Foreigners See What Californians Miss
Monday, May 24, 2021
The British Daily Mail has a piece on California's ongoing exodus which describes the conditions there that are causing long-time residents to leave.
More important, it offers a couple of quotes that illustrate how little many of those who flee seem to be aware of what went wrong.
First, though, the reporter did find someone who seems to have a good grasp of what's going on there:
Leave it to an immigrant to see these things, and to a foreign paper to report them. And, while the Mail doesn't explicitly tie these socialist "values" to the policies that are ruining the state, it at least offers that as a possibility. Heck, it even mentions that California has been run by Democrats for ages and is a single-party state.Delian Asparouhov is typical of those who turned California into such a powerhouse: a computer geek who attended the top-ranking Massachusetts Institute of Technology, launched a space start-up, was backed by a billionaire and became a venture capitalist in the state. Yet this month the Bulgarian-born entrepreneur, still only 27, bought a house in Miami, Florida.
Image by Benjamin Disinger, via Unsplash, license.
He said: "Silicon Valley has a stifling intellectual climate with its mono-culture that only allows one viewpoint to be expressed. It seems to espouse the same socialist values as the Soviet Union.
"So I am fleeing just like my parents fled a similar system for America when I was a kid."
...
... "California is a beautiful place with beautiful people but it's fraying. It is anti-growth, espouses diversity but does not implement it..." [format edits, bold added]
Asparouhov is, sadly for California and any state that might receive its refugees, quite atypical:
Younger people are most likely to contemplate leaving, according to polls -- even those who sympathise with the progressive politics of San Francisco, as I discovered in the sun-dappled Inner Sunset district beside Golden Gate Park.It is disturbing but worthwhile to consider: Most people find it easier to leave a hellhole than to consider the idea that the political policies they support might have created that hellhole. It is easy to come up for good reasons why this is the case, including two formidable ones: (1) The causal relationship is not obvious, and (2) the political beliefs are derived from deeply-held moral beliefs, the latter being hard enough to think about without the additional handicap of having been raised in a society that proclaims morality to be outside the province of reason.
This is an area popular with families, with teenage boys playing baseball and young girls kicking a football in the gorgeous park. Homes are considered comparatively affordable here -- yet the median price is more than $1million (about £700,000).
I met Kevin, a 36-year-old sound designer, who told me: "We won't stay long-term as we have two young kids and want a backyard. We might move to Portland [in neighbouring Oregon] since it has the same political culture, similar climate and is near the coast."
-- CAV
2 comments:
Hi Gus,
"It is disturbing but worthwhile to consider: Most people find it easier to leave a hellhole than to consider the idea that the political policies they support might have created that hellhole."
I think that what we are really seeing here is the fruits of allowing the Left to control the educational establishment for very nearly a century now. This is a concretization of Rand's "The Comprachicos".
Yes, the causality behind "S-Holes" being linked to political policy is quite complex. But I see people who cannot even see first order effects. That's not complexity. That's epistemological incompetence deliberately brought on by an educational system that was borrowed from the Prussian model (to create model Prussian citizens) and used to by Leftist movements to deliberately incapacitate the minds of their students.
Why do this? For the same reason the Prussians did.
It is easier to command obedience if your victim not only Does Not Know, but Cannot Know. Political power is more easily seized and maintained if the masses are ignorant and kept that way. This is the same reason that Democrats in the Old South, and later, in the Jim Crow South, made it illegal to teach blacks to read in the first instance, and tried govt programs to discourage it in the second.
I hark back to an article a few years ago where a self-described 'Artist' in Houston bemoaned the fact that she could no longer pay her property tax bill and that she 'couldn't understand why her taxes were so expensive, since she had supported every property tax levy that had been floated since she became a homeowner.'
I live in Idaho. The majority of our new immigrants that I've encountered are on par with the Houston Artiste. There are a few who understand that the lethal policies, but they understood that when in Cali. There don't seem to be any who have come to understand the ramifications of the policies after having supported them.
I call them Blue Locusts. They devour and destroy and then move on to greener, or should I say, redder, pastures.
c andrew
C.,
A quibble: I believe our artiste was from Austin.
"I see people who cannot even see first order effects." Oh, Christ, yes. Relatives from California were here. One is trying to start a business and uses contract labor. I noted that Biden was about to screw her with his desire for the federal version of AB-5. Total blank-out, followed by rote repetition of a left-wing talking point about him just wanting workers to have "protections."
She and her at least equally blue husband know I oppose the Democrats and don't want to "talk politics" when I'm around. After that, I am more than happy to save my time, although since their politics is totalitarian and encompasses every aspect of one's life, I end up offering correctives when they inevitably spout nonsense in front of my children, such as blathering about how bad coal is upon seeing a joke lump of coal in a stocking.
And I have to say, "Blue Locusts" is a gem of a term. Thanks for sharing it.
Gus
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