Is the US a dystopia?

Calling Evanston a suburb is like calling Oakland a suburb. I don’t usually think of suburbs as places very well served by public transit, with actual downtowns.

I did used to work in SF with a guy who commuted daily from Sacramento. He was a Salvadorean Jehovahs Witness. We all went out to his place in Sacto for Thanksgiving one time, it was typical ranch-style sprawl there.

Given the Chicagoland angle this discussion has taken, I'll chime in. I live in Kenosha, WI, which is a city in its own right but also a suburb/bedroom community for both Chicago and Milwaukee. It has its own USian dystopic suburban hellscape sections, and the townships around it have even more of those due to lax or nonexistent zoning and planning regulations. Much of it is so depressing I can't believe anyone lives there. Central Kenosha is quite walkable, nice and affordable by comparison, although there is no full service grocery in the central area, that's about the only missing amenity.

Several members of this biker club, Guardians of the Children, just followed, blocked and surrounded me as I tried to approach the cemetery to meet a photographer. One member says they’re working with police: “They asked us to be here.”

Short post: https://t.co/OfZCAZbUZx pic.twitter.com/5d6wsLKQ0k

— Julian Gill (@JulianGi11) June 2, 2022

cops and biker gangs merging, bodes well imo

cops and the proud boys were allies for a long time, i'm sure they are now, although the form that takes varies by city.

rolling stones used to use biker gangs as security, worked out well for the 60s

oh yeah, nothing is ever entirely new, I just use this thread to sadlollingly note news that resembles familiar fictional dystopias

Is it even worth pointing out the irony of the Uvalde police belonging to/subcontracting with a biker gang called Guardians of the Children. Bowie's line about being insulted by these fascists has popped into my head too many times over the past 7 years

cops and have been the proud boys were allies for a long time

there's a bit of a revolving door, a little bit of oathkeepin

Can’t remember where I read it, I think it was a leftist response to Resistance Lib luxuriating in Handmaid’s Tale imagery, but somebody pointed out a key thing about the concept of dystopia is that no dystopia is dystopic for _everybody_, and a helpful bit was to figure out who actually made out well in that scenario

Listening to this parter and the host talks about how it’s entirely possible that we can have an apocalypse but will still have marketing and social media and the Oscars afterward, b/c not all people are affected by the apocalypse the same way. This last point I think is avoided by most literature and discourse about dystopic societies

https://www.againsttheinternet.com/post/50-varieties-of-scientific-revolution-pt-1

https://www.againsttheinternet.com/post/52-varieties-of-scientific-revolution-pt-2

"guardians of the children" gimme a fucking break

everyone thinks they're working in the children's best interest, even as kids are gunned down in their classroom while the police are picking their noses out in the hall

no you don't understand "children" is my name for the pigs

This is the most dystopian thing I've read in at least a few days.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/06/bus-denver-pendemic-violence/

Similar story from a few months ago out of Seattle.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/drugs-on-buses-have-become-an-everyday-hazard-seattle-area-transit-workers-say/

Ugh

That WaPo article cites the LA sheriff’s dept as an expert source on transportation issues ffs.

I’ve ridden busses in Denver recently and I know there are issues but it was better than the normal I’ve seen in SF in years past. In all of these cities — Denver, LA, SF — there is a crisis of unhoused folks which tbh seemed to explode right around the time marijuana was legalized. I’m all for legalization but it seems like there are some underlying issues that have been amplified by selected states legalizing in the midst of a national housing shortage and a recession, without pumping sufficient funds in social support networks.

some underlying issues

like what? I honestly can't even guess what you think the correlation is here

Ah yes, blaming marijuana legalization for capitalism's culture of scarcity and cruelty.

Quite literally one of the stupidest takes I've read on here in a while.

Can’t remember where I read it, I think it was a leftist response to Resistance Lib luxuriating in Handmaid’s Tale imagery, but somebody pointed out a key thing about the concept of dystopia is that no dystopia is dystopic for _everybody_, and a helpful bit was to figure out who actually made out well in that scenario

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish)

this is kind of a challenge i have talking about my life with some people, there's this tendency for, look i don't want to call them out like this but liberals, to look at the last six years and talk about how they wish things were how they were back in the 1990s, and... i don't really remember the 1990s fondly?

it's a weird cognitive dissonance that i carry around in my head, knowing that the world i live in _is_ a hellish dystopia but at the same time life has literally never been better for me. (which complicates things because, uh, i don't generally get the sense that this dystopia was created for _my_ personal benefit.)

https://static.twentytwowords.com/wp-content/uploads/Screen-Shot-2014-05-09-at-9.47.38-AM.jpg

want a 2000-era This American Life rerun interviewing the Maine outlier who eats 16.4 pounds of margarine every year.

Your friends nostalgic to return to the 90s is probably just their unexamined nostalgia for when they personally felt their happiest. For many other people on this planet we all share, the 90s sucked. It was yet another decade of war and climate inaction!!!

Nostalgia is inherently myopic if not outright delusional.

some underlying issues

like what? I honestly can't even guess what you think the correlation is here

Like the housing crisis which imo has been significantly amplified by the role of AirBnb in this case. You DON’T think marijuana legalization created any excess housing demand from trustafarians in the Denver area? You don’t think some of those incoming trustafarians may have pushed some marginalized working class people there onto the streets?

As to the user who noted my superlative stupidity, did you rtfa? It makes some pretty specific connections between cannabis use and this crisis they’re describing, and again I will note it uses the fucking LA sheriffs department as an expert source here, of all the completely shitty hills for you to die on.

Christ those articles about the buses in Seattle & Denver are depressing. I rode the buses when I lived in Portland in the 80s and in LA some too, and it was true then too that some pretty intense characters could often be found on the bus, but not at that level of "it's just terrible all the time."

i cannot read washington post articles but i am not encouraged to hear that they used the LA sheriff's department as an expert source. an expert in what?

Sorry viborg, I'm still a little confused; did I miss a link? This is the only reference to the LA sheriff in the WaPo article that I saw:

"The sheriff of Los Angeles County had created a new transit unit to keep passengers from having to 'step over dead bodies or people injecting themselves.'"

I don't see any of the specific connections to cannabis use you mentioned, just lots of refs to fentanyl.

Anyway, I think I get that you're saying it's the piecemeal legalization of cannabis that's problematic. I don't know anything about the housing crisis in Denver specifically, so I can't argue with you on the details (though do you have to use the term "trustafarian"? Rastafarians don't deserve that imo).

But it still seems odd to me to focus on (the) cannabis (industry, even), given all the other dynamics mentioned by you and in the articles: Airbnb, the pandemic, fentanyl, etc. If nothing else, it sounds overwhelmingly like a housing issue not a cannabis issue to me, as the same dynamic would happen if lots of, e.g., tech money came to town.

Maybe more importantly, since the solution isn't to re-prohibit cannabis, identifying cannabis as the problem doesn't seem super helpful unless you're arguing for full, national legalization.

Not sure if you’re aware of the controversy involving allegations of systemic excessive force etc surrounding the LA sheriff’s department but they have no credibility as any kind of source for this story.

As for trustafarians, I maintain they are indefensible. I have nothing but respect and love for genuine Rasta culture, not so much for white guys who’ve never worked a real job in their lives and who imagine growing dreads and then blasting Legend on repeat while doing dabs ad nauseam makes them Rasta.

Overall seems like this is an issue you take somewhat personally. Sorry my intent was not to make this personal. But I think it’s naive to say legalization didn’t play a significant role in this case. Idk I didn’t live there, I was just visiting a friend who’s lived there for a few decades and who spent a lot of time on public transit. I could ask him for input, he’s quite a generous soul for the most part. (He seems to have a particular loathing for Ted Nugent tho.)

wait i think people thought you were saying the use of LASD as a source was making it more credible? i'm a little confused to be honest.

Please parse this statement for me.

"The sheriff of Los Angeles County had created a new transit unit to keep passengers from having to 'step over dead bodies or people injecting themselves.'"

The article mainly seems like a thesis in search of proof. I don’t see any particular analytical value in aside from confirmation of all our dystopian bias.

Drummer Chris, from Colorado.

“I'd say it's a mecca for homeless potheads from all across the country. There's shelters and free meals everywhere, I say Welcome! But public transit is full of homeless for sure. Many ride in the winter to get out of the cold.

Lots of homeless migrate, living in Colorado in summer, then head to warmer places for winter. It sounds interesting. Maybe the hobo life is for me!”

What

Okay if the drummer says so

will take 700000000 migratory homeless ppl over one NEllie Bowles

none of what you're saying makes sense, viborg

so the trustafarians fit into this how again? theyre taking legal-weed vacations and airbnb'ing in the working class housing stock that the homeless potheads would otherwise be renting during their summer migrations to denver? do i have to be high to follow all this?

it’s typical demonization of the homeless population and buying into conservative anti-weed hysteria at the same time.

30 year denver res says the overall volume of unhoused in the metro did increase in correlation to weed legalization in CO. what that means causally is more like “more than one thing can be true at a time. i mean it alsk correlates to the popularity of grav biking, but i’m pretty sure unrelated.

washpo story is so fucking dire. btw i don’t recommend the 0 bus much either, but eh bway is not cold facts ave.

Mitch McConnell calls on Democrats to pass Supreme Court security bill after man arrested outside Brett Kavanaugh's home

“House Democrats must pass this bill and they need to do it today. No more fiddling around with this, they need to pass it today …before the sun sets.” pic.twitter.com/pRDqnPPvK2

— philip lewis (@Phil_Lewis_) June 8, 2022

Not sure how this thread turned into talk about weed because it's pretty clear the actual drug problem contributing to and/or exacerbated by homelessness is opiates. I mean even anecdotally in my own mid-size city I've walked past multiple people shooting up on the sidewalk in broad daylight, which is something you absolutely never saw 10 years ago. (And weed remains illegal in my state fwiw, but we're seeing the same increases in homeless addicts as seemingly everywhere else.)

Or I guess I should say opioids, since fentanyl is a synthetic drug.

i mean it alsk correlates to the popularity of grav biking, but i’m pretty sure unrelated.

washpo story is so fucking dire. btw i don’t recommend the 0 bus much either, but eh bway is not cold facts ave

? Sorry Hunt3r, but I understood exactly none of this.

Sorry ymp, i was just agreeing that correlation of some trends to other issues can be like correlating margarine use to whatever that graph upthread showed and is often wrong.

and the second one was just a denverite comparing the RTD 0 route (Broadway) to the RTD 15 route (Colfax Ave).

Had the armed crazy guy been stalking Justice Sotomayor's home, McConnell would remind Dems of their solemn duty to uphold the 2nd Amendment, and the inalienable freedom of assembly within any liberal justice's shrubbery

Mitch McConnell will be Minority Leader in Hell.

i still have no idea what viborg is talking about

I and I don't either <tokes>

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-oracle-larry-ellison-lanai-hawaii-plans-tourism/

Everything's retro these days, even the dystopian elements of existence

i'm going with YES