Is the US a dystopia?

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

otm

otm x 2

On way to the court pic.twitter.com/XrE9ExAzhm

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) June 24, 2022

There's no utopia that's not someone's dystopia, and vice versa.

― Infanta Terrible (j.lu), Saturday, December 11, 2021 11:15 AM (six months ago) bookmarkflaglink

Aaaand the Supreme Court tears down the legal precedents that had been keeping the US from becoming my idea of a dystopia.

NEW: Unhoused people in north LA County have faced a major police crackdown, banning them from camping + pushing them to live in the Mojave Desert, miles from running water, in severe heat. Data shows people are dying there.

🧵on folks I met in the deserthttps://t.co/7HbbnnWH7Y

— Sam Levin (@SamTLevin) July 18, 2022

The beef this has generated 👍

to be honest americans laughing at europe atop their 1.5-2x per capita gdp, multiple times higher carbon emissions, and genocide-cleared land as thousands die of heat exhaustion is fairly uncool imo

— joolsd (@joolsd) July 18, 2022

What "laughing" is that referring to?

P sure Europe has some genocide cleared land here and there as well fwiw.

love to compare genocides but it's really no contest

I've seen a post or two making fun of the air conditioning disparity. xp

If you include European colonial genocide I'm pretty sure Europe comes out ahead. And technically that includes any genocide in the Americas at least through the Revolutionary War.

the thing with (territorial) european genocides is that there were so many, overlapping the same bits of land, over so many centuries, that it’s kind of hard to keep track

looks like chancery… bold

this is a truly dismal debate, lads

xpost

If we’re really going to do the Oppression Olympics, on numbers alone the Holocaust would seem to be the record holder.

lol sorry wrong thread for my lame mac font joke

spiderman.jpg

europe and america are co-constitutive so the entire debate is moot there's plenty of blood to go around

iirc the Hitler picked up a lot of his tactics from the good ol USA, praising our racial conception of citizenship (not to mention the horrors meted out on native americans, etc). so yeah, seems like it’s been a fairly symbiotic exchange of ideas

anyway it’s real fucked up what’s happening in LA County!

left otm

re LA county — I wonder if there’s anything the president or the governor could do? like, that’s a genuine question. maybe LASD pulls rank? idk.

both are likely contenders to run in 2024. seems like a place to really show some leadership

this is the future though, unfortunately. all the people in charge seem to agree. speaking of genocide.