Source: Bigstock

Most of the customers who buy the beer to go are poor, and so can hardly afford to dine out at “true restaurants.” Supposing the stores were to be turned into cheap restaurants, would that somehow alter the criminal characters that exist in the neighborhoods in such abundance? No. If I have heart disease and elect to go into a church rather than a strip club, it doesn’t follow that I no longer have heart disease. The local media have often reported that robbers wait outside for these (mostly cash-only) business owners to leave at night in order to stick them up. If Bass has her way, the criminals will be able to get right to the point inside, at the cost of innocent lives.

For Bass, “small establishments”—that is, “places [that] have fewer than 30 seats”—should be allowed to have Plexiglas, but not to sell liquor. She is led to this conclusion—an egregious statist infringement—because she believes that the solution to the problem of black vice and “indignity” is making store owners turn their stop-and-go alcohol joints into “true restaurants.” But if there were a market for “true restaurants” in the ghetto, they’d already exist. There will be such a market only if there are true communities. And requiring that certain people change how they do business, because of other people’s poor decisions, does nothing to effect such amelioration. Democrats like Bass, however, seem to have no interest in blacks becoming self-reliant and accountable. Blacks are to be children of the state, always and forever.

Bass’ dangerous sentimentalism has, perhaps, even more to do with her gender than her race. Imagine a man trying to explain to other men that still other men who own liquor stores should not use bulletproof glass, since it makes blacks feel bad. If you are a man, the thought experiment fails, because any man would know instantly that he would be the object of laughter and derision, and that he would never be able to live it down. One thing that most men are unable to do, or at least very unwilling to do, is to tell women to their face when they are being stupid, to laugh at them, and so on. Hence, over time there are many unfortunate changes when men are obliged to accommodate women in politics, in the workplace, and everywhere else. Sober male judgment and clarity get hindered and perverted by woman’s more emotional and illogical nature. Of course, here many people would deem me “sexist.” I am relying on “a stereotype,” they’d claim. In fact, the old stereotypes about women—that they are more emotional, less logical, flighty, and so on—are all true. That is exactly why they are rife in the world’s literature and myths and allegories, all reflections of people’s lived experience. Skeptics would do well to read the psychologist Lee Jussim, who demonstrates the overwhelming accuracy of stereotypes, to the loathing of his fellow academics.

No honest and historically informed person can believe that universities, without women, would ever have seen safe spaces, microaggressions, bias response teams, and the like. Such touchiness, hysteria, and resentment do not derive from masculinity. They issue from the weaker sex, and since most men are now weak and cowardly, they go right along. As in the universities, so in the workforce and in politics: The more power women exert, the more absurd and ridiculous life becomes for everyone. We see this now most clearly from the #MeToo campaign, largely a manipulative, money-grubbing farce whose ultimate purpose is to undermine the Trump presidency. As Fred Reed noted a little while back,

the United States has embarked, or been embarked, on a headlong rush into matriarchy, something never before attempted in a major country. Men remain numerically dominant in positions of power, yes, but their behavior and freedom are ever more constrained by the wishes of hostile women.

Much of that constraint consists in men adhering to women’s ideas, or entertaining their ideas, that are utterly delusional, but which we pretend to respect for the sake of “gender equality.” Meanwhile, it is a good question whether in all of the United States there is a single woman politician of exceptional ability. For the close student of human nature, anyway, there is no doubt that Cindy Bass’ sentimental nonsense is only to be expected when women are in power. Nor can one even imagine a rational solution to this. After all, the feminine conditioning is now so great that most men, in their unthinking, reflexive paternalism, would only deem paragraphs like the last few “sexist.”