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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 13, 2025

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Not really. The superdog ICE mural is cool, I chuckled, but generally it is pretty boring. It's fascinating how right-wingers adopted the whole "Chicago is drowning in crime" thing uncritically, simply because their talking heads repeated it enough. Don't get me wrong - it's not exclusive to right wing, Eurolibs do it to an even greater extent, but I think that this just really solidifies the post-truth world. I'm completely certain most people on this site, for instance, are certain that Chicago is an extremely scary place and would be terrified of Pilsen...

PS. Holy shit this server sucks. Are you guys running it on ZX Spectrum or something? There can't be that much traffic here to justify 10-minute loading times...

Not really. The superdog ICE mural is cool, I chuckled, but generally it is pretty boring. It's fascinating how right-wingers adopted the whole "Chicago is drowning in crime" thing uncritically, simply because their talking heads repeated it enough. Don't get me wrong - it's not exclusive to right wing, Eurolibs do it to an even greater extent, but I think that this just really solidifies the post-truth world. I'm completely certain most people on this site, for instance, are certain that Chicago is an extremely scary place and would be terrified of Pilsen...

Yeah, Chicago definitely has some problems but I'm much more annoyed at our insane municipal debt and the corruption that had us sell our public parking. There is some crime problems, especially with like loop pharmacies and grocers being regularly and blatantly shoplifted from, but safety isn't something I worry about even going to the "rougher" areas.

PS. Holy shit this server sucks. Are you guys running it on ZX Spectrum or something? There can't be that much traffic here to justify 10-minute loading times...

I've noticed this too over the last week or so. I suspect it's some kind of bug or something. @ZorbaTHut have you guys noticed anything? If there are infra costs I think some of us might be willing to kick in.

Nobody mentioned it to me until maybe twelve hours ago :V I think it's now fixed, I think the computer it was on was having problems and the solution ended up being "bump it to another computer" . . . after doing a few in-retrospect-unnecessary optimizations. But hey, at least the optimizations are done.

Does seem to be fixed now, thanks!