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>Unless it's a NAMBLA flag, I am not going to let a bumper sticker or slogan override my personal experience of a person. Most people are like this. If you hav
by hytdstd 5y ago
>Unless it's a NAMBLA flag, I am not going to let a bumper sticker or slogan override my personal experience of a person. Most people are like this.
If you have lots of personal experiences with a person, that's great. But many people don't have real relationships with their neighbors. Bumper stickers and slogans absolutely will impact such relations, they make first impressions. I certainly wouldn't trust almost-strangers with tons of flat-earth stuff to tutor my kids, would you?
- paisawalla 5y agoIn my experience, conservative and moderate-leaning people do not require a priori confirmation of ideological alignment with a person before they try to know them. Especially if they live next door. In conservative places, where you would expect to find more armed households, you would also see more neighborly relationship in my experience.
- hytdstd 5y agoThat's fantastic. Does this sense of community continue to apply when a black family moves in?
- paisawalla 5y agoThe derangement of liberals knows no end, I see. Just nakedly projecting his own internal reality without a hint of self-awareness. Being brown myself, I promise you that your cherished pet minorities are doing fine in the suburbs. None of us are looking to urban whites as a savior, and you don't need to involve us in your feud with rural whites. Many of the people who I know that are gun owners are black -- they're very neighborly as well!
- hytdstd 5y agoI'm glad your experiences have been good. But that doesn't make it true for the country as a whole. Here's a quote by Former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich: "It's more dangerous to be black in America[...] It's both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story. But it is more dangerous in that you're substantially more likely to end up in a situation where police don't respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it's difficult to appreciate how real that is."
- laverya 5y agoThat's completely unrelated to whether your rural neighbors will be friendly, though. In fact, both things he mentions - crime and police - are going to be primarily experienced in urban, democratic areas by African Americans.
- hytdstd 5y agoAre you suggesting that racism is a predominantly urban phenomenon?
- paisawalla 5y agoRespectfully, you may think you're developing a coherent argument, but you are jumping around between several unrelated points. Does racism exist? Of course. It probably is even higher among rural and suburban individuals, on some kind of self-reported metric. Does it have an appreciable, significantly negative impact on the lives of most non-white people in 2021? The evidence is pretty dubious on this point IMO, but of course it depends on your definition of impactful. Is it related to gun violence? I don't see how.
- hytdstd 5y agoWhat argument? I was literally just asking a question. If you thought I was making some statement about gun violence, I suggest that you calm down and stop reading too much into random comments on the internet.
- paisawalla 5y agoSure, I guess if someone is asking a loaded (and flippant IMO) question, they can be said to be "literally just asking a question." But I'm not sure how seriously to take "I'm not making a comment about gun violence" several comments deep into a thread about gun violence.
- 5y ago