(08-03-2016 07:36 AM)eradicator Wrote: A couple of things: we have 48 contiguous states, not 50. And yeah, we're fucked.
The bloke definitely said 50, and, if you saw him, you wouldn't argue with him either. You'd have to be an entitled Feminist type to be that stupid. Unluckily for us, there was one present.
Quote:It's not as bad as Mexico with no clean water and plugged up sewers, but the roads are in disrepair, and entire cities like Detroit and really most of the state of Michigan basically are third world
It's happening to Australia. I was noticing it around the edges first in my hometown: maybe 50% of the streetlights work, potholes everywhere, parks no longer being watered, dumped rubbish taking weeks to be collected, random couches and mattresses everywhere, regularly blocked sewers, increasing electrical brownouts. Just little observations. An increasing sense of shabbiness to everything, if that makes sense.
Now I'm seeing the Police and Health Services are both on the verge of becoming failed institutions, so got the hell out. A short haired female politican just changed the laws in the ACT stating that 50% of all Firefighters in each graduating class must now be female, so you can add the Fire Service to the list.
When I'm back home, I sometimes walk through the street I grew up in out of curiousity. Public housing estates were always the Western Third World, but I'm noticing aspects of those places (unweeded gardens, peeling paint, broken driveways) are become normalised in middle class areas. One interesting thing I noticed recently was, that last time I took a - very alert - walk through there, two years back, out of the 26 houses in the block, 8 of them had been burnt out by [Protected Victim Class], so they are empty, blackened shells with the roofs still intact. It's a hobby of theirs.
The thing was, last time I walked through there, those eight houses were still burnt out with two more added. There's been no effort to pull down, repair or rebuild these public housing properties.
So then I'd think of things like this:
How that same wet, torn couch sat by the side of the road near the traffic lights for over eight months until it was collected.
How I was at concert last Sat talking to musicians, and they were all complaining about how the Arts Grant money seems to have completely dried up.
How all the concerned citizens in my warzone of a town were screaming at the police: "Why don't you hire more cops?" and not hearing them say that there's no money to do it.
See how I note this disparate events and, as usual, see the common thread? Government resource scarcity.
I'm not worried by the decay in the sense that I was never middle class: you're used to the shabby and broken, of going without and making do. It was all I knew for a large chunk of my life.
I remember a few years ago when I was out at the rubbish tip looking for scrap metal with a mate and he found a one-armed, one-legged giant Spiderman toy. He gave it a wash, then handed it to his son, who was happy with it, because he doesn't expect anything better than making do.
The middle classes would be offended by being given a One-Armed, One-Legged Spiderman. Between Obama and Hilary, I'd suggest they get used to it. Trump at least sees shabbiness for what it is.