Originally posted at The Clash Daily
Nothing is more exhilarating, at least for me, than when liberals are victimized by their own foolhardiness. That’s what happened when a news crew from local station WUSA9 went to Petworth in Northwest Washington DC to do a story on a new app that warns people in the nation’s capital of “sketchy” neighborhoods.
The app is called SketchFactor. The idea behind SketchFactor is “to pinpoint the relative sketchiness of an area via first-hand reports from … users and publicly available data.” In other words, the application cautions people to steer clear of less-than-safe neighborhoods based on reports and data citing muggings, harassment, and racial profiling.
The app even advises users as to how poorly, or well-lit, an area might be.
Predictably, the application’s co-founder and CEO, Allison McQuire, and her partner, Daniel Herrington, are now the subjects of harsh criticism because in liberal circles, just like suggesting that a black kid robbing a convenience store is in fact robbing a convenience store, even suggesting that a “sketchy” neighborhood is “sketchy” is considered racist.
In the app’s defense, the founders are marketing SketchFactor as a “community tool.”
New York City-based blog Gawker doesn’t agree. In an article entitled Smiling Young White People Make an App for Avoiding Black Neighborhoods written by tech watchdog Sam Biddle, posted on Gawker-affiliated website ValleyWag and filed under racism, sarcastically had this to say about the new app:
“SketchFactor [is] a racist app made for avoiding ‘sketchy’ neighborhoods, which is the term young white people use to describe places where they don’t feel safe because they watched all five seasons of The Wire.”
The “city-centric” news blog Gothamist agrees, saying, “Might the residents of a so-called ‘sketchy’ neighborhood find this useful new technology offensive? Sure! Are the crowdsourced interpretations of ‘sketchy’ going to get racist as f**k? Yes, with haste.”
Amid the racist clamor, the story has taken an interestingly ironic turn.
Washington, DC’s WUSA9 News crew, headed up by reporter Mola Lenghi, decided to venture into one of those “sketchy areas” (wink, wink) to conduct interviews with some of those “sketchy” people that the “smiling young white people” who invented SketchFactor deem “sketchy.”
After choosing a neighborhood that the application identified as “sketchy,” the crew parked the van on the street. God knows why, but they then locked the vehicle. When the threesome returned with the goods to take down the bigoted SketchFactor, they found that lock on the van had been jimmied from the door and all of the crew’s personal belongings and expensive gear was gone.
Photojournalist James Hash lost 15 years’ worth of camera and electronic equipment and Lenghi lost his backpack full of electronics and a laptop. Intern Taylor Bisciotti lost her purse and her iPhone with the cracked face, which thankfully was equipped with the non-racist app, “Find my iPhone.”
After filing a police report about their “sketchy” experience in ‘perfectly-safe Petworth’, the trio tracked the cracked iPhone to a dumpster in another “sketchy” neighborhood where, according to Mola, “stolen goods are dumped.”
Clearly, the news crew’s intent was to prove that “sketchy” neighborhoods are safe and secure, because after being robbed of “many, many, many thousands of dollars worth of stuff,” Mola Lenghi still was tentative about calling the area where he was robbed “sketchy.”
The moral of the story is this: Liberals don’t get it until they become the victims of the weird fantasy world in which they live and relentlessly insist on imposing on everyone else.
What happened to Mola, James, and Taylor is just a taste of the harsh wakeup call liberals are going to get when they realize that they are not exempt from the ugliness that really does exist in this world. Liberals may not believe it, but terrorists are just as willing to lop off the head of a clueless peacenik extending an olive branch as they are the head of an Iraqi Christian clutching a cross.
In due time, the naive among us will find themselves packed into hot, dirty clinics along with people coughing and spewing Third-World diseases into the air, as well as sitting beside the ones who tried in vain to warn idealistic Obamacare supporters about the dangers of government involvement in healthcare.
As for the open-borders advocates, maybe when their own children are infected by a deadly contagion like Ebola or someone they love is murdered, raped, or run over by a criminal illegal immigrant, those on the left will come to understand the error of their ways.
When ISIS, who may have already infiltrated the homeland, descends on an elementary school in an un-sketchy neighborhood, maybe then left-wing ideologues will finally comprehend the magnitude of the deception.
As for the pro-choice crowd, only when the day comes – and it is coming – when government, after determining that inconvenience and dependency translate into useless and disposable, justifies exercising the right to choose on those outside of the womb will they realize the gravity of the pro-choice delusion they’ve embraced.
On that day, liberals will be about as shocked as the news crew robbed in an unsafe neighborhood while trying desperately to portray truth-tellers as racists by portraying a “sketchy” neighborhood as not sketchy.
As for the reporters who got a shock while out trying to prove a fantasy, their night ended with rummaging around with the rats and raccoons in a dumpster searching for most of their belongings, which were never found. But with any luck, what the news crew hoping to expose a racist app did find in that dumpster was some common sense and a dose of reality.
H/T Donald Joy
