Farewell to America: Returning to England After 12 Years in the US
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The writing in this article is very interesting, and the author reports many interesting incidents. This article deserves your close reading attention, and I predict it will be good food for thought for the readers who read it from top to bottom. I look forward to a future article by the same author about what he thinks about Britain after he lives there for a while following so many years away in America.
Three years is an awfully short time to notice things uniquely as though one were an insider. It has been my experience that cultures do not unfurl that easily for outsiders to be allowed in and wrap one's head around, all the motivations for the reasons why a society organizes itself in a certain manner much less, comprehend the complex inner dynamics of such organization.
edit: HN is starting to become a strange place. Take the time to explain how your experiences abroad - even the short ones - helped you gain non-threadbare insights about that culture, which fully invalidate my disagreement above, rather than partake in purely intellectually-lazy flaming.
He was in the US for 26 years, left for 3 years, and then returned to the US. He says that 3 years away from the US was enough time for somethings to feel strange when he returned.
This is why many don't agree with how people tend to deride either western or asian documentary photographers who go to (necessarily poorer countries) by calling it "tourist documentary photography," exploitative, etc. An outsider has a better and sharper eye for what is askew in a place foreign to them.
So, in your opinion, a point that would otherwise be valid becomes not valid if the author does not cite the best example for it?
Are you familiar with US and UK law enforcement standards on use of deadly force? I rather doubt they are significantly different.
Even if you ONLY count the number of police shootings in the US which involved shooting unarmed individuals it would be higher than all of the UK's shootings put together.
> I rather doubt they are significantly looser than those in any other western nation.
You'd be entirely wrong. US police can get away with shooting people if they feel a "threat" which is entirely not the standard used elsewhere. Other places it isn't about a police officer's fear that determines the legality of firing, it is the actual factual threat the officer faced.
For example if someone fishes around in their pockets, if that person was shot that officer would be considered justified and they would not only not go to jail but keep their job. In the UK that police officer would definitely lose their job and MIGHT go to jail.
Everyone loves to point out the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting [0]. And as messed up as that was, that was a national scandal, there was two investigations, supposedly changes were made, but what is interesting is that those types of "incidents" happen it seems on a weekly basis in the US and nothing ever seems to happen and there is very little outcry about it.
Just this week a US police officer shot an unarmed escape convict in the back as they were running away. Nobody is even defending this as the default assumption is that that officer was justified. That is the new normal in the US. Shooting unarmed people in the back...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jean_Charles_de_Menez...
Your description of standards doesn't mesh very well with this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadly_force#United_States_law
In particular: The Tennessee v. Garner ruling in 1985 in which the U.S. Supreme Court [...] abolished the Fleeing felon rule where a fleeing felon who posed no immediate threat to society (e.g., a burglar) could be shot if he/she refused to halt.
Also: In the 1989 Graham v. Connor ruling, the Supreme Court expanded its definition to include "objective reasonableness" standard—not subjective as to what the officer's intent might have been—and it must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer at the scene
So it isn't just the subjective sense of fear an officer may feel.
The US is a big place. It's possible to find a few incidents where an officer didn't live up to standards and training and try to make it seem like it's a bigger problem than it is, if that's your agenda. Certainly shooting fleeing people in the back is not "the new normal" in any way that I can see.
The best example that comes to mind is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cX5CPx4RKWw - a man with a machete actively engaging uniformed officers on the streets of London. While it does look like it should be set to the Benny Hill theme, the man was apprehended alive. They didn't just contain him and wait for a armed unit (which are highly available in London).
Perhaps I'm stereotyping US police forces, but I do think the same situation in inner-city US would have been a clearly justified shooting.
They do get a bad rap, and there have been some very debatable exceptions. But I truly believe that overall, we set a very different bar for justifying deadly force.
I agree that American police are more (overly) aggressive. But there is also truth to the statement that America has more violent criminals.
The problem is he then goes on to assume every negative experience with a white person is because he is black.
However, your comment does seem to dismiss the the article as a list of personal grievances of the author, rather than illustrations of common cultural issues. To me, the article obviously consisted of considerably more than that.
Unsurprisingly, privilege makes it easy to dismiss concerns of the groups that are "other", that do not reflect our personal day to day experiences.
For me, the value of articles like this is in providing a window into the issues that most of us do not have to deal with normally, and making me review my own preconceptions to see if I have unwittingly treated people differently than I should like.
I didn't dismiss the article. I stated it brings up things that need to be known (a positive). I then went on to say the problematic part. Some of his Hhis thinking is also inline with what I see in some social media that turns things in to an examples of racial discrimination or privilege when that simply isn't the case. Outrage over giving Dlyn Roof a bullet proof vest or food when in fact that is a common practice not a reward.
I happen not to agree with much of what this writer said. I have lived in four cultures in three continents in my life. The USA is most definitely NOT what this author paints us as being. I have noted how, for at least the last twenty years, the overwhelmingly left leaning media has made it their job, perhaps unintentionally, to destroy the US from the inside. This is nothing less than despicable.
While working in Europe fifteen years ago I noted that CNN and TV shows out of Hollywood were the primary exposure to "America" most of the world got. And what an ugly, unfair, one-sided, twisted and hateful image it is. I would hate us too.
No, this article is hateful and highly biased. Go ahead, call me a racist if you must. It'll only add to the nonsense.
Also, and related to another post[1] on the front page right now, we have the rather recent element of twitter and other social media that is deliberately manipulated to create and amplify emotional, flash-mob types of dust-ups over isolated events in order to make it appear that there is a huge systemic crisis happening. That gambit is as old as politics, but the rise of social media and the "report first, get the facts later" type of approach to "news" reporting taken by many blogs and even some previously objective media sources has made it much more efficient.
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Edited to add: I don't read Younge as suggesting that all Americans are racists. If it were that bad, I suspect, he would have left a long time ago. And I think it's very odd to see a piece like this as an attempt "to destroy the US from the inside". I think he is pointing out real problems that affect a lot of people, and that we need to deal with. To me that's constructive criticism; why you read it as something else is not clear to me.
Here's another post along the same lines (though much shorter), by Bernard Tyson, CEO of Kaiser Permanente: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141204174020-261404895-it-s...
I mean, here we are actually lending credence to the idea that the US is a racist society, when in reality, the vast majority of Americans are not. At all.
This is utter nonsense promulgated by political actors that benefit greately from minorities, racial and ethic groups being angry at "America". Having these groups remain angry, poor and disenfranchised is a strategic political goal aimed at creating large voting blocks. After elections they are dropped on their heads because improving their standing in life would lose them votes. This is sick. And this isn't limited to the US.
Your profile says you work at Facebook. If this country is overwhelmingly racist, how many of your coworkers would you say are racist? 50%? 25%? 10%?
I mean, you have over 10,000 coworkers from all walks of life. Surely there are a bunch of fucking racists in there since the USA is such a racist nation, right?
How about at Apple?
Google?
Tesla? SpaceX?
Surely Microsoft, don't you think?
No, your shit doesn't stink. The racists have are "those" people. Over there. The old couple living on a farm who own three shotguns. The fucker who watches Fox News, she is a racist, yeah, every las one of them!
Or is it more likely that the correct explanation is that racists (who are despicable pieces of shit) might be just as abundant as rapists, child molestors, murderers or criminal thugs. In other words a very small segment of human manure that is the sad reality in any society.
The vast majority of the people in this country are good honorable people. You, your parents, siblings, extended family, circle of friends, their families and friends, etc.
Chances are most of them are great people who don't hate anyone and would not hurt a fly. Yet here we are lending legitimacy a pile of bullshit pushed forward by a sick ideology that uses people like pawns for political gain.
If I am wrong, please, pray tell, how many people in your family and life are racist? Surely your family, friends and coworkers are no different on average from similar circles around the nation.
You see, when you slow down to think a bit and bring things down to a relatable level the perpective is quite different.
Does racism exist? Of course. Is it rampant? Of course not?
I agree that some people in other countries have a warped view of America based on movies and news. That being said I suggest viewing news from many different news sources such as Al Jazeera, Russia Today, NHK, etc. Gives a more rounded perspective than just watching Fox news or CNN.
At home we speak five languages (to varying degrees of fluency) and end-up consuming news, information, movies and tv shows from many cultural vantage points.
This is, of course, the exception in the US, where a good chunk of the population has very narrow cultural and ideological exposure. And this is dangerous because it creates a population that is easy to manipulate through media carpet bombing with ideology.
This last point is one of the biggest problems I have with US media and Hollywood. They've mutated into ideology delivery vectors. I am sick and tired of taking my kids to see a movie only to be exposed to two hours of pushing an ideology. Or, news and commentary shows blatantly pounding away promoting ideological extremes. This is very wrong.
Hordes of people have their opinion formed by the relentless messaging. And this is true regardless of ideology. Even if one agrees with the ideologies being pushed an intelligent person would take pause at this.
Why? Because the mechanism can be used to manipulate the masses to nefarious extremes. The first thing any dictator does it take control of the media and the messages.
While we don't have a dictatorship we do have media that is complicit in creating a frenzy around racial, ethnic and minority issues that is very, very far from the truth. America is not a racist nation. True racists are probably an insignificant percentage of the population. There might be race related biases or profiling but that is not racism.
BTW, "racism" doesn't mean "whites who are racist towards blacks". Racism occurs with all groups and in all directions to different degrees. Having a multicultural family and having lived in multiple countries in my life I've seen this first-hand everywhere, not just the US.
Jews prefer to hire Jews. So do Arabs, Mexicans and Chinese. Japanese don't like to work with Koreans or Chinese, etc. This isn't always racist, it can be pragmatic when culture, language and behavioral constructs are considered.
For example, this will never happen in the US:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFXi1cM9vO0
We are different enough culturally that it is simply impossible to even imagine this. Certain cultural groups would actually consider bowing to the train and passengers to be demeaning. Most everyone would consider having to work that fast and hard to be abusive. Unions would certainly not allow it. In fact, unions would pretty much guarantee that we'd have almost exactly the opposite results as what is seen in this video. I have a lot of experience working with and around unions. Don't get me started on that one.
And so, to an ethnic group used to a certain way of thinking, speaking, behaving and relating to each other "Americans" can seem like inconsiderate uneducated brutes. When they live here and live in relatively closed clusters they develop this idea of "we are better than them", where "them" is everyone who isn't of their ethnicity or "Americans" in general.
I studied Aikido and Karate in Japan for a while. In those highly traditional groups the way we behave can be highly offensive. Something as simple as crossing your arms or speaking when you are not spoken to can be seen as grave offenses.
Is this racism? Nope. Not at all. I don't see it that way. It's probably a natural result of the way culture and customs are constructed and adhered to. So, the stereotype of "blacks are loud" or "asians show no emotions" or "Jews only care about money" or whatever are simple-minded ways for people to classify others.
Is there a degree of truth to them? I am not going there except to say that there are distinct behavioral patterns in different cultural groups that are very real and identifiable. You are not going to see a typical "American" wedding result in people making Arab yells as they exit the church. You'll never see coworkers kissing each other on the cheek every day as you might see in places like Buenos Aires. These things are real. They are not racism.
When people see certain behaviors played out on TV and carpet-bombed all over the place 24/7 their view of a group might be reinforced or modified. Seeing young black males burn down everything in sight in a town and loot stores right and left does not do the black community any good at all. It is quite damaging. And it could take years to repair that damage.
This is why it angers me to see our leaders use these events for political gain. They see them as opportunities to solidify voting blocks. They don't care that they are destroying lives. They don't care that feeding these flames will result in the black CEO of a large US corporation experiencing someone being apprehensive about crossing paths with him while walking down the street. That's not racism. That's politicians and the media manipulating the population to create a result that is of benefit to them. Doing damage to these communities is to their benefit. They ultimately do not care about these groups at all, they are tools they use to support their political agenda. And they are really good at doing this.
I wish more people would stop, think and realize that we are all being played like finely tuned instruments. It's sad to see so much blindness. It's sad to see cargo cult that fails to see that the emperor has no clothes.
Asking for an ID when paying by credit card or demanding that people who vote in the US prove they are US Citizens isn't racist. Yet these and other situations are being paraded around as racism to feed the fire.
Is racism real? Of course it is. Yet it is not as rampant and tv as politicians would want you to believe. I don't know any racists. Do you?
How did the descendants of immigrants become xenophobic?
The founders of the USA were not immigrants, they didn't immigrate to join Indian tribes, they were founders of a country. And until very recently, immigrants to the USA immigrated and integrated, they became Americans, they didn't immigrate and expect to receive special treatment because they were a member of group X.
It's not xenophobic to simply not want your country and culture to be overrun with competing cultures. The idea of multiculturalism is nonsense. Cultures can't coexist that's just not how it works, a culture is the dominant way of life in an area, you can't invite another culture to come and live within the confines of another culture, that makes no sense. What is being done in such a case is you are inviting significant changes to the host culture, and it shouldn't be surprising that most people are pretty content with their home culture and they're not receptive to the idea of having foreign cultures thrust into their home.
cannot pay a visit to their home country because they are undocumented
Are you f-ing kidding me? Can't do you something because it is likely to reveal that they are in violation of a law they willfully chose to violate? That's some kind of big problem we should be concerned with?
A nation without laws is no nation at all. What's the point of any country having rules and regulations for the people they admit if people who break those rules are simply overlooked, much less greeted with pity and concern for their plight of possibly getting caught?
When matters such as these are written about in the media why is it that preference is so often given to euphemisms such as 'undocumented' when what they are actually trying to describe is illegal alien?
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Another commenter mentioned the race angle that was brought up in this article, I luckily missed most of that in my brief skimming.
The real race problem that never seems to be addressed, and it's an uncomfortable reality and whatever the solution is, it is not immediately apparent and I suppose that is one reason why there is a near and total blackout on the subject in the national media. But it doesn't explain why the national media tries to portray the facts in a way that is near 180 degrees opposite to reality.
The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.
No one is asking for "special treatment". They are asking not to get special treatment that consists of being killed by police officers.
And yes, too many white people are killed by police. The police in the US have both a tendency to shoot too many people, and have a tendency to target too many black people, which both add up to shooting disproportionately many black people.
And yeah, the problem is more complex than simple racism by police. There are problems of too many criminals being armed in the US (both black and white), meaning that the police are more prone to shoot in supposed self defense. There are problems of class and poverty, that lead people into violence. There are a lot of complex, interrelated factors that lead to this.
But all of that said, it is undeniable that there are a disproportionate number of law abiding or peaceful, unarmed black men who are killed by police in this country.
> The real race problem is that when it comes to interracial violence, and black on white vs white on black, the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence. It's not even close.
Interracial violence is a pretty small fraction of all violence.
Most violence is intraracial. Source: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf (2010, reporting data up to 2005, see page 67); about 42% of homicides are black on black, about 45% are white on white, about 8.8% are black on white, about 3.2% are white on black. If you're white, I'd be a lot more worried about that 45% than the 8.8%.
You know what's likely to be the most likely way to avoid getting killed or shot? Not having family members who have ready access to firearms. You are a lot more likely to be shot by a family member in anger than you are by a stranger of another race.
Say that sentence on St Patrick's day sometime and see how much sense it makes. Or Cinco de Mayo. Or eat at a cal-mex or tex-mex restaurant. Here in America we celebrate our multiculturalism. We sure don't avoid it because it's "nonsense".
>> "the facts are black on white racial violence is off the charts compared to white on black racial violence"
Care to cite that? I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes are committed by white offenders: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/hate-crime/2010/narrat...
Whites being a majority of the country this isn't an overwhelming number.
Those are examples of heritage. Multiple heritages can form a culture. Cultures are the formal and informal laws, social mores, and general modus operandi of a people. An example of the unwelcome effects of attempting to fuse incompatible cultures - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rotherham+rapes+pakistani
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/the-unspeakable-...
Here in America we celebrate our multiculturalism. We sure don't avoid it because it's "nonsense".
It's not a question of whether it is celebrated or not. It's a matter of if you think about it for a bit it makes no sense, it's logically impossible. There could be two or more adjacent cultures and as history shows, they are likely to come into conflict. But there cannot be one culture that is composed of multiple cultures because what a culture is, it's very definition, is what a group and area have in common.
Also, as you may or may not be aware, Cinco de Mayo is a mostly American invention.
And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"
Care to cite that? I'm not sure exactly what metric you'd be citing, but I was pretty quickly able to find that the majority of hate crimes
If it wasn't clear, by 'violence' I meant things like rape, murder, and assault.
You cite something for which there is actually a degree of ambiguity, discretion, even politics in its prosecution, 'hate crimes.'
Why don't we just stick to the basics, numbers to numbers, dead bodies. A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime. Blacks kill whites far more often than vice versa.
Wrong. Murder committed in the course of a robbery is not a hate crime. Even robbing and killing a white person because "white people got money" is not a hate crime. A quick Google search will let you know the real definition.
I made the point that anyone who kills another individual for some trivial material gain, or other arbitrary reason, no doubt harbors more than a little hate for themselves, others and society.
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On a meta note, I wish people would learn to formulate their cases without leading with a blurt of things like "Wrong." Then they would hopefully devote a little more thought to the issues they are discussing, especially the important ones
Let's take a look at a dictionary definition of culture: "the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time" (http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/british/culture)
Now, note the "particular group of people" part. A person can be a member of more than one group. Some groups are sub-groups of others; some overlap with others.
For example, I am an American, and as such I have been brought up in American culture, with many of the traditions and ideals that that entails; Thanksgiving, the 4th of July, a strong belief in civil liberties, and a love of strawberry rhubarb pie.
American culture is also a subset of Western European culture, with influences from Catholic and Protestant branches of Christianity, so while I am not myself Christian, I celebrate Christmas and Easter and have many Christian influences on my values and life.
However, I am also a member of other cultures. My most recent ancestors to travel to the US were Scottish; and so Scottish culture is also part of my culture, but not most other people in the US. I wear kilts to weddings, and have an uncle and cousin who play bagpipes at weddings and funerals. That's a part of my culture, but that is not a part of overall American culture.
I'm also a software engineer and computer geek, and involved in free software, advocacy for civil liberties online, advocate for strong encryption and privacy, and the like. This is a particular subculture that tends to promote strong protections for individual privacy and liberty, while openness and transparency on behalf of institutions such as corporations and governments. This is not part of mainstream American culture, but it is part of my culture; and this particular subculture spans multiple countries as well, so in many of these ways, I have more cultural values in common with a Brazilian or German who is also involved in these communities than I do with the average American.
There are many other subcultures I could describe myself as a member of. And the same goes for anyone you ask. "Culture" is not one big, monolithic thing with clear boundaries. Because it is a set of customs and beliefs shared with a group, that set can be larger or smaller, and stronger or weaker, depending on how big of a group you choose.
> And if "multiculturalism" whatever that is, is so great, you'd think someone would have come up with support for that notion by now beyond "Ethnic food!"
Food is a pretty fundamental part of any culture. As something that is necessary for sustaining life, it's something that everyone does. In almost every culture I've seen, meals are a large part of fostering community, of strengthening social bonds. You have meals with family, with friends, with coworkers. "Breaking bread" is a term rich with culture connotations of mutual trust, peace, welcoming, because sharing food with someone is so important; and the same holds in many other cultures, one of the most generous and welcoming things you can do is invite someone to your table and share your food with them.
So don't be so quick to dismiss "ethnic food" as an important part of multiculturalism. Food is in many ways the heart of of a culture, and exploring the food culture of another people can be a strong way to share something with them.
However, multiculturalism can extend far beyond that as well.
The musical heritage of America is quite strongly multicultural. Ragtime, blues, jazz, R&B, and hip-hop all have their roots in black culture in the US, but have had enormous influences in white culture as well. Of course a large amount of American musical traditions comes from Western European classical and pop traditions as well, and then there are a variety of folk traditions, such as Celtic, that have been integrated into the mainstream through bluegrass and country music.
But there's a lot more than just that. A large number of cultures have made substantial impact on film in America. Many of our "Western" genre is actually a product of Italy; but that in turn influence Akira Kurosawa in Japan, with Samurai westerns such as Yojimbo. His work has also influenced Western work, where The Magnificent Seven is a western remake of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, and his The Hidden Fortress is one of the major influences on Star Wars.
Let's see, getting back to day to day life, Jewish culture has also had a fairly large impact; from Yiddish, we get words like "schmuck", "chutzpa" and "klutz". We also get bagels (oops, back to food again),
On the musical front again, some of the best American music like Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue had roots in Western classical tradition, jazz, and klezmer, traditional Ashkenazi folk music.
I could go on, but man, detailing all of the positive effects of multiculturalism on American society could fill up hundreds of volumes of books, not just a single comment on HN.
> A murder seems to be ipso facto a hate crime.
That is not what is meant by the term "hate crime." Simply redefining a term that has a particular meaning to mean something else does not really add to the discussion.
I'll quote from Wikipedia:
> In both crime and law, hate crime (also known as bias-motivated crime) is a usually violent, prejudice motivated crime that occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her perceived membership in a certain social group. Examples of such groups include but are not limited to: ethnicity, gender identity, disability, language, nationality, physical appearance, religion, or sexual orientation.
A "hate crime" is not simply any violent crime. It is a crime in which the attacker was motivated by their perception of the victim's membership of some other group.
There are several things that can motivate a criminal to commit a crime. Poverty, greed, hatred of a particular group, hatred of a particular person, sheer anti-social tendencies, and I'm sure many other motivating factors. Only one of these falls under the term "hate crime" as it is commonly defined; those crimes in which hatred of a particular group of people is a primary motivator.
If you look at the statistics I cited in a previous comment, while it is true that black on white murder happens more often than white on black, white on white murder far surpasses either (and likewise, black on black). No amount of arguing about the black on white vs. white on black levels of crime will make these intraracial crimes go away, and the levels of intraracial crime is a very strong signal that racial animus is not actually the motivation for the majority of crime that occurs.
The reason it is important to look at the motivation behind a crime, and not just the statistics about whether a crime happened, is that the motivations can help tell you the best way to reduce that type of crime in the future.
Hate crimes, in the sense of any crime committed on behalf of membership in some group, can be particularly dangerous because they can lead to either prolonged violence between those two groups, or ethnic cleansing or genocide. These types of crimes, when allowed to escalate, have escalated into some of the greatest atrocities of a last couple of centuries. Breaking the chain of hate-motivated violence by discouraging the use of rhetoric of hate, by changing laws that institutionalize disparities between these groups, and by applying harsher penalties to those crimes committed for these reasons, are some ways to deal with these types of crimes.
Crimes committed due to a hatred of a particular person, however, are fairly different. They are usually based on some aspect of those people's relationship; perhaps an abusive domestic relationship, a cheating spouse, or the like. Here, there isn't some group-based animus, but a dysfunctional personal relationship. Here, the better way to deal with the problems are to provide better outlets for change than violence; provide shelters for people to escape from abusive relationships, allow divorce, as it it preferable to violence or murder.
Crimes that are committed due to poverty, to people having as sense of hopelessness and no further opportunity but to turn to crime, are another kind of problem. Here providing better social services, better education, better access to affordable housing, and the like can all help take that pressure off that can push people over the edge.
In all of these cases, the actual perpetrators of actual crimes do need to be punished; there needs to be deterrence as well. However, on a societal level, there can be many things done to reduce the temptation and pressure to engage in criminal behavior. And even on the individual level, knowing someone's motivation for a crime can be important in rehabilitating them and reintroducing them back to society.
Your definition of an immigrant is interesting, and seems to suggest an assimilation rather than an immigration. Trying to pretend that "Nation founding" was not cultural destruction is an amazing cognitive disconnect.
If you don't want to change your culture then don't try to exploit foreign workers(through immigration) to prop up your failing economy. Certainly don't prop up your economy then get upset with the underclass you are exploiting to do it when they complain they are being exploited.
It's amazing how righteous "whites" can be about the sheer disgusting way they have acted in their history.
Sorry, I'm afraid I don't understand the distinction you're drawing.
If some people move from one country to another, and the other place has people living there already, what characteristics of the move classify it as founding a country rather than immigration?
The fact that there was no existing country here in the sense the European migrants understood one to be, and the fact they didn't integrate with Indian tribes or attempt to.
The fact they literally founded a country, established the institutions intrinsic to, and expounded extensively on said founded country and the characteristics necessary to make said new country successful.
And until I tried to submit it myself, I had thought that it had only appeared once. The previous submissions are https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9811591 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9820574, each with only 2 comments and fewer than 10 upvotes.
I think it is, actually. I've seen stories take three or four tries to hit the front page -- at which point they get quite a lot of attention; there's no doubt they were HN material.
I think all frequent HN readers should contribute some time curating new stories -- don't spend all your time on the front page. If more people did this, maybe good stories wouldn't need multiple postings so often -- making the front page would be less accidental.
I might do this if there were separate buttons for "upvote" and "save". As it is, I don't want to pollute my saved page with excess bulk.
It would be nice to be able to forget saved comments too.
Each story on New already has 4 or 5 links, depending on how you count. What's one more?
The path to perdition.
Of course it also means another database table, or equivalent, in the back end.
Edit: I have an idea. We could add a 'save' link, but only at the top of a story or comment's individual /item page. To save a story or comment, you'd click on its timestamp to go to its individual page, then click 'save'. This is exactly how comment flagging works now. It would add no complexity to story pages and very little to thread pages.
I use bookmarks for frequently visited sites, and a few select references. Using them for content management... really doesn't work particularly well.
Instead I actually download and save stuff I realliy want (and am actively looking for better tools to manage and organize that, though Zotero and Calibre are a start). I'd been using Readability somewhat, but it gets really inconvenient after a few hundred items (I've got 1000+ now).
At least with site-specific curation you've got stuff saved in some sort of context, though, frankly, that doesn't much work either.
It's a long-standing frustration of mine. Though it was actually kind of refreshing to read Vannevar Bush's Memex document a few days back which basically expressed the same concern from 1945.
It's really unfortunate they're not seperate - just now I "saved" a comment I KNOW I'll want to refer to later...went to my "saved" comments page and it's FULL (of everything I've ever upvoted obviously - I just now clued in that that's how you "save" a comment, although I already knew for articles).
When I became public as moderator I heard from a lot of users (e.g. [1]) that the biggest problem with HN was high-quality stories not making it to the front page. At first I was skeptical. I was looking at /newest a lot as a moderator and hadn't been noticing much good stuff on the cutting room floor. But the users saying this were good, observant HNers, and I kept hearing it, and it got me worried. So I started looking at /newest more systematically, and then I was shocked. Not only were many high-quality stories being overlooked, probably most of the finest submissions—the out-of-the-way, intellectually interesting, totally unexpected submissions that make for the best of HN—were getting ignored. I'm still not sure how I could have missed that; I must have been looking at /newest at least as much as anybody.
Since last summer, we've put a lot of effort into addressing this. One simple thing we did was clarify that a few reposts are ok if a story hasn't had significant attention yet [2]. That's why it's ok that nkurz reposted this one.
ScottBurson hit the nail on the head, I think: giving good stories multiple cracks at the bat is one way to counteract the randomness of what gets traction here. Sometimes people abuse it, e.g. by reposting things that don't belong on HN or by being overly promotional, but those are fairly easy problems to solve and their cost is much smaller than the benefit of having more substantive stories—especially those out-of-the-way gems—on the front page.
The above isn't an opinion about the current article, which I haven't read, but it's clear that nkurz reposted it for the right reason, which is that he thinks it's intellectually interesting and well-written. That's the kind of thing we want users to do.
If it is intended that duplicates be allowed, then perhaps the discussion threads for such duplicates should be merged together, rather than getting such posters in the habit of not honoring original titles.
Beyond that, I'm not sure I get your point. It's definitely intended that reposts be allowed if (and only if) a story hasn't had attention in about a year. You have to change the URL slightly to make the repost work, and that's by design. Merging threads doesn't solve the problem we're talking about here, where the previous post didn't get much attention, since you'd be merging into a dead thread. The problem merging solves is the opposite one, when you have several active threads on the same story, and we do merge threads when we see that.
Better dupe detection is on our list to work on, but it's a harder problem than it sounds and I don't know when we'll get to it.
There's so much submission to the queue that if you show everything to everyone, good quality posts simply slide off the page too quickly to be reviewed.
An alternative would be to set some sort of threshold below which submissions aren't seen by all site visitors, but are instead revealed to only a subset. That subset increases as votes come in. You're basically increasing the probability that any one story will be seen by someone. Set levels such that a submission is on the "New" page for some suitable period of time (an hour, six hours, twelve, 24, whatever seems pragmatically reasonable), during which someone ought to see it.
Alternatively: eliminate the "New" page entirely and populate the front page directly with distinguished new submissions, again though, each presented to only a subset of visitors.
You're right, I didn't realize that this was now part of the FAQ. Thanks for the clarification!
Maybe, could also be because the newest stack is broken. Submissions are furiously added, yet few stories are selected off the stack, leaving new submissions to drop off and disappear. Good on you @nkurz for re-posting.
Also, there should be a distinction between "I'm flagging because this content does not belong or is spam" versus "I'm flagging because this is the 8th copy of it in the 50 most recent postings."
No it doesn't. Stories rarely stay on the front page for more than 24 hours. This means that it's very easy to miss great articles if you don't visit HN for a day or two.
Problem being, if it is, in fact, worthy of discussion here, there are three different discussion threads for this article... and a given reader is unlikely to see more than one.
For example, your extensive comment on copy #2 goes unseen by those reading comments for this copy only... as most readers would.
Not sure what we're talking about here then. The whole article sounds like a post factum rationalization. Lots of feelings with not so many arguments.
The fact that this simple argument is discarded by you in order to maintain your agenda, shows more about how tolerable and inclusive you are not than about how racist I am.
I'm not saying that most or any of the attitudes of Whites described in the article were justified, but it's one sided to focus entirely on the police and White attitudes and ignore Black crime.
Because of time will have leave a that for now.
Also [0] is only able to explain half of the crime gap through "structural characteristics". Of course this article would be considered extremely racist by many people in this thread (not you) since it assumes the crime gap reflects actual higher rates of criminal behavior, and not just bias in the justice system.
[0] http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~roos/Courses/grstat502/phillipss...
[1]http://boingboing.net/2015/06/29/why-im-leaving-london.html