ROBOKiTTY wrote:Why did I say black people will 'top the list'? Because according to stats published by the FBI, of all the racial hate crimes they track, 66.5% were motivated by anti-black sentiments, 21.2% anti-white, 4.6% anti-Asian, and 4.5% anti-native. Many people on this site like to think that hate crimes are mostly fake, but unless I have a reason not to, I'll trust stats from an agency that actually tracks the info.
Are those the stats for murder or for all hate crime? Because hate crimes includes hate speech or vandalism or intimidation, which are bad but don't kill you.
The stats for racially motivated murders show that
in 2013 there were 5 total victims of murders or negligent manslaughter due to hate crimes (I haven't found out how many of them were due to anti- black hate). In the same year there were 4 victims of islamic terrorism in the US. The numbers aren't incredibly different
I'd say that saying that black people will likely "top the list" of people killed because of hate is a bit disingenuous. Are black people in the US still targeted by racists? Absolutely. Are black people cause black people to "top of the list" in the number of deaths due to hatred? I wouldn't be so sure.
I don't have a better alternative. I don't need to, because that wasn't my point. My point is an abstract one, and it has to do with the human tendency to see whatever we have as the best possible thing. For example, humans erroneously see themselves as the pinnacle of evolution. Liberal democracies have a tendency to circlejerk over how democracy running on capitalism with heavy government intervention is the best possible system. It becomes a cult of worship that stifles debate, as any thought of reform could be slapped down with the cry "That's undemocratic/unconstitutional! You want to go back to tyranny/taxation without representation?"
The core elements of liberal democracy are civil and political individual rights and freedom, equality before the law, a justice system based on protecting those rights and some kind of system of representation based on voting rights for everyone over a certain age. Everything else should be debated about and is possible to change or reform. The cult of the US constitution doesn't represent all liberal democracies or even the core elements of liberal democracy. In some aspects the US, being the first liberal democracy, had a pretty primitive constitution.
You're normally quite reasonable, but I fear Islam has become a blind spot for you. Really, the Middle East is only a matter of national security only because the west want to maintain their projection of power there for various reasons, many of them outdated Cold War-era goals. If the west just left the Middle East alone, it would cease to be a security concern.
It's not Cold War era goals, it's lobbies and nets of interests. Getting out of the Middle East dramas as far as possible is a good idea (and Trump, interestingly enough, seems more likely to reduce US involvement than Clinton would have been) but that's not the end of problems with Islam, as I've written in other posts.
As for Saudi Arabia, considering the caliphate has a stated goal of conquering Mecca and overthrowing the kingdom and has no problem accepting allegiance from any far-flung warlord, it would be suicidal for the kingdom to finance them. It's fairer to say that there are elements amongst the massive royal family that would like to topple the kingdom and institute an even stronger theocracy.
It's important not to confuse the Islamic State with the more vague idea of muslim supremacy. The Islamic State isn't the only organization which supports an idea of a muslim caliphate. All the Salafis do, and some of them fight against the Islamic State over who are the "real muslims". Saudi Arabia has supported Salafi and other muslim supremacist groups for years. The fact that the Islamic State specifically is hostile to the current Saudi regime doesn't mean that the Saudi regime doesn't support people who wish to establish a worldwide caliphate.
Note the term 'empower'. Most systems opt for an elite that gets fat off the uneducated and miserable masses. Democracy gives power to the people, who are just as likely to vote themselves back into a dictatorship without a robust tradition of democratic thought. And even with such a tradition, people like Hitler and Erdogan still happen. Yes, people in liberal democracies are generally better educated, but a cynical analysis says that's only because educated workers make productive taxpayers. The system is not good because of its intrinsic goodness, but because the interests of the people and the rulers tend to intersect more often than in dictatorships, and its faults must be criticized harshly lest we start to look upon it as a secular altar.
All true, it's not a matter of inner goodness, it's a matter of which system works best. Inner goodness is a poor meter of judgment for anything. No person is completely good (or evil for that matter), no group of people are good, nothing is always and forever good. However as of right now liberal democracy works much better than any other system, so it's better to improve it rather than to throw it away.
But non-successful systems easily survive alongside successful systems. Many third-world dictators milk their people dry at the cost of an even worse tomorrow. They call for foreign aid and debt forgiveness and then use that money to fatten the bank accounts of their cronies. It's not a pleasant life for the average people, but it's stable and not reliant on growth, and any challenger is more likely than not to make things even worse. Geopolitics really is not survival of the fittest, at least if we define fitness as economic success.
Those regimes are still reliant on either foreign debt or on a demand of their resources. Without the economic growth in other countries which sends them aid or buys their resources they'd collapse into Somalian-style anarchy. Environmentally speaking they're
commensals of economic growth, or outright parasites.
Is it though? I've mentioned the US constitution and its worship. It's basically a 19th century system with no provision for universal education or healthcare. They barely managed to fit an education system inside it, and there are still people who claim that's unconstitutional, and the homeschooling community continues to churn out fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists.
The problems with healthcare or education in the US have less to do with constitutional rights and more to do with state rights and, once again, lobbies. Isolated communities can lobby at a state level for non-standard education. The US government actually spends more money on healthcare
per capita than many other governments of liberal democratic countries (like the UK), but a lot of those money benefits people who are only marginally involved in education or healthcare and are part of a system of pharmaceutical, insurance or legal groups of interest.
Short terms and term limits mean that politicians only look a few years ahead at most, rarely challenging to stop the inertia pushing them along. And reelection campaigns cost money, which must come from somewhere, and the people paying expect to be repaid in some fashion. So much money is wasted in that process of covert corruption that it might as well be streamlined to make for better efficiency. Why not elective monarchy, for instance.
In many liberal democracies campaign costs are funded by the State. This of course has its own downside in that people are lead to inflate their expenses to pocket government money for themselves or for their party (like it happened in Italy). Short terms are actually a good safeguard against permanent cronyism, since long term politicians tend to privilege the status quo to stay in power.
