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I did, still have property there in fact, and hope to return someday, but no time soon. What you are saying is absolutely correct. Crime is rampant and goes com

I did, still have property there in fact, and hope to return someday, but no time soon. What you are saying is absolutely correct. Crime is rampant and goes completely unreported, due to some mix of people being desensitized and the feeling of futility it has. Every time you go out you’re quite likely to have or at least witness some kind “incident”. Maybe a guy lunging at an elderly Asian woman, perhaps a man riding around in circles in the middle of Houston in a stolen Citibike wielding a wooden club at people passing by, or quite possibly someone walking by drops their shoulder and tries to shove you for absolutely no reason. That’s the baseline, constant menacing, aggression of drug addled lowlifes with everyone just pretending nothing is happening. If this boils over into some kind of more significant incident maybe people will pull out their phones and record it for social media, but nobody is filing a police report. I travel quite a lot, visiting around 20 countries a year, often staying for weeks or even months in different cities around the world. I haven’t seen this kind of behavior anywhere else outside the US or Canada. Not even in quite “dangerous” cities in Latin America (I did see one guy try to rob someone on a bus, the other passengers beat him, stripped him naked, and the driver slowed down and opened the door while they threw him out onto the street), nothing like this in Asia, and definitely not anywhere in Europe. Something is seriously wrong in US culture. Personally I think it’s the amount of drugs Americans consume.

aikinai 2y ago
I was with you until you said this doesn’t happen in other countries. There are some countries (e.g. Japan, Singapore) where it doesn’t happen, but it certainly does in major European cities. There’s you way you can say London, for example, is that different from New York.
- throw__away7391 2y ago
  London in particular is a great example because the two cities are similar in many ways. London for sure has its share of junkies and hooligans, and I even hear people complaining about it using almost word for word identical language, but the magnitude and pervasiveness is completely different. Especially riding the tube vs the NYC subway is a completely different experience most of the time and I don’t get the feeling in London that the inmates are running the asylum that NYC has gotten over the past few years. Same story walking the streets in the west end vs lower Manhattan, sure you’ve got the phone snatchers on e-bikes now that constantly make the news and there’s random deranged people, but it’s less common for one, but more importantly it hasn’t crossed the threshold where it’s been normalized and people are desensitized, so even in these cases people are less brazen, less aggressive. London today feels more like NYC did in 2019, before it passed the tipping point. Even there I think its a lot more tranquil than NYC was back then, but at least the city hadn’t been surrendered as it is now.

aikinai 2y ago

I was with you until you said this doesn’t happen in other countries. There are some countries (e.g. Japan, Singapore) where it doesn’t happen, but it certainly does in major European cities. There’s you way you can say London, for example, is that different from New York.

throw__away7391 2y ago
London in particular is a great example because the two cities are similar in many ways. London for sure has its share of junkies and hooligans, and I even hear people complaining about it using almost word for word identical language, but the magnitude and pervasiveness is completely different. Especially riding the tube vs the NYC subway is a completely different experience most of the time and I don’t get the feeling in London that the inmates are running the asylum that NYC has gotten over the past few years. Same story walking the streets in the west end vs lower Manhattan, sure you’ve got the phone snatchers on e-bikes now that constantly make the news and there’s random deranged people, but it’s less common for one, but more importantly it hasn’t crossed the threshold where it’s been normalized and people are desensitized, so even in these cases people are less brazen, less aggressive. London today feels more like NYC did in 2019, before it passed the tipping point. Even there I think its a lot more tranquil than NYC was back then, but at least the city hadn’t been surrendered as it is now.