Hacker News Reader

Comment by BigTTYGothGF | Hacker News Reader

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?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com