Lol, do we need to say something rude in order to avoid banning? I miss barbecues - this motherfucking virus has a lot to answer for. I’m fortunate not to know anyone who died, but I didn’t get to see my little nephew until he was six months old, and none of my family got to meet my baby for months. It’s sad, and time you don’t get back. Plus being a new parent home with a baby is isolating - and anxiety provoking - at the best of times.
No one’s going to be doing much travelling for a while now, not that we were planning anything too exciting. I wouldn’t want to visit any of those Gulf countries though, considering their attitude towards women.
Speaking as a Brit who has had occasional encounters with the travelling community, I agree with Riemann - I don’t care what race/ethnicity someone is, or even what lifestyle they choose, provided the latter doesn’t excessively impinge on the rights of others. And I would never use the word “gyppo” to refer to someone. What is objectionable is stuff like occupying land that others like to use for recreation without the landowner’s permission, especially if it also involves leaving a lot of rubbish behind and an increase in crime in the area. And unfortunately, that does seem to happen a lot. It seems to be a vicious cycle that we have yet to find a good way of breaking - like a lot of crime in general, in fact.
That may be true, but the Ancient Egyptians didn’t drive around in stretch limousines. Which also has nothing to do with the point I was making. Which to be clear, is that criticising members of a group for certain behaviour is not the same as being racist towards that group. I am quite comfortable with doing the former without doing the latter, I acknowledge that’s not the case for everyone and that is a real issue.
Granted. But your post seemed to imply that Rom travelers wouldn’t encounter discrimination based on their lifestyle due to some atavistic “Wagons Ho!” ethos surviving in our cultural memory. I was just pointing out that t’aint necessarily so.
I’m just pointing out that specifically itinerancy (which is not actually a feature of trailer park occupants, is it? They tend to be plonked down until moved by tornado) might not be as frowned on in America as it is in much-longer-settled Europe, for various reasons, including the whole frontier settling business as a possible one. But much more that yes, there just aren’t that many Roma in America.
This speculation is not supported by the fact that the Romani in the U.S. have abandoned the itinerant lifestyle, whereas many in Europe have not. The frontier era in the U.S. was one of traveling to find new lands to settle, not of travel as a persistent way of life. Sure, there was much greater opportunity for the Romani to settle in the U.S., and that may fully explain the fact that they did so. But I think that the mentality of aggressive armed self defense in the U.S. that persists to this day may have been a strong motivator for them to do so. In other words, I suspect there may be a lower tolerance in the U.S. for itinerant groups perceived to be potential criminals trespassing within settled communities. Such groups in the U.S. would be at risk of being shot rather than just told to move on by the local authorities.
There are estimated to be around a million Romani in the U.S., a larger fraction of the population than in the U.K.
ETA: On further reading, I’m seeing some different and higher estimates of the number of Romani in the U.K. But in any event, the proportion of the population is roughly similar in the U.S.
Many in Europe have (or tried to, or were forced to). They’re just not the ones you hear about - until the pogroms start, that is.
For some, sure - for others, not so much - that’s not the traditional cowboy lifestyle, in myth or reality. It very much was an itinerant life. Same with mountain men. Basically, travelling around in America makes you Johnny Appleseed or Paul Bunyan, or at the more tragic end, Tom Joad. In Europe, you’re the frigging Pied Piper…
1 million (or less) people of Romani descent, but not 1 million living a traditional Romani lifestyle or being classified that way (just over 5000 in the 2000 census, a very different number from 1 million). And in relative proportion they disappear in a way they don’t in Europe - basically, Romani are not a visible minority in the USA the way they are in say Serbia or Romania. Or even places where they are in more-or-less the same proportion as even the most optimistic numbers for the USA, like Italy or the UK.
A rather simpler and more plausible answer is that in the United States there was more opportunity to settle down. The characteristic of itinerancy is a cyclical thing; the Roma being hated is one of the things that keeps them moving on. In a place where people don’t even know who they are and have no pre-existing opinions of them they are less pressured to depart. The USA is also, let’s be honest, rather a less crowded place.
It’s a little odd to snip the immediately preceding sentence in what you quoted from me where I said precisely this, and then respond in paraphrase as though it’s a simple explanation that I had overlooked.
Right? If the story is that Romani are discriminated against for being Romani, then it wouldn’t matter if they were moving around or not. However, if people just generally don’t like people who wander around, act like squatters, etc., then it’s their lifestyle that gets the negative attention.
In the US, if there is discrimination, it would be due to their lifestyle I would imagine, or because they look vaguely Hispanic or something, not because they are Romani (or, as nearly all Americans would say, who? what?).
In the US, in a lot of circles, I could easily see some people bragging about Romani heritage.
Native Americans are still largely discriminated against in many parts of the country, but paradoxically, being more or less white with some Native American ancestry is a mark of pride for many and absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.
Likewise, there are going to be a lot of Americans who learn somebody is Romani and think it’s vaguely cool and exotic and not have the associated cultural baggage.
Yes, there are critics. Most of them publishing opinion pieces. The actual peer reviewed stuff nibbles away at the edges a bit but the central conclusions of the fryer article remain intact.
Fryer asked for and received 15 years of information from houston 2000-2015. The reforms by mccleland could not have started until 2010 when he was appointed chief. Was there some shift in police killings that occurred between 2010 and 2015 that fryer didn’t account for?
Footnote 8 of the fryer article.
“8We asked for data on all OIS between 2000 and 2015 and police departments replied back with years they had
data on. With the exception of LA county, Brevard county, and Jacksonville county that gave us less than 10 years
of data (an average of 5.7 years), the other 7 OIS locations gave us more than 10 years of data (an average of 13.7
years). At the least, we have Jacksonville with 5 years of data (2011-2015) and at the most we have Houston city
and Orange county, with 16 years of data (2000-2015).
14”
Of course it does. It’s immoral and I don’t condone it but the notion that we don’t have to debate the moral implications because it simply doesn’t work is a rhetorical shortcut that only works for those that already believe what you believe. It’s like saying that we don’t have to argue about the morality of abortion because a fetus simply isn’t a life that has any moral value, this only works with people that already have their minds made up to agree with you.
Nope, that is why there are new studies, you seem to not have a handle of how science works.
And that only shows how stupid you are as you forget that in that discussion the ones you pointed as the ones supporting your points came saying later and elsewhere that indeed “torture does not work”.
Where it works is for the dictator and authoritarian leaders that find what they are looking for. That it is not true it is not the reason why they use torture.
Cool. Then we don’t disagree as much as it has seemed in other threads on these sorts of topics. It’s just more about where we draw the line.
Unfortunately, then the rest of your posts here are making me doubt that. You seem to be pulling up the same arguments that bigots use–you know, using the rhetoric of white supremacy.
Black people do not commit more crimes. They get arrested for more crimes. There is a huge difference. It’s been proven that white people get no or less punishment for things black people get strung up for.