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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   31288 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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Yet it was also clear that it was a lawless shithole, abandoned by all but the hardiest pedestrians for point-to-point car transfers. And even then, they seemingly increasingly avoided the urban core. This is what marks the biggest difference between Seattle and places like Johannesburg; there, in the poor and violent downtown, one can see that the material situation is dire.

More than anything else, though, the trip underscored just how much of a farce the extreme urban decline of West Coast cities has been. Other countries have real problems. When their cities become hellholes, it's because their economies have collapsed, or because they've been taken over by extremely well-organized criminal gangs funded with cartel money in a nation too poor to pay for honest police, or because they're locked in years-long siege situations with militarized gendarmerie, or because they recently imported millions of people from cultures that hate them and don't care about their rules. But on the West Coast the shithole city problem wasn't the fault of any of those things, not even mass immigration (certainly not of the legal kind, although honestly very few of the hobos appeared to be Latino). Nor was it a grand act of clear-headed sadomasochism, amusing as that would be, because I can't really say most of the people I met there were happy about what had happened.

Having lived in 'Blue' and 'Red' cities, I had the opposite experience and assessment. The Red city despite a Republican leadership was/is full of homelessness and tents. Being hit up for money is a daily experience . I got vibes of it being unsafe at night, and I had to be mindful of my surroundings. The Blue cities are orderly to a fault. None of the looting and lawlessness that one frequently encounters on social media as being supposedly representative of those areas. I noticed a few tents by a freeway and a single homeless man passed out in front of a 7-11, but otherwise nothing indicative of widespread decay.

If one was a street criminal , the Red city is a better target compared to the Blue one ,despite the Second Amendment, only because in the former people seem more atomistic and no one is keeping an eye out on each other, unlike in the Blue cities, in which people seem more mindful of each other.

It's evident that the social problems blue areas face are as prevalent in red areas too, even worse, at least from my own experience. Like everything else in life, ymmv.

Just because a modern big-city downtown does not look like a picturesque scene from 1900 Paris with dapper Parisians sipping on coffee and making small chatter, on the tiny chairs on the cobblestone, does not mean it's a hellhole or decayed.

  • -14

What red cities are there in the United States? Oklahoma City? Mesa, Arizona? Dallas has a GOP mayor, but he’s a former Democrat and was elected as such. As far as I’m aware no major city is really controlled by Republicans holistically.

He might mean Miami. They have some weird non partisan city gov i don’t understand, but the mayor I believe is Republican.

It’s basically Fort Worth and Oklahoma City. And neither of those are overrun with hobos and crime.

My first thought was, “Surely Salt Lake City…” I looked it up, and SLC’s current mayor is a leftist female activist with a bachelor’s degree in gender studies. What a nightmare. (To be clear, it does appear that part of her appeal was her promise to deal effectively with homelessness, and when I visited SLC about a year and a half ago the homelessness problem was not very bad from what I can tell, so I guess there’s that.)

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