Ok, actually they did do quite a few things wrong – e.g., most things under Maoism – but they did absolutely nothing wrong specifically 30 years ago.
It’s an artificial outrage drummed up as part of America’s Sinophobia campaign.
There was no such big outrage or sanctions when South Korea killed thousands of protesters in the 1980s, whereas only a few hundreds died in Tiananmen. Nobody in China cares about Tiananmen apart from a small crowd of ageing pro-Western dissidents. So it is obviously played up for ideological reasons – for the cause of Taiwanese svidomism, for Japan to minimize its own crimes against China (as if killing 30 million in a war of aggression is comparable to killing 300 in putting down sedition), and to aid America’s attempts to isolate and contain China now that it is becoming a discernible threat to its global hegemony.
Please do clarify.
The only significant killings took place during the Kwangju Uprising, which was an actual armed revolt, and even then only sensational foreign reporters and communists claimed 2,o00 died, whereas the number of civilian dead claimed by the group representing the families of the dead is under 250.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwangju_Uprising#Casualties
Furthermore, there was significant international and American condemnation, and officials including former presidents were convicted (though later pardoned):
I can’t believe it’s 30 years already.
Obviously for the CCP, as the governing structure, they made the right decision and the outcry is often composed of false and hypocritical outcry but I am not particularly sympathetic.
As long as the Communists implicitly act as if the suppression of the opposition at Tiannanmen was a shameful and sordid event, why should they be surprised when their enemies garner moral energy and seek to take advantage of this fact?
How about using non-lethal methods against those Anti Black men / Asian women dating protests?
I only came across the thousands figure. Thank you for the correction!
https://www.iiss.org/-/media/files/shangri-la-dialogue/2019/speeches/plenary-4-qa.ashx
Chincom leadership endured because they were not tricked by the West, unlike many of their students and the Soviet leadership.
https://forums.spacebattles.com/posts/40443197/
Yes, they were obviously justified. I’d say it’s not only hindsight, but hindsight helps a great deal. China became a middle income country, the second biggest (by some measures the biggest) economy in the world, and it’s pretty unlikely it could’ve been much faster than that. So it’s quite unlikely that it could’ve been better. Russian experience also shows that it’s pretty difficult to introduce a Western democratic system in a formerly communist greater power. The third world nature of late 1980s China means that it was, if anything, still much more difficult there. Meanwhile, oppression was moderate anyway (though recently it’s increasing).
So the likely result would’ve been a slower (possibly much slower) rate of economic growth (including a lower rate of increase in life expectancy, so probably millions would’ve died earlier due to this), and not much of a democracy longer term anyway. It’s even possible China would right now be turning authoritarian again.
So I can’t really see why we need to protest this 30-year-old crackdown.
disagree – i think a decent country should have riot cops who can deal with that kind of thing with only accidental fatalities and not having that implies a sociopathic attitude among the rulers.
on the other hand no point making a big thing about it now as the people who would agree with my point are largely responsible for the world slowly slipping back into a dark age where things like that become the norm again everywhere.
Or not much money. China was dirt poor back then.
Here the liberators in action in their own country: 1967: Newark – 26 dead. Detroit – 43 dead. 1968: Washington – 12 dead. Chicago – 11 dead. All these cities, taken together, are smaller than Beijing. If liberators had to pacify (or liberate?) Beijing, they would have killed 300 too.
My favorite 1960s riot would be the Baltimore riot of April 1968.
In that case, a crowd of mechanics and working class Joe’s from a white east side neighborhood had to be stopped by the National Guard from marching into the black neighborhood and restoring order by any means, mostly by wielding wrenches and the like.
Oh, for such fun times now.
300 is really a drop in the ocean. 3000 or 30000 would also not be too much. Of course, that doesn’t mean escalation is always the best option to pacify opposition or, in a losing situation, carry on a transition of power with less punishment of the previous rulers. But I think it would be inefficient for the rulers of the country to behave in a moralistic manner.
I take a utilitarian position on this, if sociopathy helps perpetuate their existence, then I see it as better than idealism, noting the divergent fates of the CCP and the CPSU.
If this were true, why do they still try to sweep this act of oppression under the rug? Why not come out and boldly profess that it was Okay, like Karlin does? The official Chicom line is that it never happened. 🙁
It’s not even sociopathy, it’s probably politically more expedient to do this without casualties.
It’s simply a question of China not having enough riot police back then (maybe not even now) for such a large-scale protest. They had to use what they had, which was the army.
Justified like the police actions in Budapest in 1956? Like the soviets that eventually sent tanks into Hungary to quell the protests? 🙁
I think the Iranian Shahists faced the same problem of not having enough non-lethal equipment, although for them it didn’t end quite as successfully.
I think the question is “what is the correct thing to do now?”
Is apology for potential excesses a way to regain moral high ground, or an opening to weakness for attack?
If they were large enough, the CCP definitely would. It is a mistake to believe that the government of China exists for the benefit of the Chinese; it exists for the benefit of the Party, the Chinese are just along for the ride. Therefore any rival power structures are struck down, the same reason why oligarchs aren’t really a thing in China.
The equation is quite different in that case.
1) Hungarian economic growth post-1956 was anemic. It’s very likely that had Imre Nagy’s government continue and hold free elections (and the country becoming either something like Finland, or something like Austria) would have been better economically. So there’s nothing on the other side of equation. Or rather, it’s already negative.
2) The number of casualties was way higher (roughly 3,000 civilians and rebels killed, including the several hundreds executed in the aftermath), and for a much smaller population (10,000,000 in Hungary v 1,000,000,000+ in China), so that side of the equation was way worse.
3) From a Soviet point of view, it might’ve been justified.
It was normal and correct to support the protesters when the protests occurred. At that time, Chinese communists had the legacy of Mao, and we did yet have the example of Russia’s disastrous 1990s.
But in retrospect, we know China turned out very good for the Chinese people. Maybe if the protesters had won, China would have followed the path of Russia in the 1990s and become an impoverished, disastrous mafia state of 1 billion people desperate to leave and no functional government preventing them from doing so.
We also know China obviously reformed and the Communists in charge of it don’t rule a North Korea-style dystopia.
To be sure, Communism is distasteful and ugly in principle, but is is highly likely that the way China has turned out has been the best possible way forward for China’s people. And for Western business leaders and consumers (though not workers).
The future is not certain, but I don’t think revisionist powers will ever be able to play the Empire’s rules as good as the Empire itself.
Rather the normative international norms need to be decontructed and a sense of nihilism and disbelief in universal values induced in the international sphere, although this is of course easier said than done.
You see AP, I don’t buy the proposition that ‘the ends justifies the means’ as you and others here seem to do. My Christian values encompass the precept that ‘man does not live by bread alone’. In China’s case, even today with all of its wealth things are terribly wrong. If it were a freer society, people would be allowed to protest the desecration of their air and water quality, but as it stands, this is not allowed.
And it’s still the tiny clique that narrows as you reach the top of the pyramid that disproportionately benefits economically from the system. Freedom to congregate and protest things that are wrong are a telltale sign of the vibrancy of any form of government. Sooner or later Ukraine will get things right too (If Yanukovych’s crackdown in 2014 had worked, where would we be today?).
China’s people were mostly poor in 1989 as were Hungary’s in 1956. Hungary is doing much better today, than it was then. Who’s crystal ball is so accurate to predict that if things had loosened up a bit in China in 1989, its economy would have suffered?
100s, not 1000s, were killed in Gwanju massacre. Also, it was an armed uprising unlike peaceful Tiananmen Square protests.
Also, Japanese aggression in China more likely killed 5 to 10 million, mostly indirectly. Not 30 million.
The real difference is China is independent whereas Korea, being small and weak, always leans on a big brother type for protection. Historically, it was China. In the first half of 20th century, it was Japan(under compulsion). In the second half of 20th century, it was US for south, USSR-China for north. After the cold war, North is independent but run by tyrants. South is prosperous but decadent and controlled by globo-homo Zionists. New globalism in SK, Japan, and Taiwan is leading to wholesale replacement of people by low birthrates, spread of homo celebration, and mass immigration(and promotion of race mixing). Kwanju Massacre killed a few 100s. Globalism is wiping out entire nations. Look at Ireland. It is soft genocide engineered by Jewish Power that, in contrast, supports nationalism and natalism for Israel.
As for dead Koreans, the main killers in the past century have been US bombers that committed mass genocide from the air.
No, it is allowed. The problems of pollution is not a people vs government issue, but rather one of despoiling the commons to which the population participates in.
That’s untrue. China’s middle class is huge; the rising tide did indeed lift most boats and its particularly weird that you’re mentioning compared to Ukraine that since China’s gdp per capita is higher than Ukraine’s.
That’s very idealistic and innocent. In practice, it would lead to massive corruption as the mobs would be monopolized by oligarch or foreign powers as political pressure. Large risings take logistics, and such logistics ultimately have to come from a centralized authority.
I’m no fan of the CCP – I’ve often called them cancerous, but it still seems to be the best of all practical options. Cancer with purpose.
“Means” was perhaps better than the alternative. There might have been a lot of unnecessary violent deaths from crime or from civil war had China become chaotic.
Christianity is rapidly expanding in China and China is on track to become the world’s largest Christian nation.
Conversely, had China remained solidly in the third world its air would have been cleaner. They are finally cleaning it up now.
From the perspective of clean air, this is sadly not the case. China has a huge newly emergent middle class that is buying stuff like cars and home air conditioners.
A stagnant Donbas-focused Sovokstan tied closely to Russia.
They did “loosen” up. The protestors pushed too far.
No one has a crystal ball, but its likely that instability in the government would have led to at least to soft collapse with terrible results. This is especially because the West was triumphantly herading the end of all organized resistance to it, as well.
Typical J Curve effect.
Environment (inequality, etc.) typically gets worse when countries industrialize, but then starts to get better. China has been going back up since about 2010.
The Chinese Gini index is around the world average (Europe is highly atypical). It will also probably get better as the provinces catch up with the coastal areas. That is, indeed, already happening (e.g. Chongqing).
I double checked, and you’re right and my perceptions were off. 75% of Chinese are considered middle class as opposed to 52% American. One might quibble about what it means to be middle class in each society, but these figures are quite telling, no matter.
But the fact remains, that if there weren’t huge improprieties in the way the Tienanmen square massacres were handled, there wouldn’t be any attempts at a cover up by the Chinese government today.
Nothing is “swept under the carpet”. Similar to the absence of memorials for the protesters killed by the US Army during race riots, the Chinese press has decided there is no point in praising what they think of as violent thugs. DC newspapers don’t remind everyone, every year, about the dead of Washington riots. Why would Beijing newspapers do otherwise?
Your country does not have a monopoly on memoryholing.
In Romania, what you call “antisemitic pogroms” was a series of peasants riots, based exclusively on economic problems. However, they led to the lynching of quasifeudal domain administrators (almost all Jews), and which the government stopped with howitzers. In the eighties, I was told it was a proto-Marxist revolt. Now, the monuments were removed, and I’m told by historians imported from America that it was an anti-minority retrograde something. Memoryholing in action.
Students and streetwalkers ‘violent thugs’. Give me a break – we’ve heard that one before!
We’re those that disposed of Ceausescu also ‘violent thugs’?
This extract shows that revolutionaries such as Lenin,Mao… are pretty much misanthropic nihilists who harp on a cause to satisfy their lust for destruction.
The true builders, such as Deng (or even people like Putin or Andropov) are almost universally the fundamentally pragmatic ones.
If I remember right, about 250-300 rioters and 180 Chinese soldiers died fighting outside the Tiananman square. Massacre ?
I notice that besides CNN & other US media, up to this minute, none of those ageing ‘June 4th’ honchos who seeked refuge in US said anything in public on this 30th anniv. occasion because they know anything they could say against the Beijing govt will backfire on them badly in this atmosphere of US-china economical warfare.
I checked that even ‘progressive, liberal..’ sites like truthdig, realnews don’t give a shit on this anniv. I guess they know what happened on that date.
…
BTW, I heard that though those ‘june 4th’ elements residing in US are sworn enemy of the Beijing govt, the latter actually allows them to visit their relatives in china, as long as they don’t try to stage demonstration or say anything provocative in public.
I don’t think you’re using this correctly. It usually means “a bloodbath justified by a mirage.” It does not apply when you have evidences and you go back to reconsider your presumptions. It is more like what scientists and engineers do everyday.
Now look at Russia in the 1990s and Iraq in recent years, I would say, that, is “a promised end of democracy justifing suffering and death.” But of course you won’t condemn that because you’re a Christian?
Fwiw I do not like the Party just as I think Sadam deserves to be killed, but what about all that many Iraqis? Are they invisible to you? When you came in, remove the army, remove the police, unable to secure its borders, and civil war breaks out, it’s all dandy and fine because it’s not America’s responsibility, it’s just those damn folks killing each other, I guess?
Now I also want democracy and want to rid of the ridiculous Great Firewall, but how? Are you suggesting that by ruining Chinese economy or maybe even Operation Chinese Freedom? So far, US has firmly established a track record of bringing calamity to their targets. And that, with the insufferable moral preening!
They used to do that in Baltimore, decades before, like in the 1800s. I think I recall HL Mencken mentioning that his father had to hit a violent black with a wrench or something like that.
Of course, now, with the demographic changes, it would be suicide – you would probably need to bring in machine guns and artillery.
I think the Doom is descending on Baltimore. It might be the next Detroit.
Were they right to get rid of Zhao Ziyang?
This is because there is censorship, so ordinary Chinese people do not know about this incident.
If I have to choose between stability and censorship, there are historical epochs and situations where I could understand benefits of censorship. Political stability can be a higher virtue than “free speech”.
However, in your view – your main argument against countries like the UK, is that they have too much censorship and negative treatment of dissidents. So at least from consistency, you must be against censorship and negative treatment of dissidents in China, which will be a lot higher in China than in UK?
I guess it is people who have property in Western countries, where they access the internet and libraries, or at least, people who use VPNs in China?
As a boy must grow to become a man, a country has to develop and it takes time and sometimes goes in tragic directions. People like you seem to think that everything must be stopped and wait for politics to be solved first. Only after politics can you working on everything else. All those evidences be damned. A boy must be moral before he can be allowed to grow up. Why does God allowed Augustine of Hippo to grow up?
For now, inequality of income is rising in China (rate of increase is the highest in the world at the moment https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-09-23/china-s-racing-to-the-top-in-income-inequality )
However, of course, this is a result of the high rate of economic growth in China, and it’s a relative (not absolute) formulation.
The important thing (from compassionate perspective), is not the relative equality, but the absolute poverty rate.
Absolute poverty in China, is decreasing very fast compared to the 1980s. So their economic growth, is overall a success story even from this compassionate perspective.
–
As for wealth inequality generated from the economy, which is often impossible to register – I wonder if this can compare with Russia, Brazil? Also, Chinese, are recently starting to behave similar…
One of the major differences is that speech suppression in China is done for the Party’s benefit, so more or less there’s a single source and canon of what is acceptable(or not). The SJW mob, on the other hand, operates as an all-consuming machine with no brakes and necessarily must perpetuate itself through ever more intense virtue signaling. In that sense, it resembles the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and its attendant destruction.
Another point is that the pieties demanded by the Party tend to be less offensive to our sense of normalcy; they are authoritarian but sensible(government wants power). They do not demand that you accept same-sex marriages, praise immigration, or even accept climate change.
By design, the Chinese system makes wealth insecure for the wealthiest lest they form a rival to power(or forces them to buy into the system). It has its upsides and downsides, but definitely contributes to the exodus.
I once found a measure of PM 10 showing Los Angeles a few decades ago was actually worse than Beijing at its worst. Californians are big on environmentalism nowadays but did monstrous pollution ever register as a talking point against the US or its political system?
Also London a hundred years ago, used to have horrible measures, worse than Delhi which has some of the worst air in the world. And annualized it measured worse than Beijing up until the 70’s. Which means the older cohorts lived through these levels just like residents of Los Angeles. I’m sure this had health effects on them but was it as catastrophic as people generally assume when thinking about the air of Chinese cities?
Contamination is a problem all around the world.
https://qz.com/1630348/dupont-and-3m-face-a-growing-list-of-water-contamination-lawsuits/
The industrial revolution and its consequences have been a great experiment.
From an Irish Facebook group I follow:
https://i.imgur.com/4adxqE6.png
Would be interested to hear more anecdotes from people with first-hand knowledge.
The Chinese communists got one thing right: they realized very early on that Milton Friedman and Julian Simon were lying whores, and that Ma Yinchu and Alexander Hamilton were the ones to listen to.
The implication here is that a few hundred protesters should be able to take over a state with hundreds of millions or even billions of people just by congregating in the capital and being stubborn and resisting arrest.
The equivalent in the US would be like a few dozen Black Lives Matter protestors being allowed to take over the federal government and control a country of over 300 million people.
https://i.imgur.com/xzCEUiD.png
all the effects of industrialism should be investigated when people notice modern life comes with problems like increased autism, homosexuality (is it real or a great deal dependent on changing diagnosis and definitions?) or more objective measurements like low sperm counts.
As an aside dramatic decreases in infant mortality aren’t discussed much, I feel, do we have an idea how different a generation would be if this great reaper was still in effect? I bet it wasn’t entirely random and survivors tended to have better constitutions and immune systems.
For ethnic Chinese, there’s even a nice congruence of interests, since both want China to be stronger, more affluent, developed, healthier, with stronger military, independent of foreign influence, etc. It’s pretty easy to identify with a government which is not actively working on destroying its own people.
Whoooa…where did I ever condone US foreign policy in Iraq? Let’s stick to China and Tienanmen Square. Killing a few hundred (thousand?) mostly young protesters didn’t guarantee that China’s great economic future was assured? I’m glad that it worked out well for China, but I’m sure there were many other factors that worked well for China to inspire this economic miracle. Were the principles that these protesters stood for and died for right or wrong?
Things can still go wrong terribly. Think about Chernobyl the recent TV show reminds. The engineers and most of (?) the officials were not actively working on destroying their own people.
Recently for a small example, the English and Japanese Wikipedia got banned again. My recent uses of Wikipedia is to read about bio of not so famous people. Now it’s totally gone. What good does it do to uphold the CCP? I have no idea.
One of the bad things is that it basically killed off a potentially easy path for political reform. And the econ reform almost stopped too. And now it seems to serve as an excuse for Amer Hawks to want to ruin the Chinese economy.
I think majority of Chinese sympathise with the students. Even today. But there is no survey to be cited. The question is as always: pragmatically what can be done?
Twenty years ago, the answer seems to be, at least to people like me: just trust the Amer leadership. Now that is gone.
The Creator lets all humasn act as they desire (freewill). There is nothing to suggest that Augustine’s moral infractions in his youth were either condoned before or after his conversion. With a contrite heart, I’m sure that the Lord forgave him.
Yes, the incompetence, corruption, or petty oppression of the government is annoying and can occasionally lead to tragedies like Chernobyl or the Ufa rail disaster, but it’s on a whole different scale than an actively hostile government.
Tiananmen Square was also an actual armed revolt. Read the real history, not American media spin bullshit.
i think it just made for a good photo and that’s it.
a lot of this stuff works on encapsulating an idea in a single photo. like showing dead kids washing up on the shore, so open your borders, bigot.
it’s a lot harder to summarize ‘killing thousands of protesters” in a single photograph.
It was an analogy. If God let Augustine grow up despite his moral imperfections, then certainly we can let China grow economically despite its leadership not being a democracy.
Why were the 1990s so disastrous in Russia, Ukraine, et cetera in comparison to countries such as Poland?
With Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 speaking tour convincing Jiang Zemin to continue the economic reforms?
Mongolia didn’t go to Hell when it transitioned from Communism to a capitalist democracy, though. Indeed, what allowed Mongolia to escape Russia’s, Ukraine’s, et cetera fate in the 1990s?
For that matter, East Asians generally appear to do a decent job with democracy. Mongolia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, perhaps Hong Kong (before the Chinese crackdown), maybe Singapore (it’s authoritarian-lite but their elections are free and fair, no?), et cetera.
Why have countries such as Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, and Mongolia fared better after the collapse of Communism, though?
I certainly don’t endorse the idea of US military action to engage in regime change in China. After all, China has nukes and thus it certainly isn’t worth it. (Plus, it could perhaps benefit us to receive smart, innovative, and free-thinking Chinese immigrants.)
As for this part, though:
Had it not been for the US military intervention in Iraq, it’s possible that Iraq would have turned into an even larger bloodbath during the Arab Spring. Indeed, we could have seen another Syria in Iraq in this scenario–which might have been even worse than what Iraq endured in real life.
The best move for the US IMHO would have been to overthrow Saddam back in 1991. That would have probably been the least bloody option for Iraq–at the very least because the mass deaths that occurred as a result of Saddam crushing the Iraqi Shiite rebellion in 1991 would not have occurred.
Ironically, had Ukraine’s integration with Russia in this scenario become very deep, Putin might have forced Yanukovych to clean house in Ukraine. After all, Russia is probably going to want to make its imperial brand attractive–and what better way to do that than by improving the lives of Ukrainians through good micromanagement?
I did not say the Chinese protesters were violent thugs. I said the consensus, among people who run Chinese media today, is that they were violent thugs. What I think of them is irrelevant.
It’s identical to what Americans, from Trump to Booker, think of rioters of Newark ’67. Yes, I don’t recall Booker helping the surviving families, or at least holding a vigil on the anniversary date. You may whine about Kamala as much as you want, but she didn’t say anything good about them either. Americans, in particular in the upper layers that guide the country, decided that rioters of ’67 and ’68 were violent thugs. What I think of them is irrelevant. The fact is US Army killed them, and the society damned them.
From the Whiskey Rebellion (1791) to the glorious liberation of New Orleans (2005), US Army killed civilians because why not. So how do you think that something perfectly acceptable in US should be forbidden in China or Romania? Aren’t the Americans the fucking shining light on a hill?
Weren’t the riots in 1967-1968 largely race riots (with the exception of the riots near the DNC in 1968, of course)?
I think the historical consensus is that it’s not Jiang that Deng had to convince. It’s the other Party seniors like Chen Yun 陈云 etc. Probably more than half of the Party back then wanted a competent socialism economy that Mao totally failed at. Esp after the turmoil of 1989 it looked like, to them, the market oriented reform was bad. Those people fought for communism all those years ago. They were true believers. Deng, strangely, was not a true believer.
Jiang back then was hesitant because he did not know Deng’s mind. When Deng cleared things up sufficiently forcefully, Jiang was only happy to go along.
In America, there is almost absolute free speech, and lack of censorship – as seen in this website (which would be blocked and owner imprisoned for inciting ethnic hatred in e.g. Russia). On the other hand, in America, there are absurd prosecutions of innocent people, extremely brutal police, and America has the highest imprisonment rates in the world.
Because America’s population is accustomed to this high free speech and lack of censorship, Americans are ultra-sensitive about the topic of censorship, complain on this website about comically small problems like Amazon not selling a book, or losing a Facebook account. At the same time, they are desensitized to their high imprisonment and almost do not complain about people being randomly murdered by police and gangsters.
Often you have to reverse what they say, to make balanced assessment of their situation – because what they say expresses more where they are sensitized and where they are desensitized, and what Americans are sensitized to is what they do not have in large quantities (e.g. things like censorship), and what Americans are desensitized to is what they do have in large quantities (shootings, police brutality, alienation, etc).
In the 18th century, philosophers like Montesquieu were amazed by cultural differences between countries, expressed in terms of clothing, daily customs, music, dances, etc.
Today everyone listens to the same music, same clothes, same dances. But cultural differences of perception, are enough for almost complete reversals in conversation.
With Karlin, though, who has experience living in the West, I don’t understand how he is angry about things like imprisonment of Assange, but not at the same time not angry about Chinese treatment of dissidents (Assange would surely be executed in China).
Personally, I’m not angry about either – if China wants to kill its dissidents, and America wants to imprison its ones; c’est la vie.
But some things which are accepted in Chinese culture like one-child policy, female infanticide, eating dogs, and blocking of internet, seem a lot more strange, than even more silly Western obsessions like climate change (which seems like a modernization of biblical prophecy), or that 1% of population who are gays are marrying each other (the gay topic I can’t understand either why people on this website are obsessed with it, or why the students in countries like England have created a new religion from it).
It is a mistake to believe that the government of China exists for the benefit of the Chinese
It is sad to say and I fight against saying it, but this is true for every country.
3) From a Soviet point of view, it might’ve been justified.
F*** the Soviet point of view.
From what I have heard, raids or piss tests take place outside of nightclubs and the like where drugs are often found. Particularly ones where expats congregate. Lots of idiot foreigners think they can get away with smoking marijuana in China. The Chinese should be praised for this particular repression. Or perhaps criticized for not doing it enough. Foreigners should be expected to be on good behavior when they are allowed into countries other than their own.
Nearly the only Americans who are upset about this are right-wing Americans. These people also support ultra-aggressive policing and mass incarceration…so long as it is primarily directed against blacks. Blacks in jail is, for them, a good thing. Now, with an increasing number of “woke” prosecutors putting prominent right-wing people and random whites in prison, these same right wingers are starting to criticize the criminal-justice system…but if it just went back to harassing blacks they would have no problem with it.
On the left the situation is reversed: they decry “mass incarceration,” celebrate the Central Park 5 and Michael Brown as heroic martyrs…but also say that Brett Kavanaugh is a rapist criminal and want Facebook and Twitter to ban “hate” accounts (e.g., anybody to the right of Bill Kristol). They have no deep principled commitment to “freedom” and “liberty” any more than the conservatives care about “law and order.” It’s just identity politics and tribalism, nothing more.
On the other hand, in America, there are absurd prosecutions of innocent people, extremely brutal police, and America has the highest imprisonment rates in the world
Ignorant dipwad.
Russia and Poland have very different economies.
In Russia, commodity prices are also relevant, and have contributed primarily to the strength of recession and poor financial situation of the 1990s (in the 1990s, oil falls to $12 a barrel, and most commodities related to sectors like mining have very low prices).
Warsaw Pact countries like Poland were historically living from Russian money, as partners of the USSR. But in the 1990s, they suddenly started to access EU markets, and by 1997 they already have EU accession talks.
That’s not to deny that they also take important economic reforms and were generally more well organized in transition than in Russia.
Is it typical, that Americans themselves do not know that they have highest imprisonment rate in the world.
https://i.imgur.com/rjxU5Q5.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/tVxTJ2y.png
Good. Western “expats” should be harassed to the point where they voluntarily deport themselves, other countries should adopt this approach as well.
There’s this Anglo youtuber in China, “serpentza”, I’ve seen a few videos where he is bitching how he doesn’t like the way China is changing, as if his faggy opinions matter.
You are pretty ignorant.
Poland had several key advantages:
http://www.unz.com/akarlin/polish-perspective-on-polish-reforms/
Although there was violence and resistance directed against armed troops, and more particularly against military vehicles, there were no gun battles between the civilians and the Chinese troops. The gun fire was all one way.
In contrast, during the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, protesters raided armories and police stations, took weapons, organized into student and worker militias, and initially drove the South Korean army units out of the city after several firefights, leaving the former in control of the city.
Then the army returned in force with special forces units, defeated the militias in a brief battle, and put down the revolt. Prior to the last battle, there were heated debates among the rebels about whether to continue armed resistance, and the “fight to the death” faction won the argument. Most of the civilian deaths occurred when the “headquarters” of the most diehard armed rebel faction was assaulted by the special forces and overrun with extreme prejudice.
Polish external debt (in hard currencies) was several times larger, but most of it was forgiven. They had defaulted on it earlier anyway.
The big advantages were:
You are welcome.
Soviet (really Russian) aid to Poland, was equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, and more or less reindustrializing their economy.
USSR could even finance construction of large city districts for them like Nowa Huta. True, it’s not exactly Poland’s favourite choice (they had to reject the Marshall Plan funding they were offered from America), and they also have some conditions, like to name parts of what is constructed after Lenin.
I’m not familiar with Poland, but in the case of Hungary or for example China, Soviet “aid” was always very expensive. I’d be extremely surprised if it turned out that Poland was a special case unlike the others.
Not really the same thing. People can and did complain about all of these things and there’s no real consequence for it. The government is certainly not going to punish you for virtue signaling about eating dogs, or not eating dogs for that matter. In fact, you can probably complain about the Great Firewall all you want and you’ll be ignored as much as you wish. The Party doesn’t enjoy being complained about, but mostly they don’t care enough to do anything about it.
In the US, you can and will have your life ruined for not enthusiastically advocating inanities – which is weird as heck, from a statist perspective. A hardcore religious conservative can be still very loyal to the state, but now he is to be punished for disagreeing with the acceptability of gayness(and close to having his life destroyed).
US political leaders in the late 60’s throughout the 70’s started to really attract the approbation of America’s white middle classes, especially its youth, that culminated with Nixon’s fall from grace. Protesting the government’s involvement in the Vietnam war was seen as a right of passage by many Americans. America could no longer countenance the Vietnam war, especially with so much dissent over it, and finally was forced to go back home with its tail between its legs:
https://youtu.be/MN_9VqfVQ9c
Mongolia wasn’t a continent-spanning rustbelt.
There actually is a rather large difference – Assange is not a US citizen, and never even set foot in the US so far as I’m aware.
His persecuton is America claiming that its judicial demesne encompasses the entire world.
Moreover, to back up this point, I even specifically stated that it was perfectly within its rights to prosecute Bradley Manning: https://www.unz.com/akarlin/i-dont-care-about-bradley-manning/
So your claims of hypocrisy fall hollow, I think.
Either way, money was from the USSR (mainly Russia). Perhaps, they also have some help between other Warsaw Pact countries or China.
Sure, disinterested charity would not be exactly a right description – e.g. Nowa Huta is exporting millions of tons of steel to the USSR.
I don’t want to give Americans excessive shit for mass incarceration because they truly do have many troublesome minorities who skew the figures, and it is genuinely nice to live without the fear of property being stolen as is the case in much of Europe (certainly the UK at any rate).
Edit.
Things I have had stolen in the US in a decade of living there in diverse and non-elite neighborhoods: Literally nothing. Ok, one time a homeless Negro snatched up my partly eaten burger (which the venue replaced for free). And a certain crazy homeless white person had a habit of going to the local bar and quaffing unattended beers while the patrons weren’t looking. That’s about it.
In the center of London in the UK: A cell phone during a total of about 3 months in London during the 2016-2019 period. The police couldn’t be assed seriously investigating it and dropped the case after 2 weeks because policing racists in Twitter or confiscating butter knives or whatever the fuck they do is more important.
It’s not hypocrisy claims, but I didn’t understand your logic.
If the problem is America has extradition power over all these countries? Or problem is prosecution of people who are dissidents?
The former one is a logically consistent with your view about Chinese dissidents.
But it’s also quite predictable and nothing very surprising that UK will extradite people to America. The US-UK alliance has been called “the special relationship” since Winston Churchill.
The issue of dissidents – I can understand people feeling angry for moral reasons (government persecution is brutal). But if I am supposed to feel compassionate about some narcissistic dissident like Assange, that lives from other peoples’ charity. I would feel a lot more compassionate about 1980s Chinese students, who were probably normal people, just living in a country with third-world incomes and extremely high inflation when they protested, and not knowing the future trajectory of China’s economy.
Countries with the power to do so are going to pursue their enemies without regard for borders or international law. Whether they are arrested or mysteriously fall ill due to exotic poisons…the goal is the same, only the means vary.
Anatoly good boi, I hereby grant 50 cent RMB for you.
Jokes aside, the June 4th event is something that we’ll never exactly know what happened unless they declassify the files. What lead up to the event, who was responsible, how many people died, and how they died will remain a mystery unless the CCP itself declassifies the files. If this ever happens, this will be way in the future by that time China will be unrecognizable from what it is today.
Whether its a crime against humanity, never happened, or justified response to an uprising remains a mystery.
What happens if you would criticize one-child policy in China? Perhaps this policy is now phased out, but what happens if you criticized it years ago?
If there was Chinese version of Karlin, and writing articles about how to stop this policy and the need to increase the birth-rate . I’m guessing at least his website would have been blocked? (if not the author prosecuted?).
But this is social disapproval in America. Like in the past, how a village girl would have her life ruined by social disapproval, if all the villagers disapproved of her life in some way.
I believe it will also depend on social views in your area. For example, in Fox News, and Republican politicians, are often opposing gay marriage.
Suppose they were race riots, although that distracts us from the fact that Americans, whose army kills civilians, are concerned about muh Chinese protesters.
Isn’t that an aggravating factor? “US army kills minority protesters” sounds much worse than “US army kills violent thugs”. All of a sudden, you transformed Angela Davis into The Tienamnmen Martyr Who Faced Those Tanks Empty-handed.
Worse, this martyrization of minorities is the subject of litanies in US (muh Tibetans, muh Taiwanese, muh Xinjiangese, muh Hong-Kong-ese), whereas Chinese are probably OK with the dictatorship of the majority.
Practice what you preach, or let us practice what you practice.
Something interesting I saw from watching reports of the protest before the shooting, was that the student protesters were supporting Mao.
It seems to be a protest where anger will be primarily motivated by the economic situation and standards of living (not pro-West protest, as the protesters were the supporters of Mao). China in the 1980s was extremely poor, and we probably don’t understand the anger caused by this poverty.
Fact they were starving themselves as well, shows they were probably in quite a bad situation already.
See at 3:25 about Mao
https://youtu.be/m4XHytFbvHU?t=203
I’m not sure your comparison with Russia makes sense.
China’s 1980s, was epoch of economic liberalization and transition to capitalism, which begins at the end of the 1970s or beginning of the 1980s. China transitioned to capitalism several years earlier than the USSR/Russia, and Tiananmen protests were partly a response to the brutal economic effects of this transition period (which occurs in China several years earlier than in the USSR/Russia).
Tiananmen protesters, were protesting partly motivated by the effects of economic liberalization of Deng Xiaoping. An interesting thing, is you can see in earlier videos, how protesters had flags of Mao.
So in our context, this aspect is like an analogy if you imagine young students had protested against the effects they experienced from Yeltsin’s economic reforms in early 1990s (as the transition process is later than China), and some of them at the protest even with flags of Stalin (as Tiananmen protesters have flags of Mao).
I don’t know. If the whites from the city of Baltimore alone counter-rioted, yep, they’d get slaughtered. But if the whites from the surrounding suburbs and countryside (believe it or not, there IS countryside in Maryland) together joined in, then there would be some fun.
The problem is that whites went soft for a while. But, we’ll harden up eventually. It’s the good king, bad king cycle.
All due respect, I’m not sure what this means. Baltimore might be the next Detroit? Baltimore and Detroit have actually been in a roughly equal race for Doom all along. They’re equal competitors for worst nightmare of an American city. If anything, Baltimore might be worse. And it’s been a total train wreck now for several decades.
And China was?
” An interesting thing, is you can see in earlier videos, how protesters had flags of Mao.”
On a fundamental level the protests was the result of massive anger built up during Mao times that never have a chance for the people to vent their anger. 1989 was only a little bit more than a decade after Mao’s death and the death of the beloved party officials Hu Yao Bang provides the spark for massive people’s movement that eventually festered into massive demonstration. That people hoisting Mao’s image (and red flags) was a way for people to insulate and exculpate themselves should the government clamp down on them. It was basically a way for the demonstrators to signal themselves that they were not anti-government and anti-party even though the action they were performing were precisely that.
Amazed Anatoly could agree with this, you two must have a much higher opinion of the racial consciousness of American conservatives than I. You know who cares deeply about “law and order”? The national review. To try to pretend that the “law and order” types aren’t largely also the immigrationist cuckservatives is silly, to call them ethnic tribalists is risible (excusing of course those who belong to THE tribe).
There is a kernel of a point in there about the militarisation of the police, but to think that mass black incarceration is due to arbitrary harassment (and thus presumably false conviction? How deep does this vast right wing conspiracy go?) is really indefensible. Black criminality is consistently extreme everywhere, and despite what you may have heard, the maintenance of genuine law and order does involve the imprisonment of criminals. Thus any state with a large black underclass and a commitment to public order will naturally be imprisoning a (disproportionately) large number of blacks. You may have a point about the frequency of police shootings, but per police interaction (every “at bat” so to say) this is actually more likely with whites, but owing to black criminality they get a lot more kicks at the can. Maybe it’s just that only the most intractably violent white criminals get in trouble with the law, but I seriously doubt it.
There’s really not a reasonable way to interpret the data otherwise; the concept of “over-policing” being responsible is absurd, since it relies on a huge rate of false conviction, so are the juries in on it as well? Even if they are, are the victims of these crimes falsifying the description of their assailant? I guess those damn conservatives are so racist they’d rather imprison an innocent negro than catch the white guy who really stole their car. That’s what you have to believe to make that explanation work since per-capita incarceration, police interaction, and reported race of the suspect are all pretty consistent.
China wasn’t a rustbelt either since it was still very rural (just Manchuria – which, incidentally, was precisely the region that actually experienced many of the ill social effects from liberalization that the USSR and EE experienced).
That’s what I thought. In turn, this causes me to question AP’s conclusion that China would have ended up just like Russia had it democratized in the 1990s.
(Also, as a side note, I don’t think that Russia ever fully democratized even in the 1990s. After all, genuine democrats don’t use tanks to fire on the parliament building!)
Interesting book review from Branko Milanovic I just encountered.
http://glineq.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-social-and-geopolitical-origins-of.html
China sometimes punishes people for dumb things too. They once jailed a Chinese girl streamer for five days for singing a line from the national anthem while imitating a conductor.
I remember, vaguely, reading a Chinese website (a college forum iirc) having a negative discussion on this, about 10 years ago.
Recently I even came upon a scholarly book strongly criticizing the whole history of this policy. I mean a Chinese book published in China. I only skim a few pages so far, the tone is quite acid.
But, if you were organizing on this issue, it will be very different.
That being said, last year, when someone posted a basically bad review of some alcohol product, he’s being thrown into prison for a few months. Interestingly enough, a national uproar ensued and national gov intervention got him out. Turns out, the local police & local gov are very protective of their local manufacturers.
Black people are just around 13,6% of America’s population. Even if they are imprisoned multiple times more than non-black people, then this has not a very large effect on the overall imprisonment rate, due to their small proportion of its total population.
So you can remove black population from these figures, and the imprisonment rate for non-black Americans will be still be the highest imprisonment rate of any population in a developed country.
How does the argument even make sense?
China has the same liberalization process as Russia in the early 1990s, but the staged process beginning some years earlier.
Tiananmen protests are partly motivated by the negative immediate effects of the second economic liberalization process of Deng Xiaoping (resulting in very high inflation).
This idea China will be like Russia in the 1990s, if they democratized, makes no sense, as they were ahead of Russia/USSR, and were already having equivalent problems of early 1990s Russia, in the late 1980s (which partly resulted in these protests).
You’re right, they are also protesting for more free media access.
But the students are not capitalists and support communalist ideals of Mao, and were including support of their university professors.
It also included some kind of cultural movement of the students (and more generally, when cultural movement is suppressed this much, you might understand China’s low achievements intellectually and culturally are probably result more result of politics, and poverty, instead of intrinsic racial inferiority of Chinese).
Jailing e-girls is not a crime.
To write more clearly – I mean in terms of economic liberalization process.
It’s also another disaster which is partly – although in this sample unintentionally – the idiot Gorbachev’s responsibility.
Students go to the square because of Gorbachev’s planned visit.
From 1:17:00 on about Gorbachev’s visit
If Chicoms proudly owned it up everyone faces, as you imply they should, if they celebrated victory over rebels as a holiday and made big budget movies about patriotic heroes fighting the CIA supported traitors, would be they seen better or worse today?
Censorship is increasing, even blocking petty things like Quora or NicoNico. There are also more stricter rules to be followed than before (which is more annoying due to the general state of disorganisation).
But if they are getting noticed by the police then they are most likely doing something they know is not allowed (drugs would be one of these things).
As later seen by the opposite reaction which occurred during the 1993 Russian Constitutional Crisis, it is not the act itself which is subject to reproval but rather the entity.
Perhaps in the beginning, when tensions with outside powers were tense a rationale could be made to hide it, but at this point the CCP has shown the productive outcome of remaining in power and has the dreary result of other failed “people’s revolutions” in other countries to warn against.
They are 13.6% of the population but commit nearly 50% of the homicides.
Incarceration rate for white Americans is 380/100,000:
https://static.prisonpolicy.org/images/raceinc.png
This is higher than for western European nations but lower than in Russia. And in exchange for this, white America has much less crime than does Russia.
The other reason for higher incarceration rates in the USA is that Americans, unlike Western Europeans, do not tolerate petty crimes. Americans are use dot having expensive things shipped to their houses and left on their front porches all day without them being stolen. Americans are not used to pickpockets. They expect people who commit petty crimes to get locked up. Europeans let them loose, and have lower incarceration rates.
Only if you consider Russia to be an undeveloped country.
France is estimated to be around 13% North and sub-Saharan African, Sweden has a very large population of Middle Easterners and Africans, Germany of course has its Turks and Africans and whoever else etc etc. This is not the 1950s, very few countries are “homogeneous” in the way you think and even fewer in Western Europe. And this has caused many problems, but still the situation in America is remarkable.
In reality America is just a sick country: sick with individualism, sick with selfishness, sick with violence, sick with its primitive obsessions with revenge and honor. This sickness has many manifestations: opioid epidemic, sociopathic violence amongst young black men, school shootings, insane gun culture which is the joke of the world, medical establishment giving sex hormones to teenagers because “they said” they were the opposite gender, military-industrial complex, and, of course, Stalin-like levels of incarceration and the conditions thereof. The Soviets always had plenty of excuses for locking people up: stealing grain, hoarding, smuggling, theft of government property. Probably most of the charges were true. Doesn’t mean the response was always justified, or that the society imposing it was any less diseased. American approach is the equivalent of chopping a man’s arm off because his finger is infected and then declaring him cured. Try an antibiotic first. And if you suddenly see a huge number of men with infected fingers consider asking yourself if there may be some new factor causing it.
Russia is not anyone’s model of a civilized country.
I replied to you on Open Thread 77, though tbh I couldn’t really add much coming from multiple generations of expats.
Because incarceration doesn’t affect most Americans but is skewed for a minority (see my other post).
America is about 65% European-American.
As I wrote in another post, Americans don’t tolerate petty crimes like Europeans do, and lock up people who pick pockets or steal packages. If they do it a lot, they get locked up for a long time.
Europeans think it is inhumane to do so, and allow those people to run free and do their thing. So the USA has a lot of criminals in prison, Europe has more criminals on the street and much more annoying petty crimes.
Americans of European descent are among the most violent of Europeans, but still within European norms.
Good to know that you think honor is a bad thing.
So you believe the USA is as diseased as was Stalin’s USSR. Good to know.
Great comment from a great Finnish poster:
“I would much rather have American or even Russian judges than a murderer as a neighbor with the knowledge that he can stab me and not go back to prison but that I can’t fight back because self-defense in this country is basically an aggravating factor. That’s not a hypothetical – a notorious multiple murderer and violent criminal was living across the street from me for years. He didn’t kill anyone during that time he did a lot of very bad stuff like severely beating up a disabled man in a wheelchair and he never got any meaningful prison time.
I dealt with this in the typical Finnish fashion – we memorize the faces of murderers, rapists, pedophiles and other notorious dangers that are allowed to walk free and avoid them with the knowledge that the state is on their side, not ours. Yeah, we have low incarceration rates and our leaders get praised around the world for it while they travel in armored cars and live behind private security that bypasses our meaningless state authorities.”
Not Stalin level, no. Probably about Khrushchev level in its heavy-handedness, intrusiveness and generally hostile atmosphere.
Stop talking about “Europe” as though it is one entity. Pickpockets and stealing packages off stoops are limited to a handful of large cities, all of which are still safer than American ones. In rural parts of the EU people leave their doors unlocked 24/7, nobody gives a shit about crime. Pretending that Americans have some big advantage in safety or security compared to most Europeans is ludicrous.
Rural parts of the EU are almost entirely white.
True, but they are still safer and more secure overall than their American counterparts. When you compare the incarceration/crime rates for white Americans to overall rates for EU nations and find that it’s higher, this is telling; almost all of these EU nations have large numbers of poor Muslim migrants, disproportionately young men. And they do indeed commit a lot more crime than the locals; they inflate the national statistics, just as blacks do in America. But still the crime rates in these countries are generally lower overall than America, and still the incarceration rates are lower too.
Comparing white Americans as a group to diverse nations with hundreds of thousands/millions of semi-primitive refugees, and the best you can say is “well, the white Americans are better than Russians”? Nothing to be proud of.
Russia has a high homicide rate but does it also have a high incarceration rate?
Also, it’s interesting that a legacy of Communism (especially the resulting alcoholism epidemic) might have made Russians as violent as Blacks at the start of the 21st century.
Pray tell, who is this Finnish poster?
Pickpockets and such crimes are not a problem in Manhattan which is more densely populated than any European city. These places are safer than large European cities. Sure, non-European inhabited ghetto areas are worse. But otherwise, no.
On the other hand, in America,
there are absurd prosecutions of innocent people, – ignorant BS
extremely brutal police, – ignorant BS
and America has the highest imprisonment rates in the world – 1 out of three, not very impressive.
Anyway, as other commenters pointed out we are “special” in several ways. Diversity and homegrown hostility to authority being just two.
The trend is to stop enforcing laws with regards to blacks and other POC so you will likely be 0 of 3 before too long.
You can remove blacks from the figures, and American whites still have the highest imprisonment rate compared to the total (unsegregated) population of any country in the developed world.
That’s even more crazy when you realize America has almost the highest income levels of any developed country, and yet the white population of America is the most imprisoned people compared to any developed country’s population.
And also the fact American blacks are imprisoned 4-5 times more than the population of any African country, requires some explanation.
Western European cities are incredibly safe, as far as my personal experience. I could walk through them for years and have no danger at all. The only danger you can see, is that sometimes some drunk people are fighting in the evening. As for people stealing phones from cafes, this is most in countries like Spain.
You post all that, and yet you’d never choose to live around Blacks who don’t act White.
Perhaps Africa is softer on crime than the US is?
Pickpockets and purse snatching are common in Italy. Apparently being beaten up by chavs is not unknown in England.
American whites are incarcerated at a lower level than Russia. So you think that Russia is not in the developed world?
White Americans are imprisoned less than are Russians.
As I wrote earlier, Americans have much less tolerance than Europeans do, for petty crimes and nuisances. Many European cities have public parks full of junkies. These people would all be locked up in the USA. Pickpockets, shoplifters, etc. are much less tolerated. People who assault or murder typically spend much more time in prison in the USA than in Europe; for example Norway caps its prison sentences, even for murder and rape, at 20 years, and many are released after only 10 years. In America these people are more likely to just rot forever, never again to bother normal people.
For example, this guy murdered a police officer during a robbery and was released after only ten years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kjell_Alrich_Schumann
Jan Anderson raped two little girls and murdered one of them (his partner who also raped them murdered the other one) and only spent 14 years in prison:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baneheia_murders#Verdict
How much better and civilized Norway is because it has a lower incarceration rate than the USA!
In the USA he would probably spend 20-30 years in prison going through various appeals, before being executed.
I quoted Jaakko’s excellent comment:
“I would much rather have American or even Russian judges than a murderer as a neighbor with the knowledge that he can stab me and not go back to prison but that I can’t fight back because self-defense in this country is basically an aggravating factor. That’s not a hypothetical – a notorious multiple murderer and violent criminal was living across the street from me for years. He didn’t kill anyone during that time he did a lot of very bad stuff like severely beating up a disabled man in a wheelchair and he never got any meaningful prison time.
I dealt with this in the typical Finnish fashion – we memorize the faces of murderers, rapists, pedophiles and other notorious dangers that are allowed to walk free and avoid them with the knowledge that the state is on their side, not ours. Yeah, we have low incarceration rates and our leaders get praised around the world for it while they travel in armored cars and live behind private security that bypasses our meaningless state authorities.”
Americans tolerate crime less than African countries do.
Officially, Russia is classified as “Economies in Transition”. This is a classification between developed and developing.
https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/policy/wesp/wesp_current/2014wesp_country_classification.pdf
>99% conviction rate in Russia criminal “justice” system and one of the highest imprisonment rates in the world. So the fact America is significantly worse in its imprisonment rate than Russia, should be quite shocking for Americans, and does rather damage the image of living in the “land of freedom”.
It’s nonsense if you compare to Western Europe.
In American cities, you see far more drug addicts, homeless and criminal elements, in the streets.
In Western Europe, most cities are far safer than American cities.
Maybe you can find in a few small areas in Western Europe – homeless people, illegal immigrants and some minor criminal elements.
For example, in Spanish cities, there is usually at least one “dangerous area”, where the population is illegal immigrants from Africa and Arabia, with Latin Americans, some Turks, and bars where the Polish prostitutes are displaying onto the street.
Atmosphere in these areas is a little strange and sinister. But even those places are clearly far safer than walking in an equivalent area in an American city.
Occasionally they might steal a tourist phone, or you see drunk people are fighting – it’s all nothing very scary.
In UK and Ireland, proleterian drunks are fighting on Saturday evening and the police wait in the street, and arrest them after, like a kind of social ritual.
I doubt they would be any threat to people they do not know (perhaps very weak or gay people might be endangered). It is generally quite clear that even in the drunkest or blackest area, the average situation in countries like the UK is hyper safe.
On the positive side, Americans probably at least grow up to be less pussies than Western Europeans, as a result of the higher levels of violence in their cities.
I don’t know where you are going in Europe where every park is full of junkies and pickpockets are on every corner. The Netherlands has had some troubles with drug addicts it’s true, Spain has both drugs and some pickpockets…but compared to the problems of e.g. San Francisco or Seattle, Barcelona or Amsterdam or Naples seem like paradise.
Most Americans in prison are not there for murder. Even if they were, that is hardly an endorsement of US culture. If we’re going to say that blacks in the US are solely responsible for their own dysfunction then we have to also admit that white America–with its opioid epidemic, obesity epidemic, lack of education and widespread ignorance, and generally being dysfunctional in every way except income compared to “whites” in the EU–is primitive and backwards as well. I don’t agree with this; the fact that white America has degenerated relative to its condition even 20 years ago indicates that there may be environmental factors at work. I don’t agree with it for blacks either.
What is especially baffling is that, unlike most of Europe, America has not dealt with any wars on its own soil or political upheaval in the past century. By European standards, America has been quite placid. And it is still a wealthy place, relatively speaking. But it has lost its soul. That most Americans don’t even recognize a huge number of young men sitting in prison cells as a human tragedy is a testament to that.
For example, one day in central Frankfurt, in a decent toursity area, I went to the bathroom in a restaurant and was almost pricked by a junkie holding a needle and trying to tell me something. Such a thing had never occurred to me in the USA. It might be common in ghettos or in desolate trailer parks, but not where normal people go.
In southern Italy people on scooters grab purses off women’s arms and drive off. I’ve never heard of this happening in the USA.
Many are also in prison because they cause lesser annoying crimes that are tolerated in Europe.
There are three reasons for high incarceration rates in the USA:
USA usually doesn’t let murderers and rapists out after 14 years.
USA doesn’t tolerate pickpockets, petty thieves, people who shoot up in public etc. as Europe does. It sends them to prison so normal people can be undisturbed by them. States with “3 strike laws” can send someone to prison for 20 years for stealing a bicycle, if it s third offense. Europeans just tolerate having their stuff taken whenever..
Yes, it’s a human tragedy that such a young man in America would be in prison for more than 14 years:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baneheia_murders#Verdict
Jan Anderson raped two little girls and murdered one of them (his partner who also raped them murdered the other one) and only spent 14 years in prison.
White America has a much much lower incarceration rate than does Russia. Russia isn’t 13.6% African.
Depends on the neighborhood. Nice parts of American cities are safer than nice parts of European cities, but worse parts are much worse. AK has lived in both, he seems to agree.
Here is rate of auto thefts per 100,000. Keep in mind that America has many more cars per capita than do European countries. Yet Italy, Sweden, France and Greece have more cars stolen per 100,000 people than does the USA:
https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/Motor-vehicle-theft-rate
Keep in mind USA has many more cars. USA has 811 cars per 1,000 people, France has only 569, Sweden only 536:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita
This can be seen as a proxy for property crime in general – much worse in Europe. And even worse than that if one considers how crime is segregated in the USA.
White people in America have a higher imprisonment rate than the total (multinational) populations of any developed country.
And white people Americans have almost the same imprisonment as the multinational population of Russia.
While overall, American imprisonment rates are the highest in the world (whether developed, transition, or developing countries).
I don’t understand the motive to be Dr Pangloss in this area. America’s situation in economics or science is great – and it’s easy to celebrate that. But the fact it has the highest imprisonment rates?
He said that brown people in London are dangerous – but it doesn’t reflect my experience. I can walk anywhere in London and it is safe and harmless.
That’s just nonsense that nice parts of American cities are safer than nice parts of (Western) European cities, if you talk about Western Europe. Nice parts of Western European cities are completely safe – so I don’t see how you can improve on a completely safe place? (Moreover, there are nice parts of American cities – like e.g. Hollywood – which can seem a little dangerous).
As I explained:
Americans jail people for lesser crimes, in order to prevent nuisances. This is why , for example, fewer cars are stolen in the USA per capita than in many European countries. Peole who these things are removed from society. Again – a good thing.
This speaks more poorly of your objectivity than for his.
I haven’t been to Paris since I was a student in 1990. It was fine then. My uncle is a Francophile. He often stays in French towns but hadn’t been to Paris in over 10 years. He visited recently and – never again. Impression of friends from Moscow who have been to Paris is the same – dangerous, dirty, etc. They cannot all be wrong.
And yet Western Europe is far safer.
Again, to be Dr Pangloss about America is not making sense on this topic. America is the best in world in some areas, sure – and it’s bad in others, and this is one of those others.
Car stolen per capita is 62% higher in the USA than in the UK.
Rate of imprisonment is 380% higher in the USA than in the UK.
Why? What is there a lack of objectivity about.
I can go to the most dangerous and brown place in London (this is my idea of exploring).
I leave the metro, and disappointing to me, areas are secure, no open evidence of criminal elements, and nobody attacks or even looks dangerous (except that they are black/brown). And you can even do this at night-time.
You can read in the media about London knife crime – but this is some little brown kids fighting in the housing buildings. The areas where they live are extremely safe and boring, if architecturally dystopian.
In my home city, we have more dangerous areas, where people actually try and test you.
On the other hand, in America – when I go on the wrong bus in cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, and there really are openly homeless, crazy people and drug addicts.
Comparison between Western Europe and America, in this area, is just silly – Western Europe has very ordinary street life, whereas dangerous parts of Americans are visibly more dysfunctional.
I’m not sure discussing is useful, if you only travelled 30 years ago.
Paris is demographically Africa/Arabia, but I don’t think it is at all less safe than when I visited first time as a child, when it was safe then.
And in terms of safety, it is (aside from a few terrorist attacks), not at all Africa, and I have yet to see fights in the streets.
Last time I passed through Paris last summer, the shocking thing for me is that the buildings like bus station – feel like they are from the 1990s.
Also I was in the bus from Paris to London, and the bus was maybe 70% black (they were well behaved though).
I’ve been to Paris many times – I remember some African people once looked at my mother’s bag (like they were interested in stealing something). Other than that, I have not seen anything dangerous.
What’s the use of people in Moscow’s view about Paris? It’s like asking people in New York about Beijing? Or the opinion of Denver about Sao Paulo?
Of course, Paris is not dangerous (unless you are really a pussy or there is a Muslim terrorist attack). Of course, Paris, is somewhat dirty.
Not compared to Euro-America.
And number of cars per capita matches most (though not all) of that. Now consider America’s race situation with crime and you see that Euro-America is safer than the UK.
But cars stolen per capita is still higher in France, Sweden, and Italy than in the USA, despite fewer cars on those European countries.
We are comparing Euro-Americans. I can only imagine how sky-high crime would be in Europe, with its aversion to incarceration, if Europe got all of America’s troublesome minority population.
But Western Europe is safer than white cities in America, and imprisonment rate of Europeans far lower than for white Americans. While Western Europe itself, has many black/brown people.
For example, murder rate in London (which is all full of black and brown people) is lower than murder rate in Chandler, Arizona, which is second from left in this map.
https://i.imgur.com/2f5AJHz.jpg
All these countries are saturated with automobiles, however. Why would automobile stealing increase monotonically with car ownership per capita, once there are hundreds or thousands of cars on the road for each stealer in a country?
USA has one of the higher rates of automobile stealing. The fact it is lower than Italy and France, is not a great datapoint in support of its highest rate of imprisonment, when car stealing in the USA higher than in most Western European countries.
Cities like London are black/brown demographically (like a dangerous American city), yet in countries with vastly lower imprisonment rates. At the same time, they manage not to be very dangerous cities overall.
So these explanations for the American situation are somehow not matching.
I am aware black population has far higher rates of imprisonment, and violence, in America, and this can partly be beyond political control. Yet even when you look at white Americans – the situation is a lot worse than Western European countries, which themselves have very many dark people (there are places in London that demographically feel like Africa or Pakistan).
It doesn’t have African Americans. African immigrants to America are much safer than African-Americans. Muslims, who commit terror acts, don’t seem to commit nearly as many “street killings.”
It is not higher when taking into account number of cars. Fewer cars to steal will mean fewer thefts. Except in France, Sweden and Italy – there are more thefts despite fewer cars.
White state of New Hampshire has a lower homicide rate than France, Germany, UK, Finland, Sweden, etc.
Surely, but this contradicts what you were saying earlier. For example, why African-Americans should have 4-5 times higher imprisonment rate than in African countries.
All these countries are saturated with automobiles, however. Why would automobile stealing increase monotonically with car ownership per capita, when there are hundreds or thousands of cars on the road for each stealer in a country?
You saw that USA has a high rate of car stealing, but slightly lower than a couple of countries in Europe. Then inferred this was a good datapoint for America, by adding in car ownership per capita. But where is there is evidence car ownership is related to rate of car stealing in a developed country (for example, Sweden has lower car ownership rate than UK).
New Hampshire – also one of the richest regions of America (really one of the richest places in the world).
Yet the safest region in America (New Hampshire), has a homicide rate higher than many Western European countries.
And for example, in 2014, the murder rate of London (< 1 per 100,000), was lower than the murder rate of New Hampshire (which was 1,1). Yet in London, there is panic about its high murder rates subsequently. This illustrate some of the extreme difference in number of killings.
https://i.imgur.com/MJQK41Z.jpg
More cars, more opportunities. Perhaps more parked on the street vs. in a garage. I’m not sure there is a saturation point for this. Why do you think so?
Probably poorer than London (see below).
Your chart showed that in most years London’s murder rate was higher than that of New Hampshire. It is now higher than white North Dakota and about the same as Maine (which are poorer than New Hampshire).
‘…Foreigners should be expected to be on good behavior when they are allowed into countries other than their own…’
Hear, hear. I’ve always followed that rule, and outside of Italy, I’ve always found everyone quite congenial. Even among Parisians — who are supposedly rude to tourists — I had no bad experiences. I had some opening line that whatever it meant, certainly made it clear I couldn’t speak French. Everything was sweetness and light for the week we were there.
Charming people, the French. Now, the Italians…of course, I started out with Venice, so maybe that was it. God, what a bunch of dicks…
Did I veer off-topic? Oh well.