AND THEN LET'S REPEAL THAT STATIST CIVIL RIGHTS ACTS.
Mad about the Eric Garner verdict? Think it's another case of cops killing a black man with impunity? Ole Perfesser Glenn Reynolds wants to set you straight. The Perfesser says it has nothing to do with race -- in fact, he wonders what all these black people are upset about:
Listening to NPR on the way back from the UT Studio — I taped a segment on this for The Independents on Fox Business tonight — they kept stressing that it was a WHITE officer who had killed a BLACK MAN. You could pretty much hear the capitals in their voices. They’d never stress race that way in other circumstances. And it’s not clear that excessive force by police is especially a racial problem. In Alabama, we had the shooting of a unarmed white 18-year old by a black cop; in Utah, we had the Dillan Taylor shooting, also unarmed, also not prosecuted. Racializing the issue makes it more divisive and less likely to be addressed.
I'll see the Perfesser's two cases and raise him four unarmed black guys and that was in one month -- and there's plenty more where that came from.
Of course, if you've been living in the United States of America for a while and paying attention, you probably don't need the explanation.
The Perfesser also has a solution:
If police can’t be accountable for their use of force, then we shouldn’t have police. Fire ‘em all and privatize.
Because privatization worked so well with prisons. Jesus, these people are so reliably wrong that when they finally object to a cop killing a black guy, it's for crackpot reasons.
UPDATE. Reynolds is just one of the conservatives who are outraged by Garner not because of this "black lives matter" thing you hippies think is important, but because free enterprise:
Whereas many conservatives said Wilson was simply doing his job, some on Wednesday said Pantaleo was enforcing a punitive big government policy. And while Brown was nothing more than a "thug," Garner was the victim of the dreaded nanny state.
"A man is killed for selling *unlicensed* drugs by a cop who walks even though it's all on video: Putting the 'police' in pink police state," tweeted New York Times columnist Ross Douthat on Wednesday.
Douthat was one of several conservative media personalities to seize on New York's law against selling single, untaxed cigarettes.
Whereas if they'd killed him for walking in the middle of the street, well, no big whoop.
UPDATE 2. CNN:
Rand Paul blames Eric Garner's death on high NYC cigarette tax
The still-alive white guy selling you smokes out of the trunk of his car is laughing his ass off.
UPDATE 3. In comments, Kevin Berger reminds us that Ferguson is already sort of a libertarian privatizer's paradise, as it makes its poorest citizens fund the city with user fees masquerading as criminal justice. New York, on the other hand, is in the usage of Robert Tracinski a "nanny state" that taxes regular people, which is why he and every other asshole is rushing to declare that the first dead black guy they ever troubled over is really all about taxes and race has nothing to do with it, except insofar as liberals are (I swear to God he said this) "hoping for a new series of contentious, racially charged killings."
It's the new wingnut fad, alright, and here's proof: Look at the change in that ancient authoritarian John Podhoretz. When de Blasio was elected, Podhoretz was telling us that the ooga-booga barricades had broken down and it would be Crown Heights Riots every day from now on -- why, just last week he was telling New York Post readers that we were "Turning on the cops: Forgetting what crime was like," and blubbering over the end of stop-and-frisk. Now he's telling us that we don't need Broken Windows policing anymore! Man, they're good at message discipline -- what a pity that their message sucks.
UPDATE 4. OFFS:
Yeah -- Al Capone, Pablo Escobar, and Eric Garner; I can see the connection. Hey, I wonder what tax Rumain Brisbon was resisting?