I've lived in a big city for years now. Never seen anybody get mugged, or shot, or carjacked, despite doing activist work that often has me visiting poor minority neighborhoods.
The only time I ever really felt uneasy was when I had to walk alone at night through a neighborhood where all the businesses had bars on the windows. Worst thing that happened was a couple of people asking me for money, and they didn't give me any shit when I said I didn't carry cash.
But any time I visit the small town where I grew up there's always someone or another acting like I came back from a fucking warzone lmao
"Try that in a small town" oh you mean the suburbs where everyone is alienated and afraid and paranoid of their neighbor so they shoot a kid who's basketball lands on their front yard? Yum, community spirit!
oh you mean the suburbs where everyone is alienated and afraid and paranoid of their neighbor
No better description. They might as well surrender to the Machines and get into the Matrix.
The steak scene from the matrix but the steak is overcooked and slathered in ketchup to own the libs
Also you know what beats out all those bad things?
Deaths from fucking car accidents which happen waaaaaaay more often in suburban and rural areas.
Can you really call yourself a patriot if you dont treat your wife and kids like shit while drunk ?
I wonder what the percentage of domestic violence is done by cops.
I do feel much more comfortable driving in my town of <500 people. Although our traintrack crossings don't have arms, and I feel like I'm constantly swerving deer. I guess I also share the road with a lot of side by sides, 4 wheelers. It probably is more dangerous, but there isn't a stop light for miles.
Deaths from fucking car accidents which happen waaaaaaay more often in suburban and rural areas.
Only on a technicality. You're never more than 5 minutes away from an ER in the city so of course you have a better chance to survive. Most small towns are 30 minutes away from an ER, if that. Unless you believe rural people are genetically pre-disposed to car accidents then the problem is lack of public infrastructure.
This has the same understanding as quoting FBI crime by race statistics without the overall societal context.
the problem is lack of public infrastructure.
Yes. That’s it. I never claimed it had anything to do with something inherent to the people who live in suburban and rural areas, but in those areas people drive more and at higher speeds, which means more deaths.
If you built a robust bus network in every town of 1000 people it might fix that problem but those towns don’t have that.
"Oh yeah? If cities are so safe then explain this video footage from Chicago"
Shows a guy walking through Freeside in Fallout New Vegas
shows clips of shoplifting
"This is why X retailer is leaving Y city!"
[Six Months Later]
Retailer X closed Z stores in Y city because those stores were underperforming, as cited by their investor documents.
I live in a city. Today a dude tried to smash my window in and called me a f[slur].
In 2022, a homeless dude stole my bag from my on Burnside.
In 2020, multiple comrades got fucked up by the PPB.
In 2016(?) a comrade of mine was stabbed on the lightrail.
In 2015, a comrade was run over by a fascist (rip Lewis)
In 2014 a comrade had their house ransacked by the pigs during a "wellness check."
Cities can be violent places. That said, I live in thr suburbs now and desperately miss Portland. Lake Oswego can suck my fucking asshole. I'll take rest of it any day.
And you know what? It's more dangerous here. Everyone's sedentary because they can't walk anywhere. Everyone's an alcoholic because they're alone and miserable. Everyone's broke because they have to pay for a car. This shit kills people.
In 2020, multiple comrades got fucked up by the PPB.
What is the PPB? This is the one time I've seen that acronym refer to something other than pig poop balls.
In 2020, multiple comrades got fucked up by the PPB.
Even this instance isn't immune.
Keep Hexbear weird!
I honestly really want to move away from the city I love and lived in for decades. In the last 10 years I've moved three times to avoid the violence and it just follows me wherever I go. This year, a 16yo girl was killed in front of my home, two young girls were mugged and the thief attempted to carjack me to escape but he stopped when he saw my baby in the car seat, a man on the corner was shot to death for panhandling the wrong dude, my friend and neighbor was carjacked and hospitalized (she'll never be the same), a woman ODed in my driveway, my car was broken into twice, I've dragged my young daughter, on my back, through the front door to escape gunfire... Twice. This year!
Then there's the profiling.
And it's the same shit in every neighborhood. My HS friends want me to move back to [suburb] and, after years of saying no, I find myself seriously considering it.
The suburb where I grew up was and is a conservative, racist, white flight town. And it was hard being who I am. It's where I learned to truly hate cops. But I never thought I'd be killed by random violence. And my parents never dragged me by my shirt away from gunfire.
It may be a grass is greener situation, for sure. But I don't want to die and I don't want my family to die. I'm full of existential dread. I can't afford to move anyway.
I honestly really want to move away from the city I love and lived in for decades. In the last 10 years I've moved three times to avoid the violence and it just follows me wherever I go. This year, a 16yo girl was killed in front of my home, two young girls were mugged and the thief attempted to carjack me to escape but he stopped when he saw my baby in the car seat, a man on the corner was shot to death for panhandling the wrong dude, my friend and neighbor was carjacked and hospitalized (she'll never be the same), a woman ODed in my driveway, my car was broken into twice, I've dragged my young daughter, on my back, through the front door to escape gunfire... Twice. This year!
holy crap, what city is this?
My chud ex-neighbor visibly cringed when I told him I was moving closer into the city. "more power to you, I guess", says the man who jokes about killing homeless people for sport
Fuck I should've slashed his tires
a lot of US conservatives experience notions of safety/crime by
, and since huge parts of the US have a rural-white / urban-brown diverse situation going on, it's the coded way to express racial bias.i grew up and spend the first half of my life in areas where the rural communities were as racially diverse as the cities, so it was not something i recognized until i moved to the "rural = white" parts. if you get a white conservative cornered on this topic, rub their tummy/make them feel safe and tease it out... it's always about them being
don't get me wrong, there are always people in rural areas that have apprehension about the city who are not fucked up about race. the overpolicing, the prices, the unfamiliarity with navigating / complexity with parking (often paid) and traffic patterns. for people without social connections in the city who are having to go there for some administrative/bureaucratic b.s. or a big event, the city quickly becomes a place where there are lots of institutions putting their hands in your pockets. regional urban hospitals can absolutely nail families visiting from the boonies on food and parking. not to mention, there are a number of downtown areas where finding a fucking free/public bathroom is a goddamn nightmare if you're just arrived and on your own. which is absolute bullshit, imo. a big fancy city with no easily accessible public bathrooms in the central core deserves all the scorn and piss and shit on its sidewalks and streets that humans put there. i personally hate that the most.
but to your point, the conservatives complaining about "crime" and "safety" (and explicitly not "safety from zealous cops") are talking about their racial hangups.
I just feel like there has to be some connection to all the dipshit racist Eastern Europeans who love America and Capitalism but hate communism
Eastern European libs fetishize USA, and it logically leads them into racism, because, of course, the only reason non-white people in the free, equal and rich US are disproportionately poor is because they are lazy and stupid.
Also I hate when people’s stories of why a place is so dangerous are actually a story where everyone was fine?
“I don’t feel safe walking in the park at night, one time there was this homeless guy walking behind me”
And did he… do anything? Or have true crime podcasts just rotted your brain and now you just see other human beings and think they’re going to murder you? Because what you just told is a story of walking through the park and being completely unharmed.
One time we were explaining to a relative how a storm had downed some tree branches and they implied that our urban trees were just weaker compared to their country trees lmao
Smh at the rootless cosmopolitanism of these city trees
I used to live in an area where trees were planted too close to the curb and street, so 50ish years later the trees got huge and had a very lopsided root system that would knock them straight into the road. Every year a few go down and wreck the overhead powerlines.
This was firmly a suburb though.
When my grandma was still around, the family would all go to her gouse for holidays, and she lived in a tiny little town in a redwood forest. Since redwoods are protected here, some of them grow straight up through the road, so it feels like you're walking into this mossy post-apocalyptic land of colossal pavement-breaking trees and banana-sized slugs.
Man, redwood trees rule
That sounds really amazing. I love forested areas. I don't know how people look at a bare sky with no trees and go "ah nature".
the other night i was walking home alone and a person asked me if i had a spare dollar. i said i didn't. they seemed happy that i even acknowledged their existence.
that's my experience of living in basically the "warzone" city.
Now I must speculate. Perhaps LA, Philly, Chicago, or Oakland? You didn’t say so I’m not asking. Just having fun guessing.
Clearly the whole San Francisco Bay Area is Escape from Silicon Valley with Snake Plissken.
Tell Peter Thiel it's promotional material for another Breakup California ballot initiative, and he'll financially back you.
You garnered a LOL with this one. Thanks!
Omg, I want to see this movie.
yeah I was thinking chicago or minneapolis tbh. It's astonishing how afraid certain people are of minneapolis since george floyd was murdered. Its a pretty tame city really.
Samsies. I was impressed with how many people who lost stores or property just shrugged and said "well it had to happen sooner or later".
with bay area cost of living, they would have asked for two dollars
Also, if cities are so bad, then why are property values in cities SO GODDAMN HIGH!?
I live in a rural shithole because I'm too poor to afford anything else, and trust me, I feel plenty unsafe around so-called "good 'ol boys" who can [redacted] someone and then get it away with it. If you don't like it, you're seen as the weirdo.
Even people that live in cities start to believe the same shit. I've lived just about my entire life in a big city. Can't say I haven't seen anything, but certainly not at the rate that suburbanites and rural people seem to think it is. Its like they really think that you'll see 3 murders and 10 muggings in the span of 3 city blocks.
Anyone that watches the local TV news in the US watches a broadcast that is about 50% crime reporting. They also use the cops wording to describe the events, and oftentimes a police PR freak will be on the TV talking about what happened.
This is even in mid-size cities for "crimes" that don't deserve coverage, but "The atomic unit of propaganda isn't lies, it is emphasis" and Amerikkkans are constantly blasted with it.
Yeah, I fucking hate it. And my dad watches the news almost constantly. When the local news finishes on one channel he flips it to another and its almost always the same exact stories.
Just a constant reminder of that video from a few years ago showing how different local stations around the country covered a national story the same exact way, down to the script. All thanks to major corporations, and in particular Sinclair Broadcasting, buying up local stations.
I felt so much safer at night walking around Chicago surrounded by people than I do on my own streets where someone could murder me and maybe a white lady would yell out the window to keep it down.
witnessing/being the victim of some crimes isn't even a valid reason to live in fear of the city to the degree these suburban brownshirts do.
wana fucking smack any asshole who's heard where i'm going or where i've been and does the whole "dangerous area" routine. i've been stalked & saw someone get shot over there, i don't give a shit what your coward ass has to say about somewhere you're too scared to go
and the people doing the beatings & killings in these "bad areas"? 90+% cops, the same people the suburban nazis think need even more license to enact violence. most blood i've ever seen in my city was when the cops attacked peaceful protestors. the attempted murders i've witnessed were by rent-a-cops.
There has to be some kind of car brain explanation. I grew up in the middle of nowhere, a tiny town an hour and a half's drive north of a mid-sized city. I remember people thinking it's perfectly reasonable to drive 90 minutes to work or to revolve your life around your car. But back home they love it. Driving around is pleasant for them for some reason. They love driving 100mph with no one doing anything about it, since there's no traffic and the cops don't give a shit unless you're black. Back home you can drive in a straight line without stopping for at least an hour. The road just keeps going. I think some rural folk interpret this as the greatest personal freedom, the ability to get on any road you want and drive in a direction far too fast and end up wherever you please.
In cities things are more congested, and driving around is more of a chore. Parking is more difficult, there's traffic, and navigation is more complicated. Back home there were just two roads. You go north to be in more rural swamp forest nowhere, you go south to be in civilization. Navigation rarely got more complicated than that.
Yeah that's actually how they see it. Half of my family drives recreationally to unwind and calm down. They genuinely enjoy it. They even have fun fixing and maintaining the car, or tinkering with it and modifying it. And yeah, their perspective is: I can just get into my car and start it and go wherever I want whenever I want. But a bus or train I have to rely on someone else for, and adhere to limitations of schedule and lines. So to them it's more freedom.
Yeah, they can't interpret a car being a burden or driving as a waste of time. Living somewhere rural means you're a car hobbyist by default.
I do have fun modifying, operating, and maintaining my primary vehicle, but it's a bicycle. So I can almost see where they're coming from. But my bike didn't cost tens of thousands of dollars and I'm not gonna explode if it crashes.
I mean you should be able to understand it. Its a hobby, and a fun mechanical one, as you do with your bike, except it gets absurdly powerful. And let me tell you, absurdly powerful cars are very fun and kick ass. Its expensive, yes, but some hobbies are.
Cars as a hobby fuckin rule. Cars as a necessity is fucked up.
Yeah I can understand having fun with cars. They go fast and some people enjoy tinkering. I was never able to get into it because being in a car makes me sick. I can handle about 30 minutes at a time before I get too dizzy to keep going.
Yeah it's also way too expensive. My car is by far the biggest money sink I have and I barely use it and it's paid off. Constantly breaking down and demanding gasoline. If it was just a toy I used to ride around on weekends, that's fine.
Capitalism makes rural life untenable, and forces people into the cities in search of jobs that pay high enough to survive off of. This forces people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds into close proximity with one another, which leads to diversity which reactionaries see as the destruction of the traditional heterogeneous society. Cities are also highly polluted, easy to get sick in, and full of safety hazards. Capitalism creates poverty alongside urbanization, and poverty leads to addiction, mental illness, and crime (since poverty is criminalized under capitalism, and so is doing what you need to survive, like stealing food) which in turn leads to overpolicing, prison slavery, etc.. Reactionaries skip over the part where capitalism causes poverty, and assume the cities themselves cause crime. Along with their favorite scapegoats: immigrants and minorities. So I think there's a combination of economic, environmental, and cultural grievances one can have with cities. Some of these grievances are reactionary, and some are sincere displeasure with the inconveniences of urban life (the economic and environmental issues, mainly).
Pretty sure the perception that cities are very violent is entirely untrue. There are violent cities, but they, as you send, in places with truly appalling abuse and exploitation. And in America at least a lot of the violence is centered in GOP help first and second ring suburbs rather than in cities themselves.
Yes. I could have worded it more carefully. I guess I'm trying to say that capitalism causes both violence and urbanization, and reactionaries simply associate violence and urbanization with each other, rather than their root cause: Capitalism.
