“An explosion of drive-by shootings erupted on Chicago’s South and West sides this weekend. At least 74 people were shot, and 11 killed, between 3 p.m. on Friday and 6 a.m. on Monday. In one seven-hour stretch, starting around midnight on Saturday, at least 40 people were shot, four fatally, as gunmen targeted a block party, the aftermath of a funeral, and a front porch, reports the Chicago Tribune. Over two and a half hours that morning, 25 people were shot in five multiple-injury shootings, including a 17-year-old who died after being shot in the face. An 11-year-old boy, a 13-year-old boy, and a 14-year-old girl were also hit over the course of the weekend’s bloodbath. Mt. Sinai’s emergency room shut down for several hours due to the overload of bodies; in May, the entire hospital went into lockdown following a virtual riot in its lobby among gangbangers, reported Tribune columnist John Kass.”
Here is a link to the status of gun laws in Illinois.
This article says gun laws in the state of Illinois are “relatively strict” compared with those in other states of the US.
As far as I can see, the level of shootings in Chicago is driven by drug gangs that thrive in one of the most corrupt, welfare-screwed cultures in North America. The level of violence in that city (Chicago has always been a rough town) is of a level that stands comparison with the grimier parts of Iraq during the post-invasion phase of 2003. Things are reaching the point where President Trump could, with some justification, send in US military forces and put that city under external control. Of course, with my classical liberal hat on, that would probably cause more harm than good in some ways, perhaps. I’d imagine that more law-abiding people are leaving the city, creating a vicious circle where the middle class has gone, and there’s a sort of mix of gangs, welfare dependents and political hucksters running the show, rather like the favelas of Brazil but without the entrepreneurial energy. And bear in mind that this is going on while the US is, at least according to official statistics, enjoying decent economic growth and low unemployment. But in such wrecked towns, I’d wager that labour force participation rates are weak and business dynamism isn’t all that evident.
A final thought: in the UK the media reports, often to the maximum, on spree shootings (although as I noted before, things went weirdly quiet after a short while after the Vegas mass shooting). But the remorseless killing counts in Chicago, Baltimore or other cities barely registers a flicker. It’s as if it is seen as normal, or, to coin a phrase from London’s unpleasant and useless mayor, part and parcel of living in a big city.
When overwhelmingly white losers go on a gun spree in a school it makes the news. Many tens of people die each year this way unfortunately.
When overwhelmingly black losers go on gun sprees in their own communities it doesn’t ever make the news. Many thousands of people die each year this way unfortunately.
Draw your own conclusions around media bias.
Sounds like they need more doctors…
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1137450/
I HAVE CORRECTED AN ERROR IN THIS COMMENT.
The Chicago Democrat machine has long had a claim to being the most corrupt in the US. It had this claim in the days of Mayor “Vote early, vote often” Daley, half a century ago. It still has this claim today under Rahm Emanuel.
That Obama emerged from the Chicago Democrat machine was always a very important (and intentionally under-remarked) fact about him. (He was a community organiser; if anything can be more when all is most, community organiser in Chicago is one of the more explicitly right-in-your-face-corrupt roles.)
THE CORRECTION
The last Republican mayor of Chicago served from 1927 – 1931 – and was no advertisement for the Republican party. Through misremembering 1927 as his date of leaving office, not of entering it, I suggested that the start of an unbroken line of Democrat mayors went all the way back to the glory days of Al Capone in my first version of this comment. Although the period from Capone’s first trial in March 1929 to the Feds finally convicting him of tax evasion in 1931 overlaps the rule of the last Republican mayor of Chicago, he reportedly deserves, if anything, less than no credit for these events.
The Chicago capers are the product of statism and socialism–Drug Prohibition, Gun Control, black leftist politicians and Welfarism. Of course our own dear Marxist controlled BBC has little interest in what goes on there.
“Gun control” regulations and “Social Justice” government spending – Chicago has been a centre for both for many years, observe the results.
I was just listening (via the BBC) to an academic from University College London – he blamed the rise of American suicides and drug and booze abuse on “lack of social investment” by which the man meant lack of government spending on benefits and “public services”. If the academic spent five minutes on honest research he would know that such government “investment” (spending on consumption is not “investment” you cretin) has EXPLODED over recent years and decades – he was exactly wrong, as it is the rise of statism that has undermined Civil Society (and led to the very despair he blames on “lack of social investment”).
No doubt this is why I am a “failed academic” rather than a university academic – because I (unlike them) have some basic respect for truth.
By the way – even the academic noted the falling life expectancy has been most marked among “middle aged white males” – so much for the claims of the left about “racism”, “sexism” (and so on).
If they cared about black people the left would be out protesting against the black-on-black violence in Chicago and other cities – but the “mainstream” media and so on is almost silent about such things.
It is not a part of living in the big city – it is a breakdown of civilisation – it is the result of abandoning moral absolutes – it is Milton’s Pandæmonium – it is the classical definition of Hell: Kaos.
What hasn’t been mentioned here, and, as a suburban Chicagoan who has watched that city collapse, I think is the real root cause of this explosion in Chicago, is the police. Simply speaking the police in Chicago have backed off. They will even tell you if you ask them in an off hand moment. Why? Because they fear that a split second decision will be analyzed for a week in a court and decided that he was wrong, thus ending his career, or possibly sending him to prison.
I think there is a lot to complain about with respect to police behavior, and in some cases the actions of certain police officers demands dismissal and possibly jail time. There is plenty wrong with the police. My first memory of the Chicago PD when I first moved here was seeing some guy dragged off by the cops for the crime of “not being respectful to a police officer”. So the complaints about the police certainly are not groundless.
But make no mistake, the violence in Chicago is a child if the false narrative surrounding Michael Brown and all the chaos that followed.
The Government makes a great husband but a very poor father.
Today’s killers and victims are the fourth and fifth generation of children who have grown up without responsible men in their world.
It would take a full brigade of active duty military forces to make a difference. I’m talking simultaneous surgical strikes on the mayor, politicians, gangs, drug dealers, etc. No arrests. Confirm ID and execute on the spot. Then withdraw and send in a provisional government with bodyguards to run the
city. No elections for 20 years. Complete replacement of the K-12 education bureaucracy. Among other things.
This would at least get the attention of the people behind the scenes. If it works, have a quiet chat with similar cities: Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit etc.
When the infection has gotten down to the bone, amputation is required for the patient to survive.
Oh, don’t say that the killings in Chicago “barely register” in the UK press. Why the Times had an article about just today: “Dozens shot during weekend of gang violence in Chicago”.
How’s this for chutzpah in the opening line:
The Chicago police chief has called for tougher gun laws after 74 people were shot, 11 fatally, in a single weekend.
Even the Times commenters, usually sympathetic to any call for gun control, weren’t buying that.
Golly, how’s that knife crime bit coming along in London?
How’s that no-go zone, (not interested in “Official” proclamations) bit resolving itself?
Are there ANY historical similarities between the downfall of Detroit(and Washington DC), and the downfall of London, from within?
Including their…*ahem* leadership selection process.
Back in the ’70s, Chicago decided to get draconian in it’s gun laws. See, the Mafia and the police both wanted it that way – wouldn’t do to have uppity citizens being able to resist fiscal initiatives by either of the two worthy groups mentioned above. Welcome to Hell.
The last half-way decent, half-way competent mayor of Chicago was Harold Washington, and he died in 1987.
Chicago is one of a number of American cities where politicians and leaders decided that one way to address their crime problems was to ‘partner’ with the primarily-minority gangs which where responsible for the great majority of crime.
Chicago took it a lot further than most other places, to the point where there have been 2 or 3 generations of this kind of ‘partnering’ and the gang-bangers and their cohorts are now inextricably woven into the fabric of Chicago politics. The Chicago ‘machine’ politics of old have simply morphed into a system for channeling patronage and money into the pockets of ‘community leaders’ and ‘outreach workers’, most of them either gang-affiliated or mobbed-up, in return for the reliable delivery of votes on election day.
This in turn has created a set of criminal individuals and gangs that enjoy varying levels of immunity from law enforcement action.
Just as an example, take a peek at this:
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2012/Gangs-and-Politicians-An-Unholy-Alliance/
Ten years on, nothing has changed. This column describes very well how the entire political, legal and criminal-justice systems are now networked directly with major criminal enterprises.
Well, what did you expect? When there are groups of outlaws running around more-or-less unmolested and untouchable – what the hell did you expect?
And no major media outside Chicago will touch stories like this with a 10-foot pole. I thought Black Lives Mattered? Self-evidently, not.
llater,
llamas
22 out of 30 of the wealthiest counties in America vote Democrat, the reason for the poverty and violence of cities like Detroit and Chicago are primarily the result of the people who populate them, not those who govern them.
The people who they select to govern them incentivise the to population behave as it does. Girls marry the Government, boys breed and fight since they don’t have to work or get to raise families.
Nobody powerful gives a hoot about big city black and Hispanic public assistance recipient crime in the U. S.
The victims and criminals are 90% reliable D voters in local and Federal elections. The Ds run the city governments, hospitals, police forces, and courts.
The Ds have no net vote or money gain to see from fighting crime effectively. Probably a net cost, since that would require more work and danger for the crimefighters and anger the, again, reliably 90% D, criminals and their families, clients, and allies.
The Rs have no wedge to get into the fight, and in any case wouldn’t have anything to gain by fighting crime even if they could. Even if they were successful, the direct beneficiaries would still be reliable D voters.
The American “deal” is, vote D, stay in your zones, just prey on each other- you’ll get your welfare and housing in the zones. Everyone directly involved understands it.
It’s the Great Society.
You think it’s bad now? They just announced the official Pizza Museum will be located in Chicago.
The New Yawk families are not going to take that lying down without a deal.
Race war is one thing, but pizza? Be afraid, very afraid.
Yes Natalie, Fraser and Staghounds – and everyone.
The only response to the deaths is MORE OF THE SAME – more “gun control” regulations (after all they work so well in Mexico – and in Chicago itself), more “anti racism” investigations (meaning that the police back off even more – including black police officers), and more government welfare statism, destroying families and creating generations of fatherless young men.
Still at least the left (or some of them) get on thing right (as some comment people here have noted) – prohibition has clearly failed.
No one detests drug abuse more than me, but the state and its laws have just made this disgusting vice vastly WORSE in its consequences – they have, essentially, handed over the cities (and increasingly the towns) to drug gangs.
I believe it was Gladstone who said – of one thing I am certain, it is not via the state that we will get moral improvement.
It’s a good time to be reading the Second City Cops blog, a blog whose proprietor must remain secret lest Mayor Rahm sends cruise missiles after him.
There’s a huge split between cops and cop management. The main topic of the SJW efforts in Chicago is the quelling of police violence – in a city where cop shootings comprise a minuscule portion of all shootings. Rahm is pushing this, as he thinks it’s a sure vote-winner in his city. As the city watches its citizens die, its government seeks to punish the police. Thus, the police are in self-protection mode.
Obama and Rahm had been pursuing “litigation” (i.e., fake, collusive litigation) by the federal government against the City claiming the cops were violating constitutional rights. The point was to secure massive federal funds to help prop up the City’s failing finances. But the election of Trump – instead of Hilary – killed that effort, so Rahm instead got his State-level compatriot Democrat Illinois Attorney General to carry on the lawsuit, still seeking federal oversight over Chicago cops (and thus, again, federal money.)
It’s all been a hoot to watch, but I pity the (nine) good people in Chicago as their city descends to Detroit status.
The shootings in Chicago have nothing to do with socialism, the welfare state, or Democrat Party policies. The cause is black genetics, and black behavior is the same under all regimes. Ghetto blacks have IQ’s in the 70’s (genetically fixed), high impulsivity, proclivity to violence. They are uneducable and can do only brute manual labor, and so are economically useless and surplus.
The real problem is young black ghetto males between 15 and 30. They commit a majority of America’s violent crime, gun crime, gun murders, rape, inter-racial crime, hate crime. Drug use and drug crime are a consequence of black behavior not a cause.
The cure is a heavy-handed crack down on black criminals. There are not that many, even in the ghetto. Nationwide in America, there are only 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 young male black criminals. This is a managable number and easily imprisoned.
UK has its own ghetto problem, except in Britain the Muslim groomers are employed by and protected by the elites in Parliament and the Civil Service
Wow, Bob (Sykes). Careful with the genetic predestination carp [sic]. Imagine a world where government weren’t mucking things up so horribly, and one can imagine a healthy culture where personal responsibility was rewarded, and so folks of every capability were able to have meaningful lives… and there is no need to invoke truly racist theories of Nature over Nurture.
B.S., that’s BS. Without dealing with the meat of your theory, everyone is educable. My dog is educable.
When one party spends decades rewarding antisocial behavior in order to cement into place a bloc of voters, that bloc of voters becomes antisocial. When you subsidize broken families, you get more broken families, and the consequent antisocial boys who are raised without limits. (Yes, most boys do better in the presence and influence of their fathers.) When you drill into a bloc that everyone else hates them, they feel hated. When you reward a bloc for staying insular and unassimilated, that bloc forms insular enclaves and its resentments grow.
We can lay the blame for current poor urban black culture directly at the feet of the Democrat hunger for power, the hunger that led them to treat an entire bloc as their pets for votes and support, without caring what that did to the bloc. Thank the true racists in this situation, the Democrats.
The New Yawk families are not going to take that lying down without a deal.
Oh they’re going to get plenty of deals, I don’t think they’ll care soon.
bobby: double-plus good.
Bonus points for actually knowing how to spell “bloc.” (Thus proving yourself no blockhead.) 😀
Above, llamas makes an informative comment and offers us this link:
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/January-2012/Gangs-and-Politicians-An-Unholy-Alliance/
It rather surprises me to see an article so critical of the PTB from Chicago. But then, it’s been awhile since I was a devotee.
I can’t resist quoting two paragraphs.
The first backs up Niall’s observations of the Windy City’s collusionary politics as having a much longer history than just the past 10 years … or 20 … or 60:
I note also the squalid projects of the Righteous Libruls and Politicos, such as Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green, both ostensibly built to store the folks moved out of their less-than-upscale digs in such eminent neighborhoods as Hyde Park, home of The University of Chicago, under the mantle of Urban Renewal. (And trust me, they truly were less than upscale. Lots of students shared apartments in the old brownstones along 55th and 53rd Sts., where the most notable odors were of insecticide — which were not up to the cockroach challenge — and the sickly sweet industrial cleansers, mixed with scents of mould and dry-rot. Yecch! But at least there was heat in the winter, and mostly the plumbing worked.) This paragraph brought that to mind:
“Large public housing complexes …” ah yes. Will they become (or are they already) Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green?
.
Viz.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Taylor_Homes
Let me just pile on the Bob Sykes too. What is says truly is racist bs. The data on this is absolutely clear. New York has just as many young unsupervised black boys as Chicago, but has nothing like the violence problems. So too have many other cities. The distinguishing factor is how the city is run, and in particular how the police are run. Most young men, regardless of skin color, have poor impulse control and violent tendencies, it is called testosterone. What makes the difference is the culture and morality with which they are inculcated, and the other societal mechanisms designed to keep this natural tendency in check. It is the failure of these mechanisms, dreadful public schools, terrible ideas about education, “entitlements”, work ethic, family that start people down that road. And the final buffer on the track is the police, and if they take a step back and you strip away all the other mechanisms it is no wonder that the place is such a mess.
The great SIR TERRY invented the city of Ankh-Morpork, where crime is licenced by the guv’ment and it is a serious offence to resist being mugged or burgled (unless the mugger/burglar is unlicenced, of course. Not buying a licence is the most serious offence).
I took it for a joke. I know better now.
School shootings make the news because they’re rare and inexplicable. Street gangsters shooting each other over control of lucrative (for drug sales) street corners have entirely mundane and understandable motives – it’s about money. The general public cares less because both the shooters and victims tend to be criminals. You don’t get a major crackdown until a little kid gets caught in the crossfire. That hasn’t changed since the speakeasy days, where the feds didn’t get involved until innocent bystanders started dying.
This is going to be a hard problem to deal with effectively – the young guys involved tend to come from neighborhoods where nobody has a legitimate job. The women live on state benefits, and the men either mooch off the women or get into the drugs trade. To a kid growing up in that kind of environment people with legitimate paying work must seem unbelievably exotic.
The root of the problem here is the welfare state, but that’s not going anywhere.
It’s true Chicago suffers from the Ferguson Effect, but so do a lot of other cities. The problems in Chicago go deeper than poor policing.
“The Wire” revisited, over and over and over.
Julie near Chicago, August 8, 2018 at 2:02 am, thanks for endorsing my comment. Just FYI, I have since edited my comment to make clear that Capone’s glory years and downfall in fact overlapped the last Republican mayor of Chicago (who appears to deserve no credit for the latter).
The fear of your political rival taking over your administration is a key way in which democracy restrains corruption. The lack of this fear promotes corruption – as we can see from how the FBI helped ‘sure-to-win’ Hillary. Chicago’s not having had a Republican mayor since 1931 – or any perceived likelihood of it – is probably connected to why New York (that was quite as famous as Chicago for gangsters voting early and often a hundred years ago) is today not in such a dire place.
Regarding comparisons with the era of Capone and the Roaring 20s – it needs to be borne in mind that the Capone-era gangsters were (generally) very careful about keeping the violence private and not letting it spill out into the public sphere where innocent citizens might get hurt. It was very rare, in those days, for outsiders to be hurt by accident. And this was in the days when full-auto weapons and sawed-off shotguns were completely legal for civilians to possess.
Sure, citizens would often see the aftermath – there’s a hundred WeeGee photographs of gangsters who met sticky ends in very-public ways – but it was very rare for a civilian to get caught up in the violence.
‘I’m a businessman, Tom. Blood is a big expense.’
The modern gangster crop, by contrast, really doesn’t seem to care, and apparently they often target women and children (always an ‘infamia’ for the traditional Mob types) the better to get their message across. And many of their conflicts seem to be only tangentially-connected to criminal enterprise, although the perpetrators are invariably serious criminals – a lot of this violence seems to be driven by the most trivial ‘beefs’ about ‘respect’, ‘turf’ and (of course) by whisky and women.
While I do not for a moment endorse all of what Bob Sykes wrote, as with most irrational prejudice, there are some small kernels of truth in there. The vast majority of this type of crime is committed by young men who are Poorly-Educated and Poorly-Parented. PEPP young men of all races suffer from the same issues – lack of judgement, lack of impulse control, inability to assess consequences or risks, and a predeliction for violence. Lots of young men like conflict, and they like to fight. But this is not unique to any race. And some of those failures must certainly be laid at the feet of previous administrations, whose policies led inexorably to the destruction of the family and the failures of public education. Between President Johnson, President Clinton and the Kafka-esque all-party insanity of the War of Drugs, the social structures of the lower SE strata have been ravaged in many ways, and we should not be surprised that a surfeit of young PEPP males is the result.
llater,
llamas
Al Capone could have been a barber like his father – he choose to be a criminal (and that choice was made long before prohibition).
As for modern “Gansters” – it is a “lifestyle”. They do not listen to opera as Al Capone did (indeed he could talk about cultural matters perfectly sensibly – if he choose to do so), they listen to “gangster rap” music that celebrates murder and rape. And Mr Capone (horrible man though he was) did not go about his business drunk – the modern “gangsters” are often stoned-out-of-their-minds (they use the stuff they sell).
All this is NOT genetic – black people in American cities were mostly quite respectable as recently as the 1950s, there can not have been a genetic evolution in only a few decades. This is a CULTURAL collapse – and white people are going down the same rabbit hole (and not just in the United States).
There are both genetic and cultural causes for the dysfunctional american cities. Note that just liberalism doesn’t necessarily lead to social breakdown, e.g. Portland, San Francisco. These are cities with relatively few blacks, and have more or less done ok with low rates of homicide, AFAIK.
San Francisco, of course, is buckling under a whole lot of other problems of the liberals’ making. But still, at the moment loads better than the black liberal havens of Baltimore, Detroit, and Chicago. As Paul Marks mentioned, the cultural collapse of white civilisation will eventually bring down white liberal cities as well. It’s just a matter of time.
Then we have the cities with a high proportion of blacks, with high crime and murder rates.
https://rapidcityjournal.com/news/national/the-cities-with-the-highest-murder-rates-in-the-us/collection_0e7dd367-2f62-5822-b849-97f4e9a43e3d.html#24
That’s not a coincidence. The characteristics of blacks Bob Sykes mentioned – IQ’s in the 70’s (genetically fixed), high impulsivity, proclivity to violence, can be controlled, and were indeed controlled, as recently as the 50s. Then the Great Society, the welfare state, the collapse of traditional religion, all acted to release the innermost id of the black population.
Which brings us to New York. New York’s liberal order does not tolerate threats to its safety, power and prosperity, despite what BLM and SJWs say. Stop-and-frisk policies, stringent laws (Eric Garner was essentially killed over selling single cigarettes, which was ridiculous) serve to keep the black population under control, and even to drive them out into other cities (look up AFFH) so that the liberals can enjoy urban living free from the threat of black crime. A similar gentrification effect is going on in Washington, and if rumors are believed, Chicago.
When conditions are bad enough, anybody will succumb to chaos and disorder, no matter what their genetics are, just how long to get there and how bad it would be. E.g. the east asians (especially chinese) in the US seem pretty productive and civilised now, but it wasn’t that long ago that the Cultural Revolution and its excesses were going on.
It’s just that blacks succumb the quickest.
Is there any high black proportion city NOT controlled by Dems that can serve as a counter-example? Or can we also say that the propensity of blacks to vote Dem is emblematic of their id problems?
Some weird comments here.
There is no Chicago Machine – it died in 1979, when an unknown with no money or organization defeated the Machine’s hand-picked successor to Boss Daley. And she wasn’t even a reformer! The city is still run by Democrats of varying degrees of corruption, but there is no Boss. Each officeholder is on his own; anyone can run for anything, and no one is required to endorse anyone else.
Obama was not a “Machine” operative; he never had a city job. He moved into the state senate when the incumbent retired to run for Congress. He knocked off his primary opponents by showing (correctly) that the signatures on their nominating petitions were mostly forged. He was never challenged after getting in, but there doesn’t seem to be much interest in challenging incumbents anywhere.
There are no “large public housing complexes in Uptown” and never have been. Shiller came into politics out of the radical Left, but stopped being a firebrand in the 1990s, when Daley II co-opted her and the rest of the “Left Opposition” in the city. (Unlike his dad, he ceded blacks a much larger share of power and patronage, and hewed to the Left’s social agenda.)
There is a distressing level of criminal violence in Chicago, but except in a few concentrated areas (Englewood, Garfield Park) it’s nothing like 2003 Baghdad. 10 or 20 shootings in a day, in a city of 2.7M people covering 600 sq km, is not visible. Yet. (There were 66 homicides in July, and one arrest.)
Rich Rostrom, Barack Obama not only married the daughter of someone in the Chicago machine (and Michelle certainly did NOT go to Princeton on merit – and was NOT later given nice jobs in Chicago itself on merit) he was, personally, on various boards and so on that were the heart of the new Chicago machine. I AGREE with you that the old “Chicago Machine” of Mayor Daley (senior – his son was later Mayor for many years) is gone – but the machine (if not Machine – small “m”) has evolved and changed – not gone away.
As you say yourself much of the radical (i.e. MARXIST) left in Chicago was “co-opted” into the machine (small “m”) in the time of Mayor Daley junior. Do you really think that people like Barack Obama gave up the Marxist beliefs of a lifetime just because they were now working with the machine? Or did they “give up the luxury of the radical pose – for the deeper satisfaction of the radical end”.
Please observe the Chicago Teachers Union – one can not be more “on the city payroll” than them, and they are Marxist.
I AGREE with you that there is no old style “Boss” in Chicago – no one person running the city in terms of the long term interests of the Machine (big “M”) – actually Chicago was a much less unpleasant place when it was run by a Machine (big M) interested in the city still being in existence when the time came for them to get their pensions and so on.
The modern wild taxing, spending and regulating typed who have run Chicago in recent times (of whom the present Mayor is actually on the MODERATE wing – by modern Chicago standards) do not care if Chicago is still solvent in a few years time.
People like Barack Obama do not care about the “capitalist society” still functioning in a few years time (as the old Mayor Daley, bad man though he was, DID care – which is why his people fought the Marxists on the streets in 1968), people like Barack Obama (and many in such things as the Chicago Teachers Union right now) want “capitalist society” to be destroyed – that is the point. They want a “fundamental transformation of society” – which can only come by DESTROYING the present society.
That is why the old Mayor Daley (bad man though he was) and his Machine was vastly better than the modern “machine” – which is made up of people who do NOT want the present society to exist in the long term.
Remember under the old Mayor Daley (Daley the first) the Chicago tax-and-spend burden was about half that of the New York City tax-and-spend burden – that was because the old Mayor Daley wanted there still to be a “capitalist” city in the long term to pay the pensions of his supporters.
Do you really think that people like Barack Obama cares about that? On the contrary – he (Barack Obama and people like him) want “capitalist society” to be GONE in the long term.
I believe there’s a bit of confusion between the northside community officially called Uptown (as one of the official 77 areas of Chicago) and the area of upper downtown that has historically been referred to as Uptown.
Sykes, you’re not allowed to notice that some races have different intellectual and ethical norms. That would upset the libertarian fantasy that importing 3rd world savages into the west will work out just peachy as soon as they have some nice clothes and a council flat (provided by white taxpayers, natch). The right kind of people might consider you a racist and that is worse than death, or so they tell me.
Some remarks on IQs and Chicago violence in comments above could (I think) benefit from the reasoning in the comment below.
1) Political correctness harms those it patronises even more than those it hates, just as drug-culture harms those who live near it but harms even more those who succumb to it. There is no way to know what black inner-city IQ measurements would be if a generation grew up in a functioning culture of many two-parent families. Black commentator Thomas Sowell describes himself as fortunate to grow up in the US in the 50s, when the old prejudices of the past were dying and before the new PC prejudices pressed new ways to fail upon blacks.
2) The prejudices and pogroms of Russia caused many eastern European Jews to migrate to the US at the start of the 1900s, at a time when IQ testing was becoming fashionable. Testing these immigrant Jewish populations, American academics first reported that “the idea of superior Jewish intelligence is a myth”. Within two decades, these same academics reversed themselves: as the immigrants assimilated, the ‘myth’ of superior Jewish intelligence – or IQ scores at least – became fact again. At the other end of the scale, low IQ scores of Hebridean islanders in early testing vanished later. It is right to treat the PC de-facto lawfare ban on IQ testing with the same contempt as all else they do, but since it means we have little ability to track detailed trends, we should be wary of any rival orthodoxy.
3) There is absolutely no reason why a low-average-IQ population should for that reason be violent. It is well known that psychopaths sometimes score highly in IQ tests. Conversely, the amiable dunce, more likeable and empathic than his cleverer confrere, is a known type – and common-sense is often more common in the less educated. If a low average IQ population is abnormally violent, look at its culture.
America should take Kim du Toit’s advice on Africa and “Let Chicago Sink”……
Niall, probably the biggest issue when it comes to dealing with race differences is the absolute refusal of so many to acknowledge that such differences can exist. A low IQ sub-culture that exists in isolation may not be any more prone to violence. Maybe. You’ll have to show me your working before a mere claim is given any status. But put that population in the middle of a high IQ, high achievement society and those people will spend their entire lives knowing that they are inferior. Their entire family is inferior. Their friends, pretty much everyone they have ever known is inferior to the average man of the high IQ society. Imagine the kind of rage, the greed, the desire for revenge that must build up in a person when they realise that. When they know that their best efforts are a failing grade, forever.
In a multi-cultural society, this is the obvious end result. Not everyone is equal and when the losers realise they ARE the losers, they aren’t going to sit there and act like it. We can honestly try to address that, or we can laugh at them and say ridiculous things like “go to college” or “get a good job” when the losers know damn well that both are out of reach. It is an act of mockery to say such things. I really understand why they hate “whitey”. Even the former President hated whitey, for all that they represent. A better people than his people. Addressing it in real terms is a necessity, or the killing will go on.
The rage is cultivated: taught in lying PC history and the like. People don’t need to be taught to resent others who seem wealthier, or more respected or whatever – human nature will attend to that. But the behaviour of the PC demonstrates they think it very needful to teach the degree of rage they want; they think it won’t happen of itself.
As an ex-Chicagoan, I can tell you that Chicago isn’t just corrupt, it is defined by political corruption. Actually, Illinois as a whole isn’t great.
Four of the previous seven Illinois governors went to prison – though one or two of those were arrested for something they did AFTER they got out of office.
But the thing that is killing Chicago is their continuing efforts to not keep the bad guys off the streets. Charges are reduced, pleas offered that turn felony charges into misdemeanors. And the rate of prosecution for gun crimes is shockingly low, considering what is happening in the city.
It also doesn’t help that the Chicago Police Department is under attack by every level of government. Admittedly, the Chicago PD has had more than its share of problems. (See the “Cops Behaving Badly” category on my website.)