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176 sats \ 28 replies \ @didiplaywell 19h \ on: How safe do you feel in America? AskSN
Trust me, you are safe in the US. God forbid you ever get the Argentinean experience of living in fear every single day. The fear of not knowing if you're going to make it back home from work, or if you are even going to find your home as you left it. Getting back to a fully empty house is normal. And hoppeles: you will never recover what's stolen. Stealing is practically legal. Trying to get your stuff back is practically illegal, and god forbid you find the one who did it, because you're going to have to move to another city, which is the norm, and what the police itself will kindly advise you to do.
I'm not exaggerating in the least. When Iran started to bomb Israel some months ago, hundreds of videos went viral here of Argentinians who emigrated to Israel who where calming down their relatives saying that they felt pretty secure and actually feared more for their relatives back in Argentina.
I would go to live in the US right now, just like it is right now.
That said, the way to keep the standard high is to worry whenever it's felt it's getting lower, so keep it that way. Just don't lose the reference of where you're at.
There are definitely some Democrat-run cities that are trending in the Argentinian direction (as you described it, I had no idea it was like that), but I've felt perfectly safe almost everywhere I've ever been in America and I've been to every part of the country. Until very recently I mostly lived in low income areas, too.
Even in the most dangerous cities, the crime is usually (historically) isolated to very small areas that are very easy to avoid.
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so basically, stay away from the Hood type situation?
how about school shootings and random acts that seem to keep happening?
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There are hundreds of millions of people here. All kinds of crazy shit happens, but that doesn't make it common.
I think there's only one county in America that's ever had more than two mass shootings (it's in the Denver area and has had 3). There are more than 3000 counties in this country and almost all of them have never had a single mass shooting.
In grad school, I was trying to do a research project about mass shootings and there were so few that it was really difficult to do any kind of statistical analysis.
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i mean, it is way more common in the US than seemingly anywhere else though (shool shootings, not always mass school shootings).
I don't give it a ton of thought, since you know, i'm not there, but asked chatgpt:
-Using the K-12 School Shooting Database (very broad: gun brandished/fired or bullet hits school property), there were ≈1,468 incidents in the past decade, a ~324% jump vs. the prior decade.
Other trackers use stricter definitions and get much smaller counts (e.g., Everytown’s “gunfire on school grounds,” Education Week’s K-12 list, and the Washington Post’s database). They all agree the trend rose sharply in recent years. -
Then i asked what other countries rank in the school shooting list and it gave me this
*There isn’t a single, reliable global database with apples-to-apples rates. The best-known cross-country snapshot (CNN’s compilation Jan-2009→May-2018; incidents with ≥1 person shot) shows the U.S. far ahead and the next countries a tiny fraction of that:
United States — 288
Mexico — 8
South Africa — 6
Pakistan — 4
Nigeria — 4
could still be an interesting research project i think
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Notice that CNN is including "gun brandished", which is not a shooting. These metrics are really tricky when you start parsing them and it doesn't help that many outlets are intentionally misleading in how they report them.
There are a lot of gang related incidents on or near school grounds in the kinds of neighborhoods I said needed to be avoided. Most researchers don't include those as mass shootings, though, and they only count them as school shootings if they happen during school hours with targets in the student population.
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If there's one thing that, as a social scientist, I'd like to communicate to the world, it's this:
Sociological data has to be collected and produced by someone, and the entity producing it is often not a neutral scientific observer. It is usually either a government agency or an interested third party. Moreover, different jurisdictions tend to have different data collection procedures, making cross country comparisons difficult
That's not to say you should distrust every report using sociological data, but it does mean that you should always have in the back of your mind how these statistics were collected and produced. It's often harder than you think to collect an accurate picture of what's going on.
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There are definitely some Democrat-run cities that are trending in the Argentinian direction
Could you name some?
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LA, DC, SF, Seattle, Chicago, St. Louis, Baltimore, NYC, Milwaukee... The list of exceptions would probably be shorter, if we're just talking about major metro areas.
Not enforcing property crimes has become a common practice in many cities and property owners have to put up with lots of theft and trespassing.
The odds of getting your property back has always been very low.
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I was thinking of metro areas, so Oakland would fall under SF.
My understanding is that theft below something like $500 was basically not being enforced anymore as a matter of policy.
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Fair.
My understanding is that theft below something like $500 was basically not being enforced anymore as a matter of policy.
True. I visited SF in 2020 and recently. It has improved dramatically. I still think their policies are nuts but they hopefully already hit bottom.
Oakland is still a hell hole. It wasn't always this bad.
I don't cheer for the fall of these places as some do. That's poisonous thinking to me.
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I was in San Francisco back during the Bush years and loved it. When I went back more than a decade later, it was definitely a lot sketchier and dirtier. Berkley was still beautiful, though, although I've heard that it went way downhill.
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JUST IN - Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin Tyler Robinson lived with his transgender partner, who is now cooperating with the authorities.
Read more: https://www.disclose.tv/id/6mnyku3526/
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I'm not sure there's much left to learn, but we'll see.
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Just to clarify: This is happening exclusively in the Democrat-run cities? Are Republican-run cities oases of safety then? And how is it in Boston area (I am traveling there soon)?
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What major cities have been historically run by Republicans? I'm not aware of any.
I'm not familiar with Boston, in that I have few personal acquaintances there and have never been there myself. I don't associate Boston with being particularly troubled, just from what I've read and listened to.
As I said in my initial comment, I think pretty much everywhere in America is reasonably safe. You just have to avoid small sections of certain cities. I'm sure you'll be fine on your visit.
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I think pretty much everywhere in America is reasonably safe. You just have to avoid small sections of certain cities.
I think that except for Japan and South Korea (that feel incredibly safe) this part applies to pretty much every place in every developed country.
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That’s been my experience too. It’s also been my experience in the Caribbean and Central America.
The vast majority of humans just aren’t inclined towards violence.
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If that’s the case, the Democrat party should be dissolved and the politicians imprisoned. This is like watching a Soviet coup from a hundred years ago live. It’s scary to be honest.
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They're being investigated right now. The problem is that there's no neutral way to do this and not have it look like it's just Republicans weaponizing the legal system.
Once people become locked into their tribes, they lose the ability to believe criticism from the outside.
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All the cities are run by Democrats
I can't think of a single city run by Republicans
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I’m specifically referring to the major cities that have been exclusively run by Democrats for decades.
Some cities occasionally elect non-Democrats and that puts some pressure on the local Democrats politicians.
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i mean, where I'm at is crazy safe, but it's all about perspective i suppose.
Is Argentina really that fucked?
I mean i'm used to hearing about inflation and things from there, but never looked much into other aspects, have you seen any improvements at all under Mile?
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You got it backwards. Everywhere is a shithole by default. You're living in one of the few places that might be not one, albeith superficially.
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