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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Boston isn’t a shithole; Back Bay is probably second only to Greenwich Village / Lower Manhattan in terms of quality walkable neighborhoods in the US.

You literally said:

The financial district seemed fine enough, and in general the hobo problem, while worse than Manhattan, was no worse than Boston was late last year, and I thought Boston was still liveable, probably.

So Boston is only 'probably livable' and equivalent to San Francisco, in your eyes. You said this about San Francisco:

Not that it wasn't a dump, because it was, but it didn't really appear worse than it was before 2020. SF was (laughably) considered a "Tier 1" city (and had a weirdly cheap Four Seasons), so I stayed in the FS by Union Square, famous for shithole status and close proximity to the Tenderloin.

So you say San Francisco is a dump (and by extension, Boston is the same). I assume now you'll try and wriggle out of having used the word shithole by saying you were only talking about Union Square, so whatever.

I was willing to suspend disbelief, never having been to Seattle or Portland myself. But when you start going off on cities I've lived in and indeed bike commute through everyday and call them 'barely livable' I know you're either so snobbish and rich as to be out of touch with the reality the rest of us live in or playing it up to try and make an argument about how we're all ugly people leaving in ugly cities. Granted, I'm not a (presumably) 5 foot something Jewish woman but I can't deny what my lying eyes see every day.

So you say San Francisco is a dump (and by extension, Boston is the same). I assume now you'll try and wriggle out of having used the word shithole by saying you were only talking about Union Square, so whatever.

Yes, I literally was only talking about Union Square which has had a hobo problem since well before COVID. I apologize if you think that’s changing my original meaning, but it wasn’t.

And again, you’re comparing neighborhoods to cities. The point is that both Boston and NYC have neighborhoods ‘as bad’ as downtown Seattle. But their core business areas are nowhere near as bad, that’s the tragic thing about Seattle, that the crisis has consumed the city center itself.

Boston is not a shithole. Like literally every major coastal city it has a big problem with homeless drug addicts, but as I said there are nice places. My point was to compare the financial district of San Francisco to Boston in a way that made clear both were ‘liveable’.