...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.
Does anyone have a link / post that argues against this? Like, ignoring the kulakisms and just focusing rebutting on the steelman that a primary cause of america's urbanism issues is mostly-black crime
You can look up the murder rates of cities, some like Baltimore have homicide rates that reach 80 per 100,000, El Salvador territory, literal warzones are often less murderous, by contrast peaceful cities with 20+km of walkable core like Toronto or Montreal have homicide rates of 2 per 100,000. then its trivial to look up how the homicide rate in American cities are almost one to one correlated with the percentage of the population that's black.
"White Flight" (fleeing what? Interethnic Violence! ie. Ethnic cleansing) followed the riots of the 50s and 60s after federal and state governments had subsidized the great migration, when masses of southern blacks to move into Northern (though largely not New England) cities, with massive public housing builds.
Gary Indiana is a prime example from 60,000 whites and 10,000 blacks in 1920, to 120,000 whites and 90,000 blacks by 1960, to under 10,000 whites and 80,000 blacks by 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_flight#/media/File:Gary,_Indiana_racial_demographics.webp
The idea this was just "MuH RaCiSm" when whites left the cities they had lived in for generations after they'd peaceable allowed blacks to settle there through the 30s, 40s, and 50s, is laughable. What Changed? suddenly the regime was backing race riots and refusing to enforce the law when it came to violence aganist whites. Anything like this would have resulted in the state subsidizing armed militias to defend these cities between ~1870 and 1939.
People often talk about how black people moved to cities in the 30s and 40s, missing the point that there was a depression on in the 30s, so there were no jobs in Northern cities, and that in the early 40s, people were a little busy with the other thing. There was some Black migration to Norther cities during the war to replace white workers who were fighting.
Racial covenants were ruled unenforceable in 1948, so there was essentially a year or two when Black people could not move into white areas after the war. Furthermore, the red-lined areas in those cities were drawn in the 30s, long before the bulk of the great migration. Black people moved to red-lined areas because they were cheap. For red-lining to have made a difference would require that black people lived in the area before it was red-lined, and then left the area before red-lining was eliminated while white people moved in. I can't think of any place where there was a gradual displacement of black people by white non-Hispanic people in Northern cities. There are, of course, examples of Hispanics displacing Black people.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link