Professor Sarah Chinn (who looks exactly as much like a coal miner as you would expect a professor whose work “explores questions of race, sexuality, and gender in U.S. literature and culture, particularly in the 19th century” to look) Is not too happy about a new application offered by Microsoft. The app, to quote the über-leftist Nazi Party Radio NPR “is meant to help pedestrians avoid unsafe neighborhoods, bad weather and difficult terrain by taking information from maps, weather reports, crime statistics and demographics.”
Describing the application as “appalling” and being a humanities professor, Chinn had nothing intelligent to say about this application. In fact, she should be embarrassed to have said the following thing:
“Of course, an application like this defines crime pretty narrowly, since all crimes happen in all kinds of neighborhoods. I can’t imagine that there aren’t perpetrators of domestic violence, petty and insignificant drug possession, fraud, theft, and rape in every area.”
GPS for today comments:
What seems so interesting about these comments is that they don’t seem to take into account Microsoft having employees who employ common sense. Why would anyone with even a small amount of sense think that incidents of insider trading ought to be included right along with rapes and muggings when determining a safe or unsafe walking route?
I would be absolutely shocked with surprise if Chinn is not an ardent and passionate supporter of gun control. Decent citizens, in Chinn’s ideal world probably would be reduced to going through city neighborhoods unprotected neither by knowledge nor by firepower.
Radio Derb has further commentary on other ridiculous aspects of Chinn’s comments linked here.
Painful as it may be to think about, there are unsafe neighborhoods in American cities. People are best advised to avoid them. Those who refuse that advice are indeed taking their lives in their own hands. The risks of entering such neighborhoods may not be huge, but neither is the benefit. Having defended criminals in law courts for eight years, I can tell you that some of the denizens of such neighborhoods are not joking around. Having sat alone in jailhouse interview rooms with them, I clearly got the picture that I would not want to encounter such individuals in their natural habitat. One public defender in my town got mugged by his own client on the way out of the courthouse after he won his client’s trial. Such people tend to be low income. Such people tend to live in certain predictable areas of town, areas that outsiders may not be familiar with. This does not mean that everybody in such neighborhoods in evil, criminal, or even that they have bad breath. It means that crime statistics point to the existence of a certain number of people like that in that area. It only takes one such person to ruin your whole afternoon.
All of the above is obvious.
Being a good person, according to the Politically Correct, means the willingness to sacrifice one’s wealth, one’s health or even one’s life rather than acknowledge uncomfortable truths no matter how obvious.
