Fantasy author Theodore “Vox Day” Beale certainly has a rich fantasy life. Beale, who seems to grow ever more flamboyantly racist by the day, has roused himself into what he thinks is righteous fury over reports in far-right media outlets claiming that DHL Express has cut off delivery services to one especially dangerous neighborhood in Berlin.
According to The New Observer, a virulently racist and anti-immigrant “news service” quoted by Beale,
Violent attacks on personnel, robberies, and fraud have forced DHL Express to halt all deliveries in the invader-overrun region of Wedding, north-west Berlin, a statement from the company has announced.
Wedding has a “German-origin” population of only 50 percent, with the rest being made up of Africans, Turks, Arabs, Asians, and Eastern European gypsies.
The implication, of course, is that these terrible brown “invaders” have rendered a portion of formerly white Berlin uninhabitable.
The reality is a teensy bit more nuanced. According to TheLocal.de, an English-language German news site, DHL in fact said that only a handful of people in Wedding had been asked to pick up packages at a DHL facility in a different neighborhood. Dismissing press reports that Wedding had become a “no go” zone due to violent attacks, the company said its main concern was fraud, not violence, “referring to when people falsely pose as the recipient of packages.”
But, damn the fact-checking, full speed ahead! Beale, accepting the New Observer account as gospel, warns his readers that the end is near for Western cities and countries that aren’t majority white. Sorry, majority “European.”
“Forget home delivery,” Beale declares.
A minority-European population in a Western country isn’t even going to have flush toilets or functioning dishwashers for very long. If white workers can’t even drop off a package safely, they sure as Hell aren’t going to enter a stranger’s home and stay there for hours.
Really? When Beale thinks of “minority-European” cities in the United States, he no doubt thinks of deindustrialized basket cases like Detroit, or Flint, or Gary, Indiana.
But there are a lot of other cities in the United States with minority-white populations, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. None of these cities are on the verge of collapse, or even vaguely close to it. Their toilets and dishwashers work fine, and there are many options for delivery of everything from electronics to burritos.
The thing that is so ludicrously stupid about the equalitarian position shared by American liberals and conservatives alike is that it assumes because reasonably digestible numbers of European immigrants were semi-successfully assimilated with only one massive civil war followed by 60 years of virtually no immigration, an unlimited number of non-European immigrants can be permitted to enter the country indefinitely.
This is not merely bad logic. This is insane. There is no way – none – to rationally defend or justify the position, which is why its defenders immediately retreat to abstract ideals and pure rhetoric.
Bullshit. Even setting aside such “abstract ideals” as, you know, equality and fairness, consider this: the US is considerably less white than it was a quarter century ago. It is also a safer place to live, with violent crime rates down considerably nationwide and in many of our largest minority-white cities, including New York and, yes, Chicago, despite a rash of gun deaths mostly linked to gangs and a failed drug war.
Yes, the US faces all sorts of problems and challenges. But it is demonstrably not turning into the dystopian hellhole of Beale’s imagination, where toilets don’t work and roving gangs of “invaders” chase deliverymen out of the inner cities.
The invasion of 60 million immigrants in 50 years, the largest invasion in human history, will lead to war in the United States. There is ZERO question of this, as it is only a matter of time. We can’t know when it will happen, we can’t know exactly why it will happen, but given the fact that the USA is already at a stress level that was last seen in 1856, the odds are against the USA even making it to the 2033 date I had predicted for financial collapse and some form of political dissolution.
If civil war erupts in this country, and at this point I wouldn’t rule it out, it won’t be the fault of immigrants. It’ll be the fault of racists like Beale and the demagogues like Donald Trump who’ve exploited their bigotry to win power in elections in which, due to the bizarre anachronism that is the electoral college, white votes count more than those of minority voters.
Trump won big with whites in majority white areas freaked out about immigration, but whites in cities and states where lots of immigrants actually live went, often overwhelmingly, for Clinton.
Consider Chicago, where Trump got a measly 12.4% of the vote. Chicago has a justified reputation as a severely segregated city, at least when it comes to where people live. But public space is significantly less segregated, and the city is sufficiently diverse that even in the whitest neighborhoods on Chicago’s north side, white residents regularly encounter and interact with and sometimes even become friends with people of all races and nationalities.
Contrary to what people like Beale believe, all this contact with black and brown people — many of them immigrants — hasn’t turned white Chicagoans into white supremacists. As a reporter for one of Chicago’s neighborhood newspapers recently pointed out,
Clinton got 95.4 percent of the vote in Chicago’s 18 black-majority wards, 87.1 percent in the 11 Hispanic-majority wards and 84.6 percent in the seven affluent, mostly white, Lakefront wards.
None of this is to suggest that racism isn’t a problem in Chicago; it has been and remains a huge issue, as does the city’s seemingly intractable racial segregation. But it is striking that white Chicagoans who live in a city teeming with non-white immigrants are a lot less anxious about immigration than whites who live in decidedly un-diverse areas where immigrants are more of an abstract boogeyman, rather than people they interact with every day.
So, cry Racism, Constitution, Declaration, and Proposition Nation all you like. Virtue-signal your color-blindness all you like. Adopt one child of every color if you want. None of that frantic appeal to totem magic will save you from what is to come any more than it would have in 1861, in 1914, or 1939.
An interesting selection of dates there, given that both the Civil War and World War II were caused not by “virtue-signaling” liberals but by, you know, racists — in the first instance, by southerners who refused to give up slaves and slavery, and in the second, by Literally Hitler.
None of that is going to excuse your complicity in the nightmares to come. And regardless of what you think of it, understand that the Alt-Right program is the only one that even has the possibility of averting the coming conflict.
Sorry, dude. I’ll “cry Racism” when it’s completely fucking blatant. The problem isn’t immigrants. It’s the irrational fear and hatred of immigrants being preached by alt-white supremacists and their “God Emperor” Trump.
Cool! I’ve warmed up to it! It’s great.
@ Neremanth,
I remember hearing about the warehouse temperature problem, and essentially swallowing Amazon’s response that it was a one-off situation that had been satisfactorily addressed. Your links suggest a much more pervasive problem with disregard for workers’ wellbeing. So I will be looking much more closely at buying ebooks from other platforms if possible. Thanks!
PS, not your fault, but I’m slightly peeved that ethicalconsumer.org only makes their reports available to paying subscribers. So I will also be shopping for further information *elsewhere*.
@Croquembouche of patriarchy,
I hope this catches you, seeing as you posted here earlier 🙂
Have you seen today’s First Dog on the Moon? He’s used part of your nym! And we have a catchy new rhyme to sing about George Brandis (to the tune of Spiderman):
As a fellow Aust. I thought you might appreciate it (although of course you are the absolute opposite of a douche like George)
@ Mish, I actually cribbed my nym from First Dog on the Moon, around about the time of Peter Dutton’s “mad fucking witch” débâcle.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2016/jan/11/is-it-sexist-against-men-first-dog-moonsplains-sexism-again
FDOTM is wonderful. Unfortunately, I don’t think George Brandis is as incompetent as our pollies get, though. It’s a crowded field.
@Croquembouche
I hadn’t clicked through far enough to find that out about ethicalconsumer.org. That is indeed not good. If you find information elsewhere, I’d be interested in hearing about it.
When it comes to ebooks, I have a kindle which I bought before I was boycotting them, and I think I’ve only ever bought 2 books for it from Amazon. I was a PhD student at the time I got it, so cash-strapped, and mostly planning to read free content (fanfic, out of copyright works) on it for the next few years anyway. Now that I can afford to buy books sometimes, I just buy them from wherever I want, and if they don’t offer a .mobi option I use a piece of software with the bizarre name of ePubor to convert them. (It handles DRM too, so not having registered my kindle with whoever I bought the book from isn’t an issue.) ePubor wasn’t free, but as I recall it wasn’t very expensive – and I’m sure it’s not the only one out there that can do the job.
Unfortunately, not everything is available from a non-Amazon source when it comes to ebooks – in particular those who self-publish via Amazon don’t always make their stuff available elsewhere too. To my great sadness, I’ve had to miss out on reading the works of the great Chuck Tingle, despite how awesome they sound, because he doesn’t seem to let you get them any other way.
@Croquembouche,
I thought your nym had a First Doggie flavour! How could I have missed that? *hangs head in shame*
You are of course correct about incompetence. But surely Brandis has been raising the bar lately? 🙂