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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'm sure you've heard of "sideshows" or "slideshows" where groups of mostly Dodge Challengers and Chargers do donuts in the middle of an urban intersection or freeway or bridge, creating an informal yet spectacularly dangerous block party. Also the roving gangs of plateless dirt bikes and quads, presumably mostly stolen anyway. Oakland, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc
And the police are literally completely incapable of shutting these down. We've heard the official explanations about manpower and escalation, but I would love to know how those internal deliberations really go. You've gotta have some gung-ho sergeants putting together gameplans and orchestration, but the top brass shut it down? For woke / squishy / PR reasons? Anyone have real insight?
It seems like it'd be 'trivial' to infiltrate the chat groups that are organizing these things and have a sting set up to roll up as many participants as possible.
Logistically challenging because of the decentralized nature of the situation. Its the rough equivalent to the raucous high school house party that gets out of hand, as soon as someone yells "SHIT, THE COPS" everyone scatters and most of them WILL get away.
I imagine the bigger difficulty is that a lot of those arrested would be minors and how do you justify throwing the book at them solely as a deterrent?
From a vigilante standpoint, I imagine a quick way to get them to disperse is to just fire a high-powered rifle into the air a few times and MAYBE put a couple rounds into an engine block. But ironically doing so is, individually, a more serious crime than what most of the actual miscreants are each committing so you're risking legal consequences yourself in the process.
Really seems like its a proxy for the quality of parenting in your area. If these things are happening regularly maybe it is a sign that the rot has really set in already.
Once the rot is passed down it is metastasized. Here in southeast asia there is a popular pastime among Malaysian Malay kids called basikal lajak. Take a normal bike, shorten the height by shaving the handlebar and the seat down, take off the brakes and reflective pads, then go to the highest point on your nearest highway and speed downhill. The kids go prone on the bike to minimize drag, and they also do not wear any protective gear of any sprt because protection is for pussies.
Wipeouts are common, but this practice came into focus because a group of malay kids lajak at 3am (because of the heat) and they went down the wrong direction of a highway, smashing into a car driven by a chinese woman. The malays cried that this woman murdered the eight kids, and the courts were subject to racialised pressure from malays until finally the high courts made clear that the driver, who was on the correct side of the road and following all rules, was not responsible for the kids all killing themselves.
So, why would the kids do something so incredibly stupid and dangerous and still think they were in the right? Its because their authority figures are themselves lajak (the grown up version are called rempits, who waste their food delivery paychecks on constantly destroyed motorbikes because they do drag racing at night too). These figures are the ones feted in the community, seen as cool and brave for irritating the authority figures enslaved to the rich yet too impotent to clamp down on rempits.
What of the parents? The parents either are rempits themselves, or simply do not give a shit. The mothers of the kids killed by the driver said that they had no responsibility for the conduct of their kids because 'kids do what they want, the government should build things for kids to do'. Its 3am and your kids are riding downhill! They did that when their road outside the village was a 200m dirt track and cars were nonexistent, but thats not the case anymore.
Because of this incident, the parents have doubled down. Rempits regularly arrange for convoys to travel the interstate highways to prove that THEY own the roads, not the authorities and certainly not normies. Any attempt at shutting them down is met with cries of racial discrimination, and politicians promise to fight for the right of rempits to practice their unique culture regardless of the cost to normies. It does not matter that the police and normies are themselves malays who simply want to lead a normal life, what matters is that the thugs are playing at being a protected class, and their rotten behavior flows down to their offspring.
It is difficult enough to enforce behavior when it is technically in-community policing. It will be Impossible in racial-culturally segregated societies like the USA.
I'm pretty sure the US is less racially-culturally segregated than Malaysia.
Perhaps not? Malaysia certainly isn't great, and Singapore uses forced integration as a cheat code, but I've never felt under active threat and treated like a foreigner in Indian plantation worker encampments or in Malay kampungs the way I was treated when I crashed at my friends place in Prospect Park (the precursor to the aforementioned loot goblin episode). I honestly think the difference between Black (ghetto) and Latino America is greater than the difference between Malay and Chinese Malaysia, much less Black vs White America. I've lived in both, and the cultural contrast/conflict between ghetto america vs gentrified condos is extreme, much less suburbia. When malays reach class escape velocity and become middle or upper class, they upgrade the trappings of their existing culture and maintain existing cultural practices. Blacks who reach class escape velocity either turn full white (Obama Harris) or live white while acting black (rap and sport stars). There is no maintenance of the actual good practices of hood life: community time sharing for elder or childcare, church attendance, I'm struggling here so I'm tapping out.
I could just be especially negative towards 'the black experience', since I am not actually black and my black friends were codeswitchers who had intact middle class families and spoke ebonics just to get entry into Orange street clubs.
What’s the intermarriage rate between Chinese and Malays? Most people with a large social circle in diverse middle class parts of the US will know or have known at least a few black-white couples. I’m in KL on occasion and I’ve never seen a Chinese-Malay couple.
Honestly you might have seen plenty of Chinese women who were married to Malay men, but they dress identically to upper class Malay women (HEAVY makeup, overly embroidered tudungs, and double layered flowy full body dressses that swish aggressively to show off the expensive underlayer or shoes) and thus are indistinguishable. Similarly, upper class Malay men can look extremely Chinese, so the racial differences may not be so obvious if they are dressed the same. Malay and Chinese men can look very similar, especially when heavily weathered by the sun. For air conditioned professionals, grooming can make all the difference. Remove Hishamuddins pornstache, put him in a suit and he will look like any number of Chinese contractors.
Specific to marriage rates, Chinese women marry out at far higher rates than Chinese men, but usually to White or Indian men. Chinese women rarely marry malay men due to extreme familial resistance stemming from the religious intransigence of Islam, and for the most part girls who marry malays become fully acculturated, hence my above on the presentation.
Off the top of my head I would say the ratio of Chinese women marriages in Malaysia is 85% chinese, 7% white, 6% indian and 2% others (black, malay, hispanic). Among PMC it would be 60% chinese, 25% white, 10% indian and 5% others. This factors in the overseas education rate of Chinese PMC, where it is almost guaranteed they will marry a foreigner.
Indian and malay with have lower outmarriage rates because of lower baseline attractiveness relative to chinese women. Pale skin and low bodyfat% is still valued, and unfortunately indian and malay girls simply don't have the same genetics or cultural influences incentivizing outmarriage optimisations. Indian and Malay families refuse to let Their women be despoiled by outsiders, but Chinese either devalue daughters (more a historical than current practice) or the Chinese PMC is cucked by western liberal values into pretending all races are equal and perpetuate the kayfabe. The last point is more a westernised Asian phenomenon but such liberal pieties have found traction in the PMC here.
Interesting. I have to say though, there is categorically no way that even close to 25% of Chinese PMC women in Malaysia marry white men. White people aren’t uncommon in KL but there aren’t that many of them outside of that one backpacker / gap year party street with all the outdoor bars and stalls (and I presume those aren’t the whites marrying wealthy Chinese women), and most are either tourists, expats with expat wives/husbands, or business travellers. As regards Malays and Chinese, I’d say when dining at high end restaurants that are not specifically Malay-unfriendly (say the Nobu in the Four Seasons, which is probably my favorite decent restaurant in KL for consistency and service) every Malay I’ve ever seen there with family (ie not entertaining more diverse clients, colleagues etc) was with a wholly Malay family. All my Malaysian colleagues and clients, even though they work in companies that are ethnically diverse enough in terms of Malays, Chinese, Indians and sometimes whites being represented, are themselves in mono ethnic relationships and in their own ghettoized communities.
One thing I find amusing in KL is that even the high end shopping malls are completely segregated. There’s the Malay / Muslim one, by the base of the twin towers near the Four Season and Mandarin Oriental, featuring all halal restaurants and the Din Tai Fung where every dish replaces pork with chicken, and there’s the Chinese one whose exact location I forget, where every restaurant serves pork and one would be hard pressed to eat a full meal at Din Tai Fung that did not contain pig in some form. The stores themselves are the same, only the clientele differs.
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