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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23014 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 16, 2024

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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).

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