Hacker News Reader

Comment by jappleseed9 | Hacker News Reader

Ofcourse all types of people are likely intrinsically pretty close to everyone else, but you can't underestimate the effect of culture. Roughly speaking, alcohol is legal worldwide if you're above the age of 18 or so. So why do alcoholism rates vary massively between countries? It's largely 'culture'.

Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years. Look at rap music videos, thug culture, single motherhood statistics, etc. Meanwhile recent immigrants (asian americans) are passing them.

Culture is incredibly powerful and we don't all have the same culture.

View on HN

>Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years. Look at rap music videos, thug culture, single motherhood statistics, etc.

I suspect you would hesitate to judge the entirety of white american cultural progress on e.g. Kim Kardashian, sporting event riots, and Nascar.

For anyone interested in a less monolithic assessment of black american culture, this is possible. https://nmaahc.si.edu

>Black american culture has been pretty self-destructive these last hundred years.

This is entirely your own subjective opinion and a very racist one. Except you can provide definite proof that show that rap music, jazz music etc somehow lead to 'self-destruction' (or even that single motherhood is some deliberate part of the culture) all you're doing is revealing your personal dislikes and biases. It is also a very selective statement - no one conflates the behavior of say redneck Americans or free love hippies with the self-destructive culture of white America.

The four cornerstones of gangsta rap music (seemingly the dominant subset of it) are:

1)Prostitutes (And pimps and promiscuous sex and STDs that go along with that)

2)Guns (And you can bet those aren't being used for self-defense against wild animals when you travel to your remote cabin in the woods for a weekend)

3)Drugs (These are self-evidently bad, so no need to elaborate)

4)Money (Often obtained as a result of illegal use/exploitation of some or all of the above)

And even absent all that you can often hear lyrics about the performer singing about how he (or the song's protagonist) "couldn't make it in a white man's world": Afroman - Palmdale.

That type of depressive, often criminal culture seems to fit the description of "self-destruction".

> no one conflates the behavior of say redneck Americans or free love hippies with the self-destructive culture of white America.

Neither rednecks nor hippies have any significant influence on how an average white american behaves. Most people would struggle to name any names.

Yet it's trivial for people to name a few prominent gangsta rappers. Heck, those who achieved cult status were shot in mid 90s.

>Neither rednecks nor hippies have any significant influence on how an average white american behaves

Meanwhile uber-violent and hyper-sexualized mass-market movies, outright pornography, and death metal are largely produced by white people/entities. Should we discuss the influence they have on how ”average american whites” behave? For that matter, much of "gangsta rap" has been produced by white-owned entities.

In short, you provided the "four cornerstones of gangsta rap music". For each, we could just as easily plug in widely consumed, top-grossing films or other products of "white culture".

Meanwhile, back in the real-world, mass shootings seem to be the near-exclusive purview of white men. Shall we also opine on the destructiveness of white culture based on that?

The point is that racist generalizations don't help anyone.

Mass shootings are insignificant in the total amount of shootings.

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states

2016: 38,658 2015: 36,247 2014: 33,599 2013: 33,636 2012: 33,563 2011: 32,351 2010: 31,672 2009: 31,347 2008: 31,593

Which year have mass shootings by whites amounted to at least 1% of total gun deaths?

As for Death Metal bands, how many of the performers in this genre have been arrested for gun-related crimes?

How many were killed by guns and went on to achieve cult status?

> are largely produced by white people/entities.

Jewish, not white. Jewish culture is distinct from generic white culture. You can get away with a lot with Jewish privilege, like Bill Maher's casual N-word use on television. A random white John Doe's career would have been done right there.

I think you're completely failing to get the point. It's not about statistics, it's about perception (I wonder what percentage of Black Americans actually listen to rap music or have anything to do with 'gangsta' culture). In this case your perceptions are warped because of your own biases. I'm also glad the poster above brought up the example of mass-market movies. Porn is probably another good example of something that no one conflates with 'white culture' even if there are seemingly good reasons to. There are many other aspects of mass culture in the west that are viewed very negatively elsewhere. The poster certainly makes a good point about mass shootings as well, whatever the percentages are they certainly make a huge bang on public perception. We can argue stats all day but what constitutes 'good' culture or 'bad' culture is your own subjective opinion and your (racial) bias makes you blind to one and hyper-sensitive about others

edit - Also by making that distinction btw 'jewish' and 'white' culture you're very plainly showing where you're coming from.

edit - I just took a look through your profile and now I'm not surprised at all. A very common theme emerges lol. You can disregard everything I said above since it won't make sense to you either way

My great grandma was jewish.

I'm not white, I'm a minority in the country of my birth.

Do you have any arguments or are these ad hominems[0] all you got?

[0] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Your comments amount to ideological trolling whether you mean them that way or not. That's not what this site is for, and flamewar about race are especially not what this site is for, so please stop abusing Hacker News this way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"Do you even have arguments..."

Can you even read? Go away race troll. Anyone can look through your comment history and see what you are. Not even American pffft.

We ban accounts that attack others like this, regardless of how wrong someone else may be. You may not owe the other person better, but you definitely owe this community better if you want to keep posting here. Please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please don't do this again.

Apologies. I don't usually lose it like that online but this person is an obvious troll. I like that HN is one of the more civil places online and don't intend to be the one to spoil it.

* Also please monitor this user's posts. He has a history of posting fact-free racially inflammatory comments that would be more at home on a forum like 4chan. It would be nice if someone kept an eye on this account. A few examples:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16071344

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=jogjayr&next=1744780...

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=gspetr&next=16069082

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15624778

Reply on news.ycombinator.com