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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

It's the reality of most cities in northern Italy, e.g. the one my SO lives in: Reggio Emilia.

If you go out after 7 pm most of the year half the people downtown are immigrants selling drugs, doing petty crime or whistling and annoying women.

I see and live that, and have female family members and friends being assaulted by these people, and they are immigrants.

It's not a matter of skin color, but demographics.

They are young, male, unemployed and from a different culture, they are more prone to decaying and aggressive behavior. But it's a fact, they make the cities less safe and they dominate the stats in petty and violent crimes.

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Reggio Emilia, like pretty much everywhere we refer to as “provincia” (essentially Italy outside Rome and Milan), has never really had much going on after 6 pm. That's certainly not a new phenomenon brought about by drunk immigrants.

Unfortunately, the most powerful men in the world at this point are known to harass and assault women. That doesn't mean it's ok when the powerless do it, but you should be careful about attributing it to their demographics. It's something men need to address globally, not try to scapegoat immigrants for.

One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.

Why have you placed “facts” in quotation marks?

we live in a (post truth) society

The original use of quotation marks in English, before scare quotes came along, was to suggest that the words you're using came from someone else. Fun fact: that's actually why they're called quotation marks.

That's what's going on here. @passive is repeating the word "fact" from the parent comment.

Why is it so hard to admit that there is a cultural (and, by extension, racial) component?

Acknowledging that contradicts liberal ideology, which is the closest thing most people have to religion in modern western society.

It's not merely a bit controversial, it's heresy

Because it's not true in general. You've written a couple of meaningless statements just to signal something.

UPD: looked at your other comments... wow..

If what I write is meaningless why bother reading my other comments?

Because in a large number of cases, people are conflating economic situation with culture or race. And many of these so-called cultural or racial components disappear in the "home" country when you look at people in the middle class and above. Just like violent crime rates drop massively for those same races and cultures in the country they have immigrated to when they gain economic independence.

It's quite possible that high levels of immigration of unskilled or otherwise unemployable people is a bad thing for a country that shouldn't be allowed. That is a very different thing than acting like the reason it is a bad idea is because of their culture or race.

Of course there is one, but what exactly is "immigrant culture"?

That is my problem with the whole thing, all just gets thrown into one bag "immigrants". The women assaulting islamist gets the same label as the homosexual atheist fleeing where they are in charge. (And never mind that the bible contains mostly the same bad passages as the quoran and I never done the numbers, but I assume if we count and plot "muslims killed by non non muslims vs "non muslims killed by muslims" - that number would not match the felt reality)

Why is it so hard to admit that there is a cultural (and, by extension, racial) component?

What does "by extension" mean? Culture is voluntary. You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture. Race is an unsheddable fixed attribute.

Meanwhile, both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups, making discrimination a losing proposition even aside from its inherent immorality.

>both culture and race see more variation within groups than they do between groups

Btw, the premise underlying this fact is a fallacy. It is the norm for population groups, even meaningfully differing ones, to have "more internal variation" than between groups.

There is more variation in height within sexes than between them, but despite this there is still a very (statistically and culturally) significant difference in average height between men and women.

It's even possible for two distributions to be completely separated by a given variable while still having more internal variance.

The fallacy comes into play when you use those characteristics to prejudge individual humans.

Tall women are taller than short men, so if you're hiring a librarian who needs to be able to reach books on a high shelf, you still need to look at the individual. Society as a whole suffers if you run employment ads saying "Women need not apply," so we rightfully deter that.

"You can (and should) walk away from a flawed culture."

To a limited extent as an individual. One can't simply remake the entire world they were born within.

It's our religious belief (or closest thing to it) and overall it's adaptive. It's like asking a Christian why it's so hard to not just admit god isn't real. There aren't many monoculture ethnostates doing great right now and they're pretty much all on the path towards extinction given current fertility rates

Nobody is scapegoating anything.

I'm just stating a fact: the presence of dangerous immigrants in downtown Reggio Emilia or Modena make these cities less safe, especially for women.

Immigrants make less than 10% of the population but account for 52% of small and 74% of violent crime, while sexual harassment reaches almost 90%.

I have been assaulted twice, my SO and her friend have been, and anybody we know has a similar story.

They make locals less prone to go shopping, and as shops close it enforces the vicious cycle of people not going downtown and thus more shops closing.

> One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty, which makes sense, since those who are doing well have more motivation to avoid disturbing the status quo.

What are some of the other "facts" "we" know about? Are you conveniently ignoring the Epstein class and all we've learned?

The most powerful men in the world do not loiter in city centres, which is what the commenter is referring to. It is a common phenomenon across Europe, readily observable, that groups of young men, commonly (but not exclusively) foreign, loiter in loose groups in town and city centres, where they appear to be doing... nothing.

I think the commenter has expanded further on what he or she thinks they ARE doing, I reserve judgement - but this phenomenon is apparent.

That is completely true and fascinates me. If you go to any city centre, train station, etc. in Europe, you will find lots of black people just... doing nothing. They are just there, sitting, perhaps alone, perhaps many of them. They aren't even talking or doing anything, they just stare into the distance. They are part of the scenery. I have no idea what this means, who brought them here, what they actually do (if anything), and who's going to take them away (and when).

>One of the only "facts" we know about crime is that it correlates very closely with poverty

Yes, but be careful about implying that the dominant causation is poverty -> crime. Crime is the best cause of poverty because it makes doing business impossible and forces every actor to make every aspect of their life more and more inefficient in order to protect what they already have. Places like, say, Singapore are case studies in how a crackdown on law and order is all it takes to make a place go from very poor to extremely wealthy in a generation or so.

"is all it takes"? did you watch a 30 second youtube short on singapore and decide this?

Wasn't too long ago people in the US were saying those kinds of things about Italians.

Yeah, we remember. And thanks to the attitude displayed in your comment, these complaints were not taken seriously. until these specific Italians ended up with control of massive illegitimate industries, gambling, and loan sharking, ran protection rackets that victimised and intimidated thousands of legitimate small businesses, and murdered hundreds of innocents.

...which was finally ended by the RICO act; which is almost certainly unconstitutional, but has been allowed to fester b/c the Mob was (so far) worse.

>but has been allowed to fester b/c the Mob was (so far) worse.

It's been allowed to fester because the late 20th century was (so far) the high water mark for societal tolerance of that sort of thing and it hasn't been abused enough since to really see much legal scrutiny.

So people should have been discriminatory against Italians? What are you getting at?

There was always the option to just not let them in in the first place. Many people at the time (HP Lovecraft being an example) thought that Ellis-Island migration into the United States was an existential mistake.

..and in the case of some of those Italians, they were absolutely right.

High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.

>High-trust Anglo civilization is not compatible with the attitude towards civil authority common in the 19th-century Mezzogiorno. It took literal generations to fix.

Waspy paternalism gave us eugenics, multi-generational welfare and plenty of other great stuff so it's not like the alternative is all that much better.

Whataboutism: Is There Anything It Can't Do?

Ah, yes, Italy, where the men are famously very respectful to women and never whistle or catcall...

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