They are blue because studies have shown that proximity to others makes you more compassionate.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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This explains the rural/city divide and why conservatives view blue cities as hell holes:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Having lived both sides, the whole thing not only resonates with me, it rings my fucking bell. If there was one article I could force all Americans to read, this is it.
Unpopular things for Republicans to hear:
- The free market crushed their industries and pressured them over seas
- Mexico is pretty much what republicans and libertarians wish they were. Particularly in the north.
Thats a pretty good read. I often think about a lot of that. But I never come up with a way to help the rural population much. Thier way of life is dying, has been for a few hundred years. But it is still essential. They don't like handouts or even assistance. So how do you help them?
I'd start by taking to top off Fox News and see them dance the hemp fandango. I cannot overstate how they've poisoned America. Had some education in journalism so I'm better tooled than most to spot media manipulation. Sure they come out with in-your-face lies now and again, but they're mostly subtle, which is far more evil. Next, I'd go after our social media overlords. These snakes have to be decapitated, literally.
Lately I've thought that the best way to heal America's rural/urban divide is to point out that the rich are fucking us. It's not the farmer or the blue-haired girl, not the LGBT folks or gun nuts, certainly not the immigrants. If I could hammer a single message into the American zeitgeist it would be this, "The wealthy are hurting all of us. Fight them every step of the way."
I know Bane's the bad guy and straight psychotic, but his speech in The Dark Knight Rises makes we want to fucking cheer.
We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity, and we give it back to you... the people. Gotham is yours. None shall interfere. Do as you please. Start by storming Blackgate, and freeing the oppressed! Step forward those who would serve. For and army will be raised. The powerful will be ripped from their decadent nests, and cast out into the cold world that we know and endure. Courts will be convened. Spoils will be enjoyed. Blood will be shed. The police will survive, as they learn to serve true justice. This great city... it will endure. Gotham will survive!
There is no hope until the rich live in fear of the masses.
I know Bane's the bad guy and straight psychotic, but his speech in The Dark Knight Rises makes we want to fucking cheer.
Wft... Bane is a working class hero, and this gives you power over me
I'd also like to point out that the joker burned a pyramid of money. A deflationary move that helps ordinary Americans. What did he get for his efforts? A billionaire takes it upon himself to beat him up.
To people from small towns, everyone in a city is 'wealthy', they must be to afford the insane cost of living right? But thats part of the problem. They don't realize the people spending $2500 a month on rent are spending 80% of their paycheck, or that they can't build any savings or eger hope to own a house or even a car because of it. They make no distinction between the actual rich people who live in cities and everyone else, and the state of America right now IS them fighting back against the 'rich'. Until these people understand the orders of magnitude the people actually fucking us are over the rest of us i don't know what can be done. To them anyone with a college degree is a wealthy elite.
This in mind, why isn't Trump a wealthy elite to them? How did he become their savior??
This post hits in a way I hadn't quite figured out to myself. No wonder they still buy into the welfare queen thing. I've got to think on this a bit, woke me to a thing I hadn't considered.
To expand on what @emeralddawn45@lemmy.dbzer0.com is saying, I live rural because I don't make enough to live in the city. My town is rapidly gentrifying and I might not afford to live next to cows any more pretty soon. City folk spend more on rent than I make in a month.
A lot of our 'welfare queen' perspective is colored by the fact that tax-funded services are usually concentrated in the city. I keep petitioning my county transit authority for better rural bus service, but the best they can do is make the city bus lines run every 15 minutes instead of every half an hour. Meanwhile, I'm paying uber $50 just to get to a doctor's appointment and wait to catch a ride home when a friend gets off work. Food costs more for worse quality in rural areas, so food stamps don't go as far as they would in the city. Welfare in the city feels like you could live like a queen off it. It's not entirely true, because the amount you get is scaled to income, but per dollar, you do get more for your welfare in cities.
There's also that city dwellers can get really nasty about rural folk. I've never voted for a republican in my life, but living out here makes people assume the worst of me. I get told that living rural means I'm a bootlicking hick that's too stupid to know what's good for me, so it's hard to sell that they deserve sympathy and we don't.
where are all these Utopian "red cities" that people are apparently in favor of?
They do not and can not exist. Conservatism is an antisocial and anti-intellectual, authoritarian ideology. This pretty much rules it out of success in most conventional metrics.
Well there's Dayton Ohio which is a successful red city if you look at how they vote and literally nothing else. Jesus fuck their crime rate says magnificent things about the democrats
This one?
That’s Texas…?
Gerry Madarin
With the new gerrymandering 2.0 Ohio is proposing, soon all of their cities will be "red" (on paper)
Why even propose it? It's illegal. They know its illegal. We know it's illegal. The courts know its illegal, and the courts won't stop it
Pretty sure Dayton started very blue
Yeah i grew up in the area. It changed alongside ohio
the funny thing is... getting people to live closer together encourages empathy.
living in the middle of nowhere reduces empathy... this is why people living in bumfuck are empathy-lacking tools calling themselves 'conservatives'
I was biking a dirt road near my rural neighborhood and saw a sign at somebody's driveway that said "if you can read this you're within range" and wondered how country folk got the stereotype of being friendly and kind. I really miss living in the city.
propaganda from the movies and shows. probably they need economic businesses to thier area, so they make up an image so people would go there, but NOT LIVE THERE. Yellowstone being one of those shows, and many other shows make reference of "southern hospitality"
It seems like a lot of the time they are like "boy, crime is higher".... but if you live in a city that's just a fact of life. It's pretty obvious that there will be less crime out in the sticks. I wouldn't really attribute this to any "blue" policies.
Part of "less crime in the sticks" is a population effect. The rate of violent crime in New York City is 494/100,000 people. The rate of violent crime in the whole state of Alabama, from its stickiest sticks to the 225,000-resident Huntsville metropolis, is 404/100,000, which isn't that different, in my book.
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We also see that rural crime is undercounted, underreported. Many studies show that (sometimes) rural areas have more crime. Of course it varies by time and location and depends how you define everything.
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Staying afloat using tax dollars from blue states
Welfare queens.
Those cities and states should have a work requirement and random drug tests.
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Miami and Saint David, UT come to mind. Outside the US though, lots of the Balkan major cities are much less liberal than western cities.
Miami is purple at least. The old guard Cubans are Republicans, the last governor race not so representative. St. George in Utah is really nice, though maybe a town more than a city.
Tampa is nice but all of our potentially fixable problems are from the conservative outlying areas, as so much of the government is county not city. it would be much nicer with more money going to transit in particular.
I spent 3 weeks in Thonotosassa in 2015, and Jesus Christ was downtown Tampa sad. It just was devoid of any culture or any reason to be down there. The Columbia Restaurant and Ybor City walk was fire though and made up for it a little bit; it just wasn’t enough to make up for the rest of the city being dreary.
Well yes, it has come a long way in the past few years. I used to get so mad because we are a better city to live in but St. Pete's downtown knocked it out of the park, absolute gem of a downtown and ours sucked.
But ours has gotten so much livelier, it's not just the Tampa Theater and convention center and the Hub, there are a bunch of apartments downtown, the kids of the Columbia people opened a really good restaurant, the city built a much better Riverwalk, there are people out in the nights, concerts, events, it's completely different.
BTW, when I was growing up we would go downtown on the weekend and it was an absolute ghost town, we wandered the empty streets and made up stories about the buildings. And you could buy houses in Tampa Heights for almost nothing, now they are millions of dollars.
Thonotasassa still sucks
Balkan? The countries that were drawn into a brutal civil war by right wing pieces of shit and are still trying to recover from the bloodshed and brain drain? Those Balkan cities?
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Miami only recently turned right wing.
Miami was never liberal. It was always a sort of libertarian with certain key issues like anti communism, pro masculinity, pro protectionism, pro small government. We saw them swing right in 2024, but if those were major issues in past elections, we would’ve seen a red Miami sooner. Miami is full of people that have an attitude problem imho.
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I think San Antonio is about as red as it gets for a city its size
Salt Lake City obviously but that's a different story
And to be clear, San Antonio may be more red leaning, but is not red still.
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From what I've noticed, cities tend to be more liberal than rural areas. I can't think of a major city off the top of my head that is a republican stronghold. I've got to go to work but I found these two links which may help.
https://townsoftheusa.com/most-conservative-cities-in-usa/
https://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/15-most-conservative-major-cities-in-the-united-states-883419/
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Did anyone else thought about cities with communist mayor when reading about red cities?
Yes the whole red<->blue political spectrum swap in the US is confusing sometimes for us non-US.
Makes sense with horseshoe theory. Red for authoritarians no matter left or right. Red is a warning.
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