TheBalancingAct

@Skwerilleee Teenage me feels very seen by this comment.

Libertarianism is just 120 IQ people with a strong moral compass projecting their psychology onto everyone else.

@RambleMan51 Hitler was pathetic in other ways, like raving and ranting about how he was betrayed by the German people and moving armies that weren't there, but he did face his death with dignity. That much must be said.

Addressing rebuttals: 1. Commies also aura farmed their own execution. Beria wasn't a dictator. Che did try to bargain for his life but regained composure when faced with certain death. 2. Gaddafi was tortured to death, not a regular execution. 3. Hitler killing himself fits his worldview and denied his enemy the satisfaction of getting him.

This only really applies between the years of 1832 and 1979. It was easy to view Islam as a quaint, vaguely exotic and largely irrelevant thing in those periods because the Islamic world had at that point been effectively been neutered. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling and most of the Islamic world was under European colonial authority. For a long stretch it seemed plausible that Istanbul would be liberated from the Ottomans and that the Arabic world would persist in endless backwater as Christendom expanded across the known world. But that was not always so. Islam was not an exotic intrigue to the European courts of the 17th century, it was a massive and pressing threat that regularly raided their lands, enslaved their people, and threatened to conquer the known world. Fear of Islam (far from irrational) returned to us when Islam gained power again in the wake of decolonization and Islamic terrorism in response to Israel and the US's meddling in the Middle East.

Crazy to consider how much modern Islamophobia was just not a thing until the mid-20th century and arguably the GWOT Islam was usually a niche thing you'd read about to LARP as worldly, much like modern Chinaposting

It did generate enormous capital for the Islamic world however, the latter just squandered it because it failed to innovate and industrialize. European industrialization explains its growth in wealth much more than it does it's slavery. Particularly when you look beyond the top 1%.

The Barbary slave trade enslaved Europeans along the North African coast between roughly 1500 and 1800. It was brutal. It was real. It deserves historical acknowledgment. It did not: Create a hereditary racial caste across generations. Generate the capital that built modern Western economies. Produce a pseudo-scientific ideology defining white people as biologically inferior. Leave structural economic consequences still measurable in wealth gap data today. The suffering was comparable. The systems were not. Comparable suffering does not produce identical historical consequences.

If white people deserve exclusive credit for "ending slavery," then white people built the system, ran the system, defended the system, went to war to preserve the system, and then at the very last moment, after centuries of resistance from the people inside it made it unsustainable, signed the paper. And kept all the credit. That's not a legacy of moral leadership. That's a legacy of owning the pen.

I do try to balance my perspective. Black communities suffer from a lot of the same problems that plague Native communities in Canada and the crime rates are commiserate. And I'm intimately familiar with the latter. One thing that I would say is historically underappreciated as an explanation, is the low rates of land ownership in both communities. Coupled with lack of economic opportunity and societal marginalization, this tends to be, I would say a core feature of how to create a high crime community. There's chicken and egg problems in explaining them. But a lot of it does come down to, unfair land expropriation disproportionately affected blacks in urban development, and well land expropriation is basically the short-form history of Native Americans.

@YRespectfullyK @ward5kwinner @SizweLo I actually appreciate this response.

bell hooks said that White people will meet a Black person who completely challenges every racial stereotype that they have, but rather than giving up the stereotypes, they create a special category for that person and say, things like “Well, you’re not like other Black people”, instead of saying, “My ideas of Black people were too narrow”. This is called “subtyping” and it leads to the survival of negative stereotypes because the new category individual who’s supposedly “not like the others” is mentally isolated from the group. What this shows is that bigotry is all about protecting an existing hierarchy and it doesn’t matter much whether a person is exposed to other people or not. Which is why meeting intelligent, kind, accomplished, or complex Black people does not dismantle prejudice if someone is emotionally invested in keeping the stereotype intact. Exposure to facts and figures doesn’t change the situation either. Someone can know the statistics on crime, education, poverty, or discrimination and still keep racial stereotypes because the stereotype preserves a sense of superiority and avoids confronting historical responsibility. This is part of why bell hooks further argued that racism is emotional and ideological more than just purely ignorant, which is then why facts by themselves usually do not overcome a worldview that a person is motivated to preserve.

I don't know that this is a sufficient answer at the polar extremes. It seems unlikely that lower middle class white communities are better resourced and more stable than the richest black communities. I also doubt that there is much segregation happening in the top 10% of black and white communities in America. But I wouldn't say that it can't be a factor. Much as the mass incarceration of black men has had the knock-on effect of massively increased single motherhood and poverty rates in black communities. One counter to the argument of systemic racism is that the disproportionate rates of black incarceration have increased since the 1960's rather than decreased, as one might expect. Black crime rates and incarceration rates were lower under Jim Crow than they were in the 1990's. Which is the opposite of what any theory based solely in systemic racism ought to show.

@YRespectfullyK @ward5kwinner @SizweLo The answer to that is, systemic racism. Black people are targeted by police & recieve harsher sentencing. Remember, arrests dont always equal actual offenses. High income black people tend to still live in less resourced, & unstable areas than high income whites.

It's land development, short and simple. African American neighborhoods are, because of both the historical impacts of things like redlining and being underserviced, but also due to issues like high crime, typically the cheapest land in an urban area. The incentive to buy and redevelop the land is, by itself a good thing, the problem is the low income people (of all races, this doesn't just happen to black communities) are typically priced out of the new developments and because they are rarely land owners, all they experience is an increase in rent. I don't begrudge anyone mad at gentrification as it is done now. China actually handles this pretty well. Redevelopment projects have to, by law, allow the residents of torn down buildings first right to buy and sell the resulting apartments. Not sure you could square it in America. But it is a clever solution.

@Ma_We_Ay @YRespectfullyK @SizweLo That's how it ends yes, but how does it start? I really doubt there's a coordinated plan of white people to take over a black neighborhood. If there is I've never been invited. It seems more reasonable for it to start out as simply white people moving in and then snowballing

Grok was taking too much time. The long answer is, the primary people killing africans in King Leopold's Congo Free State were fellow Africans. There were practically no Belgians even present in the country. This doesn't, in and of itself, absolve King Leopold II, but it's important context. Leopold only cared about keeping the rubber flowing. It was primarily his African subordinates that committed atrocities to enrich themselves. It's also notable that when the truth of these issues came to light, the Belgians promptly made immediate and drastic changes to their system including taking over control from the King. Not the actions of people callous to indiscriminate murder.

@anythingprintin @grok @Patriotic4Jesus @Joe__Bassey @Grok answer please, but as you do, please provide also who committed the vast majority of the killing, and how many Belgians actually lived in the Congo at the time.

No lies detected…

What do you make of the evidence that black rates of criminality don't normalize to the white American rate even across all income spectrums? Note: I agree, broadly that the primary issues are systemic and cultural (rates of single motherhood in particular), much as Charlie Kirk did.

@ward5kwinner @YRespectfullyK @SizweLo In raw numbers its not true. And even "per capita", Kirk & Fuentes draw the wrong conclusion. They will say that means the issue is our race & culture. That's racist. In reality, the issue is socioeconomic, under resourced neighborhoods, & lack of jobs. Redlining plays into this

That is not correct. Neither of those claims are correct. Or I should say the first one is only partially correct. The African slave trade, within Africa is prehistoric. The Trans-Saharan slave trade predates it by 900 years. The Indian Ocean triangle is even older than that. It is true, however, that the codified nature of racial caste-based slavery did originate in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Though, this has less to do with Europeans being especially villainous than it does that the various Muslim Empires that predated them readily enslaved people of all races in the same horrific conditions. But! It should be noted that Muhammed himself viewed black slaves as inferior to white ones, famously trading them two for one.

@BardofLagrandil Christian countries started African or color based slavery so 'eliminated' would be no badge of honor, Christians have murdered more people than any group that has ev er existed.

He did. Christians countries gradually eliminated slavery and we were the only ones in the world to do so

A Catholic man and woman, who went viral after a proposal during the Chartres Catholic pilgrimage last year, are now set to be married in three months. He brought a record number of young Swedes—including former atheists—to the pilgrimage from Sweden last year. Info: Boulevard Voltaire

Remember: the Bukele option is the gentle, civilised option. You lock up 1 in 100 people, you transform your country. Then there's the medieval option: You kill 1 in 100 people, you transform your country. This is the choice for all serious rulers in the 21st century.

Ghengis Khan exterminated as much as 10% of the world's population under a single reign and conquered a more than a third of the old world. Though I don't consider him the worst human, just a savage conqueror. I would rank someone like Pol Pot or Mao Zedong or even Ranavalona of Madagascar as the most awful human beings of all time. Muhammed, of course, but his inhumanities were quite localized historically. It was his followers that truly became vile. A lot of this, is, ironically, because most leftists are fed a steady diet of eurocentric historical criticism. They're mostly ignorant of history outside the narrow band of European colonialism.

"The worst people in history were White" Lefty reveals his intense bias in colonialism debate

@ward5kwinner @Ma_We_Ay @SizweLo That's a fascinating claim that I haven't actually seen in evidence before. It would certainly point to, if nothing less, negative impressions of majority black communities.

@YRespectfullyK @Ma_We_Ay @SizweLo Honestly once I realized how willing people are to pay to avoid black people, something that can be clearly observed with Zillow and an ethnicity map side by side, I haven't been the same since.

It depends on the source for certain. At any rate. You still get the picture that the numbers are correct for homicide specifically. Of course, it's also important to remember the primary victims of black murderers are other black people. They are proportionally much more likely to be victims of murder than any other race as well. It speaks to broad challenges that face African American communities on both sides.

@ward5kwinner @Ma_We_Ay @SizweLo Although. On second look. Something is off here with the lack of Hispanic numbers (who are also overrepresented but by a smaller ratio). I'm going to search for a better source.

@ward5kwinner @Ma_We_Ay @SizweLo This graph is helpful. Though not measuring the same thing. This is rate per 100.

@ward5kwinner @Ma_We_Ay @SizweLo Depends on which statistics you look at (and when of course). In overall crime the overrepresentation is smaller. But in homicides specifically Charlie Kirk is correct.