The point I was making was that not all Muslims are homophobic. Your original argument is that all muslims are homophobic and thus should not be allowed to immigrate to the US. You have now changed your argument and are not responding to the argument I have presented.

Further, do not mention my girlfriend in the context of Muslims killing her, and don't make a fucking joke about it.

This wouldn't explain why murder rates have declined, considerably as well. The U.S is down to pre-boomer levels. 

Much of it can be explained by an aging population + reduced lead poisoning rates, is my guess. 

Although the youth culture is also a lot less "bad." Teen pregnancies are down considerably, drug and alcohol usage is down, etc. 

Of course on the other-hand there is a lot more depression, social alienation, and anomie. 

Lead-poisoning is also a good reason that I wasn't considering, leaded gasoline is something we no longer use and that had an effect on some, particularly violent, crime. 

However, the portion of the population that you're looking at with regard to drug use is not the population I'm discussing when talking about large cities in American culture. It's persons over 50 that are the cause for a substantial portion of drug use today. In addition, on average it's people over 50 that are also homeless (which homelessness is no longer a crime, but it used to be until the early 70's). 

For the shoplifting rates, the reported revenue lost from stores for shoplifting is at a historic high, almost twice as much as it was just six years ago. However, shoplifting crime has gone DOWN, which doesn't make sense as a function of what the stores are reporting.

So while you've done a great job showing that some crime has legitimately gone down (underage substance use, murder), there is still a large portion of crime unexplained by this. Particularly given the fact that murder has never been the most prevalent crime per capita, yet our total crime levels are at lows not seen since the 1960's. 

I mean, we shouldn't be considering vagrancy and larceny equal to murder and rape as "units of crime." The crimes that matter to most people (violent crime) are down, and in so much as vagrancy and larceny are up, it's almost certainly due to the increase in inequality. 

By the way, the median age of unsheltered homeless Americans isn't different from the median age of Americans (~39 years old.) 

I didn't say they were equal, certainly not for each individual instance. However, these other aspects are important when discussing the decrease of overall crime, which is what I was responding to. Particularly since some forms of crime that you are discussion (namely murder) have never been the largest source of crime. 

As for the homeless population, it's interesting the US Department of Housing is reporting 39 as the median age when sources I've seen quote 45 and above. I discussed average (i.e. mean). Regardless, people over the age of 50 are the fastest growing homeless population, and, as trends continue, will skew the average and median as time goes on. 

Edit: Also, the "increase of inequality" that you used as an explanation is precisely a reason why America isn't in a great place right now, which could very well be a reason why this WW2 veteran said what he said. 

And there is the strawmen. You bring it up as "others present it", but you comment on him, not these nebulous others. So let's be real: we talk about the validity of his comments, not what idiots on the internet say. But moreover: "some sort of appeal to authority about whether or not we live in freer and better societies today than his was during the war". No it isn't, that is your strawmen. He said that it was not worth the sacrifice. That means he can actually fully agree with you or me, that our society has shown progress, just he feels not enough to justify the sacrifice — which was enormous! You keep on and on and on about here and there we won freedoms, but you fail to balance it against the sacrifice. But that was the point he said.

You are right we don't know which freedoms he spoke about. But we sure as hell know which sacrifice he spoke about and we know how big that was. But you keep on saying "Gotcha, here is a law that got better, see he is wrong." Which only works because you leave out the sacrifice and misrepresent his position as "whether or not we live in freer and better societies today than his was during the war". This sort of toxic discussion style with misrepresentation riles me up.

And if you ramble against nebulous people on the internet, be specific, cite the people you ramble against, because what I see right now is his position, not some unhinged internet crackpot.

No, you did not discuss his words, as you keep trudging your strawmen of (your words just now) "because he thinks his current world is less free than the old one." Such toxic discussion styles is why the internet is shit now. So no, you are not discussing his words, you are rambling against a mind-constructed mutated version of his words that are entirely yours. But you are probably have convinced yourself first that this is his meaning.

And fascist use his words as propaganda — fascist, and in fact all propagandist of all coleur, will use everything. So ramble against these fascist propagandist you keep seeing, not against this man.

So when he says, "What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it."

You think there is a space where he can agree with me that the British population is freer now than "when [he] fought for it" and whatever their threats are currently they aren't (yet) as bad as the threat of a Nazi Europe? 

I made two points in my original comment: 1. My main point was to ask why this is being shared. What is the intention to share a personal view in a politics sub-forum if not to make a political point? What is that political point? What has been that political point when this article has been shared over the last month? 2. To suggest (and this was only a side-point so I didn't even go into detail on it) that he is wrong about the bolded above and he is wrong probably because of his age more than his veteran status. That is what seems to have set you off as me not listening to him. It seems to be that you interpreted this to be flippantly ageist. Since we're being real. 

And I can expand that view, because I still do believe a 100 year old would make a different assessment from say a healthy 70 year old when given the same facts and experiences. If they were interviewing a 70 year old Alec, he likely would have been clearer about what he meant. 

Okay and what do Putin and Trump have to do with "Britain ... [being] a darn sight worse?" The corporate control point is fair (although agai in the 1940's British people had fewer labor rights than now.) Yet again that is what I meant when I said, "Most hundred year olds aren't going to be able to make these sort of nuanced assessments." He didn't get a chance to make a nuanced assessment, and the right-wing media has already ran off with "Britain is less free today than in the 1940's." "It's in a sorry state", "Britain is in ruin", etc. If you don't believe me on that, I can provide 5 sources from conservative/right-wing media that do just that. Actually, here. 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/why-is-this-second-world-war-vet-crying/

https://www.foxnews.com/media/wwii-veteran-says-britain-today-wasnt-worth-his-friends-sacrifice-less-free-than-his-youth

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tv/article-15268525/world-war-two-veteran-gmb-adil-ray-kate-garraway.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15274047/D-Day-hero-sacrifice-lost-men-UK-gone-rack-ruin.html

https://www.lbc.co.uk/article/ww2-veteran-declares-winning-the-war-wasnt-worth-state-of-uk-5HjdGTg_2/

Please provide evidence where I "rambled against an old man." It is really annoying that you keep saying this as if I am attacking him personally. All I have done was talked about his perspective and points. Provide the example of a "ramble against." Also what is the point of using emotionally charged language in this whole discussion. I notice you keep saying "an old man" rather than using his name, as if that is important. And maybe it is the point in the conversation, since we are being real of course, where we talk about the importance of that. I just brought it up a few times in this post I am writing now. So there is your chance. 

Again, how do you interpret this sentence? "What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it."

He didn't just tell us he thought his sacrifice wasn't worth it, he told us why he thought so. He also didn't leave room for your interpretation of "there has been progress, but not enough to justify the sacrifice" because right there he is saying that overall there hasn't been progress [with regards to freedom.] "It's a darn sight worse."  In so much as I did address his statement, that was the focus. There really isn't a point to discuss his subjective feelings of the sacrifice, because that isn't something that has political or social meaning other than maybe if we were talking about how we (collectively) should treat and help veterans or other veterans issues, which this  thread is certainly not about that whatever it is about. 

But regardless, if the reason why he thought his sacrifice wasn't worth it was because he perceives Britain as less free, and I am addressing that point, I don't really see where the strawman is. You can't really create a strawman for an argument that is not there anyway. He made an assertion to justify his feelings, and I addressed that assertion. I had to speculate about what the argument might be beyond the assertion because the argument was not made. That is what we all are doing. You as well. 

I suppose strictly, yes, these other aspects are important if we were just looking at a total crime statistic and not also the breakdown by crime type. Crime is reduced because what we defined legally as a crime has reduced to match the moral views of the population. But also things that are unambiguously crimes have also actually reduced. And the most severe crimes have reduced the most drastically. There is a reason why the nativist population in the U.S are trying to paint a picture of undocumented immigrants as rapists and murders and not serial larcenist, drug addicts. 

I am not sure what inequality in America has to do with an assessment of the state of Britain. Although I guess inequality has also increased in Britain, so something might be there. 

Sharia law is bad, yes. It should be abolished from every country forever, yes. You're missing the part where you shouldn't judge a whole race of people based on a country's laws.

Sometimes a decisive strategic victory might not mean much in the long run. You can defeat your enemy, but defeating an ideology is much tougher. We defeated the fascist governments of the Axis powers, but our goal technically wasn't to defeat fascism itself. And we didn't. It was just temporarily delegitimized. The U.S. had its own homegrown Nazi movement before WW2, and if Japan never attacked and we never entered the war, I honestly believe that groups like the German-American Bund would still be around today in full force acting all buddy-buddy with the Third Reich and pushing our government to do the same. But WW2 put a stop to those movements of the 1930s, and for a few decades, it was considered gauche to be an overt Nazi. They were seen by most as irredeemably evil.

But the war ended a bit over 80 years ago. We've had multiple generations of people grow up after the fact, totally removed from the war and its immediate consequences, all while fascist movements steadily and slowly regrouped, some of them trying to make fascist ideals more acceptable to the public. While the literal swastika-waving goose-steppers have also been emboldened to come out in force (the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 being a notable recent example), others have tried to be less overt, trying to incorporate neo-Nazi and white nationalist talking points into mainstream right-wing politics.

Just a couple of years ago you had Tucker Carlson espouse the "Great Replacement" theory, which originated in neo-Nazi circles, on Fox News prime time and is clearly catching on and forming the basis of immigration policy. They basically turned "Jews will not replace us" with "The Left will not replace us," because they know that overt antisemitism is still not socially acceptable by most, even among their own side. We have people, some of them in various positions within the Republican Party, sharing Nazi memes. And the de facto leader of the GOP for the past decade has been a virulently racist man who envisions himself as a dictator, and who, along with close advisors and complicit political allies, has taken steps to ensure that he's capable of doing whatever he wants with absolute impunity, and who felt that those neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were "very fine people." Most of them reject the label "fascist" because it's still considered an ugly word, but if it honks like a goose and steps like a goose, well...

There is precedent for this in American politics with another defeated government: the Confederate States of America. An avowed white supremacist nation that, by their own admission, seceded from the United States for the express purpose of defending the "right" to own other human beings as property. A nation that drew first blood when the Confederate garrison at Fort Moultrie fired on Fort Sumter. A war was started for morally repugnant reasons, that war was lost, and a multi-generational grudge resulted that persists to this very day.

Despite being defeated and forcibly reintegrated back into the United States, the Confederates and their descendants spent the next century doing everything in their power to make sure that, even though they could no longer own slaves, that there was a perpetual legal framework that ensured that the black man could never be the equal of the white man. Everything from Jim Crow to memorials to Confederate military and political leaders existed for that purpose, all while they attempted to rehabilitate the Confederacy in the eyes of the public with ahistorical nonsense like the "Lost Cause" myth, which had later historical parallels with the "stabbed-in-the-back" myth in Germany.

Their racism was handed down generation to generation, indoctrinating millions of new people into white nationalist ideology, and spreading well beyond the boundaries of the Old South. Not just racism, but racialism as well never left American politics. Suffering a military defeat in 1865 didn't disabuse them of their beliefs. Suffering political defeats 90-100 years later did not disabuse their descendants of the same beliefs. Centuries-old racist attitudes still cling to our politics like a stubborn stain. Oh, and racist conservative American Southerners and their Jim Crow laws were major influences on Adolf Hitler, so they arguably helped create that monster.

It's perhaps no surprise that modern-day Confederate apologists dovetail politically with fascist ideology. These are people that believe that white cishet Protestants are superior to everyone else, and believe that this should be reflected in our laws. This is the whole point of the "Culture War." They view themselves as needing to win by any means necessary a war against nefarious "cultural Marxists," a term that's the modern approximation of "cultural Bolshevism," which was used by the Nazis to tarnish any aspects of then-contemporary German society that they didn't agree with. The fact that they've appropriated so much of fascist rhetoric ought to be a huge red flag, but they always have a knack of finding ways to give themselves plausible deniability among their base.

Ever since the Reagan Revolution unified the GOP with the Religious Right, modern Republican politicians, propagandists, and activists have been telling whoever would listen that "The Left" (which they define as anyone who isn't a Christian conservative) was actively conspiring to do all sorts of horrible things to society. They view emancipatory movements, much of art and science, and increasing secular attitudes as existential threats to the nation that must be defeated, that they must take freedom away from others to save the soul of the nation. They know they're in the minority, which is why they're so desperate to ensure that they at least have a perpetual political majority (easy to do when you have a two-party system and can just enough influence to dominate one of them), one that can enshrine their regressive social views in law and give their base some sort of demographic group to serve as a scapegoat, which is currently trans people and, their old perennial favorite, immigrants.