By David Langwallner
The concept of zero tolerance is bandied about in an unthinking way as is the other slogan gets tough on crime.
The billboards around London desentise you with all of this and with pictures of hands with cuff on them. Well frankly there are a lot of people who should have cuffs on but let us assess who?
Now I should say I have no disagreement with either of these propositions of zero tolerance to criminality or indeed abuse as long as we understand what they mean and do not mean. It should be in an even handed way noted that Mr. Giuliani when he became Mayor of New York on a zero tolerance platform did two things. One he did deal however mercilessly with the drug problem in New York but 2 he fired over half the New York police department. I have advocated separately and recently that The Irish police force of equivalent levels of corruption should be disbanded and replaced with objective outsiders from ideally Switzerland or The UK where competence and ethical levels are much higher. Where the force is not intrinsically criminal.
It should also be stressed in Burkean conservative terms that moderation needs to condemn the extremism of left and right and balance and proportionality need to be reasserted.
The problem is an age of polarization that moderation gets crucified for being moderate as Albert Camus found out historically when he correctly condemned French torture tactics in Algeria but also suicide bombing extremism.
I am not tolerant thus and have zero tolerance for extremism and zero tolerance sloganeering masking deep structure criminality.
Thus we should in point of fact have zero tolerance for the following:
1. Racism on the rise throughout Europe and particularly prevalent in Ireland significantly over the European average according to a recent report from an independent anti racism comparative report in Vienna.
2. The destruction of minority business and livelihoods like a modern day Kristalknacht in many countries in Europe.
3. The rise of fascist authoritarians and the strongmen of Europe in Hungary, potentially Italy and also knee jerk populists and the triumph of al right conservatism also a recipe for the demonization and exclusion of non nationals and foreigners. In this respect Brussels through the infliction of austerity has morphed into a form of corporate fascism inflicting austerity on others as the bureaucrats enrich themselves like the aptly Brussels fat cat name Mr. Cresote in Monty Pythons The Meaning Of Life.
5. Left wing academic Stalinists barring sensible people from campuses on transgender or gender equity nonsense. Those politically correct leftists who endorse this nonsense in academia. Inverse racism which does not understand that all lives not just black lives matter or who attack progressives for freedom of speech however cutting as in The Charlie Hebdon massacre of journalists in France or the Lee Rigby murder in the UK.
6. Religious fundamentalist jihadist nutcases such as Youth Defense or Liberatas in Ireland but also evident in the UK or the dark money of the US Republican party who seem to regard it as their god given right to seek to entrap Islamic men in particular on chat lines, murder abortion doctors or target liberals with false allegations. In God We Trust INC.
Now regardless of whether an offence may or may not have been committed such tactics are despicable. These people are a modern day lynch mob no different than The Klu Klux Klan but they are gaining much control in America and Ireland with an unholy synergy between those two countries.
7. Criminal and semi literate police officers and social workers advocating zero tolerance when they should be in prison themselves. In this respect many of the police officers of the North side of Dublin which has become a warzone including but especially Clontarf and Raheny and indeed many of the police officers of Cork should be in prison as indeed should be the last two garda commissioners not the present one who is in effect an outsider and successive Ministers for Justice. They have sponsored, endorsed and countenanced criminality while purporting to resolve it. When the gatekeepers those whose business it is to enforce the rule of law do not do so then the system has broken down.
8. Ignorance and stupidity. Now in a small community like Ireland or Greece where work is allocated not on merit but because of associational and political ties and relationships in a dynastic way many wholly inadequate people are promoted well beyond their competence level ascending to dubious success, power and influence and then seek to use those positions in a protectionist way to destroy the lives and livelihoods of others. There is nothing worse than a vested interested masked as a moral principle. I have seen myself personally by someone now a High Court judge in Ireland that when selections were made for a Mental Health Tribunal and those deselected peddled influence to get reinstated that the entire process was fraudulently aborted on a pretext and those newly and correctly appointed had to go through a farce of a new selection process where the natural Irish order of rigging the game, pre determination and in fell well met snitchers were much in evidence.
9. There is also no excuse for the following abuses evident increasingly in Legal Systems and Processes.
(I) the manipulation and tradition of evidence and the framing of people by corrupt state officials.
(ii) The abuse of process of the state by the utilization of standing criteria, guilt by association, amorphous bad character admissions as in the Blairite reforms, non enforcement of constitutional rights such as due process or the creation of constitutional rights such as the right to have handguns by court structures in America.
District of Columbia v Heller (2008).
10. The cartelization of work and the exclusion of others particularly migrants, non nationals and mixed race people evident in parochial communities.
11. The targeting of poor or impoverished people and the upholding of the nefarious interest of transnational corporations, banks and vulture funds to create a worldwide housing and eviction and homelessness crisis and the concomitant breakdown in world order caused by the unregulated free market, structural inequality, human greed, corruption and folly where America I predict with the effects of the virus is on the brink of total collapse and internal civil war. In the corruption and caret context as the world recedes into ever narrower cartelised conglomerates note how Burke spent much of his career opposing the cartelized corruption of The East Indian Company.
12. People appointed to positions of civic responsibility on affiliations and ties where their lack of independence clouds their judgment.
Truly these are the matters that we should zero tolerance for. These are the abusive issues.
Also and here a final controversial though no excuse for those who say Eve was framed in a univocal way there is no excuse for those who do not accept Steve can be framed by Eve.
