You ought to read that article, since this definitely isn't whataboutism.
289 karma · joined August 31, 2020
The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.
Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.
All of world history involves the push and pull of various groups competing for land and resources. Somehow we're supposed to treat every single one of the hundreds of pre-Columbian peoples who occupied North America with a sort of reverence like they were the only rightful inhabitants of the continent. Even though these hundreds of groups fought amongst each other for land and resources before and after the arrival of Europeans. Every single major conflict in North America since 1492 (including the American civil war) has seen Native groups fighting on both sides - because they were people with agency and not monolithic in their views and interests.
Do people in other parts of the world act like this? When a conference is held in conference in Turkey, is it important to mention that the area was previously controlled by Mongols, Seljuk Turks, Christian Greeks, Romans, Hellenic Greeks, Persians, Assyrians, Luwians, Hittites, Hattians, etc. ?
That's not to say it's useless, it's a nice tool to have in the standard library, but if you're coming from one of the many mainstream programming languages with lightweight threading libraries which make it much easier to take advantage of parallelism it's easy to get frustrated at both python's standard threading and multiprocessing libraries for their respective shortcomings, at least in their CPython implementations.
Are you trying to say that the situation in Europe is just "business as usual" or something?
Now I don't know if you've been paying attention these last few years, but in case you're not aware European countries have taken in a pretty unprecedented number of migrants over the last decade. Many of those migrants were/are young men from regions with cultural norms that are fundamentally different from the European countries that they end up in. In addition, many of these migrants lack strong proficiency in the standard language of the host country, and do not possess a level of education that would generally be commensurate with their age in the host country. Note that none of this is meant as a value judgement, it's just the reality of the situation. It's not an easy situation for the migrant or for the administration of the countries taking them in. It's not really any secret that integration/assimilation has failed in many parts of Europe, and this all has consequences.
With regards to gun violence, I don't know about Europe in General but Sweden's rate of gun homicides has risen consistently every year over the last decade. Obviously the numbers are nothing compared to what you'd see in the United States, but if the problem is getting worse, then it's probably worth talking about. Also, for a highly-developed Western country, Sweden experiences a large number of hand-grenade attacks every year in a pattern that also seems to be increasing.
But the main cause of violence tends to be organized crime, and as seen by the murder of Peter R De Vries earlier this year, a lot of European police agencies are simply not cut out to deal with organized crime in their current state.
Europeans also discover that weapons restrictions only go so far when you have active organized criminal groups with the initiative and contacts necessary to smuggle firearms and grenades into Western/Northern Europe from a number of regions (Ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, former Soviet Union, North Africa, etc.) that are only a car-ride or fishing boat trip away.
Swiss gun owners are allowed to buy, own, and use ammunition. They may also use a privately-owned firearm in self-defense situationally, but the legal justification for use of deadly force in Switzerland will obviously be more stringent than it would be in the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_regulation_in_Switzer...
The main thing that sets the US apart from other countries is not that civilians can own AR15s or similar weapons, it's that US law for the most part gives any adult the legal right to purchase and own firearms by default, provided that they can pass a background check. The United States and Yemen are basically the only countries that use this system. Basically every other country has some sort of tiered licensing system for firearms ownership, with varying levels of strictness. And as it happens, Switzerland is pretty unrestrictive in this regard. The Swiss "Firearms acquisition permit" looks essentially equivalent to the United State's "Form 4473" which is required for the majority of firearms transactions.
In what way is a RC helicopter with a camera on it in a public place "force"?
And with regards to force it's not "only deployed against a specific political demographic". Tons of the BLM protests over the last year went by without any major intervention from law enforcement. In fact, in plenty of cities the police departments outright stated that they supported the protests and did the whole "kneel in solidarity" thing. Call it an empty gesture if you like but it's a far cry from what you're describing. I watched tons of livestreams during that time. It was usually only when the looting, random assaults, arson, etc. got out of hand that serious riot control measures were put in place. And even then, lots of police departments seemed to think that it was better to just let the city get looted and burned than to risk more bad press for the Police by engaging the perpetrators. Not sure what you mean by "pro-Trump insurgents get treated like gentlemen, and get to take selfies with the police who should be arresting them" - if you're referring to January 6th, then perhaps you're remembering wrong. There was tear gas all over the place and 4 of the pro-Trump rioters were killed by law enforcement.
On this article (which really says very little aside from "we claim that a lot of complaints contain racial bias, therefore the people complaining are wrong and stupid and we don't have to listen to them"), one of the linked articles in this side bar is this one:
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2021/apr/09/tv-panel-shows...
I wonder why working-class white Britons might be a little upset?
I recommend anyone who is interested in this topic watch Paul Freedman's "The Early Middle Ages, 284--1000" Yale course lecture videos, which are free online.
https://oyc.yale.edu/history/hist-210 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC8JcWVRFp8&list=PL77A337915...
Which is the definition of being an ethnic Swede. He's part of the relatively small Swedish minority in Finland. I was never contesting his Finnish nationality.
That's pretty big news, I think? Correct me if I'm wrong, but as I understand it potential incompatibilities and behavior differences compared to CPython were often given reasons to not use PyPy. Either way, I'm always glad to see that PyPy is making progress. I think that a robust JIT compiler implementation is virtually a necessity for any serious language nowadays. Say what you will about Javascript, but its most common implementation nowadays (Google's V8 engine) is substantially faster than CPython for most benchmarks. The reason is pretty simple - the V8 engine makes use of JIT compilation whereas CPython is strictly a bytecode interpreter. I know that numba and cython exist, and that there are many other to get good performance out of python (mostly through the use of libraries that offload work to optimized C or C++ code), but I don't think having those options erases the need for a performant general purpose implementation.
I graduated from my CS undergrad degree in the USA in May of 2020. One of the job offers I had was from a relatively new tech company in Norway, and the offer was for an on-site position in Oslo. They had a booth at a recruiting event at my University (in Texas, if that matters) but I applied online like everyone else. After a couple of interview rounds, the last of which was in-person in Norway (seems surreal given the state of the world now), I received a job offer from them which I ultimately ended up not taking.
At the time of the offer I had two previous technical internships (neither of which were at well-known companies), a solid (>3.5) GPA, and a couple interesting side projects on my resume (e.g. compiler, android app game, NLP course projects). The technical interview portions were all pretty easy compared to what larger US-based tech companies will throw at you, but keep in mind that this was for an entry-level position. No Norwegian language skills were required for the postion.
I was offered the job as a US citizen, and though I had German citizenship (but no passport) at the time, I don't think that factored into me getting the offer. They had other international employees at the office, including one from Brazil, so I figured having citizenship in an EU-member country didn't matter that much. As you may know, Norway isn't in the EU itself but they do have a lot of economic/labor agreements with the EU.
Anyways, the (yearly) salary was something on the order of 590,000 kr or around 63,000 USD at the time, though the value of the Norwegian Krone has increased a good bit since I got the offer near the beginning of the corona economic downturn. As I understand that's about the expected salary for that sort of position in Oslo, so take from that what you will.
I had my own reasons for taking an offer in the US over one in Europe, but hopefully some of this info was helpful.
Are you trying to say that all 100 million of them have meaningful influence on CCP policy? Like some sort of great big Athenian democracy?
My point is that there is a pretty clear tendency for people to attribute sex/gender discrepancies to societal factors when it benefits men, but less so when it benefits women. The reasons for this are likely varied, but you can draw your own conclusions on that.
> The statement "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them" doesn't imply men are responsible for their own misfortune
I think it does in some cases, but I suppose it depends on the speaker's definition and characterization of this nebulous term, "the patriarchy". I think some people do indeed feel that all men are complicit in "the patriarchy" and so if the system ends up hurting them, they are at least partially responsible.
Perhaps that's all the more reason that characterizing all gender issues as "our society is a patriarchy unconditionally, in which women are always oppressed and men are always the oppressors" is not all that great.
I'll demonstrate:
Whenever statistics show an imbalance that benefits men, say in earnings, prestigious jobs, or positions of leadership, then the modern worldview dictates that this must be a result of a nefarious bias on the part of society or men as a group, aka "the patriarchy".
On the other hand, whenever the statistics show an imbalance that benefits women, such as sentencing/incarceration rates, suicide rates, or academic performance, it seems that often people are satisfied with an explanation that says the disparity is due to some innate behavioral difference in men. Occasionally, in the case of poor academics or crime rates among men you'll hear justifications along the lines of "men do worse here because of patriarchal social norms that ultimately end up hurting them", which in my opinion is a statement that subtly implies that these men's misfortune is their own fault.
Also in some cases you see outright deflection; bring up how women generally make better grades than men, and how they outnumber men by nontrivial amounts at universities? The response it "well, better education doesn't necessarily translate into better employment for women". Bring up the substantially higher male suicide rate? You'll often hear "well actually women attempt suicide more often, but use less effective methods" - and that's supposed to be the end of the conversation, as though attempting suicide with a bottle of pills (where you could still wake up in the hospital surrounded by family and friends) has the same sort of finality as shooting yourself in the head or jumping in front of a train.
Had a programming class in high school in which the teacher gave us a lot of free time to work on whatever interested us. I made dozens of games in Java during that time, mostly pretty simple ones, but by senior year I had written a sort-of advanced ray casting engine (Think Wolfenstein 3D but with textured floors and a fully-rendered ceiling layer) and I worked with two of my friends to develop it into a sci-fi RPG that we entered into a Game Development competition.
There was a definite moment in high school where I realized that I liked programming, and not just making games with it, and decided that I'd study computer science at university.
I don't think my experience is typical for my demographic, however.