I’ve been mugged a few times, and it’s no fun. You get publicly humiliated, you lose a bunch of your stuff, and unless your assailant has an eye patch or a hilarious lisp, it’s not like you even get a good story out of it. Back when I was younger—when I was unable to defend myself and when my neighborhood was a hell of a lot more dangerous—I would have killed to have some kind of technological resource that would provide local crime rates and inform me of the statistically safest route home. If it showed that most of the threat came from young black males, I could have lived with that; the vast majority of knife crime and robberies in my vicinity was being carried out by them, so it would have only been telling me what I and everyone else already knew.

I have the feeling that Sam Biddle of Valley Wag—a Gawker Media blog—has never been mugged; either that, or it’s happened so often that he’s learned to enjoy it. I definitely get a masochistic vibe from the guy, and while there’s nothing wrong with masochism as a sexual practice, it takes on a decidedly ugly quality when exhibited outside of the bedroom. For one thing, he opens his post about Sketchfactor—a new app that allows users to track their risk of being mugged or assaulted in various neighborhoods, and therefore to preserve their own safety—with the line, “Is there any way to keep white people from using computers, before this whole planet is ruined?” seemingly unaware of his own status as a white guy writing for Gawker’s tech site.

This nugget alone seems like evidence of some serious cognitive dissonance at play, but he goes on to call the app “racist,” to deride “young white people” for fearing the statistically real threat of violent crime from minority perpetrators, and refers to the app’s developers as “grinning caucasians [sic]” as though he were some beautiful, ebony-skinned, warrior-painted African tribesman.

He’s not, by the way. This is what he looks like. Just look at this dour little gnome. Even Leonardo Da Vinci would have had trouble rendering an expression that ambiguously smug. This guy looks like he eats being mugged for breakfast. He actually suggests that the only reason anyone might feel unsafe in certain neighbourhoods is because they “watched all five seasons of The Wire,” which is ironic considering how that show was lauded by the left as being brutally honest and unflinchingly accurate; you know, despite the fact that poor black neighbourhoods are only dangerous in conservatives’ minds? I really don’t get why he has a problem with people trying to protect themselves…oh wait, yeah I do. It’s his job.

This is the same response that the Ghetto Tracker app—which effectively followed an identical premise to Sketchfactor—received when it premiered. Liberalism is based on wishful thinking, and the problem with wishful thinking is that it can get you killed. Just ask a Jehovah’s Witness in desperate need of a blood transfusion if you don’t believe me. I’m fine with leftists pissing and moaning about intersectionality and privilege and rape culture and patriarchy and prejudiced norm theory and all their other hysterical ideas, but it’s when they want to impose their ideas upon my reality, upon my personal safety, that I feel the need to say, “Thanks, but fuck you.” I’d rather be seen as a live racist than a dead progressive. Can you imagine how stupid these people must feel when reality comes crashing through their delusions and reminds them of how things really are?

It’s like they’re trying to grovel their way out of being white. Really sad.

I invite Sam Biddle, and anyone who thinks like him, to travel the streets of Southside Chicago or the South Bronx for that matter wearing and carrying whatever they usually would in their own, gentrified neighborhoods, and to see if it’s all just a bunch of white fright or not. Better yet, they should move their elderly parents into those parts of town since the rent is cheaper and there’s nothing to actually fear beyond one’s own prejudice. Just don’t do any research on crime stats before you go, as they just might burst your bubble.