This piece is a great example of PMC smart-people sophistry.
And by “great,” I mean full-on clownery. It’s a way of dancing around the problem — as is the liberal/left wont — and then declaring that oh gosh, there is just no perfect solution, so no solution can nor should be tried.
The stupid-ass line about Arnade “treating visibility as a proxy for prevalence” is the wankery of a faux-sophisticate. Visibility is the issue. Public disorder and chaos in subways, sidewalks, parks, and buses cannot be evaluated the way one examines a disease prevalence table. It is evaluated by whether ordinary people can use shared space without being threatened, feeling disgusted by someone taking a dump on the sidewalk, stabbed, immolated or forced constantly into avoidance behavior.
When the liberal line becomes, “You’re not tough enough for the city if you can’t stand fighting like you’re in a Waffle House every day,” then that is going to leave most families, most women and all children out of any public life. And they are going to be in cars any time they need to go somewhere to avoid all of that. As they should be.
I could go on. For instance, the passage creates a false choice between “culture” and “institutions.” Bub, those interact and can’t just be separated like that. It’s all related. Housing scarcity alone can’t explain someone like Decarlos Brown nor his (currently) less-violent but just-as-scary co-crazies.
Then — and isn’t this this the most liberal thing ever — this faffish turd of writing concedes Arnade’s central point but refuses to grant that something, anything, can or should be done about it. And this concession to the thesis but slipping out of any conclusion therefrom does not work morally or logically. Once you’ve granted Arnade’s primary moral point, coercion of some type becomes inevitable. At that point you’re just arguing about how much and how hard.
But no. That’s because idiot leftists like the pseudo-intellectual who penned this offal will never grant that it is not in fact beneficial to have feral schizoids roaming the streets, ranting, stabbing, assaulting and immolating. That is “equity” and “justice” to them; they want it. It’s not some accident or side effect. It is the point.
This piece is not serious. It’s intellectual stotting, as is so typical of people like this. It uses recherché vocabulary and convoluted sentence structure to signal to compatriots and sycophants that the piece’s author is on the right side of history. But two can play that game — and in fact I just did.
But the difference is that I am vastly smarter, much more capable of dealing with reality, and care not a whit about what any PMC dipshit is going to think about my moral rectitude.
I stand for whatever protects someone like Iryna Zarutstka; someone like this sheds tears for Decarlos Brown. From that it follow that this intellectual lightweight should be given no quarter, and no audience.
