I am very spoiled by living in one of the European capitals. It's super safe here, and it's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk in 22-02h.
I visit SF at least once a year, and default to my learned habit of walking alone, and later at night.
I live in "one of the European capitals". It is super safe here, but there are still stabbings. The crime-rate is also enormously variable between European cities.
> No more.
Changing your habits based on a single event isn't particularly rational. If this were a comparative articles on SF crime-rates you might have a good point, but it isn't.
And I say this having had a shooting happen on the street outside my hotel room the last time I stayed in SF - one event isn't a pattern (though in fairness if you look at comparative firearm incidents between US & European cities you're a bit more likely to see obvious disparities).
>Changing your habits based on a single event isn't particularly rational.
It's doesn't need to be "a single event" that happened to the parent.
Many individual observations, talks with residents, learning what they consider "normal" and "acceptable" baseline are also very possible to scare someone used in a safer city off for life.
I was just addressing that their comment seemed to be reacting to "a single event", rather than to review of actual stats (which is, by contrast, a good & rational approach).
You could trip on a curb outside your home, hit your head on the ground, and die. But you leave your home based on a rational assessment that that series of events is reasonably unlikely. Avoiding doing anything because it might kill you is always a function of the likelihood of that outcome - if you're assuming the likelihood is high, based on a sample size of 1, then no, that is neither prudent nor rational.
I like Europe but you're exaggerating...I got robbed in Amsterdam and could have been stabbed to death in Frankfurt. London felt dicey in certain spots too (turns out it has 95\1000 rate which is 20% higher than the average in the UK)...To anybody traveling through Europe you've got to be aware of your surroundings because it's not always super safe and there can high risk of crime in tourist areas.
Lol yeah. The reality is that any metropolis will have dodgy areas. Tokyo is super-safe, but even there you don't really want to look funny at a yakuza bouncer in Ueno at 3am.
The question really is whether SF has more dodgy areas than average, and I guess the answer is yes. I've been a couple of times, and it was a long time ago, but some very central areas felt a bit too unsafe even during the day.
Part of the thing with SF is that it's somewhat unusual in that a business traveler attending an event at the Moscone is at more or less ground zero for some of the seedier parts of town: the Tenderloin, Civic Center, generally W/SW of the Moscone.
(This probably used to be somewhat true of the Javits in NYC but that whole area of the city has generally gentrified with the Hudson Yards project being the latest big change.)
You could have just asked for the story rather than make one up.
A homeless guy on a street full of druggies near Frankfurt hbh asked for a euro and I said no I can't help you. He walked directly to a spot nearby where he kept a knife, and brandishing the knife, he paced towards me. I put my back to the wall of a nearby building and watched as he approached. About 10 meters from me his friend intervened and talked him down. He walked away instead of assaulting me.
Shit happens in every city in the world. I was assaulted by a raving lunatic with a metal pipe while I was shopping… at a Christmas market in Oslo, Norway, probably one of the safest cities in the world. Had I not been aware or mobile enough to get out of the way of his swings at me, I could have been killed (he was a pretty big guy).
I still think Oslo is incredibly safe, but shit happens anywhere
Here's what happened...A crazy guy started screaming at me randomly and made a move to stab me with a knife but got handled by other bar patrons. (it seemed like some knew him). That sort of shit happens in Europe like it happens anywhere else in the world. What I should have done is research where not to go but I was 20 years old.
You might be the most unlucky person on Earth. European cities are almost universally safer than American cities. To which cities are you comparing Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and London?
DC metro area has a 28 per 1K crime rate.
The london area has a 95 per 1K crime rate...
Amsterdam has a 33 per 1K crime rate.
Frankfurt has a crime index of 44 (which is higher than anywhere else in Germany).
Saying that Europe is super safe compared to the US isn't really accurate or nuanced enough. I'd agree with homicides but most of those involve gangs fighting over turf and not random victims.
Lots of comments about relative safety of US vs European cities.
Looking at the data, you need to scroll past 9 US cities (all big cities) until you find the first European city (relatively small city you never have a reason to go to) in this crime ranking: https://www.numbeo.com/crime/rankings.jsp
The "problematic" parts of Copenhagen and many other European cities are often counted as being part of other smaller suburban municipalities/cities that are too small to appear on such lists.
Nation-wide statistics show that Europe is definitely much safer than the US. However I would rather compare metropolitan areas than cities.
Many years ago my dad worked for a british company. Some of his coworkers were traveling to DC for business and staying in a very nice hotel. They asked my dad if they should buy a gun to be safe in DC. He was floored.
No. Jesus Christ.
Violence exists. You can compare risk between places and activities. But decisions should be based on data, not headlines and hunches.
The ridiculous part of that story is the expectation that they could just buy a gun and walk around with it in DC. Concealed carrying is a viable option but not something you can do after you simply walk off a plane.
Also, walking around and taking care of yourself is just not in the realm of known data. You should consider the known data, sure, but don’t ignore your instincts on the ground. That is insane.
Obviously buying a gun wasn't the solution, but at least "many years ago" DC was pretty bad. I was at a company event and the wife of one of our dinner guests was cut and robbed right outside of a downtown business hotel. And absolutely no one thought this was a freak or particularly out-of-the-ordinary event.
I used to live in the Tenderloin of San Francisco, an area full of homeless people, drug dealers, and probably other things. I hosted a foreign woman via couchsurfing.org and she asked if my neighborhood was safe. I told her she should be fine as long as she didn't bother anyone and didn't stay out too late. She then corrected herself and said she wasn't worried about the criminals. She was worried about being shot by the police.
I never understand why people feel like they can make such generalizing statements as "One of the European capitals".
Europe is not a monolith.
Different areas also have different problems.
It's like the whole talk about "walkable cities" or healthcare.
Everything is frame from a US perspective and simplified to an absurd level so that no contextual criticism is possible without descending into weird political tribalism and an apples to oranges comparison between an entire continent and a country.
OK then make it apples to apples and compare crime rates in your preferred manner? It’s hard to make the US look good no matter what grouping or aggregation or whatever you choose. There’s a clear difference in policies and their downstream effects (eg poverty rate) between the US and a random European city you select by throwing a dart at a map. Not all, but do a few trials and pretend not to see a pattern.
e: Also, sorry, it's ridiculous to say the US looks to Europe too much when discussing policy. This almost never happens, and when it does it's from the left, who has 0 actual influence. Every policy discussion should begin by talking about prior art & what we've observed about the effectiveness of policies as implemented elsewhere. It'll never show causality, but it'll start the discussion off with some possible causal links to explore w/ our own policy experiments!
I know your comment is tongue-in-cheek but the overall US homicide rate is comparable to the UN casualty count for the Russo-Ukraine war (most of which will be in Donbas, not Kyiv). So I wouldn't be completely certain the rate in Kyiv is necessarily higher. I don't think there's good figures but I'd wager it's actually lower than some US cities.
Per Wikipedia, in 2019 there were 1428 murders across Ukraine (perhaps this includes the already-invaded Donbas and Luhansk regions, though I somewhat doubt it).
Let's assume all of those happened in Kiev, with a population of 2.8 million (since I can't find more specific data easily right now). That gives a wildly inflated homicide rate per 100,000 population of 51.
St Louis, Baltimore, Birmingham (AL) all had murder rates that year higher than this inflated figure.
I don't think it's in dispute that most European capitals of any size have areas where one could easily get murdered, though. I can personally easily think of areas of London and Paris where I'd not be surprised by news of it happening.
At about 1.4 it's still pretty low compared to American cities. It's also not really "getting up there" as it appears to be on a relative decline lately.
The stats you link to a meaningless. The city of London don't set the budget for their police. That is a matter handled by the British goverment and according to them they've been decreasing it for 8-years straight.
> When compared with the previous year, overall funding for policing (including any in-year adjustments) for the financial year ending March 2023 will increase by 2.8% in real terms. This will be the eighth consecutive year in which policing funding has increased in real terms
There's probably some examples, but the US has such an outsized per-capita murder rate that it's not particularly comparable even when trying to select the best examples. If you stretch the definition of "major" and "comparable" then it's possible to find examples where they're somewhat similar but it requires a lot of stretching and is no longer representative. There's hundreds of cities in America with a murder rate higher than that of London. The US has a homicide rate approaching something like an order of magnitude higher than the UK (8/100k vs. 1/100k last I read).
UK is part of the European continent in terms of culture and geology. Perhaps you mean the EU, which is only part of Europe, instead of the continent itself.
Yep. Us Europeans have a tendency to pretend that "America Bad - Europe Good". And sure, we don't have the gun violence and have healthcare, but we also have our own share of violent crime.
And of course it all depends on many factors, but I know for a fact that not all of Paris is safe, or all of Berlin. You have your bad apples everywhere.
Sure, all generalisations are wrong and it even depends by the neighbourhood but the highest homicide rate in Europe appears to be in Tallinn and it's on par with Seattle. The only very worst places in Europe overlap with the very best in US. San Francisco also appear to be on the better part, way worse than Tallinn still.
Even Istanbul, which is a 15M population city in a country with serious economic turmoil and and has huge number of refugees and illegal immigrants from war torn countries, is much batter than most of the US.
Europe is part of the Asian continent. I think the idea that it’s a continent is eurocentrism. Perhaps you could say it’s a subcontinent of Asia, like India.
No it's not, it's either two continents Europe and Asia or one continent Eurasia (or even more rarely Afro-Eurasia), but certainly not part of Asia, it's like saying North America is part of South America, it can be either North America or both are part of America, but North America is certainly not part of South America.
North America and South America are clearly different landmasses, whereas Europe is a section of a large land mass we call Asia with the exception of the section we call Europe. It’s just part of 1 end of Asia. If Europe is a separate continent, why isn’t the India? The Middle East?
Because it works in general? Even the worst country in Europe [1] (Latvia 4.9 murders/100k pop.) by murder rate is better than US average (6.6/100K) [2] with France 1.1, Germany 0.9, etc. So unless you choose extreme in Europe you are looking for sure at least at 3-5 times lower murder rates in Europe.
As we can see by comparing the county map of the USA that you linked with a demographic map, murder in the USA is overwhelmingly a demographic issue. We can debate the reasons why, but the data itself is readily available and incontrovertible. The changing demographics of Western Europe will prove an interesting new data point for that debate.
What are the arguments against your position that you think are strongest and why are they so weak that you think they can be considered ‘incontrovertible’?
Fair objection. I thought it was obvious that the map was just a visualization and not the incontrovertible data. That would be the data from various high quality reports such as those produced by the UCR[1], BJS[2], NACJD[3], and the MAP[4].
I don't know of any non-straw arguments against my position that demographics are a dominating factor in homicide rates because of the high quality of the homicide data. Note that I say factor and not cause. The causes for these observable patterns are very much under debate. Nevertheless, corpses are hard to ignore. The paperwork almost always gets filed, so the data quality is considerably higher than for underreported crimes such as rape.
Yes. However I assume you mean they do at a per capita rate higher than people who aren't in cities. That's not necessarily true. San Diego for example has an admirably low murder rate for a large US city and San Jose isn't too far behind.
The somatic marker hypothesis (Bechara and Damasio, 2005; Damasio et al., 1991) highlights the importance of emotions in decision making. The hypothesis postulates that reasoned decision making is influenced by biasing signals (somatic markers) arising from changes in the body periphery.
First triggered as a reaction to experienced feedback (e.g., increased heart rate or visceral responses), the somatic reactions are assumed to be reactivated in similar decision situations.
It is argued that there are primary and secondary inductions of emotional responses.
The primary induction can be understood as innate or learned affective responses arising from a confrontation with pleasurable or aversive stimuli.
Secondary inducers comprise affective responses induced by the recall of past events or anticipation of future states.
While there are obviously crime stats that give crime rates for whatever somewhat arbitrary political boundary defines a city, they can tell a misleading story. LA covers a lot of different types of areas. SF does to some degree as well (and a lot of visitors are most familiar with area around the Moscone which is at least near somewhat sketchy areas).
But this is really true in general. I consider Boston a pretty safe city. But there are absolutely areas that I wouldn't be walking around late at night.
> It's super safe here, and it's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk in 22-02h.
A small point about language, in case you or anyone else didn't know: In English, it sounds weird to use "female" as a noun to refer to people. If, in that sentence, you would replace "female"/"females" with a word like "man"/"men," then you probably want to be using "woman"/"women" instead of "females." Using "female" as a noun for people can come off as dehumanising since it's how we refer to ex. animals in various situations. This applies to men too! Use "men" or "boys" or similar instead of "males"! Dehumanising language affects everyone.
Not upset / telling you to change immediately / etc., just thought it might be useful to bring up in case (:
Edit: Done engaging with this, thanks for the comments all! Don't want to accidentally start a flame war any more than I may already might have. Sorry mods!
Saying males or females is putting emotional distance between you and the subject. One possible reason for creating that distance might be to dehumanise, but it's far from the only reason, as you presumably know quite well.
If you or anyone else didn't know, consider a police report or a research paper in which the language is deliberately distant to avoid biasing the reader: "The two female victims were struck by the SUV, and the male suspect fled on foot", "we observed higher rates of CVD for males in the treatment group, but in females the effect size was not significant", and equally bloodless language. This may be dehumanising in some sense, but it's done in a benign way to help the reader be objective.
It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.
> It's easy for a non-native speaker to make a mistake in informal language after reading formal material like the aforementioned, and it might not be great to call out minor breaches of etiquette in such a targeted and public way.
It seemed to be addressed in a respectful and understanding manner, what's wrong with helping someone (and apparently a bunch of bystanders) learn from their mistake?
English is my first (and only) language and I’ve never heard of this. I would say that it not only doesn’t sound weird, but is totally normal. Who told you this isn’t correct?
The last few years aside, I've always had an issue with it. In my personal experience, people who tend to call women/girls "females" never, ever use the word "males" to describe men/boys in similar context. It's about using language consistently imo.
This is a new wave thing pretty much only prominent in online spaces like Reddit. Read some fantasy by female author Robin Hobb and she will regularly use the word. Spend anytime immersed in minority culture and you will frequently hear females used with affection. At best this argument is right up there with “chicks”. Some groups in some places decided to be offended while other groups in other places proudly refer to themselves as Dixie Chicks. It likely stems from online incel communities using the word frequently when discussing…females.
It’s not entirely new. As late as the mid-20th century, the term “female” was considered vaguely dehumanizing when applied to women even as an adjective. Here’s a Google Ngram graph showing changes in usage over time:
Yes, it wasn't that long ago that making the OK sign was the most evil Nazi thing one could do, and it didn't matter how many times it was started that it was a 4chan troll that society fell for, people who weren't in the know about the outrage news of the week got harmed for doing an action that for most their lives was viewed as completely harmless. Unable to admit they were trolled, the message was "Well, now Nazis are actually using it", with zero evidence or even thought of pushback against the "Nazis" who allegedly were controlling everyone's actions through negative identity.
Now you can make the OK symbol again and it's OK. The outrage over it got replaced by a new outrage and the victims of outrage culture during that period are simply seen as an acceptable cost for keeping the outrage fire burning. No apologies. No admissions of guilt or harm. Just the monster leaving behind its path of righteous destruction.
I empathise with your thoughts on this. It occurs to me that the different words aren't consistent across cultures and sometimes the word man and woman don't feel equivalent. Sadly I didn't pay attention when being taught grammar so can't explain why I think that in detail.
What do you think of the word lady? Gentlemen doesn't seem to be the male equivalent anymore.
"female" and "male" are only used as nouns in technical contexts like biological studies of sex and police reports, where dehumanization or objectification is intentional because the human part is irrelevant (Biologists because their work isn't human-specific or even about humans at all, police because they are describing attributes of a suspect).
That's entirely wrong, just google anything with "female" in front and watch the results roll in. I started with "female athlete" and there are plenty of headlines that match exactly from big name publications like Forbes.
British by birth and upbringing. In my 50s. It sounds a bit weird to me too. It would sound fine in a scientific or official context but not in normal conversation or an internet post. Context matters - and some usages are fine.
I speak 4 languages to various degrees, and female/male is either dehumanizing or an overly biological term to use in a normal conversation in all of them, like "oh let me pick your cortex about an idea".
I assume that English speaking folks who don't notice this just got used to hearing 'female' and never paid much attention to the sensibilities around it.
I mean it's technically correct. But it is weird (to me) to use in conversational English, and I've been paying attention since before 2000. Speaking for New England region between and around the NYC/Boston metros.
Now that I think about it, you know where it is used a lot? In news reports/police reports. "A young male was injured.... a female was spotted leaving the scene..."
If one is derogatory then the other should be as well. Try it out with some more universally accepted derogatory nouns to see my point. Thinking about it, when applied as an adjective most terms sound even worse.
Also an English speaker, and nerd about this sort of semantics.
Just to keep the blood pressure low here: I want to be clear there are two sides to this issue. I'm not the sort of "enlightened centrist" who says that lightly: more often than not, there are not two sides to an issue, but this is one of the rare cases where there are two sides to this.
I'm going to explain this as briefly as I can, but it's complicated, so it's not actually going to be brief.
First, let's understand that communication is a two-person (or two-group) activity involving both communicator and audience. Effective communication of complex and charged topics requires that the communicator understand their audience and use language that their audience can understand without being distracted. Likewise, effective communication of complex and charged topics requires that the audience make a good-faith effort to understand the communicator by taking into account the communicator's background/motivations, and try to suss out the communicator's intended meaning, possibly by asking clarifying questions.
One of the important observations in David Foster Wallace's Tense Present[1] is that language doesn't just communicate its direct meaning, it also communicates membership in a group. As Wallace says:
> [M]ost of us are fluent in more than one major English dialect and in a large number of subdialects and are probably at least passable in countless others. Which dialect you choose to use depends, of course, on whom you're addressing. [... T]he dialect you use depends mostly on what sort of Group your listener is part of and whether you wish to present yourself as a fellow member of that Group. [... U]sage-as-inclusion is about much more than class. Here's another thought experiment: A bunch of U.S. teenagers in clothes that look far too large for them are sitting together in the local mall's Food Court, and a 53-year-old man with a combover and clothes that fit comes over to them and says that he was scoping them and thinks they're totally rad and/or phat and is it cool if he just kicks it and does the hang here with them. The kids' reaction is going to be either scorn or embarrassment for the guy — most likely a mix of both. Q: Why? Or imagine that two hard-core urban black guys are standing there talking and I, who am resoundingly and in all ways white, come up and greet them with "Yo" and call them "Brothers" and ask "s'up, s'goin on," pronouncing on with that NYCish oo-o diphthong that Young Urban Black English deploys for a standard o. Either these guys are going to be offended or they are going to think I am simply out of my mind. No other reaction is remotely foreseeable. Q: Why?
> Why: A dialect of English is learned and used either because it's your native vernacular or because it's the dialect of a Group by which you wish (with some degree of plausibility) to be accepted.
I think what a lot of conversations about the word "females" versus "women" or "girls" get wrong is making universal statements about English as if it's a single coherent language. There are many dialects, such as biology English or medical English, where using "female" is absolutely appropriate and using "woman" or "girl" would be unequivocally wrong. Likewise, there are dialects, such as gender theory English, where "female" isn't dehumanizing if used properly: using "females" refers to people with XX chromosomes, while "women" refers to people who identify with a feminine gender (although usually one would say "female assigned at birth" or "FAB" rather than saying "females" by itself).
Audience is everything here. Using gender theory English to a biology audience drastically changes the meaning, placing you as an outsider to the group, and if your intention was to speak biology English, you'd have failed to communicate in that dialect. In fact, the above paragraph, which I, a cisgender man, wrote, is fine only because the audience is a mostly-male, slightly-socially-inept audience of Hacker News denizens. If my audience were a group of American women, that paragraph would be horribly offensive because it's someone who hasn't directly experienced the effects of this sort of language, explaining it to people who have directly experienced the effects of this sort of language. In other words, mansplaining.
The problem with saying "[I]t's normal thing to see young females taking a dog out for a walk[.]" is twofold:
1. It is perceived by some as dehumanizing women. Note that I didn't say "it's dehumanizing women", because that a) assumes the word has some sort of inherent meaning (it doesn't) and b) assumes a lot of intention coming from the communicator. But actually, whether it's dehumanizing isn't as important as the fact that it's perceived as such. Remember that communication is a two-person activity. Yes, that means that it's up to the audience to not assume the worst, and to assume you aren't intentionally dehumanizing women. But it also means that as the communicator, if you find out that your audience perceives the wording as dehumanizing, it's now up to you to change your language to communicate your actual intent more effectively. If you as a communicator find out that your audience perceives your wording as dehumanizing to women, and then insist on staying with your wording, that really starts to communicate that you don't care about communicating effectively, about your audience's perceptions, or about the fact that you might be misunderstood to be dehumanizing women. In the worst case, it communicates that you do, in fact, intend to dehumanize women, although I'm not willing to go that far in your case: I think it's much more likely that you're just feeling attacked and being defensive.
2. As noted before, language communicates membership in a group. In this case, we're clearly not demonstrating membership in medical, biology, or gender theory communities, and the remaining groups which use "female" aren't groups you probably want to associate yourself with. Unfortunately, the other groups which say "females" are generally groups like incels, neckbeards, self-described misogynists, self-described alpha/sigma males, etc. Likely, this is the underlying reason why "females" is viewed as dehumanizing women: these groups really do intend to dehumanize women, and by associating yourself with them, you're implying that you agree with some of their ideas. Again, I assume it isn't your intent to associate yourself with these groups, but effective communication of your identity would avoid associating yourself with these groups. It's up to you, as the communicator, to understand your audience and how they will perceive your use of words, and to choose the words that your audience will perceive as your intended meaning.
Just to highlight the complexity of this: there are also contextual problems with referring to adult women as "girls" as this might be perceived as infantilizing. But, in other contexts, referring to adult women as "women" is denigrating to their youthfulness/attractiveness (i.e. some women would often take offense to being called "that woman" rather than "that girl"). Louis C.K. was adept enough to riff on this phenomenon with his "Nobody wants to see 'women gone wild'" joke, but we all know what happened with Louis C.K. later... But this is partly why Global Citizen has a "Girls and Women" issue rather than a "Girls" or "Women" category (and certainly not a "Females" category)[2]. Either "Girls" or "Women" would not be inclusive of the entire group they're trying to help in the context of their audience's dialect.
Female is the word for any female sexed animal. Woman is the word for a female sexed human being. By using the more general term you are allowing the possibility that the individual in question is perhaps not fully human. Hence the term “dehumanizing.” Does that help?
That tells people considerably more about you than it does about other men and women.
Edit reply: Yes obviously you were talking about yourself and I used that to draw a conclusion about you. Why would that indicate I didn’t think it through? Your response however really does appear to have not been thought through since you failed to consider that point. That’s consistent with your apparent trend of denigrating yourself in attempts to denigrate others. If I were you I’d check my priors, but I expect you’ll continue to do you.
Not sure if you're male or female, but you certainly didn't think your reply through.
Edit Reply:
> Yes obviously you were talking about yourself and I used that to draw a conclusion about you. Why would that indicate I didn’t think it through?
Your conclusion about a post where I spoke about myself is that it speaks about myself more than it speaks about others.
Not the sharpest tool in the shed, I see.
> Your response however really does appear to have not been thought through since you failed to consider that point. That’s consistent with your apparent trend of denigrating yourself in attempts to denigrate others. If I were you I’d check my priors, but I expect you’ll continue to do you.
I see nothing wrong with the previous poster's use of "females". Males/females is sometimes used instead of men/women in a forensic context (e.g. a police report or an objective description: "female athlete," "single white female," etc).
>Using "female" as a noun for people can come off as dehumanising since it's how we refer to ex. animals in various situations.
Honestly, it's all about context and really the people say "oh he used female workers instead of women workers" what a pig are the people who are going to be mad no matter what they're literally just looking for an excuse.
And quite simply I find that demonisation of the word female to be rude and fundamentally sexist. We wouldn't have a problem saying "two males walking around" but in escence you would have a problem with "two females walking around". The fact being female is considered dehumanisng is a problem in itself and sexist. Being male is not dehumanising. See how that got turned around? You had good intentions then I got mad and used your words againist you.
Police are also fond of saying "individual" instead of "person," which is another way of dehumanizing the people they encounter. It's always a red flag to me when I hear someone say the word "individual."
Police and military do this specifically as a strategy at passive language. At least among those interested in linguistics, cops are famous for their usage of passive language to downplay violence they participate in: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/07/14/...
Basically, they do it because the terms are in some way dehumanizing.
I also find the terms dehumanizing, but specifically because I've noticed that it's most frequently a term used by incels, self-identified or otherwise. It's common on certain subreddits or on twitter to see users aligned in gamergate / manosphere circles using "females" when talking about women. And yes, these same people will say "men" when talking about men.
No they do it because it’s the correct term. If you say “a man wearing a white T-shirt” and the actual suspect is a 14 year old boy. Many of the people searching with disregard them in the search because they got told to look for a man. When it goes to court the defence lawyer would use it as doubt since the description is for a man and not a boy.
Dehumainzing others is one of the main characteristics of the military in wartime, and often the police in peacetime. You maybe have a pretty cool life experience not to have experienced that.
It is very common to say "I saw two males doing x" when reporting what you saw. Just as common as saying you say two men. And this proves my point, you would have a problem no matter what. You're just wanting to be outraged.
Imagine thinking someone's gender dehumanising them. It makes no sense. The idea "You're not as human as them because you're male" is an asburd one.
> Imagine thinking someone's gender dehumanising them. It makes no sense. The idea "You're not as human as them because you're male" is an asburd one.
Absolutely not what I'm saying. My objection to it is specifically that referring to someone with "male"/"female" as a noun, in common contexts, can -- not will -- come off as dehumanising, particularly when some people tend to only use "male" or "female" for one gender and not the other.
> You're just wanting to be outraged.
I want people who both don't know that smth may make others uncomfortable and want to change in that case have the relevant information. If you don't want to change, then... good for you? That's not my problem. You do you, I guess?
As I said, its' all about context. And the context it was used it was perfectly fine, normal, etc. In fact it was perfect English, it's common to see 16 year old girls walking late at night just as common to see 40 year old women walking late at night. They're both female, one group are girls and the other group are women.
> I want people who both don't know that smth may make others uncomfortable and want to change in that case have the relevant information. If you don't want to change, then... good for you? That's not my problem. You do you, I guess?
Right back at you. It makes other people uncomfortable when others go around saying a gender is dehumanising. Especialy, when in English it's the correct word. Female/male is refers to gender, woman/man refers to gender and age. It makes people very uncomfortable when you imply they were some how rude when they weren't.
But as I said, people who would be outraged would always be outraged. It's the new trend, to show they're thinking of other people while disregarding others.
It is not outrage. It is demanding that women get respected in the ways that they want to be respected. Perhaps you have not noticed the tendency for some people to consistently refer to men as “men” and women as “female” or “girl”.
If you don’t like it, too bad. We will continue demanding respect. It takes exactly zero seconds to use the word “woman” over “female”.
You demand respect for women by saying their gender dehumanises them?
Perhaps you've not noticed but some of those people are women. You going to start correcting women when they say they're off on a girls night out and tell them it's a womens night out? You going to start correct them when they say they have an all female executive board and tell them it's an all women executive board?
The reality is, when you say that the word female is offensive, which you are, you're making their gender offensive. And that is not respectful.
I don't know about this either. It sounds fine to me and I hear both used interchangeably (from NYC area). I've also seen it written both ways. To the original comment, you're fine IMHO.
A small point about self-righteousness in case you or anyone else didn’t know: asserting your own beliefs as dogma is often counter-productive in a forum like HN.
Stating that you’ve got information that CLEARLY everyone else needs to be taught; that you’re just trying to be helpful; that nobody should feel pressured to conform “immediately”; all comes off as disingenuous at best and threatening at worst. Instead, try asking questions and engaging in conversation rather than lecturing.
As to the topic at hand: in what way is it dehumanizing to refer to a human as male or female? Being male or female is a fundamental part of being human, not something to be erased or ashamed of. I am a trans woman: a human male who identifies and lives socially as a woman. Should I hide the fact that I’m male? Why?
> In English, it sounds weird to use "female" as a noun to refer to people.
By "it sounds weird" you actually mean "in the past few years there's been a movement to hyperfocus on this small language quirk that nobody really cared about in the past". Just so we're clear.
No, it always sounded weird. Its certainly not a word my grandparents nor parents would've used in casual conversation.
In the last few years there's been a hyperfocus on restricting genders that has caused a minority of native-English speakers to start overusing the word "female" with extra emphasis: which may be leading to learners to consider it a normal word to use casually, but historically it has mainly been applied in formal medical/scientific settings.
I'll go further than "sounds weird". It's a shibboleth that associates the speaker with certain misogynistic red-pill internet subcultures. Anybody who doesn't want that association should probably just say "women" instead.
Or perhaps, just perhaps, they're non-english natives who speak English as a second (or third, fourth, etc) language and have no knowledge or interest in absurd internet-american-english witchhunts?
Yes incels are utterly annoying despicable broken records of tediously uncreative low quality mental illness, i also strongly dislike them - but for monolinguist americans to start to paint with such an absurdly wide brush is far worse. Choose your bloody battles.
I don't. I mean it genuinely sounds odd to me. Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way; what's wrong about wanting people to use language consistently? Don't push your biases onto me.
Do you have any evidence that "Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way". I think it's highly likely that you do not have enough (anecdotal) data to legitimately make a claim like that. At most you could make such a claim about "most people in my experience" but then, you wouldn't have monitored them for quite long either, just for an internet convo or so.
"To me" is the key bit here. I'm conscious of this particular issue since I've run into it on the internet a few times. Whenever I've mentioned it to a woman in a face to face conversation (in the UK) they've looked at me like I was barking mad. I even corrected my mother (she referred to "females" when talking about women) which resulted in a lengthy tirade. She is old though to be fair.
I blame the Ferengi.
>Most people who word things that way don't use the term "males" in a similar way
Conversely, I'm not sure many people are keeping track of this since no-one objects to be called male if they're a man.
- Assume why people care/don't care about a certain issue
- Tried to force my values onto people.
Saying "if you didn't know, wording things this way can come off weird. Maybe try X instead? No pressure (:" is very different from "yeah well obviously your intent here is X [because of the last few years]." I'm not here to force people to change. But if people didn't know something, and do want to change on their own, I'd rather the information be there for them if they want it.
I don't care about this issue, but you opened with stating "it sounds weird". An absolute statement. Not like you are wording it here. Way to derail a thread about someone loosing their life with semantics policing.
I didn't accuse you of doing any of the things in your bullets so I can't really respond to them.
What I did say is that you're pushing your biases onto others while simultaneously telling others not to do the same thing.
Your life experiences have led you to the point today where you object to a certain use of the word "female". That's fine.
But taking your personal objection, which is not a universially agreed upon truth, and using it to lecture someone else in a condescending "you must not know English" way is another matter and probably why you're catching heat right now.
it's pretty common in aave/ebonics, that's probably how it's become more common. lots of slang has mainstreamed from the black community in the past few yrs
stabbing is quite common in some big european cities
London is the European (well, kind of) city that most people cite as being bad for knife crime. It's still rare enough that a stabbing will make the national news though.
For a basic comparison, in 2022 there were 710 murders in the UK. 282 were stabbings. In the US there were 26,031 murders (a little more than 20,000 using guns), which is 36 times more, while the US has a population that's only 5 times that of the UK.
One would think that a comparison with the UK would be a smart one to make considering the media coverage stabbings in the UK receive, and the fact that homicides in the US tend to be conducted using firearms instead.
Turns out, shockingly to me at least, that the US also has a much higher deaths due to stabbing rate than the UK.
0.60/100k residents in the US vs 0.08/100k residents in the UK.
Well why don’t you find London and SF numbers then.
In the meanwhile, considering the U.S. has an order of magnitude higher rate of stabbing, it’s highly unlikely that London would have a higher, never mind a significantly higher, rate of stabbings than SF.
It's a people problem and we aren't allowed to and can't get rid of the people. People have poured in so much help and aid for years and it went nowhere.
Supporters of drug addiction and severe drug addicts for a start. Severe addicts need to be removed from society and treated medically in isolation to wean them off their addiction. The damage done to addicts by the common opioid and opioid mimicking drugs on the streets of SF is so severe there is nearly zero hope for them to consciously stop.
US governments need to scrap their existing operational model tackling drug users and adopt the Swiss National Strategy on Addiction and the four-pillar policy. There are no junkies in the streets unlike in the 1990s.
>In 2017-18 there were 145 homicides in London, of which approximately 80 were carried out using a knife. There were an additional 4,793 incidents of "knife crime with injury".
which sadly does seem to be more than daily. That said living in central London I don't see any of it.
That's pretty appalling but don't forget that London is a city of 9 million people. When you have that number of people in a place there will obviously be crime. It could be argued that 145 deaths and 4,793 incidents is quite low.
I visit SF at least once a year, and default to my learned habit of walking alone, and later at night.
No more.