Venice Beach, and America, Sinks into Human Waste By Chris Knight
The Daily Mail visited Venice beach, once a place of the body beautiful, but now is a scene of urban ugliness. The photographs, and there are many, tell a story of how cities turn into cesspools under Leftist policies of mass immigration, and social mismanagement. The opening quote, that it is an outdoor psychiatric ward, is chilling. The lunatics, of California, and soon the entire country, then the West itself, run the asylum now, and run it into the ground.
“'It's become an outdoor psychiatric ward!' How California's scenic Venice Beach has become a homeless hotspot with tent cities, violent crime and rampant drug use pushing families and tourists out
- Venice Beach, California, is known as a tourist hotspot with an iconic boardwalk filled with tarot card readers, tattooists, wannabe rappers and the artists trying to make a buck by selling their work
- But visitors' numbers have decreased as they have to contend with an ever-growing army of homeless and the crime that accompanies them
- The homeless have abandoned downtown LA's Skid Row for Venice Beach where a city of tents are set up along the boardwalk and on the sand
- com found syringes — one with a needle still attached — nestling in the sand in a children's play area
- 'I can't even walk my dog or go bike riding along the Venice Beach bike path anymore,' one longtime Venice resident said. 'It's too scary and just too violent'
- Another young woman said, 'There's violence, screaming, fighting and open drug use with needles littered on the ground. I call the police probably twice a day. It's like a full-time job'
- The homeless population has mushroomed in Venice - in 2014 only 175 people lived rough and five years later that figure stood at more than 1,200 - but things have spiraled out of control in the last few months
- com found syringes — one with a needle still attached — nestling in the sand in a children's play area on the beach, emblematic of how the people for whom the area was designed are now being pushed out.
- 'I can't even walk my dog or go bike riding along the Venice Beach bike path anymore, longtime Venice resident Heather Sullivan said. 'It's too scary and just too violent.
- 'We have had numerous dog thefts and it's just heartbreaking and many of the animals in these encampments are not treated well.'
- Another young woman who asked for anonymity for her own safety added: 'There's violence, screaming, fighting and open drug use with needles littered on the ground,' one young mom told DailyMail.com.
- 'I call the police probably twice a day. It's like a full-time job.'
- The mom showed DailyMail.com a video she shot of a fight that broke out close to her home two blocks from the beach that showed three homeless man — one armed with a long piece of wood —viciously pummeling another as he lay on the ground.
- Another parent added: 'No one wants to have a birthday party at the beach or in a park and be confronted with needles and human feces. And that's saying nothing about the possibility of criminal acts or a mentally unstable individual.
- 'Families just aren't going to plan activities in these places any longer.'
- Those living in the tent cities are there for an untold number of reasons.
- Ian, a bearded 35-year-old wearing a sherpa-lined Asian print jacket to protect himself from the gray May day, said he ran two successful businesses in Long Beach and had a private pilot's license.
- 'Then I had a massive heart attack when I was 29 and I couldn't work anymore.'
- Many, like Betty, clearly have mental problems — soon after the wood-chucking incident, she got in the face of a young woman jogger shouting 'Hag' at her. Then she started harassing cyclists by standing in the middle of the path and shaking a ceramic coffee cup at them, forcing at least one off into the sand. Clearly, she was in no fit state to understand that bike riders are among the least likely to have spare change jangling in their skin-tight shorts.”
Many pictures go with the article, which is essentially a photo-shoot. It is a journey to the end of the night, as Celine once put it in the novel of the same name. The same themes are addressed here, more generally:
“My 2011 book, Into the cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For America From Post-Apartheid South Africa, rests on two axiomatic truths, and I excerpt (pp 40-41 & 126-128, 2011):
“In all, no color should be given to the claim that race is not a factor in the incidence of crime in the US and in South Africa. The vulgar individualist will contend that such broad statements about aggregate group characteristics are collectivist, ergo false. He would be wrong.”
“Generalizations,” I continued, “provided they are substantiated by hard evidence, not hunches, are not incorrect. Science relies on the ability to generalize to the larger population observations drawn from a representative sample. People make prudent decisions in their daily lives based on probabilities and generalities. That one chooses not to live in a particular crime-riddled county or country in no way implies that one considers all individual residents there to be criminals, only that a sensible determination has been made, based on statistically significant data, as to where scarce and precious resources — one’s life and property — are best invested.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot, pp 40-41)
In short, generalizations about certain group characteristics are, in aggregate, valid. These, however, do not contradict the imperative to treat each and every individual as an individual.
In his infinite wisdom, but with a different — strictly empirical approach — social scientist Charles Murray has ushered into mainstream this very same truth. In a luminous little book, Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America, Murray counsels precisely that:
“. . . when mean differences between groups are real, it is absolutely essential to resist generalization; it is essential to accept the reality of documented group differences but to insist on thinking of and treating every person as an individual.”
Next, in Into the Cannibal’s Pot (ITCP), I explained that we conservatives and libertarians who oppose affirmative action, set asides and quotas, because of our unfettered fealty for a merit-based, free-market based society are, sadly, promoting “half-truths,” as I put it. Here’s why:
“Free market economists have long since insisted that the rational, self-interest of individuals in private enterprise is always not to discriminate. ‘The market is color-blind,’ said Milton Friedman. ‘No one who goes to the market to buy bread knows or cares whether the wheat was grown by a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Muslim or atheist; by whites or blacks.’ As Thomas Sowell put it, ‘prejudice is free, but discrimination has costs.’” (ITCP pp. 126-128)
Inherent in these arguments, I had argued, in 2011, is that, while not untrue, they are incomplete, mere half-truths:
“Arguably, however, [our] good economists . . . are still offering up a half-truth. Rational self-interest does indeed propel people, however prejudiced, to set aside bias and put their scarce resources to the best use. But to state simply that ‘discrimination is bad for business’ [and that a pure, free-market meritocracy would solve the problem of racial underrepresentation] is to present an incomplete picture.”
“This solecism stems from the taint the word ‘discriminate’ has acquired,” I posited. “The market . . . is discriminating as in discerning — it is biased toward productivity. Hiring people on the basis of criteria other than productivity hurts the proprietor’s pocket. Thus, we can be fairly certain that, absent affirmative-action laws, the market would reflect a bias toward productivity.” (Into The Cannibal’s Pot, p. 127.)
And the clincher:
“In other words, what the good economists [and good conservatives] are loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler,” I wrote. (ITCP pp. 126-128.)
Murray’s work agrees — and amplifies this point, writing on June 16, 2021, that, “refusing to confront race differences in means . . . leads in a straight line to thinking that the only legitimate evidence of a non-racist society is equal outcomes. . . . the logical conclusion is that the state must force equal outcomes by whatever means necessary.”
Prior to the publication of my essay, “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?,” on August 6, 2020, my astute editor, a young lady, inquired about empirical studies for the immutable truths therein.
“The thesis of systemic racism,” I countered in the piece, “is derived from the logical error of reasoning backward. ‘Backward reasoning, expounded by mystery author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle through his famous fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes . . . applies with reasonable certainty when only one plausible explanation for the . . . evidence exists.’”
But, I reasoned, “Systemic racism is most certainly not ‘the only plausible explanation’ for the lag in the fortunes of African-Americans, although, as it stands, systemic racism is inferred solely from one single fact: In aggregate, African-Americans trail behind whites in assorted academic and socio-economic indices and achievements.”
“Equalizing individual and intergroup outcomes . . . is an impossibility,” I added, “considering that it is axiomatically and self-evidently true to say that such differences have existed since the dawn of time.”
It is what it is. Aggregate group differences in intellectual achievement, athleticism, and inhibition-control are here to stay.
Wise young lady that she is, my editor on “Systemic Racism Or Systemic Rubbish?” found the analytical, logical method (which is in the Aristotelian and Misesian traditions) persuasive.
Murray says the same thing, with reference to mounds of empirical data:
“We have been unwilling to say openly that different groups have significant group differences. Since we have not been willing to say that, we have been left defenseless against the claims that racism is to blame. What else could it be? We have been afraid to answer. We must.”
Disarmed of the firearm of truth, analytical and empirical — without standing our ground on the immutable truths of aggregate groups differences, while we take care to treat each individual on his or her merit — we conservatives are rendered intellectually defenseless.”
It is the same old story, conservatives being intellectually defenceless, and much more.
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