Then I looked for the link to support my argument. OMG, statista says that the violence rate is skyrocketing since 2015, at least in England and Wales. This is not the case for other Western European countries.
Quite interesting! I try not to interprete these numbers, because I don't know the reasons behind them.
It is in some of them like Sweden for example.
Sweden is well known for having high levels of this other factor right now, so your observation about violent crime is not surprising.
Keep your dog whistle and racism out of here.
[0] https://amp.theguardian.com/law/2017/sep/25/oxford-student-l...
Also, private observation : Poland was relatively safe country during communist rule, although everyone was very poor. Then '90s happened, income disparity went through the roof, unemployment skyrocketed, and you could be greeted on the street by a group of young gentlemen asking you for your possessions, not to mention extreme gang violence and fights between hooligans.
I also simply don’t understand what you’re implying from your comment - that being poor explains attempts at murder? I don’t believe that. I think it’s not having the right morals and culture, and those root causes should be discussed honestly even if it is uncomfortable.
How else is a person supposed to interpret these words of yours? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41076775
>>> You’re talking about poverty, right? Because that’s what the driver in knife crime is in the UK.
What is the other interpretation you had in mind? Why not simply say it?
So long as we're objective about this and leave tabloid mentality for Reddit and Twitter (...ok, X)
Of course, I’m an immigrant, so…_shrug_
If you (or anybody, really) files a charge with the police you can bet good money on the fact that it enters the statistics. For all the faults of modern bureaucracy, being sloppy is not one of them. They may be ineffectual but the paperwork is in order!
It would be an exaggeration to say that Britain has descended into lawlessness, but not a vast exaggeration. A great deal of crime is simply being ignored, because there aren't the resources in the system to investigate or prosecute it.
The problem at the core is that we rapidly went from high-trust societies where you could literally leave your door unlocked or even open so the cat could have free dominance over the local bird population and nothing would happen to a low/zero-trust society where you have to fear even a locked door isn't a guarantee that some crackhead didn't break in to get something to pawn for their next hit.
And to be very clear: more police, deporting migrants or whatnot else that conservatives/far right reliably preach as a "solution" will not help, because the root cause is widespread poverty and income and wealth inequality, nothing else.
That sounds like article of faith. The GP is speaking about the UK - wasn't it always a very socially stratified society? What about other poorer European countries? In a cross-border comparison, there is no obvious strong correlation between the parameters you mention and violent crime, how could there be a causal relationship then?
And if we limit ourselves to the US, what about crime development in time? It certainly didn't rise and fall in lockstep with poverty, income and wealth inequality, not even in the last decades.
My grandpa grew up without electricity in his home, seven people in a single wooden hut. He was always a kind old man, even though a bit of a drunkard.
Poverty does tend to correlate to crime, but poverty never exists in a vacuum. Population density probably has a greater bearing on crime, and poverty and population tend to go hand in hand in metropolitan areas.
If you have an area that is poor but has few people, there'll probably be less crime, as less people means it's easier to track each person socially, and thus there's more accountability.
I'm sure there are studies that show optimal 'tribe' sizes, and I know from experience how different orgs can be from small teams to large teams, so it stands to reason that the key driver is probably population density.
we have to differentiate between 'low level' crime and 'high level' crime, e.g. fraud, financial crime, all of those super-rich organised crime
From WW1 until about 1975, no it was getting less stratified. The upper classes famously had to relinquish their country houses because they couldn't afford to maintain them and the middle classes grew.
It wasn't until neoliberalism took a foothold under Thatcher that social stratification started to grow again.
It got way worse during the Thatcher years and especially following them, with the formerly mighty heavy industry all but collapsing, and the Brexiteers made heavy bank on that. The aftershock of first Covid and then Ukraine with the gas price and general inflation was yet another heavy blow.
Knifings are still pretty rare here. I have met and lived with plenty of poor people and mere material precariousness won't remake one into a callous psychopath who behaves like a violent predator.
Drugs will, though. Frying the brain, as they say.
The approach that does: https://www.svru.co.uk/ / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_Reduction_Unit
You need both carrot and stick, and you need the police to target people who are doing crime and not target people who are not doing crime.
Media distortion driving fear is a whole other category of problem.
If we go out to rural areas, we'll probably find more neighbourly behaviour than we will in inner cities. Poverty, population density, economic status, and more. These all play a factor.
And I'm pretty sure this perfectly correlates with poverty. Both parents working means the kids are at home without supervision and with unlimited access to the TV and streaming services. In my childhood, it was still pretty easy to see that zombies were a movie invention, but with modern CGI, I can't tell the difference anymore.
Yes, graphics were worse when we grew up (assuming same rough age) but we still looked at them and said "Wow so realistic!" so I don't think that the issue is that people now see realistic zombie films and think, great, I'll go stab someone on the bus for disagreeing with me.
I think its more the case that people are living in dangerous neighbourhoods, so they carry a knife for protection and are amped up ready to use it and so at the first sign of confrontation, they do. What used to be a fist fight is now a knife fight. What used to be a sore head is now a dead body.
But, I do agree with the poverty link. I grew up in poverty, I saw the lifestyle, the way people act, the way they aren't raised by their parents. It's been this way for thousands of years. It'll never change.
So we evolved to create a device / technology that creates expectations and an environment that are entirely counter to our evolutionary upbringing?
We now expect to stop what is impossible to stop (i.e., life)?
And we can't stop ourselves to stop wanting to stop that thing (again, life)?
And we've normalized and culturalized all this to the point that we blame the device and anyone but ourselves for our own decisions and actions?
Surveillance Capitalism... is a certified success.
p.s..Parents have / did care. But they generally didn't feed an unhealthy paradigm. They had a reasonable sense of what mattered, when, and why. Their foundation was trust, not fear; and often they had faith (which is something the paradigm has convinced so many they don't need).
Death was around, from time to time some kid would die - hit by car, fell down something, got sick etc. If anything parents were more resistant to suffering, just sucked it up and moved, they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude. They also didn't know that well to talk about their emotions or even process them effectively, so just bottled them up and continued.
Its up to each of us to create for our kids environments we want them to raise in. You are a control freak or helicopter parent? Well there will be consequences. You run in cca full trust mode with your kids and just manage things like healthy food, tons of physical activities, a lot of time spent in wild nature and let them figure the rest? They can have it too, but some trust into them not killing themselves is required. You don't like the place you live in? Change it if you can or leave it otherwise, world is big and plenty of good places to spend rest of your life in.
> they didn't have this 'every life is precious' attitude
> Previous generation didn't care
Allow me to make one small change then
- Previous generation didn't care
+ Previous generation didn't care as muchIf that method of handling their emotions made them more resilient to hardship, then maybe it was the correct way after all.
I think that, as a not yet fully developed adult, you weren't exactly noticing that they did care.[1]
Think about it this way: remember all those times they stopped you from doing something stupid that would have hurt yourself? Yeah - that was them caring for your wellbeing.
[1] Fair enough, you say 'seemed to not care' and not 'did not care'
As it says, 'phones stop that [trusting everything is ok] from happening. Instead of getting accustomed to being out of touch for a while, now we are always able to be in touch.'
But I think at the same time, we're all so aware of the fragility of life so much more. My parent's generation seemed to not care at all, trusting that bad things can't happen to us. My generation, I feel, are aware that they can, and do. So we try to optimise to avoid it, to mitigate it, reduce the attack vectors.
Is the world different now too? In the UK, you're never far from someone with a knife and an attitude problem. You know not to argue or protest, to intervene or become involved in anything, for fear of someone with a 'zombie' knife attacking you, and the problem is kids are more mixed, not yet sorted into their social bands as we adults are. So your nice to do child might be mixing with a zombie knife carrier which increases the probability that something could go horrible wrong.
And the above is just one example of how people are thinking ahead, but multiply this by several different potential areas of concern and yes, you have a parent that worries.
But was it better to have parents that didn't seem to care?