Secrets of the City

Does anybody else think Ramix and Bud Jr are the same person?

Probably a better chance of that than Amber and Raindog.

I’m still bewildered as to how that rumor got started.

“HYSTERIA OF CRIME AND RACE”?

aT LEAST YOU GAVE UP YOUR LEFT WING LOON POSITION IN THE FIRST SENTENCE.

Whoops, check your caps lock there, chuckles.

Rambix shed the harsh light of day on the continual erosion of the city, the social engineering that the mayor, city council, and Strib responds with, and the danger that grows daily, not just on the crime infested northside, but the ’spillover’ that now results from largely ‘imported’ criminals practicing their craft EVERYWHERE.

btw, HERE’S SOME ‘DIVERSITY’ FOR YOU:

What does your puppet have to say about that?

My puppet is telling me that he knows how to make links.

Sure, darker skinned people may make the grade locally, but it’s the white folks you gots to fear nationally. In at least six of ten cases, or seven of ten, if you counts Usama bin Laden as white.)

Let’s stick to the LOCAL discussion there, Mdm. Albright.

Why don’t you correct your post to accurately reflect the content that Rambix provided?

What would you suggest?

it’s not becoming to speak of yourself in third person

The blog consists of nothing but crime reports and incoherent babbling about a liberal conspiracy. Can we change my post to say that?

Social ist.

There we go. Spam filter is catching an important word. The bog claims the consipracy is by social ists, not liberals.

msparber, if you don’t mind my asking, how often did you visit over there? I only ask because I try to be a follower of the “don’t like it, don’t read it” maxim, but the level of sarcasm in your post suggests that you couldn’t look/turn/stay away. (I never read it, but maybe I was missing out on something…..but I doubt it)

Quite infrequently.

Oh no! Does that mean no more gay-bashing rhetoric by rambix? So, so sad. /sarcasm

Actually, Rambix provided factual information that was not being provided to us by the source that claims to fill the role of “information-provider” for this area. You can argue whether or not the factual info was pertinent or relevant – that’s another topic for another day – but it’s fairly obvious that there is filtration of the info by the Strib. I’d prefer to get information from the media irrespective of whether that information helps or hurts the media-directors’ political bent. If that’s not happening, it best not happen in a vacuum – we need someone like Rambix to point out the omissions, mostly because a checks-and-balances system is the best guarantor of honesty.

It’s also fairly obvious that crime in the area dealt with by Rambix has been rising at an alarming rate. It’s an item of interest for many people, both in and out of Mpls. And yet, in this election season, the decidedly partisan local media source has done a less-than-stellar job of covering that rise. Why would that be? And, again, do you really want your information sources deciding which facts you should hear, and which facts would be socially irresponsible to share with you?

In any event, while some of the comments at Rambix have been over the top, the actual posting has not. Should I hold you accountable for your friend raindog’s rants? Can I honestly claim that this blog bel;ieves, with every ounce of its being, that Coleman killed Wellstone? I doubt that Raindog’s additions here could fairly be said to represent your efforts, yet that seems to be the burden you lay on Rambix.

Too much information is always better than too little. The Strib, by itself, provides too little, and not on a random basis. Rambix tried to provide what was missing, in his one narrow area of concern. Excoriating him for that effort seems less substantive than partisan.

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I would like to go on record for myself and other Twin Cities citizens and say, “Who?”

Good point.

Wait, no, you’re just making shit up. This was a blog serving expressedly racist and homophobic points, wrapped in a paranoid fantasy about social ist control of the cities. I suppose racists and paranoiacs will miss it, but those of ion the reality based community will be glad to continue to debate the subject without having it debased by lunatic screeds.

If Rambix were still writing his blog, he would’ve wanted you to know of the recent daytime robberies that occurred on the U of MN St. Paul campus.

Oops, my mistake. Rambix already let us know about that yesterday.

So mspbarber are you denying that the posts on Rambix were true? Did he make up police reports? Link to fake news stories? Or are you just glad that one more voice who disagrees with you has gone silent? And what makes it worse, he did it to spend more time with his family. What an evil man.

Yes. I categorically deny that there is a social ist plot to prevent Minnesotans from knowing the race of criminals.

Would you care to disprove me?

I remember when the old mayor, Don Fraser said that he wouldn’t release the racial makeup of criminals or crime suspects.

I thought “buy yourself a newspaper, Fraser, and you can release whatever you want.”

But I do think people in the city should know who the criminals and suspect are. They can draw their own conclusions.

Well I read Rambix and I don’t ever recall him saying that. Then again, I’m not as intelligent as you.

(picturing msparber writhing helplessly, clutching for any straw that will help him defend his ludicrous estimation of the validity and relevance of the Rambix site)

Or just not as god a reader.

Lats post:

with Minneapolis they are perpetually enabled by the wishy-washy liberal multiculturalist urban social ists

From October 4:

For those not familiar with the area around Lake of the Isles, it is replete with old mansions, multimillion dollar homes, and is, as previously mentioned, the natural habitat of many urban social ists.

From October 3:

There are those, mostly liberal multiculturalist social ists, who will tell you that Somali gangs are not a problem in Minneapolis.

Seriously, it doesn’t take a vary close reading.

For god’s sake, bobby_b, MNSpeak is not a blog! Comments != (do not equal) postings and are not filtered in the same way by the site owner. Your comparison is akin to holding every blog responsible for what people say in the comments, not in the postings themselves.

Whoops. Good, not god.

Within the context of his crime reports, and the perpetual accompanying ‘missing’ info from the Strib, I fail to see why these characterizations of ‘liberal social ist multiculturalists’ is NOT germane.

Are you feeling the heat, msparber?

Very not vary, too.

Why? Is crazy hot?

uh, yeah, as a liberal hippie terrorist (or whatever you’re calling us these days) I can say that I don’t particularly like the strib either. not exactly an A-grade paper by any means, and a lot of the reporting is shoddy and half-assed. It seems like they care more about redesigning it to look pretty and attracting suburbanite readers than about actually reporting.

but, you know, maybe that’s just what I think because I’m so busy enabling minority crime with my multiculturalist social ist agenda.

Methinks you doth recoil from such descriptions as the wicked witch did from that pail of water….

I liked the Rambix blog even though the author was a little paranoid and, at times delusional.

Did bud jr just get back from the Ren Fest? Why is he talking like that?

Rambix is the Brookings Institute compared to the City Pages, which just ran a blurb suggesting that Arnellia’s (the St. Paul bar) was targeted by the City because the owner is black, not because someone was shot and killed inside the bar.

As a colleague of Paul Demko, who wrote the CP item about Arnellia’s, I object to Tate’s characterization of the piece. First off, Demko described in considerable detail the circumstances leading to the Arnellia’s hearing, including the fatal shooting Tate references and the bar’s history of other violations. Secondly, Demko didn’t “suggest” the Arnellia’s was targetted because the owner is black. He simply reported the owner’s contention that was the case. Why? Because that’s what she said in the wake of a highly contentious and newsworthy public hearing. Reporters report what people say and do under these sorts of circumstances.

By contrast, Rambix–who, like “Tate,” evidently doesn’t have the stones to write under his own name–endlessly boasted about all his supposed “reporting.” But as far as I could tell, Rambix’s reporting consisted of sitting in front of a computer, reading newspaper websites, watching an unhealthy amount of TV and bitching to beat the band every time a criminal suspect wasn’t identified in the media by race. Evidently, Tate shares that preoccupation.

And your point? Maz is Einstein compared to bud jr, but that doesn’t mean he’snot some misinformed old crank.

Hey, a knife to the head is much better than an axe to the brainpan!

Nosedale, why don’t you look up the Strib’s little chunk of a story on this establishment, written last week, in which the reporter did not EVEN INCLUDE THE ADDRESS or location of said shit-hole.

i just read the arnellia’s article in the city pages. (unlike tate, apparently.) the writer doesn’t suggest, imply, or even infer the city council went after this bar cuz the owner is black. tate, sometimes all those words can be a pain, but it does help to read em.

although it is a shame arnellia had to play the race card. given the detailed reasons given why the council pursued this, and then chose to take it easy on her….she still feels the need to take a cheap shot. silly.

dud jr, you got a phone book?

“This was a blog serving expressedly racist and homophobic points, wrapped in a paranoid fantasy about social ist control of the cities.“

Part of Rambix’s point was that the Strib failed to report on many crimes at all. Whether he thinks they did it because they’re social ists, or merely because they firmly support the hugely Dem leadership of the City, really doesn’t matter. Why so firmly focused on someone calling someone else a social ist? It strikes me as relatively unimportant in the points being discussed here – we all understand that many on the right consider people on the far left to be, essentially, social ists, and it throws me that you would consider this word to be such a pejorative that it would become your primary focus. Frankly, on the left/right continuum, the point where “social ist” ends isn’t a point, but a range, as is the beginning of the “liberal” designation, so the idea that there might be overlap wouldn’t seem to set anyone off.

Another part of his point was that, when they did choose to report on a crime, they also chose to leave out descriptive information about the suspects, because they had made a policy decision that the inclusion of that information, while probably useful, was socially divisive, to the point where that divisiveness outweighed the social utility of including the info.

That’s an arguable point, but not the one at issue here. Here, the point is, in order communicate his displeasure about the Strib’s policy choice, Rambix has to, by definition, speak in terms of race, ethnicity, and the other touchy subjects.

Your reaction – that it must be racist to speak of such things – seems to me to be the cowards’ response (or, more accurately, non-response.) When you try to shut off discussion that displeases you by crying “racism”, you’re intentionally ignoring the very arguable thesis (arguable on both sides, I think) presented by Rambix. Too many times, it has been my experience that this is not done out of any real outrage – out of any real feeling that speaking about race as if it matters really is racist – but out of the desire to walk away from the conversation while holding the self-conceit that you have “discredited” the speaker.

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Did the article mention the race of the phone book?I hear it’s white.

Or yellow, I guess.

Really weird filter. You can say “shit”, but you can’t say “social ist” without the space in the middle. I suspect you got the “Karl Rove version” of the blog software.

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It’s less important whether ornot the author of the blog was a racist, and more important that he chose to focus,endlessly,one one detail — race — at the exclusion of all others, including poverty, social environment, drug use, age, gender, and a myriad of other factors that can colludeto createa criminal. I would argue that such a focus is functionally racist, whether it intends to be or not.

Hey, I’m going to start a blog about crime in which I keep asking why the press doesn’t report the type of haircut that the criminals had! I’m just contributing to the debate! And I’m contributing an important fact that the press has decided to overlook, because they’re all Methodists. And by “Methodist,” I mean anybody who doesn’t share my political viewpoint.

God, I hate my keyboard. Imagine that there actually are spaces in the above comment.

“Hey, I’m going to start a blog about crime in which I keep asking why the press doesn’t report the type of haircut that the criminals had!“

(Sorry, I really wasn’t meaning to hijack your thread.)

Implicit in your paragraph about haircuts is that there’s no correlation between haircuts and criminality, and so the reporting of haircuts would be stupid. Accepted. Are you saying there’s no correlation between race and criminality? The stats would seem to contradict you on that.

Maybe the important distinction sn’t really race, but culture. Cultures can develop into unhealthy things, producing members with socially unacceptable tendencies. (Why? Maybe generations of ill-treatment by the larger cultures, or . . . But that’s a different topic.) Problem is, discrete cultures are frequently composed along lines of race, and so it’s tough to discuss cultural issues without mention of race. If one believes that specific cultures are unhealthy, but still firmly believes that race itself isn’t the causative factor, your definition of “racist” would seem to make even that cultural discussion taboo.

How can we ever discuss such issues, then? If, in fact, a disproportionate number of criminals are being produced in certain poor black neighborhoods, not because of race, but because of the culture that has developed in those neighborhoods, how can we ever address this, for the good of those very cultures and neighborhoods, if we can’t speak of them?

Seems like we end up writing off lots of people that way, for the good of maintaining a properly PC attitude.

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so i pulled this from rambix’s blog, which he got from Kare11:

“Minneapolis Police say around 10:30 Thursday evening, in the 2300 block of Elliot Avenue South, a 16-year-old African American male was hit by drive-by gunfire. He died at the scene.”

what is the point of saying he was african-american? am i supposed to feel less/more remorse/anger? this actually does sound kind of divisive. hmm, i’m not on the side of this issue i thought i’d be….weird.

Regarding “bud jr’s” comment: Well, I just looked up the Strib’s piece on Arnellia’s. While I don’t think it is as good as the one that appeared in CP (which was what I was writing about), the Strib reporter described Arnellia’s as being located on University Avenue. So is the failure to include a cross street now part of some conspiracy?

Since bud jr seems so hung up on the issue of the Arnellia’s address, I assume he has never set foot in said “shit-hole.” From that, I can only infer that “shit-hole”–in his view–translates to “bar where black people go.”

And again, I have to ask: Why is that the people who post the most obnoxious comments on this board aren’t willing to use their real names? I can imagine circumstances where there is a legit reason. In the main, though, I think it’s cowardly behavior–especially when you slag on others by name.

Demonstratably, crime is about opportunity. Poor people tend to commit the sorts of crimes that are available to poor people — jacking liquor stores and selling crack on street corners. Rich people tend to commit rich people crimes — bribing politicians and building deadly gas plants in Bhopal, India.

Black people tend to be poorer, so they tend toward poor people crimes, which, unfortunately, tend to be more visible and easier to prosecute. As I mentioned in my initial post, there are all sorts of crimes being committed.To focus exclusively on street crime, and then to insist that race is te overriding factor, is, frankly, bizarre. It’s hard not to ascribe racist motiviations to it.

I just have to say this, because I can’t hold it in: CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION!

thanks.

Rambix’s blog=
…blah blah blah bleeding heart liberals…. blah blah blah empty suits…. blah blah ah play the race card… blah blah blah main stream media…. blah blah blah homosexual pediphile……blah blah blah quagmire….

Names and dates might have changed, but it was the same regurgitated-fear-mongering-spewage, with the occasional fact thrown in, almost every day.
While completely disagreeing with the political viewpoints, I fully admidt I would read his blog on a less-than-frequent basis. Guess I felt the need to remind myself being a “Bleeding Heart Liberal” is not as bad as being a judgemental, closed-minded, bigoted, asshat.

Well, that, and I get really bored at work sometimes.

Giggidy.

rambix was a gun-lovin’ right-winged racist nut. good riddance to him. someone with a fair balanced view of race and crime in this city should pick up where he left off and devote a blog to posting police and news reports.

I-heart-hyphens.

Also wanted to clarify, the shot above:
“Guess I felt the need to remind myself being a “Bleeding Heart Liberal” is not as bad as being a judgemental, closed-minded, bigoted, asshat.”
was aimed more so at Rambix’s commenters, rather than Rambix himself.

You know who you are.

I wrote that the City Pages blurb “suggested” Arnellia’s was targeted because the owner is black. I stand by that statement.

Paul Demoko wrote: “Asked why the city was targeting her club, Allen paused and thought for a few seconds. ‘You know what I’m going to say,’ she noted. ‘Because I’m a black woman.’”

Mike Mosedale wrote (in the post above): “[Demko] simply reported the owner’s contention that was the case.”

Yes, Demko simply reported that contention after fishing for it. If the City of St. Paul threatens penalties against a drinking establishment because an underage patron committed homicide on the premises, is it necessary to ask why the city was targeting the club? Only if you want to lend credence to the asinine notion that race was somehow a factor.

What is positively inaccurate is the assertion that I share Rambix’s proclivities merely because I object to the City Pages tired and misguided efforts to cry racism.

If you really stood by anything, Tate, you’d sign your name to your posts. Instead, you take an off-topic pot shot at CP, impugn the reputation of a good reporter and then scramble back into the bush. That’s what makes the blogosphere such a classy place.

And, yeah, you’re so right: It’s downright irresponsible to allow a black woman whose club was on the verge of a death sentence to express her opinion on the subject of race and city politics. After all, what could she possible know about such matters?

It’s downright irresponsible to allow a black woman whose club was on the verge of a death sentence to express her opinion on the subject of race and city politics. After all, what could she possible know about such matters?

So who does she think is the racist? The black police chief or the liberal democrat mayor? If the answer is neither, then she’s blowing knee-jerk style smoke. Something we’re all a little tired of.

Another Off-Topic Potshot

How many times has a show at Arnellia’s made the A-List? And how about the Turf Club? And, to all the yupsters/hipsters/hippies in the room with a penchant for “Racism Sucks” bumper stickers, how many times have you been to each establishment?

But, yeah, St. Paul officials are vile racists.