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PaperclipPerfector  13d ago (text post)   30545 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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I have been to Romania and other parts of Eastern Europe. I feel markedly more safe there than major cities in Western Europe. Perhaps Dublin is also still safe, I've never been, but its trajectory is tracking towards Berlin and Birmingham rather than Bucharest and Budapest.

Might I humbly suggest that your subjective feeling of "safety" might be belied by the facts on the ground? Romania's murder rate (1.109/100k) is nearly double Ireland's (0.654/100k), and Hungary's murder rate (0.774/100k) is likewise slightly higher than Ireland's. Germany's (0.823/100k) is likewise lower than Romania's. The only part of your claim that really stacks up is that the UK has a higher murder rate (1.148/100k) than Romania. "Dublin's trajectory is tracking towards Berlin and Birmingham rather than Bucharest and Budapest" - any of these four would represent an upward trajectory from Ireland's current murder rate.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

On the other hand, Bucharest specifically was ranked quite far ahead of Dublin in a list of safest cities in the world, so I take your point. (On the other other hand, Munich was ranked ahead of Bucharest on the same list; and anyway this list is based on user surveys rather than criminological data, a methodology they defend here.) But I strongly suspect that the primary driving factor for how safe a city is is its demographics, and I think it's fair to say that those are primarily controlled at a national rather than local level. If X% of Ireland's population is Roma/Syrian/Algerian etc., there's only so much Dublin city council can do to stop them from living in Dublin (and likewise if a Roma family wants to move from the Romanian countryside to Bucharest).

Much of the opposition to inward migration to Ireland and the UK is based on negative (but, in my view, accurate) stereotypes about Roma people (e.g. Jozef Puska is from a Roma background). In which case, Romania is a spectacularly bad example to use to illustrate your point: Roma people make up about 0.3% of the population of Ireland, but 3.4% of the population of Romania. And they are likewise massively overrepresented in crime, making up 17% of Romania's prison population.

"You Irish should stop letting in so many Roma people and become more like Romania" - like, what? Those two things are mutually exclusive. Where do you think the word "Roma" came from?

Where do you think the word "Roma" came from?

From Sanskrit or a related Indo-Aryan language, possibly from an earlier Dravidian or Munda borrowing. From here:

From Romani roma, plural of rom (“man, husband, Romani man”). The latter probably comes from Sanskrit डोम्ब (ḍomba, “lower-caste person working as a wandering musician”), which may have been borrowed from a Dravidian language.[1] Folk etymology pointed to a legend that the ethnic group were an exiled people from Imperial times.

And from "Romani:"

From Romani romani, feminine form of romano (“of or pertaining to the Roma”), from rom (“man”). See also Roma.[1]

Not related to Romanian.

See also the related Domari and Lomavren languages, spoken by the Dom and Lom ethnic groups (the former "scattered across the Middle East and North Africa," and the latter in the Caucasus), with "Dom" and "Lom" both cognate to Romani "Rrom/Řom/Rom" (spelling systems vary) — it comes down to how the respective languages changed the Indo-Aryan retroflex stops.

Where do you think the word "Roma" came from?

Roma is an endonym that derived from something in the gypsy language; to the best of my knowledge, Romanians do not call them that very often.

And gypsies themselves migrated into Europe from India, they’re not native to Romania(which has a very negative view of them, just like everyone else).

Your selective use of the murder rate

To add to the point, it's not like no one has looked at crime by ethnicity and reached some very unsurprising results. The fact that the native population, and immigrants from more peaceful countries can make the average rate look reasonable, doesn't mean that immigration from certain countries won't cause an increase in crime.

What the hell is going on in Georgia?

The caucuses are more like a continuation of the Balkans by other means than normal euro countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russo-Georgian_War

See also the Chechnya, Nagorno-Karabakh, and God knows what other conflicts in the region.

Your selective use of the murder rate

You're performing a Gish gallop Chinese robber fallacy by citing a dozen emotionally loaded stories of violent crimes committed in Europe by people who aren't European (conveniently ignoring all the violent crimes committed by Europeans) - and you're accusing me of "selectively" using the dispassionate, objective metric of the murder rate to make my case that Romania is in fact significantly more dangerous (and Ireland significantly safer) than you're claiming? Physician, heal thyself.

I don't dispute that migrants to Europe are overrepresented in crime stats. I don't even dispute that immigration policy into Europe may have been too lax in recent years and may be need to be restricted somewhat. But I am not persuaded that Ireland or any other western European country ought to be an ethnostate. Hell, this entire discussion was prompted by me complaining that Anglophone news outlets cover migrant crime in a dishonest and knowingly misleading way. Why are you so mad at me, of all people?

If Ireland maintains its current immigration levels and the birth rate doesn't increase, the indigenous population will be effectively extinct before the end of the century and in its place will be some amorphous Brazilian blob. I gather you don't care about racial identity, but there are plenty of people who do and don't want to see Western Europe die.

Correct, I don't really care that much about racial identity. Pointing out that other people care about it does nothing to persuade me. Persuade me why I should care.

That’s not really what a Gish gallop is. Nor is a Gish gallop a formal fallacy anyway. Crying Gish gallop against a list of arguments is less than a meaningful response

Fair enough, I'll amend to Chinese robbering.

And now he's deleted his Gish gallop/Chinese robbering anyway, along with all of his recent comments. "Don't mind me", indeed.

You're performing a Gish gallop by citing a dozen emotionally loaded stories of violent crimes committed in Europe by people who aren't European (conveniently ignoring all the violent crimes committed by Europeans) - and you're accusing me of "selectively" using the dispassionate, objective metric of the murder rate to make my case that Romania is in fact significantly more dangerous (and Ireland significantly safer) than you're claiming? Physician, heal thyself.

He's more right then you are. I added a reply to Hus comment with a link to a breakdown of German crime numbers by ethnicity, which is a better metric than the general murder rate.

If he asserts that Romania is safer than Ireland, I provide evidence to show that Romania in fact has a higher murder rate than Ireland - how does a breakdown of violent crime by ethnicity prove me wrong? I don't dispute that a disproportionate share of violent crime in Europe is committed by recent migrants from outside of Europe. That doesn't change the fact that Romania's murder rate is higher than Ireland's.

Isn’t it a bit more complicated compared to looking at just murder rates? Let’s say Population X worldwide commits crime at rate of 2/100. Population Y 1/100.

Country A has a tough on crime policy that lowers both rates by 10%. Country B has a lax on crime policy that increases both rates by 10%. But Country A has a materially higher rate of Population X compared to Country B whereas B has a higher rate of Population Y.

Country B will have a lower crime rate but it won’t be because of policy and indeed the more the demographics shifted the higher the crime rate of B will climb.

I’m not saying that describes Ireland or Romania. To be honest, I don’t know either well enough to make this claim. But the concept seems reasonable.

Whatever the underlying reason for it, I think if you want to argue that Country X is more dangerous than Country Y (because of the different policies/demographic makeup/policing approach in the two countries) - your argument falls at the first hurdle if Country Y is actually more dangerous than Country X.

Would Ireland have a lower murder rate if we allowed in fewer immigrants from certain countries? Almost certainly yes. Doesn't change the fact that Ireland's current murder rate with its current population constitution has a lower murder rate than Romania.

I agree that people are often miscalibrated regarding safety levels, whoever, I think we tend to overfixate on murder as a crime statistic. Murder is, obviously (or perhaps not so obviously, given recent events), very bad, but it is thankfully pretty rare. Below some fuzzy threshold, people's feeling of safety will be more tied to overall crime rate than murder rate (particularly as murder seems to be very concentrated in certain areas and demographics).

It's fair that only looking at the murder rate might obscure otherwise meaningful differences in safety levels. However there is also a very good reason that murder is often used in discussions of crime rates (including by historians); it's the most straightforward and most unbiased statistic, for the simple reason that it's hard to hide that someone has been killed. Once you get into other crimes, you start getting much more bogged down into things such as reporting rates, definitions, etc., which make comparisons rather fraught.

Fair enough. Per this list:

Country Crime Index (Numbeo) per 100k Overall Criminality Score (GOCI) Safety Index (Numbeo)
Romania 32.8 4.58 67.2
Ireland 46.1 5.08 53.9
UK 46.9 5.75 53.1
Hungary 33.8 4.62 66.2
Germany 38 5.33 62

It really does not seem to me like the differences are as stark as is being implied. Germany has slightly more crime than eastern Europe, and Ireland and the UK have slightly more crime than Germany (although even then Ireland ends up with a lower GOCI score than Germany, where lower GOCI is better). It looks like a trade-off, where in exchange for significant economic growth you get a marginal bump in crime rate. None of the cities under discussion are Detroit or Baltimore (or even, to the best of my knowledge and perhaps more relevant to the discussion, Malmö).

It looks like a trade-off, where in exchange for significant economic growth you get a marginal bump in crime rate.

The economic differences are a lot older than the ones in immigration, and the crime used to go the other way.

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