For those who support “the mass expropriation of property, mass shoplifting during a moment of upheaval or riot” you’ll be happy to know you have a fellow agitator in Vicky Osterweil who’s written a mayhem motivational manual of sorts which she titles “In Defense of Looting.”
Natalie Escobar interviewed the czar of chaos upon the release of Osterweil’s book this August 25.
Breaking windows to obtain big screen TVs; clearing shelves of all manner of stuff “gets people what they need for free immediately, which means that they are capable of living and reproducing their lives without having to rely on jobs or a wage.”
Yes – the part in quotes – Osterweil said that.
“It’s unjust,” Osterweil continued, “to have to work for a boss.”
The world is organized, Osterweil said, and oppressively so to hear her tell it, around people who own stores and factories. “Without police and without (this) state oppression, we can have things for free.”
“Looting strikes at the heart of property, of whiteness and of the police. It gets to the very root of the way those three things are interconnected. And also it provides people with an imaginative sense of freedom and pleasure and helps them imagine a world that could be.”
“Riots and looting are joyous and liberatory.”
Yes, she said that too.
And this:
“One thing about looting is it freaks people out. But in terms of potential crimes that people can commit against the state, it’s basically nonviolent. You’re mass shoplifting. Most stores are insured; it’s just hurting insurance companies on some level. It’s just money. It’s just property. It’s not actually hurting any people.”
That argument – that no one is getting hurt – is the same used by Kamala Harris, Vice-President pick by presidential hopeful Joe Biden on the Democrat side of things.
In an interview in which she advocated for the decriminalization of sex work, Harris said, “When you are talking about consenting adults, I think that, you know… yes. We should really consider that we can’t criminalize consensual behavior as long as no one is being harmed.”
“As long as no one is being harmed,” per Harris, and Osterweil, is a Libertarian philosophy which advocates that “crimes without victims” should be repealed.
No one is actually hurt in mass shoplifting?
No one is harmed by mass prostituting?
Too bad Nelson Mandela didn’t have a copy of Osterweil’s book, or be around to vote for Harris. He might have changed his tactics.
But he didn’t have her book and he wouldn’t have changed his tactics because of who he was:
“You can never have an impact on society,” Mandela said, “if you have not changed yourself… Great peacemakers are all people of integrity, of honesty, but humility.”
Interesting word, that word integrity.
Integrity is a model of a certain kind of car. There are Integrity windows and doors manufacturers. Integrity even is the name of an organization working to include LGBT people in all the sacraments of the church.
Quite apparently, integrity is used by people and organizations because somehow it conveys value.
It should.
Stephen L. Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of law at Yale University, has a book by that title.
Integrity, Carter points out, actually “comes from the same Latin root as integer (conveying) the sense of wholeness, undivided, completeness”.
Integrity gets to the heart of the matter, and the heart of the individual.
Integrity is about character.
Stealing, which is synonymous with looting, as is “ransacking, plundering, despoiling, and marauding, is theft, taking of goods by force.”
Parse and rationalize pillaging and prostitution however you want, both are still theft and demonstrate – speaking of demonstration – an absurd and an abysmal lack of character.
Also known as integrity.
Good comments and insight. Certainly while violence against a person (or any living thing) is more serious than violence against property, both are still violent – and illegal. And certainly not victimless. Just because someone isn’t physically hurt doesn’t mean there isn’t a victim. Property is lost and paid for by someone. Business and income is reduced. The stress and lack of security to the property owner can affect the owner’s mental and physical health. So there are real negative impacts of property violence.
Thank you Gary.
With regards to Osterweil’s rationalization with regards looting that after all “it’s not actually hurting any people,” and your statement Gary to the contrary, in agreement with you is Ben Sixsmith writing this August 30 in “Spectator USA” a review of the book “In Defense of Looting”.
“‘We need to stand fast beside looters, rioters, and street fighters,’ Osterweil insists. Well, let us look at what looters and rioters have been getting up to. Destroying and damaging small restaurants, bars, churches, car dealerships, grocery stores, pharmacies — many of them owned by African Americans (which I don’t think makes it more condemnable than when they are owned by anybody else, but which makes Osterweil’s arguments even more preposterous).”
All good rebuttals of Ostweil’s absurd rationalization. In short, she posits a Marxist Utopia–which turned out to be a series of dystopias. “From each according to his/her ability, to each according to his/her means”.
But this, as we know, did not turn out that way. It fomented a culture in which innitiative, talent and work ethic were subordinated to party loyalty. They were viewed as dangerous capitalist ideals and had to be stamped ouit—witness the gulags and Chi-com “reeducation camps”,
Osterweil has learned nothing from the hell into which such “egalitarian” notions that she purports to champion has spawned.