nsplayr

Fair enough. Yes I was wrong to not caveat that I meant in federal elections and copy shot that local & state elections, where some places allow non-citizens to vote, also matter. 🍻

Yea man, because it’s mandated in the Constitution to count all free persons. Since we abolished slavery and overturned the 3/5ths compromise, that’s everyone, citizen or not, as the founders intended. It’s even real early for those who can’t read so good, it’s in Article 1 Section 2. https://www.census.gov/history/pdf/Article_1_Section_2.pdf

Once again, the right wishing for a civil war. It’s not people on the left saying this. Exhibit A. I hope to god you’re not in uniform anymore with talk like this. Pro tip: some folks tried this foolishness before and they got their asses beat raw by the United States of America. I recommend we *not* do that again.

Mmm, we’ll we’re gonna have to disagree on that. Respectfully of course 🥃 I have pretty well developed political views and follow politics extremely closely. I am aware of the candidates and party I support, the policies they enact, and the values underpinning the whole thing, even if you don’t like them or think only misguided, gullible fools could even possibly like them. Locking people up for weed is & was bad! Biden’s 90s crime bill was bad in some regards! Some of Harris’ actions as DA and AG were also bad! I support drug legalization and my party does not yet top bottom, but I’m hopeful we’ll get there. Still punching my ticket for Biden 2024 eyes wide open. I do think Harris sucks FWIW, I wish we could figure out how to dump her off the ticket… Of all the criticisms I make, I try not to just disbelieve folks’ stated views and values, even if they are wrong IMHO. Lots of people on here throw around accusations of others being weak, gullible, blind, etc. and A) not everyone knows everyone IRL so how are you even able to make that kind of weighty judgement? and B) life just works better when you take people at their word as being complex yet genuine. You could say you believe in some absolutely wild, contradictory shit and I will tell you I think you’re wrong, but I will try my best not to call you naive, sheltered, brainwashed, weak, a sheep, or ask about your workout routine 😅 Anyways…RFK Jr. is an unfit crank who would get bitch-slapped by his dad (who I think would have made a fantastic President) if he were alive today. Remind me, did Trump have primary debates against anyone in 2020? There were 4 candidates who ran against him, including three who had held major elected office before (2x US reps, 1x governor). No, of course not. Fuuuck no they did not. They dropped those debates faster than a whore’s panties. There was also no GOP party platform in 2020, not even an attempt to codify guiding values and policies that supported those values. And I’m not even surprised or mad at the decision to forgo debates against noners! Trump was clearly going to be the nominee as a sitting President. So yea I’m not gonna really feel bad that fail-son RFK Jr. doesn’t get a party-endorsed stage to spout BS from and I’m also not gonna find criticism of that stance from Republicans credible at all. Maybe you’re not a Republican, and in that case, my argument is the same as the Republicans was in 2020 and I guess you can be mad at both parties then if you want.

That appears to apply to legal residents, not illegals immigrants, it’s for local elections only, and this story is about Montpelier, VT! Are those potential voters even changing the outcome of local things they’re voting on? I’m filing this under DGAF. It’s below my line. If you wanna get all spun up on this cool. If somewhere local wants to let legal permanent residents vote on local stuff, ok cool. Didn’t apply to federal elections, no data on if recent non-citizen immigrants vote in any particular way on local issues, no data on total numbers vs regular citizens.

😂ok so women‘s votes should count less or…what are you saying? It’s a real wonder why women usually vote Dem overall…with men on the right like you it’s truly a mystery 🧐 You can say that again! I can’t quickly find a dataset that breaks down voters by geography and then also gender, but overall the gender gap for 2020 was very similar to what it was in the 2018 midterms, about 11 points. Keep in mind Trump did better with women overall in 2020 than in 2016, so he closed the gender gap from one election where he was running to the next yet he won the first one and lost the second. With that in mind, the flip of the suburbs was the whole story. As you can see above, 2020 Trump did better in the cities, better in rural areas, but lost the suburbs by 5 more points than the GOP did in 2018, and he did 13 points worse than his own performance in 2016. Oof. A lot of voters live in the suburbs, including the lion’s share of your persuadables. Going back to the gender gap, think about 2016, there was a larger than average gender gap in 2016 due to a woman being the nominee for the Dems, yet Trump wins. Silly women voters, you’re so careless and wrong! But wait, now for the re-elect against a fellow old white guy in Biden, Trump wins more women in 2020 than in 2016, yet loses the suburbs by 11 vs winning it by 2. Looks like it was suburban men to me that delivered for Biden if anything! You’d know for sure with tabbed-out data where you could see suburban men & women split out in black and white, if I find that with a little more digging I’ll post it. Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/

That's the same data I'm using, great. And it shows exactly what I said, total crime is down slightly and violent crime is up slightly from 2020 to 2021. The official 2022 data should be out next month...I'm not sure why it takes 7 months to compile & verify, but that's how the TBI works. When compared to a long historical record though rather than just year-to-year, crime of all types in Nashville is way down from the 90s. So even if there's a 69% surge next year in some category (which we should not accept & work to correct the negative trend!), I am still able to say, "US cities in 2023 aren't shitholes, they're way better & safer than when I was growing up" and be correct. 247WallStreet.com isn't exactly a credible outlet, and their headline is greatly at odds with what's in the actual story. Even their actual story, using 2020 FBI UCR data, shows that Nashville is the 41st most dangerous urban area, and OBTW that excludes many major populated areas that don't report their data to the FBI, like NYC, Phoenix, LA, most places in Florida, Illinois, etc. That particular dataset from the FBI represents less than half of the US population, so it's hardly comprehensive. So yea, when you take out a massive number of other urban areas from consideration & comparison, I guess Nashville does seem really dangerous! Probably not the best way to truly understand the reality of the situation though. This is a better local news source, reporting on preliminary 2022 data, but it's still got some flaws. Let's talk murder specifically since you're most concerned with the worst violent crime, which is understandable. Like I linked to before, murders were particularly low in Nashville in 2013 and 2014...let's do whatever we can do repeat that and drive the murder rate even lower! BUT, I'm having a hard time wetting my pants over the 2021 number...it's almost exactly average looking over a nearly 60 year timespan, and again, it's like 25% lower than in the 90s when murder peaked in the city. From the story, they say the preliminary data shows murders were up 7.1% compared to 2021, which I again will emphasize is bad. That would put murders at ~15.9 per 100K...the highest since...2017. Looking at even a few years of trend, the numbers are: 2016: 12.5 2017: 16.5 2018: 13.1 2019: 12.2 2020: 16.5 2021: 14.8 2022 15.9 (preliminary data) That's just not a super compelling dataset to support the narrative that (sic) "XXX city is a shithole, it's rapidly getting worse, lock your kids away and open-carry an AR-15 to Kroger." I know you haven't said those things, but that's definitely the vibe I get from others on the right, as well the narrative incessantly pushed by Fox News. They tell their views that cities are dangerous, you shouldn't go there, they're burning down, you need a gun to protect yourself on daily errands or tourist visits, etc. and that is just not the case. The WKRN quote your bolded about how "Murder is up 82.8% in 10 years!" is both correct and misleading of the broader trend. Like I said, 2012 and 2013 were apparently lower years for murder. 2021 was almost exactly average and 2022 preliminary data would show slightly above the 60 year average. I'll say it again, we should work hard to get back to those per capita levels of murder (or go to zero!), but to me it's not house-on-fire news to say "Murder was way down for two years, and now it's back to historical average levels." Ok. I can tell you from lived experience that the city felt no safer nor more dangerous from year to year in that timespan, all of which I lived in Nashville proper. 2017 didn't feel super dangerous! 2019 didn't feel so much safer! It's noise on a relatively static trend. Heck, even the bar graphs you showed from that WKRN story are honestly pretty damn flat an indistinguishable year-to-year, certainly not showing a dramatic rise. 🤷‍♂️ So maybe by the crime metrics alone I was wrong to say, "Nashville has never been better." I apologize. It was better in 2019. Funny enough, the same mayor that was elected in 2019 is still the Mayor today (John Cooper, a very moderate, pro-business Dem), so IDK exactly how you want to attribute praise & scorn for both the five-year low in murder and the five-year high in murder, because they happened under the same guy's leadership. As someone else pointed out, citing granular crime data in order to sweepingly indict one political party doesn't work that great...Dems have been mayors of Nashville continuously since like the 1950s ,and crime has waxed, waned, and waxed again. It's almost like specific local policies, state policies, national policies and trends, and the overall mood of the country matters a lot more when it comes to crime than the letter next to a Mayor's name when assessing if a city is "safe" or not at any given time.

Well I don't personally vote for idiots like the SF DA who doesn't want to enforce the law and I don't support defunding the police. That's how I do it when I've voted in local elections in urban places! I do also advocate for legalizing most drugs because I legitimately think that would help A) end the death-by-fentanyl epidemic, B) allow the police to focus on crimes other than drug use, and C) would give adults more freedom to legally do things they want to do and will do anyways, illegally, if the laws remain the same. We've already legalized weed in the majority of states without a ton of negative repercussions. Good thing we locked away people for weed-related crimes for decades! /sarcasm Just like the prohibition of alcohol, the War on Drugs has failed and we need different policies.

Y'all do know that people who are not US citizens can't vote, right? I mean, are we talking US-born second-generation adults with latino/hispanic heritage? Please elaborate on how non-citizen immigrants, either here legally or illegally, are factors in US elections.

Well, that is one opinion! Let's stay focused on cities though, immigration is an entirely different issue. In your construct of makers and takers, how should we measure who "makes" and who "takes?" Should it be median income by zip code? GDP? Taxes paid? Productivity per capita? Net contributions to state budgets? I'm open to your idea being true and would be interested in your analysis of overwhelmingly urban & Dem-voting areas vs overwhelmingly exurban, rural & GOP-voting areas in any of those metrics. I don't suspect you're going to find that the GOP-voting areas are "making" more than the Dem-voting areas however... Your ideas about how the suburbs lean is a bit of a holdover from the 90s. Biden in 2020 and Obama in 2008 before him won the suburbs of most cities, which won them their elections. Suburbs are in modern times so split I'd hesitate to claim they are representative of either party, they're representative of both fairly equally. https://www.brookings.edu/research/bidens-victory-came-from-the-suburbs/

Amen to this! When you have three bases that are pretty great (Kadena, Mildenhall, Hurlburt) and one that's located in the smelly asshole of America (Cannon), it becomes real hard to honor BOP when you indeed desire to have a full-up Wing at CVS. Who are you gonna send there, all first-tour guys? Can't do that. Bonus takers who you have by the balls like we do now? Oh wait, BOP...yea that's gonna get jettisoned extremely quickly for needs of the Air Force. Fun story...I was sent to CVS even after 7-day opt! There's an asterisk in that program that says more of less, "Yea but we can also just waive the 24 month retainability clause and send you anyways. Good luck!" Just in case anyone doubts that AFSOC will bone you in the ass raw and repeadetly. In fact, many have at times called the command ASFOC, and personally I think it's fitting. Good times...I was there for 11 months and was a lame duck with a separation date the first time I stepped into my new SQ/CC's office. PCS'd across the country on Uncle Sam's dime twice in less than 12 months, great use of taxpayer resources for some random, replaceable cog line-dawg O3 there guys! Don't get me wrong, flying AFSOC missions was amazing and I wouldn't trade the experience for any other. I had a blast, made great friends, killed lots of bad guys, saw the world (well, many of the world's worst places...), etc. BUT, the command's HR policies are atrocious and drive so many good people out of the service entirely rather than accommodating reasonable alternatives for what folks want to do with their careers. Having Cannon doesn't help, I full acknowledge that, and that's our of AFSOC/A1's hands entirely, but they also don't do themselves a single favor ever IMHO. And oh yea, this new fangled BOP is just gonna blow hot air up people's behinds who don't read the fine print and they'll just get sent to Cannon anyways.

YMMV significantly, but in my unit among AGR pilots, the one with the most recent hire date was 2015, and he's the squadron patch. Other than him, the "newest" guy who is an AGR was probably hired in like 2007 as an enlisted dude. You can't just walk into an AGR around here as much as many folks would like to! Still waiting patiently for someone to die or retire, as god intended for his wayward children the Guard bums 😅

This is violent crime and for the US as a whole, not just urban areas...but overall it's way down from the 90s, and relatively static from 5-10 years ago. There has been some uptick during and post-COVID that we should reverse, but overall the longer trend is very good. The country is much safer than when I was a kid! "Cleaner" is subjective, but my experience is that NYC is a lot cleaner than when I went there as a kid, I remember it being pretty gross. Within the last 5-10 years I've only lived in one city where I can give you real lived experience vs short tourist trips, and Nashville's cleanliness is unchanged IMHO since I've lived here - static at an acceptably clean level. Overall US homelessness is slightly higher than 5 years ago, and slightly lower than 10 years ago, although as you can see, it's pretty static. I didn't do a shred-out for urban specifically, this is the whole country's trend, but that is probably knowable data with some digging. BL: the city I have lived in / near for the timeframe you asked is basically unchanged in the categories you mentioned. Violent crime is up a bit very recently and that's bad, but it doesn't change the overall trend of way down from the peak in the mid 90s. We're right at our historical average over the last approx. 60 years; neither particularly good nor bad. There has not been a significant change in cleanliness IMO or homelessness in my city either. YMMV depending on where you live, but like I said above, cleanliness is subjective somewhat and homelessness is relatively static for the country as a whole.

So when will this translate into voters electing Republicans to run major cities again? Like you said, NYC has had Republican mayors relatively recently. Why can't the GOP win in cities anymore? If it's all so self-evident, why isn't there a single city larger than Fort Worth with a Republican mayor? Only 9 out of the 50 biggest US cities have Republican mayors. 18% ain't good! Ya know what, I'll be charitable and give you another 0.25 of a mayor for Eric Adams in NYC lol. People ask all the time why can't Dems compete in rural areas. There are endless "old guys in a diner in exurban Ohio" think pieces. I'm asking why can't Republicans compete in the country's major population centers? Why isn't there a "shining city on the hill" run by the GOP that all these "shithole" Dem cities can look up to and copy? 🧐

Yea, those were some rough years man, props to you for getting through that shit. I'm glad we have significantly cleaned up crime in US cities since the mid-90s. It's funny that one of the two Republican mayors you give credit to is...Michael Bloomberg 😅 I get that he was officially a republican for his first two terms, but you know where he stands today politically. He would get 0.01% of the vote were he to run for office as a Republican today. I am pro-enforcing the law, I am against defunding the police, I am in favor of legalizing most drugs rather than having a broken-windows policy for low-level drug users. Legalization would also severely curtain illegal drug dealing, because users could get legal, safer drugs from authorized distributors, just like alcohol and weed now in many states. Doing drugs is usually destructive and I don't do drugs myself or encourage other people to do them, but in the War on Drugs, drugs won, and we need a different approach. Prohibition of alcohol didn't work either. Legalization + safe supply (eradicating fentanyl) + robustly funded support for getting clean for those who want to, plus abundant housing - no doing drugs in the street or on public transit. Speaking of abundant housing, I'm also an extreme YIMBY and I think the #1 scourge of urban life today is a lack of enough housing. I want to build build build and jettison every uptight "local control" NIMBY liberal directly into the sun for their role in making their cities worse for everyone else. I genuinely think that slate of policies would make urban life in particular better. More housing, more freedom, and the ability for a robust police force to focus on violent and destructive crimes rather than drug addiction.

I'm not sure where the stats from your paragraph are from, if you'd like to share I'll check out a link. Your graphs compared Nashville to the rest of the state, which is apples to oranges. You need to compare the same place in different years for a fair comparison. Crime (and life!) is obviously different in BFE than in downtown Manhattan. Here's what I know, based on the data the city provides. I didn't take the time to make a pretty graph because the data is provided in a table, as a PDF 🙄 Too much work for the dumbest hobby ever, forum posting. What I'm looking at is the crime per capita (per 100K residents) from 1963 through 2021, the latest year they provide data for. It can be found here. Crime per capita to me is the fairest measure because measure X in relation to measure Y is much more meaningful than measure X as just an absolute value. For example, there is absolutely no crime on the moon! Statistically it's the safest place you can live /sarcasm Some highlights: Total crime varied from a low of 3,188.9 in 1965 to a high of 11,146.0 in 1996. Recent numbers are 5,475.8 in 2020 and 5,080.0 in 2021. So total crime is now less than half of the peak worst year. Violent crime has been pretty stable since 1987 (the data before then is lower with a cliff-like step change between 1985 and 1987...I suspect there was a change in how violent crime was categorized before then). From 1987 - 2021, the low was 1,105.2 in 2019 and the high was 1,963.2 in 1996. So the safest year for violent crime in Nashville in nearly my whole lifetime was a year when I lived there! You mentioned murder, which is indeed up. Although "up" is from an aberrantly low level between 2010 and 2014. Murder bottomed out in 2014 at 6.5 and is troublingly back up to 14.8 in 2021. The peak high though was 20.3 in 1997, and the historical average over 59 years is 14.6, so we're basically back to exactly historical average. Needless to say even one murder is too many, and whatever we did to drive murder down for a few years, let's do it again! Property crime between 1963 and 2021 varied from a low of 2,885.7 in 1965 to a high of 9,183.8 in 1996. Man, 1996 was a terrible year for Nashville! Luckily in 2021 it's down to 3,836.8. This would all be more compelling with graphs vs random data vomited into a forum post, I get it, sorry. If you wanna TL;DR I don't blame you. Bottom line on bottom Crime per capita in Nashville is significantly lower now than in the mid-1990s. Total crime has been quite stable since 2013, locked in at that relatively lower level. Violent crime was the lowest it's been in a generation in 2019! My point: negativity against cities in right-wing circles is grossly overblown. The city I know best, where I lived for 7+ years and continue to live near, is a safe, prosperous, fun place to visit, work, and raise a family. The trends on crime here are either static or declining, and crime is much lower than when I was growing up in the 80s and 90s. YMMV with other cities, but if you wanna make the argument that a certain city is a dumpster fire shithole or some other hyperbolic BS, best bring receipts.

I have you on mute bro, give it up. Engaging with you isn't fruitful. One-time exception because I'm a degenerate and enjoy banging my head against the wall apparently. We moved out of the city limits after 7+ years to be closer to my aging parents who had moved nearby. Even with them relatively close, it was annoyingly far for how often I wanted to be there to help them and spend time with them. Absolutely nothing about the city "drove" me away, as I'm sure you imagined in you're weird obsession with me and my life. I sent my older kid to a Nashville public school K-5 and it was great. My wife was a Nashville public school teacher as well. I miss our old walkable, urban neighborhood & our good friends, and we go back to visit often. Overall though, moving was the right decision for my family in the broader sense than just who lives inside my four walls. Now please feel free to have a nice life and stop @ing me.

Man sure a lot of Republicans who seem to hate America these days /sarcasm…only sort of. Like is Memphis the Garden of Eden or even in my top 69 places I’d want to live in the world? No. Is it a “shithole city?” Also no. Again, I don’t live there, but any one of you is perfectly able to visit Memphis, have a good time, etc. I know several FedEx folks who live on the close suburbs and they don’t seem to be having a terrible time in life. I’m still waiting if anyone wants to offer up an rationale of why there aren’t any well-run large cities governed by Republicans that the “Dem hellholes” can look up to? Why are Republicans so uncompetitive in America’s largest population centers, especially at the local level? NYC used to have Republican mayors not that long ago, why can’t y’all win anymore? Granted the current mayor Eric Adams is kind of a Republican lol 😅 It’s just funny man, I come on here saying, “American cities aren’t shitholes that are literally burning to the ground” and am called delusional, naive, etc. AND I also get tasked to defend every dumbass local political decision ever made in dozens of places where I’ve never been in charge for a single day. 🤷‍♂️ Ok. My point is y’all’s pessimism is overblown and America is a great country with some fantastic cities (and medium/small towns, and rural areas!) and if you are terminally pessimistic and scared and angry all the time I’m sorry you are going through your one relatively short, precious life that way. I fully acknowledge that I can be irrationally optimistic in life, but my god, better that than the opposite! Congrats on coming out of your bubble! I know double than number just in my current squadron alone, and this is a ANG squadron in the south, not exactly a bastion of liberals. I also 100% guarantee you’ve known more, there are just a lot of people who don’t wanna bring up liberal political views in an environment like a flying squadron that’s typically heavily right wing, and that’s ok. When the country is relatively 50/50, surely you have to recognize that many of the people you have worked with, seen in daily life, etc. have different political beliefs than you.

Starship Troopers? Yes. It was ok, not my fav of the genre but still a classic obviously. I actually prefer the movie! The Forever War by Joe Haldeman is excellent and IMHO superior to Starship Troopers; well worth your time if you haven’t read it.

Ok you win for longest post 😅🙌 I will read and respond later lol…that was a lot to even skim. And this is coming from me, I should know!

1000% disagree. Having obtainable naturalization and birthright citizenship is a huge leg up for the US and always has been. Furthermore, the cultural norm that an “American” isn’t a race or a people that one either has or doesn’t but rather a set of ideals and something you can choose is at the foundation of our enduring strength. I would actually support universal national service for all young people that conferred benefits like college or job training money & opportunities. But a just-naturalized Bulgarian-American or a second-generation, US-born Colombian-American is just as much a citizen as you or I, and I sincerely believe that is a feature that makes the US superior to other countries. You can move to China and speak Chinese and live there for 50 years but you’ll never “be Chinese” and that’s simply not the case here.

I don’t know what you’re asking or wanting here. There are no comparable large cities run by republicans right now, that was my point in mentioning Jacksonville. Why is that do you think? I’m starting to think it’s time to part ways on this convo, good luck.

No US city is an absolute shithole, you should know this if you have ever deployed. Which city is a “Republican city” that you’d like to use? The largest one with a Republican mayor at least used to be Jacksonville, FL, but a Dem was just elected there. That doesn’t account for city councils, etc. YMMV on how a city is governed also depending on the state, as was pointed out, and I don’t disagree that long-term one party rule often leads to sclerotic institutions. There’s often improved results when elections are competitive and there are cross-pressures between federal, state and local levels. Not always, not everywhere, but generally. There is no GOP New York, LA, Chicago, etc. to compare right now. Why is that? Some of these cities had GOP mayors that I remember, why are republicans no longer competitive in big cities? And Eric Adams, Karen Bass, and Brandon Johnson are also different types of Dems and from obviously different places and facing different local issues. Is one of them doing a better job than the others in your opinion?

So the Dems in different cities have different policies? Especially over time? Wow, no shit. Is it the same for Republicans? /sarcasm It’s almost like you can’t paint every city as a declining shithole with a broad brush. Most cities are thriving and are drivers of the growing national economy! I don’t even know what you’re asking or arguing anymore @BashiChuni. If you want to just be mad at me, ok.

The city is run by Dems, like almost every urban area. You correctly identified that the state is Republican-led, congratulations. Whats your argument here, that all those cities are shitholes? If so, I’d argue they’re not. If you wanna talk granular specifics I wanna talk Nashville since that’s what I know in a granular level of detail. I am well aware of the broad-brush political leavings of every state and major city.