...so I was drunk in rdrama/motte BotC server one day and promised to write up a post-level critique of the American middle class. Of course, the "project" kept getting bumped for the sake of far more important things, such as drinking joylessly while reposting telegram posts on shitty drama discord servers, this being a far less effort-intensive way to anger people. However, today I suddenly felt bored enough to actually remember my prior commitments, so here it is:
Lawns are fucking moronic. Just think about it - if you put like 20% of Cook County lawns together and combine all the land, money, and effort that goes into their maintenance into something actually useful - you'll have a fucking Disneyland with a Champs-Élysées annex. But nooooo, this isn't good enough, because that would be public and not MINE, MIIIINE, MOOOOOOOOOM, HE'S USING A TOY THAT'S MIIIIIINE!!!
Worse yet, if I were to personally decide "fuck this, this is retarded, I don't need this shit, there's a perfectly good park like three fucking blocks away - I'll just grow potatoes or something else actually productive on this plot" - a formless, permanently scowling creature - the dreaded bored HOA housewife - is sure to be crawling out of the woodwork in seconds, with a clipboard and her trademark Karen-y bangs. And she'll instantly begin to shrilly preach about how something so unbelievably ludicrous could not possibly allowed under any circumstances, because, god forbid, other Karens looking for a place to live will drive past and certainly think "waah, waah, this is proposterous! Potatoes?! I can't even! I need everything to be exactly uniform!", leading to her pride and joy, the land value of the lawn containing her shitty cardboard box with fancy beige siding - will go down. Un-acc-ept-ab-le!
This isn't really my main point - it's just an absolutely phenomenal illustration of why the American middle class is the worst fucking socioeconomic group to ever live. They are petit bourgeois to an extent (primarily in their deeply rooted insecurity and precarious status), but their sensibilities are worse than that - they see themselves as some sort of smaller-scale genteel manor lord, whose lifestyle they so artlessly attempt to ape - but they lack the taste, the resources, or the confidence to actually do that. So instead, they ape the simplest bit - a manicured lawn that said gentleman would use for playing cricket or going on mid-afternoon horseback rides or whatever the fuck it is that those inbred bastards do there - but without the space to realistically be usable for that or really anything else outside of serving as a glorified litter box for the family dog.
And yet they do see themselves as above everyone else. They are aggressive about it, too! “Look at me, I have made it, I have my lawn. Mine! MINE! I won't live in a pod like those disgusting city-dwellers, ugh!.. I'm a real American. This is real America! I like my Bud Light Coors Light, my pickup, my Jesus, and my Red Lobster! Oh, and my vastly superfluous rifle collection! My office plankton job makes me inherently superior to those dirty poors, who just lack my good, old-fashioned work ethic, or they’d be able to file regional shrinkage dynamics reports just like me and become productive members of society!”
To sum it up, the only real question is... Why are they like this? Who hurt them? What possible calamity has caused them to become these incredibly shallow, yet exceptionally vain shells of something vaguely resembling human form? Perhaps we’ll never know.
I am, however, interested in your guys’ opinions on the subject!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Have you read the homicide rates?
Baltimore has a murder rate of 80 per 100,000, comparable with El Salvador.
the fact that American black homicide rates, and all other crimes are WORSE than the very worst of the third world is the single most important fact of Ameircan life.
Literally nothing about America makes sense unless you understand how horrifyingly understated even the very worst racial stereotypes are. Take it from a Canadian who niavely believed all the equality stuff, never once had to interact with any of it, and patted themselves on the back for being so egalitarian and making easy friends with Asian, Indian, and Nigerian immigrants in their school... as soon as anyone who hasn't built their life around denying what's right before there eyes observes the black and white REALITY of what's happened and continues to happen in the US, everything clicks.
I feel awful for all the times I felt myself supperior to blue collar rust belt Americans complaining about blacks... "I'm so much better than them I'm not racist" I thought about people who were being ethnically cleansed.
and?
while it may be considered rude to notice that democratic controlled municipalities tend to be cess-pools of violence, racism, and human feces, have you not noticed?
As I have argued before, the US doesn't not have a race problem, Baltimore has a race Problem, Chicago has a Race Problem, and you're just going along with it because you've never been to Atlanta or Mobile.
Blacks vote 90% democrat.
Are they not the very essence of the Democratic Party ?
More options
Context Copy link
Atlanta has a Murder rate of 16 per 100,000, Mobile has a murder rate of 20 per 100,000.
Chicago is 18. Right between the two.
Democrats are not the relevant factor.
By contrast Major cities with almost no African Americans have murder rates of 2. And almost entirely white towns and areas homicide rates as low as 0.4 or 0.2
Have you ever been to New England, or Canada or the Upper Midwest or any of the high trust areas with basically no crime and the demographics you'd expect?
I remember as a kid people talking about places you could leave your doors unlocked... And I thought "Oh ya I guess lots of people do that here, but you wouldn't do that in Toronto"
It took rewatching Micheal Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" to realize most Americans were talking about "Leaving your doors unlocked, AFTER YOU GET HOME FROM WORK AND ARE DOING STUFF ABOUT THE HOUSE"
Whereas people in my area were talking about "Leaving your doors unlocked while you go on vacation for a few days"
It was shocking to see Michael Moore surprized that Canadians in Sarnia didn't keep their doors locked on a summer's day WHILE THEY WERE AT HOME.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Is this before or after Bukele's reforms?
Before Bukele's most recent reforms the murder rate in El Salvador was 8 in 2022. It went as high as 103 in 2015, but has dropped fairly linearly since then. After the crackdown, it is now 0.8. In comparison, Norway's rate is 0.6 and Italy is 0.5.
That's fanstastic graph, I didn't think it could drop so fast.
Looks like most of job was done before Bukele?why do you single 2022 year and not year when Bukele entered office?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link