NYT: "Food Deserts" to Blame for Chicago Shootings
08/21/2018
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The New York Times is going to keep running opeds on how the wave of shootings in Chicago since the triumph over the cops of BLM in November 2015 are the fault of the Usual Suspects (cops, white supremacy, white men, Trump, systemic racism, etc etc) until somebody comes up with a semi-persuasive sounding one. Today … “food deserts” are to blame:

The Police Aren’t the Solution to Chicago’s Violence

We need more jobs, thriving schools and better access to food.

Yup, Chicago killers are D’Jean Valjeans shooting people to steal a loaf of bread for their families.

… In a place known as a food desert, where there are no jobs and too few opportunities to acquire skills, and where there are failing schools, we are there. …

That’s what happens when you eliminate schools and allow food deserts to exist: People who can afford to move will do so, and the people left behind will be over-policed.

In less comic criminology, American Affairs recounts how Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson stunned the intellectual world in 1974 by pointing out that whether or not prison rehabilitates criminals and whether or not the threat of prison deters criminals, we can say with a high degree of confidence that being locked up in prison incapacitates street criminals from preying on civilians on the street for the length of their terms. This observation then slowly led to a reassessment of the spirit of the age that had cut imprisonment during a vast increase in crime.

Incarceration as Incapacitation: An Intellectual History
by Timothy Crimmins

The general dumbness of the conventional wisdom in the Current Year is a recurrent subject here at iSteve, but let us not forget that the conventional wisdom of 1973 was often in a class of its own.

Commenter The Last Real Calvinist notes:

[Larry] Auster’s insight is evergreen. Just follow the pronouns. For example, in this article:

We need more jobs, thriving schools and better access to food. …

“That’s what happens when you eliminate schools and allow food deserts to exist.”

It’s not complicated.

[Comment at Unz.com]
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