Mexican Newspaper Shuts Down, Saying It Is Too Dangerous to Continue | Hacker News Reader

Mexican Newspaper Shuts Down, Saying It Is Too Dangerous to Continue

nytimes.com

769 pointsschoen413 comments

I truly love the country of México - I have spent a large periods of time there for the climate, as a place to work and have a wonderful life, away from the chills of winter. I often thought about making a permanent relocation, but this terror is too real and I found myself living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger, and the fear of speaking your mind weighs on you after a while. I am saddened because the people, the food, the weather, the architecture (particularly D.F.) makes for a crazy, exciting mix where the wealth and treasure of history and (deserved) national pride contrasts with poverty and the political and social conservatism that goes alongside. México: may things improve for you, though I really have no idea how that will happen.

> I truly love the country of México [...] but this terror is too real and I found myself living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger

To be fair with Mexico, those issues don't affect the whole country. Mexico City is pretty safe for example.

If you want to travel to Mexico, here is a list of states and cities to avoid: https://travel.state.gov/content/passports/en/alertswarnings...

My friends are thinkers and challengers of the system: it's for them I am more worried, that they can't speak freely. I could move to Condesa and live a protected life, but that's just colonialism (using my spending power to put a cocoon around me with Uber and private parties). That's not the México I'm interested in. I've also been mugged rather violently there anyway on Calle Amsterdam, (though no worse than Barcelona for example, being in the wrong place or time) and I've had Mexican friends sitting in traffic going to work, having a gun pulled on them for their wallet.

I'm not really sure how safe Mexico City really is, once you get out of the ex-pat bubble.

Almost hard to believe that you could have gotten mugged in that part of DF. But maybe at night?

My very limited experience with Mexico City is that I'd treat it like many U.S. cities: it's fine, if you know which areas to avoid after dark, and which areas to avoid entirely. It is not like a safe European city center where you can go almost anywhere alone on foot at any time of day. But most U.S. cities don't fit that description either. And it's not at the other extreme that some people imagine, some kind of Somalia-esque set of private compounds separated by lawless warzones.

Maybe I was lucky, but I never felt in danger in major US cities walking literally everywhere. While in D.F. I had some anxiety outside of central roads.

It's hard to give some objective analysis, but I don't personally feel safe walking alone at night in large areas of NYC, Baltimore, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit, St Louis, Miami, etc.

What parts of NYC?

Most of the Bronx, about half of Queens, about 1/3 of Brooklyn. Manhattan is mostly gentrified these days, with only a handful of exceptions. Staten Island is odd b/c it is barely walkable to begin with, so it's neither safe nor dangerous to walk.

To be fair, unless you live in the hood in the Bronx or Brooklyn, why would you be walking around alone at night anyway?

Also... in which parts of Queens did you feel unsafe? Queens is actually quite safe.

Everything is relative to what you're used to I guess. I'm from a Canadian suburb, where a 16 years old girl who got attacked in a dark alley at 3:30 am while alone made the news for 3 months because that was the worse thing that had happened in decades.

Now I'm in Boston, in a heavily gentrified area, and I'm scared shitless after 11 pm. People all tell me it's a super safe area, but I know a few people who got mugged a few blocks away in various occasions.

Maybe it's just bad luck. Maybe compared to other areas, a few people getting their backpack stolen is nothing. But feelings are not always rationals. I don't feel safe here.

I wouldn't want to walk around Washington Heights in Manhattan alone at night; I didn't feel terribly safe there during the daytime.

The Bronx is not a terribly safe place either.

Sure, downtown/midtown Manhattan are very safe, but Manhattan is a minority of the overall area of NYC.

I was more scared just outside work at the Twitter HQ in SF (Market and 10th) than I was anywhere in DF.

There are parts of SF I'd rather not be in at any time of day. That includes the area around Twitter HQ.

Why? You find homeless people scary?

Let's be real: some of the people on drugs or with mental illness can be really aggressive.

Homelessness is not a root cause for things; it is one symptom of fundamental problems that people have. Other symptoms include aggressiveness and unpredictability. These other symptoms may also be at least a partial reason why the people are homeless.

Not all nor even a majority of homeless people developed countries are aggressive or unpredictable, but the risk is higher. Around here most of them are quite tame and humble, at least most of the time, and I'd much rather use the word "weak" than "bad", though.

But yes, homeless people can be scary. Being a stranger in SF, I was somewhat alarmed when driving in the city and finding myself in a central neighbourhood where I wouldn't want to stop at the red light.

As a European that sounds terrible! That it is not as bad as a lawless warzone in a failed African state isn't much consolation??

I remember reading some anecdote from an Iraqi at the peak of the war. They talked about how most of the time you're totally safe, but every once in a while a bomb will go off and a bunch of people will die.

There's a spectrum of danger that a lot of us have had the privilege to not experience. I could imagine getting mugged in some places in Europe, but not really imagine dying in the "mugging gone wrong => someone is dead" scenario you hear about in the US.

And of course the idea that I might get killed in a traffic stop is something I have the privilege to not experience.

Eh, if you're not black and also not acting in a threatening or irrational manner, in the US, you're pretty safe.

Now, if you're either of those, much less both...

More dead whites than blacks. Individuals don't care about per capita statistics when they lay dying in the street.

More dead black people by cop guns, that's for damn sure.

Actually, no. People just don't care when white trailer trash get gunned down.

The majority of the US has a murder rate comparable to Canada. The US has particularly extremely tilted murder rates based on location. Relatively small areas with hyper murder rates very substantially skew the numbers. A couple dozen neighborhoods in Chicago for example combine to account for about 2% of all murders in the US (with murder rates 50 to 100 times the national average).

A minimum of 95% of the US population live in areas with murder rates comparable to Canada (around 1.5 to 2 per 100,000 depending on the year). More than 200 million Americans live in areas with murder rates under 2. That's not impressive compared to the nicest parts of Europe, but it is very impressive compared to Latin America and Europe's largest country, Russia.

what's the murder rate measured on? Chicago is already almost 1% of the population, so I don't see how the murder rate per capita is 50 or 100 times the national average.

Also "200 million Americans don't even live in areas with bad stats" is another way of saying "100 million Americans live in areas with high murder rates"... seems like a larger issue than you're implying

Some neighborhoods != All of Chicago

right, I get that. But is it like.. 10% of Chicago? 1%?

If it's 20% of Chicago but has 50-100x the national per capita average, that's pretty crazy. If it's one house where everyone in the house was murdered (1 murder per capita!), well it's not really representative of much.

> but it is very impressive compared to Latin America and Europe's largest country, Russia.

"Better than Russia!" isn't much to brag about when it comes to social niceties. Given that the US starts out at half Russia's homicide rate even before you filter out anything, it seems like you're intentionally selecting a very bad comparator to make it look good.

And given that 17 of the top 20 homicide-rate countries are in Latin America, that's an even worse comparator. Indeed, the top 4 countries that are around double #5 and below, they're all in Latin America. You couldn't ask for a worse comparator - being better than the most extreme outliers isn't "very impressive" in the slightest.

Likewise, if you're pulling the trick of "oh, don't include the bits where the crime really happens", you need to do the same to the other countries you're comparing against. They have crime centers as well, and it's not an apples-to-apples comparison if you don't treat them similarly.

Several continents have failed states: South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa.

...and there's really not much comparison between a failed state in e.g. Europe vs Africa.

What failed state is there in Europe?

> It is not like a safe European city center where you can go almost anywhere alone on foot at any time of day.

Which European city are you referring to? The major European cities (e.g., Paris, London, and Berlin) don't fit this description either.

When were you last in central London or Paris? It's been a long time since Limehouse or Montparnasse were dangerous to walk in at night.

Head out of canary wharf onto the isle of dogs. Or parts of peckham. Or West Ham. Christ.

If the goal is to prove that going to some godforsaken suburb miles out into the countryside is dangerous, sure. This is true in any country. But not if you live in an actual city.

Shorter to write: i don't know London

As a Cornishman, this is basically what's taught in the schools, yes. You live in a godforsaken suburb miles out of London but you pretend that, unlike us, you somehow live in a city. ;-)

"isle of dogs. Or parts of peckham. Or West Ham."

All of these places are in London. They have London postcodes, are inside the M25, and are administered by the Mayor of London.

Pretty much every major city worldwide has large suburbs that have their postcodes and are administered by the same municipal government, but they're clearly not included in the "European city center" designation. They are part of the city, but not part of the city center; and for a multimillion city the difference (and distances!) are significant.

They are all "inner" London.

"European city center".

But I know, it's a broad definition.

Buddy, what wonderful drug are you on? Writing this from isle of dogs, which is damn awesome, and extremely safe.

Canary Wharf - noone lives there - super safe at night...

Yea, but that's like restricting NYC to Manhattan. I wouldn't feel that unsafe walking the majority of Manhattan at night either.

Or for another city center, I go downtown inner harbor/fells point/federal hill Baltimore at night plenty. Most city centers in America are perfectly safe any time of day.

don't agree with berlin either, of course some areas are more criminal (almost anywhere), but going on foot alone is still possible, even at night and i've been to most of the trouble-spots.

Also: Munich, it's unbelievable safe, more boring than berlin, but safer.

I've been around central Berlin a good bit and honestly never had such a problem. If anything I end up with the opposite problem, I'm the foreign hipster who hasn't kept up with the trends enough to realize that this area has gentried sufficiently that I am no longer welcome here, because it's now an area for rich West Germans.

Alexanderplatz and others http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/berlin/polizei/die-23-unsiche...

Personally I feel that Berlin gives off an unsafe feeling on your first few nights but you as you stay longer you start to see there is no reason for it, I mean I remember going past a train station at night and some guy was playing some pots as drums, while some man sat cross legged with a beer listening. And another time walking up a dodgy back alley into a lively square with an outdoor cinema

Speaking of Italy, you'd be hard pressed to feel endangered in Rome, Milan, Turin etc. Naples can get a bit sketchy, but even then. Switzerland and Austria also seem pretty relaxed in my experience.

Trieste seems pretty sketchy too (easternmost major city in Northern Italy). I was traveling from Milan to Croatia, got all mixed up on trains, and got in to Trieste at about 8pm with no connecting bus to Croatia until the following morning and most hotels/hostels full for the night. Dodgy people walking around and weird vibe in general. Luckily I got a ride out that night.

I really enjoyed Trieste during the day a couple of years ago, delightful and historic. Haven't seen much of it at night though. It's not unlikely it's got a larger percentage of folks coming through from the Balkans / Eastern Europe than other Italian cities due to its position. There's been tension in the country in the past couple of decades due to inbound migrations from that area.

Perhaps not physically threatened, but I've been pick-pocketed both in Rome and Naples. In that regard I definitely feel much safer in, say, Berlin.

Your Italian visa.

Not surprising at all, in Italy Naples is infamous for being the city where things disappear unless they're well nailed down.

Vienna / Austria is like this.

If you want to see truly safe cities, even by EU standards, check out Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, or Doha.

With the exception of Hong Kong, aren't these all pretty authoritarian states?

Didn't Hong Kong pass over to China about a decade ago?

Hong Kong is still a SAR.

But slightly more and more in name only, with Beijing controlling it more, politically.

It was 20 years ago, in 1997.

unfortunately, Hong Kong is turning authoritarian too, with only a semblance of democracy under the iron thumb of Beijing.

Unfortunately England sold out Hong Kong

They didn't have much choice. The new territories had to go back because they were leased. So all that they could have held on to was Hong Kong island and Kowloon. There wasn't the infrastructure to maintain those areas. And China was a very different place in those days, the insane crap that they said to the British during handover negotiations made anything Donald Trump saying today look intelligent... It was a stressful time to be living there. So today Hong Kong is a Chinese colony instead of a slightly (yes, slightly) more benign British colony.

Slightly? As far as I know, the United Kingdom is a democracy while China is an oppressive, imperialist, authoritarian state under oligarchic rule, with complete disregard for human rights or the cries for independence and democracy from its dependencies. Would it be ruled by Britain instead of China there would be a world of difference, don't kid yourself.

Can you name a democratic country with 1 billion+ people that has achieved what China has in such a short period of time? Nope. Do you think China would have progressed the same if it wasn't managed as an autocracy?

So the ends justify the means, is what you're saying?

Nope. Read my comment again. Here, I'll make it easier:

> Can you name a democratic country with 1 billion+ people that has achieved what China has in such a short period of time? Nope. Do you think China would have progressed the same if it wasn't managed as an autocracy?

Who cares 1,300,000,000 people live without liberty and are subject to humans rights violations? They make cheap shit. Is that what you're saying?

I asked you two questions, and you answer with another question.

> They make cheap shit.

What?

I'm not sure about Singapore, but Doha and Dubai are the both capital cities of a monarchy: Qatar and UAE, respectively. Keep that in mind if you ever visit.

I lived in the UAE for ~14 years, so I can give you some idea of how safe Dubai is.

- You can leave your car in a parking lot for hours, unlocked, with expensive devices clearly visible. Nobody would even come close to it.

- There is no need to lock your house when you leave. People usually do though, because it just make sense to do so.

- You can walk virtually anywhere in Dubai at any time of night, completely alone. Nobody will bother you.

- The UAE has some of the friendliest police I've ever seen. Oh, and they are extremely professional and responsive, and are insanely good at what they do [1].

In my 14 years living there, I have never once been robbed, have never even witnessed a crime or robbery, nor have I ever heard of someone (e.g., friends) falling victim to one. The only incident was a break-in at the home of a family we knew. That's it.

And I hear that Doha is even safer than Dubai!

[1]: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Mabh...

Haha, that sounds like back home in western Maine, if you're a local who isn't a known drunk or stoner. Even then, you can leave everything unlocked, without fear

Safe for tourists, not for residents.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/may/27/dubai-...

Yep, their human rights track record is terrible, but even with that, Dubai is still safer than most other large cities.

What do you mean by "tourists"? Did you miss the part where I say that I lived in the UAE for 14 years?

You are probably not an Indian construction worker.

I'm not. Read my bio. But a fact is a fact: Dubai is one of the safest cities in the world.

I think you are willfully missing the point. You cannot compare Dubai's "Safe" to other place's "Safe" because other places view things like woman being raped as "unsafe" and Dubai does not.

Being an Indian construction worker, means being more likely to be killed institutionally. For example by ridiculous hazards at work that any other "Safe" place outlawed decades ago. It could also mean being arrested, harrassed and deported (or arrested and thrown in a hole, I don't know; racist gulag numbers are not exactly officially published) for speaking out of line.

Let's not even touch religion.

You are perfectly correct that Dubai is "Safe" for some definition of "Safe" suitable only for White or Arabian, Muslim or rich Christian Men.

That's exactly the point. I am not including the government in my definition of safety. Rather, the focus is purely on safety from an illegal point of view (murder, rape, robbery, etc.).

This is not a very good way to look at things, because a place without any law and order would be "safe" by these standards. If rape is not illegal, women being raped is allowed. If murder is not illegal, people being stabbed or shot to death would be just the normal way of life.

Not my idea of "safe".

...or a woman

"Yep they commit atrocious humans rights violations and systematically abuse migrant workers, but at least you can leave your car unlocked." And Mussolini made the trains run on time.

I'm just stating facts here, no need to get emotional mate.

Dubai is plenty safe unless you're a woman getting raped aka enjoying sex outside of marriage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosecution_of_Marte_Dalelv

I've been living in Abu Dhabi (capital of UAE) for the last 12 years and although I started getting more and more annoyed with the country, I can absolutely confirm what you're saying. Safety is almost always at the top of the pros/cons list.

Or Montreal!

Never been, but I would assume it's an amazing place. I would love to visit someday :)

Dubai is really not safe for unmarried couples. It's a total non-starter, even for a holiday.

This article is more about systemic state corruption though and not petty street crime. There's still gangsters in Singapore and Hong Kong, and if you worked at a newspaper writing about them and their connections to politicians you would have problems. If you decided to start writing about the prostitution racket in Dubai you could disappear pretty quick too.

I was replying to a comment about crime in Mexico City, not the article.

Not been to Mexico City, but I have been in many US cities (NYC, L.A., SF, San Diego, Salt Lake…) a variety of times during a 15 year span. One time I will never forget I was on the bus from the L.A. airport to downtown, and chit-chatting comes out that I was staying at hostel downtown. A couple of reactions were priceless, like I were a dead man walking.

It was perfectly fine in the end.

The thing is if you are showing bling in some form or simply being unaware, you are at risk _anywere_ in a city. Hell I got cash-robbed inside a Times Square restaurant when I was 18, thinking I was getting a good deal on a Sony ultra slim CD player with 30 seconds skip buffer.

This is why I prefer to live in parts of the US that resemble the demographics of most European city centers. It turns out that tends to be kind of a demographic optimum...

Well, there is a huge difference between Europe and the US/Mexico: most people don't have guns. You will rarely see anybody with a weapon here. If you get attacked, it will be with fists, sometime a knife. Having the possibility that somebody pulls a gun on you is crazy to me, like something that should only happen in a movie.

Living in the Netherlands, I know that people with bad intentions most likely have guns. Even in my small hometown, a citizen that owned a spy equipment store got shot up in daylight in front of his home. Other example would be people getting robbed in their house with guns (not daily, but it happens). There are plenty of other examples... I cannot say I feel 100% save most of the time.

It might not make you feel better, but Holland's gun death per 100,000 is in the 0.5's compared to the U.S.'s 10's and Mexico's 10's.

You're 20 times more likely to get killed by a gun in the US or Mexico.

Note that in the whole of Holland there are 50 gun homicides per year, so you were actually pretty unlucky to experience that. Your experience is exceptional and not a common occurrence, especially as I assume most Holland murders are not widely reported spouse killings, etc.

Mexico had 18,398 gun homicides in 2011, for comparison, Holland, 60, US, 11,068.

The gun homicide rate in the US is 4.5.

The US has roughly 110 guns per 100,000 people and 4.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people.

Mexico has over 20 gun homicides per 100,000 people and about 18 guns per 100,000 people.

Canada has 2 gun murders per 100,000 people and 31 guns per 100,000 people.

Mexico: each gun is responsible for 1.11 murders

US: each gun is responsible for .04 murders

Canada: each gun is responsible for .07 murders.

Interestingly, the Bahamas has 30 gun murders per 100,000 and about 4 guns per 100,000. That's 7.5 murders per gun.

France has 2.8 gun murders per 100k and 31 guns per 100,000. Which makes each gun responsible for .09 murders -- slightly higher than both the US and Canada, despite far stricter laws.

The U.K. Has .23 gun murders and 6.6 guns -- so .35 murders per gun.

Sweden has 1.47 murders per 100k with 31.6 guns for a rate of .047 murders per gun.

Nicaragua has 4.68 murders with 7.7 guns -- each gun is part of 1.65 murders.

Jamaica: 31 murders/8 guns.

Denmark: 1.28/12 guns

Israel: 2.09/7.3 guns

Brazil: 21.2/8 guns

Australia: .93/21.7 guns

My point: gun ownership does not correlate to gun murder rates -- in fact one could make a case that increased gun ownership could actually reduce gun murder rates.

Despite having more guns per capita than most countries, the overall US murder rate ranks 108 out of 218, with Honduras topping the list (incidentally Honduras has 67 murders and 6.2 guns per 100,000)

I think you're making the argument that with more guns, countries tend to have fewer gun deaths per gun. This makes sense, casually. However, I doubt that anyone cares about the number of gun murders per gun, but rather the total number of gun murders, which is (please correct me if wrong) still correlated with more guns.

Also, I see that you've focused the discussion on gun murders, which is fine, but we should note that decreased gun ownership does lead to far fewer gun deaths, mostly by reducing suicides.

Does it matter what weapon the murder/suicide was committed with?

Yes, fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths -- but does it mean fewer deaths in general?

If fewer people own Honda Civics, then fewer people will die in Honda Civic accidents. But that dip in Honda Civic deaths would likely be absorbed into deaths by all other car models, such that the overall death rate remains the same.

Overall suicides significantly reduce as suicide is easier to do on impulse with a gun.

Depends on the culture; Japan has high suicide rates but low gun ownership.

Not if it's easier (psychologically, practically, whatever) to kill someone with a Honda Civic than other cars, of course.

Suicide is one of those clubs where we, as a society, probably have an ethical compulsion to increase the barrier to entry.

10 is the death rate, 5 the homicide.

All you've done is the old trick of twisting data until it supports what you desperately want to be true because you like owning a gun. Remember, there are far more ways that the data shows you're wrong than support you.

Like climate change deniers, the only scientists that support lesser gun laws are the ones that the NRA pay for. Your congress even defunded independent research as the "wrong" result for the lobbyists kept coming out, more gun control, much less death.

(Total number of guns / total number of gun owners) is missing in this conversation. Many single gun owners skew the total number of guns.

The statistic to highlight in this debate is the number of gun-related deaths per gun owner, not per gun.

> The US has roughly 110 guns per 100,000 people

What is this based on, or what am I missing? From what I've repeatedly read before, it's more like 110 guns per 100 people.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/19/us-gun-owner... agrees with you.

Around 265 million guns ("more than one gun for every American adult") and an estimate of 55 million gun owners in the US. Interestingly, some 7.7m gun owners make up for half of all guns.

Guns are mostly concentrated in Southern/Midwest states. Most people do not own guns in the North and coastal states. Besides people living in the sticks, I don't even know anyone who owns a gun in the New York State city I live. I'm 36 and I've never shot a gun before! http://reverbpress.com/politics/firearms-per-capita-by-state...

Guns are a solution in the right hands, that's what the founders believed, and if these stats are correct it proves that they can be used responsibly if society is stable enough. I think we're approaching a time though when guns will be a net negative, but by then, the USA will cease to exist as we know it today.

History has way more moments where guns were used for terrible things that good things.

> You're 20 times more likely to get killed by a gun in the US

This is very misleading because this audience is primarily middle class/rich white/asians employed in the tech industry.

There are 2 primary factors in homicide rates. Be poor or be a certain race. If you are not either of those things, your chances of being murdered in the US is very low.

*edit 3 factors -- men. Women don't get murdered often.

Same thing applies Mexico -- if you're not involved in the drug trade or law enforcement, your odds of getting killed are almost nil. Mexico welcomes over 20M tourists a year from all over and almost all make it back home safely.

Also, if I remember the stats correctly, you are more likely to kill yourself with a gun than to be murdered by one in the US.

How is it misleading? Are all Holland's gun killings well-heeled white techies? Why wouldn't those same factors apply in Holland? I haven't looked at stats but I'd take an educated guess that the economic/ethnic divides also apply in Holland.

You've also made the same mistake as another commentator (I admit I wasn't clear), my first figures are total gun deaths, including self-harm. A significant percentage of those deaths are white men killing themselves with guns. As I understand it, a figure that only partially translates into other forms of suicides in countries or states with better gun control (basically, less guns = less suicides, other methods need more preparation and so are caught in time or fail). A brief google seems to support that:

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/guns-and-suicide/

Proportionally speaking, the factors probably hold, the cold, hard, truth is that as a white techie you're still much more likely to die by a gun in America or Mexico than in Holland.

Your own state department warns about Mexico:

U.S. citizens have been the victims of violent crimes, including homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery in various Mexican states

You can search for US citizen deaths in foreign countries:

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/statistics/deaths...

I see 75 homicides of US citizens in Mexico last year. It doesn't list guns or not guns.

I tried Holland, the UK, Germany, Spain no homicides of US citizens. 2 people killed in Italy, 3 in France (Nice terrorist attack).

There are 4 factors.. emergency services and doctors. Fast responders, can save a gunshot victim from becoming a thread to officials via statistics, and allow him to have a happy vegetative state existence ever after.

People with bad intentions most likely don't have guns in the UK. Some people with bad intentions will, but they're the people who're risking everything in the first place, not the people who'll get a couple of years if they're caught.

If you have a gun you are not safer. It leads to escalation and more people die. We are not at war, guns are not the solution.

You are less likely to attack someone if there is the risk that person has a gun. Just like you are less likely to speed in your car if there's a cop driving next to you.

> You are less likely to attack someone if there is the risk that person has a gun.

I don't believe that. I think that the calculus of whether to attack someone skips the "is the victim armed?" question. You just make sure to bring overwhelming force, e.g. bring a gun to a (probable) gun fight or a knife to a fist fight.

But what do I know. I'm just an European wuss, who has fire a handgun exactly once.

My wife was attacked and she was caring a gun. People who attack people are fundamentally not good at risk reward cost benefit analysis.

The deal is if you carry, which I did for years, you have to maintain above normal situational awareness. You have to be able to get space. Cops can do this because they arrive after the fact and get to enter the situation with the appropriate threat posture. If I have a gun and I get into an altercation the moment i'm in physical contact with the other person the gun doesn't matter. The long and the short of it is if you can be prepared and have "the drop" on someone a gun is a great way to protect yourself. That is why I feel the shotgun at home is a good idea concealed carry an overall liability.

Source. I lived in the 14th most dangerous neighborhood in the us for 15 years and carried a gun most of the time.

This presumes criminals think this through. Largely criminals exist because they didn't or couldn't think it through. If they must have money to feed their child or their addiction they will attempt to mug someone, they might pick the lowest risk target or the first target. Let's not presume these people have lots of options, if that were true most wouldn't be criminals.

I have to say, you are really over exaggerating. Gun violence is just not a reality you have to be worried about here. Amsterdam is nothing like any US city where I've lived(in terms of violence on a daily basis), and The Netherlands as a whole is extremely safe.

As another resident of Amsterdam. I don't think your impression of the situation really matches up with statistics. Look at these two articles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths

Here you can see the gun death rate in The Netherlands per 100k inhabitants is 0.58, but there's some areas in the US where the rate is quite comparable.

What really sets things apart is the suicide rate, most deaths by guns in the US are by suicide, but there's counties in the US where there's easy access to guns and the overall death rate is lower than the Dutch gun violence + non-gun suicides.

So in a lot of cases it's not that just having guns makes everything hyper-violent. It's just that if people feel like killing themselves they'll use the best available instrument available to them.

Conflating that with general gun safety as it pertains to you feeling safe walking around Amsterdam, but not in a comparable town in the US, is silly.

I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both per 100k). The lowest groups are 2-7 and 0.5-1.4, respectively, both of which are significantly higher than the value for the Netherlands. In fact, your link shows the exact opposite of what you claim: there isn't a single county in the US that has lower gun death or gun homicide ratio than the entirety of the Netherlands. That's an exaggeration, too (there isn't data for all counties), but it doesn't diminish the point that you're by far less likely to get shot in the Netherlands than in a comparable US city.

You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths.

If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them.

E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1.

Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes.

But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate.

This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife.

Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders.

What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there.

Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3].

However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes.

1. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

3. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/citation/quotes/10319

Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think.

The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"?

The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading.

I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here.

The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.

This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude.

What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead.

The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation.

That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun.

So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3].

Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_r...

Again you single out Lithuania, completely ignoring that most European countries have a homicide rate that is 2–4x lower than that in the US. Let's just check a few: France 1.2, Germany 0.9, UK 0.9, Italy 0.8, Spain 0.7, Poland 0.7, Austria 0.5, Switzerland 0.5, Netherlands 0.7, Belgium 1.8, United States 3.9.

How do you look at this data and conclude "yup, the EU is just as bad as the US"? Instead you focus on the Baltic states and the Balkans, which is not what people commonly have in mind when you refer to Europe.

And no, we're still not talking about suicides. They are completely orthogonal to homicides. Stop injecting them into the discussion.

I'm not concluding that "the EU is just as bad as the US", and really, I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion after reading my comments.

Yes, on average pretty much any part of the EU is better when it comes to homicide statistics. All I've been pointing out that from looking at the homicide & gun death statistics in the US you can't conclude that guns are important variable driving those statistics.

    > we're [..] not talking about suicides [...]
    > Stop injecting them into the discussion.

You're the one who started injecting suicides into the discussion. In your earlier comment[1] you said, in response to a graph[2] I posted that included non-suicide numbers, which is the part I was citing, that the "lowest groups are 2-7". Those numbers include gun suicides, whereas I wasn't talking about that at all but the other data on the page which shows gun homicide statistics similar to the Dutch 0.58.

But since you muddied the water by bringing up these unrelated suicide numbers, I started to itemize the suicide & the non-suicide you were conflating them with, and now a few comments later you're complaining about my discussing something you brought up in the first place.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14034308

2. http://projects.oregonlive.com/ucc-shooting/gun-deaths

Man, I have to ask if you even read past the first sentence of my comment... Yes, I'm sure that the homicide rate of Rotterdam may be higher than some podunk midwestern town. What I said though, is that I feel safer living in Amsterdam over some of the US cities where I have also lived. Your statistics show that ALL of these cities(DC, Philly, NYC, SF, and LA) are objectively more dangerous to live in than Amsterdam. I'm sure you are trying to dispel something you see as a common myth, but maybe you should try having a conversation instead of giving a sermon.

> I cannot say I feel 100% save most of the time.

You can never be 100% safe. That's impossible.

You can never be 100% safe, but you can feel 100% safe since feelings are subjective.

that sounds like an interesting story - more info on the spy equipment store owner who was gunned down please.

mayhaps it was a husband who was caught doing bad things by his wife, due to the spy equipment the guy sold to his wife?

Can't be that many spy shop related assassinations in NL, so probably this guy, Ronald Bakker.

http://nltimes.nl/2015/09/10/police-huizen-murder-gangland-a...

A search on his name brings up Dutch results that badly Google translate into English, but it seems (from what I can decipher from a translation) police suspect he may have been shot after being suspected of passing on info related to another criminal investigation.

I think I am going to start investing in "Spy Shop Related Assassinations" - just because I like the way that phrase sounds...

Most people who are into doing criminal things actually have guns here in Europe. Our open borders allow people to drive a trunk full of guns from Turkish border directly to Berlin, and they regularly catch guys doing that.

Only the people who get attacked don't have any guns, and they get fucked up.

> Most people who are into doing criminal things actually have guns here in Europe.

Speaking for the western part: no they don't. No even close to the majority of criminals have guns (I don't dispute that they have easy access, though). You'll be hard pressed to find street robberies at gun point in Germany, France and the northern countries.

You'll be hard pressed to find street robberies at gun point in Eastern Europe too. Subjectively, it is much safer to walk on the streets of Warsaw, than Berlin.

Been in Warsaw one night, live in German city; can confirm.

Oh shut up. I live in Cologne, there are gang/biker shootings and robberies with guns every week. Police is always too late.

My brother live in frankfurt and even in the worst part in the city, with people injecting heroin in the street, you never get even bothered by anybody.

In France you hear about guns, but I lived in 8 different cities there, and I never been near any gun attack. None of my friends or relatives either.

If you have gun here, people look at you in a strange way.

Everytime me or my bro got in trouble, it was fist fighting. I got a knife once. Some of my friends got messed up. Fist again. In france, the UK, germany, Italy and spain.

I don't say there are no guns. I'm saying that it's not even of the same scale of occurrences than in the US.

> Only the people who get attacked don't have any guns, and > they get fucked up.

If you fail to take regular firearm training, combat training or to acquire the necessary mindset for a gunfight under live threat, then you are even more fucked if you try to use that gun you are carrying to make you feel safer...

Do you have anything to back that up or are you just gonna keep talking?

You would be surprised, how many guns are there in Europe[1]. However, if you carry gun, it must be hidden, otherwise you could lose your permit.

Breaking law with legally held weapon is a rare thing (who would like lo lose it, right?). If someone breaks law with the gun, it will be illegal one.

[1] Except Britain. They can legally have only long guns, without cartridges. Basically only for hunting.

Yes, British firearms law changed after the Dunblane massacre [1] to outlaw handguns. The Hungerford massacre [2] in the 80s caused the outlawing of semi-automatics. I live in rural England, and many friends and neighbours have shotguns and hunting rifles. I was surprised to discover that a couple of the rifle owners use silencers too. Silencers do have a legitimate application; they confuse the directional hearing of the prey, so a hunter can get off a second or third shot at deer before they start running.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunblane_school_massacre

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungerford_massacre

Silencers also mitigate hearing loss & noise pollution.

It seems that for the first time in generations, the US is looking at loosening restrictions on guns. There has even been a law introduced to remove silencers from the NFA, which would cause them to be treated much like guns in and of themselves as opposed to how they are treated now.

Everyone and their mums has a rifle.

Mexican gun control laws are far stricter than anything in Europe. You can get years in prison for even a single unauthorized bullet.

Mexico is a case study of how gun control can lead to an increase in danger for the population. Gun control can be nice in "civilized" places, but in Mexico, even the police are on the take. Justice in Mexico consists of avoiding the "Justice System" at all costs.

I lived a year in Chapala and even there we had cartel shootouts where police were among the bad guys. If you are a potential victim of violence, the police are the last people you'd usually call. It's often every man for himself -- so that results in nearly every house having high walls, razor wire fences, bars on every window, "alarm dogs" on rooftops.

My wife if from Guadalajara and we spend a lot of time there but it isn't Texas. In Texas, a home invasion is often met by a bullet from the homeowner, in Mexico you just better hope your wall is harder to climb than your neighbor's.

That being said, Mexico IS a great place -- but it's great because of the culture and people -- the government on the other hand, is a disgrace. The odds of it every changing are slim to none because part of Hispanic culture is a sense of fatalism and "it's God's will" kind of thinking. Mexican Catholism bears a huge blame -- there's a conditioned helplessness. Not to mention the cartels are among the Church's biggest benefactors! This isn't the thinking necessarily among the more cosmopolitan Mexicans, but that represents a minuscule minority. However, even among the educated, there a overriding sense of pessimism -- starting a business in Mexico is quixotic -- as soon as you get some income, everyone starts chipping away at it trying to get their share.

> the cartels are among the Church's biggest benefactors

i'd like to hear more about this. this story does not receive a lot of coverage in the US.

I can't speak on the relationship between the Church and the cartels specifically, but many of the wealthiest narcos are significant social benefactors in their home regions. It's a brilliant strategy - it legitimizes their organization in the eyes of the citizenry, by addressing real needs that the state has failed to fulfill, and in so doing simultaneously delegitimizes the state.

For example in Sinaloa, El Chapo's home state, he's regarded by many as a "Robin Hood" figure because he's built schools, churches, hospitals and more in impoverished mountain villages that receive little to no aid from the state. In return, he was for years able to move freely and conduct his business with impunity from Sinaloa, without having to worry about locals betraying him.

I've been living in Mexico for 8 years. I'm from Europe and married to a Mexican woman. I've lived in a couple different states (DF, Edo. Mexico, Queretaro, Veracruz, Quintana Roo).

I've never once felt not safe, or seen violence.

I see the news and I really wonder if I'm living in a different country.

You should try living in Sinaloa, Sonora, Tamaulipas, etc..

The places you listed are all the safe states, which effectively is a different country.

It's not super complex, the states near the Gulf/Yucatan are generally the safe ones.

I have pretty much the same story (but 4 years) and lived in Sonora and Nayarit. I have close friends living in Sinaloa (expats of 20 years).

I now live in Guanajuato, and the only crime I've heard of first or second hand in the years in mx was a worker taking some cash which was laying around, and some gringo's stealing from each other.

On the other hand I lost three friends in hurricane Odile, so I guess don't forget nature can be a much bigger threat if not given enough respect.

I lived in Tequisquiapan for a few years which is pretty close!

Didn't expect to find someone on HN living in El Bajío. :)

I realise this is a bit of a late comment and you might miss it. But is there any way to contact you? As I mentioned earlier in the thread, I am married to a Mexican woman and I was wondering what it is like to live in Mexico as a European (Specifically software engineers, which you might happen to be as well ;-) )

Here's a map of Mexico with intentional homicide rates (data from 2011) by state:

http://www.geocurrents.info/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Mexic...

FWIW, Baja California Sur, though not near Gulf/Yucatan is pretty low on the list too.

Baja California and Sonora have significantly lower rates than Chihuahua, but all three border the US.

European married to a Mexican woman (From Monterrey) here as well.

She realises that there are bad things in Mexico, but sometimes she actually feels more scared here in Europe due to the terrorist events that have happened lately. Though there has been only one in my country, she really hates going to Brussels.

As she tells me, it is worse with terrorism because it involves civilians minding their own business, whilst most of the terrible news from Mexico actually happens due to narcos and not to random civilians on the street.

As I have not lived in Mexico, I can't really compare the two. But by the sounds of her and her family, it's not as bad as the news would have you believe. (Or, alternatively, they happen to live in a good part of Monterrey / Mexico).

I lived there some 20 years ago and it really seemed like a golden time. The conflict in Chiapas was more or less over, and as a foreigner I felt comfortable traveling anywhere in the country with only a US driver's license and a birth certificate. Times have certainly changed, and I can't imagine how it is for Mexicans nowadays living with the cartels.

>may things improve for you, though I really have no idea how that will happen.

I think a good first step would be changing attitudes towards drug use. We should treat users as patients instead of criminals. And waging a 'war' against dealers and smugglers has only made them more violent and dangerous, while driving up prices and making those who survive even wealthier. There needs to be smarter policies.

I think America should stop buying drugs from Mexico, shipping them guns and promoting the violence.

Garry Webb and Michael Rupert were two amazing reporters that brought to light the reality of the CIA funded cocaine trade from South and Central America, and most people today have either never heard of them or dismiss them as crazy. The reality is the CIA still funds itself with cocaine and still causes violence south of our border for the industries that would benefit. United Fruit, Bay of Pigs, the 1973 Coupe of Chile, School of the Americas... the list is as long as you want to make it.

This comic sums it up: http://imgur.com/a/Wtt6H

> “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

That was straight out of Nixon's aide's mouth. Openly admitting that the white conservative establishment sought ways to oppress and commit genocide on "racially inferior" demographic.

It's now Mexicans and Muslims turn. They are the new "Japs". It seems like hatred and segregation is constant driving force at unifying this country.

I've heard that quote before, but I don't really know its pedigree. Do you have a reference? (I also imagine the lack of sourcing is why you got downvoted).

I'm not sure it's the same source, but this came out last year.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-richa...

If anyone doubts the contents of the quoted text, they can copy paste it into Google and discover numerous websites pointing at it. That will guide you to the right source.

Possibly someone downvoted it because they fall under the same establishment or an offspring of that 'Murica generation.

edit: I don't understand the downvotes. This comment contains instructions on how to find the desired source of my original comment which was actually published and publicized in printed media. If you have trouble with Googling, I suggest restarting your computer. Otherwise, trying to deny the track record of systematic racial oppression evident long after the end of racial segregation through downvoting, you are going against history of USA.

> This comment contains instructions on how to find the desired source of my original comment which was actually published and publicized in printed media.

Then why is it so hard to include it yourself? It's poor form to make statements from sources and omit those sources. Unless you typed that from memory, you had one of those sources handy when you made the comment, so you could have included it easily, rather than make every person that read it have to determine whether they believed it as even worth researching to see if it is real or something you made up.

> I don't understand the downvotes.

> Possibly someone downvoted it because they fall under the same establishment or an offspring of that 'Murica generation.

> If you have trouble with Googling, I suggest restarting your computer.

People aren't denying anything. Perhaps your attitude is the cause of the downvotes. Regardless of why you were originally downvoted, imagining it might be because they aren't acting in good faith or are incapable of assessing your comment on its merit isn't exactly a useful way to move forward.

I've always been kind of curious how the people who fill threads with quotes work. Do they have macro hot keys? A spreadsheet of quotes? (In some cases, the first google result for a quote is a page explaining that the quote is fake, so either they have some system that avoids google or they just ignore results they don't like.)

I've always wondered that as well, not being one that remembers quotable material in enough detail to be able to put it into use easily in most cases.

For myself, usually I remember someone said something in a vague way that I think it relevant (often a prior HN submission of some sort), and I start using google and hn.algolia.com to start looking stuff up until I find the article. comment or submission I thought I remembered or I give up. My quotes are generally less quotes and more notes about what I think are interesting references to the discussion at hand. I imagine if even only one out of fifty people reading do that for the whole submission, it still might add up rather quickly.

Of the things I do reference, I generally find I'm likely to use them multiple times over a few months. As things are in recent memory, I see more connections. Sort of like after you learn a new concept you see places to use it all over. It feels like it's just topical all of a sudden, but I suspect it's mostly just that prior to learning it those times weren't strong enough to leave an impression in memory, making it feel like you didn't hear about it before when actually you did.

I think it's more of a birthday paradox type of deal...you get enough people in a thread, it becomes increasingly likely that at least one knows of a long-ass quote that is relevant to the situation.

The birthday paradox might not be a good technical analogy: the number of ways to collide grows quadratically, while the number of people who can individually think of quotes grows linearly.

I have a Vim plugin:

:Q find-relevant-Hacker-News-quote <URL>

It then fetches the Hacker News URL, analyzes the text and finds a relevant quote that contrasts the average sentiment of the comments and then posts it.

The plugin will even post this text.

:Q post-explaination <URL>

Cool, but that's a far cry from `M-x butterfly`.

Have you heard of his hip new tool called Google? You can find any quote you want.

This isn't wikipedia.

If someone is so concerned about sources, they can include it in the reply after the parent.

Nobody likes people who complain but won't do anything about it.

If the lack of citation bothers you so much, maybe you should include it yourself. Nobody else gives a shit in case you haven't noticed.

The original comment had no citation yet it received upvotes, contrary to your view of HN. Everyone is intimate with Google and they can follow the instructions in this thread to find the appropriate sources. If you want citation in the format you find in academic papers, that is on you, not the original commentator.

I can't help you any further but there are plenty of comments being posted as we speak that lack citations, you better get on that quick!

> This isn't wikipedia.

No, it's a forum where the norm is that if you are going to make factual assertions where you aren't the source, you should include the source.

> If someone is so concerned about sources, they can include it in the reply after the parent.

Which is just making everyone else do your work for you. It's fine, if you want to make assertions and not include sources, you'll either be ignored by some number of people, or depending on how different the assertion is to their worldview, possibly downvoted.

If you're interested in having a discussion, sources help. If you're just interested in putting your mark down and saying something because you have the urge, then they don't really matter.

There is no norm or enforcement for citations. That is your personal preference. I don't want to spend time chasing down and writing citations. Fact checking is really up to the reader. There is no rule written that says all comments must have proper citations following APA formatting.

> There is no norm or enforcement for citations.

Obviously there is a community norm. We both just experienced it. You were downvoted (although that could have been for presentation), and I was upvoted for noting that the reason you were downvoted could have been for not supplying sources. For better or worse, that's how it is here at this point in time.

> That is your personal preference.

It is my preference. I'll note that it's not my preference to the point that I'll generally downvote for it though, and I didn't in this case. Other people do though, and there seems to be a general support for requesting that people supply evidence for claims. That's what makes it a community norm.

> I don't want to spend time chasing down and writing citations.

And I don't want to either. And other readers don't want to either. As a trade-off between one person, who presumably already knows that the reference exists and has some idea where to find it and every other person who reads it, it's obvious that the efficient answer is for the person who is using it as evidence to also include a link to the source when they use it.

> There is no rule written that says all comments must have proper citations following APA formatting.

No, there isn't, which is why I asked nicely.

> This isn't wikipedia.

The norm that the person making claim bears the burden of persuasion in supporting that claim with appropriate evidence and/or reasoning (citations being a means of referencing pre-existing examples of the former) existed for centuries before Wikipedia.

The quote originated from http://harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/

The Nixon aide who allegedly said that quote died before it was published, so there is some reason to be uncertain about its veracity. It wasn't published until long, long after it was apparently said.

I find it completely plausible and it's very much in line with my political leanings to believe it, but still.

Thanks, I have certainly seen that quote before and thought it actually had been thoroughly vetted. I was not aware that the man quoted was dead.

I've been making a point in recent months to make particular note of things that confirm my own biases, as the last six months have suggested that everything I know is wrong, at least as far as people are concerned...

> as the last six months have suggested that everything I know is wrong, at least as far as people are concerned...

Well that sounds interesting. Mind expounding on that? :)

>shipping them guns

This is occasionally obfuscated, but it is utterly true. There are basically two kinds of guns (of the kind you can use to enforce this "war") in the world stage: AK-like (Russian, eastern European, and Chinese included) and AR-like (MXX(X) and modified civilian, from dealers and left over from military/agency operations). The AR-like guns are extremely common in Mexico, and they obviously are all American made. There are also a lot of AK-like weapons, which are... also all American. Bare minimum, they are legally bought in the US and smuggled into Mexico.

These facts are often overlooked by claims that you can't be sure where the guns come from- 87% of the 4000 guns we can track come from the US, but that only represents 12% of the 30,000 guns seized. The real fact is the Mexican military has seized over 300,000 guns[1], and very few of those AK-like guns come from Russia or China. The overwhelming majority of those weapons had to have been built or sold in America.

In the US there's a huge amount of disbelief that we can actually be the source of these guns. I honestly think that comes from a mistaken belief that guns actually exist everywhere... America is a giant gun store, the biggest on the block, saying they need to keep selling guns because of all these guns everybody keeps buying.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20090703011254/http://www.sfgate...

Good argument for better border control between the two countries.

There are good arguments for border patrol but this is not one of them. These guns are legal in the US and all you have to do to get them into Mexico is load them on a catapult and drive out to the middle of nowhere, or load them in one of the hundreds of small boats that make the trip. It's trivial to find guns illegally coming into mexico from a boat that can cross oceans and nearly impossible for a boat you can make in your garage. Border patrol will not solve gun violence in Mexico any more than it will solve cocaine in America.

As an unrelated thing, I find it mind boggling that immigration is still an explicitly national issue in America. Refugees and immigrants would be much better handled if they were done on a per-state basis. If California wants to let in a ton of Mexicans and issue them state-only green cards, why should Texas be able to vote to stop them? Likewise if Texas wants to exclude immigrants, why should California force Texas to give them jobs?

State-only green card programs would allow immigrants to be carefully tracked (national green card holders face deportation if their residence is not on file), gives them incentive to go from states where they aren't wanted to those where they are, and allows national money and patrol efforts to be focused where they are wanted. Immigrants can't steal Texan jobs if they live in California.

Leaving immigration to the states would require internal border controls. This is not something most people want.

You could make a single-state work permit without internal borders. If workers from California want to spend their vacation money in Nevada, let them. You can still reject them if they apply for work in another state.

It's not just about work.

To make that effective you would have to eliminate federal birthright citizenship, or anyone could easily make their children US citizens (and then too many would).

The "state immigrants" would also have to be disqualified from all federal programs or unwilling states would still be paying for them.

And if that isn't enough to make it intractable, what do you expect to happen when an immigrant crosses into another state to commit a serious crime?

>To make that effective you would have to eliminate federal birthright citizenship, or anyone could easily make their children US citizens (and then too many would).

This is irrelevant; you can do this on a visa just as easily. Additionally, this exists for a reason even if you don't like it. If anything it reduces the incentive to do this, because you can get 99% of the benefits without doing it. Regardless all you have to do to make this birth-neutral is make it as hard to get a state green card as it is to get a visa.

>The "state immigrants" would also have to be disqualified from all federal programs or unwilling states would still be paying for them.

You are ignorant of the laws regarding legal and illegal immigration. Education, for instance, is explicitly provided to illegal immigrants. Social services almost all have a multi-year "pay-in" period. Additionally, immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out. I believe you are unintentionally arguing a strawman.

Also, those states don't get a say in what they do or do not pay for. Massachusetts pays for Alabama. In fact, Massachusetts pays for immigration control that they don't want. In reality this would be a doubly more fair distribution of federal taxes. Even hypothetically it's an insignificant change.

>And if that isn't enough to make it intractable, what do you expect to happen when an immigrant crosses into another state to commit a serious crime?

I don't understand what you're trying to say at all- this would no different from anyone else, citizen or not, committing a crime.

> This is irrelevant; you can do this on a visa just as easily. Additionally, this exists for a reason even if you don't like it. If anything it reduces the incentive to do this, because you can get 99% of the benefits without doing it. Regardless all you have to do to make this birth-neutral is make it as hard to get a state green card as it is to get a visa.

The whole premise is that some states want to make it easier than that. What is a state green card even for if it's just redundant with an existing H1B visa and doesn't increase the total number of immigrants whatsoever?

> Education, for instance, is explicitly provided to illegal immigrants.

And if the number of immigrants increases, so does the cost to the school system.

> Social services almost all have a multi-year "pay-in" period. Additionally, immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out.

Welfare is redistributive. (The programs that aren't are net harmful and do nothing but sell you your own money with bureaucratic waste and corruption-induced strings attached). Its purpose is to transfer resources from those who have more to those who need more.

The only way anyone should give more than they get is if they have above average earnings, which is true of current legal immigrants (because that's basically the criteria that gets them accepted), but not true of the typical unskilled workers who would be the apparent target of this program.

> Also, those states don't get a say in what they do or do not pay for.

Sure they do, in the US Senate. No federal money gets spent without majority approval from both houses of Congress.

To make this happen you need their approval.

> I don't understand what you're trying to say at all- this would no different from anyone else, citizen or not, committing a crime.

And the political consequences?

>The whole premise is that some states want to make it easier than that. What is a state green card even for if it's just redundant with an existing H1B visa and doesn't increase the total number of immigrants whatsoever?

Look, here's some perspective. The US annually admits:

65,000 H1B visas

70,000 Refugee visas

~200,000 nonfamily immigration visas

~675,000 undetected illegal immigrants

675,000 immigration visas total

9-11 million nonimmigrant visas

If you want to just drop a kid down so they become a citizen, it is a hundred times easier to do it on a travel visa and it always will be. Regardless of how many state green cards there are, it will always be orders of magnitude easier to get a travel visa, hop on a plane, and stay under the radar for a couple months.

The H1B visa is incomparable to a state green card on numbers alone, but it also puts this decision into the hands of a small subsection of employers, which is completely divorced from the desires of the states. It's basically different in every way.

When I said immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out that was was a statement of fact[1], not opinion. They pay the same taxes as us and see severely reduced benefits, even at very low incomes. Cut federal benefits entirely for them and require the states to pay if you like. It's a tiny problem.

As for political unpalatability over finances and scaremongering, there are still plenty of solutions. Forcing states to pay for their green cards is constitutionally tricky, but theres no reason those people need to get federal benefits. If cross-border crime and employment is a problem it would be pretty trivial to have an exclusion zone on the border of states that don't want immigrants. Immigrants wouldn't be able to have residences in that area.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/09/undocum...

> If you want to just drop a kid down so they become a citizen, it is a hundred times easier to do it on a travel visa and it always will be. Regardless of how many state green cards there are, it will always be orders of magnitude easier to get a travel visa, hop on a plane, and stay under the radar for a couple months.

That requires that you can afford to buy a plane ticket and then spend nine months not working while paying US cost of living and pregnancy-related medical expenses out of pocket, which puts it out of reach for most people in the world. An easy-to-get work visa turns the economics around.

And it's not just people who come here exclusively for that reason. More people means more children. If the additional people are unskilled laborers who make low wages and pay little in taxes, someone else has to make up the difference.

> When I said immigrants pay more into taxes than they take out that was was a statement of fact[1], not opinion. They pay the same taxes as us and see severely reduced benefits, even at very low incomes.

The article is only considering social security against itself. Someone making $20K/year is paying <$2500/year in social security tax. One child in public school is four times that in itself.

> Cut federal benefits entirely for them and require the states to pay if you like. It's a tiny problem.

Take away the federal money and the states won't be able to afford it. Or won't want to pay it. The problem isn't social security, it's schools and healthcare.

And it's not like you can just leave children to grow up without schools or let infections go untreated.

> If cross-border crime and employment is a problem it would be pretty trivial to have an exclusion zone on the border of states that don't want immigrants. Immigrants wouldn't be able to have residences in that area.

For many states (e.g. Pennsylvania, New Hampshire) a 100 mile exclusion zone would have multiple other states fully inside it.

>That requires that you can afford to buy a plane ticket and then spend nine months not working while paying US cost of living and pregnancy-related medical expenses out of pocket, which puts it out of reach for most people in the world.

Uh... It requires literally none of those things. You can get into the US on a car, train, boat, bicycle or a good pair of chanclas. You certainly don't need to be here nine months to have a kid. You can certainly find work in that time, and emergency medical care is "free". And while yes, it means more people, those people are a far cry from new immigrants and their numbers can still be limited federally. And regardless, with 12 million immigrants here already, the number of births won't be changing much any time soon.

I think you're rather missing the forest for the trees with the rest.

> You can get into the US on a car, train, boat, bicycle or a good pair of chanclas.

What does it buy you to trade one expensive ticket for another? I don't think you're seriously suggesting that walking here from even Central America is not a large impediment, to say nothing of the unconnected continents where the large majority of people actually live.

> You certainly don't need to be here nine months to have a kid.

The alternative is to get a travel visa when you're already pregnant, in which case the government can observe what you're attempting to do and deny the visa.

> You can certainly find work in that time

Working on a travel visa is illegal, therefore harder to do and lower paying.

> and emergency medical care is "free"

That implies going through a pregnancy with no access to non-emergency medical care (e.g. ultrasound), risking the life of the child.

> And while yes, it means more people, those people are a far cry from new immigrants and their numbers can still be limited federally.

Either you're increasing the number of unskilled immigrants or you aren't.

>Take away the federal money and the states won't be able to afford it. Or won't want to pay it. The problem isn't social security, it's schools and healthcare.

>And it's not like you can just leave children to grow up without schools or let infections go untreated.

Having actually looked it up, federal funding is only 13% of public education ie it would be absolutely trivial to require states to fund state green card immigrants. Likewise emergency healthcare isn't federally subsidized. Plus, it's highly unlikely that allowing this program would actually even increase the number of immigrants we have, just make the illegal ones legal.

Your arguments are completely strawmen.

> Having actually looked it up, federal funding is only 13% of public education ie it would be absolutely trivial to require states to fund state green card immigrants.

You're forgetting that the federal money goes disproportionately to schools in poorer areas, i.e. exactly the schools in question and the ones who can't afford to lose the money.

> Likewise emergency healthcare isn't federally subsidized.

Well that's the other problem, isn't it? It is subsidized but the subsidies are indirect. Every time someone goes to the emergency room without paying, the price goes up for ACA-subsidized private insurance and Medicare.

And the same for the lack of non-emergency coverage resulting in people running around without vaccinations and carrying untreated contagious infections.

The only real fix would be for the state to pay for all the immigrants' healthcare.

> Plus, it's highly unlikely that allowing this program would actually even increase the number of immigrants we have, just make the illegal ones legal.

It can't not. The program makes it easier to be an unskilled immigrant. Supply and demand says if you lower the cost the quantity will increase.

If you set a quota at the current number then you aren't actually solving the problem, because more will come hoping to get one of the slots and then you have more people than slots. If you set no quota then the number goes up even more.

Title 1 federal funding is $1000 per disadvantaged student. It's an insignificant amount of money compared to state funded education. Any state funding is totally irrelevant because the states will decide that problems. Likewise healthcare is funded inside states. You're confusing the issues.

ACA premiums are a good point, as they do apply to permanent residents. Empirically this would result in decreases in costs due to preventative treatment, but politically it is a sticking point. Medicaid (not medicare, which is for retirees) is not affected.

Regardless, the point is not to engineer a perfect solution, its to make an improvement by moving the burden of illegal immigrants in red states to blue states. The burden is lowered more than would be otherwise be allowed. This would remove 90% of the burden.

>If you set a quota at the current number then you aren't actually solving the problem, because more will come hoping to get one of the slots and then you have more people than slots. If you set no quota then the number goes up even more.

The inflow of illegal immigrants is 25x smaller than the number of current illegal immigrants. The people who want to be here are already here. In economic terms the elasticity of human survival is very low. The supply is nearly constant regardless of how easy it is to get in and stay. 96% of illegal immigrants are here already. Even if it becomes twice as attractive to come into the US under this system, 92% of the people moving to blue states will already live in the US.

It is far more likely that this would be a minor attraction- the ability to get a social security card is a tiny improvement to your quality of life compared to escaping violence and poverty. It is far more likely that immigration, legal or not, will not be affected significantly. Even if this makes moving to the US 25% more attractive, 95% of immigrants will already live in the US.

> Title 1 federal funding is $1000 per disadvantaged student. It's an insignificant amount of money compared to state funded education. Any state funding is totally irrelevant because the states will decide that problems.

Total education funding per student is north of $10,000/year. Regardless of what percentage was state vs. federal, without the federal funding the state is paying the whole $10,000. That's the state's problem, but that doesn't give the state a solution. If you add a new child whose parents don't own any property to pay local property tax on, where does the extra $10,000/year come from?

> ACA premiums are a good point, as they do apply to permanent residents. Empirically this would result in decreases in costs due to preventative treatment, but politically it is a sticking point. Medicaid (not medicare, which is for retirees) is not affected.

They're all affected. If someone goes to the emergency room without paying, the cost gets distributed across everyone who does pay, including Medicare and private insurance. It doesn't matter that the person who didn't pay wasn't a retiree; the retirees and Medicare pay the resulting higher costs the same as everybody else.

> Regardless, the point is not to engineer a perfect solution, its to make an improvement by moving the burden of illegal immigrants in red states to blue states. The burden is lowered more than would be otherwise be allowed. This would remove 90% of the burden.

Figuring out how to move the burden isn't the hard part, it's how to shoulder it. California would lose the federal money, but at the same time become more attractive for the immigrants who are currently in Arizona or Nevada, which will increase the amount of services they have to provide (the whole amount, not just the federal share) even before there is any new immigration into the country as a whole. Where do they get the money?

> The inflow of illegal immigrants is 25x smaller than the number of current illegal immigrants.

The total number is derived from the inflow. If you double the inflow the result over time is to double the total number.

> It is far more likely that this would be a minor attraction- the ability to get a social security card is a tiny improvement to your quality of life compared to escaping violence and poverty.

There are many places you can go to escape violence. People come here for higher pay, which is exactly what being able to legally work most affects.

>Regardless of what percentage was state vs. federal, without the federal funding the state is paying the whole $10,000. [...] If you add a new child whose parents don't own any property to pay local property tax on, where does the extra $10,000/year come from?

That's a cost that people are very willing to pay. This system would allow states to choose exactly how many kids they want to pay for. You seem like you're trying to argue against immigration in general, which is beside the point. I just want states to be able to make that choice for themselves.

Even in the worst case, if states took in all new immigrants and paid for 100% of their public education, that would still be a better solution because it gives them the option of choice. Like I've been pointing out, it's very likely that we already pay for the education of 90%+ of the newly-legal immigrants we would experience, and the states already pay for 90% of that education. The current system forces states that don't want immigrants to pay for them- this system would reduce that 100 times. It's effectively deportation of 99% of the illegal immigrants in red states to blue states.

>Figuring out how to move the burden isn't the hard part, it's how to shoulder it. California would lose the federal money, but at the same time become more attractive for the immigrants who are currently in Arizona or Nevada, which will increase the amount of services they have to provide (the whole amount, not just the federal share) even before there is any new immigration into the country as a whole. Where do they get the money?

That's fully just an argument against immigration. You're saying that California shouldn't or wouldn't choose to accept more immigrants. I'm just saying they should be able to make that choice. Even if California suddenly decides that despite having the strongest economy in the US they are going to give up their beliefs in immigration, there is no downside to this system.

>They're all affected. If someone goes to the emergency room without paying, the cost gets distributed across everyone who does pay, including Medicare and private insurance. It doesn't matter that the person who didn't pay wasn't a retiree; the retirees and Medicare pay the resulting higher costs the same as everybody else.

So... nationalize them and make them join ACA, so that it's paid for. The current system is the one where their emergency medical care isn't paid for.

>The total number is derived from the inflow. If you double the inflow the result over time is to double the total number.

The short term -the period in which illegal immigrants are nationalized in blue states- is the only one that matters. Here's why: In economic terms we currently have deadweight loss. The political "price" of importing immigrants is too high- leading to undersupply in blue states and oversupply in red states. Once illegal immigrants are dealt with this system means that every state will be importing exactly as many immigrants as they want.

>There are many places you can go to escape violence. People come here for higher pay, which is exactly what being able to legally work most affects.

That's inaccurate. People come to America because there is nowhere else to go. We accept more people than any other area in the world- over twice as many as the EU until recently. Refugees from Syria and elsewhere come here because every other country has turned them away. Good or bad, that is a deeply historical characteristic of the US and its what most people want.

Central American immigrants fit the profile of economic migration better- the median income in America is 6x higher than in Mexico. On the other hand, America is the closest and safest country for those people, and just moving here definitely qualifies as "escaping violence". The top two countries by murder rate are Honduras and El Salvador, and of the top 20 spots 14 are in Central America/Caribbean and 3 are in South America. Even in Mexico the murder rate is 4x higher. Poor in the US can be dozens or hundreds of times safer than poor in central America.

I don't think so. What I'm thinking is that "state green cards" would let you live in one state, and your residence will be checked up on periodically. If you don't live there, or if you're found in another state without a visa, you become an illegal immigrant, and fall under the purview of the federal immigration services.

This has very little negative changes- since many/most illegal immigrants are here on overstayed visas (anecdotally, every one of the illegal immigrants I know), and because travelling from a state into inner states is so easy, it doesn't make enforcement particularly harder. Since immigrants have a readily available alternative in the states that want them, stricter enforcement of illegal immigration is much more justifiable.

All this system requires is that the federal government maintains and checks on a list of expanded green card holders (ie non-citizens) that are restricted to certain states. This system is already in place for normal green card holders. If you aren't where you're supposed to be, the feds start looking with you, with the added advantage of having a last known location, picture, description, identifiers, and information about your family and friends. It would be much easier to track people who entered legally, and justifies much stronger controls over illegal entry.

Hypothetical situation: California says "okay we'll take 30,000 Syrian refugees annually". The Feds screen, admit, and register 30,000 Syrians and tell them "Okay, you are not citizens- you can't leave California without a visa, you can't vote, and you might never become citizens. You may live and work in California as long as you pay state and federal taxes, and you can use public education and medicaid (after ten years). You will be tried for a felony if you leave California. We will check with your landlord, check on where you pay taxes, and stop by every 3-6 months to verify where you are". In return the refugees provide everything a normal green card holder does- name, identification, family, location, occupation etc.

Edit: the best argument I've heard against this is the deontological one. Essentially that the feds should be the only ones who control who enters the union, and that since they are the feds they can't contain people in one state. This argument completely disregards the possibility of the feds making deals with states.

You're right that overstays are a big problem. Now imagine how much worse it would be if every state got to choose who comes in. The federal government tries real hard to issue visas only to people who won't break the law. They're not entirely successful, but the bar is decently high.

The Syrian refugee hypothetical would have a different problem altogether. The opposition to admitting refugees isn't economic, it's about terrorism. If you can't stop a terrorist posing as a refugee from traveling from California to Texas then the only way to keep Texas safe from that person is to keep him out of the country altogether.

(To be clear, I think the worry over terrorists posing as refugees is just paranoia. But the fear is real.)

Like I said, the federal government would handle screening. States just admit a number of people, they don't vet them- the fed has primacy there because of national security and immigration control. Regardless you can replace Syrian with Mexican and probably should. I only said Syrian refugees for the sake of variety.

But again, as a national security concern it isn't a problem. As long as the number of state green cards is less than the number of visas granted, a terrorist will be much more likely to get a visa and overstay it if necessary.

> You're right that overstays are a big problem

How exactly are overstays a problem? It's just a person existing in a geographical area longer than the Mafia controlling it would prefer.

All this "theorycrafting" about how best to coerce people for the greater good is silly.

Blah-de-blah-de-blah the government this and the states that and then "we" make everyone do X and Y because Z and then there will be much rejoicing because people have been successfully coerced for the greater good!

Like if I show up at your door each day and force you to skip on one foot for 5 minutes, at gunpoint, that's good because you might not get enough exercise otherwise!

Anyone can see that would be crazy, but when you talk about some huge, gray abstract masses of people, then it's just fine to intervene in their lives in countless different ways.

How about "we" protect people from becoming drug addicts through a certain harmless "gateway drug" by threatening them with life-ruining prison sentences for using/possessing said gateway drug?

Oh wait, "we" tried that already. It didn't "work"[1], and actually WE had no say in any of it!

[1] Unless, of course, the real goal was to hand everyone else's money to the prison industrial complex, in which case it worked splendidly!

The EU manages to have immigration on a per-nation basis (for non-EU countries), without internal border controls.

True, but there are some partial exceptions (Britain and France) and reality hasn't stopped people from pointing to the EU as an example of the system gone horribly awry.

Despite the lack of conditionals placed on EU immigrants, the lack of tracking and free movement, there has been very little migration from border countries that accept migrants willingly.

Actually there are Schengen border controls which are not the same thing. You cross outside of Schengen and you do border controls. Go from France to the U.K. for example -- even pre-Brexit.

It's very easy to make AK-like and AR-like guns. Even if it's correct that the majority come from the US, they certainly wouldn't have to. Many hobbyists even do this kind of thing, and it doesn't require any particularly special manufacturing equipment. My guess would be that the reason they seize more ARs than AKs is not related to the source, but because they find ARs preferable.

If somehow guns stopped flowing across the border, and cartels still wanted them, they'd be up and running in no time. I'd be surprised if they aren't already doing it, because they have other operations that require much more sophistication.

>It's very easy to make AK-like and AR-like guns.

Preface: I know guns, I like guns, I am a competent machinist and I know all about lowers, gun laws, and the shovel AK. It is not easy to make guns. You need huge factories and while the cartels are theoretically capable of such things, its incomparable to US-based gun manufacture. Mexican factories can be shut down. Mexico can do nothing about guns that come from the US. They can do far less to stop it than we can do to stop drugs from coming into America, and we have been able to do practically nothing.

Manufacturing AKs requires can be done by a blacksmith, but you can't hire ten thousand blacksmiths to produce a gun each every day. You need stamping presses, metal casting, etc. and you will never make a gun as good as a factory. That's just ignorant thinking- the steel, the manufacture, the precision all matter.

>If somehow guns stopped flowing across the border, and cartels still wanted them, they'd be up and running in no time.

That's nonsense. People can make cars from scratch in their garages, but if you stop selling cars to a country they will very quickly not have any more cars. Guns are not that complicated but they aren't that simple. Zip guns have never and will never be a problem in countries with even a partially functional government.

This whole "we can't stop them from getting guns" is emblematic of the magical thinking I was referring to. The scale of the number of guns coming from the US is just way, way beyond what is practical or even possible in other countries. There are plenty of reasons we shouldn't stop guns from flowing into Mexico, but it is a real problem that would no longer exist if we didn't let US guns go to Mexico. There's just no way they would be able to get even a fraction as many guns, anywhere close to the same quality. The US is unique in the entire world for how many (and how many kinds of) guns it has[1]. It's not possible to just go to Russia or China- of the countries that have the most guns the only ones who don't buy them all from the US are Switzerland (where my family immigrated from, incidentally) and France, and they certainly aren't selling to Mexicans.

[1]: http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/small-arms-survey-countries-wit...

A small shop in Guadalajara was making AR-15 lower receivers, using a Hardinge VMC 600 ii CNC mill.[1] This wasn't the usual operation starting from "80% lower receivers"; they were machining the whole part from plain aluminum billets. The machining job lacks a finish pass, but probably works.

There are some surprisingly primitive yet successful gun factories in the third world.

[1] https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-cartel-gunsmi...

Yes, and they only exist because the government turns a completely blind eye. If you had a choice between all guns coming from America and all guns being made in Mexico, the government can do something about the latter but absolutely nothing about the former.

I agree it's not easy but you can do it without a huge factory as they have been doing in Darra Pakistan for decades

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/town-ak-47-sells-les...

I was there a while ago - it's a fun place and for a few dollars you can take an AK out behind the shack and let rip. Usually the tourists use Russian ones and they are less likely to explode on you than the local copies.

I saw him thread a muzzle and priming rounds. It looks very much like they are getting 99% done guns and just assembling them, or making stocks or converting them to select fire, which happens in Mexico already. That's just a technical redefinition of what a "gun" is. However even if Mexico was forced to make do entirely with 90% lowers, it would still be a massive restriction in volume. The number of lowers is way, way smaller than the number of guns that are made every day.

The US is not the only one promoting violence: http://www.insightcrime.org/news-analysis/how-german-firearm...

German firearms are also used in the middle east conflict despite of the "strict weapon export regulations".

Nothing new in politics since 2000 years: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule

If you are interested in helping out in ending the drug prohibition in the United States I recommend donating or getting involved with the Drug Policy Alliance: http://www.drugpolicy.org/

It has always blown my mind that anyone at all was surprised that when governments declared war on dealers that they responded by acting like soldiers.

legalizing drugs would cause the collapse of the cartels and help to end this violence.

And also the collapse of the government. They're totally vested in keeping drugs illegal. It's a profit center for them

No it isn't. It's a huge nightmare and this is why even current and former Mexican Presidents are calling for legalization - despite pressure from the U.S. against it.

https://qz.com/874497/mexico-is-moving-toward-medical-mariju... https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/18/former-preside...

It would likely end violence, but why can't these highly-organized, powerful cartels simply pivot into dealing wholesale, once legal?

Well, then they essentially become above board legitimate businesses competing on their ability to provide a service in the market.

Legalization implies regulation of some sort (e.g. like alcohol). You could also have a government-run monopoly.

The point is to remove the billions of dollars in black-market profits which give rise to criminal organizations who cannot depend on the law to resolve their disputes and must therefore "make their own law".

They'd be competing with alcohol and pharmaceutical companies, who could easily arrange supply and wholesale distribution, and have the advantage navigating political and regulatory issues in a legal way. The paramilitary aspect of cartels would become obsolete, or perhaps be focused elsewhere? Like many people in the black market for cannabis in the US, ranging from growers to judges, they probably see legalization as a disruption that is not welcome since the current system is working well for them.

Has there been any discussion of the Portuguese model? Their decriminalization experiment has been running for more than a decade, and the results seem to be pretty stellar. I hope we can eventually get something similar going stateside.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_policy_of_Portugal

What happened to Mexico seems quite clear. Back in the 80s-90s, South American cocaine and marijuana were mainly smuggled via Central America and the Caribbean. Some Mexican marijuana and heroin was smuggled to the US, but quality was low, and there wasn't much money in it.

But then the US clamped down on the Caribbean route. And now cocaine was moving through Mexico. Now most illegal marijuana comes from Canada. So Mexican gangs are mainly moving cocaine (and heroin).

So yes, it's the US drug problem, and the War on Drugs, that's fucked over Mexico.

Many current policies are entirely misguided and counterproductive, indeed.

Tom Wainwright, former Mexico correspondent of The Economist, has an insightful and entertaining book on this, Narconomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel.

Step one to making things better: legalize the drugs in the USA from which Mexican drug cartels are getting rich.

Places like Yucatan are safer than the US, other parts very dangerous https://i.redd.it/5nxmj0uau5gx.jpg

> the architecture (particularly D.F.) makes for a crazy, exciting mix

D.F. is an alias for Mexico City. From Wikipedia:

On January 29, 2016, [Mexico City] ceased to be called the Federal District (Spanish: Distrito Federal or D.F.) and is now in transition to become the country's 32nd federal entity, giving it a level of autonomy comparable to that of a state.

wow - what a beautiful comment

> makes for a crazy, exciting mix where the wealth and treasure of history and (deserved) national pride contrasts with poverty and the political and social conservatism that goes alongside.

I am curious why you grouped political and social conservatism with poverty.

Here's an example: during the 2012 election, a national supermarket chain gave a small amount of credit by way of a gift card to anyone who promised to vote for the (now current) party. Poverty means votes can be bought, allowing politics to focus on maintaining (corporate) status quo instead of providing a good life for citizens.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/mexicos-presidential-el...

It also means a lower rate of literacy which correlates the world over with social and religious conservatism. Quoting Harvard: ".. economic downturns have contributed to periods of increased social conservatism that have brought right-wing political parties to prominence"

http://rlp.hds.harvard.edu/economic-policies-ideologies-7

"living in constant anxiety of my friends and colleagues being in danger"

How much of this terror is coming from "war on drugs"?

I wouldb't call social conservatism bad nor "national pride" good. And I wonder if poverty isn't behind the wealth

It's us, the USA, that is causing this paper to shutdown. The cartels are financed by the insatiable drug appetite of its close neighbor. Our inability and/or unwillingness to legalize recreational drugs is the feeding tube for these vicious groups.

It's surprisingly simple to locate the plantations using LIDAR + spectrometry. Even easier in Afghanistan, where fields are cultivated in the open. It's so well documented that the UNDOC provides an anual report with the amount in acres. I could go on, but this is enough to make one wonder why they aren't being stopped.

>>Insatiable drug appetite is a constant

Says who?

The decades upon decades of failed abolishment efforts speak for themselves.

So I'm by no means pro-drug, and I agree that most people who say "it's impossible to fix because we haven't fixed it yet" lack imagination, but there is absolutely some fishy stuff going on with drug policy.

What we are doing now is broken, has been broken, and everyone knows it's broken. There are hidden motives here, no doubt. Corruption is a very real thing and there are a lot of people with a lot at stake regarding drug policy.

The most important thing to successful drug prohibition and treatment is a semi-controllable grey market.

> I could go on, but this is enough to make one wonder why they aren't being stopped.

Except for that pesky sovereignty thing.

I was thinking of police corruption myself.

Is that the same sovereignty that stopped the US from from drilling their oil after overthrowing their government?

It's odd reason given that narcotics are/were supposedly one of the principal sources of the Taliban’s financing.

We all moved on after finding out there were no weapons of mass destruction without even an "oops" from the public, so I wouldn't hold your breath on anyone launching a successful campaign there- still, if that's true, I would really like to see someone make a documentary or some articles about it in a format the masses will see. Could be really compelling to people not typically reached by advocates of drug reform.

What oil in afghanistan?

Even in iraq the oil reserves are managed by the iraqi ministry and went mostly to chinese companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93Iraq_relations#R... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/world/middleeast/china-rea...

Sovereignty and the concept of hostile action/influence on life can make the line blurry.

If, through inaction, violent warlords displace thousands or millions of people, are the destination countries not adversely affected? The US has millions of economic and war-affected Mexican refugees.

Same with Syria... should Germany, Turkey, Greece, etc. say "Syria is sovereign, nothing we can do" when their countries are being overrun?

The US should look to improve life in Mexico and reduce cartel power first through economic and peaceful political means, and then, PERHAPS and after much thought, bombing the shit out of every cartel leader on the same night, Godfather style. I'm only half kidding.

> The US has millions of economic and war-affected Mexican refugees.

This is false. According to the DHS, less than 1400 refugees have been granted asylum between fiscal years 2013 to 2015 (inclusive) [1].

> Same with Syria... should Germany, Turkey, Greece, etc. say "Syria is sovereign, nothing we can do" when their countries are being overrun?

Why not?

> The US should look to improve life in Mexico and reduce cartel power first through economic and peaceful political means, and then, PERHAPS and after much thought, bombing the shit out of every cartel leader on the same night, Godfather style. I'm only half kidding.

Doesn't seem like what the current administration is doing, though.

[1] https://www.dhs.gov/immigration-statistics/yearbook/2015/tab...

I used the refugee term in the sense of "they came here to escape poverty and gang wars", not "the State Dept allowed them in".

And "Why not"? Because of my point: Syrian war is having a very real, direct impact on the other countries, and is violating the Non-Aggression Principle. So even if someone is a Libertarian or non-absolute Pacifist, it could be argued those countries most affected by refugees have the right to self-defense against Syrian combatants.

Well, who knows why mexico doesn't take advantage of that.

But they are the only people who can.

Here's an interesting podcast on the supply of drugs: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2017/02/tom_wainwright.html The guest mentions that in the Ande's mountains it is still tough to identify drug growing.

LIDAR can go through canopy because there are spaces between leaves. Take a look at the Carnegie Airborne Observatory's tech.

Because the farmers get paid next to nothing so disrupting supply does nothing to raise costs (the usual measure of the effect a supply side policy has). Mexican weed production soared because the authorities were pulled into cities due to violence leaving the rural terrain uncovered.

Narconomics is a good read on the various measures that have been tried. Going after poor South American farmers these days means the cartels just means the cartels don't pay them as much.

Far too much policy making around narcotics is done by knee-jerk reactions, on both sides.

Mexico has plenty of its own problems that you're overlooking. It's not as simple as problem -> cause. By that logic Mexico would be to blame for Columbia's cocaine trafficking.

Nope, still America.

yes, that's why Canada is just as bad a Mexico, with Canadian drug cartels mass beheading their rivals in the streets of Toronto.

The richer the country and the stronger its institutions, the less likely cartels will take over sure, but when $40 billion USD in yearly profit (in the US drug trade) are up for grabs, someone's going to be stepping up.

There was a time when we thought Mexican institutions would resist. I am from Chihuahua Mexico, and we thought this was just happening in the rural isolated areas. Then it spilled over the cities too. I have had family killed. Smart and educated, like you or me.

American and Canadian institutions are stronger. They have been able to stand.

I agree with you, that the US needs to legalize production and sale. However, why has Canada never been wrecked by extremely violent cartels seeking to feed that insatiable drug appetite?

How do you explain nearly all of Latin America having wild murder rates? All of the most dangerous non-war zone countries on earth are in Latin America. And yet that same murder & violent crime problem isn't represented in Canada. What could possibly explain that consistency across ~15 different Latin American nations, except that it's a cultural and institutional problem? Colombia for example has seen dramatic improvements, despite the US demand for drugs increasing in the last 15 years. Or take Venezuela, one of the most dangerous nations, with a truly shocking murder rate, and it has very little to do with the US drug demand. Or take Brazil, a nation of 200 million with a murder rate 7 to 10 times that of the US (with up to half of all murders unreported in official stats), which also doesn't derive its huge murder problems from the US drug demand.

It's far too simplistic to just blame the US for everything.

Stop it in Colombia and it shifts to Mexico. Stop the routes along all of Mexico and the Caribbean and who knows - no reason to be so sure it absolutely couldn't happen in Canada.

Drug routes are already moving to poorer neighbors of Mexico like Guatemala, who are even less able to stop the cartels.

[0] http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/latin_america-jan-june11... [1] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/guatemalas-...

Simply because Canada doesn't have the natural climate for growing Coca nor Cannabis.

Nowadays it doesn't matter as much since a significant amount of production can be done in greenhouses and there are other more synthetic products with market share, but the damage is already done to those poorer countries, and the cartels already wield too much influence.

Also the US effectively supplies a lot of the guns used in the killings by allowing them to be freely purchased near the border.

The War on Drugs is now taking down free press in other countries, it is has gone too far for too long.

It is essentially funding terror and when you see the billions being made in only a few states such as Colorado with 1+ billion in 2016 [1]. Large amounts of wealth, probably 50-100+ billion going to cartels in the south annually to fund very bad things.

Prohibition always creates a criminal black market that becomes uncontrollable when there is a large demand for a product that is illegal. Better to make it legal, remove the revenue for cartels and use some for taxes and lots of jobs in the US. Colorado already has 20k jobs from ending prohibition on marijuana, that could be a 200k nationwide job creator. Legal markets, education, rehabilitation and safe use could also provide many jobs.

Legal marijuana markets in the US are already at such high growth rates that they rival the dot com boom growth [2]. It makes pro-business and safety sense to legalize and make it a health issue not a criminal one, because the criminalization of it is creating very bad blow back and funding terror essentially, destroying privacy and lives along the way. The punishment of non-violent drug users, enforcement and resulting black market criminals are way worse than the act and it is cruel and unusual punishment on individuals and people now on a massive scale worldwide.

[1] http://www.marketwatch.com/story/marijuana-tax-revenue-hit-2...

[2] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-01-04/legal-marijuana-sales-...

Colorado will make much more than that too, since when legalizing governments option for the lowest taxes possible in order for people to not return to the black market. Give it 5 years when the black market for weed disappears almost completely and full taxes are applied like they are to booze/cigarettes and could easily triple that amount in Colorado.

That sounds reasonable but is naive and does not take into account how corrupt people are. John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to President Nixon said:

"The Nixon campaign in 1968 and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the antiwar Left and black people... We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black. But by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily"[1]

So taking into account things like cultural prejudice. Those things are unlikely to be fixed just with good will and altruism.

[1] http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/9659888

The legalisation is one part of it. The purchasing is another. The cartel is another. In that order.

I disagree.

Prohibition transforms capital spent by drug users into income for drug cartels. Under full legalization, drug users would have as little incentive to buy their drugs from street vendors as alcoholics would want to buy their liquor from some guy standing on a street corner.

The great news is that we are entirely responsible for this mess ourselves, so we can fix it if we want to.

The problem with full legalization is that you are making it easy for people to get the route to drug addiction.

Maybe legalization for only people who are proven addicts, but are probably the bulk of the cartel revenue would give a more favorable result ?

> The problem with full legalization is that you are making it easy for people to get the route to drug addiction.

That's already an acceptable risk with cigarettes and alcohol, and marijuana in some places, why should it not be acceptable for everything else?

Why do you consider that full legalization is making it easy for people to get the route to drug addiction?

In general, lack of availability is not a strong limiting factor even in countries with full criminalization; illegal drugs can be bought by anyone willing, there exists a market in any population center.

On the other hand, drugs being available in a controlled environment makes it easier to recover from addiction, and also limits the proliferation of various highly addictive chemicals which wouldn't be preferred or used by anyone if e.g. simpler opiates were available.

Saying that full legalization will cause a huge increase in drug addiction sounds plausible, but what evidence we have (e.g. Portugal decriminalization) shows that it doesn't really cause any disaster.

You disagree that...

1. We have the option as a consumer of not buying illegal drugs?

2. Cartels have the option of not doing horrific things?

I have nothing but respect for the journalists of Mexico and the incredibly valuable and dangerous job that they do every single day so I hope it doesn't come off as to condescending or uninformed to suggest that journalists wanting to investigate drug cartels and the government should set up underground printing presses. During World War 2 many resistance members did so in countries occupied by the Axis Powers and they were able to print and distribute their newspapers out under the most dangerous conditions imaginable [1][2].

Of course, in 2017 it's easier to set up a clandestine press organization using the internet, but I'm certain that there are many valuable lessons to learn from WW2.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_press

[2] https://warpress.cegesoma.be/en/node/13

Blog Del Narco[1] is one such underground source. Of course, some accuse it of falling short of journalistic standards because it filters almost nothing, and so has often been used as a de facto PR outlet for numerous cartels. Even so, one of its founders is believed to have been murdered in 2013, and the other was forced to leave Mexico permanently.

[1]http://www.blogdelnarco.com/

Similar situation with Narco News[1] (though I know nothing of its journalistic standards)... I had a friend who was working for them in Mexico about 15 years ago, and he ended up quitting and leaving the country after a co-worker was killed.

[1]http://www.narconews.com/

BDN is a use at your own risk site.

I far prefer www.borderlandbeat.com

Very committed group working with material to translate into English to spread knowledge about the goings on in the large scope of the country. Many different regions / players. Just a suggestion.

> BDN is a use at your own risk site.

I'm curious, what risk(s) do you mean? If you mean NSFW and disturbing violence, you're right, and I apologize to anyone who didn't get that - I assumed given the topic it would be self evident.

Also I second your endorsement of Borderland Beat, that's what I actually read as a non-Spanish speaker.

From what I'd seen posted on the Borderland Beat forums on a semi-regular basis BDN gets injection type viruses. They're a target in that regard because of their site having vulnerabilities.

That's the main concern of why I don't visit, but in a secondary category is I've seen several instances where the Borderland Beat crew fact-check and note that BDN has recycled old material / videos under the guise of new information. I don't see that as helpful so I keep that under advisement.

Might not be a surprise but Breitbart apparently is staffing a Cartel / Mexico Crime crew to a decent extent and I have given them a look here and there. Viable sources are viable, and that's a dangerous as all get out sector to be in, so if they can get facts reported, I'll check them out / cross-reference with Borderland Beat.

This is why real journalist need to be protected regardless where you stand on the issues. It's a pillar of democracy for a very important reason.

Agreed, but let's make that even more general. No need to limit that to "real journalists", since then you're just asking for people to build an ivory tower and use it as a power base for control of "non-real" "journalists".

Everyone needs to be free to speak their minds. Freedom of speech is for everyone.

Journalists need more than freedom of speech, they also need freedom to investigate. I suspect handing that to everyone is still ok, but speech is not enough.

Everyone needs the freedom to investigate, too.

Sounds like a huge grey area.

Exactly. And "Freedom of Speech" is a broad term, with a wide variety of implications. Freedom of speech also means being able to channel ideas that aren't as popular and most of the mainstream media may not agree with. People should be able to express those ideas as well.

> People should be able to express those ideas as well

No. There is no place in the world for antisemitism, homophobia or other right-extremist views. These "opinions" are direct threats to people. And when the state, as it often does, fails to protect the marginalized, then in my opinion nearly anything is acceptable to stop these "opinions" from being expressed.

We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies - and also in America we see what happens. Evil to the core, all of it.

You tell me what your model speech code would look like, and I'll show you how I could use it to shut your speech down within a decade.

I generally agree with this point of view, but a look into history (you don't even have to go back to Hitler or Stalin - the last 10 years should be enough!) proves that "free speech without limits" as done in the US is a path to disaster.

For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.

I've been alive and in the US for well over 10 years, and I pay a lot of attention to speech issues. What proof do you believe shows us to be on a path to disaster? I could agree that there are a lot of people who think their feelings should matter more than expression, but "disaster" seems ridiculously hyperbolic to me.

> For what its worth, there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US. A dishonor to all the victims of the Third Reich. Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.

I absolutely find it acceptable. It's proof that the 1st Amendment is alive and well. Consider these groups as the canaries in a coal mine. As soon as they're shut down, based solely on the content of their ideas, the whole point of free speech is doomed.

You may think that only certain categories of ideas should be protected speech, and strive to enact that into law. But when the political winds change and your ideas become unacceptable, you'll have nothing to stand on when your speech is criminalized.

You seem fairly free with your criticism of American free speech, considering _they_ didn't birth Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin.

I sincerely hope that you will not live to regret making this comment, also, if that's the level you wish to compare the United States with you're not setting the bar very high.

Sorry for the excessive snark.

What I meant was, I think the US obsession with freedom of speech is an important one, and helps society to challenge the ideas that underpin totalitarianism. I think the absence of an American Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini is in part a consequence of their historical attitude towards free speech.

This is the most chilling aspect of Trump's behaviour, in my opinion: his disregard for the importance of free speech.

Yeah, it's definitely sad and ironic to see people citing dictators, whose first actions are to consolidate the press into a state-controlled outlet and then to swiftly and ruthlessly crush all political opposition, as reasons to place more limitations on what people are allowed to say/think. Are these guys even listening to themselves?

Our values and principles in favor of free speech have been a protection for us. It's crucial to understand this, because as we see in this thread, there are groups that are working hard to criminalize speech that they dislike.

Sadly, this is seeing some success. Americans are forgetting who they are and where they've come from. For me, the question is not whether whether the U.S. will continue to succeed into the centuries ahead, but rather if the U.S., as presently constituted, will hold together long enough to be taken over by a despot or if it will just disintegrate into regional warfare first.

I agree.

I recall a scene from Stefan Zweig's "world of yesterday", where he describes how a group of young men, armed with clubs, stormed a student debate and beat the speakers severely. The police, honoring an old tradition of never entering the debate hall, stood outside as it happened.

I guess I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure when and how this happened, who was behind it, and what it foreshadowed. Zweig is an exceptional writer, and this was an exceptional book. To everyone interested in this thread: please don't take a tl;dr from me on this. There's a lot of interest in Zweig these days, for good reason.

This passage from this book kind of haunts me, and has led me to think about what it means when civil law enforcement and rule of law stands down as politically motivated thugs use violence to shut down free speech, especially but not only in universities.

That's not far off, at this point. We already have University students rioting to prevent "unacceptable speech" on campus.

Hitler got basically all of his ideas about eugenics from the US. In a very real sense we did "birth Hitler".

>there are not small groups of people running around with Hakenkreuz flags and SS uniforms in the US

How 'not small', particularly in relation to a nation of over 300 million people?

>Please do not tell me you find this acceptable in any way.

I do not find such content acceptable in any way. But freedom of assembly and speech is baked into the United States' DNA, and rightfully so. Take a look at the Skokie case[0] - offensive stuff, but the ACLU stuck up for them anyways, and it ended up setting a legal precedent in the Supreme Court.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_Liberties_Union...

Are you sure about that? I am usually a pretty strong free speech advocate, up to toeing the line of being a free speech absolutist at some points in my life (of the: "nuclear weapon blueprints posted online are just as valid speech as any other sequence of bits, information wants to be free!" variety). But I still think you can design speech codes that are not prone to slippery slope under any sane interpretation.

I mean, the U.S. already has one of those, the whole "fighting words" exception, other countries have a few of their own. It is not entirely clear to me that banning say "open calls to organized violence or coordinated reprisals against members of an ethnic or religious group, on the basis of membership into such group" would be to the detriment of political discourse.

Don't get me wrong, as I said, I am more often on the corner of extreme free speech than its opposite, but saying that the only other alternative is broad censorship is a bit of a strawman. Even with things like eugenics, which I do find instinctively abhorrent, you can easily craft a clear line where things like "I believe group A is better at X than group B, here is my social science study about it and supporting evidence" are perfectly valid speech (and people can engage with that if they so wish and counter speech with speech until the truth emerges), but where continuing with "therefore we must get rid of all B" is considered axiomatically unacceptable. One is a question of facts, the other is a matter of societal ethics.

As for Mexico, by the way, since I am from there, let me point out that the issue with the safety of journalists in the country now a days (vs say in the sixties) has very little to do with whether we have freedom of speech as a value (we do, both legally and as a society, maybe not to the extreme of the U.S. but to a higher degree than many countries where this is not as big of a problem). The issue is the weakness and capture of the state, where no matter what the people want or the laws say, the state is not able to protect people or enforce laws (in part because it is materially incapable, in part because it is corrupt and colluded).

> fighting words

This isn't an exception to free speech protections.

'In 1942 the Supreme Court held that the government could prohibit "fighting words" — "those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace." The Supreme Court has been retreating from that pronouncement ever since. [...] the only remaining focus is on whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence. '

Quoted from https://www.popehat.com/2015/05/19/how-to-spot-and-critique-...

How is that not an exception, though? The test 'whether the speech will provoke immediate face-to-face violence' is still a restriction on free speech, albeit an extremely circumscribed one. Which is exactly what we were talking about, that such circumscribed exceptions are possible in the first place without sliding all the way to 'criticizing the government is treason, citizen'.

But, ok, if you want another U.S.-based exception: some information regarding nuclear weapons is considered to be 'born classified' in the sense that even if you develop it on your own without clearance or access to classified materials, you still are not allowed to divulge it. That is another government-enforced restriction to free speech, although admittedly a sensible one on the justification of the survival of the species.

Don't get me wrong, I think in any specific discussion about speech restrictions the bias should be huge in favor of free speech, given the obvious dangers of any too broad restriction and the incentives of people in power to put in place such restrictions. But we definitely don't currently enjoy, let's say "absolute information-theoretical freedom of speech" (e.g. including things like direct actionable threats, weapon blueprints, video-recordings of certain third-party crimes, etc). We already put up with some limits without falling into a slippery slope. 'No explicit calls for genocide' might not, on its own, be the restriction that opens the floodgates to pervasive censorship.

The beauty of freedom of speech is that it disarms that fine china that begins to appear on every square foot of ground in society where free speech is under assault. Without it, people quickly become accustomed to tip-toeing around issues like the proverbial fine china, but just as quickly very dangerous ideas are left unopposed due to the climate of fear that is generated.

I’m pretty sure that whatever parent would come up with, I could shoot full of holes, yeah. Their statement was that some “opinions” (their scare quotes, not mine) are dangerous and should not be tolerated. This is far different than fighting words or other existing carve outs.

For example, antisemitism and homophobia are two concepts that the parent thinks should be banned. But that right away leads to contradictions. If I ask you a question, “Should orthodox rabbis marry gay couples?” your answer could be deemed as either antisemitic (“yes”), or homophobic(“no”). Your best bet is to stay silent on that question!

So, I do understand not wanting to allow directly threatening speech on a specific group. It’s just such a tricky thing to codify such a ban without inadvertently stifling freedom of thought and opinion. What you really do is hone the dog-whistling capabilities of those who would organize to commit violence.

Actually, it is not hate speech to disagree with the Jewish religion or specific customs (that is protected instead by freedom of religion, which is a different argument, and an important one, but probably not with the same weight as basic personhood). That's not what people usually talk about when they mention antisemitism. Antisemitism, taken in the Nazi way, is the 'disagreement' over whether Jewish people as an ethnic group deserve rights as people or citizens.

Edit: But even with that said, I agree restrictions to speech should rather be too few than to many, and too narrow rather than too broad. Which is why I think the line should never remotely try to cover every degree of racism or xenophobia at all. I could be convinced of the need to restrict public calls for genocide, for example, though.

I agree with you, but I am worried that antisemitism, homophobia, and bigotry in general is the sort of thing that crops up on its own; it can't be eliminated by silencing it. Post-war Germany for instance attempted to suppress Nazism, but it's still around 70 years later.

I am totally willing to accept the theory that Germany did not suppress Nazism enough, but I'm worried that's not actually the answer.

Suppress Nazism? Lol that what our governments did after the initial denazification was the exact opposite. The early Secret Service was mainly former NSDAP personnel up until the 70s. Many right-wing groups, including terrorists (NSU! And thst's just one of them), were covertly supported and aided by the Verfassungsschutz (Office for protection of the constitution).

I believe this[1] and this[2] are what was being referred to... There were actual measures in place to suppress Nazism by suppressing free speech.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_Germany#West_Ger...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denazification

e.g. I can tolerate anything but the out group?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...

You are right, free speech can be very dangerous. People use it to mobilize others to truly evil acts.

But freedoms have always been dangerous. I think they are worth the risk.

The risk is mass murder. Nazis have murdered over 200 people in the last two decades alone in Germany.

In Chechenya, only two days ago homophobes murdered at the very least three homosexual people, arrested over a hundred - and credible activists fear for much worse numbers.

Fascist and reactionary ideologies always lead to death.

murder is already illegal

How many people are killed by the Islamic state? I don't think they have strong free speech protection there.

Free speech and evil are not causal links.

Restriction of free speech is a tool of fascist regimes. You don't fight fascism by becoming a fascist yourself.

A hammer is a tool of fascist regimes as well. Doesn't mean you become a fascist by using a hammer. (For what its's worth, I support free speech as well. I just don't support poor arguments.)

A hammer is also a tool of non-fascist regimes, though. Is restriction of free speech also a tool of non-fascist regimes?

Are you sure you don't support poor arguments?

Germany has the type of strict controls on free speech I think you're looking for (it's illegal to be a nazi, attend nazi rallies, etc), and yet they still have the hate crimes of which you speak.

There's no evidence that type of control really does anything to help.

EDIT: as always, am I being downvoted because I said something disagreeable, or because I said something wrong? If I am saying wrong things, please tell me so I don't continue to do so.

> and yet they still have the hate crimes of which you speak.

exactly. all you do is drive it underground, and nothing solidifies ingroup identity like persecution. with free expression you can at least tell who these people are.

You don't beat bad ideas by stifling them, that doesn't work. Beat ideas with better ideas. And once you cede authority over what is ok speech to someone else, you may not continue to agree on that definition.

That's the premise, but it stands up poorly under examination.

Simple, explicit, appealing and emotional arguments and messages beat out complex, tacit, unattractive, and logical ones.

Messages with massive organisation and resources behind them can dominate disorganised or uncentralised attempts to counter them.

Attempting to reput or fact-check specific claims operates relatively poorly.

The consequence has been that many regimes, and philosophers, including those who generally promote free speech, such as John Stuart Mill himself in "On Liberty", put conditions and limitations on the concept:

It is a piece of idle sentimentality that truth, merely as truth, has any inherent power denied to error, of prevailing against the dungeon and the stake. Men are not more zealous for truth than they often are for error, and a sufficient application of legal or even of social penalties will generally succeed in stopping the propagation of either. The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of its reappearances falls on a time when from favourable circumstances it escapes persecution until it has made such head as to withstand all subsequent attempts to suppress it.

https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/On_Liberty/Chapter_2

And who gets the power to decide what's "right-extremist"? You?

Anti-cartel articles are a danger to the cartels.

I think the issue comes to honesty and truth. Generally, far right anti semitic articles are untrue.... Unless they are about Israel. The problem isn't the facts (Israeli missile strike takes out 3 Palestinian citizens or whatever), it's the analysis after (alt-right paper: "it's the Jew's fault," ISIS paper: "it's America's fault," Israeli paper: "three terrorist sympathizers killed in heroic military action"). That's a narrative, and that's nearly impossible to contro sanely, if you are perfectly honest with yourself. Would you strip away a Unions right to push a pro worker narrative? Would you strip Apple's rights to push a pro-corporate narrative? Would you strip a black man's rights to claim he is experiencing racism? What about a white man's rights to claim that racism isn't as big of an issue as the black man says?

There are viewpoints that to you seem so wrong you firmly believe it's be safe to just make them illegal, but that mindset is just an outright dangerous precedent to set because of how fluid human morality and language is.

I'm curious to hear how you feel about this, it is an interesting (and very, very old) debate.

> We in Germany already have seen what happens when you let Nazis speak out and act in free, and the same goes for Stalinist ideologies

This is your major fallacy. You're trying to imply that the Holocaust was possible because Germany had free speech for all, which is completely wrong--it was possible because the Nazis were successful in denying free speech to their opponents.

Agreed. But I think that the way you combat negative harmful speech is with more speech.

We're at a precarious time in history when journalism is being used particularly effectively as an intentional disinformation tool. "Real journalism" unfortunately does need to be distinguished. Free speech doesn't encompass fraud.

Does the constitution list fraud as an exception to the free speech provisions?

The speech itself is protected, but speech can be deemed a tort in a civil proceeding, regardless. Freedom of speech protects opinions and best-effort reporting of facts, not necessarily all speech. Granted, we have to be careful not to exclude too much from protected speech, or we will never have the right again. The canonical example is causing panic with malice of intent, such as yelling fire!, fire!, fire! in a crowded hall, knowing well that there is no fire and with the intent is to cause a trampling hazard.

Fraud usually has to do with commercial statute (in the U.S., the UCC), where misrepresenting goods is grounds for a civil dispute.

I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.

Assuming you mean the Mexican constitution, it's kind of vague:

Article 6 . The expression of ideas shall not be subject to any judicial or administrative investigation, unless it offends good morals, infringes the rights of others, incites to crime, or disturbs the public order.

"Offends good morals" is not defined anywhere, so it's up to interpretation whether that includes fraud. "Infringes the rights of others" is defined in various places, but in similarly vague terms.

Thanks.

Once you give the government control over what constitutes "fraud", you can kiss your freedom to speak goodbye. Every totalitarian state in history suppressed (or suppresses) speech in the name of controlling disinformation.

Are you saying you don't recognize the existence of fraud as a category of crime that the government already defines and can prosecute?

I don't recognize fraud as a category of crime related to a news story.

The rest of the world does.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/03/29/felony...

I have no idea what point you're trying to make with that link.

That fraud committed under cover of "news", "journalism", or other forms of reporting, remains fraud.

Here committed by a "citizen journalist", interpreting the term very broadly.

There's the Infowars / Alex (nutjob) Jones / Pizzagate case as well, where, under threat of a lawsuit, Jones has tried to walk back earlier reporting.

(There's another Alex S. Jones, a serious journalist, associated with the Shorenstein Center. Who I strongly suspect curses his, or Nutjob's, parents, on a fairly regular basis. One of the rather more pronounced, ironic, and tragic cases of identity confusion.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Jones_(journalist)

You're mixing apples and oranges here. There's a difference between committing fraud to get a true story and printing something the government decides isn't true.

>Free speech doesn't encompass fraud.

Indeed it doesn't, which is why fraud has been illegal since the foundation of the country.

Is "disinformation" the same as fraud? Who shall decide what constitutes "intentional disinformation" and what doesn't, and at what point it rises to fraudulence? We already have laws that address these questions -- how do you suggest modifying them?

If we're using the election as a meter of the impact of this "disinformation", and, obviously we are, since the moral panic over "fake news" was a propaganda campaign to respond to Clinton's loss, it would seem that the country is pretty split over whose information is credible, and which side is perpetrating a fraud.

Let people decide and listen to the sources that they find credible. Why is the market not good enough? Is it because you don't like the decisions people make when they're free to select their own sources of truth?

How long until I should expect to see you at church, pulling the minister away from the pulpit to correct his "disinformation"? Wait -- don't answer that.

How can we have any freedom once we go down this road? It goes right back to the old ways of "might makes right". Whomever has the most power at the time will be able to decree some speech "fraud" and "disinformation" and punish people for speaking ideas that are too dangerous to entrust to the hoi polloi.

You know that in restrictive regimes, they don't go around saying "It's great living in a non-free country." They go around saying "We are free here, we just don't allow evil men to defraud the people with lies".

Ultimately, I guess it's in the eye of the beholder. Just gotta watch it to make sure nothing you believe ever shifts out from under you and becomes "hate speech", "disinformation", or, plainly, "fraud" without your realizing it.

> Whomever has the most power at the time will be able to decree some speech "fraud" and "disinformation" and punish people for speaking ideas that are too dangerous to entrust to the hoi polloi.

Yes, and in a free speech society, whomever has the most power and/or money at the time will be able to take advantage of free speech to conduct widespread and targeted disinformation and harassment campaigns - under a false flag of "angry citizens" - that can change (and have changed) the course of history.

It cuts both ways, sadly.

Agreed, also we work and advise many in Mexico who are not what some might call "real journalists" in the sense of working for a newspaper. Many of the people who have been targeted are bloggers, part time activists etc.

Freedom of speech is possible only where there is basic law & order. Everybody here is debating fine points of what speech should & shouldn't be allowed/protected - that assumes there's someone in charge to do the protecting/allowing. Well in Juarez the cartel is in charge, and they protect what they protect, and allow what they allow.

I agree. The only reason I say "real" is to make the distinction between publicly stated opinions, feelings, tweets etc. and journalism. Journalism is really the painstaking gathering of information (usually from multiple sources) for every story you write. Among many other things it's also necessary to make clear distinctions between the facts of the evidence and a particular journalists conclusions/opinions reached based on this evidence.

And yes you are correct in saying that this should in no way should prevent or limit people from speaking their minds and stating their opinions publicly.

The problem is that these days, everyone has a different definition of "real journalist," and the group of people who fit that definition tend to be strongly correlated with the group of people who agree with the definer politically.

Indeed. I think the "real journalist" should be dropped: everyone needs to have the right and the protection to be able to do that job.

Then, the "real journalist" could be just a matter of having capability, devotion and determination, not a class of people with special status.

Unfortunately too much of "journalism" is nowadays just activism, using their position to try to influence others (end even shut down the voice of other people because they think this is even more effective influencing).

who are real journalist?

Minor nit: where I live, we have freedom of the press. We do not have a special class of people called journalists.

You have the right to publish anything you like without fear of retribution from the government or anybody else. This, along with the freedom to assemble, allows minority opinions to flourish through peaceful persuasion. It also allows sunlight into actions of criminals and the government.

The crime against humanity here is that these folks do not feel safe to publish. Not that there are journalists being threatened. That's just the current method being used to shut the presses down. There are plenty of other methods that outside organizations use to shut down publishing -- burning buildings, violence against readers, blackmailing editors, having the government buy the presses, and so on. For every Mexico, there are several other countries where the presses have effectively been shut down -- only not so dramatically as this. That's actually a much worse situation.

> You have the right to publish anything you like without fear of retribution from the government or anybody else.

In the US, 1st amendment freedoms only protect against government retribution. There is nothing stopping someone from misinterpreting a tweet and getting you fired, nor is there anything to prevent someone digging up what causes you support outside of work and using that as cause to harass your employer into firing you.

While true, you are protected from some types of retribution from others. For example, someone cannot kill or rob you because you express an opinion in defiance of the political or religious leadership.

Well, in my country, it's illegal to kill and rob people at all, so what's the different in your country?

You are protected from that regardless of whether you have freedom of speech.

For example, it is illegal to murder an convicted felon serving time in prison, even though such a person doesn't have the same guarantee of freedom of speech.

>digging up what causes you support outside of work and using that as cause to harass your employer into firing you.

Tortious interference needs to come back in a big way while Trump is in office. Maybe put some harsh jailtime for it.

I believe you're in the US. Though the situation's somewhat complex, and the recognitions are nuanced, there is some legal tradition of recognition of journalists' rights under common law, case law, and legal gloss:

https://www.rcfp.org/browse-media-law-resources/digital-jour...

One wonders how many "real journalists" in USA will see this sad event as an occasion to bask in the reflected glory of those who really have spoken truth to power, and how many will instead call out the actual reason that gangsters have power: USA's foolish and evil drug prohibition.

Yup.. the social and economic cost of this futile war is insane.. This talk really helped me realize how wrong we've been about this issue: https://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_nadelmann_why_we_need_to_end...

That starts out strong, with the accounts of various on-the-ground drug warriors saying "the problem has to be solved on the other end, because it sure can't be solved here!" He kind of lost the thread as the talk went on. It would have been more effective to really dig in on examples of destroyed lives, both north and south of the border. Statistics by themselves are less compelling.

Also I was distracted by trying to figure out whether that was a really small mustache or some sort of birthmark.

It's easy to say that when you lean left. Not sure what 'protecting journalists' entails. They should by treated just like every other citizen.

Don't forget about JournoList: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JournoList .

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/03/politics/germany-media-spy...

I'm native from cd Juarez and I have a friend who is a journalist photographer and I'm sorry to tell you guys that even indeed free and critical journalism is on constant jeopardy because of the drug cartels and the corrupt government this journal didn't closed because it was to dangerous to do so. My friend told me that it closed because it was not profitable anymore.

The facebook rant about it: https://www.facebook.com/sugeyry/posts/10154385439001931?pnr...

Keep in mind that this is a journalist talking about a decision made the by owner of the paper a while ago, the original decision haves nothing to do with the death of Miroslava Breach or with some pressure of drug gangs. This paper was under the payroll of the late government now followed for corruption and money laundry (Cesar Duarte former governor is hidden at El Paso at this moment). And the "it is too dangerous to continue" is more a political cry out than any other thing.

Yes: times are still hard at Juarez, journalism is still a high risk job. But this is not a statement.

> The committee reported that since 1992, 38 journalists have been killed with the motives for the slayings confirmed as reprisals for their work. Based on that figure, the group ranked Mexico as No. 11 of the 20 deadliest countries for journalists.

I cannot imagine living in a country where posting something online, like a silly blog post, risks my life.

And yet, there are people in your situation, who cannot imagine that life, who condemn those who flee in search of a safe and stable place to live.

Why do people have such a hard time accepting refugees of such violence?

This isn't directed at the parent commenter, of course.

Are you sure? Any American that's written something controversial inevitably will tell the story of the death threats they received after.

JK Rowling got them for writing about child wizards. Planned Parenthood supporters get them. Trump electors have gotten them. Kim Kardashian (ugh) got them for a tweet supporting Israel.

It's easy to find lists of Americans that have received death threats, but much harder to find Americans actually killed because of their silly posts. Would love to read more about it.

> but much harder to find Americans actually killed because of their silly posts

can you name one?

>Would love to read more about it.

Receiving a death threat is nowhere near as terrifying as seeing one of your colleagues show up in the obituaries.

Receiving "death threats" from some thirteen years old troll is not quite the same as people actually getting kidnapped, tortured and killed by cartels on semi-regular basis.

I am from Mexico and live in Mexico City.

To clarify a little bit, the newspaper is from a northern state. And yes, things in the northern states are rather violent and dangerous. But to be honest the really bad state is the one close to the capital, Estado de México which has many violent crime, crime against women, etc. We even joke that is like Mad Max fury road. Yes that bad.

Yet people go to work, to school and carry on.

As everything there are many sides and conflicting interests. Yet violence and crime are just one more bad thing to worry, being traffic and low income being other stuff you have to take into consideration.

As tourists you could always go to many other places instead of Ciudad Juárez or Tijuana since those two have become cities for degenerate people from other countries to abuse and commit atrocities and get away with it for the only reason that they have the dollars.

"But to be honest the really bad state is the one close to the capital".

Not even close.

A couple of years ago on a SINGLE year there were some 5 or 6 narco-blockades in Guadalajara for example (that's one every few months and we are talking 25 to 35 buses lit on fire in the middle of the day, across major streets that prevent people from entering or leaving the city for several hours, on each blockade event, all around the city at the same time, which btw shows how coordinated these criminal groups are). Have you personally been there? It's really not a nice sight and it's frightening as shit. Especially when they happen so frequently that at some point you just have to ignore it to be able to carry on with your life?

Have you been to Xalapa, the capital of Veracruz? where armed people dressed as Federal Forces kidnap people with impunity? Have you had to move around in the city in daylight and watch how military convoys armed to the teeth go around patrolling the streets instead of the Police (mind you this is a town that has a population of less than 1M, i.e. it's more of a town than a big city so people are not used to military presence)?

Have you been to Veracruz city where the Navy had to literally disarm the local police and take control of police duties for a few months? how about getting stopped by a military checkpoint in the middle of the city? especially after watching in the news how many times military personnel at those same checkpoints fired upon (and killed) entire families because they felt threatened?

Have you ever talked to someone that got arrested AND tortured by the police because they thought (incorrectly) that the guy was a member of the cartel? and then seeing this person suffer permanent hearing loss on one side because of how many times his captors slammed his ear against the wall repeatedly for hours at a time?

I've personally lived all these things and let me tell you, "the really bad state is the one close to the capital" is not true at all. Not sure if it's the news not reporting these things, or maybe there's so much shit going on in EdoMex (which I know it's not really a peaceful place) that there's simply no more room for bad news from other parts of the country, but you can definitely find much worse in other states.

Let's not even talk about Guerrero, where I have friends that witnessed headless bodies being dumped on the road... and then having some shady car follow them to their home because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.

I'm sorry for being so crude... Mexico is a wonderful country full of great things and I love it. But crazy, crazy shit does happen outside of the capital and EdoMex, and while it's definitely not something that happens everyday, it's always a constant fear in the back of your head... "what if they kidnap MY family because their business was successful enough to stand up?", "what if my girlfriend goes out tonight to some bar that happens to have fucking military-grade grenades thrown at because some random cartel dude wanted to celebrate that same night at that same place?"

My wife is from a small town in Mexico where there has been a recent surge in violence and kidnappings. Her family is there and we go visit once a year or so as we can. Last time I was there there was a couple of moments that made realize I was just waiting for something terrible to happen. I worry I (as the American) am painting a target on my wife's family. Every time they call unexpectedly I fear for the worst. Right now, I'm not sure if we will go this year.

Less than 1% of crimes are punished in Mexico:

http://www.insightcrime.org/news-briefs/mexico-impunity-leve...

interesting. I wonder how that ranks against other lawless countries / regions

In stark contrast with Russia, where only 1% of those prosecuted don't go to prison:

http://www.thenational.ae/news/world/europe/russias-99-convi...

Can someone explain to me, what would happen if Mexico tomorrow, all drugs were legal like Portugal? Could it get any worse. Portugal seems to doing just fine.

Just to clarify, drugs are not legal in Portugal. There is decriminalization on small amounts, but not full legalization. However, Portugal's experiment is a resounding success and I'd expect even greater benefits from legalization (e.g. tax money derived from the industry around recreational drugs).

Well yes but this is a nitpick in my opinion. Drug possession in personal amounts is not a criminal offense. So they are no longer "super illegal" you could say. It's in the same category as a driving offense or something like that. Same in Czech Republic.

It's not a nitpick at all. Without legalization there is no tax money from sales of recreational drugs, and the black market still exists to collect that profit instead. Decriminalization also does not fix problems like contamination of drugs, mislabeling, or inconsistent dosage, whereas legalization would.

Decriminalization is better than nothing but actually misses out on most of the benefits.

There is work towards that end in Mexico. A selected few got a Supreme Court ruling that supports the legal use and growth of marijuana for personal use [1]. It didn't make it legal, but it sets precedence and a framework to keep the wheel moving to eventually make it legal like in other countries. Through this very same process last year the whole country make it same-sex marriage legal.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/05/world/americas/mexico-sup...

well actually the "El Norte" news paper was about to close much before that the journalist was murdered, the thing is that specific newspaper was in a thigh relation with the ex chihuahua governor( now fugitive ) Cesar Duarte, the owners of the newspaper takes this tragic to get some political tax against the new governor from the oposition Javier corral

I wish there was some mafia approach to rebuild a civil state. This is our house, our block, our town, we avoid interacting with people who support the corrupt government and we do not interact with Narcosi. Just shut out all strangers, isolate people who pose a long term thread to your community. Shun the restaurant, where the cops eat, walk your dog to where the drug dealers are. Create small economy's, which do not bribe, do not interact with drug money, do not sell to gang-members and "public" officials. Have a cell-structured civil service with a anonymously voted for or against major.

Walk our dogs to the dealer's house but not touch drug money? Could you clarify this seeming contradiction?

It was a lame example for civil dis-obedience. You let your dog shit where the drug-deals go down. Have a farmer spray the whole parking lot with merde. Primitive, not over the violence threshold, and yet, unpleasant. Sorry, its really tough to come up with something that would deter, but not escalate.

Why would you purposefully spread feces next to drug dealers? What has this demographic of society that is largely born of economic desperation done to be condemned by us so?

There are certain efforts with a somewhat similar idea behind them, called "auto defensas" meaning "self-defense (civilian) forces".

Basically people in towns ravaged by narcos got fed up with it and started defending themselves because they couldn't trust the local/federal authorities to defend them anymore. A very brave thing to do if you ask me.

However... the sad part is that, on the one hand, fighting an armed group with so much man- and fire-power as the different cartel groups have, it's very hard. Especially because a lot of these narco armed forces have actual military training and even when not, they are so ruthless and savage that it's hard to fight back. The sheer amount of terror these groups can inflict is staggering.

Some of these towns that chose to defend themselves were some time later attacked by huge convoys of 100+ attackers armed with grenade launchers, automatic weapons, frigging M60s and even heavier ones (some groups have anti-air guns strapped to the back of their trucks)... and most importantly, these attackers were ready to kill on sight, whereas the townspeople were armed with hunting rifles and some handguns and definitely not with the same blood lust and ability (or even the nerve) to kill people.

Lots of these towns are now deserted because people had to fled to the surrounding areas after such violent payback attacks.

And to top it all off, if you at least had the government NOT intervene either way... well, you could maybe stand your ground for some time. The problem is that in most of these places the government authorities where actually against having armed civilian forces (and in some cases even in cohoots with the narcos), so they would have to fight both against armed forces AND against government propaganda ("these are not self-defense forces, they are just another narco group taking hold of the town") plastered all over the country in major newspapers and tv stations (which de-legitimizes those self-defense forces that are actually trying to, you know, defend themselves), while at the same time local and federal forces trying to dis-arm them.

It's a really complicated problem for which I definitely have no idea how to solve.

Just imagine having to stand up and defend your town against a military force that, by some estimations, could reach upwards of 15,000 armed men... in one cartel alone. What can a town with a total population of...what... 3,000? 10,000 people? do against a heavily armed and trained para-military force?

And to be clear, those people that did try to defend themselves have my utmost respect. I can't even begin to imagine the amount of desperation you need to be in to try to fight back to such a powerful and horrific group of people.

But in the end it's heartbreaking to see them defend themselves to just later have them be wiped out or threatened with so much torture and terror that it boggles the mind.

A lot of these self-defense forces held up for maybe 2 or 3 years and are now either bought and influenced by some competing narco group or just terrorized out of their towns forever (at least that's what little info I could gather over the years of reading different news sources, both official and otherwise. Not really sure how much of that is real or not since I don't live in any of these towns).

It just doesn't seem... feasible. Maybe I'm a defeatist saying these things... but holy shit, you just have to listen to what someone like Dr. Mireles [1] had to say to get a tiny part of the terrible picture here.

The problem is much much bigger than people can imagine... and I'm not even in the front line here. I'm just some city dude "far" away (as much as "far away" can one be while living here in this country) from these realities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Manuel_Mireles_Valve...

Stopping the flow of money to the cartels would require the U.S. and others to legalize drugs and make the prices plummet. Is the upkeep of hypocrisy and the DEA really worth any amount of murder and corruption?

Legalizing wouldn't stop the flow. You think they'd just throw up their arms and walk away?

Cartels would just lower their prices and keep pushing to existing addicts and creating addicts. Once the price is driven down, how are 'legal' drug manufacturers expected to compete on price with taxes, licensing, overhead?

Legalizing won't stop blackmarket drugs, it will only increase it like in Colorado. http://kdvr.com/2017/03/03/black-market-marijuana-business-b...

I'm curious if any of the reporters will continue their work for foreign news agencies under pseudonyms to protect their local identity.

Someone would rat them out, a source would be discovered and give them away, they'd out themselves for ego, make a fatal operational security error, etc.

I'm guessing there's more to it than the risk. Maybe it was in financial trouble, maybe the owner(s) wanted out anyway, maybe they were threatened directly or paid off, or maybe something else.

Mexico can be super dangerous. But it is a beautiful country with so much to offer. If you go to the right places though it is very safe.

Why not give guns to journalists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_gun_owner...

Not sure how that's supposed to help. If some sniper shoots you it doesn't make much difference if you were carrying a gun or not.

The entire Spanish new world has been a failed state for the past 300 years.

Peruvian and Mexican metals kept them viable for a while, but that ran out long ago. Coke has barely filled the void, thanks to US prohibition.

Chile, Panama, Argentina are pretty good in comparison to many other countries. Also if you take into account the last 300 years, well... not only Argentina was richer than the USA 100 years ago but Venezuela (yes, Venezuela) was in better economic shape than, for example Spain, for decades during the XX century.

There's no way that Argentina was richer than the US in 1917, when American manufacturers and bankers were busily sucking up the wealth of the Entente powers by supplying war materiel and loans.

Not even ten years ago, Venezuela was the darling of the NY Times, among others, under Chavez. Of course, gasoline was close to $4 a gallon then.

Also, Panama would still be a malarial pesthole without the Canal.

Reading up on the various canal schemes in different regions of that era and the French and then American efforts to build the Canal is very interesting.

Columbia has done a pretty good turn around from Mexican style violence to peaceful.

I think you mean Colombia, not Columbia :)

Ah yeah

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