Analyzing this would be like shooting dead fish in a barrel, but by all means, go ahead if you want to.
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Analyzing this would be like shooting dead fish in a barrel, but by all means, go ahead if you want to.
Ethics Alarms 
Entire quote: “Fuck the suburbs. Because they don’t know a God-damned thing about how life is in the city.”
Aside from any other context, one mitigating factor I could conceive is a frustration of this nature: “So, we only care about the crime if it starts impacting the comfort of the middle-class suburbia? We don’t care if the crime only remains in the city?”
I could almost envision a similar quote: “Fuck Martha’s Vineyard. Because they don’t know a God-damned thing about how life is along the US-Mexico border.”
Of course, if she is advocating not enforcing any policing measures against the hoodlums inside the city, and thus is thinking that those same hoodlums should be free to pilfer the suburbs, that’s a different matter.
I almost think her statement here, in isolation, is a Rorschach Test, and the replies I saw in the thread seem to confirm that.
“How life is in the city” is the tell. It’s “poor people can’t help themselves, the devil made them do it. And people steal stuff and shoot each other because they are discriminated against.” Blah, blah, blah.
You really think she’s asking for more police patrolling in the city? More police executing more unarmed young black men?
Not in the slightest. And maybe her reaction against suburbia is because people are calling for more police, I don’t know. I would have to actually spend some time digging into what the full discussion was about.
But I could still defend my “mitigating factor” by suggesting that she is unhappy about the crime and wants to tackle the the heart of the matter, and none except those in the city seem to care about solving the crime issue. How the crime gets solved is a completely different debate.
I suppose I should have said more on why I only called it a “mitigating factor” instead of a defense of her behavior. Even if she is frustrated that suburbanites didn’t seem to care until it started affecting them, this could have been a chance to make allies with suburbia and work together to fight the problem. Instead she has alienated a potential ally and confirms every negative stereotype about her in the process.
You’re doubtless right, Ryan. I’m a little grumpy today. I think the reaction of the left and college administrators to the Harvard/UNC case is really bothering me. This woman seems to simply be another manifestation of the destructive double standards the college administrators and this local politician base their entire modus operandi upon.
OB,
You’re absolutely right that there is a problem, and it is insidious. There was an article that Instapundit linked to some days ago, “Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis”, which posited a looming disaster that has come about through affirmative action and other measures like that.
At heart, I think most of us want to see people succeed, and if anyone is struggling, we want to help him. The problem is we are currently running up against solutions that, even given the purest intentions, are actually detrimental, which affirmative action has been. The Left is vested in the idea that the way to help blacks achieve is to remove the legal barriers, be they segregation laws or merit admission requirements. They don’t see that by removing merit, they introduce a plague of problems that undermines society as a whole.
Affirmative action has effectively been like taking someone who had been bedridden for a time and entering him into a marathon. Because of the atrophy, he simply can’t compete. This isn’t to say he can’t eventually work up to running a marathon. The way to get him there is to work on rehab, and then walking, and then jogging short distances, and so on. Instead, the Left has shortened the race and abolished taking times and recording in what order people crossed the finish line. Now instead of training this bedridden fellow to run a marathon, the Left has crippled everyone else’s ability to run the marathon, and the entire endeavor is rendered incoherent and worthless.
I think it is correct that this then has a state politician saying “Fuck the suburbs” as the pinnacle of competence, because the bar of expectation has been lowered so far you can’t even trip over it.
Well and thoughtfully said, as always, Ryan.
No one cares about things that don’t impact them. They might pretend to, but it’s only because public perception does impact them. No one has the capacity to endlessly care about things that have no impact on their lives.
People would get a lot more done if they stopped waiting for people not in a circumstance to come save them from the circumstance. Take responsibility for yourself and your life and do what it takes to fix your own problems instead of waiting for other people to come fix your life for you.
If the cities are full of crime, then the cities need to fix the crime. Stop bitching about how other people who don’t live in the city think and act and start looking at how the people in the city think and act. The rest of the world has nothing to do with a particular place’s problems. The rest of the world doesn’t set your local policy for your community, so they cannot fix your communities problems.
OB,
I considered that, too. My very first thought was to respond, “Because the suburbanites can never know what life is like in the city?” It seems to me that there’s an attitude that no one can ever change or grow. Blacks can’t lift themselves out of poverty, and whites can’t stop being racist. Suburbanites can never, ever, figure out what life is like in the city.
And that attitude keeps thousands of government workers employed giving away trillions of dollars in the war on poverty in perpetuity. This woman is counting on continued condescension by white people to “the blacks.” It’s insidious.
Ironically, it’s the “lived experience” thing that college administrators now use to justify their quota-based admissions. You are your experience and nothing more than your experience. It’s incredibly deterministic and nihilistic. I thought a person was supposed to go to college to have a new experience, not simply wallow in their life to date. Similarly, because some people live in shitty places, anyone who doesn’t is not genuine. Aspiration is out the window. I’m getting kind of incoherent here, but it’s a really insidious and pervasive problem.
Ryan, I fully agree with your original take. I don’t have to be crime victim to be concerned about rising crime. With that said, NP is correct that those who are most affected must take the lead to effect the desired changes.
As for the idea that suburbanites don’t understand life in the city I can only say that
I did not know that white flight originated in the suburbs. Sarcasm
Only because bias makes one stupid. 1) An elected official who expresses her self that way in an official utterance is unfit to serve. 2) The “fuck anyone who isn’t my constituency” runs counter to the principles of a competent democracy. It doesn’t matter what she’s talking about.
The don’t say “fuck” in political discourse horse left the barn a while ago. It’s hardly worth noticing.
Isn’t she simply articulating the Obama (and Biden) administration’s concerted effort to outlaw single family zoning? I bet there’s some email somewhere that names the program “Fuck the Suburbs,” or “FTS” for short.
This is Marxism at work: combat income inequality by making everyone poor and miserable. Presto chango. Problem solved!
This is nothing new around these parts, it’s just another prime example of a “progressively” (read regressive) woke Wisconsin politician showing off Wisconsin’s delusional side of politics.
In other words, as we saw in the 2020 election late night results: “There’s Melwaukee and then there’s the rest of Wesconsin, and never the twain shall meet.”
“just another prime example of a ‘progressively’ (read regressive) woke Wisconsin politician showing off Wisconsin’s delusional side of politics.”
That aspect of WESconsin is conspicuously absent up in majestically forested Iron County.
Didn’t miss it a lick over the last ~ nine (9) days, bur here it is to…um…greet me upon my return.
Good for her, I actually with her, at least to the extent that the suburbs are populated by idiots who support and vote the party (Dems) that is destroying our urban centers, and who are happy to hashtag online and our signage on their front lawns spewing typical lefty virtue signaling nonsense while remain insulated from the effects of the policies of the party they support. Maybe a little spillage of crime from cities to the suburbs would help open eyes of those idiots, especially those suburban moms that are voting solely based on abortion and their personal dislike of Trump
Good points!
Of course they know about life in the city. That’s why they live in the suburbs.
EXACTLY, Willem.
The reason my parents moved us to the suburbs was because we DID “know how life is in the city”. And it wasn’t conducive to raising a family…
Nice mouth on that lady too. Very respectful. Saying fuck and goddamn on the house floor. She is so hip. I try to imagine my mother talking like that in her kitchen, let alone in public, but it’s not possible. Guess it’s just how she was brought up. My Sicilian grandmother would’ve slapped her face [while losing it in Italian about her being so disgraceful.]