101–110 of 149 posts
When people vote for politicians based on moral appeals instead of practical qualifications, corruption is much more likely; politicians don't have to do a good job, they just have to appear to be on the "good" side.
More often than not, it turns out these conservatives aren't only more corrupt but actually less competent than their liberal counterparts. Their "successful" past careers mean little when they are built upon backstage deals and friends taking care of friends.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
just to amend that: it isn't just Al Capone and Frank Nitti, which was the 20's and 30's. Richard J. Daley and his son Richie continued into the 90's, with a brief interregnum.
Oh, Nitti and Richard M. Daley. Good point. I guess the DOJ stats must be wrong. It's just a super weird argument is all, like: I can see a variety of ways to make an argument that Chicago is super corrupt, but none of them involve an organized crime empire based on bootlegging Canadian Club.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Meh I'm from a nation way more socialist than the USA and we have 3x the median wealth per capita (Australia). We have a much lower mean wealth though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_wealth_pe... If you're one of the top 1% in America life is great. But the 99% should not be going around saying socialism sucks. That to me indicates you're gullibility and mindless support of the 1% who have waaaay…
>Meh I'm from a nation way more socialist than the USA Australia is not socialist, period. Its a market economy.
"There Are No Successful Black Nations" was the original title of this article in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/why-black-people-must-h... It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to? GDP is not everythi…
I read the article with the original title. Resulting Reddit discussion: https://np.reddit.com/r/TrueReddit/comments/4x2vbu/there_are...>
>It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to?
It's all of Africa. I was flabbergasted to learn that, contrary to what I'd heard for years about how Africa was poor but rapidly growing, the truth is that Africa is poor and not growing at all. https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/6krxpv/world_map_of...>
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IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with ove…
> Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm. Them why is this "ideal" of multiculturalism so heavily pushed in media and government action? I personally speak four languages conversationally and from my familiarity, I cannot imagine even these similar cultures agreeing on enough basic values to form a stable society. How could dozens of cultures with different values and…
"There Are No Successful Black Nations" was the original title of this article in Foreign Policy: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/09/why-black-people-must-h... It's an uncomfortable title, but it's a truth that must be confronted. How have once downtrodden countries like Korea, China, and large swaths of Eastern Europe been able to turn rags into riches while most of Africa has so far failed to? GDP is not everythi…
Are we not counting Haiti or Jamaica? If we’re counting “black” as “African”, then yeah. But then “There are no successful African countries” seems a lot less difficult to prove/refute.
Relevant: TIL that Haiti has had 23 constitutions since 1801, with the most recent being enacted in 2012. At least two have declared the country to be an empire. https://np.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3t5wzt/til_th...>
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, Nitti and Richard M. Daley. Good point. I guess the DOJ stats must be wrong. It's just a super weird argument is all, like: I can see a variety of ways to make an argument that Chicago is super corrupt, but none of them involve an organized crime empire based on bootlegging Canadian Club.
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Second: This is primarily just a list of bad things that have ever happened in one of the 3 largest cities in the country, not a laundry list of public corruption.
Third: Sacco and Venzetti were accused and tried in Massachusetts, not Chicago.
Fourth: You get that the stockyards all closed by 1970, right? Chicago isn't a meatpacking city anymore, and hasn't been for over a half century.
This is what I mean by weird arguments about corruption: you've managed to attribute the entire labor rights movement to Chicago. On behalf of the city of Chicago and county of Cook, I accept the flattery, but: that ain't all us. We may have helped kick things off at Haymarket Square, but the rest of the country was shooting plant strikers well into the 1950s.
Might Chicago at some point in the past been the epicenter of corruption in the US? Absolutely! Is it now? No: we have numbers on this, and you can just go look them up. When you do, remember that Chicago (and the Illinois-Northern Judicial District) is bigger than most other places in the United States, so you have to scale the numbers. The numbers say that Chicago has a bigger corruption problem than NYC, which is a useful observation to make, but they don't say that Chicago is the most corrupt place in the country; the capital of corruption in the US is DC.
You are older than I am, but I'm no spring chicken, sorry to say, so you won't be able to dismiss me that easily.
See how this thread is going? Just find ways to make your point without declaring things "the BAD-THING-X capital of the USA".