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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   30714 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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An article just came out about the government supported grocery store in Kansas: https://archive.is/lNlvD . But the store is currently a total disaster:

Taylor, 68, has supported the KC Sun Fresh since it opened just blocks from her home. But that solitary tomato was almost too much to bear.

Sales were okay at first, but after the pandemic, crime rose and sales began to plummet. Police data show assaults, robberies and shoplifting in the immediate vicinity have been on an upward trend since 2020. Shoplifting cases have nearly tripled.

KC Sun Fresh lost $885,000 last year and now has only about 4,000 shoppers a week. That’s down from 14,000 a few years ago, according to Emmet Pierson Jr., who leads Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city. Despite a recent $750,000 cash infusion from the city, the shelves are almost bare.

This seems to be a hit piece targeting the NYC mayor favorite Zhoran who wants to bring government run grocery stores to NYC

Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York City, has attracted attention for his campaign pledge to combat “out-of-control” prices by establishing five city-owned supermarkets that he says will pass savings onto customers by operating “without a profit motive.”

But it's unclear whether the failure of the store is due to mismanagement or criminals establishing a base nearby:

Part of the problem is the city’s lack of a jail, Young said. The left-leaning council closed the previous facility in 2009 as a cost-saving measure — a move the Kansas City Star has called a “$250 million mistake” — people arrested for minor crimes are quickly released instead of being held in rural counties miles away. That allows them to hop on the local bus system — free since the pandemic — and head back to the same location, Young said. “We typically have the same group of offenders every week that are recognizable by face and by name, just loitering and hanging out,” he said. “A small percentage of people are ruining it for the rest of the community that deserves to go to their grocery store and their library.”

It also may simply be that there are too many grocery stores for that area:

Data bears out both points. A USDA analysis showed the area around the store is low income but not low access. And a Washington Post analysis of the adjacent Zip codes show the area has steadily lost population since 2020. The council member who represents the area, Melissa Patterson Hazley, estimates there are more than 200 vacant lots in her district.

... the neighborhood has other options because of a nearby Aldi store and the independent Happy Foods Center.

But there's also more to the story - and a bit of misrepresentation but not outright lie slipped in by the WP reporter. Sun Fresh market isn't government run and never was. Sun Fresh market was actually a successful independent grocery store for over 25 years. The city does own the strip mall itself, and it seems that the store moved to this location in 2018, probably after getting some generous incentives from the city. After the Lipari guy called it quits, this nonprofit got their hands on the store (probably in a move set up by the city itself). But the city doesn't actually run the store.

Community Builders of Kansas City, the nonprofit that leases the site from the city.

So there are a lot of threads going on with this article, but my take on this is that the store was probably doing okay before 2020, but then Fentanyl Floyd's crime wave absolutely decimated the area. Seeing the situation, the store owner bailed out, but the city, not wanting to see their strip mall project go bust, gave a nonprofit millions in cash to keep the store afloat. On the other hand, it seems that the other stores in the strip mall are doing ok according to google maps, so it could just be that the nonprofit currently running the store is wildly incompetent.

Overall I think there's not enough here to get a good read on what might happen with Zohran, but my bias is still that government incompetence has no bounds. Aldi is less than 1 mile away and they are doing ok according to google. And even though the city isn't running the store directly they are throwing millions into it without figuring out how to get out of the hole.

I mean, as I said

Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.

I can nearly promise you, with that much state money being dumped into the project and with that little food on shelves, there is a "community organizer" driving around in a brand new BMW involved somewhere.

I see he's banned now lol. But now that I'm here, I'm curious to know if your perspective is the prevailing opinion here.

WhiningCoil is flirting with a permanent ban himself, actually.

"Deport them all" is certainly an opinion some people have here, but as loudly as it is sometimes expressed I would not bet that it is prevailing. It's not uncommon for people to make the libertarian argument for open borders, for example--Bryan Caplan has some cachet in the rationalsphere.

I think your circumstances are not unusual. But there is a potential rejoinder you might want to consider--

My eldest is going to enter the same public high school I went to. The children of the first generation immigrants I went to school with now have their own families and, like me, have stayed in the same county to raise their children. They're indistinguishable from my family in the ways that matter to me.

That's great--my classical liberal heart is warmed--but it would be interesting to know for certain whether you are indistinguishable from their family in the ways that matter to them. If one demographic says "we love everyone, we help everyone equally, this is how we all work together to make the world a better place," but the other demographic responds "thanks for the help, we're going to take everything that is given to us to help our ingroup and, if possible, to become the dominant power, at which point we will then suppress our outgroup." The quote from Frank Herbert's Dune books is--

When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.

I am not saying this is how your neighbors think! I hope it is not how they think. But that is the angle and the concern that tends to arise when people make arguments like the one you have made here.

That's a nice quote, but how are my freedoms being suppressed? I think I would have noticed by now.

Oh, depending on your age, there's a very good chance you're not missing out on any freedoms at all. At worst, maybe you've been passed over for university admissions or a job or a promotion as a result of affirmative action or something--and given the abundance of all those things in America, even then you may not have so much as noticed.

Your comment alludes to the process of integration and I think that historically there is much to be said for it. European immigrants faced much the same concern as that directed toward South and Central American, African, Middle Eastern, and Indian immigrants today, but a couple generations later they seem to have integrated entirely. It might be observed that the integration of descendants of African slavery has gone a bit less smoothly, but of course we didn't really start trying to integrate them throughout the nation until about 75 years ago.

Nevertheless, there is in certain corners a tendency of some political groups to assert "whiteness" as a kind of original sin. Job postings listing essentially every demographic except straight white Christian men as "preferred candidates" come up a lot in Canada and even sometimes in the United States. More importantly, just the fact of identifying as "Republican" or "conservative" is enough to get you dog piled and even banned from certain online communities. If you in fact found this space via Twitter, you might not be familiar with some of the more "canonical" writings that created this space, but I heartily recommend them:

I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup

Neutral Versus Conservative: The Eternal Struggle

None of this is to suggest that I really disagree with you. I have high hopes for the long term, and I stubbornly refuse to believe that liberalism is dead (or if it is, that we should stop trying to resurrect it). But that means I strongly oppose identitarianism both from the Right ("alt-right") and from the Left ("Woke"). Identitarianism is illiberal and works against your own expressed preferences for integration by instead demanding ideological conformity. The worry toward which I am pointing is that identitarianism appears to be on the rise since ~2014, first on the Left and then on the Right. Many people only get alarmed about the identitarianism happening in their outgroup (since the other kind is a personal benefit). But I think also sometimes people don't realize that just because you don't think someone is in your outgroup, doesn't mean they actually consider you part of their ingroup.

What are some of these freedoms that an older person might be missing out on?

Sorry, I was thinking in the other direction--I think young people are the ones who may have better reason to feel this is all constraining their liberty. The 1990s seem to have been "peak America" in several ways--probably the best "Free Speech" era, certainly an economic dream time, cost disease in education had begun but was years from spiraling out of control, etc.

We do have much better video games now, though.

I feel like jokes about political correctness are somewhat peak 1990s... but I'm happy to cede something along the lines of "If we only knew...".

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