...so I was drunk in rdrama/motte BotC server one day and promised to write up a post-level critique of the American middle class. Of course, the "project" kept getting bumped for the sake of far more important things, such as drinking joylessly while reposting telegram posts on shitty drama discord servers, this being a far less effort-intensive way to anger people. However, today I suddenly felt bored enough to actually remember my prior commitments, so here it is:
Lawns are fucking moronic. Just think about it - if you put like 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex. But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public and not MINE, MIIIINE, MOOOOOOOOOM, HE'S USING A TOY THAT'S MIIIIIINE!!!
Worse yet, if I were to personally decide "fuck this, this is retarded, I don't need this shit, there's a perfectly good park like three fucking blocks away - I'll just grow potatoes or something else actually productive on this plot" - a formless, permanently scowling creature - the dreaded bored HOA housewife - is sure to be crawling out of the woodwork in seconds, with a clipboard and her trademark Karen-y bangs. And she'll instantly begin to shrilly preach about how something so unbelievably ludicrous could not possibly allowed under any circumstances, because, god forbid, other Karens looking for a place to live will drive past and certainly think "waah, waah, this is proposterous! Potatoes?! I can't even! I need everything to be exactly uniform!", leading to her pride and joy, the land value of the lawn containing her shitty cardboard box with fancy beige siding - will go down. Un-acc-ept-ab-le!
This isn't really my main point - it's just an absolutely phenomenal illustration of why the American middle class is the worst fucking socioeconomic group to ever live. They are petit bourgeois to an extent (primarily in their deeply rooted insecurity and precarious status), but their sensibilities are worse than that - they see themselves as some sort of smaller-scale genteel manor lord, whose lifestyle they so artlessly attempt to ape - but they lack the taste, the resources, or the confidence to actually do that. So instead, they ape the simplest bit - a manicured lawn that said gentleman would use for playing cricket or going on mid-afternoon horseback rides or whatever the fuck it is that those inbred bastards do there - but without the space to realistically be usable for that or really anything else outside of serving as a glorified litter box for the family dog.
And yet they do see themselves as above everyone else. They are aggressive about it, too! “Look at me, I have made it, I have my lawn. Mine! MINE! I won't live in a pod like those disgusting city-dwellers, ugh!.. I'm a real American. This is real America! I like my Bud Light Coors Light, my pickup, my Jesus, and my Red Lobster! Oh, and my vastly superfluous rifle collection! My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic, or they’d be able to file regional shrinkage dynamics reports just like me and become productive members of society!”
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them? What possible calamity has caused them to become these incredibly shallow, yet exceptionally vain shells of something vaguely resembling human form? Perhaps we’ll never know.
I am, however, interested in your guys’ opinions on the subject!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Lawns are defensive architecture.
If every house has one, its wide, and the HOA can boot you for not maintaining it, that keeps lower income blacks from moving into the neighborhood, and better the suburban design keeps them from randomly wandering through on foot.
AMERICA HAD WALKABLE DENSE TASTEFUL SMALL TOWNS WITH URBAN CORES.
Jesus you can drive through Ontario and still see all of them with their functional shopping districts. You can go to Montreal and see dense low cost 3 floor walk-ups with fire escapes and functional communities and tons of little parks, where people let their cats out at night and young children play with scooters and bicycles in back streets and allies before there parents take them to an event downtown on the subway...
America had all of this. Some of the nicest small cities humanity ever created, a ring of urbanism on the east coast and Midwest that occasionally gave Europe a run for their money.
AND THE GOVERNMENT ENABLED ETHNIC POGROMS AGAINST THEM.
The riots of the 50s and 60s destroyed American neighborhoods far removed from the south or "jim crow", where the defensive design of cities and comunities was already in place... And the government made damned sure no ordinary Americans defended their towns or cities... Hell they just did it again to another group of cities in 2020.
THIS IS WHY AMERICAN URBAN DESIGN IS SO FUCKED UP.
Because everything is designed with the assumption that no one can ever defend it, the regime will actively enable attacks on it, and come after you if you defend yourself.
If you look at how cities were designed 1864-1939 they have none of these problems, because it was assumed anyone breaking into homes or attacking old women would be shot or hanged.
Now you need a big fucking lawn, and you need to be part of a network of big fucking lawns, lest the walking dead druggies start moving through your neighborhoods... You look at neighborhoods from 1920 they follow a grid pattern, because its inherently superior for getting to places and having a wider community and having corner stores... post 1960 its all cul-de-sacs because "the community" will fucking murder you.
and you need everyone to maintain those lawns lest property values drop and your daughters be sexually assaulted or beaten into a coma at school were those lower income children will be going.
Everything wrong with urban design in the US, and all the shit it exports to Commonwealth countries, and Europe... is fundamentally an artifact of how necessary segregation was for white safety... and how now that that's impossible, we have to distort physical reality so that whites can work hard and buy segregation as a bizzare lifestyle instead of having to stand and fight the hot ethnic civil war they fled in 60s and 70s when some of the nicest examples of urban design on the north American continent were turned to fucking ruins.
You want to know what happens when you just have a well designed example of dense best practices urbanism that's been allowed to mature and keep it up piling good decision on good decision in a mid-sized city for 100s of years and as such everything winds up being reasonable and non-exclusive price wise? in the US?
Look at Baltimore.
I suppose it should've come as no surprise after you sold your soul to twitter for a Rhodesien cat-girl avatar but you're turning into a parody of yourself, you recognize that don't you?
This is all heat and no light. Your AAQCs and history obviously get you a lot of leeway, but come on. You just came off a five day ban, so I feel like I can't possibly give you any less than that here.
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Have you read the homicide rates?
Baltimore has a murder rate of 80 per 100,000, comparable with El Salvador.
the fact that American black homicide rates, and all other crimes are WORSE than the very worst of the third world is the single most important fact of Ameircan life.
Literally nothing about America makes sense unless you understand how horrifyingly understated even the very worst racial stereotypes are. Take it from a Canadian who niavely believed all the equality stuff, never once had to interact with any of it, and patted themselves on the back for being so egalitarian and making easy friends with Asian, Indian, and Nigerian immigrants in their school... as soon as anyone who hasn't built their life around denying what's right before there eyes observes the black and white REALITY of what's happened and continues to happen in the US, everything clicks.
I feel awful for all the times I felt myself supperior to blue collar rust belt Americans complaining about blacks... "I'm so much better than them I'm not racist" I thought about people who were being ethnically cleansed.
and?
while it may be considered rude to notice that democratic controlled municipalities tend to be cess-pools of violence, racism, and human feces, have you not noticed?
As I have argued before, the US doesn't not have a race problem, Baltimore has a race Problem, Chicago has a Race Problem, and you're just going along with it because you've never been to Atlanta or Mobile.
Blacks vote 90% democrat.
Are they not the very essence of the Democratic Party ?
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Atlanta has a Murder rate of 16 per 100,000, Mobile has a murder rate of 20 per 100,000.
Chicago is 18. Right between the two.
Democrats are not the relevant factor.
By contrast Major cities with almost no African Americans have murder rates of 2. And almost entirely white towns and areas homicide rates as low as 0.4 or 0.2
Have you ever been to New England, or Canada or the Upper Midwest or any of the high trust areas with basically no crime and the demographics you'd expect?
I remember as a kid people talking about places you could leave your doors unlocked... And I thought "Oh ya I guess lots of people do that here, but you wouldn't do that in Toronto"
It took rewatching Micheal Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" to realize most Americans were talking about "Leaving your doors unlocked, AFTER YOU GET HOME FROM WORK AND ARE DOING STUFF ABOUT THE HOUSE"
Whereas people in my area were talking about "Leaving your doors unlocked while you go on vacation for a few days"
It was shocking to see Michael Moore surprized that Canadians in Sarnia didn't keep their doors locked on a summer's day WHILE THEY WERE AT HOME.
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Is this before or after Bukele's reforms?
Before Bukele's most recent reforms the murder rate in El Salvador was 8 in 2022. It went as high as 103 in 2015, but has dropped fairly linearly since then. After the crackdown, it is now 0.8. In comparison, Norway's rate is 0.6 and Italy is 0.5.
That's fanstastic graph, I didn't think it could drop so fast.
Looks like most of job was done before Bukele?why do you single 2022 year and not year when Bukele entered office?
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I sometimes forget you two are different people. Thanks for reminding me you're not the same poster.
It's not enough to note abrasiveness. You've got the check what they're abrasive about.
It's not just abrasiveness. It's the whole "look at how Red Tribe I am" posture.
I'm actually not red tribe... @HlynkaCG is consistently pissed off with me for how not red-tribe I am and how much I don't get "It".
I'm a Canadian Libertarian who spent all my life in the most liberal small towns and Densest of Urban Cores.
That's why I'm so radical, these aren't just things that were unpleasant realities you learned to bite your tongue and propagate white lies about. I actually believed all the egalitarian claptrap throughout my life, that the only thing holding disadvantaged minorities back was discrimination blah blah blah, because I was Canadian and literally every minority I interacted with had gone through the Canadian immigration process and had, or had family members who had, multiple degrees in something (you basically don't get points to enter otherwise)...
So when you ACTUALLY believe everyone is created equal, and ACTUALLY believe all those disadvantaged "poor kids" are just as smart and just as talented as "white kids"... and none of your interactions would ever lead you to believe otherwise...
Then you discover the murder rate of Baltimore has been bloody 80 per 100,000! Worse than the worst warzones. And a fucking war of ethnic cleansing has been going on for the entirety of the post-war era (See any of the first hand accounts of "white flight"), and every person and institution the fucking world has been purposefully lying about it and trying to get you to hate the victims of the ethnic cleansing: Working Class whites, and to think it's just that they become second class citizens excluded from jobs and unable to speak their own minds in their own country under pain of lawsuits, being disappeared from social media, and blacklisted from public life.
And the CoNsErVaTiVeS who were supposed to be standing up for them have been actively enabling it and praising the figures who made it happen, whilst propagating every lie about it?
Ya that radicalizes in a way you cannot possibly imagine.
I'm glad I wasn't raised conservative or believing in America's institutions because there's nothing worth conserving there.
The woke are right: Race IS the most important issue in American life, and literally every American institution needs to burn because of it. They're just mistaken about the specifics of the implication.
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