I live in downtown Chicago but I occasionally take work in Springfield or Bloomington (which are small towns in central Illinois). The difference is night and day. Chicago is s vibrant beautiful city with beautiful people walking around at all hours of the day. The rural parts of Illinois are GHOST TOWNS. I walk around in the middle of the day in the middle of downtown and there’s literally nobody around. The food sucks. The handful of people I run into are very nice tho.
Red towns are nuts. That whole “hey there sugar” small town feeling is not true at all.
In my state, one town in particular had to beg residents to stop calling the police on tourists. Another town had their mayor do the whole “This does not represent the town” after a bunch of dudes in pick up trucks harassed businesses owned by PoC.
Another town, two years back, the drama was a big pro-gun town but the moment a brown dude with a rifle walked around, the sheriff swarmed them.
Red towns aren’t safe at all.
Red town people have mostly never left, they have no concept of the outside world other than what fox news tells them. They are afraid of everything.
That might be true further south but that’s not true in Rural Illinois. I’m a brown dude and most people I do end up meeting are very nice. I’m a doctor and I find the patients in these towns are much nicer and more respectful than the patients I get in Chicago. But obviously there’s a long history of medicine ignoring the complaints of minorities.
Most of the kidnappings, beatings, and shootings are taking place in blue states.
If you take ICE out of the equation blue states are much safer than red.
1000% incorrect. Texas is awash in illegal state run kidnappings right now but they’re all brown people so no one gives a shit.
You just proved them correct because that’s a “red state.”
blue states are already safer than red states, I’m not sure if you read that right.
You just repeated what Curious_canid said.
Are you unclear what awash means? And even with ICE, blue states are safer than red ones. I’m super confused about how your confused about this
If ICE are acting in both blue and red states, then it cancels out and has no effect on which is “safer” than the other. ICE or no ICE, blue states are safer is what @_stranger_ is implying.
I’m in Texas. I don’t have hard numbers, but I have personally witnessed ICE stops of vehicles, raids on neighborhoods where all the streets in and out we’re barricaded, half a dozen unmarked vehicles with all their lights on surrounding several tour bus-type vehicles in random parking lots, where dozens of people were getting arrested, etc NONE OF WHICH made even a passing mention on local news, social media, or even hyper local like nextdoor.
I drive a LOT, so I see more than most, but the fact that no one is talking about it makes me feel it’s either so ubiquitous it’s background noise here, or it’s being actively suppressed.
I pass up at least one unmarked ICE vehicle every single day on my commute. You can tell because they have lights hidden around them and are being driven by anthropomorphic swine in temu-tactical kit. The actual cops still wear uniforms at least.
I don’t doubt you at all, I was just trying to clarify your point (at least as I interpreted it, it seems I likely misinterpreted as well lol) as it was apparently falling on deaf ears
ICE is insignificant compared to overall crime rates. The blue states have lower crime rates no matter how you slice it.
I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt. They’re not anti-crime at all; they’re just racist, that’s all there is to them.
I was mostly being facetious. My point was that the overall crime rates are enough lower in blue states that ICE makes a disproportionate difference. Also, fuck ICE.
The top 3 states with the highest murder rate are Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, all red states. The 3 states with the lowest murder rates are Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. All blue states.
Lol do education next plz 😊
And healthcare.
They’re pretty much the same picture?
Yeah, but that’s only because everyone in Maine keeps getting killed by Stephen King monsters, and those are tracked as accidental deaths.
I’m not sure I would call NH and Maine blue states. They are more purple. E.g., both chambers of the NH legislature have Republican majorities right now.
NH and Maine are definitely not blue states. NY and California are blue states, NH is probably red and Maine purple.
I’ve got a friend from Louisiana and the way she describes it is terrifying including lots of murders. She feels so much safer in her blue city in the PNW
But it’s so dangerous in cities! Someone might see me putting my victim in the truck!
Ah yes…the old “this is what socialism looks like” argument while pointing at capitalism. Been hearing that a lot lately.
It has worked for them for like 100 years, why would they stop?
They don’t say things because they believe them to be true. They say things for the effect they want it to have. They lie. Or maybe just bullshit, because they don’t care about truth at all.
I visit NYC often to see family, and a business acquaintance is always amazed. He honestly thinks NYC is a warzone, with constant gunfire, random assaults, pollution, gangs, etc.
I have to tell him that crime in our Florida city is far worse than what happens in NYC. Some psychopath kills a BABY in our city about once a week. Random gunfire has interrupted public events several times in the past few years. One year there was a panic stampede because a firecracker went off, and people ran, because it’s very possible it was gunfire. Things like that never happen in NYC.
BTW, this person also brags that he’s never left the state in his entire life. Why would he? The rest of America is too dangerous. He’s also an enthusiastic, unapologetic MAGA, and believes every word of their propaganda.
I live near Seattle and nextdoor is filled with people who live less than an hour away that are absolutely convinced we’re all dodging bullets daily in the city. You show them data that not only is the city safer than ever but red states in general are more dangerous, they respond with extreme skepticism and outright denial of facts. Heard “there’s no crimes if you don’t report them” way too much, like people aren’t reporting murders.
Which funny enough does happen in rural red areas. When everybody knows everybody there’s incentive not to report crimes.
And yeah I go to Seattle from time to time and once I got used to the graffiti and the occasional unwell/intoxicated homeless person I’ve felt safer there than many parts of red states, even beyond my being queer. People will just tell you stories of horrific crimes from their small town and which people and places to avoid and you’re just like “how do you have enough people to have a bad part of town”
Yup, the bad drivers in Seattle are by far the most dangerous part.
I’m so confused. Your nextdoor neighbors live almost an hour away, in Seattle? And don’t know what Seattle is like? What?
Nextdoor also has news articles for your area, the Seattle articles get shared out to places relatively close geographically which can still be an hour or two away by car.
Nextdoor is some sort of social media app for areas. I thought it was for a small neighborhood, but this makes it sound like it can be larger.
The last time someone who wasn’t a cop shot at me was at the train station across the street from the police station.
In Lancaster. A red city hours north of LA, literally the end of the line for the regional trains. There was this guy who’d apparently been on the street screaming about how all the gays were gonna go to hell for weeks and we need to help put them there. Nobody did shit because everyone there agrees, despite at least three people having been worried about the guy doing some shit and his rhetoric escalating. I was just there to buy drugs. Some places you just shouldn’t go to.
Wait. Not only you’ve been shot at, but it happened more than once?
The only time in recent memory it wasn’t cops, yeah. You get way better deals on illicit shit in red cities/towns,
and shit happens there. I’m kind of a bargains-slut and I have an adventurous heart. Also the food is mostly garbage, and there’s a chance you get shot trying to buy it, though that time in Lancaster is the only time I’ve been shot at somewhere food was being sold. For an idea how red that part of town was: it was a farmers market roughly bounded on two sides by a mural of a b2 flying over generic idyllic farmland and a portrait mural of chuck Jaeger in front of a jet of some kind. On two other sides by a sheriff station and some other cop thing.Cops just do that. Kinda what they’re for.
Edit: I think either ice or USMC fired off some shots last year, but I couldn’t tell where and it might’ve just been in the air-which is still dangerous as hell but wasn’t ‘at me’ I don’t think. Might have been around the corner.
In the states. The blue states call the red states the “welfare states.” Simply put, the 5 blue states pay for ALL the red states services combined because they’re so poor and dilapidated and broken and uneducated. Poor little fellas vote so heavily against their own interests, they should be so lucky to have those 5 blue states.
Last time I checked Florida & Texas were exempt from that particular “all red states” grouping.
Yes, but Texas has 3 major population centers which are all pretty blue, not just Austin, and has benefited from destroying the environment through the sale of oil, which definitely subsidized itself a little (incidentally Texas should be the wealthiest per capita state if they’d socialized their oil sales instead of allowing like 3 guys in charge of 3 companies to make 90% of the money). Florida has a decent population and gets a lot of tourism money, so arguably is subsidized by external funds still.
I think the largest red city in Texas is Lubbock, which is in fact a complete shit hole. You are more than x2 as likely to be a victim of a violent crime in Lubbock than in Austin.
Florida cities are pretty liberal too. Except maybe Jacksonville but that’s nearly In Georgia. And Naples but that’s all expat northerners, and there is nobody more racist than the northerners that move down here.
Jacksonville has a Democratic mayor and voted for Biden in 2024 IIRC.
Cool. It’s also enormous because they decided the whole county was the City of Jacksonville so that’s pretty impressive. Tampa is progressive but if you included all of Hillsborough County we would not be.
Even if Texas had put all the oil into a sovereign fund, like at least one of the scandanavian states, I don’t think they would come close to beating Alaska, at least not per capita. AK just has way more oil and way fewer people than TX
True I think, I was mostly thinking of lower 48. Texans should have all the quality of life of California, but instead we get toxic sludge basically everywhere and 0 public land to do fun things and see nature in, basically.
should have all the quality of life of California
Nah, I think you got some fraction of what you deserved.
Haha well I’m from a blue state, and a socialist. I presume the you here is a royal you applying to Texans who have voted for their own oppression? Even then, better to encourage change than attack those working for it.
Ah. You said we.
‘Voted’; Texan history is one of white supremacist violence extraction bigotry and horror. Fuck em. That culture that identity and its adherents need to go.
If there’s a Mexican family who’s lived there since it was mexico or an indigenous group that somehow survived, I wish them many hugs and some real tacos.
Florida and Texas receive massive federal subsidies, paid for with the taxes generated, primarily, from these blue states.
Sounds like communism.
Hey watch it with that C word… they prefer the other C word… capitalism. That benefits far fewer more important people.
No, when it only ever goes one way its fine.
When people look back at this time in a historical sense. They will see and understand that we ARE in a civil war right now. It has already started and only one side is fighting. The enemy is slowly dividing us and putting their enemies in CONCENTRATION CAMPS one by one.
A Civil War waged on us by t He very same remnants of the confederate traitors that we were nice to and let live after their TREASON.
We’ve been in a civil war since the Confederacy, it just went cold for a while. We never actually defeated the treasonous slavers or even held them accountable.
We’ve written off so much harm in the name of national healing. But sometimes an important part of healing is cutting off the rot.
Didn’t kill enough confederates. Every officer needed to be hanged, and their kids either killed or adopted out to black families (the people who were gonna do the actual raising anyway, and in many cases blood relatives because of all the rape), their wives sterilized, etc. Fighting a war of racial identity and subjugation should have wages of racial extermination and subjugation; that identity needs to be ended. Nobody should ever be able to meaningfully identify as that ever again.
After this we need to do something like that for the fascists. The weird stochastic terror groups. Anyone who runs a social media platform or mainstream news entertainment. Even if you’re not a communist or anarchist, the capitalist regime must be dismantled to punish them. As much the christian church. If they want something similar, I’m sure they can find a willing imam.
There needs to be real punishment for blatant and intentional lying in positions of public trust and power FOR EVERYONE.
It should be treated worse than perjury and have meaningful jail time.
When the Idiot Cult says cities are a “warzone”, what they really mean is “black people are often living in cities and I am a racist POS who thinks all black people are criminal thugs.”
Its nothing more or less.
Its just racism. MAGA is a racist cult of idiots.
Also, if there was any semblance of them looking “like a warzone”, it’s because the president intentionally, illegally, deployed military there for partisan fuckery.
So it’s them making it look that way
It’s also just what they’re told on Fox News, etc., most of them have never set foot in a major US city.
Probably the same suburban people who think 3 black people within a half-mile radius of each other constitutes gang activity
“Trump is 100% right” only applies to his political orientation as head of the new American Nazi Party formerly known as “Republicans”.
Where is this socialism, I’m dying to see it.
I’d love to hear what these people think socialism is.
It’s always projection from the far right.
the far right.
Is there any other right?
Depends on how one defines right.
It extends well beyond the US. If you look at the comments on anything Olivia Chow (leftist mayor of Toronto) posts, you’d think that a stroll to the supermarket is comparable to a few laps of Death Race. Sprinkled with thinly veiled racism of course.
The only time I feel unsafe anywhere in Los Angeles is when a cop comes nearby, I try to ride a bike outside of a park, the cloud of tear gas the cops shot starts blowing towards me, when I am too close to orange county, when when I see someone who looks like they’re from orange county, when I pass a Tesla, when its 3 am (7 pm in Venice beach) and the taco trucks are all closed and I’m hungry and a little drunk and there’s just nothing to be done.
Or when the feds jump out and try to disappear somebody. That’s pretty jarring.
Edit: also when the utility company given a state enforced monopoly decides to set half the city on fire and its really pretty but you know the carcinogens in that smoke be craaaaazy. Or when there’s a lot of wind and I think for a split second it might be another earthquake. Or when the cops spam the emergency alert channel with ‘please do our jobs for us’ even though I set it to ‘serious fucking danger only’. Or when the cops just blow up a fucking neighborhood. They do that sometimes. And I wasn’t here for it but when the CIA was flooding the city with crack and having the cops move it around for them I bet it was legit scary.
Or when the feds jump out and try to disappear somebody. That’s pretty jarring.
The part that’s actually turning our cities into a warzone.
I like how your example of “well beyond the US” is a city which is physically visible while still standing in the States.
as an australian, don’t you know anything not visible without a US passport is a government conspiracy?
What
Every city run by the left looks like a warzone
Where are they getting this shit from? Oh wait, I know. The mindless repetition still boggles the mind.
I like how the Norwegian feigns ignorance (or so I choose to read it):
Are you ina civil war or something? 🤪
Where are they getting this shit from? Oh wait, I know.
Yep. Absolutely constant repetition from Fox News. Didn’t you hear, Portland has completely burned down at least 5 times already. Boy, they sure are good at rebuilding it from the ashes, though – you can barely tell when you visit! (These people never visit the ‘warzone’ cities.)
Haven’t you seen the no kings rallies and the anti ice protests?
Literal warzones, disobeying the overlord and his goons
I’m fully convinced that rhetoric is manufacturing consent to military style occupation of blue cities.
