Sixteen Volts

A few days ago The Daily Show played a clip of the debate about violence in video games, with Samantha Bee reporting live from San Andreas. In another newsclip, some fat white republican congressman said that children of poor families are more likely to become criminals and thus things that can be allowed to slide for the rich kids should be taken more seriously with the poor kids. For both Jon and the studio audience, this was somehow supposed to be a horribly wrong thing to say, even though I don't see what the heck was supposed to be factually wrong or objectionable with this statement. But if so, then I guess that we will never again hear leftists excusing crime by appeals to poverty and neglegt, yes? Let the good times just roll for everybody, for tomorrow we will die!

Also a few days ago, Boing Boing linked to some progressive nimbyist's tearful appeal "Brooklyn's Trojan Horse" where he pleads that new skyscrapers shouldn't be built in Brooklyn, as they would disrupt the favric of the existing neighbourhoods. And then these people wonder why the rents are sky high in the New York City. The writer of this plea probably owns an apartment or two himself over there and is worried about them not becoming more valuable, I'd bet, as every "you don't need to build any more housing around here, since we all already have homes" moron always seems to, when you look into it. Of course, the solution to the whole problem is simple, as Tjic recently put it: "everyone who doesn’t love socialism, raise your hand vote with your feet". Exit gives you voice, and the fact that your threat to exit is serious to the community, this proves you to be more important to the community than those people whose threats to exit would be met with a merry "Good riddance, let me help you pack!" And if the problem of American cities is that middle class is moving away from them, perhaps one solution that could work would be to return the control of cities to the middle class. Nah. That couldn't possibly work.

Meanwhile, in her posts "“innate charm,” my ass" and the follow-up "more thoughts on gentrification", the femo-socialist writer "AngryBrownButch" is angry about the fact that people of wrong colour think that they can just move in her neighbourhood. Don't they know that their kind is not tolerated around here? Hoo boy again, it sure sounds like somebody could seriously use some diversity training.

What is even funnier is that if you reverse the ethnicities in all paragraphs of these posts (for example, replace each "white hipster" with "Mexican"), the resulting screed wouldn't be out of place at the StormFront website. Jesus, just go read the whole thing, including the comments. I think my favourite part was when she used the word "invasion" to refer to the uncomfortable feeling of seeing white faces popping up where there previously were only brown ones. I could not ask for a better example of the leftist double standards when it comes to persyns of colyr, who as we know are allowed to be as intolerant of diversity as they want.

Speaking of intolerance and where to look for it, it sure is funny how the high-paid diversity consultants never seem to take their lecture mateiral to slums. (Or mosques, for that matter.) For all the leftist lamentations about how "bigoted" and "intolerant" the average middle class white male is supposed to be, the average underclass dweller is about a hundred times more bigoted and intolerant when it comes to issues such as women's rights, gay rights, transsexual rights and the rights of people of different religion or skin colour. I guess that it is no wonder why the writer herself chose to move out of her beloved Bushwick, the very area whose gentrification she now so bitterly opposes. When people have the money to choose where they want to live, their choices always reveal their real preferences. For some mysterious reason, very few people seem to actually prefer to live in bad neighbourhoods. (And "bad neighbourhood" is, of course, euphemism for "bad people", since the neighbourhood itself is just concrete, brick, glass and steel and doesn't do anything at all.)

Now, me being only a silly little reactionary with a very small brain, I have never been able to understand what exactly is so bad about gentrification. I bet that most of my Finnish readers have never even heard this word before, so they might want to check out the Wikipedia article that I linked. Even so, I doubt that they will be able to understand why making some residential neighbourhood safer, cleaner and in all ways a better place to live is somehow a bad thing. Having fewer social pathologies festering around you is what people throughout the whole political spectrum pretty universally want, yes? And even the most ardent leftists think that racially segregated slums and ghettoes are a bad thing, and we should all instead live together and get along?

But hey, if the leftists really can't stand gentrification and the elevating influence of the middle class, we could certainly seclude the poor underclass of all colours inside some isolated neighbourhood, and then let them make only each other miserable instead of ruining the life for everybody else. Now that is one leftist idea that I could enthusiastically support, if it could somehow be guaranteed that those people then remained there. Just think about it, leftists, wouldn't this sound almost insanely great? All those poor people could be authentic and real in the way depicted in the essays of Theodore Dalrymple, as they were freed from the police and the oppressive constraints of the bourgeois society and its middle class mores of logic, individualism and future time orientation.

But seriously, one thing that I will certainly never understand is when leftists complain about white flight and gentrification, and oppose these both at the same time. Excuse me, leftists, which way did you want it now? Do you want the white middle class to stay in the city and remain urbanized, or do you want these evil oppressors to move away to the suburbs as far away from you as possible? It can't be both at the same time, contrary to the way that your side seems to be able to believe seven contradictory things before breakfast.

I can certainly understand why keeping your oppressors at a safe distance would be a good thing, but even so, if I were in your shoes, I would certainly do my best to encourage the white middle class to stay in. After all, pretty much every time that the white middle class has moved away from some area, they have been sorely missed afterwards. This arrangement of ethnic integration certainly seems to work well in the Greater Toronto Area. I doubt that this city would be anywhere as nice if its middle class took off to suburbs, leaving a hollow core of the American-style inner city behind it.

But you know, in general and in many more issues in addition to just this one, when I am listening to the arguments of the leftists, I often find it so hard to decipher what they even want. It's like they don't have any kind of coherent program other than bitterly hating the middle class and the rich, trying to cover their real goals with emotionally appealing lines that were written in the former Soviet Union and still remain behind like the grin of the Cheshire Cat. Since there just is no pleasing of some people, perhaps it is best not even to try. Once the leftists started idolizing poverty and all kinds of defectives, their very ideology necessarily became poor and defective, making it impossible to salvage.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Friday, June 23, 2006 at 9:48 AM