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by pcthrowaway 1177 days ago
It.. sounds like you are hinting that you think the violence is caused by a specific ethnicity of people? Because if you're not, it'd be good to make that clear. Maybe you're saying it's a result of imported cultural values that encourages violence?

Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.

My own belief is that its some combination of:

- Extreme wealth inequality

- High cost of living

- High incidence of poverty (relative to the aforementioned cost of living)

- Poor social safety net

- Poor community cohesion and trust

- Individualistic cultural attitudes (as opposed to collectivist cultural attitudes)

- Poor public protection

- Easy access to drugs (including alcohol)

I think the drugs just become a symptom of the problem; people get addicted because they are suffering (see rat park). They develop antisocial behaviours, which reduces community cohesion and trust. The city then becomes less happy overall, and it becomes a cycle

1 comments

> Also, your list doesn't mean some combination of those things can't result in worsening incidence of violent crime.

When kicked out of the front door, try to come back through the backdoor?

You can create convoluted science that a combination of those factors leads to violence. Since it’s a combination, it’s even less provable, a correlation doesn’t cause causation, and I’ll keep finding counter examples, to which you will find even more convoluted reasons.

But there is a much, much simpler hypothesis, and for my part it explains the world with accuracy and predictability. What defines a science is its ability to predict the future based on some inputs.

So, my stance is to never make a decision based on prejudice, which is satisfying in terms of humanism, but don’t forget that people will reliably get killed, mugged and raped, and in quantity, if you don’t watch out for the thing-I’ll-not-say which was ever predictable. And it’s both our responsibility to put our family out of harm’s way, and an incredible feat of the XXIth century that we’re feeding our own relatives into a crime machine that reliably gets them killed or raped.

Speaking from experience. But everyone who has a grave opinion on this topic has, someday, seen a relative crossing the path of those people.