommate.
Many kids growing up today have NEVER shared a bedroom, and quite a few have never even shared a bathroom. It used to be that the college housing office quietly matched whites up with whites, and blacks up with blacks, and smokers up with smokers, but I think that they now see “diversity pairings” as a positive good. And if the match “isn’t working” for whatever reason, the white kid will get all the blame for being insensitive. In this case, being gay trumped being dark-skinned. [LA replies: when I entered Columbia as a freshman in 1967, I was paired in my dorm room with someone who had various interests in common with me. The school made a deliberate effort to do this. Now it seems schools make a deliberate effort to pair freshmen who have nothing in common with each other.]
A lot of 18-year-olds, girls especially, have been over-socialized to be nice to everybody, and give everybody the benefit of the doubt, etc., and they do NOT have the social poise to refuse to “go somewhere” when the other roommate wants to have a sexual encounter. How often was the Indian boy being asked to leave HIS OWN ROOM? Once a week? Three or four times a week? Nearly every evening??? When I was young, the young homosexuals that I knew were VERY promiscuous, and completely indiscriminate in choosing sexual partners for one-night stands. It was absolutely routine for them to have their money or belongings stolen. One of the “roommate issues” that comes up all the time is that one roommate wants to keep the door locked whenever both roommates are gone, and the other roommate seldom bothers with locking the door. The Indian boy obviously had a lot of electronic equipment. Was it so unreasonable that he didn’t want an endless stream of strangers in his room?
There was a girl in my freshman dormitory with serious mental health issues. I saw her sweet, helpful Southern Christian roommate sacrifice her own college experience in a vain attempt to stabilize the troubled roommate, who ended up dropping out of school after one semester. Could it be that the homosexual roommate, who ultimately took his own life, had serious pre-existing mental health issues when he arrived at school?
If your child’s roommate plans to put himself through school by selling illegal drugs, your child could end up with legal bills that will absolutely dwarf whatever the private-room surcharge would have been, because the drug pusher is going to shift the blame to your child if he gets caught. The Korean boy who opened fire at Virginia Tech had serious problems, but Mommy and Daddy sent him off to college anyway, and his randomly assigned roommates/suitemates, who quickly realized that he was mentally ill, were expected to deal with whatever came their way. The college administration pretends that mental health is a private matter, and has no bearing on roommate issues.
I haven’t followed this case closely, but I wonder whether the Indian boy tried to work through the housing office to get a different roommate. If he did, I bet they refused to do anything to help. The generation attending college now knows how to work every electronic gizmo, and they have traveled all over the world, and they have been carefully trained by the public school system to be non-judgmental about certain lifestyle differences, but they are still inexperienced teenagers who care too much about being accepted and popular. The Indian boy was an immature jerk to set up a hidden camera, but he had no way of knowing that the incident would end with a suicide. He probably thought that if he accepted a gay roommate without fuss that his peers would assume that he was gay as well. I think that that would be typical for an 18-year-old boy.
The school housing office put BOTH of these boys in a social situation that they were too immature to handle, and the results are tragic for both boys, even if the one on trial is ultimately acquitted. This case should never have gone to trial.
LA replies:
Let us also remember that Clementi’s “boyfriend” was a 30 year old. A college freshman was bringing a 30 year old man to his dorm room for “romantic” encounters. This is now normal and accepted.
Robert B. writes:
You may recall that my son had a friend four years ago who experienced the exact same scenario at Augsburg College. A wrestler was paired with an openly gay student who brought older men back to the dorm. He protested the behavior to the resident manager and asked to be reassigned to a new dorm room. The resident manager told him to tuff it because “that’s the way life is now.” My son and his friends protested this decision and it went viral. My son was viewed as the ringleader and was ejected from his dorm room and not allowed on campus except to attend class. He appealed this action to the governing board (made up of student representatives and regents) and won his “case” by unanimous decision. I shudder to think what might have happened had these laws been in effect at the time.
I have to hand it to Ken Hechtman this time—he hit the nail on the head and should have been an advisor to this boy’s legal team. Ravi’s lawyers also failed in illustrating that the Internet is full of college webcams depicting gay and heterosexual sex in dorms. I also can’t believe that they didn’t bring in psychologists to testify on people who are suicidal—his actions did not prompt the suicide, That tendency was already there.
All that being said, I can see the jury, in its deliberations, deciding (to themselves) that this foreign young man had no right to do the things he did. It would not be the first time this has happened and it reflects (if I’m right) the public’s growing discontent. I am not in anyway justifying the jury’s decision. I see the boy’s behavior as a natural response to the situation, and, as I pointed out above, it happens all the time today in the case of heterosexual sexuality in the dorms.
Mark P. writes:
Frankly, I am really tired of reading Ken Hechtman’s “deer-in-the-headlights” interpretation of liberalism. Does he not realize that liberalism is a supremacist ideology whose goal is domination and control? There is no contradiction to wrap one’s head around with these outcomes. These outcomes are the intended and logical result of the liberal system, regardless of what lies were fed to the masses of useful idiots.
Furthermore, while I agree with you that this outcome was unjust and that what is happening is wrong, I really tend to sympathize within the context of Ian T.’s argument. Though I am not a naked tribalist, I have to admit, the war against liberalism is a dirty ground war and unintended casualties are, unfortunately, a necessity.
Look at the context. First, it’s a university, a left-wing commercial interest that surely needs to be regulated out of existence. The fact that stupid parents continue to send their children into this decrepit maw is a strike against them. Second, the conflict involved two tenuous members of the left-wing, anti-white alliance: a non-white and a gay. Had this circumstance not occurred, these two would be working tirelessly to undermine America from within inside their respective speheres. In other words, two devils were fighting. Thankfully, they both lost.
I am not suggesting that VFR alter its morality to accomodate this view. I’m just pointing out that intellectual debate alone with a leftist will not win anything because the Left does not believe in reciprocity with those they hate. Hechtman’s little thought experiments, for example, are useless. Besides, a real American would not have done anything like this. Ravi forgot where he was probably because of his relatively prideful and isolated immigrant upbringing.
What will ultimately destroy the left is driving them to destroy each other, either by cannibalizing their own members, like this case, or having them fall on their own swords. Anything less, and you may as well be a Jew displaying your meticulous paperwork to a Nazi officer.
LA replies: Normally I would not have posted your moronic comment, but this time I’m posting it to show how moronic it is. Because someone is Indian, with nothing else known about him other than the behavior that got him in trouble with the law, therefore he is on the left, therefore he is anti-white, therefore he is a devil?
Then you write: “Besides, a real American would not have done anything like this.” You mean, real Americans didn’t murder Matthew Shephard, a crime which greatly empowered the homosexualist movement and helped lead to the passage of the very hate crimes laws under which Ravi has been prosecuted?
You have interesting things to offer, but your materialism, your consuming focus on power, and your knee-jerk racial reactiveness have all conspired, in this instance, to make you stupid.
LA adds:
I want to underscore this fact: For no other reason than that Dahrun Ravi is an Indian, Mark P. called him a “devil.”
LA continues:
As for Ken Hechtman, he seems to have consigned himself to the role of always wringing his hands at the tyrannical excesses of the left to which he belongs, while never recognizing that those excesses are an intrinsic part of the left. Because if he did recognize that, he would be left with two undesirable choices: of leaving the left, which would leave him without a home; or of consciously embracing the left as it really is, whole hog, along with its intrinsic evils. Since those two consistent choices are both unacceptable to him, he continues with his current, divided approach, of remaining on the left while wringing his hands and futilely advising the left not to do the bad things which the left must, by its very nature, do.
Evan H. writes:
Kilroy M wrote:
… a general principal of common law is that a jury determines only matters of fact […] if there is a law that states: “where a certain matrix of facts exist in time, then this law is breached,” a jury has no option but to decide whether or not in its opinion that matrix of facts has been proven according to the relevant standard of proof. They may all think the crime that the law creates is itself a dud, but that’s not their province.
It’s also a principal of common law, going back to William Penn’s prosecution for a tumultuous assembly, and Edward Bushell’s subsequent imprisonment and trial for failing to return a guilty verdict in Penn’s trial, that a jury may not be punished for the verdict it returns. This concept is known as “jury nullification,” and it means that the jury has the right to return a not guilty verdict, regardless of the facts. The court will not inform jurors of this right, but it does exist.
Wikipedia summary here.
LG writes:
All Ravi did was log briefly into his own IRC [Internet Relay Chat] account to check what was going on in his room. He never shared the video and he told only one or two friends about what he saw.
The fact is that most of the details of the case that the media has implanted into the public psyche are incorrect. This is a further indictment of the left in this whole affair. This is a long but useful article in The New Yorker, detailing the case.
March 18
LA writes:
I need to add a further response to Mark P.’s above comment. I have always said that the word racism is with us to stay, and that the correct approach is not to try to do away with the word, as many on the white right want, but to use it in a correct and delimited and defensible way, as meaning negative behaviors and attitudes toward people of another race, because of their race, that are clearly immoral. If calling a human being a “devil” for no other reason than that he’s Indian (or Chinese, or black, or white) is not racist, nothing is.
My definition of racism is utterly different from the PC term “racism,” because the PC term “racism” is never defined. Liberal orthodoxy simply asserts, as a diktat, that any group-related attitudes or behaviors that the liberal order disapproves of—no matter how justifiable and true (e.g., noticing the existence of socially significant racial differences) and no matter how distantly related to race (i.e. opposing the Islamization of the West) those attitudes and behaviors may be—are “racist.” By contrast, I insist on a clear definition based on rational standards. Since the “racism” charge always has the effect of moral condemnation, and since it is so intimidating and damaging, people using the term on others must demonstrate that that the behavior they are condemning is indeed immoral. (They should also demonstrate that it has something to do with race, but that’s another issue.)
I made this argument in The Path to National Suicide and have been making it ever since. In my view it is the only way out of the existing liberal impasse, in which a person either is politically correct on race, or is racist. Indeed, many white rightists accept the PC dichotomy, and call themselves racists, which means that there is no negative behavior related to another race that they would say is morally wrong. The same goes for those white rightists who deny that there is such a thing as racism: there is no negative behavior related to another race that they would say is racist and thus morally wrong.
March 19
Mark P. writes:
You wrote:
Normally I would not have posted your moronic comment, but this time I’m posting it to show how moronic it is. Because someone is Indian, with nothing else known about him other than the behavior that got him in trouble with the law, therefore he is on the left, therefore he is anti-white, therefore he is a devil?
I admit that my position is not edifying which is why I am not advocating that VFR adopt it. I am not, however, implying your syllogism at all. It is not Ravi’s Indian-ness that makes him left-wing and anti-white. It is his Indian-ness combined with the American Zeitgeist that makes him left-wing and anti-white. The Left is actively recruiting Indians and East Asians into its alliance. Indians and East Asians are already adopting the stance of discriminated-against minorities. How? By pointing out how they are not as successful as their school accomplishments would predict. They believe that more of them should be filling out the ranks of top graduate programs, top university admissions, the management suites of prestigious companies, etc., then they currently are. See, for example, California Asians complaining about discriminatory admission practices in the California university system. [LA replies: But there are such discriminatory practices, as we know very well; they are racial preferences for blacks and Hispanics.] Why are they doing this? To win cash and prizes. Yes, the Left is offering money to these people to be white America’s enemy and many of these people are biting. Ravi may be a perfectly decent person, but he does not exist as an autonomous individual. Eventually, the Zeitgeist will claim him as their foot soldier by proxy. This incident short-circuited that. [LA replies: Again, this is all totally irrelevant to the criminal prosecution and conviction of Ravi.]
You wrote:
Then you respond to my statement, “Besides, a real American would not have done anything like this”:
You mean, real Americans didn’t murder Matthew Shephard, a crime which greatly empowered the homosexualist movement and helped lead to the passage of the very hate crimes laws under which Ravi has been prosecuted?
Real Americans properly indoctrinated in the cultural Zeitgeist would not have done what Ravi did. No college-bound, white, American kid would have done something like that. It happened to Ravi because of the unique privilege of cultural arbitrage that America affords him: he gets to treat America as a place for making money while enjoying the separate cultural life of his own heritage. That is why he was so tone-deaf over the possible results of his actions. [LA replies: All this is your imagination. You have no knowledge that this is true.]
As for Matthew Shepard, that was simply a drug deal gone bad. His homosexuality was played up because the Left is fundamentally dishonest. Here you have it wrong because you are assuming that the other side is acting in good faith. Homosexualism is not “empowered” by incidences like Matthew Shepard. Homosexualism is “empowered” by the Leftist hatred for white America and the need for manpower to fight it. Ravi would still be going to prison if the Matthew Shepard incident never happened. Why? Because the stated goals of leftism (tolerance and nondiscrimination) are not the real goals, just like a “workers paradise where the state will eventually wither away” was not the real goal of communism. The Left only uses this case to go after white men because they do not have the manpower to put us in a concentration camp yet. This case is really just an opportunistic raid on Western Civilization. The armies are still gathering for the Great Putsch.
I believe there is a streak of blank-slatenism in some of your thinking. You seem to believe that liberalism is a product of legalism carried to an extreme by an unthinking application of noble principles, like tolerance and non-discrimination. I believe liberalism is a product of a dark and evil agency, fully formed, and knowing exactly what it is doing and why it is doing it. I think that VFR’s approach is a perfectly reasonable and acceptable form of argument. It is, after all, very similar to Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. But, like Road to Serfdom, it is not ultimately correct, just a measured way of speaking truth to power.
On another subject, you wrote:
As for Ken Hechtman, he seems to have consigned himself to the role of always wringing his hands at the tyrannical excesses of the left to which he belongs, while never recognizing that those excesses are an intrinsic part of the left. Because if he did recognize that, he would be left with two undesirable choices: of leaving the left, which would leave him without a home; or of consciously embracing the left as it really is, whole hog, along with its intrinsic evils. Since those two consistent choices are both unacceptable to him, he continues with his current, divided approach, of remaining on the left while wringing his hands and futilely advising the left not to do the bad things which the left must, by its very nature, do.
Wow … that is exactly the problem, brilliantly and succinctly stated.
LA replies:
It remains the fact that you called Ravi a devil for no other reason than that he is Indian. I think you should retract that disgusting statement.
April 9
LA writes:
Mark P. has retracted his statement about Dahrun Ravi.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 16, 2012 04:20 PM | Send
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