In the first place a man was brought before me with a complaint that he had gone on board one of Mr. Spurrier's vessels, prevented the crew from working and beat two of them and threatened the master - his sentence was to receive 39 lashes at the usual place of punishment - but the morning the punishment should have taken place nearly the whole of the Irish servants came to Mr. Morris (a merchant here) and offered £150 rather than it should be executed (the punishment) - but they had said before should the prisoner be brought to the place of punishment, they would shed some blood and take him away by force - Some other cases of the same nature, and equally as bad, have now come before me - when the people have threatened to take the life of the first constable that should attempt to apprehend the offender.

The magistrate viewed this incident as involving much more than simply a protest against whipping. He portrayed it as the outbreak of a serious challenge to the social order which only the presence of the Royal Navy could extinguish:

The Irish servants (which are very numerous) are at this time absolutely in a state of mutiny and without some armed force be stationed here, the lives of the inhabitants are in danger. Probably on account of their wages they may be kept within bounds until the expiration of their time of servitude (20th October) but, when they become their own masters, I could not answer for them. If His Excellency therefore would have the goodness to station one of His Majesty's Schooners here for the Winter, it would have an excellent effect and I have not a doubt but that regularity and good behaviour would, by that means be kept in this district.

So long as servants were kept under contract, they were seen as controllable, but the justice of the peace dreaded the prospect of facing masterless men. Like his predecessors in the eighteenth century, he saw the Royal Navy as the vital safeguard of authority."

Jim Stewartson at Mind-War:

I wrote yesterday that Donald Trump’s spiraling psychology has been fused into US levers of power to the point that the entire government, and in many ways the entire nation, is decompensating, and as a result he might do almost anything. While his latest move is not a false flag per se, in most ways it’s worse. Trump is quite literally pulling a page out of the Nazi playbook to target unhoused and mentally ill people to feed into the maw of his Fourth Reich. His latest Executive Order “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS” is one of the darkest things I’ve ever read, and yeah, that’s saying a lot. It doesn’t even try to hide its purpose, or its disdain for its targets. It’s not about helping anyone, it’s about “cleaning up the streets.” First sentence:

[Endemic vagrancy, disorderly behavior, sudden confrontations, and violent attacks have made our cities unsafe.]

This is the exact type of propaganda that has been used by countless dictators when they want to target a vulnerable group, but this Order has a particular disdain for substance abusers, the unhoused and the mentally ill.

[Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order. Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens. My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.]

“Civil commitment” is a euphemism for being kidnapped and put in a warehouse with a bunch of potentially dangerous people against your will. “Public order” is a euphemism for a neo-Nazi white 1950s faux-image of America that Trump thinks he can “restore” to prove that he’s the strongman his cult wants to believe in. But in reality this is a carbon copy of Aktion T4, the eugenics and “euthanasia” program that represented the initial test for the Holocaust; and Aktion Arbeitsscheu Reich a campaign to eliminate the “work-shy” who were among a group of “asocials” classified as “Preventive Criminals.”

[...] In Trump’s order, the DOJ is instructed to reverse judicial precedents and consent decrees that limit civil commitment of unhoused individuals deemed dangerous or incapable of self-care. In other words, the regime wants to take away the 1st and 4th Amendment for people that they deem to be “unfit.” They want to remove due process from people that Trump and Stephen Miller believe are unworthy and disappear them, through deportation, incarceration, or institutionalization.

It’s a shivering January night,

Cold gusts of wind blow,

Loneliness stays by my side,

My eyes are heavy with drowsiness,

Even the moon is pale and ailing,

A clamor of heartbeats echoes in my chest,

And the ache of separation persists.

January has passed and moved on,

But ______!!!

In each of these cases, the attacks were unprovoked, and the attackers exhibited the characteristics of unstable vagrants. This brazen criminality is a predictable byproduct of the habits of social and physical disorder the vagrants have brought with them.

These “neighbors” openly defecate, urinate, masturbate, and engage in sexual relations on the street, catcall and harass women and children on Broadway, openly use and sell drugs, aggressively beg passersby for money, and leave empty beer cans and miscellaneous junk all over the street, while failing to wear masks or social distance—showing no compunction about endangering the health of their new “neighbors.”

These conditions signify the collapse of social order, and unchecked disorder invariably results in more serious crime, as the prophets of smart policing and public order, James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, taught us almost 40 years ago in their groundbreaking essay in The Atlantic, “Broken Windows.”

Disorder also destabilizes the neighborhoods in which it takes root, resulting in urban decline. Upper West Siders are not immune from the impulse to escape such degrading and soul-crushing surroundings. The New York Post reported that, because of the “increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.” The last thing the city needs after an economy-destroying lockdown is more flight from industrious and respectable New Yorkers.