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

  • GayActorMichaelDouglas [none/use name, he/him]
    ·
    1 year ago

    but that you’ve done the conservative thing where you take something how it is currently and decide that that’s how it is for all time. “Surrounded by cars, smog and noise” this is not an essential characteristic of cities.

    "Man I hate my farming job because of shitty pay and long hours."

    "Uh actually, the shitty pay and long hours is not an essential characteristic of farming so you're being a conservative."

    The possibility of things getting better does not make living in the city now any more pleasant.

    The other issue is that your rhetoric plays into the conservative dichotomy of the cities as dirty and savage

    Your pro-city rhetoric plays into the neoliberal dichotomy of cities being civilized places and rural areas being filled with country bumpkins. I don't think you're a neoliberal though because I can understand how sharing one view doesn't mean you believe the same thing.

    And third, this “cities suck I prefer the trees and nature” rhetoric always leads one place, and that’s to individualist, private landownership,

    No it doesn't. It literally does not mean this in any meaningful way. I specifically prefer the rural areas because I have better access to local community and state parks. My love for nature is just about the most collective it can be. I can't believe people on hexbear are unironically stating it is individualist and supportive of landownership to enjoy nature.

    • eatmyass
      ·
      1 year ago

      deleted by creator

    • Pavlichenko_Fan_Club [comrade/them]
      ·
      1 year ago

      Your analogy to farm wage-labour is silly. Yes, those those thoughts are actually wrong /in form/, and yes it is a characteristic of reactionaries to essentialize existing conditions. But the point is that you cannot stop there as that would conceal its contradictory elements, its laws of relation, and so on.

      Yes the farm worker is suffering under low pay, and long hours, but what's important isnt the just the truth of said claim, but the /history/ of its development. No, wage-labour is not natural--it had a historically specific development, so how did it come about and what are its contradictions, what is the specificity of farm work compared to other kinds of work, etc., Etc...

      Without a dialectical, historical materialist approach we cannot understand the world scientifically, and thus all of our actions will be blind in a sense.

      So given the discussions about cities and suburbs the question is /why/ are they like that--we all already know /what/ it is--so what is its concrete history that lead to its specific form today? With that know that valorizing a thing is not just valorizing its affect, but also its valorizing its history, and its function within the system as a whole. You may say that the comment you've made are simply about personal preference, but there is an (unconscious) probably) ideological component underlying them.