I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
Politicals, wokeness, crime, shit on the roads, heat, shoplifting, crazy people, etc.
wokeness
What does that mean?
Know those annoying people that force you into accepting gay, say you’re a bigot if you don’t wanna date a trans girl and can’t take jokes? Those are woke people.
No idk what you’re talking about, I’ve never encountered that in my life, are you okay dude?
Then I have bad news for you.
Sir, I read the news every day and I checked the news just now, and I see news about the Niger coup, the Amazon climate summit, cluster munitions being deployed in Donetsk, and something about a soccer championship. Nothing about accepting gay. No jokes either, just serious business. Where are you getting your news from?
You’ve not been living in real life.
Sir, my main concerns are how to pay my rent and set up my career in the near future. I just got done doing some research on what kinds of mask to wear at my job to protect from the occupational hazard known as air pollution from diesel engine exhaust. I do not sit idly doing research on trans, bigot acceptance, or gay jokes, or whatever nonsense your liberal media is telling you to fixate on. Are you sure you’re not the one who needs to live in real life?
It’s endless soulless suburbia interspersed by twelve-lane traffic jams, what’s there to like?
I can go surfing in the morning, hike beautiful mountains in the evening, and experience the TJ nightlife, all in a single day. The next day I can go offroading in ocotillo or take a stroll through a park bigger than NY’s Central Park. idk, my section of California is heaven.
San Diego?
The fucking ridiculous natural beauty everywhere? I live in the most soulless of the soulless suburbs of Los Angeles and if I left my house right now and didn’t stop for anything I could be standing beneath the biggest tree in the world in just 4 hours. Or if I want to see the oldest trees in the world I can go roughly the same distance and do that instead. I could be at the trailhead to climb the highest peak in the contiguous US in 3 hours and on my way there I would see an ancient basalt waterfall where obsidian litters the ground, the Grand Canyon of the Mojave where semiprecious gems flow out of the mountains, lakes, rivers, the Sierra Nevadas, Death Valley, it’s ridiculous. Every fucking state has traffic and suburbs but I’ll go to my grave arguing that we can’t be beat for scenery.
california is the largest “sub-national” economy in the world. if california was a country, it would have the fifth largest economy. bigger than the uk, or bigger than india.
if i had to guess, the answer is “success breeds jealousy”
If anything, it should be California thats pissed off, having all its tax money go to support the failed red states and their failed policies via the federal redistribution.
I maintain that if red states want to end government handouts, we should respect their wishes, for them.
The problem is that policy hurts the poorest who have the least say in thr policy
California gets trotted out in the conservative media sphere as “liberalism run wild”, a place where being what they consider to be a “real American” is illegal but crime is subsidized by the state, where everything is expensive and dangerous, and homeless people have gay sex in the street. There’s an entire industry focused on filtering for the most extremely awful news they can find in a state of almost 40 million people, packaging that news as though it’s the typical experience everyone there goes through, and then blasting that news into the brains of Americans 24/7. That image, carefully crafted to be as extremely negative as possible, is the only experience most people have with California.
The liberalism run wild concept is kinda what I’m curious about. Like what things? I know California protects abortions and has stronger gun control laws. But is that really it? There’s gotta be more actual examples
Nope. Conservatives are a simple people. You tell them something is bad because god doesn’t like it and they won’t question it.
A lot of social programs, better employee pay and benefits, legal weed. Conservatives are just jealous that their shithole backwater hick towns will never change so they point at the scary liberal boogeyman that is “Commiefornia” in some vain hope they will get noticed.
their shithole backwater hick towns
It sort of depends on where you are, but in San Francisco and Los Angeles, the homeless problem is noticeably worse than almost anywhere else in America. It’s bad.
An ex of mine lives in a pretty posh part of LA (Crestview). She works constantly and really hard to afford to live there. Now there are people literally shooting heroin on the street outside her home and to take her toddler to play at the park, they’re basically walking around the bodies of people high/sleeping.
I mean, I’m as anti-drug war as they come, but that’s no way to live and the police really should clear it out. Even in the poorer parts of most other cities, that’s not something you see.
As far as I understand, the problem stems from the fact that places like skid row provide infrastructure to help homeless people, so more homeless move there to get at least basic healthcare, food etc.
If all larger cities did that instead of repressive measures, the problem should spread among them, making single places less problematic.
Well, that’s always been the case with Skid Row, though it might be debatable which came first – the homeless encampments or the aid agencies. And for that matter, there were Hoovervilles in the Great Depression. In any city in America, there are transients milling around the shelters, which is why there’s so much NIMBYism over developing new shelters.
But what’s going on in California probably has more to do with the fact that LA and San Francisco tend to be very tolerant of the homeless encampments and provide generous aid, thus inducing demand. The homeless population is soaring across America for various reasons, but California is a desirable place to be homeless: better aid, better climate, softer police, etc.
Maybe California’s big cities really are more humane and generous, but at this point it’s to the detriment of livability in those places.
It absolutely has a lot to do with Right wing/Republican propaganda, California, Chicago, and New York represent everything they hate so they constantly use both states and that city as negative talking points.
One point they constantly make is that New York City is a crime riddled hellhole, meanwhile NYC has one of the lowest crime rates in the entire country, and one of the lowest murder rates, it’s just a massive city with a massive population and everyone there has cameras so when stuff happens it goes viral. Also the Red States tend to have much higher crime and murder rates.
All in all this is usual conservative/right wing tactics, they constantly want to isolate and segregate themselves from other ideas, and aren’t afraid to take over where other people live to exclude the people already living there. This is why Idaho, Texas, Florida, and Utah have similar campaigns about “don’t California my state” and by “California” they mean don’t bring your “liberal/socialist/Communist/woke/progressive/democratic” outlook to their states, because they don’t want to be responsible for cleaning up the racism and various other problems that the red states seem to have adopted as their identities.
Also I know quite a few conservative Californians and New Yorkers that recently moved to Texas and Florida, and as conservative as they thought they were they actually talk about moving back to where they came from because of how it is in their new states, except for the fact that they moved to the new states because they can afford so much more than what they could in California.
Overall my point is, if you consume right wing media then you are conditioned to hate blue states, and particularly those blue states are Cali, NY, and the city of Chicago as well as DC, I’m not saying these places are without flaws, but I am saying that the propaganda and disinformation about those places has amplified the hate towards those places and their residents.
My conservative family still asks if I’m safe here in Seattle because they “hear so much about it on the news”. They still think Seattle is just always being with protests and the libbrerl government is just running the city into the ground.
Which Seattle and most cities have problems, all cities have crime, but no more than usually. It’s just that people live in cities. Per Capita crime in a big city can and is around the same of a rural area, but people don’t think in terms like per Capita.
But fox news loves to spin that to keep rural people afraid, keep them thankful for their backwards laws and ideas. Because what really happens when you move somewhere like Cali? You meet people from different backgrounds and religions and suddenly your views might be challenged a bit
Crime in rural areas is, on average, higher than in cities, per capita.
Vermont is safer than large cities, but that’s never what the right wingers are talking about when they say rural.
Everyone hates liberals. Even other liberals. California is probably the most liberal state. The cost of living is ridiculous. The transport is terrible. However, it is one of the cultural capitals of America. We have San Francisco, Hollywood, Silicon Valley. Probably some other stuff. It is also heavily non-white and has a large unhoused population. So people should hate it just not for any of the reasons people hate it for. It had the home of the KKK, cities with urban blight as bad a Detroit, and breaking bad was originally going to be set here because it is the true home of meth.
Id argue its not the most liberal state. It would still vote for a system democrat vs an active progressive like bernie if push came to shove.
It only seems like the most liberal state because the high number of loberals, while people forget that it also houses a LOT of conservatives (more people voted for trump in california than other states)
Yes, being weirdly conservative is part of libersl ideology.
Car-centric, sprawling concrete jungles define most of California. I hate those things thus I hate California. Additionally their water management policies are using a resource that should be reserved for the citizens of the state are instead diverted to grow non-native crops for a handful of rich fuckers.
California is what late-stage Capitalism looks like.
