Which ones were those?
Many places have gotten rougher, there is the visible disorder in San Francisco but even the small city of Ithaca, NY has seen a large increase in aggressive panhandling. You can plot opioid overdoses on the map and it looks like a pattern of bullets aimed at the needle exchange. People used to think the old African-American neighborhood downtown was “dangerous” (it wasn’t) but rents have gone up, the area has gentrified, and many of the former residents have relocated to smaller towns in the area. Today people are terrified of the large homeless colony by the inlet and the accompanying shopping cart graveyard.
The pedestrian mall downtown for years was decimated by a construction project that went overtime like the construction of a nuclear reactor, then the pandemic hit. It has been bouncing back and is even starting to get more diverse businesses (it just got a clothing store after years without one, a restaurant moved into the site McDonalds vacated 25 years ago, …) but boy there are a lot of head shops that look more lurid then head shops every looked. (You are dealing with bro overdose when you have a strain of weed called “AK-47”.). I never thought I’d see the day when the mayor, the governor, and the head of the business improvement district would hail the opening of a cannabis dispensary as a strategy for economic development.
My guess is that most cities have people telling a similar story today.
“KGB” [0] “Glock 19” [1] “.38 Special” [2] “Area 41” [3] “Crossbow” [4] “Grandpa’s Gun Chest” [5] “Brown Bomber” (Grandma’s Boy)
[0] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-kgb-by-ki...
[1] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-glock-19-...
[2] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-38-specia...
[3] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-area-41-b...
[4] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/cultivar-review-crossbo...
[5] https://thehighestcritic.com/reviews/strain-review-grandpas-...
/s
Won’t really entertain your views on weed, since that’s just practically doesn’t pan out. We’ve had it federally legal here for years now, society hasn’t changed at all because of it.
A lot of them. leaders using race baiting tactics to cause as much trouble as possible. Somehow rioters been exempt from needing social distancing.
It's readily apparent areas in multiple cities that were thriving pre-COVID and now you wouldn't consider being alone in at night.
Really? Burned down implies thousands of buildings in a single city. The displacement of hundreds of thousands. Please, name one city where that happened.
700 buildings damaged, burnt, or destroyed in Minneapolis. https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/minnesota/news/minneapolis-issue...
The scale of destructive rioting was massive and underreported at the time it was happening.
There are many course of Metro cities where businesses are still damaged and boarded up 3 years later.
I'm not saying that there was no property damage or unrest. There most certainly was. but it was far more limited in area, and far less intense, than many were describing.
"Cities are burning" is one of those absurd things. Nothing even close to that happened.
My father believes that the entire country is embroiled in an unmitigated crime wave because he gets his news from Fox and Youtube. Every time I talk to him he whines about how "the country isn't the same as how I grew up anymore."
This is a man who lives closer to the country than the city. It gives him a justification for turning his brain off and voting the way that he does, because in his mind, he's protecting the nation by preventing what he believes to be the liberal dream: allowing young, black men to run around and commit crimes with reckless abandon to bring about the end of capitalism.
"cosmetic damage, minor damage, major damage, and wholly destroyed, which included 12 structures"
Map: https://assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com/i/cbslocal/wp-content/uplo...
Classic "how to lie with numbers". 698 buildings with a broken window, one with a minor fire, and one "destroyed" (whatever that means) would satisfy this description.
Not to say that there wasn't damage done; but the stats you give are clearly designed to look bad rather than to be informative.
Further, the damage seemingly was concentrated in poor neighborhoods. Hence, citation should be provided that fear post George Floyd backlash is a major reason for tech workers to leave Chicago. From the same reference:
" They missed signals that the killing of Floyd, captured on video and played millions of times by horrified Americans, could touch off looting. And to this day, they face resentment that the city prioritized the protection of downtown at the expense of residential neighborhoods inhabited mostly by people of color."
On the other hand, the reference does say the backlash and riots caused more damage than following MLK Jr's assassination does provide reasonable context to the scale of the event. Yet, with higher numbers of businesses, it might be there is more stuff to be damaged that lead to a larger figure of monetary damage (but that is still to say that both back-lashes were seemingly at least on par)
I’d also like the point out:
> Everyone in my area (hour outside a major city) is basically the same
If you live only an hour outside a major city, you’re still living in the metropolitan region of a big city.
I don't ever recall seeing photos of numerous whole city blocks turned to ashes.
It was like twelve people laying on the road in front of the police station, as a "protest".
Mobile work is still way more popular than it was, many cities were burned down in 2020 and people remember the insecurity. I moved more rural and couldn’t be happier, I’ll take a salary reduction to keep my quality of life.
I won’t even interview in person.
Everyone in my area (hour outside a major city) is basically the same.