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I think it would also be fair to say that the US has moved to the right. Part of this was because of failures on the left but I also say Musks buying twitter was a big boost and COVID had a great deal of just be nice to the crazies thru the pandemic. It’s not just Motte going right. Maybe I’m in a bubble but I’m basically expecting as close to a landslide for Trump as possible for tribal America.
A second point for violent crime isn’t a real risks is it negates all of the costs society bares to mitigate violence in the US. We spend a lot of money on prisons. And a lot of money trying to boost black schools. Chicago’s economics would be a lot different without these costs. You also would not have had the ghettoization of the southside of Chicago. More urbanization does increase agglomeration effects. If America never had slavery I am fairly certain we would have universal health care. I don’t know if on net this would be a good thing because I think we would be less FU capitalist which probably hurts growth in other ways. Without black people American politics would be a lot more like Canada, but a super power.
Violent crime is the biggest converter from lib to con because it disproportionately affects affluent urban liberals (who are more likely to live in big cities, donate to political parties, be involved in politics, be involved in media etc).
If you live in a distant outer suburb of Dallas or Phoenix it’s unlikely that the Summer of Floyd had much personal effect on your neighborhood, which had no homeless people or significant crime before and after 2020.
If you live in Manhattan, or Georgetown, or Santa Monica, or the Mission, or in the Loop, you will 100% have seen a significant decline in the ‘social fabric’ / urban quality of life since 2020. There are many reasons for Reagan’s landslide victories but a part of them were that rich urban Democrats had gotten very fucking tired of decay. Sure, Mondale still won NYC (although not the state), but Reagan got 40% of the vote in the city.
Even in Manhattan Reagan got close to 30%, Donald Trump got 9%. And Reagan wasn’t merely charting the decline of the GOP in NYC; he got like 50% more of the vote in Manhattan than the several previous Republican candidates. And that discounts the big shifts the Dems made on crime too.
Hanania has written about this, but big cities becoming shitholes is one of the surest ways to shift the country to the right.
I am in Argentina now for a bit. And being here makes me more racists. Salaries are down like 20% in a few months in real terms and farther away from where I am at I am fairly certain there is real poverty. Yet things feel chill and feel safe. I see far fewer cops than I would in any major city in the states. In the states I have had lunch with literal army vehicles and national guard on the street corners. It keeps making me think is this what society would be like in a 100% European ancestry country.
From a HBD perspective it seems safe to say Italians have proven themselves to be incapable of managing a central bank.
Where are you seeing this? It's not at all common in the US, excepting major disasters where the National Guard gets called out. Admittedly, New York sees the state of the subway as such a disaster currently, but my American sensibilities are always thrown when I've come across gendarmerie in Europe: our cops mostly don't dress in camo or bring out long guns unless they're actively using them. But uniformed soldiers patrolling airports and tourist hotspots is common in other First World countries I've been to.
Honestly, that was a bit of a culture shock when I went there; I wasn't expecting to see someone standing around with a rifle at what I'd consider low-ready in the tube stations or just casually walking around, but the English and the French (at least; I'm pretty sure this is normal for everywhere inland) are armed to the fucking teeth. Some of them are subtle, like "this person isn't distinguishable from a normal guard, but the gun she's carrying was never made only in semi-auto... so what the fuck's so important back there?".
It's kind of disingenuous to say "yeah, British cops don't have guns" to New World audiences, because New World countries don't have soldiers on the streets whereas they're so common in Old World countries that their residents find it completely beneath notice.
Maybe I draw more of a distinction on the presence of pistols vs. rifles; pistols are defensive weapons that aren't front and center in any interaction you have with someone carrying one (there's an assumed continuum of escalation there where the cop has to pull it out first), rifles are very much not (they can't be carried in as neutral a manner). Serve and protect vs. seek and destroy.
In the British police, firearms units are seen as a plum job because you don’t have to spend as much time dealing with the public and doing shitty regular policing. In London there are hundreds (if major event) or dozens of police who sit around in vans with machine guns 24/7 so that in the event of a ‘marauding firearms’ (the official term) terror attack they can have a sub-7-minute response time for a unit whose entire training revolves around killing terrorists.
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Honestly it’s a totally different mentality. In the vast majority of the USA I can walk around with a pistol on my hip after a greater or lesser degree of paperwork; the same thing the cops carry quite literally if I desired to do so. We’re simply much less used to the idea that the cops are armed and we aren’t- sure, the police have ar-15s and shotguns in their squad cars and there’s special squads with machine guns, but when you see police working security or standing about on the street they’re usually not much more heavily armed than the civilians can theoretically be.
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It's more remind and dissuade.
With one very notable exception, public violence in the US and Canada tends to be criminal rather than terroristic, and when it's terroristic, it's usually a lone wolf. At least for now (until cartel or jihadist violence significantly rises), criminals and criminal organisations there are not exactly geared for high level violence. And for those organisations, public violence is not a smart solution anyway, it attracts too much attention and it's bad for business. Cops with pistols are plenty enough to intimidate them into avoiding public violence. And while lone wolves can buy fancy weapons and equipment in the US, they're by the nature of being "lone" wolves, immediately outnumbered as soon as two cops or armed civilians show up. Europe has more of a problem with jihadist groups with international funding and sometimes high end equipment, a disregard for their own lives and a mission that makes public violence a goal in itself rather than an unfortunate detour to another end. A group of 5-10 of them can outgun and outnumber the police on the scene for enough time to do a lot of damage. These people are not intimidated by a cop with a holstered pistol, they need to be reminded that the country they're thinking of attacking has a military, and that this military is close enough to respond quickly.
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