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.
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.
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
And only take cash.
I went to some place with my friends which Zuck apparently likes so that's probably why it was kind of meh.
I saw a "no fly zone over ukraine" poster in SF.
Well yeah, I mean it's still in the US. So it's still very bad.
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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
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No doubt but also some radicalization potential.
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.