I lived in Baltimore during the summer of 1980. Almost every day, I spent hours in the local public library. A naive Seventh-Day Adventist, I asked to join in various black basketball games in the playground outside and was told to get lost.
Once, I opened the door for a black teen and he cursed me out. I was shocked. I asked him why he cursed me. He said, “Because I hate what your people did to my people.”
* I was recently in Baltimore – and the Fell’s Point neighborhood – and spent some time with a friend who is a resident. He said that while his upper middle class neighborhood was not having to deal with murders, the amount of property crimes and break-ins were way up since the riots. He also confirmed – though discussions with a police officer who is an in-law – that the police are extremely concerned about liability/criminal charges in regard to their everyday duties. He basically said that it’s a big mess there & his comments echo those of the Fell’s Point proprietors in the NYT article.
* Struggles to Heal
I don’t think a “police encounter” — “deadly” or not — is the reason Baltimore might be ‘struggling to heal’. And yes, I can just see those hardcore underclass ghetto Blacks in Baltimore using their Obamaphones to comfort each other in their ‘struggle to heal’. The NYT is so infantile.
* “One woman complained about “blatantly open drug deals and prostitution” in her neighborhood, saying she no longer felt safe, “even during the day.” A man said that when he walks outside “at 10:30 at night, and I don’t see a single police person, it freaks me out.” …”
Hilarious. In my neck of the woods you can watch the citizen/cop review meetings on channel 8. Resident’s in these meetings complain when 3 cop cars come to their area to address a situation.
Cops are great to blame. Rule of thumb – if you live in an area where cops are not needed – you good. You live in an area where half your community hates cops for the simple reason that they are doing their job – move. Blame gentrification if you need to keep your lib cred up.
* I can’t really say I feel bad for anyone in Baltimore. All the gentrifiers only moved in because of the heavy police presence. If your city needs heavy-handed cops to be constantly patrolling and busting heads for you to feel safe, you picked the wrong city to live in. Truly nice places to live don’t need cops for much. Gentrified Baltimore was an artificially nice place to live, hence why it became a not-nice place to live so quickly once the cops realized the elites don’t want them to do their jobs.
* Feminists sometimes complain that society responds to male violence with a “boys will be boys attitude”, that it gives men a free pass. Sometimes this is tied in to what they call “rape culture”.
Feminists are delusional, of course, but Ta-Nehisi Coates seems to advocate an extreme version of “boys will be boys”, although he would never phrase it as such. His idea seems to be that society shouldn’t take black male violence seriously, since that means putting lots of black men in prison, which in turn destroys black society. Men who go to prison can’t get decent jobs, they can’t support families, women don’t want to marry them. This means more illegitimacy, more boys growing up without fathers, which perpetuates the cycle.
Coates seems to be saying, let young black men run amok during their youth, but don’t leave them stuck with criminal records. Eventually they will age out of crime and get jobs and raise families. In the long run black society will be better off that way. Some people will get mugged, some women will get raped, but in the long run that is less important than having as many men as possible become functioning members of society.
From a reactionary point of view, there’s actually something to be said for this. Law and order is vital to society, but arguably there is one thing even more important, and that is men. Men who will work, who will marry their women and raise their children. Family is more fundamental than law or justice.
This is the wisdom implicit in “boys will by boys”: that society depends upon men, that imposing excessive rules upon them in their youth only serves to stigmatize them, and they will age out of it and ultimately carry society on their back. (Feminists hate every part of this, and they actively want to stigmatize men.)
The problem is that when crime gets to the level it is in Baltimore, it destroys the economy. What businessman wants to start a small business in Baltimore nowadays? So even when black men age out of crime, there will be no good jobs for them. Who wants to hire men who have never been expected to follow any rules at all?
Still, I find it interesting that the core of Coates worldview can be interpreted in this ultra-reactionary and anti-feminist way.
* Wake up. It’s still a few decades too early to “gentrify” Baltimore, Memphis, St Louis etc. The cycle is not complete in these locations and gentrifiers will continue to take big losses.
They have been attempting to gentrify Baltimore for thirty years starting with the downtown core. Talk about a House of Pain.
You need a genuine mega trend to turn the tide in these hellholes. SanFran embraced tech and put the city on a new trajectory.
In lieu of an external mega trend there is the internal destructive trend. But it takes generations. In Detroit the cycle is almost complete. It’s probably only 10 years away from total implosion and rebirth as a largely non-black successful community.
* Why are no journalists getting interviews with “Black Lives Matter” leader George Soros?
Normally, when a large group of people shut down the Hollywood freeway, or shut down a community leadership group headed by the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles, a local journalist would seek an interview with the leader of this group, to get a better understanding of his intentions. Yet, as far as I can tell, George Soros is nowhere to be found. He’s invested over $9 million dollars to fly these activists around the country to demonstrate. You’d think he’d want a share of the credit of what his demonstrations have wrought?
He’s one of the most effective leader of black politics since Al Sharpton. I couldn’t see Al Sharpton avoiding the press. Why is Mr. Soros so shy? Why is the LA and NY Times so shy about getting an interview with him to find out where he’s taking his black constituency next?
I’ve always noted that american blacks have been thirsty for leadership since the death of Dr. Martin Luthur King, and now we have this new leader for the black civil rights movement, who doesn’t seem to want any of the limelight. Can’t the LA or NY Times at least find out why he’s so shy? Just seems strange in this internet age that reporters are so reticent to take the chance of possibly violating Mr. Soros’ privacy. I know they mean well, but they can at least keep the reader abreast of when he might decide to take the stage.
I, for one, am interested in what Mr. Soros has to say!
* For time out of mind I have been imploring Steve to watch and maybe binge on The Wire. Plenty of important things revolve around what’s good or bad for the departments “clearance rate.” Plus, the guy who keeps the clearance rate ever in mind is the most likable fatso in the history of TV. BTW, I remember a while back some commenter belittling the show for depicting drug dealing thugs as micro-economists keen to gauge which way the market is going. Well that was the comment that made me decide to watch the series, and as it turns out, that was quite bogus to impute to a show which does not make the black gangsters out to be any smarter than they generally are, and rather does a top-notch job depicting how simple-minded men are occasionally effective.
* Any place that has a sizable black population always has a cloud of uncertainty hanging over it. All it takes is one unexpected police encounter with some black youth that goes south and the entire place can get Fergusoned. Even when the police can keep an invisible cordon around the white areas it’s the still white areas that have to pay the taxes for the damage the miscreants inflict on each other. When the proactive policing ends then there goes the balancing act. One can never predict if or when such an incident will occur and there goes whatever one has put into their home. It’s actually a very simple formula: blacks=trouble; the further away one lives from trouble the better off they are.
* It is all part of code speak. Take for instance this:
“…it has also been a reminder that black leadership, exemplified by Ms. Rawlings-Blake, is not a guarantee that government can manage toxic collisions of race and policing any better than white leadership has in places like Ferguson, Mo.”
What an utterly clever way to say that blacks always have trouble with the law and still manage to sound like you are on the side of the Black Lives Matter narrative.
* Nobody chooses to raise daughters in places which basically trivialises rape. Look at the flight out of the cities in the sixties.
* You’re assuming stable, two parent families as traditionally formed by whites are also the natural condition for blacks. They’re not. It’s the difference between r and K reproduction modes. Blacks have higher fertility, but shorter and more violent lives. Fathers staying with one woman and helping raise fewer children with higher investment in each child is not part of black nature.
* “Red Light District” is not what was created in “The Wire.” “Red Light District” means legalized prostitution and sex-related activities. What was created in “The Wire” was a special neighborhood where legalized, open-air drug dealing was permitted in order to take such activities away from other areas, which then benefited by the subsequent reduction in street-corner drug dealing and associated violence. BTW the white mayor of Baltimore who goes on to become governor was clearly patterned after Martin O’Malley, even though the fictional one on “The Wire” was Italian-American, rather than Irish-American. Great series. Great writing (established crime fiction writers such as Richard Price, George Pellacanos, Dennis Lehane) and great acting. My favorite TV series (better than “The Sopranos” imo).
* 270 murders in a developed-world city of 620,000 is absolutely dumbfounding. By way of comparison, that’s only about 10,000 more residents than Vancouver, BC (a city with significant crime/homelessness issues of its own).
Vancouver has 13 murders so far this year, which is higher than normal.
But 270? That’s apocalyptic. I really don’t think Americans are sufficiently shocked when they see numbers like those, or have the context into which those numbers should be placed. Because if they did, they’d be fairly disgusted.
* That’s a murder rate of over 40 per 100,000 for Baltimore. That’s a South African level of murder rate.
* Baltimore’s population is much different than Vancouver’s. The vast majority of those 270 are blacks killed by other blacks. Of course the anticop agitators and rioters knew this. Blacks really don’t like or care about other blacks.
* I had a friend in Baltimore whose home was broken into three times, with no serious investigation by the police. Once, his wife walked in on the intruders, who, thanks be to God, ran out instead of raping and killing her. Among the things stolen were products with GPS that could be tracked. We located the home in which they were being used. The police refused to act. My friend moved his family to a small town across the country shortly thereafter.
* This is as good of a place as any to float a theory I came up with a few days ago.
To set it up, you’ll have to read VDH’s latest:
Before I get to my theory, I’ll note that Victor Davis Hanson strikes me as someone who is stuck in a political no man’s land, somewhere between straight cuckservatism and soft nationalism. This is why his writings about his native and home state are such a maddening mix of hints of truth and utter bullshit.
Now to my theory.
No, California is not going to become Detroit. This is what happens when people misdiagnose problems. Detroit isn’t Detroity because of one party political rule and liberalism. Detroit became Detroit because it’s a bell curve city, full of blacks and run by blacks. If anything, the black population of California is declining in both terms of percentage and raw numbers, and the few that remain are quickly being shipped out of their heretofore ghettos in Oakland, Los Angeles and elsewhere. Both are crucial factors, because if you’re going to have blacks, if you can keep them detached and spread out, this severely hurts their race-based political power. Because they are not tightly ghettoized and geographically compartmentalized, their networks of churches and preachers cannot materialize. And, as we all know, black preachers are the big chiefs in black political life. This may be one of the reasons why the Democrat Party wants to do AFFH, to spread out blacks in order to weaken real black political power, so that one day, the Democrat Party won’t need to be the black party, and can leave behind all the political problems that they currently face from being the black party. Sure, wherever blacks are scattered, they’ll still vote Democrat almost 100%, but that will be the extent of their contribution to the party. No black preachers to hang around Democrat functions.
