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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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Did you think the hard times were going to create strong men by getting everyone to do more pushups?

My hope is that this shifts her beliefs to strongly support giving her the means to actually threaten a hostile crowd and she becomes a GoA life member and CCW holder in a better city.

the hard times were going to create strong men

I'm pretty sure that's been fairly strongly debunked.

cyclical history as an idea has been falsified

How?

CCW in New York is impossible. You used to not be able to get a permit. Now after Bruen you can get a permit but it's not good in a huge list of places which make it impractical to use, including hopsitals I believe. Also I think it would be illegal to carry while riding a Citibike.

The difficulty of CCW varies by by body-type and wardrobe, not by state.

The only wardrobe which will allow CCW in New York City is a police uniform. Yes, I know what you mean, but the chance of you successfully concealing a weapon in NYC indefinitely while going about your business day after day and year after year is pretty much zero, unless you stick to bad neighborhoods.

Yes, that's what I meant by a better city. I'd like events like this to get her to move to a nice Midwestern city after learning about what qualities in a politician make their new home a good place and leave NYC to the Subway psychos and bike hasslers.

NYC has (and has had ever since the Giuliani era - the de Blasio murder spike was part of a nationwide phenomenon) unusually low crime for US medium-large cities. Non-NYC cities make it easier for a white middle-class hospital employee to personally avoid the crime by commuting by car from their home in one all-white suburb to their job in another all-white suburb, but the core city of the "nice Midwestern city" is going to be somewhere between St Louis and Detroit.

To check numbers, Indianapolis is the reddest big city in the midwest, and has 24 murders and 871 violent crimes (per the FBI definition) per 100,000 residents per year. The Bronx is the worst borough of NYC, and has about 6 murders and 650 violent crimes per 100,000 per year. Jacksonville FL, which recently voted out a Republican mayor for failure to control crime, was a red city in a mostly red state and also far more violent than the Bronx.

One of the problems with the crime discourse (and the problem predates the internet) is that there is tonnes of medium crime in a big city - even a low-crime one like Zurich. So anyone with a megaphone can create the impression that crime is out of control using summer-of-the-shark techniques. Very Online red tribers do this for NYC because performatively hating on NYC is part of red tribe identity politics. They are helped by NYC-based media doing the same thing because it sells newspapers. But that doesn't change the fact that "America can't police big cities the way Europe and 1st-world Asia can" is a nationwide problem, not a partisan one, and that NYC is in fact an island of minimally competent policing in a cesspool of dysfunction.