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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31827 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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it's not about GDP numbers, or even general economic strength. More generally, Euro-elitists smugly enjoy a sense of superiority over things like crime, urbanism, healthcare, which isn't really directly related to GDP growth, and more about systemic factors directly rooted in US life—not easily gotten rid of with a bigger economy.

Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism. That's the preferred way to explain disproportionate shares of black criminality in society. Hence the implication that white Americans are in effect partly to blame for this state of affairs due to their past and present sins.

It's not even elitism that's intelligent, which would be arguing that the US should police violent people more harshly without regard to race, so it comes across as fairly meaningless. Europe's lower crime rates are an accident of history (few imported slaves) rather than an inherently superior system.

So my contention is that even in areas where there are reasons for Europeans to be objectively smug over Americans, the way it's done is often incoherent and displays ignorance of the root causes of US dysfunction, such as crime in this instance.

As for healthcare, that is partially about income too. While I am no expert on healthcare, I think the meme that a large proportion of Americans are just one paycheck away from medically-induce bankruptcy has been disproven countless times yet it keeps resurrecting itself. I'm not sold on the idea that Europeans have better healthcare than Americans. If you look at the amount of innovation in the US healthcare system, nowhere in Europe does there seem to be any equivalent. Perhaps only Switzerland comes close in per capita.

Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism.

Nah, the narrative is more often about guns.

You do know that American white homicide rates are sky-high by European standards?

Not really. Lithuania is nearly twice the level of white Americans. US white numbers are above the EU median but nothing unheard of, and certainly not "sky high".

Isn’t Lithuania’s murder rate an outlier in the EU? I agree that sky-high might be a bit of an exaggeration, but US white homicide rates would be shocking in most of Europe.

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