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Comment by xvedejas | Hacker News Reader

Statistics have to come before anecdotes. I'm not really disagreeing with you, but we live in an era with many more people and much more open dialogue. It's easier to find countless stories of minority abuse, regardless of the actual prevalence. I don't know how many stories of the 1930s we have never heard because nobody was left to chronicle them...

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Statistics have to come before anecdotes

Point conceded, even if the two examples I gave are two of the highest profile events in the last five years speaking on the topic of minority repression in America, they are symptoms of a larger disease. But point conceded.

I'll play along and gladly provide sources and statistics if you'd like, I seem to have made a faulty assumption that these issues I pointed to were speaking for themselves rather loudly and the volumes of data would be readily available to anyone inclined to look for them.

There's much more recency to this discussion than what happened in as you put it "the 1930s"

It's kind of a sad, losing game to compare atrocities from different time periods, and then task ourselves with saying "this time period was worse than that time period". Unfortunately, it's the game we must play to determine whether things are really getting better over time. Since most crimes of repression were not reported in the past, it becomes a game of asking "which book has more words per page?" when one book is water-damaged and the other is burned to ash. I guess any claim that isn't too certain is reasonable.

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