Shoplifter catch-and-release, Trump goes easy on Disney, and euthanasia moves beyond “choice.”
New York City’s 327 Top Shoplifters
The New York Times reports that a third of the shoplifting in the city is done by the same 327 people. They have been arrested and released 6,000 times.
Shoplifting complaints have nearly doubled over the last five years, with 64,000 last year. Only 34% of the cases result in arrests, compared to 60% in 2017.
Is Trump Ceding the Culture Wars to DeSantis?
Florida governor and potential presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has been feuding with the Disney corporation, stripping the company of its special self-governing privileges in the state because of its woke opposition to a state law against indoctrinating young school children into the LGBTQ ideology. Candidates Chris Christie and Mike Pence, with their traditional Republican fealty to big business, have criticized DeSantis for this. And so has Donald Trump!
Trump is both credited and blamed for disrupting that traditional Republican fealty to big business, so this is more likely his reflexive opposition to anything an opponent does. But, as the Wall Street Journal‘s Kimberley Strassel says,
The surprise is that it took this long for Mr. Trump’s disdain of his rival to land him crosswise with the base. There is a reason Mr. DeSantis is taking on woke Disney—Republican voters love it. So eager was Mr. Trump to join liberals on attack, he put himself on the side of a company that disdains parental rights, axed the words “boys and girls” in park greetings, and just announced it would host the world’s largest LGBTQ+ conference. This is unlikely to sit well with conservative voters, and unlikely to be the only time Mr. Trump puts himself in this spot.
Can Trump alienate his base, or does he dictate what the base finds important? Has DeSantis, who has said his state is “where woke goes to die,” cornered that issue for himself?
From the Right to Die to the Right to Kill
The “slippery slope” argument, that taking a small step will lead to an ever-greater chain of bad events, is considered a logical fallacy. But there are also “slippery slope” events, in which people actually do slide down to their doom. The grimmest example is euthanasia, which starts with claims to “mercy killing” and keeps expanding to kill more and more people.
The Netherlands has extended its euthanasia program once again to include terminally ill children between the ages of one and 12. Also the mentally ill. Wesley J. Smith comments:
The Dutch demonstrate that once killing becomes an acceptable means of eliminating suffering, the numbers of people who die by euthanasia steadily increases — as do the acceptable causes of suffering used to justify killing. Indeed, eventually, euthanasia will encompass the terminally ill, the chronically ill, people with disabilities, psychiatric patients, ill children, and disabled babies — ultimately leading to death on demand (as it has already come to in Germany, after that country’s highest court created a right to a “self-determined death“).
But babies and toddlers can’t make a choice or “self-determination” to die. Their parents are choosing to kill them. The same with most children and psychiatric patients. And, of course, we are already choosing to kill our children when we abort them. When abortion advocates say they are “pro-choice” they mean they support their choice, not that of their victims. Similarly, in euthanasia, we have gone from legalizing “the right to die” to legalizing “the right to kill.”
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