Looking out of a broken window.

Posted by Pointman on January 27, 2017 · 15 Comments 

Even in ancient Roman times when a bunch of raw recruits joined the legion, it became someone’s job to train them. The guiding principles used by the ancient equivalent of a drill sergeant are the same ones in use to this very day, because they’re sensible and they work. You start out on them hard, picking up on every single mistake no matter how minor. Near enough, close enough – just isn’t good enough anymore, it has to be spot on.

You run them ragged, picking up on every infraction and tearing them off a strip every single time. If you’re any good at your job as a trainer, they soon learn to perform their new profession to an acceptable standard. When they start to get up to speed, you ease up gradually and see what you’ve built.

They’re starting to walk with a certain swagger; pride in what they’ve achieved. They’ll always surprise you with what they’ve become and it’s one of life’s pleasures to think you’ve had a hand in making them really good at something, sometimes for the very first time in their life.

What’s actually happening in that process is you’re modifying behaviour in a beneficial direction by not allowing undesirable behaviour even in minor things. It’s not so much a case of look after the small things and the bigger ones will look after themselves, but rather catch a small fire early and direct it before it becomes a raging inferno which can’t be controlled. The people who got me through my substantive education would have used the phrase “keeping up standards”.

The idea has been codified as the broken windows theory by various people working in the field of experimental psychology. It gets its name from the idea that if an empty house has a broken window and it’s not quickly repaired, pretty soon vandals will break other windows, then break in to do more vandalism or just to occupy it for their own purposes.

It’s a gradual process and if you follow the Wiki link to the details of the theory, it applies equally in both deprived or well-to-do neighbourhoods, the only difference being in the speed with which the process proceeds.

Like a lot of work done in experimental psychology such as Milgram’s, it seems to upset sociologists greatly. I think it’s because it’s irrefutable and apolitical; human nature is as it is and we must learn to work with it rather than bend it to fit into some pet theories about how we’d like people to be. Throwing a hissy fit isn’t going to change the results of a real-world experiment.

The idea formed the theoretical basis to a new approach to policing called zero tolerance. Basically, any and all infringements of the law were picked up on and persued to some sort of punishment. It was used very successfully to roll back out of control crime rates in Philadelphia, New York and some other cities. Chicago looks about ready for a dose of it, judging by the murder and mayhem statistics coming out of there.

As usual, the social “scientists” tend to dispute its effectiveness, but the people living in neighbourhoods where it’s been applied have no doubts.

We are living in times where the democratically expressed will of electorates is subject to violent assaults by other people who don’t agree with the result of an election or a referendum. Having no legitimate reason to overturn the result, they’re turning to violence and the threat of it to get their way. They won’t succeed and increasingly most people are ignoring both them and the people in the legacy media cheering them on, but in response their behaviour is becoming more extreme by the day.

They are Obama’s bully generation, who feel entitled to ignore not only a democratic result but the rule of law, simply because they absolutely know they’re in the right. Given that the mainstream left-wing party they nominally represent has disingenuously chosen to stay quiet and refused to exercise any restraint over them, it therefore falls to us to do the reining in, and it does involve the exercise of the broken window theory. Let’s go through what I see are examples of its application.

A female reporter covering the Women’s March from the sidelines, asks a few awkward questions of some of the people parading by, who were expecting the usual adulatory media interview. A thug appears and in short order becomes verbally abusive, threatening her and then suddenly without warning of any sort hits her full force in the face. Having committed a violent crime against a woman, he’s then bundled away to safety by women marching for women’s rights and then they all turn on the reporter to do a bit of victim blaming.

The reporter’s editor, the redoubtable Ezra Levant whom I’ve mentioned before, instead of laughing it off goes after the thug. Sure, there’d be some news value in it, but I feel his dander was up – nobody knocks his people around and gets away with it. He immediately put up the video of the man attacking and offered a $1000 reward to anyone who could identify him. Within a short time, the thug was identified as Jason Dion Bews, 34, who has since been charged with assault and threatening behaviour.

There seems to be this belief that if you’re engaged in some sort of political demonstration, then for the duration of it, all common law is suspended. Newsflash – it isn’t. That seems to be the delusion that the woman beater Bews was operating under. An even worse example of this “I’m in a demo, so anything goes” behaviour, was a woman surreptitiously setting fire to another woman’s long hair behind her back, seemingly for no other reason than the woman was there to celebrate the Trump inauguration.

It’s the same vicious phenomenon at work. The story with pictures of the criminal woman show a deliberate attempt to set alight to another human being. The woman is as yet unidentified, but if you do happen to recognise her or her accomplice, report her to the police. If you don’t, next time she’ll kill or seriously injure another person, and you’ll be culpable.

In passing, an obvious city ordinance to enact is the one already in force in most shopping malls. No hoodies and scarves concealing your face at demonstrations or you get charged. It’d save a lot of tracking down of these people and most certainly inhibit them behaving in a criminal manner in this CCTV world we live in nowadays.

Another example of what can only be described as anti-social behaviour is a woman on an aeroplane who chose to have a rant at another passenger simply because she believed it was her right since the object of her ire was a Trump supporter. It’s perhaps a sign of the times that she was removed from the aircraft accompanied by cheers from all the other passengers whose flight she had held up. I’ve no doubt she’s now on that airline’s no fly list.

A side effect of the Trump campaign is that I’ve pretty much stopped following the legacy media, but keep an eye on tweets by a few people whose take on things I find interesting. It’s a nice quick catch up on things once a day, but the downside is you have to scan the replies they get as well. Given that the ones I follow on twitter have slightly off the reservation views, they attract a lot of internet Fascists determined to silence them.

Fair enough, you go in the kitchen, expect it to get hot at times.

What is unacceptable though is tweets saying “I’m going to kill Trump”. I immediately forward such threats to the Secret Service, whose job it is to protect the elected head of state from death threats. That person is now on an assassination watch list and if they live outside the USA, their chances of getting an entry visa have just hit zero. I do notice that such maniacs fail to make a reappearance though. Pennies start to drop, even with life’s thickest examples.

Again, that slap wasn’t intended so much for them, as at the watching onlookers who now know the simple thing that happens to people threatening to kill other people.

Such reining in of unacceptable behaviour doesn’t just apply to the sad people living in their parent’s basement who think using an anonymous handle on the internet means they can’t be found, but also to celebrities like Madonna who carried away by the euphoria of the moment, start advocating things like blowing up the White House.

Someone obviously had a quiet word in her ear, her reply to which was a tweet “Fuck Donald Trump and fuck the Secret Service” which she quickly deleted. Maybe the idea of yet another world tour when you’re on a few no fly lists pulled her back from the brink of her own inanity to the soft porn squak pop music she’s good at.

It wasn’t however quick enough to prevent her getting banned from a few radio stations across America. She should ask the Dixie Chicks what happens when you decide to take an onstage dump on Motherhood, Apple Pie and the Marines in America. Your career dies, no matter how big and nasty a bitch you think you are.

I suppose the most offensive facet of this anti-social behaviour is celebrities or people in the entertainment business thinking that because they hate Donald Trump, it’s okay to say absolutely anything about his family. Even in the Mafia, family is off-limits, but we are plumbing new lows these days.

A reporter for Politico tweets “Trump fucks Ivanka” his daughter and is eventually fired, just to be hired a week later by CNN and given her own show. That’s the same CNN who hired that reporter who got fired from another channel for feeding the Clinton campaign privileged information. No wonder he has a slight problem with that particular fake news channel.

A Hollywood “C” lister stands up in front of a crowd and reads a poem about incest between Trump and one of his daughters. A scriptwriter and various performers decide to give Trump’s son Barron a good going over. He’s variously described as a date-rapist-to-be, the first home schooled shooter meaning he’ll shoot his father, and a lot of people start diagnosing him as having various painful diseases, all of which they fervently take great delight in hoping he’ll die of.

Barron Trump is a ten-year old child.

I will never watch, buy, nor recommend any entertainment product any of those people are remotely connected with. Any product they endorse will never make it into my weekly shopping, never mind my home. Anything they have anything to do with, I will avoid having anything to do with at all.

That’s my broken window policy with regard to them.

I recall the widow of one of my few personal heroes saying of the day he was murdered, the whole city of Dallas was covered in wanted posters, all labelled dead or alive. Pure hate on paper just because people would vote for someone whose politics you neither agreed with nor approved of. The haters got him that day and in the years to come they also got Martin and Bobby and a lot of others less notable.

In doing so, they shot the arse out of so many of the optimistic hopes of my generation. Politics fell into the hands of the murderers, maniacs and the assassins for a decade; it became the violent ward for psychotics you entered only if it couldn’t be avoided.

From then on, we all knew we were in the pit and all that mattered was surviving, and to hell with any residual memory of that Camelot delusion. Get your head down, look after number one and screw any idea about what you can do for your country but rather what you can get out of it for yourself. What followed, even looking back through the fond glass of decades gone recollection, was fundamentally ugly.

I fear that unless a lot of supposedly responsible people calm down, get a grip on reality and stop nailing up those wanted posters, that’s the trip we’re heading into again. All it takes is one nutter, and once the unthinkable has occurred, then all the other nutters piled up behind them like dominoes waiting to fall will have their desperately longed for fifteen minutes of fame. Make no mistake, the blood will flow and it’ll be on your hands too.

You have been warned from across the years.

©Pointman

 

Filed under Article · Tagged with Ezra Levant, Psychology, Trump