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.
Dishwashers? Blin, then i guess i do come from a 3rd world country. My perants dont have one, i don’t have one and i don’t want one either. I must have been brainwashed by all the ‘non Europeans’ and ‘eastern European gypsies’ (!) -_-
There’s a dishwasher in this house but it’s never been used; with a household of just 2 who eat way too much takeaway food for their own good, it’d take weeks to fill it up with enough dirty dishes to justify the use (unlike a washing machine, you can’t select load sizes).
On which note: Just this morning, I was arguing (well, “Get a load of this guy”-ing, but I’m sure he’d call it arguing) with some Trumpsturbating “KKK IS DEMOCRATS” dope over whether or not the Southern Strategy actually happened, and I snarked that “Bro, you might as well deny the bloody moon landing”…
… Yeeep. ಠ_ಠ
I live in Wedding. It’s seen as a bit ‘rough’ (read Turkish/Kurdish/brown/black/immigrant/Muslim) and working class, and is currently getting heavily gentrified by white, middle class Germans and immigrants who can’t afford the rent in Prenzlauer Berg or Kreuzkölln.
Many of the DHL and other couriers, along with taxi drivers, are Turkish-German or have immigrant backgrounds, so ‘white workers’ is a whole pile of bullshit.
Based on the apartment block structure in Berlin, and that it’s common for couriers and Post to trust neighbours to sign for packages if a recipient isn’t home, I would think it’s mostly about missing deliveries. Plus Wedding is historically a factory district where finding the right address within a compound is a mess and picking up packages has long been common.
Both Wedding and Neukölln have been painted by politicians and media as ‘no-go areas’ for some time. This is coupled with policies and endeavours to ‘clean up’ neighbourhoods that is directed explicitly at immigrants and marginalised people. It still has the best pubs though.
http://static1.businessinsider.com/image/55d37825371d2277018c096d-1200/these-altbau-buildings–classic-old-world-apartments-with-ceiling-molding-and-parquet-floors–are-highly-coveted-wedding-is-one-of-the-few-neighborhoods-in-berlin-where-these-are-still-affordable.jpg
Business Insider says that some of Wedding’s corners are still a little rough around the edges, but it also says that Wedding is hot hot hot — the up-and-coming neighborhood.
The building pictured here is an “altbau” building.
I ran out of time to edit the preceding post.
Here’s the link from Business Insider, that notorious SJW rag:
http://www.businessinsider.com/berlins-hottest-new-neighborhood-2015-8/#one-of-the-things-that-makes-wedding-special-is-that-its-a-complete-potpourri-of-classic-old-world-buildings-and-the-newer-more-low-income-apartment-blocks-222224
Here’s the caption for the preceding photo:
The (August 2015) article says this about the demographics of Wedding:
On the plus side, Vox Day continues his unbroken record of being wrong about everything.
Damn you, Editing Mammoth!
Here’s the link to the Business Insider article:
http://www.businessinsider.com/berlins-hottest-new-neighborhood-2015-8/#located-in-berlin-mitte-wedding-was-combined-with-the-tiergarten-neighborhood-in-2001-while-its-eastern-half-became-the-new-neighborhood-of-gesundbrunnen-1
Isn’t this “DHL won’t deliver there” story just a variant on the old “the police/fire brigade/ambulance/$OTHERSERVICE won’t go there” canard? The one that’s been disproven and even Snopes-ed time and again? Shame on Beale for being so gullible.
Moon landing denialism? Oh boy ohboyohboyohboy.
I’m continually annoyed that anti-intellectuals on the Right-wing fringes tend to give my field a free pass. They dislike historians, geographers, demographers, cartographers, biologists, doctors, psychologists, psychiatrists, linguists, child-development specialists, sociologists, social theorists, archeologists, paleontologists, anthropologists, economists, ecologists, ecological development scientists, cognitive scientists, data scientists, computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers, artificial intelligence philosophers, human intelligence philosophers, moral philosophers, philosophers of science and communications philosophers, because all those people point out the inconvenient flaws in their ideas. I’m feeling left out here.
All I want for Christmas is someone who attempts to use bad astro to justify their misogyny and racism.
@NelC
I’ve found that (at least on Twitter) the Alt right/Nazis and Trumpsters all feel that Snopes is a biased source of misinformation written by cat lovers living in their basement. And Politifact is working for the left.
As a librarian I die a little inside when I hear these things. 🙁
@EJ Would Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus count as bad astro?
@ NelC
Whilst Boris Johnson may not be everyone’s cup of tea, he did do a nice snarky response when Trump tried to raise the ‘no-go areas’ thing.
The proliferation of media outlets devoted to right wing propaganda through half truths and outright falsehoods is terrifying enough, especially when you condider the uses they can be put to by actual and would-be dictators.
What makes it worse is that mainstream media has its own problems with prioritizing the bottom line and misguided notions of “balance” to informing the people and countering misinformation.
The space race was driven by hypergamy. Overly-selective white females would only breed with white men who proved their superiority by going to the moon. As this task was impossible (have you even seen the moon? It’s like a 4 centimeters across. Nobody could stand on that, that’s just absurd), they had to pull together to create the great moon hoax. No women or men of colour were involved at any time. WAKE UP, SHEEPLE.
“Massive civil war followed by sixty years of virtually no immigration.”
False. There was a significant wave of immigration by the 1890’s, especially Jews from Eastern Europe, and Italians. Sixty years after the Civil War would be 1925. There was, in fact, a slowdown in immigration in the 1920’s and 1930’s as a result of a reactionary, racist and xenophobic backlash at the end of WW1. So Beale fails at history as well as at elementary human decency.
Considering how flamboyantly racist Vox Day was online back even in the early 2000s, that’s quite the feat.
@Alan Robertshaw
Not wild on Boris Johnson – he’s a showboater – but we share that in common. Don’t diss London. 🙂
Lived here for 40 years now and LOVE it! The only no go area is really around Leicester Square, where there are too many damned tourists.
When the Moon has never felt a foot
And Jupiter aligns with Mars
Alt-Right will save the planet
And cu (u-u-u) ucks will fear the Stars!
@ falconer
“This is the spawning of the sage of nefarious”
(Probably need to polish that; work in progress)
Thanks, Viscaria and Falconer. You’re the total best.
@ shadowplay
Yeah, I did 15 years there and loved it. Never once felt unsafe anywhere; and I used to stroll around supposedly dodgy places at 3 in the morning.
@ Falconer, Alan;
nope, absolutely spot-on as is!!
re: Ron Glass, he and Sherman Hemsley did one of my FAVORITE Twilight Zone (1985 series), “I of Newton”… all geeks and wanna-geeks should look, it’s on yoo-toob.
@ Scildfreja, re: “dinner in hell… ” for the third dinner, pick a place they won’t go….
As a person living in Berlin Northwest (literally a ten-minute walk to the Wedding S-Bahn station, what the fuck is Vox Day even saying.
My district, Moabit, is also an inmigrant neighborhood, and its population make-up is very similar to Wedding. These “Turk invaders” he complains about have been around since the 60s, when they were called by the German government to work in the reconstruction. We are getting refugees, but they are being disproportionately victims of violence, not criminals.
Thinks are fine here. Wedding and Moabit are probably going to become the new “hot” districts for young people to move in, since the currently hip ones (Neukölln, Kreuzberg, etc.) are becoming overcrowded. Toilets work just fine. I can walk alone at night when I come back home. The only time someone gave me shit was when a German guy followed me home.
And, believe me, DHL has not halted deliveries in the area. Since I work from home, I am the one picking up the packages for all my neighbors.
Speaking of things German, it was a friend’s birthday this weekend. So we had a bit of a session of classic German music, especially the 80s electropunk stuff (and, for some unfathomable reason, David Hasselhoff). I did have my illusions shattered though when she explained that the brilliant “Ein Zwei Politizei” which I’d assumed was some sort of political commentary, like 99 Luftballons, was just a kids nursery rhyme.
Still a banging tune though.
the Fox News mindset. They can prove that Snopes, PolitiFact, et. al. are biased, because EVERY TIME they report on something “I” believe, they have the SAME conclusions!! If they were unbiased, they’d come to different conclusions depending on the data input. It’s just not possible that the basic premise of the Fox News-ite is wrong, it’s got to be bias on the part of the media, and if they’re ALL biased, why, that’s conspiracy!!
ETA: It couldn’t possibly be that, yeah, actually, we really DID go to the moon… and 9/11 WAS a couple of hijacked airliners… and yeah, the Earth really IS flat and Antarctica IS an ice wall… uh, oh, sorry….