Originally Posted By: Tempest
You are describing one of the largest fallacies in county by country reporting. These statistics assume a perfect homogeneity of people and uniformity of location. This is of course totally incorrect.
Point taken; but the dynamic - socio-economically and demographically - between the differing areas/ neighbourhoods/ districts of any nation effectively render any comparative statistical analysis of these apples and those oranges moot, if this is the case. Nations whose rates of this crime or that crime or whose economies are indexed in this way or that still have, in lesser or sometimes greater ways, disparate classes of have's and have-not's. Many European nations (not to mention Canada) are as immigrant-laden as the U.S. and I am told a few even have places nearly as barren as Detroit. To that end, of course, Zurich and Compton could not be less similar! So *point taken*.
I've been to a good few international big cities; and although they admittedly do not suffer in the same way as American rust belt cities suffer things urban blight/ flight-of-the-affluent-to-the-suburbs and the ensuing erosion of inner-city tax bases, etc. there is still not the violence. People are packed more tightly with less affluence and less opportunity; yet there pervades still an overarching respect for human life!
This is only my personal observation, and carries no implication of factual or statistical merit: The U.S., being the most wealthy and powerful nation in history (thanks to violence plus abundant resources) has attracted the most ambitious, greedy, industrious, hard-working, materialistic people from all over the earth for years and years and years. Why do they come? Why did the first ones come and every one after that come? For opportunity and individual freedom. Over generations and generations it has become by far the most culturally individualist nations on earth, populated by those who came to compete for a slice of the pie; mostly due to the *lack* of necessity of the community that less affluent nations are still forced into by circumstances. This rugged individualism, I believe, is a natural forbearer to a culture of violence. I have seen many people comment on these boards that it is perfectly acceptable to shoot (and injure of even kill) someone who is attempting to steal your stuff. Your *stuff*. Again, this is just my observations, but I think that such a concentration on the adversarial nature of competition for artificially-limited resources, consumerism and individualism can twist the minds of some and, as a broader stroke, lessen the respect for the sacredness of human life. I think that for every "x" number of people who do what they're supposed to do and work hard and live decent lives there are going to be "y" number of people who finds themselves isolated on the fringes of society. This isolation, over time, does terrible things to people.
That is the most bizarre thing.
