WhiningCoil
No bio...
User ID: 269
WhiningCoil
4d ago
Link one: Don't avoid romance says more people are single nowadays and unhappier nowadays because more people have avoidant attachment styles in the past, with some (mostly circumstantial) evidence that the amount of avoidant attachment is increasing. Ends with an exhortation to not be avoidant but doesn't examine the question I would have thought would be of interest, which is why more and more people don't have healthy attachment styles. (Aftereffects of higher divorce rate? Internet usage? Weaker community institutions? Microplastics? I'm just spitballing ideas but wouldn't a marked societal-leve change in people's psychology be something you'd want to investigate the causes of?)
Your achive link isn't the full article. This one seems better?
Once again, it's remarkable all the hoops the article, or the researchers, jump through to avoid the obvious answer. People have avoidant attachment styles because our culture almost universally portrays marriage and family as an existential horror. Women fear being "trapped" in a marriage. Women's media my entire life has bent over backwards feeding women's neuroticism that every marriage is a "bad" marriage.
And on men's side, every single man has witnessed half their friends and family cut in half by divorce. Lost the house, turned into an every other weekend "dad", and a court ordered pay pig. Probably seen friends, family and coworkers spend a weekend in jail on some trumped up charges. I had a coworker arrested because his ex said he broke into her place. On a night he was on security cameras working late in the office.
Marriage has been turned into something horrific unless you literally trust the other person with your life. A gun pointed at your head 24/7, trusting the other person not to pull the trigger, and everyone has seen it. They know someone who's been shot. Probably a lot of people. And one wonders why kids who've watched this happen to their parents (or lost a parent to it) have developed an "avoidant attachment style".
WhiningCoil
5d ago
Once upon a time, there was this concept of a "tight script". It wasn't so much about the quality of the dialog, so much as making sure every element of the film was telegraphed in advance. Some character is going to have a heart attack at a crucial moment? Show him taking his statins, maybe have his wife nag him about them. There was an understanding that payoffs were more satisfying when they'd been set up. Maybe this is just catering to midwits so they can point at the screen and feel smart that they understood a callback. Maybe, when you are building out a fiction, you need to signpost the elements of the real world that are in play or not so the audience isn't constantly wondering what from the infinite array of all possibilities is on the table here.
I often think about Blood Simple, the Cohen Brothers first film. Film opens with this lady talking about how much she hates her husband. Among the gripes she has, she mentions that he bought her a gun as a gift. Giving your wife a gun as a present? Can you even imagine such a thing? It's a six round revolver. Over the course of the 90 minute runtime, it discharges exactly 6 rounds. If you've been counting during the film, by the final scene you know exactly how it's going to end. It's a simple concept, but well executed. Everything has a set up, everything has a payoff.
At one point I read some article about the "Asian" method of story telling, which is less about set up and pay off, and more about doing whatever ass pulls are necessary to arrive at the scenes the director wants. The best of these films, if this is at all true, come off as surreal journey's through a director's id. Gozu comes to mind.
I swear we're getting the worst of both worlds. Scripts with zero set up and zero payoff, with none of the coherent vision or creativity of an auteur. A lot can be forgiven if it's done with style. All we get anymore is a 30 producer's coke fueled rantings filtered through a writer's room full of cynical activist who've ruined their lives with their poor choices and worse beliefs, with visual effects produced by some sweatshop.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
Never Meet Your Heroes, Even Posthumously
When I was a kid, I discovered Harlan Ellison on Sci-Fi Buzz during his Harlan Ellison's Watching segments. They were my favorite segments, and I was crushed when an episode didn't have one. I would have been about 10 years old at this time. Luckily enough, they are all still available on Harlan's youtube. This one in particular I remember, being a comic card collector in middle school, along with most of the boys in my boy scout troop.
For me at that age, there was a lot to look up to in Harlan. He was witty, funny, charismatic, and never gave up on his childhood passions. More over he seems important and respected, his awards always preceding his name. I thought he was simply the best as a young nerdling. But I never read his stories. I can't even remember wanting to. Maybe I wasn't there yet, in terms of reading level. I honestly have no memory of what I was reading at that age. I do recall that by the time I was a freshman in highschool, I had read ample Ray Bradbury collections, and had been dabbling in Iain M Banks. For whatever reason I never circled back to Harlan until much later, picking up a ebook copy of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and being blown away by every story in it, especially Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes.
Over the last month, I've been working through The Essential Ellison: A 35 Year Retrospective. It's completely changed my view of the man, and not for the better. The tome really lays bare how autobiographical much of Ellison's short stories are. The barely disguised self loathing, the tireless hatred he feels for all of humanity, but seemingly goys above all others, and the immaturity disguised as worldliness. Qualities I admired as a child watching him on Sci-Fi Buzz I'm profoundly glad I did not grow up to emulate as an adult.
The facts are Harlan's father died when he was very young, he was constantly in and out of trouble, he ran away from home, he worked a smattering of tough sounding blue collar jobs, he spent 2 years in the army, he was expelled from college, he was married 5 times, divorced 4, and he had no children.
Through his fiction, you further learn that he was, imagines, or romanticizes, being the only jewish boy in a small Ohio town relentless victimized by it's shitty irredeemable goy population. He loathes goys, and it rears it's head in story after story after story. He hates their dumb kids, their dumb churches, their dumb music, their dumb bowling leagues, you name it, he hates it. And he hates that they're all bigger and stronger than him at 5'3". Does he really feel this way, deep down? Who's to say. But after 1000 pages, probably 500 of which riffed on that theme, I'm left with the impression some part of him must. Often cloaked in humor, or the virtue of the civil rights movement of his day. But in his fiction, he seems less interested in the humanity of Southern Blacks, and more interested in the inhumanity of the goy.
He returns to his childhood repeatedly in his fiction, and how much better things were then, when radio plays lit his imagination on fire and his father was still alive. This is a strain of stunted growth I too suffer from, as my grumpy rants about video games will attest. I find ample share of compatriots in this regard. But something about Harlan's inability to take on the masculine burden of supporting and raising a stable family casts a darker tint to his nostalgia.
Harlan Ellison's entire public persona was a fraud. Or at least, in many of his writings, his fear that he was a fraud came through. Stories about a 4 times divorced celebrity manufacturing a shameful charismatic and funny public persona to hide how much he hated everyone. Stories about a shameless womanizer who has worked all sorts of rough and tumble blue collar jobs... but only for a few weeks so he could say he did. In reality he (I mean his character of course) has soft hands only barely acquainted with manual labor. Which reminds you Harlan the author never draws on all the odd jobs he claims to have had in his fiction, beyond name dropping them. Lastly, multiple stories where a four times divorced main character convinces his first wife to get an abortion she doesn't want, resulting in her emotional destruction which he treats as a personal offense to himself.
Are all these details that sound curiously autobiographical true? Or angles Harlan plays up for want of something to do when seated at his typewriter? At this point, with enough dots connected, I suspect the worst.
After making it through The Essential Ellison, I'm hurt. Hurt that someone I looked up to so much as a kid was in reality a hateful, developmentally stunted man. And I mean emotionally, not physically, though I suppose there was that too. A man who for 35 years picked his wounds in public, on the page. He kept them fresh, knowing it's what put food on the table. I feel sorry for him, but I also sincerely wish I hadn't known all that. Ah well.
WhiningCoil
11d ago
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
Men who want sex... get married.
/r/deadbedrooms would like a word. It's interesting you brought up closing on a home, and said marriage makes it so that neither party can get what they want without coughing up what they were offering it. It just doesn't hold up under scrutiny though. Virtually the only way to make the arrangement fair like you claim it is would be, is to make it so that you can have as much sex with your wife as you want, consent be damned, legally. But I doubt anyone has the heart to go through with that. So you are left with one side that can defect at will, and the other losing most of their assets and income.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
"Emotional Labor" is just a buzzword people with "Emotional Intelligence" use to abuse you. I'm increasingly certain that "Emotional Intelligence" is just a measure of how good you are at emotionally terrorizing, gaslighting and lying. It's a measure of your capacity for toxicity in relationships. And somehow the same type of person who complains at having to be their spouse's "therapist" will also launch into a 3 hour free roaming tirade leaping between islands of seething negativity triggered by their salad not having adequate cranberries on it. She isn't paying $25 for a salad with only, what, 12 cranberries on it? And another thing...
And after not letting anyone else get a word in edgewise, she walks away from the interaction confident in all the "emotional labor" she did for you.
WhiningCoil
28d ago
At some point I got hit with belief fatigue. I can scarcely tell what's true from last week. Was the Minnesota shooter a D or an R? Will I ever really know? We still don't know shit about the Butler PA Trump Assassin. Or the motives of the Vegas shooter. I've utterly given up concern over whether the truth of the Christian tradition is 100% literally exactly what happened. Probably 75% of what I hold to be true about history, or the active state of my own country, is a lie. Lies I will never have the ability or opportunity to correct. Shit, people get wrong the truth of things they saw with their own damned eyes. Eye witness testimony is famously among the worst forms of evidence. I get all the nitpicking about the game of telephone/oral tradition that eventually got put down in the bible, and then translation after translation etc. I just no longer see how that same argument isn't a fully generalized destructor for any concept of truth.
Dan Carlin constantly quotes some historian talking about ancient texts, and it goes something like "We cannot believe ancient history, but we have no choice but to believe ancient history." It goes back to the constant arguments about how much of what we know about, say, Alexander the Great was real, how much was propaganda, and how much was apocryphal nonsense? But at the same time, you can't go full retard and claim Alexander the Great never existed. Sometimes I like to think about the Trojan War, and how for the longest time, I think basically since the Enlightenment, "educated" people believed it was just a myth and never happened at all. Then some random German thought "I donno man, this poem is pretty specific about where Troy was. I think I can just, like, go there?" And then he did, and it was. The truth was sitting there just barely below the surface for anyone with the motivation (and lack of sneering cynicism) to just check and see.
How important is it really if I choose to believe that 2000 years ago God manifested as a human on Earth? More over, as I go down the rabbit hole, and try to intellectualize that belief, I can still make it work, literally. If I really want to.
I guess if I had to try to put a point on this, it's that everything may be lies and nonsense. The fog of war isn't some vague concept in distant operations. It exists inside our brains far closer to the source than we'd like to believe. Not unlike LLMs have done more to degrade my estimation of people than raise my estimation of AI, arguments against the Christian Tradition have ultimately eroded my ability to believe anything more than they "disproved" Christianity in specific. So fuck it, why not return to the belief system my ancestors had for over 1000 years? They had a pretty good run during that time.
WhiningCoil
18d ago
So... even though the twin studies can't really be proven, despite two decades of intensive, worldwide research focus and ungodly amounts of funding, he still argues they are "mostly right."
This feels like it's setting an incredibly high bar for "proven". If the studies replicate, which is already amazing in our current era, but the specific mechanism can't be isolated, that doesn't mean it's not proven. I mean, famously, a lot of the "why"s of gravity aren't well understood. Notably why it's so weak compared to other forces. But you'd be insane to go full retard and deny the accuracy of the models that match observable gravity.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
I feel like this would be different if Ellison had any sort of coherent views aside from being loud and angry. What did he stand for that could outlive him? Following along with the civil rights movement? Earning a few attaboys along the way? He mostly just spilled hate across countless pages.
Like I said below, I fell in love with the man's TV persona. And I greatly enjoyed many of his non-autobiographical stories. But undergoing this deep dive into the person has been a journey into the horror of the man. Where as I naively assumed before that the TV persona was the real Ellison because it was so much more impactful than Ellison on the page, and so I assumed written Ellison to be schtick, it turns out the TV Ellison was the schtick, and the written Ellison was the genuine article.
I can only describe it like this. There is a horror film coming out called "Cannibals Rape, Murder and Consume College Coeds 3". You watch all the press junkets and the actors seem very charming and likable. You know when you see the film you'll see some shocking stuff, but you know it's not real. There are no actual cannibals eating anyone.
Then 2 months later Italian authorities arrest the cast and crew because they did in fact rape, murder and consume one of the extras when they were filming in Sicily. Do you still separate the artist from the art? I mean, it was the most amazing cannibal film you've ever seen.
Possibly the only defining feature of Ellison's entire body of work is the hate. It used to exist in a box with suspension of disbelief applied. They were just words on a page. Now I have a sneaking suspicion that more likely than not, the hate was the realest part of him he ever put out there, and it's just sad. Not fun and edgy anymore.
WhiningCoil
24d ago
They were a protected species. I spent some time googling the name, all the news articles conspicuously avoided his picture, except a particularly spicy one with copious use of N-Bombs, and then this one that finally gave me a mugshot.
There was some random black podcast clip that went around a few months ago where one of the guys on there was talking about his community needing to clean up it's act. He said something along the lines of "We all know somebody that is fucking kids". Everyone went conspicuously silent and started sputtering denials. But if you've ever listened to any black comedy, the family/neighborhood pedophile in the ghetto is an oddly consistent bedrock of bits.
WhiningCoil
4d ago
Right?! It's like either you've seen it, or you have some sort of mental blinders on that make what you've seen "not count".
WhiningCoil
7d ago
I would say this has been broadly true, so far. However, with the last 10 years of naked anti-white racism on display at all levels of society, noticing is off the charts. It's going to be experiments like these that show if your thinking, which has been true my entire life at least, still holds true. Or if, just maybe, enough "good whites" have been burned enough to take a gamble on racial solidarity, and bring their prosocial traits with them.
WhiningCoil
6d ago
Overwhelmingly, every time it's put to a vote, people vote for less immigration. People vote against affirmative action policies. People vote against racial carve outs. Don't pretend the call is coming from inside the house, and whites are inflicting this on themselves. The government is running amok, either because racial spoils are easy to lie about but still deliver votes, or because some unaccountable aspect of it has been captured by racial interest groups. Might be worth looking into that "Critical Race Theory" thing. Whenever it comes up, I always hear it's defenders claim "They aren't teaching that in schools, it's only a legal theory".
WhiningCoil
6d ago
At the moment, most people openly advocating for racial segregation are Neo-Nazis. I think I speak for the vast majority of Whites, HBD-pilled or otherwise, when I say I would much rather have a randomly selected Black person as a neighbor than a Neo-Nazi for purely selfish Bayesian reasons.
But this goes to the core of it. What if normal whites have noticed enough that they decide "You know what, I'm going to act like every other race treats me." What if they preferentially hire whites the same way Indians favor Indians, or Jews favor Jews? What if they aggressively subsidize and import white residents the same way the federal government bombs small Midwestern towns with Haitians or Somalians? What if they start giving out contracts to white owned businesses the same way the federal government gives contracts only to black or minority owned businesses? What if they forgive debt for white's the same way the federal government keeps finding way to forgive debts exclusively for blacks? What if they give preferential medical treatments to whites the same way preferential treatments were given to blacks?
None of this requires deep supremacist neo-nazi beliefs. Just noticing and then going tit-for-tat. Realizing if you don't, you have no future.
WhiningCoil
19d ago
Women could be pleasant.
If all you have to offer is what's between your legs, and men flee as soon as they get it, I mean, sure one option to create a pussy cartel. The other is women would just be pleasant. Be nice, be warm, be loving, create a positive atmosphere. And maybe change your preferences in men too.
But that codes too "Stepford Wives", and women have rejected it for the political prospect of being a boss bitch and unchecked neuroticism.
WhiningCoil
26d ago
Progress continues on my 200 snatch goal. I carved out some headroom above 130 reps. But man, it sucks getting old. First something in my mid right back tweaked the fuck out. Sprained or knotted something so fierce I could barely get out of bed the next day. Eventually stretched/massaged that out. Then something in my right shoulder hurt so fucking bad I couldn't reach behind myself to wipe my own ass with my right hand. And more or less only that movement in specific caused problems. I could actually still do tons and tons of snatches no problem. Lots of stretching and massage for that too. Both those problems have gone away and don't seem to be coming back. But now my fucking fifth metacarpal on my right hand, which I broke in my 20's, has decided to ache for days every time I do my 100+ snatch reps.
Fucking why?!
On a sadder note. We lost my cousin last month. The funeral was last week, and I found out he committed suicide. We weren't especially close growing up, but we had reconnected a few years ago, and unfortunately lost touch when I moved away. He was a good guy, struggling with what remained of a life of poor choices and core traits he couldn't reform, despite solid success breaking some of their more destructive manifestations. There was always such a tone of regret when we'd catch up, and he'd ask how the wife and kid were doing. He clearly wanted those things, he'd had chances, but he couldn't stop himself from fumbling them, badly.
I miss you cous'. I'm sorry you couldn't make it. I hope you're at peace now.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
So I read Blindsight in about 4 days ish. That was a ride. Waaaaaay less comfortable of a first contact story that Mote in God's Eye, which was the last novel I talked about which brought recommendations of Blindsight. Here, and also a buddy of mine who just lent me his copy.
I liked it... but I didn't enjoy it. Like, it was rich in concepts and took the story in directions I never saw coming. But I felt like it spent more time trying to fuck with me thanks to the layers of unreliable narrators than it did advancing a story. And then of course it's just a total downer from a humanist perspective. I feel like Blindsight is a better recommendation to go along with something from HP Lovecraft than an almost Star Trekkish "Rah Rah Humanity!" first contact story like The Mote in God's Eye.
I guess if you love hearing about how much we suck and are doomed and the universe will trample us with it's indifference, Blindsight is pretty good. But something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
The details of H.P. Lovecraft's life never bothered me. Probably because I never admired him as a human being or public persona the way I admired Harlan. So I can sit back and intellectually register that the existential dread he conjures up in so many of his stories just wouldn't hit the way it hits if the man wasn't constantly terrified of the mongrelization of his nation.
Also, well, my stance on what I believe to be the future of my nation is on record here. But it's enough to say I don't even necessarily find those stances to be offensive, and perhaps even somewhat prescient after the irrefutable evidence of the failures of multiculturalism we've all been subjected to in the countries or localities tipping white minority in the western world. But that's a separate topic.
No, my heart break with Ellison is from the fact that as a kid, I didn't love him for his work, but for his public persona. I came to his work much after the fact, and if anything, it's working backwards. I've rewatched several of those Harlan Ellison's Watching bits, and instantly fell in love with this witty outspoken firebrand telling it like it is. Then I go back to the fiction and my heart sinks at another autobiographicalish story venting his spleen about how much he hates me.
WhiningCoil
28d ago
That being said, and I mean this genuinely, but your posting style seems very uhhh cynical for someone who believes in Christ? If you genuinely believe in the Christian tradition, shouldn't you be more joyous? Christ won!
Yes. I am a lifeline cynic/edgy internet atheist trying to change my ways. It's not moving in a straight line.
WhiningCoil
14d ago
Of course the same criticism of the right wing populists applies to the left wing ones: they don't really have any realistic solutions and the system will not let them implement any if they do. New York's equivalent to Jeremy Corbyn will surely have that same problem.
Depends on your diagnosis of the problem. If you believe, as I increasingly do, that most of our societal ills with corruption and collapse of state capacity revolve around the mass importation of high time preference demographics incapable at a genetic level of pursuing generational projects, deporting them is not only a solution, but the only solution. Because with that anchor tied to your feet, no state project, be it reinvigorating capitalism, monopoly busting or state run grocery stores can possibly succeed. If the labor market is flooded with lazy scammers who shameless loot the till, it's not going to matter if the grocery store is a coop, state run, unionized or anything.
WhiningCoil
21d ago
One narrative was that Trump executed some clearly telegraphed strikes on Fardow that didn’t accomplish a whole lot other than be a highly visible strike on the Iranian nuclear program. The 5d chess speculation was that this was a clearly telegraphed move that didn’t in fact cross any Iranian red lines as a way to appease the Iran hawks.
Compounding on this aspect of the narrative, I see people theory crafting that Trump denied Israel their cause celebre to continue strikes against Iran. So they get ahead of Israel, without bombing any hospitals or apartment buildings, and then try to make it seem like everyone is even now, capiche?
I have no fucking clue how much of the theory crafting I see is true. I have no clue if this truce is even real. I've seen reports than Iran is reporting they know nothing about it, and other reporting saying it was back channeled through Qatar.
I've been trying to disengage from politics as best I'm able. Which isn't very. But an effort is being made. Largely because the information space is being too polluted to even be worth the effort of forming cogent or accurate models to discuss. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm waiting until the midterms. Either my life will be better or it won't. World War 3 will have begun, or it won't. Whatever day to day nonsense happens between now and then I'm powerless to effect, and seemingly being lied to from all directions.
I will say, re: the theory that Trump used the strikes to get ahead of Israel, if any of this shit is real, Trump is either the luckiest fucking man on the face of the Earth, or he truly is a 4d genius. If it's all bullshit, well, it's not that much different that Biden just announcing the that the Equal Rights Amendment passed with practically zero basis for actually asserting it. We're fully into Clown World already, and I'm not going to hold it too against Trump if he's bold faced lying and making shit up out of whole clothe like all the rest. At least he isn't trying to sterilize and mutilate children.
WhiningCoil
26d ago
I fucking love programming, and noodle around in random unprofessional bullshit all the time.
But i spent my childhood obsessed with computers. I also did Computer Engineering with a software focus versus straight comp sci. I felt it gave me a better perspective of how computers actually work.
What's been good for my confidence has been contributing to a smattering of open source projects I used, but which had bugs that annoyed me. Emulators, open source bios, etc. Jumping into foreign code bases is great for experience.
From where I sit, the industry is scary. My little corner in my small government contractor company is fine. But I do wonder if the ladder got pulled up behind me. Some of it is hardcore culture war material, so I have to leave it at that.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
But the natural slave cannot ultimately be freed; they can only be managed well, or managed poorly. Left to their own devices, they will manage themselves poorly. Aggressively managed ("literally enslaved"), they will lash out against the strictures of the arrangement, often violently (the free citizens of slave societies live ever in far of revolt). How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
Maybe this calls for an inverse catch-22. If you have enough executive agency to successfully organize a slave revolt, you clearly do not belong to the slave class. Welcome to the ranks of the masters brother.
Maybe it's less important that slavery is abolished, as there exist class mobility out of the lowest rungs of society.
WhiningCoil
3d ago
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Ah ahahahahahah.
Hah.
Oh man, that's a good one. That's a really good one. You really aren't from around here. Our society's worship of women is downright pathological at this point. They can do almost anything and it's excused. I mean even in your own home away from home, there are plans to just get rid of Women's prison. Women are too good to spend time in jail for their crimes you see? In fact, their reasoning is that since more women are being sent to jail, something must be wrong with the legal system, since women are wonderful obviously. So we'd better start shutting down the women's jails so they can't be sent there.
Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life. Where I used to live was fine on paper. I lived there for about 15 years. Then things started getting really weird. Some things would show up on paper as "crime". Gas station on the corner kept getting robbed repeatedly. There was a shooting and a shooter on the loose in my townhouse parking lot after we had our first child. Women were getting dragged off the trails and raped in attacks so lurid and on the nose you'd think they were made up had there not been so much physical evidence and they caught the guy. Turns out sometimes, just sometimes, rapist do wait in the bushes to ambush women jogging on a trail in broad daylight. Same trail we'd walk our infant daughter on in her stroller.
There were plenty of non-"crime" stuff that just added to the overall ambiance of chaos. People suddenly started stopping me in my car on the street and screaming at me for money. There were more loitering gangs of kids smoking and shouting obscenities at my wife as we walked by. Often on the playgrounds we'd go to take our daughter to... and then think better of it. More stores started locking things up. But if you complained about it, some shithead was always there to remind you "Town USA's crime rate is actually below average per capita! And year and year crime has barely budged!" I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
So I left. And in the last 5 years I haven't caught a wif of a crime or "crime" anywhere in my proximity. No stores I shop at have gotten robbed, I haven't driven by a house with a squad of police cars trying to disarm a hostage situation (I forgot to mention that one in my old locale). There are no strong "civilization is at the edge of chaos" vibes like I used to get on a daily basis, per capita be damned.
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