nsplayr

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.

🤷‍♂️ ok man fair enough if your a native, I don’t even necessarily disagree about SF re: people who live there. Lots of problems are worse there and local policies (housing shortages, refusal to enforce the law) that are the root cause. But the overall picture that all cities are hell holes is wrong. Lets talk Nashville since that’s what I know best. It’s great here, never been better IMHO. We need more housing but that’s not a unique problem. Come visit sometime, it’s very nice.

It is! I disagree with you. Nashville has never been better or more prosperous. That’s where I live near and so I have the receipts more than elsewhere. Come here and see for yourself!

Because I do not agree with your premise than Dem party policies are “obviously destructive” to cities, families and individuals. Come on man, what kind of question is that? “Tell me sir, when did you stop beating your wife?” I live near a city, have a family, and am an individual, and we’re all doing pretty great! Hope you are as well.

I’m just pushing back with a purposefully overly-sunny demeanor against the over the top online doomerism. People literally think cities are burning to the ground daily 🙄 Yea SF has some issues and I do fault local leaders for it. I would vote for changes if I did live there. I happen to have spent a whole week in SF actually, so longer than most of my other visits to various cities, and it was great as a tourist. I didn’t even get pooped on once 😅 Fully understand living somewhere is different than visiting. Do you live there?

I will tell you Nashville is very nice. Lots of growth, fun stuff to do, etc. Come visit! Many other people do all the time. The level of doomerism online I see around cities is hilarious. Some places are having a rough go of it, sometimes due to stupid policy choices, but overall cities are awesome places where millions of people pay hefty premiums to live. Of course not everyone wants to and that’s cool too. Most cities are safer than when most of us were growing up, and the one I live near, the ones my close friends live in, and the ones I’ve visited recently on trips have all been great. Cities I’ve enjoyed over the last handful of years: Nashville, Atlanta, Birmingham, San Diego, LA, SF, DC, Tampa, Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Austin, KC, Asheville, Knoxville, Memphis, Chattanooga, Honolulu and Seattle.

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It’s not flimsy “political bias” to have policy preferences my man. If there was a hypothetical election where the GOP candidate was pro-choice, pro-clean energy, wanted to strengthen the social safety net and raise taxes on the wealthy, all why the Dem advocates for the opposite, I would happily vote for the Republican! What I find more flimsy is to say, “Wow, he/she is a great speaker/debater/etc., I would vote for them!” without regard for what policies they support and the values that underlie those policies. I will 100% vote for a boring, replacement-level Dem who aligns with my policy preferences vs a charismatic, inspiring, well-spoken Republican who wants to do the opposite of what I would do on every policy choice. You should vote that way too, consistent with whatever values you hold & policies you support!

Based on what public policies they support. Most of today’s GOP leaders would move forward enthusiastically with policies I think are wrong and bad. Most of todays Dems would also pursue new initiatives if elected, but for policies I think I are generally correct and good. So even if I like Nikki Haley enough as a GOP candidate, especially compared to the actual leading contenders, that doesn’t mean I support her policy vision for the country. Is this a weird or alien concept to some folks? 🤷‍♂️ I am a liberal democrat. I do in fact support liberal Democratic Party policies, like those of the current President. I think they are mostly correct and good and that the competing GOP policies are mostly wrong and bad. I guess that’s like a 🤯 concept around here, but it’s part of why I keep posting on politics even though it’s 96.9% a waste of time. I would not support a Republican in a general election where a passable Democrat was also running. I don’t expect many of my friends on the right to vote any differently than me, just the opposite way consistent with their differing views & values. There are a fair amount of “independents” and learners who usually decide close elections, but I’m just not among them and that’s ok. FWIW I did vote for a Republican for mayor of my town because she was the best candidate - the catch is there are relatively few Dems here and her opponent was an extremist, whereas to me she is a reasonable, pro-business country club Republican. So ok, I’ll take the best of two sub-optimal choices given the realities of where I live and my fellow voters here. By that same logic were I to vote in the IA or NH GOP presidential primary somehow, Haley would definitely get a look from me, even if I would not support her against Biden in the general were she to become the GOP nominee. I do genuinely want good GOP candidates and leaders because in a two party system like ours, you ain’t gonna win ‘em all and I truly don’t believe rooting for the “worst” “most beatable” Republican is a strategy Dems should pursue (or vice versa).

I agree, she’s a good candidate. Won’t get very far IMHO unfortunately. She’s much too conservative for me to vote for in a general election, but she seems like a good person and is well qualified to be President as a former governor & ambassador. I wish her luck and want to see more candidates like her for both parties n the future but…yea I don’t think she’s gonna get far against Trump in this primary.

This to me is why we still need pride month. The vocal dead-enders who are still virulently and actively anti-gay rights, let alone tolerant, accepting, etc. Gay people are not pedophiles, I don’t know how that even gets lumped together. I’ve known one pedophile in my life and he was straight (e.g. grown man attracted to underaged girls). Extremely weird story…one of my friends’ dad, school board president, retired army O5 -> intel community GS, super nice (seemingly) upstanding guy. Had a high-level clearance with a poly and somehow got into a box canyon on a routine reexamination and admitted to terrible crimes. Went to a federal pound you in the ass prison. FAFO. Everyone was shocked. Anyways, I digress…it sounds like you’ve never had a gay best friend or a gay kid. I have both. Too bad, the experience might change your hard heart to one able to understand that homosexuality has always been a part of the human condition and it’s not gonna go away if you hate it extra loudly. You’re just going to hurt people who deserve to be loved and accepted just the same as you or me.