I’ve lived in a big city for years now. Never seen anybody get mugged, or shot, or carjacked, despite doing activist work that often has me visiting poor minority neighborhoods.
The only time I ever really felt uneasy was when I had to walk alone at night through a neighborhood where all the businesses had bars on the windows. Worst thing that happened was a couple of people asking me for money, and they didn’t give me any shit when I said I didn’t carry cash.
But any time I visit the small town where I grew up there’s always someone or another acting like I came back from a fucking warzone lmao
The aspiring urbanists here have a hard time believing that some of us feel very agitated living in cities.
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“Man I hate my farming job because of shitty pay and long hours.”
“Uh actually, the shitty pay and long hours is not an essential characteristic of farming so you’re being a conservative.”
The possibility of things getting better does not make living in the city now any more pleasant.
Your pro-city rhetoric plays into the neoliberal dichotomy of cities being civilized places and rural areas being filled with country bumpkins. I don’t think you’re a neoliberal though because I can understand how sharing one view doesn’t mean you believe the same thing.
No it doesn’t. It literally does not mean this in any meaningful way. I specifically prefer the rural areas because I have better access to local community and state parks. My love for nature is just about the most collective it can be. I can’t believe people on hexbear are unironically stating it is individualist and supportive of landownership to enjoy nature.
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Your analogy to farm wage-labour is silly. Yes, those those thoughts are actually wrong /in form/, and yes it is a characteristic of reactionaries to essentialize existing conditions. But the point is that you cannot stop there as that would conceal its contradictory elements, its laws of relation, and so on.
Yes the farm worker is suffering under low pay, and long hours, but what’s important isnt the just the truth of said claim, but the /history/ of its development. No, wage-labour is not natural–it had a historically specific development, so how did it come about and what are its contradictions, what is the specificity of farm work compared to other kinds of work, etc., Etc…
Without a dialectical, historical materialist approach we cannot understand the world scientifically, and thus all of our actions will be blind in a sense.
So given the discussions about cities and suburbs the question is /why/ are they like that–we all already know /what/ it is–so what is its concrete history that lead to its specific form today? With that know that valorizing a thing is not just valorizing its affect, but also its valorizing its history, and its function within the system as a whole. You may say that the comment you’ve made are simply about personal preference, but there is an (unconscious) probably) ideological component underlying them.
It’s really just a personal preference. I don’t like living in crowded places. It’s not anti-social or misanthropic. I like other people. But I get agitated in crowded areas. It makes me unhappy to be constantly surrounded by people.
I don’t need a personal fief. I don’t care if I lived in a collectived area where I was close to my neighbors. That sounds fine. But it’s important to me that I have nature available to me. So if I could walk out of my collective into some trees I don’t own, that would be great. Public parks are okay, but they aren’t the same, and they’re always packed with people, too.
I’m sorry, but there’s no way to reimagine cities in a way that they won’t be crowded and noisy. People make a lot of noise just bustling about without cars. Some people like that feeling, and that’s cool. But I don’t.
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Okay, thanks comrade.
I guess I should have been clearer and not attached my opinion to someone else’s. For the record, I agree with you that these places need to be reimagined.
This is the second time that I’ve had a similar conversation on Hexbear. From my perspective, I’m just saying I don’t enjoy cities, and I get a bunch of people telling me that, actually, I do like cities.
I understand why that’s happening now.