So why is the US so violent?

Judging__Eagle · Post by **Judging__Eagle** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 8:58 pm

Dang, 56,000 people. I've never read anything about Greenland aside from anthropological teams finding what were assumed to be abandoned viking peatmoss and stone shacks. The article didn't mention anything about Greenland's current population.

Fallen Hero · Post by **Fallen Hero** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 9:45 pm

I've always wanted to live there someday.

I'd be willing to suggest that political factors have to do with the violence in the states; not so much the party v. party sense at all in any way whatsoever, but rather the fact that until recently lobby groups like the NRA and political tactics such as using fear and protectionism as political bases has contributed to the amount of violence.

Crissa · Post by **Crissa** » Sat Feb 28, 2009 10:57 pm

My science teacher in high school was there as well. I always assumed it was like where I was living at the time, minus that we can go into the hills and see trees... Beaches, small grass and scrub, lotsa wind, few people.

Prolly no tourists, too.

He had this great story about a bomber flight getting stuck on a glacier.

-Crissa

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Mon Mar 02, 2009 10:38 pm

I take offense to your claims southerners are overly violent.

...

...Prepare to die. /joke

Ganbare Gincun · Post by **Ganbare Gincun** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 2:36 am

I blame a combination of racism and repressed sexuality.

Count Arioch the 28th · Thu Mar 12, 2009 2:48 am

Ganbare Gincun wrote:I blame a combination of racism and repressed sexuality.

I know if I got laid more often, I'd be in a better mood.

Roy · Post by **Roy** » Thu Mar 12, 2009 1:44 pm

Took that long to grind for diamonds eh?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 6:33 am

So here's a related question.

Why did Reconstruction fail? Or rather, why did the North let Reconstruction fail? What exactly did they have to lose out of it? It can't be economic reasons because racial equality and rebuilding the industrial base created money. It can't be white pride or any of that crap because the beginning and middle part of Reconstruction had a butt-ton of racial idealism (including our first black senator). So what gives?

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 7:31 am

From the wikipedia:

White elite-dominated state legislatures passed disfranchising constitutions from 1890-1908 that effectively barred most blacks and many poor whites from voting. This disfranchisement affected millions of people for decades into the 20th century, and closed African Americans and poor whites out of the political process in the South.

Re-establishment of white supremacy meant that within a decade, people forgot that blacks were creating thriving middle classes in many states of the South. African Americans' lack of representation meant they were treated as second-class citizens, with schools and services consistently underfunded in segregated societies, no representation on juries or in law enforcement, and bias in other legislation. It was not until the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of Federal legislation that African Americans regained their suffrage and civil rights in the South, under what is sometimes referred to as the "Second Reconstruction."

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Tue Mar 24, 2009 8:44 pm

Basically the North tried to let the South govern itself after promising to blow them to hell again if they tried to actually secede again. The problem was that the assholes who had seceded in the first place just spent the next two generations running shit and running shit into the ground.

The fact is that home rule failed in the South. So when the North tried to give home rule back to the South it failed again. It really shouldn't have surprised anyone.

But no one had the heart to militarily occupy the South and run them like a colony for fifty years. Even though that's exactly what needed to be done. That or actually go plantation to plantation shooting all the land lords and bringing in a whole new power base from the ground up.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:04 pm

FrankTrollman wrote: But no one had the heart to militarily occupy the South and run them like a colony for fifty years. Even though that's exactly what needed to be done. That or actually go plantation to plantation shooting all the land lords and bringing in a whole new power base from the ground up.

-Username17

Were those really the only alternatives?

It didn't take that long to get post-WW2 Germany and Italy to get their shit together, so what gives?

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:23 pm

Frank's just having deluded fantasies on how the redneck problem can be eliminated without resorting to real stupid shit like genocide or systematic elimination of the "educated"/"leadership" class.

Italy didn't get its shit together after WW2 for a while. Germany and Japan did, but mainly because the Allies didn't try to run Germany and Japan like a colony either.

Yeah, there was Nuremberg and the war crimes trial. But the whole point of those trials was to pin the blame on like a couple hundred guys, so that the millions of people who registered for the Nazi party or were Tojo-lovers can be deemed "innocent".

This kind of policy resulted in some of the guys who planned the Holocaust living freely in Germany as wealthy bankers until they died warm in their beds (seriously), but it also meant that the German political system survived at the local level, which could then be patched together into a larger national body once the Allies decided it was kosher to do so. That business leaders were also not being shot left and right contributed greatly to the German and Japanese economies being able to fix themselves after the war.

Trying to militarily occupy the South - as Frank said - would just breed the same kind of resentment Eastern Europe felt towards the Soviet Union, and it wouldn't really work because America seriously doesn't like doing white-on-white genocide so the troops on the ground would probably just shrug at any order that told them "shoot the white folk owning the land".

Instead, what happened in real history is that a minority of Republicans tried real hard to change the South ("Radical Republicans"), but the movement rapidly lost support in favor of a general mood of reconciliation. So America was left with a pretty imperfect South where slavery was abolished, but institutional discrimination wasn't. But, hey, post-WW2 Japan also showed its appreciation for the West for not simply nuking it to a cinder by inventing fucking Hentai, so I'd chalk this up to "It's real hard to have a perfect happy ending in history".

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:40 pm

An 18-month necro. I'm curious what brought this up.

Regarding how long it took to get post WW2 Germany back: I think a lot of it has to do with Milgram's experiment. Basically, most of Germany was just doing what they were told. Once the leadership was taken out, I think a lot of them mellowed out.

The south's deep-seated racism goes much deeper than the rants of a charismatic leader. It's going to take a lot of education and time to get that to go away. And of course, we know how they feel about education.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 4:49 pm

Germany... wasn't really "doing what it was told". Hitler was, in fact, elected into office with about 1/3 of the popular vote, because Germans had really serious issues about that whole Treaty of Versailles thing. Even in 1944, with German cities burning and millions already dead, the Nazi party still had something like a 33% approval rating according to surveys they conducted.

But don't ever tell the Germans that. They'll just blame Hitler.

Japan was a much more "conformist" society. But that's because the grandfathers of the WW2 generation were literally serfs serving under the samurai class. With the latter having the right to lop the former's head off as part of an archaic feudal system.

Count Arioch the 28th · Fri Sep 10, 2010 8:37 pm

Zinegata wrote: Italy didn't get its shit together after WW2 for a while. Germany and Japan did, but mainly because the Allies didn't try to run Germany and Japan like a colony either.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 8:59 pm

Didn't we rewrite Japan's constitution? I thought that was why they didn't have a standing military.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 9:08 pm

RobbyPants wrote:Didn't we rewrite Japan's constitution? I thought that was why they didn't have a standing military.

Germany's too, yes.

Although Japan's police have fighter jets, so it's largely a semantic thing at this point.

-Username17

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Fri Sep 10, 2010 10:33 pm

Wait I know this one. Italy took longer to recover after the war, and indeed is economically and politically crippled to this day because of one specific factor.

The Mafia.

An organization largely created by the USA during the war. The impact the mafia has on Italy is quiet amazing really.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Sat Sep 11, 2010 12:20 am

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:

With the exception of the East German portion (for obvious reasons), those divisions lasted only until May 1949, when the Western Allies let West Germany form into an independent country. That's a period of just 4 years, and hardly a "colonial" occupation.

Ironically - just to show the historical parallels - all of the Southern states who rebelled were officially "re-admitted" back to the Union around 5 years after the Civil War (re-admission being defined as "Being allowed to send Congressmen back to the Washington").

(Nitpickers might note that there was an extra 6 year observation period after '49 before West Germany got full sovereignty so it should be an 10 year "colonialism", but I'd also note that the Reconstruction period in total was around 12 years long)

Also, the Japanese constitution was written by McArthur, and not America. That it has somehow managed to work is either a credit to Japanese flexibility, McArthur's "genius", or people simply not really giving that much of a damn to their constitution outside the US.

Japan's constitution - just to be clear - renounces war. It does not renounce the right to have a military in case someone makes war on them. And no, the Japanese police doesn't have jet planes (traffic and S&R helicopters only).

It's the Self-Defense Force (featured in Godzilla films) that has the big guns, and it's seriously the 2nd most powerful naval and air power in the Pacific as long as you don't count nukes.

(Also, Italy's problem post-war was the strong communist movement, not the mafia)