Thursday, May 14, 2015

Baltimore

Baltimore real estate, specifically.



Dave, who is a bit weird but I haven't noticed, wrote a powerful essay a few days into the Baltimore rioting, a monologue in colloquial form from a white guy to an imagined rioting black guy one-to-one who would be unlikely willing to listen. Dave who is weird mentions a few specific Baltimore locations in buttressing his insider take but if you are not a resident then you will not know what these specific locations in Baltimore look like. Dave includes a few photos of rioters, "this is you," and he describes and infers without showing the places. And I'm curious about that. Because this is right there along Washington/NY commuting corridor so close to Washington. And now with the commuting train incident in that area I'm thinking it would take a mighty force indeed to depress all that real estate. Here is what Weirddave said back then that I found interesting enough to open Google Earth with the hope it could help show what Weirddave is talking about. It does! Even parsed so poorly without addresses.


1) North Broadway and Gay Street, Baltimore 

Here's an exercise. Let's stand on North Broadway, just above Johns Hopkins, say right where Gay Street crosses. We're right by that triangular house that I like to refer to as “Baltimore's Flatiron Building” (It's not even close). As we walk north towards the Great Blacks in Wax museum, count the number of burned out or boarded up homes. 1..2..3...5..8...13..There are a lot of them. Some of them are pretty neat, with Arabian styling. All of them are pretty big and would make great homes for your family(or mine). This is what government has done. They take your money, and your votes, and this is what they leave you. They're just another entity dedicated to enriching itself at your expense.
2) Etting and Gold, Baltimore
As long as you keep doing that, all of the folks above stay in the gravy. You ever see them at the corner of Etting and Gold? Their kids are on the college track at City and Poly, why are yours dodging gangs at Douglass? You're being manipulated and used, and as long as they keep your attention on boogeyman me, they can suck your bones dry.
3) Sandtown and Winchester, Baltimore
I've demonstrated what those “on your side” have gained, what have I gained? Money, Jobs, Power, Influence? I have gained none of those things. You could burn Sandtown/Winchester to the ground and it would have zero effect on my life. Look at Detroit. It IS burned to the ground for all practical purposes and yet all around it suburbs are full of people living nice middle class lives. Brutal truth: You don't matter enough in my life for me to hate you. Burn down all the CVSs you want, I have a nice big Wal-Mart half a mile from my house. What have you got? A burned out shell and a bunch of old folks who can't get up to the Plaza to get their prescriptions filled.
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11 comments:

Methadras said...

This is what I've been saying for a long time. Blacks are their own worst enemy. They are suckers to boot and they have only themselves to blame for the depredations they find themselves in. Decades of democrat rule have led them and put them into these situations and yet blacks and their leftist handlers all blame the GOP and whitey. They will trip over themselves believing this nonsense even though the proof of their lies is right in front of their face.

So if democrats are going to accuse the GOP and conservatives of not paying attention or hating on the poor and believe it and disseminate these 'truths' to themselves and each other, then I say live by it. In short, a giant fuck you to the poor. I don't like you. You know why? Because I know you don't have to be. Anyone can say I want to be rich and work hard to do it, but not you, you just wallow in your own misbegotten shitpiles and basically let the whole world know that you would rather be poor, destitute, and languish on the government tit for life. So fuck you, you neither deserve my money, earn my compassion, or require my attention. The world would be a better place without any of you and your millennia's worth of nonsensical antics to today.

ricpic said...

"...Washington/NY commuting corridor...it would take a mighty force indeed to depress all that real estate."

Every major city in the Washington/NY corridor: Newark.Trenton, Camden, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore: every one of them is majority black. That is the mighty force. Business, in every one of those cities cannot survive the astronomical cost of black crime. Once crime makes the centers of those cities no-go zones they are done. The result is protracted decay and finally death ala Detroit.

bagoh20 said...

Man, what a shithole. The worst parts of L.A. aren't that sad. The first rule of holes.

To condense the point, he could just ask: hey, how's that working for you?

Have you ever seen a debate with any Black on the plight of Blacks where the discussion stayed calm and reasoned?, where the counter points to the worn out racism argument were given any real hearing?

Whites don't even try to discuss it in mixed company. We know we will never be heard. We don't know anything. We have no perspective on being Black. Blacks know about being Black, but maybe, just maybe there is another perspective of value to you. If you want something different than what you have,it makes sense to me to ask people who have found what you want. If you really want change, you would at least consider what they say, especially if you never tried it.

Joe Biden, America's Putin said...

As we walk north towards the Great Blacks in Wax museum, count the number of burned out or boarded up homes. 1..2..3...5..8...13..There are a lot of them. Some of them are pretty neat, with Arabian styling. All of them are pretty big and would make great homes for your family(or mine). This is what government has done. They take your money, and your votes, and this is what they leave you. They're just another entity dedicated to enriching itself at your expense.

This is what they have done, on purpose. The good intentions were a lie.

bagoh20 said...

I think the parasitic pols believe their own bullshit when they start out their career, but later they simply have no answers that would both keep them comfortable themselves and help their constituents, because the only way to help would be to admit failure, take responsibility, and suggest change. Hard for anyone, but after spewing all the hatred and blame on others, it would take heroic humility and selflessness that is pretty rare, and not appreciated by your peers.

I'm Full of Soup said...

A few Christmases ago, my nephew gave me a t-shirt that had "What Would Robin Hood Do?" on the front.

So I was wearing it the other day and he and I were trying to remember why he had that shirt made for me. I think it was because I used to tell him that the pols and activists who advocate for more and more govt money & govt programs also tended to live high on the hog [think of Joe Biden,Obama, Ted Kennedy, every big city Congress critter, etc] and that you never saw the legendary Robin Hood making money by taking from the rich to give to the poor.

William said...

I grew up in a housing project. I knew some people, black and white, who interacted with the police on occasion. They complained about their treatment. The lesson I drew from their experience was to try not to interact with the police. It's not that difficult to avoid having to interact with the police. On the other hand, some of the people who complained of police mistreatment were quite brutish and callow towards anyone smaller who fell within their orbits. And unlike the cops they weren't all that easy to avoid.......Do you think that that store clerk was the only person Mike Brown ever strong armed? Do you think any person who ever had a hard time with Mike Brown or his family will ever come forward to talk about it? Do you think anyone n the media will seek them out?.......There are stories that are not being told, and they are the stories that count. Detroit didn't become a a trampled butt end because of police brutality but because of crime. The middle class blacks all moved to some place where the cops were an oppressive presence.

Michael Haz said...

Whoa, Chip, how did you sneak on to the set for The Wire? Heh.

Not discussed much in the media, but since the riots ended, there have been 25 homicides and 43 non-fatal shootings in Baltimore. This is, of course, the fault of people who look like me, because we hate other people so much that we make them kill each other. Racism and such, the catchall answer to problems created by and for urban liberals.

Meanwhile where I am in the northwoods, several black families and singles have moved here from urban areas. Happy to have them as neighbors. One guy is a butcher, a couple opened a coffee shop, several are teachers, etc. An MD, even. They came here because they wanted to get their kids away from the urban "culture" that is so utterly destructive.

So we happily trade skills and knowledge, just like we have always done. Need to borrow my log splitter for a week? Sure, let me show you how it works. Ever tried turkey hunting? Walk along with me Saturday morning. Have you found a church you like? And so forth.

No fighting, no looting, no riots, no shunning, no harassment, no isolation; just humans being human with each other. The reason why that works is because it is people who are doing it without the forces and strictures or heavy-handed government.

Look at what has happened to our cities, to a large segment of the urban population once politicians on the left decided that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was just some white goofball who needed to be pastured out before his ideas caused harm. That whole "needs intact families" thing was such a horribly racist thing to write about in those scholarly journals.

When people who won't get their kids to go to school, when generations are criminals, when the concept of right versus wrong is laughed at, when pregnancy is a badge of honor and a means to eke out a tough living on the dole, thee is little we who aren't there can do.

I help fund an urban church/school that does yeoman work in rescuing some ghetto kids from horrible lives, housing, schooling and feeding them, essentially becoming parents in absentia. My daughter and a group from her church cooks dinner for 32 kids one night every week for the same organization. Others do likewise on different days.

But beyond that, there are no programs that government can provide that will cure the problems in places like Baltimore. The cure for those problems has to come from within' form people who have had enough and who finally take management of their own kids and see to it that they are educated, churched and taught values.

Government programs enrich only the well-connected friends of government, but never the people who most need help.

Michael Haz said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Methadras said...

I just had a little bit of a discussion along the same lines as this conversation with a lefty buddy of mine and when I more or less espoused what I have in the past, the first thing that pops of out his mouth, other than bewildered shock was that it was an unchristian thing for me to say. This, coming from an atheist. So I laughed for a little while at the irony of this statement and more or less asked him why he thought it was unchristian of me to say so? So he gave me a screed about Christ being a socialist and that he required that people have compassion and give to the poor. I said yes that is true, but only to a point. Christ had compassion for the poor, but nor for them to be perpetually poor and he never espoused dependency or even dependency on government. A huge distinction.

You see this topic here on Lem's about Baltimore is exactly that. Dependency of the perpetual poor on government or specifically, Democrat Party Rule over these perpetually poor. Keeping them perpetually poor and never allowing them to escape that perpetuity. That is why I detest the poor. Not because they are poor, but because they will never be anything but.

Michael Haz said...

I hear that sometimes. The point the lecturer misses (because the lecturer usually gets theology from a non-theological source) is that Christ never even hinted at government confiscation/redistribution of money. He was a direct intervention guy - people directly intervening to help others.

And the help was never intended to last generations long, jut to provide food, clothing and a bit of shelter.

Also, when Christ speaks of the poor in his parables, he often meant those poor in spirit i.e. non-believers, not those poor of material possessions.