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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28483 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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And I’d be wary of saying I’m an extreme prude about this. I grew up in NYC...I’ve walked through much of lower Manhattan at 2am countless times, in my more reckless days by myself, have taken the subway at all hours. I’m not a wide-eyed suburban naïf who crosses the street at the sight of two loitering black men...

Sure, but I'm looking at the comparisons you are drawing, and clearly you and I have a significant gap in perception of something. Perhaps it isn't risk of violence?

In the comment thread above you stated:

Ithaca: Eternal shithole, long has been, long will be. Those who must live there deserve nothing but pity. I’ve heard it’s even worse now, but how that’s possible is beyond me. 100.

I assume Buffalo is also 90-100, it’s not a place you hear great things about. Asheville was nice 7 or 8 years ago, would be a shame if it had deteriorated.

(By this scale San Francisco is 90, Vancouver 40, London is 25, Paris and Berlin 30[...]

Maybe we're talking about different things, and your 100 rating is to do with some aesthetic distaste which I don't even notice. What exactly is your 0-100 based on?

Ithaca is, has been for decades, and remains as of last year, ten square miles surrounded by reality. I can't imagine anywhere safer, short of a literal shopping mall or something. I wandered around as a kid, as a drunk undergrad, as a law student, as a middle aged tourist. I've never even heard of violence there that wasn't perpetrated between students, or essentially domestic in nature. Buffalo is...just a city? Not particularly upscale, but neither particularly dangerous nor hassling, I felt no sense of risk going out for wings there. San Francisco and NYC I've lived in, I don't know that I felt THAT much difference from Paris or Berlin, certainly Madrid and Barcelona and Luxembourg were worse experiences for me. Paris certainly I had significantly more hassle from street people, but that might be because I am quite obviously not French. I've heard great things about Singapore, though I've never had the pleasure.

I can accept your assessment of Seattle and Portland, I haven't been to either since I was maybe eleven. But then to say SF, which I have visited, is 90% as bad, and Buffalo and Ithaca which I've been to regularly and enjoy, are also "shitholes" and just as bad...I'm a little lost.

To your point...

The ‘red tribe’ often exaggerates problems with urban crime. In Britain, conservatives like to suggest knife crime is a big problem in London (it isn’t, London is one of the safest cities in the West with a 100% murder clearance rate and almost every knife homicide victim is either in a domestic violence situation or a young black man involved in gangs on tough project housing). And the hysteria about NYC, certainly since Giuliani, is very much misplaced.

I agree, the Republican fear of inner city crime suffers from the same 'boy who cried wolf' problem that Democratic accusations of Naziism and racism have suffered from. And when you call Ithaca a horrifying shithole where residents should be pitied, it destroys credibility of accounts of other places.

To be completely clear, my point about Ithaca was largely intended as a joke. But as the link shows, nowhere is safe from this problem in the US right now.

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