Or centralize it in the Midwest and put it next to the work that enables us to eat and use diesel to make consumable calories. Columbus, Des Moines, Oklahoma City. This is the way.
I'm sorry, I'm sure this was an innocent typo, but seeing a "tech bro" mythologize the midwest and then misspell Oklahoma is just too funny. You realize OKC has a higher violent crime rate than SF right?
Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.
I just think it's so bizarre watching people act as if Oklahoma of all places is a beacon of rational governance and domestic tranquility.
(Source: I grew up there and it's no different from most other places in the country. Our country's problems are dispersed fairly homogeneously. The opioid crisis is not limited to cities and neither is homelessness)
I don't know if people really comprehend that it's a national issue and not localized to any area. Inequality + years of segregation and neglect + drugs have been left to fester and our only tool against these issues has been a big boot.
Suburbanites are insulated by 20 miles of highway from the problematic areas and can't even fathom what it's like-- the talking heads on their TV are more real to them than whatever is happening in the inner city. But even then their kids are popping xanax and getting DUIs. They just have a better support system and can continue functioning in society instead of getting locked up. In rural areas too, there's so much drug crime and violent crime.
The unfortunate part is that our anti-poor propaganda works flawlessly even on the conventionally "smart" as we can see in threads like these.
What happens is SF doesn't have the traditional US organizational structure of 'heavily policed mall-like downtown -> elevated highway over poor neighborhoods -> suburbs' (like it or not, even NYC has turned into that with the gentrification of Manhattan and extreme Western Long Island).
So people see all that a city has to offer when they go to SF, while they'll never set foot in East New York.
For the most part, anywhere that Democrats have held TOTAL power for decades is a dump. They become more of a dump as the politics become more progressive and they hold even more power. We should acknowledge this. That having total Democrat control results in really bad places. They need to be challenged.
NYC is a great example. Was a dump until Giuliani came in and became the gold standard city when Bloomberg took over for 12 years. He called himself a Democrat at the end, but they all hated him because he was pragmatic and got shit done. There was a tension there though and it worked out well.
DeBlasio came in and almost immediately things started to turn. As SF has consolidated power it has just fell off the deep end. Chicago has this story going for 50 years.
2000 vs 2021
Murder 673, 488, down 185 27.5%
Rape 2068, 1491, down 577 27.9%
Robbert 32562, 13831, down 18731 57.5%
Felony Assault 25924, 22835, down 2089 11.9%
Burglary 38362, 12811, down 25551 66.6%
Grand Larceny 49631, 40870, down 8761 17.7%
Auto Theft 35442, 10415, down 25027 70.6%
Progressives ran these places in the 70’s and 80’s and they went moderate in the 90’s and 00’s mainly. Progressive last 10 or so years and they’re dying again.
I know this thread is old but I can't help pointing out that Guliani ran nyc until 2001.
Rudolph W. Giuliani 1994-2001
Shouldn't the crime rate in 2000 be lower than today? He wasn't a progressive, he followed the broken window theory, cracked down on small crimes, blah blah evidence.
You think crime is bad in nyc because of a campaign by Republicans/conservatives to make cities look bad combined with an actual recent hike in crime probably due to Covid causing layoffs in the service sector and now inflation
> every midwestern city of any size is violent as fuck. STL, KC, Indy, Chicago, OKC
If there's nothing there, why are they so violent? Answer: they really aren't. If you've lived in a midwestern city you'd know that there are areas that have more violence (like probably any city) than others, but I would wager that proportionally they're much smaller compared to outlying metro areas than larger cities.
I've spent a few weeks in each of SF and Chicago. SF constantly felt worse/scarier/more tense.
Most of that time in both cities was in business and/or tourist districts. There are pockets of Chicago I would definitely avoid, but the core felt safe. In SF, the core does not feel safe.
* Oklahoma had the highest incarceration rate in the United States (or the world if you compared it to other countries). Most of the people in prison there are in for drug crimes.*
At least in the Midwest the thugs have the courtesy to congregate in known bad areas.
I fixed this in response to Green Man's comment.