Scum Housing
When the Mt Hermon Missionary Baptist church offered Section 8 housing in Columbus, Ohio two thousand applicants, mostly Somali immigrants, rioted for the first-come-first-served application forms. The cops were forced to mace the crowd and the event had to be canceled due to the chaos. ‘Free stuff’ really isn’t free. It’s rationed. It’s only free for those at the head of the line or on the inside track.
Entitlements attract dependents until the point where government can’t afford it any more. Then the system breaks down. Take Amsterdam which is creating shipping container ‘villages’ to house its riff-Raff. Years of tolerance attracted them like flies. Now its Mortein time.
“First there was an effort to clean up the red-light district in Amsterdam. Then came new laws regulating who could frequent “coffee shops” in the city and elsewhere in Holland for a joint. Now, the Dutch capital is introducing a plan to punish bad behavior by sending chronic neighborhood bullies and vandals out of the city center for a punitive stay in uncomfortable housing containers.” Ironically the proponents are the center-left Labor Party.
Van der Laan, a member of the center-left Labor Party, has been mayor of Amsterdam for the past two years, a period which has seen accelerated efforts in the city to shed its image as being a hotbed of prostitution and drugs. But his new plan is not uncontroversial. Many have pointed out its similarity to the proposal by right-wing populist politician Geert Wilders to set up what he called “tuigdorpen,” or “scum villages,” for repeat troublemakers. “Put all the trash together and leave normal people alone,” Wilders, who is virulently anti-immigrant and anti-Islam, said at the time. Indeed, “tuigdorpen” has been nominated as the worst neologism of the year in Holland as a result.
Step Right Up
The Daily Telegraph explains how it works. “The tough approach taken by Mr van der Laan appears to jar with Amsterdam’s famous tolerance for prostitution and soft drugs but reflects hardening attitudes to routine anti-social behaviour that falls short of criminality.”
There are already several small-scale trial projects in the Netherlands, including in Amsterdam, where 10 shipping container homes have been set aside for persistent offenders, living under 24-hour supervision from social workers and police.
Under the new policy, from January next year, victims will no longer have to move to escape their tormentors, who will be moved to the new units.
A team of district “harassment directors” have already been appointed to spot signals of problems and to gather reports of nuisance tenants.
Of course City Hall’s powers will be used only in the most necessary cases. UPI reports: “A City Hall team has already begun identifying the worst offenders, The Irish Times reported … The new rules will be enforced only in extreme cases, such as for violence against gay people or intimidating police witnesses, officials said.”
Critics say the camps are coming back. Of course they’re called something else. And maybe not just the camps. The Guardian has an article written by the wife of a Labour Party politician who described her husband’s death in the care — if you could call it that — of Britain’s National Health Service. “My husband died like a battery hen in hospital,” the Labour MP said.
Ann Clwyd has said her biggest regret is that she didn’t “stand in the hospital corridor and scream” in protest at the “almost callous lack of care” with which nurses treated her husband as he lay dying in the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff …
Clwyd, the Labour MP for Cynon Valley since 1984 and Tony Blair’s former human rights envoy to Iraq, told the Guardian she fears a “normalisation of cruelty” is now rife among NHS nurses. She said she had chosen to speak out because this had become “commonplace”.
Describing how her 6’2” husband lay crushed “like a battery hen” against the bars of his hospital bed with an oxygen mask so small it cut into his face and pumped cold air into his infected eye, Clwyd said nurses treated the dying man with “coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt”.
“He had been in the flagship hospital for ten days.” But at least it was free. Yet if that’s the flagship what does the fleet look like? It must look great, according to a perceptive commenter at the blog Samizdata. How can it not look great, he wrote, when we’ve always been told how great it was.
It’s the NHS first got me thinking how the power of the narrative distorts so much of how organisations & ideas are viewed. This one starts; “Staffed by dedicated doctors & caring nurses the British National Health Service is the envy of the world…….” It runs for a couple of paragraphs, was first written the day before its inception & has been repeated so many times it’s probably encoded somewhere down in our DNA by now. It’s not just that the public believe it. Almost everyone connected to the NHS do as well. Doctors, nurses, administrators, politicians. Even most of the media. It makes it impossible for any of them to view it with a clear eye. The incidents quoted above. others much worse we’ve heard about in the last few years. They should be part of the narrative as well but it just rewrites itself over them. Edits them away so the next time comes as exactly the same shock as the one before & the one before that. No-one actually learns any lessons or does anything because the narrative reassures them it’s not necessary. They’re just aberrations. Momentary & inexplicable blips in an otherwise perfect system. Or just signs that even more money needs tipping into it. That the engine that’s coughing & banging & spewing out smoke & broken parts would be running as sweet as a sewing machine with just a little more fuel.
It’s a very perceptive observation. Imagine how outraged everyone would be if Clwyd died in the care of a “monopoly”. A private monopoly, not a broken down, unaccountable, government monopoly. We are happy to accept a situation which we would not tolerate under any other circumstance if it’s just labeled right.
Geert Wilders biggest sin was the temerity to call the camps what they really were. But the enlightened officialdom of Amsterdam are smarter. They give as their reason for exile to the “tuigdorpen” the tendency to anti-gay “hate crimes” among the sequestered individuals. It’s not concentration community, it’s prevention community, meant to re-educate, not to punish.
Wilders openly identify the troublemakers as Muslims who refuse to assimilate and instead view themselves as hostile colonists rather than genial immigrants. Leftists such as Amsterdam’s mayor would finger them as people who disproportionately engage in violent “hate crimes” against homosexuals. Either way, it’s roughly the same group. Whatever you deign to call them, it’s becoming unavoidably obvious that no, we can’t all get along.
The European welfare state, like that in America, still chugs along blindly unaware that it is unsustainable. Multiculturalism is a delusion that all cultures are compatible, when it’s obvious that multiculturalism is only compatible with itself—and then only temporarily, because it inevitably splinters into gays fighting against blacks against women against Muslims.
But what’s in a name? Truth in packaging, that’s what. To some extent the Muslims being identified for transportation to the “tuigdorpen” by “harassment directors” are victims of a monstrous bait and switch. They were lured into a ‘tolerant’ European society by the promise of multiculturalism, which meant if anything that their behavior would be tolerated, even celebrated. It turns out that multiculturalism just means learning to speak in code.
We forget that the horrors of the mid-20th century were not due so much to the prevalence of unenlightened people but to the existence of state structures which permitted absolute control over the lives of their citizens. Once the machinery was there someone was bound to push the buttons to set it clanking. Politicians have conned voters into handing them near-absolute power in exchange for the promise of limitless benefits and tolerance. What could go wrong?
Maybe anything big enough to have the power to grant you everything you want has the power to strip you of everything you have. But don’t worry, its programmed to build a paradise on earth even though in principle the same machinery can assign people to a “tuigdorpen” or let them die in a battery cage.
Western literature is full of warnings about such the dangers of creating false gods over yourself, the story of Babel, Faust, Frankenstein’s monster, Skynet. It is perhaps no coincidence that Joseph Stalin’s standard for literary excellence was in fact Goethe’s Faust. But nobody reads those old stories any more. And today things are old after only 70 years.
“And some things that should not have been forgotten were lost. History became legend. Legend became myth. And for two and a half thousand years, the ring passed out of all knowledge until, when chance came, it ensnared a new bearer.”
Nah.
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Who says it c
I am sadly reminded, Wretchard, of that famous scene from the movie Judgement at Nuremberg, when one character asks one of the Allied lawyers who had been persecuting German war crimes, “how did it start?” The answer was “it started the moment you decided the lives of individuals expendable for society” or words to that effect – it has been many years since I saw the movie.
The overall good is progress – defined as power and priviledge for the Left, for those in charge. The goal for the masses is equlity of outcome – and indeed camps for undesireables and health care rationing will provide that. It happened in Camboida under Pol Pot, in China under Mao, in Russia, in Germany – in many countries in many times. And it will happen here.
I watched a couple episodes of “Doc Martin” on PBS. It’s a fantasy series much like Doctor Who. In Doctor Who the action is centered around an especially commodious telephone box. In “Doc Martin” it centers around a social welfare system that works as advertized. If you keep the fantasy elements in mind it is quite good.
I’m upset I didn’t get my invite to the riot in Columbus. Locally we have a public housing project that was completely remolded a few years ago and then completely torn down. Flattened. OK, everybody out of your newly remolded apartments ’cause here come the bulldozers! Now they’ve built new homes there which will be ready soon. It is called stimulus, I think.
Last Spring I said Obama was the candidate of the Government Job. He would allow young women to believe that with him in charge they could get their government job (great pay and student loans forgiven). Tuns out 73 percent of new jobs since July were with government. I wonder how I can know with such accuracy what the Left Democrats will do and still be such a poor speller. It must use different parts of the brain.
@1 Battle: It has already happened. We have been in the midst of a 40 year invisible decline in the standard of living that will soon become visible even to the blind. On a single income my parents lived at a higher standard than my wife and I (both physicians) live today on two full time incomes. Pre-school tuition is higher today than medical school tuition (at a private medical school, no less) was for me 45 years ago.
The censorship fought against by The Free Speech Movement is nothing compared to the censorship of Political Correctness and campus speech codes. I dare not reveal either my political or my religious affiliations at University faculty meetings, nor my political leanings at my place of worship. Fortunately I do have a group of close friends who offer a combination of solidarity and tolerance and appreciation of our differences.
Whereas two and three decades ago autonomy was high on the list of factors that affected the choices of the third year medical students whom I teach, it now ranks at the very bottom. Security and free time for lifestyle are now the highest ranking factors. Drip by drip we have been selling our birthright for a bowl of faux red soup.
I suppose once things transition from a private source to a government monopoly they are seen no longer as a product, but as a service. People are willing to accept the distinction because of the tragedy of the fiscal commons; when no one is sure who is paying for it, pretty good is good enough.
This is why bureaucrats HATE the flat tax and love the M.C. Escher system we have today. I may not like the services provided but I am reticent to vote to decrease them because maybe I am getting them at a discount. Brains are weird…
The bestest line in that article had to be the second to last paragraph. When Bartho Boer, spokesman for Mayor Eberhard van der Laan, responded to claims that the new housing centers (centres?) are similar to the scum villages proposed by Geert Wilders.
The last part of that sentence, I mean, wow! That line, “it has to work”, has to be one of the top two rationals of leftist thinking. The other one being, “…didn’t fail, it was never done right.”
Of course, these are the smarter than smart people who know best how to run the world.
But I will have to agree with Mr. Boer that these housing units will not be like Mr. Wilder’s scum villages. The feeling I get is that they’re supposed to be more along the lines of a re-education camp. But hey, always forward!
On a somewhat related side note, the good professor just pointed out an article by Christina Hoff Summers, You Can Give a Boy a Doll, but You Can’t Make Him Play With It.
KRB
After World War2 Holland, out of compassion and sense of obligation, invited Muslims from Indonesia, formerly the Dutch East Indies, into their country, and immediately had to deal with Muslim attempts to subvert the Dutch culture and government. Malmo, the second largest city in Sweden, is now effectively a Muslim city, where the law of Sweden does not apply. The city of Hamburg has just given its Muslim population rights no other citizen of Germany has. The declining native white birth rate throughout Europe, if maintained, guarantees a Muslim Europe in two or three generations. There is still time, but is there the will to reverse the slide to national extinction?
Before things get better
They always get worse
The age of compassion
Has been a great curse
To help third world Muslims
By bringing them in
Resulted in what they
Have just always have been
The age of compassion
Has run its cruel course
The first world is stuck now
We’ll never use force
To send them all back to
Wherever they came
We’re losing our countries
And we are to blame
It’s not just in Holland
It’s now everywhere
The first world is losing
And none seem to care
Exsqueeze me, but isn’t the very name “Section 8 Housing” obviously offensive?
‘In Doctor Who the action is centered around an especially commodious telephone box.’
The show was one of many disclosure programs started back then, drawing on ancient scriptures and modern esotericism. Wicked, satanic stuff.
Sad how it was first cancelled: the star’s wife ran off with the head of the BBC. It was the sort of thing you see in western democracies – those people have acted that way for millennia.
There is a vein of humor that relies on describing something in real life using terms that would be considered unsurprising if they referred to a government agency.
Irony, it’s not just for late night anymore.
Maybe anything big enough to have the power to grant you everything you want has the power to strip you of everything you have
I only want the produce of my own labor and to be left alone. Not really much to wish for but the state still retains the power to strip me of everything I have and will gladly use it if I come up on their radar screen.
Back in the late 60’s the Fed Govt came up with the FHA 235 Program. The idea was special loans to enable people to buy better houses, to move out of the slums.
In reality, they just ended up building new slums, nicer newer, cleaner, but not for long, given the occupants. The really bad news that there normal decent people who bought houses in those neighborhoods without realizing who and what would be moving in next door.
In the 60’s there was a key Earl Warren Supreme Court decision. It was proclaimed by the court that it was no longer possible to lock someone up because they were too crazy to be allowed to run around loose. They could not be incarcerated protectively but only if they had committed a crime worth of their being imprisoned. So they were sent home, where family members were ill-equipped to deal with them, or out on the street, where everybody has to deal with them.
The money once spent on state mental hospitals was diverted to other Great Society programs. Theoretically, people were supposed to visit their friendly neighborhood mental health center if they were feeling a bit deranged on a given morning, but this worked probably even less well than if we got rid of the cops and just let criminals check into a jail if they found one morning they had committed a crime.
And now, municipalities, having nowhere to put obviously crazy people who create problems and are placing them in rest homes, where they inevitably prey upon the largely elderly population.
There are no bad neighborhoods. There are only bad neighbors.
Coventry becomes reality.
Heinlein you magnificent Bass Turd! I read your book.
Isolating undesirables is a classic left wing solution. Along the same lines, American lefties conceived internment camps for Japanese citizens in WW2 for which they were never held to account. Maybe they found the idea of otherwise patriotic, self reliant farmers and small businessmen who might vote Republican to be scary. I have heard that the only person in the FDR admin who objected to the internment program was heartless right winger J. Edgar Hoover.
I am with Bob @10. I just want to be left alone to either fail or succeed. I don’t understand the kind of politician busybody who gets off running my life. I want to be the one to decide whether or not I have enough personal “design margin” to commit altruistic acts, because when the government decides for me, I do less of it just out of principle. I used to enjoy talking to the black kids that come around to sell magazines. Now I just tell them I gave it all to Obama and if they want something, they can damn well go get it from him.
Wretchard,
There is no SkyNet. And even if there were, if someone were building SkyNet, it’s only there to protect us from the Russians, and bitter clinging gun owners and self-described patriot groups helpfully identified in the MIAC Report. SkyNet is actually our friend. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. And no the 30,000 drones recently authorized by Congress are not the vanguard of SkyNet’s Terminator army but simply there to keep us all safe. Drones are in fact good for the economy as everyone knows the military industrial complex creates more wealth than it destroys. Do you hear me? Military spending paying one guy to blow a hole in the ground and another to patch it creates jobs!
Forget what some WWII General and Republican President said, he was an old guy anyway. And read your @ReginaldQuill tweets whereby we’ve got to stop the Muslim Brotherhood from taking over Egypt while we help the Syrian Muslim Brothers conquer Damascus. Oh what a world we weave!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKY1nq3se4E
Check it out with the cool techno music…
The Somali’s in Columbus, such a funny group.
They work at the airport a lot. They use to run security (prior to 9/11), and now they drive the shuttle busses from the parking lot to the terminal. A few years ago, one of the drivers was singing about how great it was that Ramadan was about to begin.
They hang out in the big shopping malls, and the rumor is that they were all organized to vote Democrat in the last election. My teenage son complained about them in Middle School and High School. And all the Halal food stores in town now that were never seen 20 years ago.
I’ve speculated elsewhere that some day we will all have to open carry firearms to protect ourselve. It’s not that they are openly violent yet, but the cultural friction is growing.
Ain’t diversity great? My next door neighbors are Chinese (born in China) and the folks down the street are Sikhs (Indians). The problem is not with them, because they don’t self segregate in neighborhoods like the Somalis do.
As Kathy Shaidle pointed out on her blog, notice the very nice shiny expensive Toyotas and other cars the public housing Muslims had lined the road with as they waited to sign up for their freebies.
Earlier today, I met a man, a single father who lives in a trailer park. He walks everyday to his minimum wage job. He has no car. He does not qualify for medicaid because he makes too much money. However, he was offered a family planning plan, it does not cover medical expenses but it does cover sterilization. In case you had not already figured it out, he is white.
So lets sum this up. White guy lives in trailer, single dad, two kids to feed, makes minimum wage, no car. Gets jack shit from the government. Muslims (who are probably not even citizens) driving $20,000 Toyotas line up for free housing.
Give me back my money greedy scum, I’d rather give it to the guy who is truly struggling to get by.
14. Vanguard of the Commentariat
Failure and success seem to be much like good and evil. You can’t have one without the other.
I don’t think the government has helped me a great deal in any of my successes and as I have proved to myself on more than one occasion I damn sure don’t need its help to fail.
3. batman “The censorship fought against by The Free Speech Movement is nothing compared to the censorship of Political Correctness and campus speech codes. I dare not reveal either my political or my religious affiliations at University faculty meetings, nor my political leanings at my place of worship.”
The Free Speech Movement was for free speech: Speech on campus was already free. Its purpose was to politicize the universities. Its instigators took over, and now we have the Stalinist thought control they wanted.
Interesting stuff Wretchard. Reminds of London’s Transportation that populated the antipode.
Also … Do you know anything about what’s happening with the tire nail traps in Jakarta?
So those container houses are called “correctional”. Isn’t “Correctional Institution” another eupehemism for Ye Olde Pen, aka the Greybar Hotel, aka the Slammer. The difference seems to be that the Dutch allow their barbarians to run free and pillage at will before returning to their quarters.
As for Columbus, the city athers would have done better to emulate Bonaparte, and instead of giving the crown a whiff of mace, give them a whiff of grape.
RWE, if you check, you will find that most of the slum neighborhoods were actually respectable middle class neighborhoods until they were taken over by the slum dwellers. I think Al Capp ran a series of episodes along this line in L’il Abner durin ghte early 1960s.
“Clwyd said nurses treated the dying man with ‘coldness, resentment, indifference and even contempt”‘.”
Bureaucracy is ever bureaucracy regardless of the product it supposedly delivers.
Out of respect for the dead–at least until the end of this clause–I will not write “reap what you sow.” Oh, wait. I confess to being surprised the Clwyds hadn’t the political connections and cash to get what they think they deserve.
“The new rules will be enforced only in extreme cases, such as for violence against gay people”
The harshest punishments are always dealt to those whose crimes disrespect the nobility.
Even as the Euros pack off their “ne’er do wells” for places with controlled movement and minimal services, they’ll remind themselves how evolved they are, not having prisons like the bestial Americans do.
but…
I strongly suspect American prison inmates will have better services than the shipping container residents.
btw….
I followed the “link chain” to look into the story. When I hit the “TM” page, the ad it gave me was for shipping containers:
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/simgad/7428388430716811865
Ahh . . . . Section 8 Housing. A program that is very revealing of the progressive mentality, in several intersting ways.
First off, Section 8 — distributing the poor throughout more prosperous neighborhoods with housing vouchers — was a response to the monumental failure of public housing. Public housing needn’t have been a failure, but became such because of the unwillingness and inability of authorities to manage these projects properly. Section 8 was also supposed to have the additional effect of “civilizing” the transplanted poor by having them exposed to a better environment. This, of course, didn’t work. Instead, the more prosperous were/are directly exposed to the pathologies they thought they had escaped by moving up the economic ladder.
The second phenomenon was the reaction of otherwise tolerant and liberal folks in those nice neighborhoods. I call these folks:
“THE LIBERAL BUTs”
I came up with the expression from when I lived in a moderately upscale apartment complex with lots of amenities which had substantial Section 8 set-asides. Angry and alarmed at the behavior of their Section 8 neighbors, tenants would start their complaints with, “I’m a liberal, BUUUUUUT … . “. Hence the term “Liberal Buts.”
“Liberal Buts” comprise a major portion of the Democratic voting block. Their conditioning (ideology and swallowing the narrative) comes up against their instincts (a rational reaction to unpleasant realities). They would prefer that “liberal” experiments be done elsewhere.