atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
No bio...
User ID: 2162
I'm sorry, but this is just sloppy demagoguery. If you're being priced out because supply is artificially restricted to such brutal extremes as housing in California, you don't blame the other people who are similarly being screwed over, you blame the people causing the artificial restriction! Anyone telling you otherwise is probably manipulating you.
I don’t understand why Trump isn’t more popular
It's pretty commonly accepted that the housing issue is caused by restrictions on building new housing. It's been Democratic leaders like Scott Weiner and Gavin Newsom that have been pushing hard to remove these restrictions. Trump's party on the other hand has been actively fighting against this, calling it some kind of war on the suburbs.
It used to be almost all white and now it’s just insanely wealthy tech workers who are probably majority Indian and Asian
However, I get the impression that being priced out isn't what you (or the original poster) are mainly focused on here, rather this demographic change. Well, that's easy to address---contrary to what you might think if you spend a lot of time in places like this forum, most Americans and definitely most Californians care that people have similar values and ideals as them rather than that they look superficially similar. "Why aren't more people being radicalized because my personal and unpopular aesthetic preference isn't being satisfied?"---that question answers itself.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
1d ago
I don't know the situation in your country so that very well might be true. However, it is definitely not relevant in California where there actually is huge space for building more housing without much disruption (as many other posters have given various arguments for).
In addition, people tend to overestimate how full their cities/countries actually are. There are very few places in the world that are as densely populated as Somerville, Massachusetts which is a super pleasant place looking like this on Google streetview. No skyscrapers needed and with that density, the countryside can be kept clear too. I suspect that your country could build housing for hundreds of thousands of more people while still only looking like Somerville and avoiding what you want to avoid.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2d ago
There are two reasons why I think the description is fair
- First, the "war on the suburbs" rhetoric specifically talks about how "your investment and lifestyle may soon come under attack." This isn't just about exclusionary zoning; it's about anything that could significantly depress housing prices
- Second, Republican organizations have been using "war on the suburbs" are rhetorical demagoguery against almost any policy to increase housing supply: see this as another example.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2d ago
Wow, does sideswiping an entire group of people as an "infestation" not count as being overly antagonistic here?
The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I never conflated these two groups in that entire conversation and repeatedly tried to explain that I didn't. From the very first post, I tried to be very clear that I was only talking about the antebellum south:
The Confederacy/Antebellum south is one of these---one of the worst cases of hereditarian, anti-egalitarian nonsense in modern-ish history.
This is in fact the main issue. If you try to argue many points on this forum, you get pattern-matched and rounded-off to a very different point that is actually objectionable. You can take however many pains you want to say that you are just talking about the antebellum south, and even the moderation team thinks that you are somehow also talking about the modern south. Like how are you supposed to interpret the group that's being teabagged by melting down a statue as something other than the group led by the person the statue represented?
In the case here, a similar effect creates huge blindspots when applying the guideline:
You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here
How is "infested with Indian and Chinese tech workers taking over" at all being careful while talking about a group? Pointing this out, however, gets conflated with other crying wolf about racism, so this rule about not casually and unjustifiably sideswiping large groups of people doesn't really get applied properly.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
24d ago
Anti-semitism on the right really seems to be restricted to a bunch of fringe characters no one in power really wants to be publicly associated with
Have you paid attention to the comments and voting patterns on this very forum? I have the impression that this place is pretty representative of the intellectual parts of the right and antisemitism here tends to be an upvoted and therefore not at all fringe position.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2d ago
You guys are allowed to mod however you want---it's your website. It's just dishonest to pretend to be a neutral "place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases" when there's a pretty clear bias in which groups you're allowed to use this kind of antagonistic language against and which you aren't.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
"the outgroup" in this comment is pretty clearly referring to contemporary people, not the Confederate slavers.
This is not clear at all (except for literal neo-confederates who want to bring things like slavery back). The confederacy is a completely different culture from the modern south and making the connection from destroying a statue of a confederate leader to somehow teabagging modern southerners is almost a non-sequitur! Sure, some people mistaken about who actually represents their values might be upset but this is an unfortunate side-effect and really the fault of those people. It's definitely not anyone's intention in melting down the statue and really confusing if it's referred to by such a motivated word as "teabagging"---to the point where the most natural thing is to immediately dismiss that as a possibility.
Again, the far-and-away most reasonable interpretation for which group is being teabagged by a statue being destroyed....is group the person led/was part of.
I'm clearly missing something here that made modern southerners an at-all reasonable interpretation for that group: which of the following is it?
- Most modern southerners somehow still identify with Confederate leaders even though Confederate values are completely antithetical to their own and everyone here just buys that this is a reasonable thing for them to do.
- There's some weird politics bubble thing going on here where it's just accepted that lots of things are some sort of "liberal elite" or whatever attack against people who don't live in the Northeast or California
- Because the above two are too uncharitable to possibly be true, something else?
He's talking about one thing, you respond with a line that makes it seem like he's talking about something else
Like maybe it was clear to you he was talking about one thing, but that's completely opaque to anyone who doesn't share the politics of this place.
I find it doubtful that you were actually confused by what he meant by "moderate".
I thought he was referring to neo-confederates as moderates and trying to double-check this because that isn't really a reasonable definition of moderate.
atokenliberal6D_4
Defender of Western Culture
2d ago
Do you think there are no Indian or Chinese, bay-area tech workers on this forum? I thought part of conceit of a public forum like this is that you are talking to some notion of "everyone". Either way, I'm definitely sure there aren't any antebellum southerners on this forum (they're all dead), so it's still super confusing why my linked comment wasn't also not antagonistic by this standard.
This is putting way too high of a standard. Buildings are demolished and replaced all the time! If you don't allow this, you get nonsense like the "historic laundromat" in San Francisco. Putting all the cases like this together, there's a ridiculous amount of space in San Francisco itself for more housing when so much of the city looks like this.
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