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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   24847 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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I can only say "I think the bottom line, is this is just what a low trust society looks like."

Luigi's CEO assassination has been a real statement piece to drive your point.

Other than money, the US lacks other recognizable traits of a developed nation.

High violence, low trust, unreliable social safety nets, bad health outcomes...... you name it. The US has money, and that's about it. Yes, being in the top 1% of America makes for an amazing life. Guess what ? That applies to every half-developed nation.

This is how ChatGPT outlines what living in a developed nation feels like:

Aspects of a Developed Country from a Quality of Life Perspective

  1. Healthcare

    • Universal access to high-quality healthcare services.
    • Advanced medical facilities and technologies.
    • High life expectancy and low infant mortality.

  2. Education

    • Free or affordable access to primary, secondary, and tertiary education.
    • High literacy rates and skilled workforce.
    • Emphasis on research and innovation.

  3. Economic Stability

    • High GDP per capita.
    • Low unemployment and inflation rates.
    • Strong social safety nets and pensions.

  4. Infrastructure

    • Efficient transportation systems (roads, public transit, airports).
    • Reliable utilities (electricity, water, internet).
    • Modern urban planning with sustainable practices.

  5. Safety and Security

    • Low crime rates and effective law enforcement.
    • Political stability and strong governance.
    • Protection of civil rights and freedoms.

  6. Environmental Quality

    • Clean air, water, and well-maintained public spaces.
    • Access to green spaces and recreational areas.

  7. Social Equity

    • Gender equality and inclusivity.
    • Access to housing and elimination of poverty.

  8. Work-Life Balance

    • Reasonable work hours and paid leave policies.
    • Opportunities for cultural, leisure, and recreational activities.

(Note: it gave me a couple of woke talking points. I deleted those)

I've personally striked out what America fails at. It's pretty damning.

  • -20

Like, @The_Nybbler (apologies for pinging you twice in rapid succession) i dont care what your glorified markov chain has to say. And even if i did, i would dispute the assertion that it is "The United States" that is lacking and not "a distinct subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party have managed to impose one-party rule".

America is not fucked up, Chicago is fucked up, Oakland is fucked up, and Baltimore is... well... Baltimore.

Don't spam threads with LLM output. ChatGPT answers aren't forbidden, if there is some context or purpose to them, but "I was too lazy to write up my thoughts myself so I had ChatGPT do it" is what every lazy college student is doing nowadays. This place is not for lazy college students half-assedly submitting their homework.

I did only use it to get a list of points that add up to a first world QOL.

The actual value add (the strike throughs) and the core point (Luigi's assassination as major anecdote for America's low-trust-society-ness, America feeling like a developing country) are all mine.

But point taken. Not a lot of 'human' places left on the internet. No point in turning this one into a vanilla slop-fest.

PS: and before I get accused for using Chatgpt, this is the first time I've done that. My point-wise markdown writing style is my own. That chat gpt uses the same style is coincidence.

I have surprisingly few feelings about the object level discussion here, but why must you impugn the good name of vanilla?

Vanilla isn't an insult, Vanilla is a sign of absolute victory. Made from the 2nd most expensive spice, vanilla is exquisite. So much so, that we normiefied it. We now have ways to make imitation vanilla and once the inner bean is used, we can still extract by preserving it in alcohol.

English is the most 'vanilla' language, because the Britain/America won. Fries are vanilla sides because nothing is better. Chatgpt's writing style is vanilla, because that exact sentence pattern dominated western speech for a century.

Vanilla becomes an insult, yes. But, that's because it's already won. High quality vanilla bean is genuinely top-tier.

The US does have a European-sized welfare state, has crime rates which are not globally that high, has a high life expectancy and low infant mortality with universal access to emergency medicine(seriously a driver of US healthcare costs is the constitutional right to access emergency medicine and then just not pay it), and has universal access to college education(which, if you’re willing to accept the kinds of conditions college kids have historically lived in, is actually fairly affordable). There’s a housing shortage, but it’s a lot better than other Anglosphere countries.

Crime rates are geographically constrained in the USA rather than an everpresent reality. Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem. The USA has enough space for crime-worried californians to flee to economic centers in texas or florida, while economic activity concentrated in only a few cities filled with racialized criminality limits the options for Europeans.

Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'. The problem is liberals who use disparate impact as a means to castigate their proximate political opponent instead. There is of course the grift of NGOs and the like to extract sympathy from do gooders, but that happens on both sides of the aisle and so its a wash.

Much ink can be spilled about general observations, but the simple fact is that if you don't live near blacks, crime will be a much lower problem

Proximity to black people is not the issue. My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.

Crime rates are geographically constrained, but that constraint is to the above-mentioned subset of urban areas where the Democratic Party has managed to impose one-party rule. IE places like Baltimore, St Louis, Chicago, and Seattle.

My reasonably affluent suburban nieghborhood is easily 20% black and im not worried about my nieghbors.

So is mine, but they're pretty wealthy black people. Many of the older ones moved here to get away from shittier co-ethnics. Even then, though... there's a neighboring town which is also wealthy and also has a considerable number of black people, and the few murders there were disproportionately committed by black people (specifically black men, if it needs to be said), including wealthy ones.

Common regression-to-the-mean W.

I was going to say that it reminds me of how wealthy blacks underperform poor whites (and especially poor Asians) on standardized tests. However, to my pleasant surprise while looking up the previous link, I Noticed that Random Critical Analysis also has a post "Racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics," where he concludes: "Race is a strong predictor of homicide rates at a county level. It predicts better than the poverty rate, median household income, racial segregation, income segregation, education rates, and so on and so forth."

Ah, but does it predict better than percentage of households headed by a woman?

Indeed it does, if we consider the percentage of households headed by women to be equivalent to single motherhood rates.

The literal next sentence after the brief blurb I pasted reads: "The single-motherhood rate is a close second though" (second to % black, in a bivariate correlation table). As shown in Section 3, black remains a significant predictor on top of single motherhood rates; that is, the black effect on homicides is robust net of family poverty and single motherhood rates.

Not that I necessarily believe blacks should be granted "credit" for family poverty and single motherhood rates as to excusing their high homicide rates. Akin to how we wouldn't adjust for homicide rates using battery rates. The same combination of heritable traits such as low IQ, high impulsiveness, and high time preference would result in high family poverty, single motherhood, and homicide rates.

Crime in the US is a disproportionately but not exclusively black problem- US whites have much higher homicide rates than Europe, and indeed higher than Canada. It’s also not the case that crime is a mostly blue state problem- if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states, while there remain many hotspots in other locales.

Red states are disproportionately black, with blue cities in red states blacker than blue cities in blue states. Everytime liberals (so not specifically referring to you) smugly post that red states are stupider and more criminal than blue states they end up shooting themselves in the foot because it goes back to how large the black population is.

The ultimate test of this experiment will be the outcome of St George county in Louisiana after it split from Baton Rouge county. Richer whiter (but still having black residents) zone splits off from failing black county because the whites wanted better schools. With less whites around will the blacker Baton Rouge be free to prosper and flourish without the evils of racism tainting their progress? I posit no, but the anticipation of the upcoming crash is itself part of the journey.

Well yes, Baton Rouge itself does not want St George county to split off for that very reason. And the prototypical blue cities in red states, like Austin and Asheville, are doing at least OK.

Very poor governance associated with extremely large- and often outright majority- black populations is a major problem for these cities; Jackson and St. Louis are not doing well on non-crime related metrics either. Very white red states often do quite well on things like education and crime. But sun belt states maintain high crime rates and rural whites in the south have extremely high crime rates by first world standards- while blacks have a big portion of the blame, there are still other things going on.

if anything, it’s more common in blue cities in red states.

This probably deserves some exploration in itself, but annecdotally there seems to be a flow of bad actors towards places where they will be tolerated, and this is most visible in places where you have an island of "tolerance" in otherwise "intolerant" territory.

There’s probably a confluence of factors, with particularly bad local governance being a factor in lots of cases(Jackson’s water crisis was resolved by the corps of engineers in a matter of hours, but had lasted for weeks with no progress; you don’t get that with even minimal competence from the local authorities). Everything in New Orleans and St. Louis is horribly mismanaged, an adversarial relationship with the state doesn’t help but cant be blamed entirely(Austin seems to do fine despite its frequent and visible fallouts with the state).

Racialized crime is a solvable problem; black people don't like crime either as clearly evinced by their disapproval of 'defund the police'.

I recall polls as such. Perhaps blacks disapprove of "defund the police," insofar as they may imagine themselves as the victims of crime.

However, it's a different story when it comes to blacks being disproportionate perpetrators of crime—blacks are likely not as enthusiastic about law and order when it comes to imagining their brothers, sons, nephews, etc. doing prison time for robbing convenience stores or gas stations, participating in lootings, harassing/assaulting people in subways and other public spaces, beating up Asian and white classmates with their other black friends, punching Asian grandmothers on the street.

I'm not accusing you of this, but I'm not a fan of using the opinions of blacks to subtract/add legitimacy from/to "defund the police"/"law and order". It reinforces the notion that Black Lives Matter More, and has the vibe of DR3. Mainstream conservatives, such as /r/Conservative, are always two-soyjaks-pointing when it comes to blacks being (at least superficially) supportive of things like "law and order," though.

And why does it matter? Until we bite the bullet and actually go into those areas arrest and jail those committing the crimes, they cannot have the save communities, let alone prosperous ones, they say they want. It’s always been a problem for the liberal democratic state — we often know exactly what the problems are, and exactly how to solve them, but because the solutions require short-term pain they can never be implemented. They probably wouldn’t like tge process of law and order policing, they wouldn’t like to see black men going to prison for decades. They will like not having to ask the clerk to unlock the plastic doors so the6 can take groceries off the shelves. They will like not needing bars on their windows. They will love it when the lower crime rates mean businesses choose their neighborhoods to open up shop.

Yeah, if the U.S. has a housing shortage than every country has a housing shortage.

I'm hard pressed to think of any single country where a person can get more square feet per hour of labor than the U.S.

The US does have high life expectancy and low infant mortality though. And most of the issues are caused by obesity not healthcare here in any case. Its not the highest certainly, but that isn't your criteria. Likewise the US does have a fairly robust social safety net, and low crime rates. It also has very little actual poverty. It certainly also has a lot of opportunities for leisure and recreation.

I'm by no means in the top 1% but the US is an excellent place to live.

Just comparing to places I have spent plenty of time in, it's better than the UK, better than France, better than China, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Russia. Maybe the Nordics might beat it, maybe, but I didn't spend enough time in Sweden to assess.

I remembered an article comparing America’s gun crimes rate as the best among developing nations but high for developed nations. Certainly gave me food for thought.

And why should anyone care what a jumped-up matrix multiplier trained on the output of the Internet thinks?

That's a tired argument. For near-consensus topics, Chat-gpt gives acceptable answers. I could've done the legwork and found this exact same points elsewhere, but I ain't doing that for free. So you get Chatgpt.

  • -17

but I ain't doing that for free

You don't have to post if a particular comment would cost you too much effort to be bothered to research and then type up.

And I'm not convinced that the median internet opinion fed into ChatGTP is a consensus view worthy of consideration. They poisoned these poor LLMs with all of reddit, etc. Their "consensus" opinion could be overly online nonsense. How indeed should I thicken my pizza sauce.

fair fair.

I doubt I would trust any actual "consensus" on this topic, I'm certainly not going to trust ChatGPT. If you'd found the points elsewhere, I could tell you exactly why the definition was not to be trusted, but since you used ChatGPT as your authority, there is no authority.

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