Posted on 08/29/2026 9:11:16 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The real world — It’s full of complexities, ambiguities, unknowns, trade-offs, risks, and evils that we would prefer not to acknowledge. Perfection can be sought and approached, but nothing close to perfection can be achieved.
And then there’s the world that we can imagine in our minds. In that world, we can ignore the complexities and ambiguities and the rest. Achieving perfection can be imagined as just a matter of overcoming a few simple obstacles. I often write about the musings of people who conjure in their minds imaginary scenarios of perfection that are inconsistent with anything that can be achieved in the real world. The most important example is a socialist economic system of perfect justice and fairness. Another example is an energy system that produces always-available electricity in infinite amounts from the intermittent wind and sun.
Consider now another example: the crime found in fiction versus the crime found in the real world.
In my younger days I became a fan of crime fiction, examples being the novels of Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) and Agatha Christie (Hercule Poirot). In the iconic Agatha Christie plot, a group of upscale friends gathers at a country house, and then suddenly one of them turns up dead by violent means. Hercule Poirot coincidentally appears and starts interviewing the guests. All of them submit willingly to questioning, the murderer being supremely confident that his plot is so devious that he will never be discovered. All of the guests/suspects repeatedly tell Hercule that none of them could possibly be the murderer, and they insist that the criminal must be some outsider or intruder. But of course Hercule persists, and sure enough he figures out that one of the guests committed the crime, along with all the details of how and why that occurred.
At one time I found these plots fascinating. But over time I gradually lost interest, because I came to realize that in the real world almost no murders are committed in a fact pattern that bears any resemblance to this. The real muders, or at least almost all of them, are much more mundane, messy and random. With 10,000 to 20,000 homicides per year in the U.S., the large majority never make the news at all.
I thought of this when I picked up a copy of the New York Daily News a few days ago (August 25). The front page headline was “Wild Meetup Turns Deadly.” (Behind paywall.). Here are the circumstances of the murder in question:
Three young people were shot — including a teen who died a day later — during a wild Bronx car meetup that ended in dozens of bullets fired after two women were robbed, police said Monday. The shooting . . . sparked off about 5:40 a.m. Sunday outside a recycling plant in Baychester, police said. Werling Mendez, 18, was rushed into critical condition to Bronx Care Health System, where he died Monday morning from a gunshot wound to the head. . . . A 22-year-old man shot in the chest and a 20-year-old woman shot in the foot . . . were taken by medics to Jacobi Medical Center in stable condition. The shooting was sparked by the robbery of two women: a 25-year-old woman who was delivering slushies when someone ripped off her wallet and gold link chain, and a 37-year-old woman who was confronted by three men, one putting a gun to her head as she was robbed of her Cuban link chain and cell phone. . . . Sources said that after the robberies, more than one gunman opened fire, with upwards of 60 shell casings later found at the scene.
It’s hard to think of what Hercule Poirot, or someone like him, might be able to contribute to solving this particular crime. I note that the Daily News subscribes to the absolute taboo on mentioning the race of anyone participating in this 5:40 a.m. “meetup,” or of any of the participants in the robberies or shootings.
Or consider this report from the New York Post of the next day, headline “Violent NYC parolee fatally gunned down wings restaurant worker, then killed deli customer in heists 48 hours apart: cops.” Excerpt:
A violent parolee is wanted for fatally gunning down a “kind” Brooklyn wings restaurant worker and married dad of two — then shooting dead a Bronx deli customer — in heists about 48 hours apart, cops said. Jesus Acosta, 31 – who has been on parole since April after doing 10 years behind bars for a 2015 Harlem subway shooting – committed the first of his latest blood-soaked crimes around midnight Sunday at America’s Best Wings and Pizza on Rockaway Avenue in Brownsville, police said. He shot a 44-year-old worker – identified by loved ones as “hardworking” MD Yousuf – in the head and struck another man, 39, in the leg, officials said. . . . Then around 12:15 a.m. Tuesday, the gun-toting criminal opened fire during another hold-up at a deli on East 149th Street near Walton Avenue in the Concourse section of The Bronx – hitting a 33-year-old male customer in the chest, police said. [Both victims later died.]
For your entertainment, here’s a New York Post compendium of homicide headlines from the past couple of weeks. There are twenty in this list, about half from outside New York City area. Since the U.S. averages 200 - 300 murders per week, these represent only a small percentage of the total. If you look at the list, consider how many of them you might think appropriate for sending in the social workers, as opposed to armed police.
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Would the DSA folks still believe in eliminating the police if it was themselves who had to go in unarmed?
Manhattan Contrarian ping
If the DSA folks ever got control, you would have more “cops” than you ever dreamed of. They would be the Stasi, the KGB, or whatever initials the Marxists in charge decided. Name a Socialist state that hasn’t become a Police State.
“We Believe in The World
As It Is Presented to Us”
.
The Truman Show
A good examination of real world crime vs. Detective fiction.
MtnClimber wrote: “Would the DSA folks still believe in eliminating the police if it was themselves who had to go in unarmed?”
Two points.
One, many DSA folks are rich enough to have their own security, armed of course.
Two, it’s DSA principal that inequality causes crime, get rid of inequality, crime disappears, and there is no reason for police.
As I recall Sherlock Holmes expressed the very idea the author here is giving, that most crime is humdrum and mean. He would take cases that were complex and seemingly baffling. He would take cases that rose above the common.
The fictional murderers and master criminals in the worlds of Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie are morally compromised but still rational and reasonably intelligent people.
In contrast, the overwhelming majority of violent crimes are committed on impulse by the barely sentient animals of the inner city and similar creatures. That's hardly great material for fiction writers, because the criminal has no inner mental life to think about and his crimes are simple brutality rather than elaborate works. Someone getting shot or stabbed over an expensive pair of sneakers just doesn't make for a great novel.
Even most serial killers (usually more intelligent than the typical violent criminal, but hardly the Hannibal Lecter-type geniuses shown by Hollywood) are much less entertaining or interesting than their fictional counterparts.
This isn't unique to crime - works of fiction generally romanticize just about everything beyond recognition, because the sordid day to day world is usually more repulsive or boring than interesting. If the day to day world were more interesting, there would be no need for literature, theater, or film, so this shouldn't be so surprising.
El bumpo. (A little Spanish lingo there.)
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