Splendid Isolation

From Knuckledragger, talking about his old neighborhood (happens to be in California, but could have — and has — happened anywhere):

The shooting happened in the 200 block of Semple Street, I used to live at 238 Kimble, one street over. Most of the houses there were built in the 1920s.
…
When I first moved there in 1996, it was a nice neighborhood – quiet with a lot of older folks that would sit out on their front porch in the evening drinking tea and talking with other neighbors that were out for their evening walk. As time went by, those folks either died or sold their homes to go into retirement communities or whatever and younger folks moved in. Then they opened up an apartment complex on Johnson, 2 streets over, to Section 8 [low-income] housing and shit really went downhill after that.

One of the biggest failures of “progressive” philosophy is the “magic dirt” theory:  that transplanting people from a bad place to a better place will somehow magically make them change, and act more like the people in the better neighborhood than they did in their old one.

As any amateur* student of human nature will tell you, that’s completely wrong.  Instead, the transplantees will bring all their old behaviors to the better place, and infect it with thuggery, crime and general lawlessness, to the point where the original inhabitants of that (no longer) “better” area simply pack up and move.  Then that’s referred to derisively by the “planners” as “White flight” or, to be more accurate, as “middle-class flight” (which is what it is).

Then the neighborhoods go to shit, as Kenny observes, the schools start to fail, businesses also leave and voilà!  a shithole is created where no shithole existed before.  By social redistributionism.  (In this case, not of wealth but of antisocial behavior, to make it somehow more “fair”.)

And no matter how often it fails, the Leftists (as always) continue the practice, again and again, because Leftist activity only concerns itself with intentions, and outcomes are always the fault of others rather than of the basic Marxist principle.  (The “others”, of course, being “capitalism”, “greedy businessmen”, “bankers” or, more recently, “racism”.)

*the “professional” students of human behavior are the ones who initiate and perpetuate this foolishness, reminding me of the (paraphrased) expression that so stupid and wrongheaded a precept could only have been produced by an academic — academia, of course, never having to live with the consequences of their folly.