Steve Sailer asks: Sincerity or Satire?
Raheema Majeed preparing for a yoga class for women. “Yoga relaxes the mind and helps my breathing problems,” she said. Credit Ian Willms for The New York Times
TORONTO — Her face framed by a yellow hijab, Idil Hassan watched her young daughter splash with other children at the Regent Park Aquatic Center, an architectural jewel of glass, wood and chlorine in the middle of Canada’s largest housing project.
The center has given Ms. Hassan, a 34-year-old nurse, the ability to do something more than just watch her child: she, too, can join in.
On Saturday evenings, mechanized screens shroud the center’s expansive glass walls to create a session that allows only women and girls to relax in the hot tub, swim laps or careen down the water slide, a rare bit of “me” time treasured by many of the neighborhood’s Muslim residents.
“I wouldn’t come before because my religion doesn’t allow women to be seen uncovered by men,” said Ms. Hassan, a Somali immigrant. “It’s really helpful to have that day to be ourselves. I even learned to swim.”
Until not too long ago, the mention of Regent Park here in central Toronto brought to mind cockroaches and drug-fueled gang violence. It was an embarrassing stain on a progressive city that for decades had welcomed immigrants fleeing war, famine and poverty only to leave them trapped in an isolated collection of decrepit brick apartment blocks where crime and despair took root.
Hard lessons have been learned, and today, an ambitious rejuvenation plan for the 69-acre neighborhood, with the aquatic center as its centerpiece and a ring of condos that are helping to pay for new subsidized and affordable rental housing, is disrupting entrenched notions of class, race and religion at a time when concerns about income inequality and immigration are growing in the West.
As Canada accepts 25,000 Syrian refugees, the new Regent Park, thick with immigrants from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, provides a blueprint for successful economic and cultural integration.
* Well, to Toronto’s credit, it’s almost unbelievably safe by American standards. The city is somewhat more populous than Chicago, but has something like 31 murders so far this year compared to Chicago’s rapid race toward 300. Even NYC looks like a pit of violence relative to Toronto.
Perhaps there are some lessons there in the management of historically-troublesome urban populations…
* Grammar check:
Until not too long ago, the mention of Regent Park… brought to mind cockroaches and drug-fueled gang violence. It was an embarrassing stain on a progressive city that for decades had welcomed immigrants fleeing war, famine and poverty only to leave them trapped in an isolated collection of decrepit brick apartment blocks where crime and despair took root.
Passive constructions for cockroaches, drug-fueled violence, crime and despair taking root. Check!
Still, ghosts of the old Regent Park haunt the neighborhood, particularly in the public housing blocks that have yet to be demolished. Sally Beebee… worries about using the stairwells in her building, where she says young men use and sell drugs.
Incorporeal entities as the root cause of social problems. Check! Young men using and selling drugs: Points off for Subject-Verb-Object construction (even though these youth were likely stale and pale, probably evangelicals).
The risks are especially high for young Somali men and boys in Regent Park. Aside from the perils of drugs, which have led to the sometimes violent deaths of dozens of Somali-Canadians over the past decade, the authorities worry about the lure of Islamic extremism, particularly from terrorist groups like the Islamic State and the Shabab, the Somali branch of Al Qaeda.
Ending on a strong note! Risks harming black bodies. Then back to the passive voice, as sometimes violent deaths and then Islamic extremism are visited on these hapless yet vibrant youth.
Whether straight reporting or parody, a solid B-plus.
* Sounds real nice. It sounds real expensive also, catering to each individual need, everyone has private cubicles shielding them from the next person, glittery housing and so on. So who is paying for all this? What sort of benefit do these exotic people provide? None, it’s one huge albatross.
* It is all so wonderful until the Hassans reach a critical mass and longer have use for the Levins. In fact, the Levins will be target number one and we’ll start hearing the same kind of bitching about anti-semitism we hear about in France. Anyone who has worked with immigrants is surprised by the anti-semitism. Not just Arabs, but Africans, et al. And in France and elsewhere it will get exponentially worse in shorter time periods. Because demography is destiny, and not just for white males.
* Questions: Who accommodates whom? Does multiculturalism favor cultural peccadilloes from the new invasive cultures over established law, custom, and majority interests? Do the accommodations “Islamisize” European culture rather than integrate the new immigrants into the extant European culture? The growing evidence … (and this is not satire).
2. Schools in Minnesota are offering “prayer rooms” to accommodate its growing Muslim population. The school lunch menus also offer pork-free entrees. The accommodations were the result of a legal challenge brought by the local Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and supported by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. According to the Department of Education, maintaining European standards creates a “hostile environment” for Muslim students.
So, who accommodates whom? What are the chances of the new Muslim immigrants anywhere integrating into the mainstream European culture? What are the chances of the new Muslim populations accepting the democratic governmental and legal traditions of European culture? Is Islam a “cultural cancer” that will ultimately destroy European culture and traditions in the name of multiculturalism?
* It really is hard to believe that anybody could miss the irony of that particular caption under that particular picture.
* This is some kind of strange world, where inanimate objects and abstract concepts – apartment blocks, stairwells, the streets, drugs, extremism, etc. have agency and power but humans, especially non-white humans, do not. These things are so powerful that they are able to lure non-whites into their clutches. Stairwells attack you, like the trees in the Wizard of Oz. Whites however reside on magic dirt which largely protects them from these things.
You really have to have a medieval mind to think in this way – I guess the Age of Reason is over. Or else the author has adopted a worldview that is like a fragile bubble that requires a lot of fancy rationalization in order to keep it intact. Writing a whole article in the passive voice is a small price to pay to prevent your worldview from being shattered.
* I can’t speak of Canada’s historically troublesome populations, but America’s has a very deeply entrenched attitude that jaw-dropping rates of criminality and anti-social behavior at an early age that continues into adulthood are just “being real.” Added to that is the taboo against the larger culture being able to criticize this behavior in direct terms – to do so is to bring down the condemnation of all right-thinking people and accusations of racism or ignorance of history. One must always blame nebulous concepts like “white supremacy” or “structural racism”.
* Guy from Toronto here. It’s safe largely due to the demographic composition. We have fewer Blacks than American cities of similar size. Chinese and Hindu immigrants make up a huge proportion of the immigrants here and these groups aren’t violent or belligerent for the most part. However, Somalis, Jamaicans, various Arab and certain South Asian groups like Pakistanis certainly are.
Toronto’s city motto is the Orwellian, “Diversity Our Strength”. This is supposed to be self-evident, but it’s only self-evident if you’re a minority racial agitator or insulated liberal white person who interacts almost exclusively with other insulated liberal white people.
This city is truly a bastion of anti-white male neurosis. The amusing part is when the lefty-liberal types talk about “toxic masculinity” (under the assumption that it applies mostly to white guys) they pretty much describe many (most?) Somali, Jamaican, Pakistani and Arab men to a tee.
A fun game is to agree with the lefty liberals about such things as toxic masculinity and then point to male members of the darker ethnys, without mentioning race, as evidence of said toxic masculinity. Often, you can see a flicker of realization that is quickly extinguished by their crimestop-inhibited brains.
* I spend a lot of time in Toronto, having married one of them, and their big-city pretensions never cease to amuse me. They like to call it “T-Dot” and fantasize that they have a gangsta problem. Meanwhile, the meanest neighborhood in Toronto is gooder than the goodest neighborhood in quite a few American cities–for now. Enough third world dirtbags can ruin anything.
* Definitely not a parody — just someone with reasonable intelligence but who has been deeply and thoroughly marinated in The Narrative. In my own work I talk to people who are intelligent and thoughtful with good critical judgement until the subject wanders into any social-political topic where the evidence is wildly inconsistent with The Narrative. Then they drop all critical faculties and launch into bizarre leaps of logic and ignore gaping holes in the evidence to ensure that they can adhere to The Narrative. It is a common ailment.
* We can only assume that somewhere within this project lives the future goalie who will lead the Maples Leafs to the Stanley Cup.
* I forget where Maslow put halal meat and all-female yoga classes in his hierarchy of needs…
* All neurologically normal humans, and many folks well on the autism spectrum, have a psychological need for fantasy, taboo and unfalsifiable worldviews. For those of us in Protestant lands (and increasingly Catholic lands), Equality has usurped God as the deity to worship uncritically.
* The most murderous cities in US are: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit and New Orleans. Still only 4 of top 50 most murderous cities are in U.S.
* Is Somalia so well known for its’ medical care that we need to import nurses from there? If I walked into a hospital and I saw a nurse got up in one of those islamic body-condom ninja-frocks, I’d turn the hell around and walk straight out again.
* I live in a mid-sized city in the Deep South, and my apartment complex is FULL of Arabs and Muslim South Asians. Some are students and some are families. All of the women wear conservative hijab, and 5 or 6 even wear the Niqab (veil that reveals only the eyes). A lot of the men smoke weed on their porches with impunity. They toss cigarettes on the ground and the younger guys spend a ton of time sitting outside the gym and pool, quietly ogling women. The management does not seem to care- keep in mind it is a very nice, gated apartment. It is a high crime city so maybe that’s why they don’t care. the Arabs are a nuisance but aren’t really dangerous.
Anyway, point is the demographic change is way worse than the official numbers suggest. There are probably millions of uncounted immigrants, legal and illegal. I go to the park, I go to the grocery store, and I am sometimes in the minority even when you just count the non-black population (my city is half black). You’ve got to consider that a lot of the white population on the census is old and semi-disabled, so they don’t get out much.
We are not being told the truth about demographics. The scale of what is going on is enormous and there is absolutely no equivalent in history. The white, rural areas are just too thinly populated to account for the discrepancy between real-life and the numbers.
* I welcome our new Muslim overlords. They’ll be much easier to handle than our Jewish overlords, who the Muslim overlords will have handled for us.
* That line, the burka pics, and the description of Muslim takeover of the swinming pool make me think Levin may be dog whistling about Muslim immigration.
The focus on the newly segregated pool is interesting in light of what happened in Germany. With Muslims, public pools where white teeneagers meet members of the opposite sex who go to different schools is a nice thing we can’t have anymore. Dads who want to take their daughter swimming? Can’t have that either.
* I live in Toronto and it is for better or worse a polite functioning multi-culti city.
As a previous commentator pointed out the specific composition of our immigrants and POC probably functions in a way to keep everyone reasonably well behaved and the grievance industry in check.
It takes a lot to be a non-noticer in Toronto because the entire city is basically a giant HBD laboratory, but the enforcement of non-noticing is absolute here. This also probably helps with cohesion.
I will also note that Regent Park did a pretty good job of being a first stop for a lot of immigrants who within a few years would usually end up living some version of the suburban canadian dream. The reason Regent Park was perceived as a ghetto was completely the fault of a small subset of blacks from Regent who played US gangster dress-up and ended up shooting each other for all the usual “disrespectful comment on my youtube gangster rap video” reasons. Even my criminal defence lawyer friend was shocked when i told him that only like 15% of Regent residents were black. Like everyone else he assumed from the news and the coverage that it was a 100% black multi-generational poverty trap. I don’t mind the new regent and there are some nice new buildings there that are filling up with asians and SWPLers. On the other hand we may have demolished a functioning entry to Canada neighborhood, with good supports for new residents, for no reason other than the bad press from 10-12 wanna be gangsters shooting each other.
* This is a crock. Yoga is forbidden by conservative Sunni Islam, and a Sri Lanka Muslim would know that.
The article would be as offensive to Muslims as an article about conservative Christian women pole dancing would to evangelicals.
Maybe that’s the real intent of the article.
* Presumably there must also be decent Toronto natives trapped in these apartments too. The author of this article seems to be suggesting the immigrants deserve better treatment than the locals simply by virtue of not being from there. Which is quite amazing when you think about it.
It’s like their anti-racism has become an exact inverse copy of the racism they supposedly despise: an unthinking, prejudiced, knee-jerk reaction in favour of anyone they think doesn’t belong there. ‘You ain’t from round here, are you? Get to the front o’ the queue, boiiiy’
* Don’t be so sure. The Muslim overloards will be more numerous as there is a nearly inexhaustible supply of foreign-born Muslims willing to immigrate, and so they will take a large portion of the White female population for themselves. There won’t even be a pretense of merit-based employment as extended Muslim clans monopolize all of the good jobs. Even if you convert, you will be inferior. Those families that claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad rank highest, followed by the old peninsular Arab clans that formed the core of the earliest Muslim faith, followed by the Arab Muslims outside of the Arabian peninsula whose lands were conquered in the 7th and 8th centuries, followed by non-Arabic speaking Muslims whose countries/clans converted centuries ago. A new convert likely wouldn’t be mistreated by all Muslims, but it’s a good bet that he would at least be shown his inferior place by some of them.
* Comments are being switched off all over the MSM, especially the Disqus system. Bloomberg and CNN have dropped it. National Post (Canada) bailed out in 2015. The UK Daily Telegraph dropped out this year and The Independent (also UK) some time ago.
These major sites have mostly given up on comments altogether or point the reader to Faceberg, Twitter and Reddit. In some cases they have installed limited, clunky, commenting systems that seem like a throwback to the early 00s, almost useless compared to Disqus. Articles that would have seen hundreds of comments now boast three or four.
It’s almost as if they didn’t want people commenting. Crazy I know!
However the Disqus universe seems to be expanding across all manner of more minor outlets, blogs etc The commentariat are satisfied with what the MSM are offering and seem to be spurred on to start their own sites.
(The Daily Telegraph abandoned Disqus on 31 March. I used to visit every day, since then I’ve been there maybe twice, once quite by accident. Their traffic figures would make fascinating reading).
* Astonishing hypocrisy on display here.
Accommodations to Jewish Orthodox Women for separate pool times = “a capitulation to a theocratic view of government services”
Accommodations to Muslim Women for separate pool times = “ethos of inclusion”
I am speechless.
* This is the real New York City angle to this story. The same week they condemned a public pool sex segregation system in Brooklyn for the benefit of Orthodox Jews, the Times celebrates it for Muslims in Toronto.
The Orthodox are particularly upset with this phrase which is being taken as a slur against the Orthodox “with its strong odor of religious intrusion into a secular space.”
What a world.
* When Whites eventually drop down to 13 percent of the population, is this country still going to have a lot of zip codes that are over 90 percent White?
No. But that’s because other people *want* to live around white people. White people make stuff nice. In fact, the essential demand of the left–no longer worth calling it “left multiculturalism, because it’s the only “left” around–the essential demand of the left, is that non-whites must be allowed to live around whites and loot them. Pure parasitism. You can’t “make a deal” with them for us to move off to our own nation, or even communities and ergo stop our “oppression” of minorities. Nope … that’s racism! We must be enriched by minorities and support them with our labor–i.e. we’re slaves.
In contrast, no one else wants to live around blacks, so black areas tend to move toward 100% black with only those too poor, or those trying to gentrify potentially nice–if cleared–areas.