RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2019/08/02/justice-system-allows-innocent-mans-reputation-trashed-not-fit/

EXCERPT

“Innocent until proved guilty” is – or was – one of the proudest legal doctrines of Western civilisation. It dates back to Roman law, and is particularly strong in the Anglo-Saxon tradition. Why does it matter so much? I suggest two reasons. The first is about human nature. We are not always naturally fair. If we see a wrong done, we are often so angry that we wish to punish someone straightaway, without bothering to establish guilt. Society has to guard against that instinct. Otherwise, mob rule takes over.

The second reason is about human dignity. If you do not presume a person is innocent, you presume he or she is guilty. If that is the way a society thinks, the authorities gain terrifying power over the individual. The burden of proof lies on him. If he faces hostility, that word “burden” is apposite. If you have to show you did not commit any crime of which anyone accuses you, how on earth do you do it?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/01/the-war-on-the-obvious/

https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/01

When was the last time you were called racist? If a supporter of President Trump, it’s a safe bet the gross epithet is regularly seared upon your forehead. Always, by those who self-anoint as progressive.

Such a charge, once preserved for the truly primitive of mind, is now stamped and singed on anyone who dares to disagree with anything issuing from the left side of the political aisle.

To point out the obvious is “racist.” This week, President Trump’s blistering comments on Baltimore’s cadaverous state invited the familiar threadbare cries. Perhaps, because that city is majority-black. Or perhaps because that term is the only resort of those defending the indefensible.

Because Baltimore is indefensible. And its denizens deserve better.

President Trump’s greatest gift is his penchant for forcing his foes to defend the indefensible. Baltimore, like many Fishtowns across post-industrial America, is Hell, for the forgotten majority, at least.

Baltimore condemns its citizens with the country’s worst schools and mops up more murders than El Salvador. Its poverty rate is nearly twice the national average.

This scandal, of course, has nothing to do with a congressman’s melanin density. In the 1950s, city residents, buoyed by chrome, copper, and steel industry jobs, enjoyed a 7 percent pay bump on the average American. The number earning middle-class wages was one-fifth higher, poverty one-fifth lower than average America.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-would-we-do-without-the-word-racism-11564782112

If the country had a National Language Commission, and I were appointed commissioner, the first word I would put in cold storage—filed permanently away beside the N-word, the C-word, the K-word and other prohibited words—would be “racism.” In our day the word has been used imprecisely, promiscuously, perniciously and well beyond abundantly. If you are politically on the left, racism is what you accuse people of who don’t agree with you. If you are on the right, you can accuse them, I suppose, of socialism, but it doesn’t carry anything like the same resonance in moral opprobrium or self-awarded virtue as does racism.

The racist, if we can use the dictionary definition, believes that all members of a particular race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, which distinguish it as superior or inferior to other races. The true racist of course feels his own race is superior, and thereby he hasn’t any difficulty in discriminating or otherwise ill-treating members of other races, sometimes through government policy—as formerly under apartheid in South Africa or during the strict segregation once pervasive in the American South—or sometimes through ugly personal actions.

I am old enough to remember Jim Crow racism in action. When I lived in Arkansas in the early 1960s, there were still “colored” and white drinking fountains, separate bus and movie seating, and obvious differences in the quality of school buildings and other facilities available to blacks, and most people made no bones about it. Blacks were suppressed, oppressed and made to feel inferior in nearly every way that local governments could devise. The word racism wasn’t much in vogue in that place, or anywhere else, at that time. The majority of people who could rightly be called racist would not know what you were talking about if you accused them of racism.