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Fair enough, and I applaud you for your honesty. As I said, I don't really care if you want to make your life and town different than mine. It bothers me when others want to change my lifestyle from far away because it gives them feelings.
If I want to live in a safe, convenient, family-oriented place in America at a middle-class price point, I am limited to car-centric places. I know this is path-dependent, and the experience of the Japanese is quite different.
That's entirely true, and East Asia is the perfect example of that. The functional, rich and poor alike, can enjoy public parks and clean, safe mass transit, because there are so few dysfunctional, and those few are rapidly removed from the public.
That requires pragmatic and authoritarian East Asian morality and culture though. That's not possible in the West, where the Blue Tribe hides behind the motte of helping the poor and functional, in order to farm the bailey of increasing the dysfunctional so they can thumb their nose at the Red Tribe.
It doesn't require East Asian morality and culture - even 2023 NYC subway levels of disorder on public transport, let alone 2023 BART or LA Metro levels, would be a five alarm fire in City Hall in any European city - even Naples. There is a good case that all it requires is fare enforcement - the number of people who are going to buy a ticket in order to shit up a tube train is not high.
"Blue Tribe" and "Red Tribe" are US-specific concepts - there are terminally online people in any European country who think they are part of the blue tribe, but not enough to build a serious political party around. And the specific problem of not being willing to enforce basic quality-of-life crimes on public transport stems from the way the tribal conflict interacts with a US-specific race relations issue. It clearly is possible to have non-shittified public transport in the West, because London, Paris, Berlin, Zurich, etc. do.
No it wouldn't. Because they just wouldn't talk about it. The politicians and press would conspire to keep silent about it.
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Seeing how El Salvador went from being a crime-ridden hellhole to being safer than almost anywhere in America in the span of a few years would seem to invalidate the notion that such measures are impossible. Maybe blue tribe liberals won't be the ones to do it, but their hold on power is not eternal, and they are doing their best to empower nonwhite immigrant groups that have fewer qualms about the methods necessary to clean the place up.
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Years ago I saw a beggar in China sitting on the sidewalk. Two Chinese cops stood over him and were politely trying to get him to stop. They weren't dragging him off or even talking harshly. But they were standing over him preventing him from begging.
If I had to spend a few weeks living and using public transportation in San Francisco or a major Chinese city, I would 100% choose the Chinese city. You are spot on about the lack of publicly dysfunctional people making big urban centers tolerable.
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Again, you’re looking at our current cultural/political moment and acting as though it’s indicative of some deep and timeless truth about “Western morality”, when in reality many aspects of it are entirely contingent and reversible. Less than a hundred years ago in America, people with mental and physical disabilities were routinely institutionalized, and even lobotomized and/or coercively sterilized. This was one of the great triumphs of the first half of the 20th century, and it is largely Christian conservatives who revolted against this and who still to this day crow about how progressives are evil eugenicists.
Deinstitutionalization in this country happened under Reagan, as a result of activism from both leftist disability-rights advocates and libertarian anti-government/pro-liberty types. Blame can be spread all around for the catastrophic proliferation of street homelessness and the coddling of the disabled. Yes, there was certainly a Marxist anti-civilization element involved - the Critical Disability Theorists, an offshoot of the Frankfurt School, for one - but they were far outnumbered by do-gooders from across the political spectrum who felt yucky and guilty over how successful their forebears had been at nearly eradicating profound mental illness and high levels of crime in this country.
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