Racist asshole Rod Dreher continues to be a racist asshole:
Another item, this one from Andrew Sullivan’s blog. He talks about how for 20 years there had been violence on his block in DC, but he never let it scare him away from walking past young black men in groups. The other day, three black men jumped a white guy on the block, beat him up, and, say police, yelled at him, “This is for Trayvon Martin,” then robbed him. Andrew:The overwhelming evidence of two decades "seems reasonable" to Dreher, but nowhere near as compelling as his terror of black folks.
Will that change my attitude when I manage to return from NYC? No. Does it deeply depress and anger me? Yes.Andrew is willing to let 20 years of experience continue to guide his behavior, versus a single incident. That seems reasonable, in one sense. In another sense, that victim could easily have lost his life, or been seriously wounded in this attack. The odds of being attacked by young black men on that block in DC are very small, based on Andrew’s experience, but not nearly as small as if you lived in a part of town farther from where young black inner-city men live. But if you are attacked, the price you might pay is your life. Is that a prudential gamble you are willing to take to avoid passing a racial-profiling judgment as a pedestrian?
I lived in New York for 33 years. I remember specific periods of racial tension, like after the Howard Beach incident, when I was extra-on-guard; any time the atmosphere changes, one should take precautions till it blows over. But never did I think, I should just get away from these black people -- then I'll be safe! I can move to Bumfuck and see my chance of accidental death rise 20% -- but at least I'll die in a racially-pure environment!
Dreher likes to show us how worldly he is, but his arguments -- yes, you've been safe for 20 years, but why take a chance? Wouldn't you be better off in a white neighborhood? You're just doing this to prove a point, you know -- remind me of what my well-meaning suburban relatives would say to me back in the day. The main difference being, they were well-meaning.
Birch Barlow: Mayor Quimby, you are well known for your
ReplyDeletelenient stance on crime, but suppose for a second that your house was
ransacked by thugs, your family was tied up in the basement with socks
in their mouths, you try to open the door but there's too much blood on
the knob....
Mayor Quimby: What is your question?
Birch Barlow: My question is about the budget, sir.
Old, rich white guys are dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Remember when Robert Novak ran over that pedestrian in Washington, D.C.? So, if you see white guy in a luxury sedan, the price you might pay is your life. Is that a prudential gamble you are willing to take to avoid passing a racial-profiling judgment as a pedestrian?
ReplyDeleteWouldn't you be better off in a white neighborhood?
ReplyDeleteI don't know, is it being prowled by armed Dirty Harry wannabes?
The only people who have committed any violence against me have been white men. So, clearly, I should move to East New York.
ReplyDeleteI was just thinking "What's the use, it's all been said" when you saved me from existential dispair with three words "White Cower Movement".
ReplyDeleteOr maybe they don't kill you, they just break into your house while you're on vacation and steal all your shit, and then when you ask them to compensate you - because after all, they're a bank, they have plenty of money - they tell you to fuck off.
ReplyDelete20 years in the neighborhood and he still doesn't know his own neighbors? Talk about your rootless cosmopolitans!
ReplyDeleteWhere's my avatar????
ReplyDeleteWait. Isn't this the man who dragged his family into a rural hellhole, and writes about his own siblings as a cautionary tale? When he gets jumped the only question would be who in town didn't do it.
ReplyDeleteI came for the KW Jeter, but stayed for the Steve Sailer.
ReplyDeleteCall me cynical, but is there any evidence that Sullivan's story isn't complete horseshit? Seriously. Did they draw an upside-down "T" on the guy's face as well?
ReplyDeleteRIP Doghouse Riley,
ReplyDeleteHis nickname always cracked me up, I had an image of a ww2 GI looking at this absurd world we all live in.
But Roy, if you don't move to Bumfuck, Louisiana, how will you turn your lifestyle tourism about the plainspoken wisdom of simple country folk into a book deal?
ReplyDeleteIt's a T for Tony Wonder. Clearly this was really a straight-bashing.
ReplyDeleteStolen by urban youts, no doubt.
ReplyDeleteHe does have a point about health outcomes. If I crossed the street every time I saw a black youth, I'd be 10 pounds lighter.
ReplyDeleteThat's an easy one: whoever was holding the camera and posted the recording on YouTube.
ReplyDeleteHis nick was from Chandler's "The Big Sleep".
ReplyDeleteIf you didn't cross the street when you saw a Scottish acquaintance, you'd be 10 pounds lighter, too.
ReplyDeleteThe really hilarious part is where he talks about how the Mafia kept people in Italian neighborhoods from being mugged by black people.
ReplyDeleteEvery time some racially charged news item goes nationwide, stories start popping up about supposed waves of black-on-white revenge violence, with the black antagonists loudly announcing their current-events-related motivation. Conservatives eat that shit right up. But it's pretty much always bullshit, and Sullivan's story fits the pattern pretty closely, so I'm going to go ahead and assume it's bullshit, too.
ReplyDeleteI mean, is it possible to be too cynical about Sullivan? He's kind of a piece of shit, isn't he?
Well sure, but only because the Mafia mugged them first.
ReplyDeleteSame here. I've lived all 66 years of my life in NYC. Skin doesn't get much paler than mine and I've walked many times through East New York, Brownsville, Bed-Stuy, E. Flatbush, parts of Coney Is. where the tourist don't go, old Red Hook, pre-hipster W'burg, Jamaica, Hollis, Alphabet City, Harlem, the Heights, the south Bronx, etc. Never a problem. Where was I ever accosted? Lily-white Bensonhurst, Midwood and Sheepshead Bay. Then again, I used to be able to jump when i was younger and I can still dance pretty well so let the stereotypes fall where they may.
ReplyDeleteI lived and worked in Mount Vernon during the LA riots, and never once felt skeered and afeared.
ReplyDeleteThose weren't muggings, those were insurance audits.
ReplyDeleteHo ho ho!
ReplyDeleteTa-Nehisi Coates explained why this is stupid about a week ago.
ReplyDeleteEarlier he wrote that "An capricious anti-intellectualism, a fanatical imbecility, a willful amnesia, an eternal sunshine upon our spotless minds, is white supremacy's gravest legacy."
Dreher is an example of this; I know he at least reads Coates sometimes, but his attitude towards race always devolves back to "But if you think about it, shouldn't we be really scared of non-whites?" no matter how often the nuances of the world are actually pointed out to him. Like, he got mad that when it turned out black children and foreigners were being disproportionately disciplined in LA schools, because we didn't all assume that black culture was to blame.
Anybody looking at America with just the tiniest bit of honesty will see that black people have been punished for imaginary crimes in this country very often. The mere fact that black people are disproportionately punished can't be used as evidence that they deserve to be so punished.
You could, of course, do research into the LA school systems and perhaps build a case that this disproportionate punishment does represent a disproportionate acting out by black children, but why do that when you can just go "Aren't blacks scary???" and not think about the issue at all?
Yeah, this dates to the backward B woman who claimed a 'black man' marked her for Obama, and the only conservative who had doubts was that malevolent sprite(diwata, in Philpino) Michelle Malkin.
ReplyDeleteWell, they hide from him, you know.
ReplyDeleteJust like most Christians argue from the position that everyone knows Gawd Exists, and Atheists are just being stubbornly rebellious at the risk of eternal damnation, so too do Racists believe that Everybody is a Racist, and those who claim otherwise are risking their lives just to be mean to honest wing nuts.
ReplyDeleteThis is Dreher's meaning, I believe. He is wrong; he is an asshole; he is racist.
They also have Samuel Goldman, who Corey Robin singled out for praise as having one of the best critiques of The Reactionary Mind but they balance him out with whiny fake-hipster wingnut Jordan Bloom so yeah, I don't know and kind of gave up on that place.
ReplyDeleteAnd remember that Larison, while maybe not an out and out neo-Confederate, is way more sympathetic to them than a sane person should be.
ReplyDeleteWonder what Dreher would say to a movement by women to get away from neighborhoods with too many men, because statistically, you know....
ReplyDeleteIf you want to see what straight up total contempt for women as human beings looks like, read a Dreher post on the ordination female priests. And then read the comments and realize he could be even worse.
ReplyDeleteSomeone posted a thing the other day where he's threatening libel action over comments on the local parish blog, so yeah, my guess is he is not popular with his neighbors.
ReplyDeleteThis is a great title!
ReplyDeleteAnd a great concept.
No reason to believe it isn't bullshit; I notice stories of black gangs beating white people senseless and then loudly proclaiming it was for a political cause only show up on conservative blogs. If something shows up on conservative blogs and nowhere else, there's a 98% chance it's bullshit.
ReplyDeleteIt's not enough to say "I got mugged", they've got to be morally aggrieved. They've got to convince themselves that everything and everyone they don't like is in cahoots and out to get them, otherwise they might have to rethink why they hate those things.
"Kind of"?
ReplyDeleteI'm sure that death squads kept the nicer Guatemalan neighborhoods quiet, too.
ReplyDeleteIf logic and evidence fail to support your racist assumptions, invoke racism as a compelling value in and of itself. This stratagem is Dreher all over, and he's welcome to it.
ReplyDeleteCould be worse and usually is.
ReplyDeleteI feel a strange urge to peek under this rock. Do you have a link?
ReplyDeletehttp://westfeliciana.blogspot.com/2013/07/defamation.html
ReplyDeleteThat's what was linked to here. Sadly I could never find what he's complaining about.
I do think that Dreher would explode in a shower of shit if he doesn't yell, "oogah-boogah!," in print at least every couple of days, or that Obama is in some indistinct way inciting "them" to riot.
ReplyDeleteWe could probably reduce the noise level considerably in this country by electing a half-black, half-Chinese woman homosexual to the Presidency, but the cleanup job would be daunting.
this is sadmazing
ReplyDeleteI can take a good guess what he'd say, because I've seen MRAs react to women's shelters and violence-against-women charities and such. Naturally, to an MRA, even when a woman leaves a man who's physically abusing her, she's still a horrible bitch.
ReplyDeleteThe mere fact that black people are disproportionately punished can't be used as evidence that they deserve to be so punished.
ReplyDeleteAu contraire. Conservatives live in a Panglossian best-of-all-possible-worlds, where the fact that wealthy white men are on top is proof that they deserve to be on top. The world is inherently just, which means not that nobody suffers, but that those who suffer must somehow deserve it.
The only exception, of course, is slights and injustices against wealthy white men and conservatives.
Next week on National Review Online: my 500-word explanation of how you're the real racist, somehow.
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like something a fifth-columnist with inferior black genetics would say while helping Sarah Palin pretend to have a baby!
ReplyDeleteIt's the sort of news morons care about, too. Even granting that it happened, does anybody who isn't hopped up on race-crazy believe that those three guys were previously non-muggers but decided to start mugging for justice? Or did they mug somebody they'd have ordinarily mugged anyway and say something that was probably pretty funny in context at the end of it?
ReplyDeleteIt also seems like Dreher is just refusing to understand things like probability and statistics. Why it's almost like it's just an excuse for something else! Their idea that moving to suburbs will make them safer from crime, assuming it was true, doesn't make a damn bit of sense because there are other bad things that can happen to you besides crime. Some are very common, such as car crashes, which I could see being more common for suburban, exurban or rural dwellers. But it apparently doesn't occur to Rod or his ilk to put that kind of systematic thought into their deep concerns about their personal safety. Who has time for that, when there's black people to be worried about!
You just have to understand heir reasoning. See you bought all that shit on credit using their money. So even though you paid them back, with interest, they still see the shit as theirs. :)
ReplyDelete"kind of" he's a poster boy for POS
ReplyDeleteWell if I was his neighbour I'd take my morning constitutional on his front doorstep each day and hope he stepped in it
ReplyDeleteDid you ever notice Pat Buchanan's byline there, though?
ReplyDeleteWow. What. A. Tool.
ReplyDeleteIt's his magazine. Yeah, it's a weird confusing place that balances being very right (or at least insightful) with deeply insane bullshit.
ReplyDeleteAll-white neighborhoods are boring.
ReplyDeletehttp://odysseusontherocks.blogspot.com/2013/07/coppage-sacrificing-at-plastic-shrine.html
ReplyDeleteThe kids are having a drunken party while Pat's napping in the back yard. And something about ideological hermaphrodites.