Posts Tagged ‘race’

Flash Mob at Brooklyn Mall

Saturday, December 28th, 2013

One problem with defining the flash mob problem is conflicting reports on the severity of particular incidents.

Thursday there was a flash mob at Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Brooklyn. How bad was it?

According to the New York Post story linked above:

A wild flash mob stormed and trashed a Brooklyn mall, causing so much chaos that the shopping center was forced to close during post-Christmas sales, sources said Friday.

More than 400 crazed teens — who mistakenly thought the rapper Fabolous would perform — erupted into brawls all over Kings Plaza Shopping Center in Mill Basin on Thursday at 5 p.m., sources said.

The troublemakers looted and ransacked several stores as panicked shoppers ran for the exits and clerks scrambled to pull down metal gates.

[snip]

“They were playing the ‘knockout’ game,” said Shante, a 21-year-old perfume merchant, in reference to a violent trend in which teens try to knock out an unsuspecting victim with a single punch.

However, this CBS NY report makes things sound pretty chaotic, but a whole lot less criminal:

“There were reports of minor damage and no store owners reported any thefts.”

Well either looting occurred or it didn’t, but you would think thefts would have been reported if stores had been “ransacked.” Did the “minor damage” consist of decorations being knocked over or windows being smashed?

All sources agree that some fights broke out (though video of that seems to have been pulled from YouTube).

There was also reports of black-on-white racial attacks in the same neighborhood back in October.

And what does The New York Times have to say? Either my Google-fu is weak, or a mini-riot at a mall in the city it ostensibly covers is simply beneath The Gray Lady’s notice, as I couldn’t find any online coverage.

More on racial tensions in Brooklyn and the knockout game.

Edited to add: Gothamist seems to have some non-embeddable videos off of Facebook. What’s shown there seems slightly on the “rowdy” side of the “rowdy/criminal” divide. I would have been concerned had I been there, but I didn’t see any window smashing or looting. Caveats on limited viewpoints and small sample sizes apply.

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Posted in Crime, video | No Comments »

Shut Up White Women!
(or The #solidarityisforwhitewomen Tag And What It Means)

Tuesday, August 13th, 2013

Last night the #solidarityisforwhitewomen tag raced to the top of the Twitter trending chart, treating people not only to an amusing left-on-left slap fight, but also providing a glimpse into the fever swamps of far-left victimhood identity politics.

It’s an unholy marriage of Marxism and racial identity politics, brewed and decanted among far-left community organizers and tenured faculty members. The basic idea is that victimhood equals saintliness, in that the more of a victim you are, the less of a white capitalist hetronormative patriarchal oppressor you are. (Feel free to add another dozen or so far-left buzzwords to the preceding sentence.) This is done both in order to assert who has the greater moral claim on the spoils of big government, and to cow others and guilt-trip them into giving in to your demands, because black victimhood automatically trumps white privilege, etc. It’s also to keep people firmly ensconced in the left’s group-think herd mentality rather than thinking critically. It’s the language of thought-terminating cliches, designed to end debate by placing those employing it higher on the hierarchy of victimhood than those it is deployed against.

As for what brought on this hashtag, well, it’s a rich, zesty, resentful stew of left-wing grievance-mongering.

Part of it seems to be backlash over all the attention lavished on Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s “how to have it all by climbing the corporate ladder to CEO and still having children while promoting the sisterhood” book, which seems particularly near and dear to the hearts of white female business writers everywhere.

Part of it seems to stem from some white feminists actually daring to be critical of radical Islam, which (for complex and mysterious reasons) seems to trump white feminism on the hierarchy of victimhood.

The topless activists of Femen seem a particular object of their ire:

For some reason, something Amanda Marcotte did in 2008 still seems to be a fresh wound in the minds of many:

And it’s just a chance to grind the usual left-wing axes some more:

And this is particularly gratifying for those of us on the Vast Right Wing:

It’s also amazing how often some variant “You shut up” is deployed for any white women who happen to have some objection to this mass race-based mobbing.

The lesson: On the far left, you are not allowed to speak when your superiors on the victim hierarchy chart are speaking. As usual on the far-left, “let’s have a dialog on race” turns out to mean “you’ll shut up and listen while I condemn you, bigot.”

Of course, underlying all of this is a real truth that none dare speak out loud: The Democratic Party as currently constructed spreads the benefits of its patronage disproportionately to old white politicians and their favored cronies. Just look at the paleness of hue of all those green energy subsidy recipients. Why, think of all the community organizing and diversity consulting sinecures that money could have underwritten! The Pigford scandal is a drop in the bucket by comparison. The Hillary Clintons, Harry Reids and Nancy Pelosis are always going to have first call at the trough of big government largess, because that’s the way the Democratic Party’s spoil system works.

But above all, this blue internecine warfare is designed to do one thing: to keep those on the identity politics left as part of the herd. Those fixated on victimhood and inter-feminist doctrinal differences are far less likely to question why their policies have failed so badly when allowed to run their course in Detroit, or why 72% of blacks are born out of wedlock, thanks in large measure to to the welfare state.

More commentary from Twitchy.

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Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | 3 Comments »

Democrat Paul Sadler: Texans Don’t Understand How Awesome Obama Is Because They’re Racists

Thursday, March 22nd, 2012

It should be no surprise that Democratic senate candidate Paul Sadler supports the the whole liberal checklist of Obama initiatives. However, what’s surprising is how easily he plays the “Obama’s opponents are racist” card on his fellow Texans:

“If he had an ‘R’ behind his name—and unfortunately, in some parts of this state, if his skin color was different—they would hail him as one of the greatest presidents of this country.”

I’m sure Texans are absolutely delighted to hear they’re racists for opposing Obama’s failed Blue State model of big government, out-of-control spending and higher taxes. The Race Card used to be the last refugee of black liberal scoundrels. Now it seems to be the first refugee of even white Democrats.

Later on he mentions that “fundraising isn’t going too well.” Imagine that.

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Posted in Democrats, Elections, Texas | 1 Comment »

“Obama’s the biggest affirmative action baby in history”

Friday, April 15th, 2011

That’s the money quote from Mickey Kaus, a Democrat who voted for Obama (and may very well vote for him again), in an article about why Obama seems so bad a politics.

Now that Kaus has uttered an obvious truth, that Obama owes much of his success to white guilt (and, to his credit, to being the first serious black candidate for President who (unlike Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton) wasn’t a complete scumbag), do you think the MSM, whose hero worship was such a large factor in getting Obama elected, might cease accusing anyone who opposes him of racism?

More than two years after Obama’s election, we’re still waiting for an honest “national conversation about race.”

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Posted in Democrats, Media Watch | No Comments »

How the Washington Post Lies About Guns And Crime Through Omission

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Like many liberal publications, the Washington Post has a long history of promoting gun control. Today they published a lengthy, reasonably well researched article by David S. Fallis asserting that Realco, a gun shop in Forestville, Maryland, sold more “crime guns” (i.e., guns used in crimes) than any other dealer.

The relevant paragraphs:

86 guns sold by Realco [have] been linked to homicide cases during the past 18 years, far outstripping the total from any other store in the region, a Washington Post investigation has found. Over that period, police have recovered more than 2,500 guns sold by the shop, including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies.

In Maryland, Realco towers over the other 350 handgun dealers in the state as a source of guns confiscated in the District and Prince George’s County, the most violent jurisdictions in the area. Nearly one out of three guns The Post traced to Maryland dealers came from Realco. The rest were spread among other shops across the state.

Let us for the moment take these figures at face value. However, to my mind the biggest and most obvious problem with the story wasn’t what was in it, but what was missing, the elephant in the room Mr. Fellis failed to mention even once: race.

Not once do the words “African American” appear in the article, nor does the word “black” appear in reference to race.

But it is well know to anyone with even passing familiarity with Washington, D.C. that the whites in the District live overwhelmingly in the northwest “white pipeline” that runs from roughly Capitol Hill all the way up through Georgetown to the Virginia border, while blacks predominate in the rest of the city, but especially in the southeast.

Take a look at this map depicting the ethnic demography of the Washington, DC area created by Eric Fischer:

In Fisher’s map, white people are red dots, black people are blue, Hispanics are orange, and Asians are green.

Now take a look at Realco’s location in comparison to Washington DC:

Realco is not only the closest gun shop to D.C., it is smack dab in the middle of the most overwhelmingly black neighborhood in the greater D.C. area. Also, if I’m reading this map correctly, no less than three Metro bus lines (J11, J12, and J13) run right past the store at 6108 Marlboro Pike.

The reason this matters is that blacks in the United States commit a disproportionate share of violent crimes compared to the total population. Look at Table 43 of the FBI’s U.S. crime statistics for 2009. 49.3% of those arrested for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter were black, despite blacks making up only 12.4% of the U.S. population. (The reasons black crime rates are so high is are a source of endless debate (see nature vs. nurture, just for starters) and beyond the scope of this essay.)

So all other things being equal, Realco being the source of so many guns eventually used in crime makes sense, since it is the nearest gun store to the district, as well as the gun store situated most closely to a demographic group that suffers from demonstrably higher levels of violent crime than other demographic groups. Thus Occam’s Razor suggests that we look no further than the obvious for the real facts surrounding Realco.

It’s a pity David S. Fallis didn’t feel the need to share this most basic demographic context for crime with his readers.

I have to go off and walk my dog, but I’ll probably post another piece on this subject tomorrow to touch on some angles I don’t have time to address just right now.

(And if anyone has a better source for comprehensive crime statistics broken down by race specifically for D.C. and Prince George’s County, I’d love to take a look at them.)

Edited to add: Here’s my followup to this piece.

And here’s Dwight’s analysis.

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Posted in Crime, Guns, Media Watch | 6 Comments »