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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

What do you think about all those videos on how dangerous Paris is? Having made the move, would you say that those stem from real experiences and are organic or would you say that it was an organized campaign for some political reason? Or maybe something else?

Trump keeps saying that they want to prevent USA becoming a dangerous place like Europe, even said that recently and the Irish president disagreed with him. As an American, would you say that EU has fallen and it has become a shithole or maybe something in between? I'm just curious if its just about differences of expectations or something.

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> What do you think about all those videos on how dangerous Paris is?

The question to ask is why those videos are being made.

Paris, as other people have pointed out, has a much lower homicide rate than big US cities.

However for pickpocketing, paris is notorious. But getting actual stats that are comparable is difficult.

Homicide in US cities is an inner city issue. It's not mainstream. There's bad areas - stay out of them.

It depends if pick pocketing is ubiquitous or prevalent only in specific places.

The homicides in the US are not random, they are targeted. There is no need to avoid “bad areas” unless you are attempting to start a new gang or sell drugs there.

> The homicides in the US are not random, they are targeted

I don't think that's really selling it to me. it sounds like there is a organised crime problem in the USA.

It's not just an inner city issue. Rural areas in the U.S. are bad too! Parts of the rural south and rural midwest have homicide rates that are completely off the charts for a first-world country (Holmes County, MS; Scioto County, OH; McDowell County, WV).

As a European who moved to the US for 20+ years then moved back to Europe, any idea that Europe is a shithole or has fallen is ludicrous.

If anything, the US degraded far more over the time I spent there than Europe did while I was away.

I am EU too and I know Europe is doing quite fine on average with some good and bad places but I wonder if all this is propaganda for the Americans or if the Americans genuinely expect something else from life.

My impression is that it's propaganda to stop Americans from expecting the same from life.

EU is overall safer then USA. Including Paris.

And cops are significantly less likely to shoot you. You dont have to be afraid of them.

Nobody is "afraid of cops" in the US.

Spoken like a true cis white american.

> As an American, would you say that EU has fallen and it has become a shithole or maybe something in between?

Would love to know the social media you've been consuming that could make you believe that an American in Paris who is praising French city planning for its positive health effects could possibly believe anything close to that epithet uttered by the current American president.

I don't have anecdata, but Paris homicide rate is 6x less than LA, 10x fewer car related deaths, but only 1.2x less crime.

Comparing countries and policies is a great thing, we have to learn from each other. Just be careful of misinformation and out of context numbers. Sure France's GDP seems lower, but they don't need a larger car and a larger diet coke to be happier.

I just paid about 2 grand for new tires on my car. That contributed to GDP, but it certainly didn't make me happier than I'd be if I didn't need a car in the first place. GDP is very misleading when it's measuring work that shouldn't need to be done in the first place. Hurricanes and earthquakes are also amazing for GDP, especially in places that never bothered to prepare for them.

I have visited Seattle, SF, LA, Phoenix, Miami, Shanghai, Tokyo, Paris, and Amsterdam in the past 2 years, and I can say with 100% confident that the cities in the US are shit compared to those in Asia and EU. They are not even close, they are just simply shit, there is no comparison at all. I have no idea what the statistics is, but I feel much less safe in US cities.

Videos about how dangerous some city is, often to scare people about nonwhite residents, is a longstanding and utterly useless genre.

Better to get crime information from anything else.

The idea that Paris is more dangerous than any big city in the US is laughable, and any person that thinks otherwise or that believes anything that Trump spouts is either gravely uneducated at best, or an absolute moron at worst.

Trump and his base think that. The rest of us know we are 40 years behind the rest of the modern world.

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