What are your thoughts re Hegelian Dialectic & CRT in the Church?

[Ken]

I'll give you another example of CRT-influenced policy that has negative, though not unforeseen consequences. The Soros-backed prosecutors that have determined to not prosecute low-level crimes and to prosecute high-level crimes for lesser degrees. This was done principally, though not exclusively in the name of the anti-racist effort to balance the disparity in incarceration rates between white and minority prisoners.

Here's George Soros in his own words: "Why I Support Reform Prosecutors" (It's pay-walled)

Here's James Kirchick at Tablet highlighting the Soros angle to the story:"The Sanctification of George Soros"


And here's the The Atlantic piece by Nellie Bowles again describing what went on in Boudin's D.A. office: "HOW SAN FRANCISCO BECAME A FAILED CITY"


I remember starting a thread about this Soros-backed progressive prosecutors project a few years ago but for the life of me I cannot find it now.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Higher than China and over 6-times higher than say Canada. It also has more total prisoners than any other nation in the world including China. Black people are also incarcerated at far higher rates and for longer sentences than White people in the US for the same crimes. A lot of this is due to things like "gang enhancements" cited above.

Is it your estimation that the old way of doing things were going just fine? How many more people need to be locked up before we "solve" crime? How many more trillions of dollars are you willing to spend to turn our society into a police and prison state?

I'm not any particular supporter of Boudin. I haven't followed that issue closely enough to have a specific opinion. But I expect there were a lot of people with entrenched vested interests in the old way of doing business.

What is the Christian approach to criminal justice? Do we make room for rehabilitation and redemption? Our current system for the most part does not. When we make it impossible for former felons to find employment, find housing, go to college, and even participate in society in normal ways such as voting then we basically point them right back to a life of crime with predictable consequences.

You seem to be doing that which you like to ding Josh for: ascribing motivations or ideas to me that I did not write or even imply.

I recognize the problems inherent in the American criminal-justice system and what's more I don't need a critical line of inquiry to see those problems. I have no vested interest in keeping it from being reformed. My point in throwing up the example of Soros-backed prosecutors and the disastrous effects they're having on their cities, and specifically minority communities, is that CRT-influenced solutions, inasmuch as they cannot allow for nuanced solutions because such nuance implies that there's more to a problem than simply group power and group injustice, necessarily end in immiseration.

In point of fact, I agree with Bowles from her piece when she writes:

Of course there is good in what Boudin was trying to do. No one wants people incarcerated for unfair lengths of time. No one wants immigrants’ relatives to be killed by MS-13. Few of Boudin’s policy ideas—individually, and sometimes with reasonable limitations—are indefensible. (Ending cash bail for truly minor offenses, for instance, protects people from losing their job and more while in jail.) But as with homelessness, the city’s overall take on criminal-justice reform moved well past the point of common sense. Last month a man who had been convicted of 15 burglary and theft-related felonies from 2002 to 2019 was rearrested on 16 new counts of burglary and theft; most of those charges were dismissed and he was released on probation. It really didn’t inspire confidence that the city was taking any of this seriously.

Boudin’s defenders liked to dismiss his critics as whiny tech bros or rich right-wingers. One pro-Boudin flyer said stop the right-wing agenda. But the drumbeat of complaints came from plenty of good liberals, and so did the votes against him. If it were only the rich, well, the rich can hire private security, or move to the suburbs. And many do. They’re not the only people who live here, and they’re not the only ones who got angry.

You are the one who brought up Boudin and claimed he was a disaster.

We had a nationwide crime wave due in large part to the pandemic that swept across both urban and rural America in the past two years. Has the crime rate increase in San Francisco been worse than in other cities that don't have reformist DA? I have no idea. Do you?

Criminal justice isn't my particular area of expertise so I don't have good answers. But my instinct is that the American approach to punishment and incarceration isn't working and we should be exploring other ideas and looking to the examples of other nations that have had much more success. I do think our current system actually tends to direct people into a life of crime by closing off all other alternatives. That seems counterproductive. Changes definitely won't be cheap but neither is our current police state and infrastructure that incarcerates over 2 million of our fellow citizens.

[Josh]

Of course. But I am also willing to LISTEN to those communities of color when it comes to identifying problems and solutions in the area of criminal justice.

Are YOU?

Certainly, but not every community necessarily analyses its problems correctly. For example, I used to know some Serbians. It seemed that 100% of the problems they faced were due to nefarious Croats, Albanians, Bosnians, and others, whether in Europe or abroad. I "listened" to the community, but did not entirely agree with their own analysis that they were suffering greatly solely due to the oppression of neighbouring people groups and their allies such as the United States.

The groups that have proposed disbanding police, having DAs issue lighter sentences or none at all, and so on are not coming from the "communities of color" either. Is George Soros part of that community? Is Chesa Boudin? As far as I can tell, they are white men, and not just that, they are wealthy white men. It seems that there are warring factions of white people who want to control what society does, and some of them do so claiming they are "anti-racist".

[Josh]

We had a nationwide crime wave due in large part to the pandemic that swept across both urban and rural America in the past two years. Has the crime rate increase in San Francisco been worse than in other cities that don't have reformist DA? I have no idea. Do you?

I do. The crime rate where I am hasn't budged. San Francisco is a unique case. You cannot continue to blame the pandemic for everything.

Criminal justice isn't my particular area of expertise so I don't have good answers. But my instinct is that the American approach to punishment and incarceration isn't working and we should be exploring other ideas and looking to the examples of other nations that have had much more success. I do think our current system actually tends to direct people into a life of crime by closing off all other alternatives. That seems counterproductive. Changes definitely won't be cheap but neither is our current police state and infrastructure that incarcerates over 2 million of our fellow citizens.

Okay, Ken, so what approach to crime & punishment do countries that are majority black (including control of their governments) do? There are lots of such countries. If we look at a list of countries by incarceration rate, Rwanda is at #5, the B.V.I. at #9, the Bahamas at #10. Perhaps it not as much about "race" as you think it is.

The simple fact is that people who run around hurting other people, committing violence, property crimes, robberies, breaking windows, breaking into homes, committing rapes, and so on, are people who need to be incarcerated, and usually members of their own community are the victims. Proposing that we no longer incarcerate or prosecute such crimes has been a failure and the people who suffer are the very people such justice "champions" are claiming to serve.

[Josh]

I further noted that in all contexts, including the modern one, one can make a case that Biblically and empirically society is as a whole to some extent liable for their members actions. And I explained it. I'd like to know if you accept the idea that a society/family to some extent does bear culpability as a whole...or do you see it purely from an individualistic sense and the individual is in no way morally connected to his family, tribe, upbringing, or society?

Presumably, at the judgment seat, I will not be prosecuted for whatever my grandparents did, or my parents, or my brothers, or my neighbours, or everyone else who is an American, or everyone else who is an Australian, or everyone else who is the exact same percentage ancestry of African, Asian, and European that I am myself.

In particular, you seem fixated on race, as if "white" people are somehow going to be judged. Exactly how does that distribution work? If one is part European and part African, is one only judged in part? Are they then half-guilty, innocent, or entirely guilty? What is the threshold for when they start to share such a collective guilt?

And since you seem to believe in collective guilt... how exactly do you propose that collective punishment (or collective restoration) work? You seem really confident that "white people" as a class (which I'm not convinced is even a valid classification of people) are somehow collectively guilty of something, and thus they have some moral duty to do something. I cannot find such a proclamation anywhere in scripture that people are guilty or not simply because they share the same skin colour as other people.

[Ken]

Of course. But I am also willing to LISTEN to those communities of color when it comes to identifying problems and solutions in the area of criminal justice.

Are YOU?

Certainly, but not every community necessarily analyses its problems correctly.

Well it is a good thing you are around to "correct" them then!

[joshuabgood]

And since you seem to believe in collective guilt... how exactly do you propose that collective punishment (or collective restoration) work?

I am not really for collective punishment so much as collective reconciliation. Jesus though did speak to whole cities and churches with judgement. See Laodicea. As did Paul.

Regarding individualism, most people agree we don't exist in a moral vacuum. For example children who are abused and neglected often act out in antisocial ways and yes I think their parents bear some degree of liability for the actions of the child.

If my son broke a window most folks would agree I bear some responsibility. That is the principle in essence. Our lives impact each other. We are out brothers keepers to some extent.

However we need not focus on retribution but on restoration. Peacemaking is hard but it is God's work. Let's at least ask the right question of how we could rectify things.

[Josh]

Of course. But I am also willing to LISTEN to those communities of color when it comes to identifying problems and solutions in the area of criminal justice.

Are YOU?

Certainly, but not every community necessarily analyses its problems correctly.

Well it is a good thing you are around to "correct" them then!

I gave an example from Serbians. I didn't "correct" them, but I do somehow have a duty to join them in their quest to lay blame on every Croat, Bosnian, Albanian, and others?

The main thing I have learned is that when party A blames all its problems on party B, there's usually some shared blame on both sides, regardless of which side is or was more powerful. And as a Christian, we're supposed to learn to stop doing that kind of thing.

[Josh]

Regarding individualism, most people agree we don't exist in a moral vacuum. For example children who are abused and neglected often act out in antisocial ways and yes I think their parents bear some degree of liability for the actions of the child.

Ah, but do you believe the children are indemnified because their parents were imperfect? That is, that they are no longer fully responsible for their actions?

If my son broke a window most folks would agree I bear some responsibility. That is the principle in essence. Our lives impact each other. We are out brothers keepers to some extent.

Okay, so if I go and break a window, is my dad responsible? Or my (deceased) grandfather? Or my deceased grandfather's estate? If I dug around enough, I would eventually find abuse and neglect in my family history. Would that mean I am not fully responsible for my actions?

So who is?

However we need not focus on retribution but on restoration. Peacemaking is hard but it is God's work. Let's at least ask the right question of how we could rectify things.

I simply disagree that I somehow have a responsibility to a specific group of people determined by skin colour for things other people with a similar shade of skin colour did to other people with a different shade of skin colour.

I realise you do, but I'm not a racist. I don't judge people because of their race.

[Ken]

I simply disagree that I somehow have a responsibility to a specific group of people determined by skin colour for things other people with a similar shade of skin colour did to other people with a different shade of skin colour.

I realise you do, but I'm not a racist. I don't judge people because of their race.

So what is your explanation for the higher crime rate in Black communities and lower average school performance?

[joshuabgood]

Ah, but do you believe the children are indemnified because their parents were imperfect? That is, that they are no longer fully responsible for their actions?

They are responsible also.

Okay, so if I go and break a window, is my dad responsible? Or my (deceased) grandfather? Or my deceased grandfather's estate?

If I inherited something my father stole...it seems I would have some obligation for restitution.

I simply disagree that I somehow have a responsibility to a specific group of people determined by skin colour for things other people with a similar shade of skin colour did to other people with a different shade of skin colour.

I realise you do, but I'm not a racist. I don't judge people because of their race.

It seems to me that God and Jesus did speak to groups of people. The Egyptians, Israelites, and Laodiceans and Corinthians come to mind.

I don't believe I have called you a racist...so that defensiveness I don't understand.