Yes, oxymoron I know. But like many of you, I am stuck in :amerikkka:
So if you could pick anywhere to live in the States, where would it be? And why? Ideally where far left ideology is the norm.
:fedposting: Fellow radicals of Hexbear, why do you like the city you live in, and what is it?
Why, of course! Come to my address and talk to me in person, I'll gladly show you all around the city, all the hot leftist spots, and maybe even let you sit in on a leftist meeting where we do leftist things! Meet me tomorrow at:
742 Evergreen Terrace Springfield, USA
"far left ideology" translates to smug liberals driving smart cars in this country. I hate South parks take on just about everything, but they kind of got the "aging liberal hippie douche" thing figured out.
Outside of a big college town, you won't find leftist politics, and once you age out of being to hang in those circles, it basically doesn't matter where you live. Nobody will ever be left enough for you. At least that's my experience.
I have moved around a bit and done some travelling. I always come back home to Michigan. I'm used to the culture here, the natural beauty is endless, and the climate suits me.
Hey man I got a smart car for like 1000 dollars once and it was fucking awesome. Whips around like a go cart
I actually sold it for the same price a few months later to a kid but yeah it was such a good deal
You got to use a car for months and then get the money back . That's actually really great, and generally hard to do if you aren't a mechanic or something.
Oh yeah for sure it was a great deal. I was paying like25 dollars a month for insurance too. Tbh they're fun a fuck cars lol
Too bad it doesn't have the pep I want to get out of the way of the giant SUV that will eat me if the motherfucker hits me. I like driving tiny shit but it's gotta have the ability to MOVE when I want it too. Had a Nissan with a cvt that just wouldn't get up and go, always took it's sweet sweet time getting up to speed lol.
probably on top of a mountain completely naked and devoid of contact with other humans
There's almost 100 posts at this point, but if nobody has said it already, Chicago is a cool city. Not as dirty as NYC, public transit is actually functional (comparatively speaking), there's plenty of leftists, and the food is great! Lots to see and do, especially outside the touristy stuff, which is largely confined to one specific part of the city.
There are also lots of squirrels and small birds for me to wage a protracted people's war against :rage-cry:
Ideally where far left ideology is the norm.
These cities are probably as close as you'd get and they all have their own pros and cons: Olympia WA, Eugene OR, Burlington VT, Portland OR, Minneapolis-St. Paul MN. Madison WI might be on a similar level as well. Worth mentioning that while leftist ideology is a norm in these places (to different extents) it is not a majority position anywhere except maybe Burlington, although idk exactly how it's fared since Bernie's days.
Could also consider Puerto Rico which I believe has less Ameri-brain, but surely has its own flavor of brainworms just like literally anywhere.
From personal experience; Only if you can't make it to Chicago. Minneapolis is very gay and has a bunch of leftist orgs but the white lutheran scandanavian majority are a bunch of insular racist assholes. If you're going to be spending most of your time with white people I'd strongly recommend Chicago.
Thanks for the recs-- I really don't expect full blown majority anywhere, just sizable population that at least has a somewhat prevalent voice
PNW is nice if you have the money to live in one of the big cities. The seasons are mild, the rain is exaggerated, and the wildfires only sometimes blacken the sky and turn your home into a hellscape. Politically, you got your city nimbys and plenty of right wingers, but Seattle, Olympia, and Portland at least have a lot of leftists.
It's also very spendy to live here, even outside the big cities.
:walter-shock: :walter-breakdown: :dean-frown: :dean-malice: :dean-neutral: :dean-smile:
Propublica did a write up cross referencing all the climate change maps and found that a few counties in Vermont are likely to be the most stable in the coming decades. So that's where I'm trying to get all my friends and family to move. The piece also listed counties in Colorado being somewhat safe, but there's a pretty large white supremacy contingent there, I hear.
other good thing about vermont is it's close to the border
The piece also listed counties in Colorado being somewhat safe, but there’s a pretty large white supremacy contingent there, I hear.
There are a few solidly red areas like isolated mountain towns, Colorado Springs, the eastern plains, and cattle ranching towns. While I'm not as afraid of those fascists as I would be in Idaho or East Washington, I avoid those areas as much as possible and they'll be indistinguishable from Wyoming or Texas as things get worse. The northern Front Range, so like Denver-Fort Collins, is the left-liberal area which might still have water in a few years. Not as dependent on the Colorado River as the rest of the state, at the head of the rivers we do draw from. Of course to live in that area my rent starts at $1000/mo for a 1 bedroom apartment.
Gotcha. I used to always be surprised when I heard of lost cause southerner type peeps out west, but I've come to accept that the US is on some crazy shit.
It quickly becomes Qanon territory 10 miles outside of any city. I lived about that far from one and the town was essentially a colony of four evangelical churches, dominated by rancher libertarians and cops from the city who lived there instead. I'd imagine that's the dynamic most places though, ours just have big game guns.
there was a whole contingent of confederate sympathizers that moved west after the civil war, because they could not abide to live among the black people of the south without slavery. think about that: these people thought being around free black people was a bridge too far. such people had a profound impact on the western territories' development and the formation of their statehoods.
you should check out Oregon's early days and laws surrounding black people's rights.
Oregon was explicitly established as a white ethnostate, with all the violence that entails, and continues to be one of the whitest and most racist places in America.
Yeah, it's on my todo list. Currently reading the Counterrevolution of 1776 so I'm getting all sorts of 'fuck white people' thoughts in my head already.😅
but there’s a pretty large white supremacy contingent there, I hear.
It's okay. Denver solved everything by banning ARs.
A few others have said Chicago, but I'll put my 2p behind it as well. 5 DSA members on city council and we're hoping one of them runs for mayor next year. Decent social safety net, bike infrastructure, and public transportation here. Chicago has good food, good bars and is a super chill place to be queer. Cheap flights, usually, because it's United's HQ. Some drawbacks are gun laws (it's pretty easy to get around the AR ban, though), terrible winters and a shit load of lazy, useless police.
I'll take the lazy Chicago cops over the racist Chicago cops. Yes all cops are both but the dominant trait is passive racism and just not doing anything, preferable to very active racism.
is a super chill place to be queer
This did not cross my cishet brain, but yes, it is from my understanding, very true. To counter one of your points, however, I will say that I've noticed the past few winters being progressively more and more mild.
Fuck the cops tho, all my homies hate Chicago cops
Also pretty expensive rent wise, although it's not as bad as Boston or NYC or something
Chicago doesn't even Crack the top 20 most expensive metros in the US. Is it as cheap as Huntsville, Alabama? No. But it's the most affordable big city in the US.
Really? Guess my perspective is warped from working in the ritzier parts and seeing prices there
You can definitely find 3-4k a month apartments in Chicago. The difference is that, in other cities, every apartment is that much. You can still find nice 2bd apartments in desirable neighborhoods for $1500 in Chicago.
I know I'm gonna get shit on for saying this here but fine, I'll go ahead and say California. Of course any leftist enclave is gonna be better, but those are only as big as a large neighborhood, not even a small city.
I think living in CA is probably a lot like living in one of the not-as-social-democratic-as-the-Nordics European countries. Like Germany. As I'm sure many of my German comrades will attest to, living in Germany sucks too. Of course Germany's welfare state is propped up by imperialism. But that doesn't change the fact that as a leftist, your day-to-day life is gonna be better in places like Germany (or California) than nearly everywhere else in the US.
I get why people here shit on CA, I do. But I've been able to live in both a red state and CA. And yes, there is a significant difference. My old home state in the next 12 months will likely ban abortion and ban puberty blockers (if not worse). There's gonna be some version of a "don't say gay" bill passed. Trans people have it rough in my home state but in CA there does seem to be more acceptance (and state employees get all gender affirming care and surgeries covered by insurance). The most liberal part of my old red state (big city) is so openly segregated and racist those census maps that show race make the city look like two different countries. In CA my partner was able to take off 16 weeks for pre and post birth maternity and get state benefits. In our home state she would have had to go back to work before the c-section scars healed (2 weeks). So not saying it's great, but there's at least a certain baseline here that makes it a bit better to live in than the rest of the country if you can swing it financially.
California - it's like being on the lido deck on the cruise ship to hell that is the United States.
I visited San Francisco and Los Gatos for a couple of days and thought it was basically the epicenter of neoliberalism. The city seemed empty except for a few tourists and the suburbs were kind of eerie, like every cookie cutter house had an SUV parked in the driveway, almost like every person was just a walking talking iPhone that needed to be recharged. The highways are also everywhere and go on forever. The pizza, sorry to say, was by far the worst I have ever tasted. Like burnt cardboard. And the Mexican food was good but not amazing.
You didn't go far enough south (or look hard enough) for good Mexican food, and there are some decent Pizza places here, but yeah it's nothing much to write home about considering you can find better of both in many other places.
Yeah there must be more to it than what I saw. But what I saw didn’t do much for me.
As far as taquerias, find a place where they don't even have english on the menu
I went to some place with my friends which Zuck apparently likes so that's probably why it was kind of meh.
California is way worse than any of those places. The rent, the complete lack of any sort of social safety net, the literal Nazis infesting everywhere more than 2 miles outside any city limits.
It's even more insidious because of its progressive aesthetic.
Better than most places in the US? Sure (aside from the cost of living and the places here where that isn't as bad are all extremely reactionary)
I'll concede that a state employee in CA probably has it better than anywhere else in the country though
There's a metric fuck ton of chuds in central California that increases sharply if you're anywhere near the foothills.
What would concern me is that it seems to be becoming uninhabitable much more rapidly than most of the rest of the country. Those wildfires and droughts look, uh, terrifying. Unless that's just regional?
Those concerns are valid imo, if you go past wooded areas about half the trees are dead from repeated years of drought or infestations of borer beetles. I assume the state will be looking fairly savanna-like in a couple decades.
I haven't lived in a ton of places but I'll throw Chicago into the mix. It's a big city in capitalist America so it has all the normal issues, but the rent is much lower compared to other big cities like NYC or LA and the L and buses are solid enough to avoid needing a car. And while you get like 6 months of winter a year (for now), you trade that for basically zero risk of wildfires, earthquakes, or hurricanes (tornadoes only really impact people downstate). Plus, being directly on the lake practically guarantees access to fresh water, which feels to me like something that's soon to become a luxury.
Seconding this. Its in a good location for climate change as well lol.
I moved to Chicago last year (from the South) and I've been liking it. I always figured I was priced out of any big cities so I was pleased to find a place that was the same rent I'd been paying before. Decent minimum wage and public transit makes it very affordable compared to most places I looked at, and I love how close by everything is.
The weather has taken some getting used to. I actually liked seeing all the snow, I just didn't realize it would stay cold for so long. But I'm glad to get away from the Summer heat in the south, especially knowing that it's getting worse.
Most ideal would be Washington because the PNW has evergreen rainforests full of fungi. Really remarkable ecosystems.
Runner-up is Colorado. Within an hour's drive I've got a national park, two national forests, maybe a dozen lakes full of trout that I can kayak in, several dozen trails which would be the jewel of most other states, and probably like half a dozen mountains over 14k' that provide a marathon-level degree of accomplishment for summiting. I can do one of the three big trails within walking distance of my house multiple times during the same week and see different wildflowers. I live in an ancient jungle/sea with some of the best dinosaurs in the world, a major Paleoamerican area with some of the most interesting anthropology in the country, and every natural science aspect of the state is fascinating due to its extreme conditions. It's a Bernie state but only has a PSL/DSA/SRA presence.
