"A crucial fact about white liberals must be kept in mind: They are not simply in favor of blacks in general. Their solicitude is poured out for blacks as victims [italics in original], blacks as welfare mothers, criminals, political activists against the larger society, as well as those blacks who serve as general counter-cultural symbols against the larger society."
And from Shelby Steele's excellent book "White Guilt":
"In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism."
White Guilt has to be the most powerful and pervasive social phenomenon that is never discussed, except maybe by the Robin DiAngelo types who wield it as another tool in their cult-indoctrination techniques.
White liberals can't face, admit or try to solve this issue because for them it's not social or political, not a problem to be faced w facts and empiricism, but a moral and spiritual crusade based on their desperate need for atonement, and their need to feel more righteous and holy than white conservatives.
They treat black people (and other official victim groups) not as fallible mammals like the rest of us but as sacred cows or holy children, who must be worshipped, protected and adored.
White Saviorism (which is the beating heart of Social Justice) is impervious to facts or reality because it's not about saving people or communities, but about saving souls, particularly the souls of our secular clerisy, the White(d) Sepulchers of elite America.
This Christian view guided Progressive imperialism around 1900 to help "our little brown brothers." The Phillippines and Cuba were not attacking the US.
I agree with Malcolm X but the IQ comment is a bit too much. Go to London plenty of African doctors, architects,engineers and financiers. The IQ is not linked to skin - it is cultural. When a culture values others frivolities over serious education it disintegrates.
That's because they've been selected by mechanisms other than slavery. Willing immigrants are always a better-than-average sampling of their source populations, which is why recent African immigrants (especially North African) in the US do significantly better than native-born blacks (i.e. descendants of slaves) - by some measures they do better than whites!
IQ is largely genetic, and gene frequencies do vary between geographically-separated populations. Unfortunately, the populations who historically originated in Sub-Saharan Africa have much lower IQs than those who originated in Northern Europe. This is well-documented and beyond reasonable dispute. Which is not to say that there can't be high-achieving members of those populations - every distribution has a right tail, after all - who become the doctors, architects, engineers, and financiers that you mentioned. But those are the extremes of their distributions, not the medians.
“While I support policies that can make incremental improvements, actually solving our...[almost any] problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government... If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take.”
Removing the references to crime, this applies to almost every issue in American society. People and groups differ in meaningful ways, everything will have some degree of disparate impact, and there is no feasible path towards meaningful solutions without acknowledging that (which will not happen).
Agreed. It's obnoxious but also heartbreaking. We could massively improve society if only we could be honest about certain issues and work towards effective solutions.
Eventually the radical chic of letting violent antisocials roam free will wear thin.
The “defund” people are effectively telling their fellow Americans to let themselves get beaten up, let themselves get robbed and raped. Basically, turn the other cheek.
The “abolish” crowd is morally culpable for every woman beaten by a man released from prison in the name of racial justice. Soon the wife beaters will be millionaires thanks to reparations.
>Soon the wife beaters will be millionaires thanks to reparations.
For a few months at most. If it wasn't for the cost it would impose, I would actually root for this happening just so that we could watch the comedy that would ensue. Just like the average lottery winner or professional athlete, 90% of them would be broke again within 2 years and probably in worse debt than when they started. I'd love to see how the libs would eventually blame it all on racism.
Of course they would blame it on racism. The arguments would be simple, and there would be two of them:
(1) Blacks have been disadvantaged by racist institutions, and as a result haven't developed the same human capital as other minorities.
(2) Because they have lower human capital, they're more prone to making financial mistakes.
(3) Because they're more prone to financial mistakes, they misspent their money.
(4) Therefore, because of racism (see (1)), reparations didn't work, and so they need to be tried again, and in a different way.
I suspect the above argument would be popular among technocrats, though they wouldn't say (2) as brazenly as I just did. The more popular argument would be:
(1) America is a historically and currently racist country.
(2) Because of its past, America has developed structurally racist financial institutions.
(3) Because of its present, racist whites got very angry at blacks getting reparations.
(4) Because of (2) and (3), racist whites and structurally racist financial institutions made it basically impossible for blacks to keep the money that was justly theirs.
(5) Therefore, racism was the reason so many blacks lost the money that was justly theirs.
For my life time crime has been a boom and bust cycle. Things get really bad so we do something effective, it gets called racist, then we stop doing the effective things, then it gets bad again. The cycle continues, and we even have a new Bernie Getz.
I grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, and it has been really difficult to watch the city descend into chaos, particularly within the last five years. The reasons aren't as closely tied to racial disparities within the city itself, but they are the direct result of leftist policies that prioritize offenders and criminals over law-abiding citizens and property owners. What just galls me is the number of residents of the city itself who support these policies. I'm amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people who seem to really believe that we should defund the police, not prosecute criminals, decriminalize hard drugs (measure 110, which passed in 2020), and punish property owners and local businesses. All the while claiming we should just give the homeless housing, as if that's going to fix their problems.
What I don't understand is why we are so uncomfortable with disparate impacts on different racial or gender groups. I don't understand anyone who thinks that in the absence of equity interventions, we should have exact demographic representation across every domain in our culture. It just makes no sense. Furthermore leftists seem to focus their zealotry on certain domains, such as black criminality or women as CEOs. Just the other day I noted to someone that the demographics of veterinary medicine have made a virtual 180 degree shift from 90% male to 90% female in the last 30 years, and she didn't seem to have any problem with it. In addition most people have no problem with the idea of disparate representation in other domains, namely sports (not many people deny you need to be a minimum of 6'5" for it to even be possible to have an NBA career, and not taller than 5' to be a top female gymnast).
I hope we can have more truthful conversations about this topic. It is really hard to watch a city you used to love descend into chaos because people are fucking stupid and dishonest.
As an east coaster who lived in Portland for a few years, my initial thoughts on moving there in 2008 were 1) “this is the whitest city I’ve ever seen” 2) “the white people here sure are naive” and 3) “wow, they just let the homeless do whatever the hell they want”. Fast forward 15 years and, well, here we are
Something is wrong with Portland. Either they are being poisoned by some toxin(s) in their environment, or there is some kind of genetic decline. Walking around Portland, I was thunderstruck by the extremity of the problem:
Every single person I saw there stood out as outrageously ugly and visibly sick. The whole time I was there, I saw one or two healthy-looking people who weren’t hideous or obviously immunocompromised and/or afflicted with some metabolic disorder, and they turned out to be tourists.
I noticed something similar in Austin, TX, Portland’s sister city. It was shocking to spend time there over the summer and grow accustomed to how sickly and ugly the population is, and then see the influx of healthy, good-looking university students flood back in at the start of the academic year.
I can’t overstate the stark difference. I don’t know why it’s not more widely commented upon, because it is impossible not to notice.
It is reasonable to assume that whatever is behind it is related to the descent into silly liberal dystopianism in both shitholes.
I think the issue in these debates is that everyone projects motives as to why people are raising the issue.
It's like tweeting: "Women who dress up in revealing clothing are more likely to get sexually assaulted by strangers at night." Ok, sure, that's probably true. But many people would impute the motive for saying it to be to somehow blame women for wearing revealing clothing.
What goes wrong in these conversations is that each side doesn't understand the motives that could cause someone on the other side to say what they do in good faith. For instance, those on the left don't feel the irritation that many on the right do about having a certain narrative pushed or facts highlighted so they don't appreciate that maybe the reason someone tweeted that wasn't because they want to denigrate or blame blacks but just because they are irritated that someone is pretending that fact isn't true.
Add some trolls and a few extremists to the meeting x and you've got a recipe for a fight.
The reason why scenes like the two bostons clip resonate so much is because they are true. Black men who are decent, law-abiding citizens generally have to deal with that kind of negative stigma. It is also true that the suspicion from store owners and cops is rational. Nearly every single black person that a progressive spends time with is the former but also, for whatever reason, refuses to acknowledge the existence of the latter.
Regardless, it really doesn't matter what the cause is because the solution is the same. Criminals are gunna do crime and they must be put in jail. There are a finite number of would-be criminals at any given point in any society, and they must be either jailed or scared into submission.
In Iraq, we used Clear, Hold, Build to tamp down an insurgency and restore order. The same is required of our high-crime cities. Flood the streets with cops and stop crime. Only then can the relationships heal.
"They now turn around and say, let’s not talk too much about murder, because blacks are the victims?"
I don't think that's it....it's because blacks are the perpetrators. And to see someone as perpetrator is to attribute agency to the group which deflates the concept of the "marginalized/victim": That they have no agency and therefore incapable of sin.
And it also dilutes the supposed evil of whites as exclusive agents or racism/supremacy. Which is why this whole business of multiracial white supremacy is so contrived (think of the recent mass shootings in Allen, Texas).
“Other than blacks themselves, no group would benefit more from solving our crime problem than wealthy urban whites.”
Come on. Non-rich whites, eg those who ride the subway and buy into areas that have just begun to gentrify, are at far greater risk than rich urban whites. Georgetown is safer than Northeast, and the Upper East Side is safer than the mixed areas of Queens.
unleashed blacks? we’re black people caged before the 60s or are you implying that Jim Crow was good? if you support Jim Crow, your status should be reduced and you should be marginalized. we need racial peace.
This is a very thin pretext for maintaining a racial caste system. There are about 600 black on white murders a year. There are over 41 million blacks in the US. Suppose a return to overtly discriminatory policing would cut the number of black on white murders by half, which is optimistic. That would mean subjecting 135,000 people to a racist caste system for a year to avert one murder. No thank you.
Black on white violence is not a huge problem, cancer and overdoses claim orders of magnitude more lives. I think you just enjoy racism hierarchy.
It's pointless to talk to these people. They won't be convinced by your arguments. If they consider racial hierarchies bad, then they won't agree with any of the facts about black-on-everyone crime. If they don't care about the annual hundreds of thousands of black-on-white crimes and only focus on the murders, then they are anti-white by definition. Also, you forgot to mention that the only reason the black-on-white murder rate is so low is because of segregation, which he clearly disapproves of. If whites were forced by lottery to live among the black underclass, most white leftists would quickly turn to KKK members. As Joe Sobran said: "In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are no different from members of the KKK." The black problem in the US and every other white country is akin to the Terminator. It can't be stopped, reasoned with, etc, but it can be denied as long as you are safe from the consequences of the Terminator, which virtually all of the white cognitive elite are. White pathological altruism will always lose to black behavior. It's like running away from the Terminator. It can work for some, but the Terminator will do A LOT of damage in the meanwhile, and it won't be stopped until someone stops it. Only whites have this suicidal streak in them, though, for now, so other races have a far easier time dealing with blacks by just not letting them into their countries or by minimizing the damage through tough-on-crime policies, ramping up the anti-black sentiment, not lying about black behavior. Hell, the Arabs were wise enough to castrate their black male slaves, while the US whites were unthinkingly ignoring the problem by pushing it forward. European leaders can't get enough of blacks and will probably take a billion of them this century.
On the last paragraph, could it be that blacks currently vote for tough-on-crime mayors and police commissioners but also for progressive DAs? If so, it looks more like low-information voting than like an actual policy preference. Mayor elections are loud and visible, while DAs have rarely seen any spotlight until the most recent years. IMHO few people (of any ethnicity) understood the role of the latter until ca. 2020; let's hope the understanding percolates further.
On the other hand, I'm getting wary of the prospect of the Right winning on the "tough on crime" front while not making any inroads on personal freedom and pushing back the nanny state at least somewhat. I, for one, don't want more cops enforcing COVID lockdowns and making British-style thoughtcrime visits.
My gut feeling is that candidates who are tough on crime are actually so only in comparison to the opposition field. That is, Eric Adams in NYC was tough on crime compared to the likes of Maya Wiley, making it more relative than absolute. There could be the occasional outlier, like Duggan in Detroit, who is both popular among the heavily-Black electorate there but also a reasonably sincere anti-crime mayor. (Interestingly he was attacked from the law and order side there in his last election by a Black opponent.)
My own anecdotal experience of Black voters where I live is that even moderate or conservative ones either have a direct family member or a close friend in prison and as such they don't think quite as reflexively about crime and punishment as many White voters.
I'd like to see some polling on this but overall I think that for Black voters, law and order always comes with a "but..." even if they are innately in favor of it, whereas White and Asian voters won't have any hangups about a scorched-earth approach because they're far more likely to be victims than perpetrators (not that either is particularly likely) and they believe the same of their family and friends.
The “but” is their son/nephew/cousin who punched the daylights out of a store clerk or shot up a block party. They are just good kids who made a bad decision, so we should give them a break.
The progressive DA in Portland (Mike Schmidt) has done such an atrocious job that enforcement has basically collapsed. It's a revolving door for criminals, made very obvious during the 2020 riots. Also I agree with you on the second point. Our dumbass governor at the time encouraged Oregonians to snitch on their neighbors in 2020 if they had more than 6 people over for Thanksgiving.
That may explain a lot, but not sure if it helps explain Krasner in Philadelphia or (not that I have any problems with this one) Biden on the federal level.
Blacks are allies of the regime. Conservative whites are its enemies. Policing blacks would help conservative whites, or at least be perceived as helping them, and would be an implicit admission that they are right and the regime is wrong.
This is why we have the situation that we have and also why it won't change any time soon. It would require regime change, and in a more serious sense than just Republicans winning an election.
Taking seriously America's Bantu problem has many more implications than you want to admit. For example, pro-immigration eLIGHTENDED cENTRISTS constantly cite statistic showing that immigrants are better than American citizens by various metrics, but these statistics are only true if you include Bantus. If you exclude Bantus, immigrants are worse, and so it is only rational to accept immigrants if you can get them to live in Bantu cities (which, tbf, has happened in LA and some other places).
What's your source on this? I assume you're conflating illegal immigration with legal immigration. Legal immigrants by far outperform American natives, with even Nigerian Americans ("Bantus") having median incomes on par with the overall non-Hispanic white population, to say nothing of the various Asian groups that come here to attain advanced degrees in science, medicine, etc.
Of course I'm conflating illegal and legal immigration. They are not going home and they are not going home because the Federal Government doesn't want them to go home. Why would I distinguish between them based on what a piece of paper says? Am I a conservative or something? Geez.
Also, if you want to be more specific than Bantu, you should say Igbo, not 'Nigerian'. Hausa or Yoruba immigrants do not do as well as the American average, nigga please.
You claimed that by various metrics, immigrants are worse than American citizens, when "Bantus" are excluded from the American citizen group. If you want to make an anti-immigrant claim you need to name those metrics (for example, you're Noah Smith-tier stupid if you think Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Indian/etc Americans have a higher homicide rate than white Americans).
Yes, they are worse. America gets twice as many immigrants from Mexico as any other country. America isn't going white minority because of Igbo and upper caste Indians. When Enlightened Centrists say immigrants are less likely to be criminals and welfare cases than existing Americans, what they mean is that Bantus pull down the average so much that Mexicans are better than it. However, the fact is that unless you live in a Bantu area, the addition of more Mexicans will make your area more crummy. This is why you learn about median as well as mean at primary school.
When I think of BLM and trans-activist narratives, this Orwell quote always comes to mind: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The effect of these movements is to emotionally blackmail you into rejecting the evidence of your eyes and ears. Given the way these movements are bankrolled and supported at the highest echelons of power, I can’t help but think this is at least partially intentional.
One thing that frustrates me is the amount of people on the “right” who are kind of OK with seeing cities rot, and seem to believe that cities are inherently bad or something. Obviously these aren’t serious thinkers, but they’re definitely people with influence, such as Tim Pool. It’s extremely important to a functioning society that cities are well run and safe, considering this is where 100% of innovation happens, be it in the arts or science/tech. There needs to be places with vast amounts of resources where intelligent and ambitious people could go to compete with one another while building on each others ideas. Cities need to be safe, and ideally affordable, or else innovation becomes more difficult. New York, LA, San Francisco etc. are what built America. The more safe we make our major cities the better our country will be for everyone.
I spent some of the best years of my life in a few great American cities, and generally agree with you on their value, culturally and economically.
But both the right and independent normies have spent the past several years watching city governments and DAs enacting half-baked, neo-Marxist policies that immediately blow up in their constituents faces, without any course correction or even acknowledgment.
The schadenfreude in response to this is unseemly, but how many times do you expect us to feel bad for Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football?
Because in most places these people aren’t Charlie Brown.
Q: why is NYC so safe relative to other US cities comparable in size, and why is it always one of the first to go full tough-on-crime?
A: because the income level at which you go literally everywhere in a protected bubble is stratospheric in NY, so the policymakers have to live with the consequences of their own actions.
There doesn’t seem to be much statistical evidence that gun ownership explains a lot . Only comparing the US to Europe means leaving out a huge amount of useful data. There are big differences in gun ownership within Europe. The US has 3 times more guns than Serbia, but Serbia has 15 times more guns than Romania or Poland . Still Romania and Poland have similar homicide rates to Serbia . Difficult to reconcile with the theory that guns are an important factor in determining homicide rates.
If you just look at per capita deaths of white people by homicide, it is shockingly close to Europe despite the tremendous amount of guns in the US.
But Richard's point was that it guns laws aren't enforced on black people (because equity), so more guns laws won't help the situation. If they were enforced harshly they might make a dent (which, ironically, would provide rationale for more gun control).
The nature of gun laws favored by the left are somewhat vague in terms of the legalese, but extremely specific in what types of guns and (more importantly) who they want to target. At best, the left’s proposed gun control boils down to never enforcing current “point of use” laws while creating new “point of sale” laws. I’m sure you’re aware of who coined those terms. At worst, they actually do favor quasi point of use laws in which the government would impose a hard core confiscation program of legally owned scary looking long guns.
Philosophically, I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of stricter point of sale gun laws or requirements to get a license. The reason I oppose them is that in 2023 America, any stricter regulation on a given action just turns into another form of anarcho-tyranny.
McDonald v. City of Chicago shows very clearly what gun laws the left wants. Thankfully this is one of the few areas of policy where the right is not only correct, but also successful.
It should be our #1 priority to dismantle the legal concept of 'Disparate Impact'. Nothing else matters until we can return to true merit-based EVERYTHING.
Here's some necessary wisdom from Thomas Sowell:
"A crucial fact about white liberals must be kept in mind: They are not simply in favor of blacks in general. Their solicitude is poured out for blacks as victims [italics in original], blacks as welfare mothers, criminals, political activists against the larger society, as well as those blacks who serve as general counter-cultural symbols against the larger society."
And from Shelby Steele's excellent book "White Guilt":
"In the age of white guilt, whites support all manner of silly racial policies without seeing that their true motivation is simply to show themselves innocent of racism."
White Guilt has to be the most powerful and pervasive social phenomenon that is never discussed, except maybe by the Robin DiAngelo types who wield it as another tool in their cult-indoctrination techniques.
White liberals can't face, admit or try to solve this issue because for them it's not social or political, not a problem to be faced w facts and empiricism, but a moral and spiritual crusade based on their desperate need for atonement, and their need to feel more righteous and holy than white conservatives.
They treat black people (and other official victim groups) not as fallible mammals like the rest of us but as sacred cows or holy children, who must be worshipped, protected and adored.
White Saviorism (which is the beating heart of Social Justice) is impervious to facts or reality because it's not about saving people or communities, but about saving souls, particularly the souls of our secular clerisy, the White(d) Sepulchers of elite America.
> White Saviorism
This Christian view guided Progressive imperialism around 1900 to help "our little brown brothers." The Phillippines and Cuba were not attacking the US.
Malcolm was a very wise man.
In your comment all whites are seeking power... white liberals white conservatives all whites are out for power ......racist much?
I agree with Malcolm X but the IQ comment is a bit too much. Go to London plenty of African doctors, architects,engineers and financiers. The IQ is not linked to skin - it is cultural. When a culture values others frivolities over serious education it disintegrates.
That's because they've been selected by mechanisms other than slavery. Willing immigrants are always a better-than-average sampling of their source populations, which is why recent African immigrants (especially North African) in the US do significantly better than native-born blacks (i.e. descendants of slaves) - by some measures they do better than whites!
IQ is largely genetic, and gene frequencies do vary between geographically-separated populations. Unfortunately, the populations who historically originated in Sub-Saharan Africa have much lower IQs than those who originated in Northern Europe. This is well-documented and beyond reasonable dispute. Which is not to say that there can't be high-achieving members of those populations - every distribution has a right tail, after all - who become the doctors, architects, engineers, and financiers that you mentioned. But those are the extremes of their distributions, not the medians.
You're in denial.
We're talking on average... average IQs.
On average a Black's IQ is 30 to 40 points lower.
But they also have a bell curve and will have smart people as well just not as many.
Where white people will only produce two or three Geniuses per 100 people blacks only produce one genius every 4500 people.
You still get your Thomas sowell's in your Shelby steals but you also get 4,498 low IQ individuals
Not in denial just have a different experience however if there are some studies please reference them and I will gladly read.
No need - just tracked down one study from Brookings which seems to support your comment
“While I support policies that can make incremental improvements, actually solving our...[almost any] problem to any serious extent would take a revolution in our culture or system of government... If any part of you is uncomfortable with policies that have an extreme disparate impact, you don’t have the stomach for what it would take.”
Removing the references to crime, this applies to almost every issue in American society. People and groups differ in meaningful ways, everything will have some degree of disparate impact, and there is no feasible path towards meaningful solutions without acknowledging that (which will not happen).
Agreed. It's obnoxious but also heartbreaking. We could massively improve society if only we could be honest about certain issues and work towards effective solutions.
Eventually the radical chic of letting violent antisocials roam free will wear thin.
The “defund” people are effectively telling their fellow Americans to let themselves get beaten up, let themselves get robbed and raped. Basically, turn the other cheek.
The “abolish” crowd is morally culpable for every woman beaten by a man released from prison in the name of racial justice. Soon the wife beaters will be millionaires thanks to reparations.
>Soon the wife beaters will be millionaires thanks to reparations.
For a few months at most. If it wasn't for the cost it would impose, I would actually root for this happening just so that we could watch the comedy that would ensue. Just like the average lottery winner or professional athlete, 90% of them would be broke again within 2 years and probably in worse debt than when they started. I'd love to see how the libs would eventually blame it all on racism.
Of course they would blame it on racism. The arguments would be simple, and there would be two of them:
(1) Blacks have been disadvantaged by racist institutions, and as a result haven't developed the same human capital as other minorities.
(2) Because they have lower human capital, they're more prone to making financial mistakes.
(3) Because they're more prone to financial mistakes, they misspent their money.
(4) Therefore, because of racism (see (1)), reparations didn't work, and so they need to be tried again, and in a different way.
I suspect the above argument would be popular among technocrats, though they wouldn't say (2) as brazenly as I just did. The more popular argument would be:
(1) America is a historically and currently racist country.
(2) Because of its past, America has developed structurally racist financial institutions.
(3) Because of its present, racist whites got very angry at blacks getting reparations.
(4) Because of (2) and (3), racist whites and structurally racist financial institutions made it basically impossible for blacks to keep the money that was justly theirs.
(5) Therefore, racism was the reason so many blacks lost the money that was justly theirs.
For my life time crime has been a boom and bust cycle. Things get really bad so we do something effective, it gets called racist, then we stop doing the effective things, then it gets bad again. The cycle continues, and we even have a new Bernie Getz.
I grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, and it has been really difficult to watch the city descend into chaos, particularly within the last five years. The reasons aren't as closely tied to racial disparities within the city itself, but they are the direct result of leftist policies that prioritize offenders and criminals over law-abiding citizens and property owners. What just galls me is the number of residents of the city itself who support these policies. I'm amazed at the number of otherwise intelligent people who seem to really believe that we should defund the police, not prosecute criminals, decriminalize hard drugs (measure 110, which passed in 2020), and punish property owners and local businesses. All the while claiming we should just give the homeless housing, as if that's going to fix their problems.
What I don't understand is why we are so uncomfortable with disparate impacts on different racial or gender groups. I don't understand anyone who thinks that in the absence of equity interventions, we should have exact demographic representation across every domain in our culture. It just makes no sense. Furthermore leftists seem to focus their zealotry on certain domains, such as black criminality or women as CEOs. Just the other day I noted to someone that the demographics of veterinary medicine have made a virtual 180 degree shift from 90% male to 90% female in the last 30 years, and she didn't seem to have any problem with it. In addition most people have no problem with the idea of disparate representation in other domains, namely sports (not many people deny you need to be a minimum of 6'5" for it to even be possible to have an NBA career, and not taller than 5' to be a top female gymnast).
I hope we can have more truthful conversations about this topic. It is really hard to watch a city you used to love descend into chaos because people are fucking stupid and dishonest.
As an east coaster who lived in Portland for a few years, my initial thoughts on moving there in 2008 were 1) “this is the whitest city I’ve ever seen” 2) “the white people here sure are naive” and 3) “wow, they just let the homeless do whatever the hell they want”. Fast forward 15 years and, well, here we are
Yes the decline has been going on for some time. It has just accelerated in the last few years.
Something is wrong with Portland. Either they are being poisoned by some toxin(s) in their environment, or there is some kind of genetic decline. Walking around Portland, I was thunderstruck by the extremity of the problem:
Every single person I saw there stood out as outrageously ugly and visibly sick. The whole time I was there, I saw one or two healthy-looking people who weren’t hideous or obviously immunocompromised and/or afflicted with some metabolic disorder, and they turned out to be tourists.
I noticed something similar in Austin, TX, Portland’s sister city. It was shocking to spend time there over the summer and grow accustomed to how sickly and ugly the population is, and then see the influx of healthy, good-looking university students flood back in at the start of the academic year.
I can’t overstate the stark difference. I don’t know why it’s not more widely commented upon, because it is impossible not to notice.
It is reasonable to assume that whatever is behind it is related to the descent into silly liberal dystopianism in both shitholes.
I lived in Oregon for 42 years, and witnessing what's happened to Portland is heartbreaking.
"decriminalize hard drugs" is not like the others
Decriminalize individual rights, inc/property rights.
I think the issue in these debates is that everyone projects motives as to why people are raising the issue.
It's like tweeting: "Women who dress up in revealing clothing are more likely to get sexually assaulted by strangers at night." Ok, sure, that's probably true. But many people would impute the motive for saying it to be to somehow blame women for wearing revealing clothing.
What goes wrong in these conversations is that each side doesn't understand the motives that could cause someone on the other side to say what they do in good faith. For instance, those on the left don't feel the irritation that many on the right do about having a certain narrative pushed or facts highlighted so they don't appreciate that maybe the reason someone tweeted that wasn't because they want to denigrate or blame blacks but just because they are irritated that someone is pretending that fact isn't true.
Add some trolls and a few extremists to the meeting x and you've got a recipe for a fight.
It's gamergate at a society wide level.
The reason why scenes like the two bostons clip resonate so much is because they are true. Black men who are decent, law-abiding citizens generally have to deal with that kind of negative stigma. It is also true that the suspicion from store owners and cops is rational. Nearly every single black person that a progressive spends time with is the former but also, for whatever reason, refuses to acknowledge the existence of the latter.
Regardless, it really doesn't matter what the cause is because the solution is the same. Criminals are gunna do crime and they must be put in jail. There are a finite number of would-be criminals at any given point in any society, and they must be either jailed or scared into submission.
In Iraq, we used Clear, Hold, Build to tamp down an insurgency and restore order. The same is required of our high-crime cities. Flood the streets with cops and stop crime. Only then can the relationships heal.
What common sense!
And Iraq, as we all know, worked out so well!
Why is this “truth” so uncomfortable?
Because the “discomfited” can’t handle facts. They can barely handle their emotions.
It’s either ostrich behavior and cowardice or the dreaded race realism.
"They now turn around and say, let’s not talk too much about murder, because blacks are the victims?"
I don't think that's it....it's because blacks are the perpetrators. And to see someone as perpetrator is to attribute agency to the group which deflates the concept of the "marginalized/victim": That they have no agency and therefore incapable of sin.
And it also dilutes the supposed evil of whites as exclusive agents or racism/supremacy. Which is why this whole business of multiracial white supremacy is so contrived (think of the recent mass shootings in Allen, Texas).
“Other than blacks themselves, no group would benefit more from solving our crime problem than wealthy urban whites.”
Come on. Non-rich whites, eg those who ride the subway and buy into areas that have just begun to gentrify, are at far greater risk than rich urban whites. Georgetown is safer than Northeast, and the Upper East Side is safer than the mixed areas of Queens.
Actually Staten Island, Borough Park, Bensonhurst, Rego Park, etc. are all safer than UES on a by-precinct level.
unleashed blacks? we’re black people caged before the 60s or are you implying that Jim Crow was good? if you support Jim Crow, your status should be reduced and you should be marginalized. we need racial peace.
This is a very thin pretext for maintaining a racial caste system. There are about 600 black on white murders a year. There are over 41 million blacks in the US. Suppose a return to overtly discriminatory policing would cut the number of black on white murders by half, which is optimistic. That would mean subjecting 135,000 people to a racist caste system for a year to avert one murder. No thank you.
Black on white violence is not a huge problem, cancer and overdoses claim orders of magnitude more lives. I think you just enjoy racism hierarchy.
It's pointless to talk to these people. They won't be convinced by your arguments. If they consider racial hierarchies bad, then they won't agree with any of the facts about black-on-everyone crime. If they don't care about the annual hundreds of thousands of black-on-white crimes and only focus on the murders, then they are anti-white by definition. Also, you forgot to mention that the only reason the black-on-white murder rate is so low is because of segregation, which he clearly disapproves of. If whites were forced by lottery to live among the black underclass, most white leftists would quickly turn to KKK members. As Joe Sobran said: "In their mating and migratory habits, liberals are no different from members of the KKK." The black problem in the US and every other white country is akin to the Terminator. It can't be stopped, reasoned with, etc, but it can be denied as long as you are safe from the consequences of the Terminator, which virtually all of the white cognitive elite are. White pathological altruism will always lose to black behavior. It's like running away from the Terminator. It can work for some, but the Terminator will do A LOT of damage in the meanwhile, and it won't be stopped until someone stops it. Only whites have this suicidal streak in them, though, for now, so other races have a far easier time dealing with blacks by just not letting them into their countries or by minimizing the damage through tough-on-crime policies, ramping up the anti-black sentiment, not lying about black behavior. Hell, the Arabs were wise enough to castrate their black male slaves, while the US whites were unthinkingly ignoring the problem by pushing it forward. European leaders can't get enough of blacks and will probably take a billion of them this century.
On the last paragraph, could it be that blacks currently vote for tough-on-crime mayors and police commissioners but also for progressive DAs? If so, it looks more like low-information voting than like an actual policy preference. Mayor elections are loud and visible, while DAs have rarely seen any spotlight until the most recent years. IMHO few people (of any ethnicity) understood the role of the latter until ca. 2020; let's hope the understanding percolates further.
On the other hand, I'm getting wary of the prospect of the Right winning on the "tough on crime" front while not making any inroads on personal freedom and pushing back the nanny state at least somewhat. I, for one, don't want more cops enforcing COVID lockdowns and making British-style thoughtcrime visits.
My gut feeling is that candidates who are tough on crime are actually so only in comparison to the opposition field. That is, Eric Adams in NYC was tough on crime compared to the likes of Maya Wiley, making it more relative than absolute. There could be the occasional outlier, like Duggan in Detroit, who is both popular among the heavily-Black electorate there but also a reasonably sincere anti-crime mayor. (Interestingly he was attacked from the law and order side there in his last election by a Black opponent.)
My own anecdotal experience of Black voters where I live is that even moderate or conservative ones either have a direct family member or a close friend in prison and as such they don't think quite as reflexively about crime and punishment as many White voters.
I'd like to see some polling on this but overall I think that for Black voters, law and order always comes with a "but..." even if they are innately in favor of it, whereas White and Asian voters won't have any hangups about a scorched-earth approach because they're far more likely to be victims than perpetrators (not that either is particularly likely) and they believe the same of their family and friends.
The “but” is their son/nephew/cousin who punched the daylights out of a store clerk or shot up a block party. They are just good kids who made a bad decision, so we should give them a break.
Or they hung out with a bad crowd. Many such cases.
The progressive DA in Portland (Mike Schmidt) has done such an atrocious job that enforcement has basically collapsed. It's a revolving door for criminals, made very obvious during the 2020 riots. Also I agree with you on the second point. Our dumbass governor at the time encouraged Oregonians to snitch on their neighbors in 2020 if they had more than 6 people over for Thanksgiving.
That may explain a lot, but not sure if it helps explain Krasner in Philadelphia or (not that I have any problems with this one) Biden on the federal level.
Blacks are allies of the regime. Conservative whites are its enemies. Policing blacks would help conservative whites, or at least be perceived as helping them, and would be an implicit admission that they are right and the regime is wrong.
This is why we have the situation that we have and also why it won't change any time soon. It would require regime change, and in a more serious sense than just Republicans winning an election.
Taking seriously America's Bantu problem has many more implications than you want to admit. For example, pro-immigration eLIGHTENDED cENTRISTS constantly cite statistic showing that immigrants are better than American citizens by various metrics, but these statistics are only true if you include Bantus. If you exclude Bantus, immigrants are worse, and so it is only rational to accept immigrants if you can get them to live in Bantu cities (which, tbf, has happened in LA and some other places).
What's your source on this? I assume you're conflating illegal immigration with legal immigration. Legal immigrants by far outperform American natives, with even Nigerian Americans ("Bantus") having median incomes on par with the overall non-Hispanic white population, to say nothing of the various Asian groups that come here to attain advanced degrees in science, medicine, etc.
Of course I'm conflating illegal and legal immigration. They are not going home and they are not going home because the Federal Government doesn't want them to go home. Why would I distinguish between them based on what a piece of paper says? Am I a conservative or something? Geez.
Also, if you want to be more specific than Bantu, you should say Igbo, not 'Nigerian'. Hausa or Yoruba immigrants do not do as well as the American average, nigga please.
You claimed that by various metrics, immigrants are worse than American citizens, when "Bantus" are excluded from the American citizen group. If you want to make an anti-immigrant claim you need to name those metrics (for example, you're Noah Smith-tier stupid if you think Japanese/Chinese/Korean/Indian/etc Americans have a higher homicide rate than white Americans).
Yes, they are worse. America gets twice as many immigrants from Mexico as any other country. America isn't going white minority because of Igbo and upper caste Indians. When Enlightened Centrists say immigrants are less likely to be criminals and welfare cases than existing Americans, what they mean is that Bantus pull down the average so much that Mexicans are better than it. However, the fact is that unless you live in a Bantu area, the addition of more Mexicans will make your area more crummy. This is why you learn about median as well as mean at primary school.
When I think of BLM and trans-activist narratives, this Orwell quote always comes to mind: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
The effect of these movements is to emotionally blackmail you into rejecting the evidence of your eyes and ears. Given the way these movements are bankrolled and supported at the highest echelons of power, I can’t help but think this is at least partially intentional.
One thing that frustrates me is the amount of people on the “right” who are kind of OK with seeing cities rot, and seem to believe that cities are inherently bad or something. Obviously these aren’t serious thinkers, but they’re definitely people with influence, such as Tim Pool. It’s extremely important to a functioning society that cities are well run and safe, considering this is where 100% of innovation happens, be it in the arts or science/tech. There needs to be places with vast amounts of resources where intelligent and ambitious people could go to compete with one another while building on each others ideas. Cities need to be safe, and ideally affordable, or else innovation becomes more difficult. New York, LA, San Francisco etc. are what built America. The more safe we make our major cities the better our country will be for everyone.
I spent some of the best years of my life in a few great American cities, and generally agree with you on their value, culturally and economically.
But both the right and independent normies have spent the past several years watching city governments and DAs enacting half-baked, neo-Marxist policies that immediately blow up in their constituents faces, without any course correction or even acknowledgment.
The schadenfreude in response to this is unseemly, but how many times do you expect us to feel bad for Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls the football?
Because in most places these people aren’t Charlie Brown.
Q: why is NYC so safe relative to other US cities comparable in size, and why is it always one of the first to go full tough-on-crime?
A: because the income level at which you go literally everywhere in a protected bubble is stratospheric in NY, so the policymakers have to live with the consequences of their own actions.
There doesn’t seem to be much statistical evidence that gun ownership explains a lot . Only comparing the US to Europe means leaving out a huge amount of useful data. There are big differences in gun ownership within Europe. The US has 3 times more guns than Serbia, but Serbia has 15 times more guns than Romania or Poland . Still Romania and Poland have similar homicide rates to Serbia . Difficult to reconcile with the theory that guns are an important factor in determining homicide rates.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/black-americans-are-killed-at-12-times-the-rate-of-people-in-other-developed-countries/
If you just look at per capita deaths of white people by homicide, it is shockingly close to Europe despite the tremendous amount of guns in the US.
But Richard's point was that it guns laws aren't enforced on black people (because equity), so more guns laws won't help the situation. If they were enforced harshly they might make a dent (which, ironically, would provide rationale for more gun control).
The nature of gun laws favored by the left are somewhat vague in terms of the legalese, but extremely specific in what types of guns and (more importantly) who they want to target. At best, the left’s proposed gun control boils down to never enforcing current “point of use” laws while creating new “point of sale” laws. I’m sure you’re aware of who coined those terms. At worst, they actually do favor quasi point of use laws in which the government would impose a hard core confiscation program of legally owned scary looking long guns.
Philosophically, I wouldn’t be opposed to some form of stricter point of sale gun laws or requirements to get a license. The reason I oppose them is that in 2023 America, any stricter regulation on a given action just turns into another form of anarcho-tyranny.
McDonald v. City of Chicago shows very clearly what gun laws the left wants. Thankfully this is one of the few areas of policy where the right is not only correct, but also successful.
It should be our #1 priority to dismantle the legal concept of 'Disparate Impact'. Nothing else matters until we can return to true merit-based EVERYTHING.