Pro/Regressives and hive-cities

[REGENDarySumanai]

I prefer the area I am in right now. The right amount of urban and the right amount of rural, while having easy access to five major cities in less than four hours.

 

[Marissa Moira]

I prefer the area I am in right now. The right amount of urban and the right amount of rural, while having easy access to five major cities in less than four hours.

Literally the figurative textbook definition of suburbia.

 

[Sprig of Parsley]

Literally the figurative textbook definition of suburbia.

The fuck.

 

[Hellbound Hellhound]

I lived in the middle of a city once, and I pretty much hated it. Though it came with many undeniable conveniences, there was something decidedly depressing about life there. I think for people who are not used to it, living in a city can have a disconcerting effect on you, and for me personally, this feeling became most apparent at night, when I could look out of the window and realize that unlike the suburbs or the countryside, a city never truly sleeps. Perhaps that is normal to the people who are used to it, but to me, it felt eerie and unnatural.

This might just be my catastrophizing mindset, but I can't help but feel that a lot of cities have something of a dystopian quality about them. They're like a window into a nightmarish future where we are all crammed together like sardines into these imposing yet soulless mega-structures, and forced to subsist on Soylent Green. What's even scarier for me is the fact that there are many people who seem to welcome this kind of future.

 

[Marco Fucko]

I actually like cities because you can walk everywhere and there is a certain privacy and anonymity since people are too busy with their own shit to bother you.

Cities drive you fucking insane. That's pretty much it. Cities fuck with your notion of personal space, they fuck with your perception of how society fucking works, they distort how you view other human beings. In a city you are constantly on guard against everything, you trust almost no one, you deadbolt your apartment door at all times, you never go somewhere you aren't familiar with on your own, you hate the cops because they're useless fucking pissants that are completely incapable of Protecting or Serving, you hate your neighbors because they do exceptional shit that makes the one place that should be a safe haven for you into a torture chamber, you hate your elected officials because they do nothing but soak up taxpayer dollars while the city issues that affect you get ignored in favor of some asshole's pet project.

tfw born crazy

 

[Meat Poultry Veg]

I can't help but feel that a lot of cities have something of a dystopian quality about them. They're like a window into a nightmarish future where we are all crammed together like sardines into these imposing yet soulless mega-structures, and forced to subsist on Soylent Green. What's even scarier for me is the fact that there are many people who seem to welcome this kind of future.

They're called Asians.

 

[Randall Fragg]

I love it when people whine about 'muh superior agrarian society' while conveniently ignoring the fact that cities exist because they have economic incentives which bring people to them.
Blumpkin County is nothing more than a bunch of doped-up inbred angry about 'damn big city liberals' and imagining that any place with over 500 inhabitants is some kind of Judge Dredd-esque hellhole because 'I done seen it on the talky bawks'.
Take the Bobpill motherfuckers. Superior Future!

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

Cities drive you fucking insane. That's pretty much it. Cities fuck with your notion of personal space, they fuck with your perception of how society fucking works, they distort how you view other human beings. In a city you are constantly on guard against everything, you trust almost no one, you deadbolt your apartment door at all times, you never go somewhere you aren't familiar with on your own, you hate the cops because they're useless fucking pissants that are completely incapable of Protecting or Serving, you hate your neighbors because they do exceptional shit that makes the one place that should be a safe haven for you into a torture chamber, you hate your elected officials because they do nothing but soak up taxpayer dollars while the city issues that affect you get ignored in favor of some asshole's pet project.

I live in a city right now (and have for 6 years) and this is so far removed from my experience that I feel like we live on different planets.

I love it when people whine about 'muh superior agrarian society' while conveniently ignoring the fact that cities exist because they have economic incentives which bring people to them.
Blumpkin County is nothing more than a bunch of doped-up inbred angry about 'damn big city liberals' and imagining that any place with over 500 inhabitants is some kind of Judge Dredd-esque hellhole because 'I done seen it on the talky bawks'.

Needlessly hostile for joke reasons, but I do feel like there's an irrational level of negative stereotyping about urban life on this site.

 

[Xarpho]

I think it's funny especially with people like Moviebob, who despite living in a big city is effectively a hermit. I feel he particularly likes the idea of the city rather than the actualities of the city. It is a place with all minorities and few whites, all enlightened euphoric atheists and few disgusting religious people, and all fart-sniffing liberals and few dangerous conservatives.

Big city liberals have a really skewed idea of minorities, pretending to be in their favor as long as they stay out of their neighborhood but still provide good ethnic food. But it goes beyond all that. It's this weird romanticization of mid-century cities (clustered city core) that are particularly annoying, and yet you can find these things all sorts of places with their own blogs like Citylab and Streetsblog. They hate cars with passion and will sperg about highways, trains, buses, cars, suburbs, parking lots, and bicycle safety. (Interestingly but expectedly, they will only look at things in affluent city cores, like discussing removing an aging but major arterial highway near downtown but never mentioning an outdated highway in a poorer part of town being redeveloped). They want nothing with a parking lot in front of it (if there's a parking lot at all). For a look at this sperging, check out this recent article about a new sidewalk in Denver (don't worry, it's an archived link).

Some people are committed batshit insane idealogues, some people are just bored millennials trying to escape from the suburbs (before reality sets in). If I had a bit more dedication to make an OP it would make a great Community Watch thread.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Pol Pot was right. Cities are dens of evil.

 

[escapegoat]

Didn't Aesop already cover this?

 

[pomme]

I live in a city right now (and have for 6 years) and this is so far removed from my experience that I feel like we live on different planets.


Needlessly hostile for joke reasons, but I do feel like there's an irrational level of negative stereotyping about urban life on this site.

It's because we are all alt-right, cousin-fucking Nazis who have grown accustomed to a rural lifestyle which enables our backwards social ideas.
(Rural life ftw, cities are built for rats)

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Come to think of it, I'll just go ahead and take another opportunity to spout off about my vaguely-related ideas.

People in cities often have a genuine belief that:
1) The South is like Deliverance.
2) Everything rural is like the South (???)
3) Everything rural is like Deliverance.

There's this weird notion that rural people are sketchy, untrustworthy, hateful towards outsiders, dangerous.

In reality, rural America is way more peaceful than urban America, and rural people are way more polite/friendly than urban people. Urbanites sometimes think rural people are somehow dishonest in their friendliness, which seems to mostly be suspicion coming from their own negative attitude.

You are way more likely to get murder-raped by a retard in a Northern city than you are in the Southern mountains.

 

[Webby's Boyfriend]

Cities are something that developed before the internet was invented.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

It's because we are all alt-right, cousin-fucking Nazis who have grown accustomed to a rural lifestyle which enables our backwards social ideas.
(Rural life ftw, cities are built for rats)

I never said any of that.

Come to think of it, I'll just go ahead and take another opportunity to spout off about my vaguely-related ideas.

As someone from the south, let me address some of these points:

People in cities often have a genuine belief that

Saying "people in cities" is like saying "green-eyed people" or "left-handed people": it's not a very good signifier of being part of X or Y tribe.

1) The South is like Deliverance.
2) Everything rural is like the South (???)
3) Everything rural is like Deliverance.

This may be a stupid thing people think, but I'd just like to point out that there are plenty of major urban and metropolitan areas in the South (Atlanta, the Research Triangle, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Richmond, Charlotte, etc.) and the idea that these places "don't count" is absurd.

There's this weird notion that rural people are sketchy, untrustworthy, hateful towards outsiders, dangerous.

As someone who grew up in the rural South, I am just going to ask you now: have you had any meaningful interaction with the rural South? Because if you did, you would understand that the belief that rural people are sketchy, untrustworthy, hateful towards outsiders, and dangerous stems from the fact that there's a significant minority of rural people who are sketchy, untrustworthy, hateful towards outsiders, and dangerous. The McDonalds in my hometown had three murders go down in its parking lot in as many years, two of which were related to inter-family blood feuds (the third was a mugging gone bad). It was closed down the year before I moved out because meth was being sold through the drive-thru. Its common knowledge that there are entire regions of the backcountry that you don't drive through if you aren't a member of a certain clan (or race: there's an area where a lot of very angry Eastern Band Cherokee people live that's essentially off-limits to whitey on pain of pain). My hometown survives entirely off of tourist money and there are still large portions of the native population that would rather all the tourists fuck off and leave them alone. A neighboring town deliberately drove off all of the tourists as a matter of policy and has had a massive population and infrastructure crash and they consider this a moral victory. In addition, my county leads the state in teen pregnancy and is dead last in high school grad rates.

In reality, rural America is way more peaceful than urban America, and rural people are way more polite/friendly than urban people.

I suspect that the former is a matter of statistics (because there are more people in urban America, there's going to be more crime even if everything else is equal), while the latter is very cultural and specific. Rural Mainers, for example, can be very, very rude with little provocation.

Urbanites sometimes think rural people are somehow dishonest in their friendliness, which seems to mostly be suspicion coming from their own negative attitude.

I can't comment on rural people elsewhere, but in the South, a lot of the time the friendliness is dishonest: there's a reason the phrase "bless your heart" is understood by Appalachians to be the socially-acceptable version of "fuck you".

You are way more likely to get murder-raped by an exceptional individual in a Northern city than you are in the Southern mountains.

Once again, I think this is a statistical thing.

TL;DR: as a rural Southerner, I think you're engaging in condescending romanticism towards rural people in general and the rural South in particular.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

I never said any of that.

As someone from the south, let me address some of these points:

Saying "people in cities" is like saying "green-eyed people" or "left-handed people": it's not a very good signifier of being part of X or Y tribe.

That's not a very interesting point.

This may be a stupid thing people think, but I'd just like to point out that there are plenty of major urban and metropolitan areas in the South (Atlanta, the Research Triangle, Miami, New Orleans, Dallas, Richmond, Charlotte, etc.) and the idea that these places "don't count" is absurd.

Well, yeah, but I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. It's rare that metropolitan areas of the South are ever considered in stereotypes/impressions of the region. South Florida is its own cultural region that other Southerners don't adcknowledge (having passed to the carpetbagger invasion), New Orleans is usually treated as its own entity, and Nashville/sometimes Memphis is sometimes considered. I live closer to Richmond and Charlotte than to Chicago and Detroit, and I still don't give a shit about Richmond and Charlotte.

As someone who grew up in the rural South, I am just going to ask you now: have you had any meaningful interaction with the rural South? Because if you did, you would understand that the belief that rural people are sketchy, untrustworthy, hateful towards outsiders, and dangerous stems from the fact that there's a significant minority of rural people who are sketchy, untrustworthy, hateful towards outsiders, and dangerous. The McDonalds in my hometown had three murders go down in its parking lot in as many years, two of which were related to inter-family blood feuds (the third was a mugging gone bad). It was closed down the year before I moved out because meth was being sold through the drive-thru. Its common knowledge that there are entire regions of the backcountry that you don't drive through if you aren't a member of a certain clan (or race: there's an area where a lot of very angry Eastern Band Cherokee people live that's essentially off-limits to whitey on pain of pain). My hometown survives entirely off of tourist money and there are still large portions of the native population that would rather all the tourists fuck off and leave them alone. A neighboring town deliberately drove off all of the tourists as a matter of policy and has had a massive population and infrastructure crash and they consider this a moral victory. In addition, my county leads the state in teen pregnancy and is dead last in high school grad rates.

Motherfucker, I have lived in Appalachia, in a small town, since I was a toddler. The experience you've described is something I've never heard any Yankee mention, but I've heard many say the opposite. It may depend more on what specific region you're in. I assume you're from Cherokee, NC. I'll still gamble on walking a night through that reservation before I ever try that in the South Side of Chicago.

I suspect that the former is a matter of statistics (because there are more people in urban America, there's going to be more crime even if everything else is equal), while the latter is very cultural and specific. Rural Mainers, for example, can be very, very rude with little provocation.

Mainers are Yankees, who are more hostile than Southerners by nature. I bet you they're more friendly than Bostonians (as long as we're comparing people within an area).

I can't comment on rural people elsewhere, but in the South, a lot of the time the friendliness is dishonest: there's a reason the phrase "bless your heart" is understood by Appalachians to be the socially-acceptable version of "fuck you".

And a lot of the time, the friendliness is honest, or the friendliness is neutral and just a courtesy extended to people in general. Let's consider what the alternative is. Midwestern indifference? Northeastern hostility? If the person who's being friendly isn't trying to screw you, I consider that an improvement in behavior over treating them like they're invisible. It bothers me that I can see the sentiment here changing towards a cosmopolitan attitude of not holding doors, not addressing people as sir/ma'am, not greeting strangers on the sidewalk.

TL;DR: as a rural Southerner, I think you're engaging in condescending romanticism towards rural people in general and the rural South in particular.

As a rural Southerner, I think it's possible that I may have been raised in an uncharacteristically civilized part of the region, but my carpetbagger parents and neighbors never showed any negative opinions of the South other than a patronizing disapproval of its politics (more so the neighbors for that last part). If my view is too romanticized, yours is probably too negative.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

That's not a very interesting point.



Well, yeah, but I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. It's rare that metropolitan areas of the South are ever considered in stereotypes/impressions of the region. South Florida is its own cultural region that other Southerners don't adcknowledge (having passed to the carpetbagger invasion), New Orleans is usually treated as its own entity, and Nashville/sometimes Memphis is sometimes considered. I live closer to Richmond and Charlotte than to Chicago and Detroit, and I still don't give a shit about Richmond and Charlotte.



Motherfucker, I have lived in Appalachia, in a small town, since I was a toddler. The experience you've described is something I've never heard any Yankee mention, but I've heard many say the opposite. It may depend more on what specific region you're in. I assume you're from Cherokee, NC. I'll still gamble on walking a night through that reservation before I ever try that in the South Side of Chicago.



Mainers are Yankees, who are more hostile than Southerners by nature. I bet you they're more friendly than Bostonians (as long as we're comparing people within an area).



And a lot of the time, the friendliness is honest, or the friendliness is neutral and just a courtesy extended to people in general. Let's consider what the alternative is. Midwestern indifference? Northeastern hostility? If the person who's being friendly isn't trying to screw you, I consider that an improvement in behavior over treating them like they're invisible. It bothers me that I can see the sentiment here changing towards a cosmopolitan attitude of not holding doors, not addressing people as sir/ma'am, not greeting strangers on the sidewalk.



As a rural Southerner, I think it's possible that I may have been raised in an uncharacteristically civilized part of the region, but my carpetbagger parents and neighbors never showed any negative opinions of the South other than a patronizing disapproval of its politics (more so the neighbors for that last part). If my view is too romanticized, yours is probably too negative.

1. Swain County, although I don't live there anymore and won't go further than that for fear of someone trying to dig up my kin. And I'd rather walk through the South Side at night than walk through a trailer park in Big Cove in broad daylight. They murder people with swords and beat up the cops for fun there. It's a step beyond ordinary gangster violence. Relying on what a snowbird tourist has to say about your area and weighing that above someone from the area seems kind of biased to me.
2. You seem pretty blind to the cultures of other parts of the country: the Midwest, for example, has a large number of (superficially) polite and nice people there (source: essentially live with my grandparents in Ohio during December); it reminds me a lot of the South, but cold, to be honest. As for people in the NE, they're brusque and blunt, but if you get to know them they warm up to you. I think characterizing your culture-group as the Last Bastion of Civilization in a World Gone Mad is very natural, but also not really productive, especially if it leads you to a conclusion like "Maoist Third-Worldists were objectively correct when they wanted to burn all the cities to the ground and make everyone live in huts".
3. I'll yield that I may be biased because I got to see the worst parts of the South, but I will stand firm in my position that the difference between rural, urban, South, North, Midwest, and West is one of kind, not of overall quality.

 

[Spunt]

I spent most of my life in a fucking massive European city, and have now left for the country. I thought I'd miss it, but it was 25-year-old me that would have missed it, not 35-year-old me who values peace and quiet and a slower pace of life to constant stimulation and everything being on your doorstep. Of course, people tend to move from Left to Right politically around this time (and in general as they get older) so it might be a change of life priorities. I don't have kids, but raising kids in the middle of a city if a nightmare for both kids and parents, with suburbia and the country (at least in Europe) offering better schools, more safety and more room for kids to fuck around and be kids without getting in trouble. Plus you can buy a big enough house for your family in the country, whereas the price for anything in a big European city that isn't a rotting shoebox is beyond the wildest avarice of man for the most part. Renting a tiny box is fine if you're partying, working and studying 24/7, but once you have kids and your body can't take that lifestyle anymore that has a big effect on your priorities. I just wanted to get the fuck out.

The kids thing is huge. Few SJWs have kids, either because SJW ideology or their own out-there sexual preferences (polyamory, transgenderism, lgbbqwtf) don't lead to procreation as much, or because having kids make you more conservative as you start to care about their safety, their job security and their freedom in a way you never really cared about your own. Only the dirt-poor or mega-rich raise their kids in cities. Everyone else leaves.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

1. Swain County, although I don't live there anymore and won't go further than that for fear of someone trying to dig up my kin. And I'd rather walk through the South Side at night than walk through a trailer park in Big Cove in broad daylight. They murder people with swords and beat up the cops for fun there. It's a step beyond ordinary gangster violence. Relying on what a snowbird tourist has to say about your area and weighing that above someone from the area seems kind of biased to me.
2. You seem pretty blind to the cultures of other parts of the country: the Midwest, for example, has a large number of (superficially) polite and nice people there (source: essentially live with my grandparents in Ohio during December); it reminds me a lot of the South, but cold, to be honest. As for people in the NE, they're brusque and blunt, but if you get to know them they warm up to you. I think characterizing your culture-group as the Last Bastion of Civilization in a World Gone Mad is very natural, but also not really productive, especially if it leads you to a conclusion like "Maoist Third-Worldists were objectively correct when they wanted to burn all the cities to the ground and make everyone live in huts".
3. I'll yield that I may be biased because I got to see the worst parts of the South, but I will stand firm in my position that the difference between rural, urban, South, North, Midwest, and West is one of kind, not of overall quality.

I'll look up Swain County. The snowbirds actually live in the area, have for over a decade. It's a retirement community of Yankee world-savers in among a more generic Appalachian population. They usually look down on the Southerners politically but have good things to say about the area, never making the connection that the area is livable in large part because of the easy government.

I don't consider my group to be particularly great. I like Southern culture for its more independent and earthy attitude. However, the South is, in many ways, like a Third World country, and a lot of that stems from the attitudes of its people. Southerners have a strange attitude where they'll often be hard physical laborers, but lazy in every other regard. They have little desire to improve their towns (like New Englanders do) and little appreciation for intellectual activity. Really, my impression of Southerners is the same as everybody else's stereotype, except minus the murder-rape-banjo stuff (which is pretty much a figment of the cosmopolitan imagination), and I find them preferable to Genericans (people who mimic that sort of suburban, Midwestern-accented-but-not-actually-Midwestern culture from the sitcoms).

Given the choice of being around Genericans or rednecks, I find that even though I don't really relate to the things that rednecks are interested in, I find rednecks way more personable, way more enjoyable being around. The Generican isn't arrogant or anything, but there's just a blandness to their personality, a reservedness that makes them tiring to be around.

What you said about New Englanders can be said of everybody, except for in the special cases where a culture has beef with another culture and doesn't accept crossing over. The closest thing to that I've seen around here is church snobbery, but I don't think they really care about regional heritage, just the denomination.

My Pol Pot statement was just a joke. Cities have their need. I just think there really is a lot of truth to the idea that cities are breeding grounds for bad morals. Somebody else already mentioned how Aesop said the same thing. It's just the natural consequence of taking a lot of people and putting them into an environment where they have too many options for misbehavior and too few controls on them.

The statement about differences in kind has merit. For the record, I consider Midwesterners to be the master race of America. They strike me as mostly being grounded people who have a natural propensity for community-building (unlike the lazy Southerner) but aren't prone to the hateful, moralizing bullshit of New Englanders. I figure it goes from their largely German heritage. Midwesterners are people who leave other people alone and build up their lives. Southerners are prone to lazing about and squabbling, Californians/New Englanders/Jews/NYCers are prone to degenerate modern trends and have a compulsion to impose them on everybody else.

 

[KimCoppolaAficionado]

I'll look up Swain County. The snowbirds actually live in the area, have for over a decade. It's a retirement community of Yankee world-savers in among a more generic Appalachian population. They usually look down on the Southerners politically but have good things to say about the area, never making the connection that the area is livable in large part because of the easy government.

I don't consider my group to be particularly great. I like Southern culture for its more independent and earthy attitude. However, the South is, in many ways, like a Third World country, and a lot of that stems from the attitudes of its people. Southerners have a strange attitude where they'll often be hard physical laborers, but lazy in every other regard. They have little desire to improve their towns (like New Englanders do) and little appreciation for intellectual activity. Really, my impression of Southerners is the same as everybody else's stereotype, except minus the murder-rape-banjo stuff (which is pretty much a figment of the cosmopolitan imagination), and I find them preferable to Genericans (people who mimic that sort of suburban, Midwestern-accented-but-not-actually-Midwestern culture from the sitcoms).

Given the choice of being around Genericans or rednecks, I find that even though I don't really relate to the things that rednecks are interested in, I find rednecks way more personable, way more enjoyable being around. The Generican isn't arrogant or anything, but there's just a blandness to their personality, a reservedness that makes them tiring to be around.

What you said about New Englanders can be said of everybody, except for in the special cases where a culture has beef with another culture and doesn't accept crossing over. The closest thing to that I've seen around here is church snobbery, but I don't think they really care about regional heritage, just the denomination.

My Pol Pot statement was just a joke. Cities have their need. I just think there really is a lot of truth to the idea that cities are breeding grounds for bad morals. Somebody else already mentioned how Aesop said the same thing. It's just the natural consequence of taking a lot of people and putting them into an environment where they have too many options for misbehavior and too few controls on them.

The statement about differences in kind has merit. For the record, I consider Midwesterners to be the master race of America. They strike me as mostly being grounded people who have a natural propensity for community-building (unlike the lazy Southerner) but aren't prone to the hateful, moralizing bullshit of New Englanders. I figure it goes from their largely German heritage. Midwesterners are people who leave other people alone and build up their lives. Southerners are prone to lazing about and squabbling, Californians/New Englanders/Jews/NYCers are prone to degenerate modern trends and have a compulsion to impose them on everybody else.

I think I agree with like 90% of what you're saying and the remaining 10% is the result of differing axioms, so I'll chalk this up as a win. However, since you're also a Southerner, I am bound by honor and tradition to ask the most important and dangerous question any Southerner can ask another...
What's the best kind of barbeque?