Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Brown vs. NYT, Robot vs. Bum

robocop.jpg
You couldn’t ask for a better pair of stories (from Drudge today) underscoring why the left-wing Ivy League elites are an impediment to human progress while the Average Joe with a thirst for justice and a desire to protect property is the vanguard of the future:

Pampered Brown students physically assault a writer for pointing out that trade makes people around the world wealthier (thus making things like their educations possible)…

…while an Atlanta bar owner builds a robot to combat crime by the homeless.

Choose sides accordingly: savagery and censorship, or self-defense and economic analysis.  The critics whining that the robot has not addressed the root social causes of crime is the cherry on the cyber-sundae.  Give the robots time.  Give them time.

2 comments:

Dylan said...

Ha!

“He’s moving the problem elsewhere,” Christensen says. “And that works for him, but it’s really not solving anything.”

So the guy comes up with a clever way to protect his (and his neighbor’s) property from street crime, and now it’s his responsibility to ’solve’ the problem of poverty? If crackheads and other degenerate people were hanging out in and ruining Ms. Beaty’s front yard, she’d just allow them to stay there until there was no more poverty, right?

The “root social causes” argument makes sense to some extent — certainly there are causes of poverty and crime that can be addressed. But suggesting that potential victims of crime shouldn’t be able to defend themselves against it (non-violently at that!) because that doesn’t ’solve’ the whole problem is bizarre, to say the least. Unless, I suppose, you’re some activist-type whose sole purpose is to be self-righteous.

Does it ever occur to people like Ms. Beaty that one of the “root causes” of crime is people allowing it to continue?

Dylan said...

Oh, my mistake. I should have looked at the text I cut and pasted. It was Henrik Christensen who said the above quote, not Anita Beaty. But her criticisms were basically along the same lines.