It's not a non-sequiter at all. The author observed that an extremely poor post-soviet country has superior infrastructure to the US; that observation could be extended well beyond anti-suicide walls in the subways, as anyone who's ever suffered an American airport can attest.
Since America has a gigantic GDP, it follows that the money is being spent otherwise than on infrastructure. Military is an obvious culprit. The vast non-productive tax sink that is the black population is another. The average black costs far, far more to society than they produce; very much the opposite of whites, Asians, and Indians. It is therefore entirely logical to posit that the reason American infrastructure is the laughing stock of the world is at least partly because America's economic surplus has been squandered over several decades by the costs of managing the black population. To say nothing of the second order effects such as e.g. the economic friction caused by the incompetence originating from affirmative action.
I'm not arguing that's the only reason. Again, see: military. Massive overregulation due to an overpopulated managerial class is another big factor, although I suspect the pervasive corruption in Bulgaria represents a similar level of economic inefficiency. However, the only possible argument against 'blacks are expensive and money spent on them could have been spent on other things' is basically 'that's mean tho'.
Haaaa no, Bulgarians are at each other throats about everything. And frankly I'd rather be dropped in the middle of the most violent part of the US than spend time dealing with bitter, angry, Bulgarian bureaucrats.
I would guess the difference is, a) almost no guns and b) It's EXTREMELY rare, if not virtually non-existent, for a family to allow even a distant relative to become homeless out on the street. There's just no conception of the atomic individualistic US culture.
"And frankly I'd rather be dropped in the middle of the most violent part of the US than spend time dealing with bitter, angry, Bulgarian bureaucrats."
I respectfully disagree. It's not about guns at all. Guns have always been easy to obtain in the US, but the violence recently is a symptom of larger societal problems there. To wit: there is almost zero mental health care in place in the US, and the bulk of the violent crime is committed by a small segment of the population that refuses to assimilate. I live in Sofia now and nothing on the planet would get me to go back to the US. Това място е гноен кенеф.
It’s easy for you to say that you prefer living in a dysfunctional American urban war zone rather than dealing with bureaucrats, but if you actually had to do it, I’m pretty sure your revealed preferences would say something else.
Yeah - the creation of the welfare state back in the 1960s-70s eliminated that wonderful trait - looking out for your extended family. After welfare, everyone decided they could just let the govt take care of those that fell by the wayside. How's that working out? Do those bureaucrats actually shoot at you? Scary!
They have 10x as much knife violence in UK as they do gun crime, because they've banned guns but not (the world's most violent demographic here). Dollars to donuts, UK vs Bulgaria crime stats bear this out.
White Americans are roughly as violent as autochthonous Europeans. It's (the world's most violent demographic here) that skews the stats in the US.
Tana, here's a quick mental exercise for you. Ask yourself, do you feel safer on a subway car full of Bulgarians or a subway car in NYC full of black people?
You know the answer, despite what you would say publicly. And you're a hypocrite as we all know you'd get off the subway car full of black people ASAP and not feel safe until you did. Just like you'd cross the street is you saw a group of black people at night. And if you didn't do that you would be an idiot who doesn't understand pattern recognition, the basis for human survival.
What the hell are you talking about “Would make Tucker Carlson blush”? I am truly pig sick of this liberal bigotry and projection. You’ve divided America against itself. I hope you enjoy the coming chaos but the rest of us don’t.
Pretending that an allusion to Tucker Carlson's rhetoric is bigotry while ignoring the multiple comments round here implying (or outright saying) that blacks are to blame for crime. The person dividing America here is you, stop playing stupid.
Thank you for writing this, Tana. I’m delighted to find your sub stack. Many of these comments are boorish.
To engage with your original question, it’s a puzzler. I have not spent time in Bulgaria but I wonder if there is more of a sense of shared culture that breeds respect for each other and a commitment to not crossing boundaries.
I’ve noticed the commitment to boundaries and respect for others declining in the US when there is a feeling that the powerful are not looking out for the rest of society, and the increasing sense that there are no boundaries or limits to how far they will go. This feeling is on both right and left (ie George floyd, fbi raid on former President) and seems amplified by social media.
To summarize, I would guess that Bulgaria has a strong, widely shared culture and that explains the difference.
"Strong, widely shared culture" yeah that's what you get in a real country (i.e., not a "multicultural" "melting pot" international boarding house and economic zone posing as a country, like the USA.)
Tana, the real question you should ask is why is Bulgaria safer than NYC, or any other democrat controlled city in the USA. But you want to play dumb and pretend that's not the real question, because you wouldn't like the answer. Why is Sofia also cleaner. Why is violent crime extremely rare in Sofia compared to NYC.
Of course, you liberals want to blame crime on poverty. But when you point out Bulgaria is the poorest EU nation but DOES NOT have anywhere near the crime NYC has, or Chicago, or Baltimore, or Detroit, or Philly......, then it must be something else aside from poverty which leads to crime, the one thing you won't touch.
Nowhere near the crime because BG has no gun-toting cosplayers running around looking for ways to make trouble, while refusing to join the modern world?
You're dishonest, Tana. Not that you're allowed to be honest and keep your social status, career, friends, etc. But dishonesty for self-preservation is still dishonesty. It rots your soul.
It's always amused me how the most liberal Europeans will wax poetic about the brotherhood of man and the evils of racism, and then go full schutzstaffel when the gypsies are mentioned. Having dealt with gypsies I don't really blame Europeans for that.
Here's a prediction though: as demographics in Western Europe shift thanks to mass immigration, their subways will become more like NYC's and less like Sophia's.
Already been happening for decades. This shift is the last Rubicon. Paris metro is a dump compared to the nineties. France is on the verge of collapse from reverse colonization. Germany has a fifth column of 5 million Turks that could seize the country on behalf of Erdogan in a week. The western liberal mind cannot grasp these realities while holding refugee welcome signs. Collapse is the goal. The Kalergi plan in motion. Hungary on the other hand 👌
They're like those preprogrammed software from the 80s that had a handful of selective commands that if you strayed off the only commands they knew they became glitchy and confused. People use the term cognitive dissonance but it still implies cognition and that's just a bridge too far.
EXCUSE me, sir. Using 'minorites' in that fashion reinforces eurocentric white supremacist norms. The accepted nomenclature is now 'peoples of the global majority'. Educate yourself.
Funny, they refuse to STATE the obvious, but they also refuse to live in black neighborhoods. Strange, given how cheap the real estate is there. And they'll say "poverty" if you confront them, but you know and they know they'd take the poorest white neighborhood in America over a richer black one...
Bulgaria is NOT the most corrupt country in Europe, Ukraine is. As for public transport, I am not surprised because even a small city in Mexico has better, cheaper transport options than San Francisco. One, many people don't care about transport. Two, we've made it so expensive to expand it that it's really impractical.
No one in America cares about public transport because we know it will be swarmed with (the unmentionable demographic here) and thus unusable by all other groups.
That system is heavily subsidized by a corrupt government and extravagant taxes levied on both the population of Bulgaria and other EU states (since redistributive funds from the EU often bolster public works like this). All of it adds up to an economy that produces a per capita GDP of about $13,000 - the sort of income that creates perpetual dependence, a hardscrabble existence, and a small, generally constricted, life.
Yes, the MTA might not quite measure up to even basic European systems, but here we also have a lot of people who make enough to take Uber or own a car. Having that choice is important! I may not like driving, but there are lots of people who do, and they should have the ability to build a life around their preferences, not mine or some central planner’s. Plus, if I want to temporarily visit a place with nice public transit, I can afford to travel there. That economic freedom is, personally, superior to having a limited selection of public options that are the default because no-one has the money or the options to do anything else.
I have to say that the "way Bulgaria treats its Roma" is largely the fault of the Roma themselves. It wasn't like this under the communist regime, but since no one is holding their feet to the fire, they refuse to assimilate, refuse (mostly) to work honest jobs, or to be at all part of the population. It's not Bulgaria, it's the Roma that is the problem.
Whiter population at fault in relationship with less-white population, does not compute, error, error, does not compute.
It's tempting to use majority and minority here, but that's incorrect; the white minority in South Africa is to blame for everything, you see... Edit: oh, and the J#wish majority in Isr@el are the good guys.
Its called having blacks.
One of the richest cities in history can't have metal platform barriers because blacks? Get real.
How much has the US spent on affirmative action, welfare, public housing, and policing since 1964? What is the opportunity cost of those policies?
Posting non sequitur questions is not getting real.
It's not a non-sequiter at all. The author observed that an extremely poor post-soviet country has superior infrastructure to the US; that observation could be extended well beyond anti-suicide walls in the subways, as anyone who's ever suffered an American airport can attest.
Since America has a gigantic GDP, it follows that the money is being spent otherwise than on infrastructure. Military is an obvious culprit. The vast non-productive tax sink that is the black population is another. The average black costs far, far more to society than they produce; very much the opposite of whites, Asians, and Indians. It is therefore entirely logical to posit that the reason American infrastructure is the laughing stock of the world is at least partly because America's economic surplus has been squandered over several decades by the costs of managing the black population. To say nothing of the second order effects such as e.g. the economic friction caused by the incompetence originating from affirmative action.
I'm not arguing that's the only reason. Again, see: military. Massive overregulation due to an overpopulated managerial class is another big factor, although I suspect the pervasive corruption in Bulgaria represents a similar level of economic inefficiency. However, the only possible argument against 'blacks are expensive and money spent on them could have been spent on other things' is basically 'that's mean tho'.
Haaaa no, Bulgarians are at each other throats about everything. And frankly I'd rather be dropped in the middle of the most violent part of the US than spend time dealing with bitter, angry, Bulgarian bureaucrats.
I would guess the difference is, a) almost no guns and b) It's EXTREMELY rare, if not virtually non-existent, for a family to allow even a distant relative to become homeless out on the street. There's just no conception of the atomic individualistic US culture.
"And frankly I'd rather be dropped in the middle of the most violent part of the US than spend time dealing with bitter, angry, Bulgarian bureaucrats."
Everyone (you included) knows that's nonsense.
I respectfully disagree. It's not about guns at all. Guns have always been easy to obtain in the US, but the violence recently is a symptom of larger societal problems there. To wit: there is almost zero mental health care in place in the US, and the bulk of the violent crime is committed by a small segment of the population that refuses to assimilate. I live in Sofia now and nothing on the planet would get me to go back to the US. Това място е гноен кенеф.
It’s easy for you to say that you prefer living in a dysfunctional American urban war zone rather than dealing with bureaucrats, but if you actually had to do it, I’m pretty sure your revealed preferences would say something else.
Yeah - the creation of the welfare state back in the 1960s-70s eliminated that wonderful trait - looking out for your extended family. After welfare, everyone decided they could just let the govt take care of those that fell by the wayside. How's that working out? Do those bureaucrats actually shoot at you? Scary!
They have 10x as much knife violence in UK as they do gun crime, because they've banned guns but not (the world's most violent demographic here). Dollars to donuts, UK vs Bulgaria crime stats bear this out.
White Americans are roughly as violent as autochthonous Europeans. It's (the world's most violent demographic here) that skews the stats in the US.
Tana, here's a quick mental exercise for you. Ask yourself, do you feel safer on a subway car full of Bulgarians or a subway car in NYC full of black people?
You know the answer, despite what you would say publicly. And you're a hypocrite as we all know you'd get off the subway car full of black people ASAP and not feel safe until you did. Just like you'd cross the street is you saw a group of black people at night. And if you didn't do that you would be an idiot who doesn't understand pattern recognition, the basis for human survival.
That's very well put. I've never once felt unsafe in Bulgaria. I can't say the same for my time in Chicago on the el, however.
What the hell are you talking about “Would make Tucker Carlson blush”? I am truly pig sick of this liberal bigotry and projection. You’ve divided America against itself. I hope you enjoy the coming chaos but the rest of us don’t.
Pretending that an allusion to Tucker Carlson's rhetoric is bigotry while ignoring the multiple comments round here implying (or outright saying) that blacks are to blame for crime. The person dividing America here is you, stop playing stupid.
Thank you for writing this, Tana. I’m delighted to find your sub stack. Many of these comments are boorish.
To engage with your original question, it’s a puzzler. I have not spent time in Bulgaria but I wonder if there is more of a sense of shared culture that breeds respect for each other and a commitment to not crossing boundaries.
I’ve noticed the commitment to boundaries and respect for others declining in the US when there is a feeling that the powerful are not looking out for the rest of society, and the increasing sense that there are no boundaries or limits to how far they will go. This feeling is on both right and left (ie George floyd, fbi raid on former President) and seems amplified by social media.
To summarize, I would guess that Bulgaria has a strong, widely shared culture and that explains the difference.
"Boorish" seems to be Tyler's dysphemism for "fact-based and obvious to everyone."
"Strong, widely shared culture" yeah that's what you get in a real country (i.e., not a "multicultural" "melting pot" international boarding house and economic zone posing as a country, like the USA.)
Seems like I know NYC and BG better than Tana.
Tana, the real question you should ask is why is Bulgaria safer than NYC, or any other democrat controlled city in the USA. But you want to play dumb and pretend that's not the real question, because you wouldn't like the answer. Why is Sofia also cleaner. Why is violent crime extremely rare in Sofia compared to NYC.
Of course, you liberals want to blame crime on poverty. But when you point out Bulgaria is the poorest EU nation but DOES NOT have anywhere near the crime NYC has, or Chicago, or Baltimore, or Detroit, or Philly......, then it must be something else aside from poverty which leads to crime, the one thing you won't touch.
Culture.
You're pussy-footing around it yourself. What you are talking about is "race".
"Culture" - Yeah you are guilty of what you accuse her of
Nowhere near the crime because BG has no gun-toting cosplayers running around looking for ways to make trouble, while refusing to join the modern world?
Yep! Nailed it.
You're dishonest, Tana. Not that you're allowed to be honest and keep your social status, career, friends, etc. But dishonesty for self-preservation is still dishonesty. It rots your soul.
The answer is the same as why America has 5-7 of the cities with the highest homicide rates in the world.
I believe Cleveland and Philadelphia were added to that list.
It's always amused me how the most liberal Europeans will wax poetic about the brotherhood of man and the evils of racism, and then go full schutzstaffel when the gypsies are mentioned. Having dealt with gypsies I don't really blame Europeans for that.
Here's a prediction though: as demographics in Western Europe shift thanks to mass immigration, their subways will become more like NYC's and less like Sophia's.
Already been happening for decades. This shift is the last Rubicon. Paris metro is a dump compared to the nineties. France is on the verge of collapse from reverse colonization. Germany has a fifth column of 5 million Turks that could seize the country on behalf of Erdogan in a week. The western liberal mind cannot grasp these realities while holding refugee welcome signs. Collapse is the goal. The Kalergi plan in motion. Hungary on the other hand 👌
It's darkly amusing watching liberals regarding all of this and asking "why is everything always getting worse?" while refusing to see the obvious.
Very similar to the deaths from Suddenly and Unexplained.
They're like those preprogrammed software from the 80s that had a handful of selective commands that if you strayed off the only commands they knew they became glitchy and confused. People use the term cognitive dissonance but it still implies cognition and that's just a bridge too far.
Yep. NPCs. When there's only one acceptable response or belief in any given situation, cognition shrivels.
Calling other people NPCs while mechanically echoing at each other decades-old, rotted Minorities Bad talking points. Couldn't be me!
EXCUSE me, sir. Using 'minorites' in that fashion reinforces eurocentric white supremacist norms. The accepted nomenclature is now 'peoples of the global majority'. Educate yourself.
Thanks for (((that))).
Funny, they refuse to STATE the obvious, but they also refuse to live in black neighborhoods. Strange, given how cheap the real estate is there. And they'll say "poverty" if you confront them, but you know and they know they'd take the poorest white neighborhood in America over a richer black one...
Hail Hungary.
Bulgaria is NOT the most corrupt country in Europe, Ukraine is. As for public transport, I am not surprised because even a small city in Mexico has better, cheaper transport options than San Francisco. One, many people don't care about transport. Two, we've made it so expensive to expand it that it's really impractical.
No one in America cares about public transport because we know it will be swarmed with (the unmentionable demographic here) and thus unusable by all other groups.
She wrote European Union. Ukraine is not in the EU.
Ah okay I missed that part. I wasn’t aware that Bulgaria was in the EU either
I have yet to find a European city that does not have cleaner and easier to navigate subway than NY, even better English usually
Italian girls are pretty and sexy and cool, far above most countries (cough US & UK), but the most beautiful woman I ever met was Bulgarian.
Wow! It's common for women here to be tall and also have dark hair and light eyes. That's sort the most distinguising thing.
I will have to pay a visit! 😄
That system is heavily subsidized by a corrupt government and extravagant taxes levied on both the population of Bulgaria and other EU states (since redistributive funds from the EU often bolster public works like this). All of it adds up to an economy that produces a per capita GDP of about $13,000 - the sort of income that creates perpetual dependence, a hardscrabble existence, and a small, generally constricted, life.
Yes, the MTA might not quite measure up to even basic European systems, but here we also have a lot of people who make enough to take Uber or own a car. Having that choice is important! I may not like driving, but there are lots of people who do, and they should have the ability to build a life around their preferences, not mine or some central planner’s. Plus, if I want to temporarily visit a place with nice public transit, I can afford to travel there. That economic freedom is, personally, superior to having a limited selection of public options that are the default because no-one has the money or the options to do anything else.
Качи се с "горките" цигани във влака и ще разбереш.
Hop on train with the "poor" gypsies on the train and you'll see.
Ask anyone working in healthcare, education, law enforcement, or just the evening news to see the daily problems they cause
So it’s true. Liberals really do live in an echo chamber hive mind.
"The way the country treats its Roma minority population would make Tucker Carlson blush. "
There's your answer, Honey.
I have to say that the "way Bulgaria treats its Roma" is largely the fault of the Roma themselves. It wasn't like this under the communist regime, but since no one is holding their feet to the fire, they refuse to assimilate, refuse (mostly) to work honest jobs, or to be at all part of the population. It's not Bulgaria, it's the Roma that is the problem.
Whiter population at fault in relationship with less-white population, does not compute, error, error, does not compute.
It's tempting to use majority and minority here, but that's incorrect; the white minority in South Africa is to blame for everything, you see... Edit: oh, and the J#wish majority in Isr@el are the good guys.