This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the
junkies and crackheadsindigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
As someone who lives in a particularly red area of an already red state, I'd say go ahead and do it... unless you're still angling to find a suitable life partner, then you might need to optimize for that first and foremost.
I read your entire post with a certain amount of bemusement, because while these problems aren't totally absent from this area, they're treated as an aberration, rather than a baked-in feature. The politicians and law enforcement talk a big game about fighting crime, and to a large extent actually follow through. I think the literal ONLY extant organized criminal gang active in the whole Tri-county area was rolled up and shut down the year after I moved here.
There was a single homeless man who used to post up outside my (very small) office building a couple years back. One day I came by and saw a Sheriff's deputy having a conversation with him. He hasn't been seen since, and no new vagrant has stepped in to take his place.
The town is miles and miles of suburbs, with one increasingly dense downtown area, and one long major 'strip' of road that has most of the local mainstay restaurants and amusements. That strip in particular is kept as clean and nice as possible because that's what drives most of the commerce for the surrounding area, although there are other developed areas that offer alternative, more walkable amenities.
On one occasion I was out with a date in the downtown area and a shooting occurred right outside the bar we were in. I didn't notice anything had happened until I walked outside and there were easily a dozen police cars with officers on the scene locking things down and questioning witnesses. These guys KNOW that keeping the area's reputation for safety intact is necessary to keep the money flowing here. So I dislike that there was in fact a shooting, but there is a certain comfort from knowing the local constabulary is actually focused on catching the guy and preventing it occurring again.
EDIT: I did a quick search of news articles, and there hasn't been a shooting incident in the downtown area since that one I happened be present for, over a year ago. And I laugh hard because it also dredged up news stories saying the perp of the previous shooting turned himself in (it was a white guy in case that matters), so the case wrapped up nigh-instantly rather than dragging out and people worrying about the guy resurfacing to do it again.
Much I could complain about, the local government has its corrupt and inefficient elements. But there's no sense in which I feel at risk, either my person or my property, when going about daily activities. Corrupt, inefficient, but RESPONSIVE and mostly competent governance is acceptable enough for me. I may at some point try to run for local office.
Also, there is a variety of great pizza places all around. Most of them are expensive though.
Yes, there's less 'culture' in the strict sense. I'd have to drive hours to go to a major concert or event. Although occasionally larger country music acts (the modern examples of the genre though, blech) do shows here. There are barely any 'tech jobs' to speak of, you're definitely not getting hired by one of the big players if you're here. There's something to the strategy of putting in 5 years with a giant company at high salary to save, then moving to a cheaper COL location with your nest egg.
Yeah the people are pretty fucking bland. The LGBTQ presence is limited overall, most restaurants close at 10, most bars around midnight. If you're in your twenties, the dating pool is limited and if you don't find a solid group of friends quickly, it can be very boring since most of the 'fun' stuff is geared for an older generation. Golf courses, tiki bars, nature trails. There IS a decent-sized university nearby where you could look for parties. But that is the tradeoff, because the more 'vibrant' the populace, the more likely you're getting all the attendant problems and risks, and the people around here just don't want to deal with that.
I understand why some people would accept the risks, the constant anxiety that is induced by living in a dense city with an apathetic (at best) government and frayed social fabric. I simply could never reach that sort of mindset myself. I like having a few local haunts that I can visit without fear of mugging, being shot at, or seeing a guy walking around naked and/or drugged out of his gourd. I like being able to have friends over without, as you have seen, having to warn them about the local wildlife. I like that what relatively low taxes I pay do actually go towards keeping the town nice and that the cops try their damndest to keep the undesirable elements on the fringes of society at bay.
And I feel like people who live in the cities long-term forget that all of this is EASILY possible if your citizens and your government just GIVE A DAMN, and that you don't have to believe that fixing things is futile.
I feel like this could describe my north-Texas environment.
There are a few nutjobs on the train, but everyone uses the sprawling highways. There might be beggars at intersections, but no camps, no fentanyl shuffle. It gets worse if you go into Dallas proper, but not that much worse. Not in the parts remotely near a venue. Maybe it’s just too damn hot to stay on the streets.
I was looking up articles on some recent shootings in Deep Ellum, and they make all the right noises. Clamp down on anything resembling a trend. Manage the impression of safety.
It really is a constant.
I have literally never seen a Fent zombie or similar zonked out drug user in person around here. I bet they exist, the drug trade sure does, but I'd guess they remain in off-the-beaten-path drug dens that are 'known to police' so they can keep an eye on things, and the druggies don't get to wander the street.
I think there are also areas that are rural enough and mostly vacant and abandoned where you can form a homeless camp without anybody noticing easily, so there's less pressure to set up in populated areas.
And of course, the local response to the housing crunch has been... building more housing at a frenetic pace. Much to my chagrin the cow pasture near my house has been converted into a tiny little gated community of houses on postage-stamp lots, but I can at least be pretty damn sure there's unlikely to be an 'affordable housing' development thrown up within walking distance of me.
I know people don't much like it as an idea and it's probably not possible to formalize in laws, but this actually is my primary solution to homelessness. I want the police to aggressively enforce rules to chase bums out of nice city parks. I also want them to look the other way at encampments in lightly trafficked areas. My goal isn't to "criminalize homelessness", it's to keep bums out of parks and off of sidewalks.
Yep. See my comment here where the police will roll through at irregular intervals to make sure there's no nasty surprises or people hiding in the camps, but otherwise tolerate them when they're well away from civilization.
It WOULD be hard to formalize, because the way trespass laws work. The owner of a particular wooded, vacant parcel of land can tolerate a homeless camp but at any time can also have them all trespassed off if he wants to do something with it. So there could be 'tacit' agreement with the owner to tolerate them in the meantime, while reserving the right to kick 'em off if it becomes inconvenient. The other option is letting the city or county own the land but leave it undeveloped and just let the camp exist, but that opens up some potentially problematic optics. You don't want there to be any implied 'contract' between the land owner and the camped out homeless to ensure their safety as 'guests.'
The cops around here are also a bit more aggressive than average about enforcing panhandling laws, which has led to some 'interesting' tactics to evolve by the panhandlers to create some level of deniability as to why they're standing around at the intersection. Of course, summers here get hot and humid as balls so there is a natural deterrent in effect too. The panhandlers themselves are most likely to set up in places with shade.
Private landowners have many of the same worries, like liability and the condition of the property should they decide to do something with it in the future. But they also have to worry about squatter's rights in the medium term. I don't know if there are jurisdictions where they have to worry about tenant laws, but I would not be surprised.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think this is probably a lot of it. Having a release valve to give people an option of doing something other than the most disruptive possible thing seems very helpful. If nothing else it means when the cops hassle them they have an option of a place to go where they won't be hassled and of course won't be bothering other people. If there are literally no options available which don't involve bothering normal productive people, then why not set up shop in downtown and shit directly onto the sidewalk. The cops having a middle option of "roust them out of here and into the out of the way encampment not bothering anyone" also means there is something for them to since all of the more serious remedies have been denied them.
Back when I was in the criminal defense world there'd be the occasional 'raid' on a given encampment which was basically just a handful of officers checking the tents for fugitives, drugs, and weapons, and otherwise making sure there were no dead bodies or hazards to the occupants. It was pretty obvious that arresting the homeless guys would be doing them a favor so unless there was an actual violent resister it was most common to just seize whatever contraband was lying around in plain sight and asking if anybody needed medical attention, then leaving.
If the raids are random enough, it probably disincentivizes them acting as drug mules and such.
Don’t you want homeless encampments moving every so often to prevent buildup of unsanitary conditions? It’s not like anyone’s gonna run plumbing or garbage collection out there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link