I love how some Refugees are in crisis mode because someone had a difference in opinion! Sound the alarms! Hit the big red panic button!
WE NEED MODERATION! SOMEONE IS DISAGREEING WITH US!
It’s hilarious.
Maybe we should discuss why the race card gets pulled when nothing I said was remotely racist…
Exactly. The real crime is that someone dared to disagree with the majority (on this site). There are a lot of “sacred cows” on this site.
This forum is a bizarre cocoon of a very particular type of person and anyone who doesn’t fit that mold is either relentlessly mocked until they leave or intimidated into hiding in the shadows. You don’t see a lot of dissent on here, people will say there is, but it’s mostly about shallow stuff like “what’s your favorite Italian dish” but when something serious is discussed, it’s an echo chamber.
I have thought about leaving multiple times because clearly I am an outlier on this forum but as you mentioned, real-life looks a lot different than The Refuge. I almost feel like I have to represent the majority of non-Refugees because of how imbalanced this place often is. I’m not sure if a few active users created the culture that exists and have chased many like me away, or if the NLU audience is organically just a Bernie rally but this isn’t the golf demo at large. Maybe the Park Slope inhabitants that frequent this forum will have a genuine understanding of the opposing side, but from my experience on here, that’s laughably naive.
That’s what I was pointing out, Zippy. I actually don’t think you were wrong initially, which I’ve now stated a couple of times in this thread. The problem is, you’re such a dick in every single post that people who might otherwise defend you or at least publicly agree with your opinions are disinclined to do so. You might learn how to express your opinion without resorting to “Bernie rally” or “Park Slope residents” to do it.
But yes, there is a very clear political leaning to this forum, or at least among its most vocal members, that also inhibits discussion and turns most social or political discussions into shoutdowns. And because this forum is less anonymous than most, it’s just not worth it to express dissent when there’s a likelihood that even stating the benign opinion that a city of 500,000 that has had 1,000 murders in the past three years is not particularly safe could lead to being called a racist.
Bingo. It’s not always what he says (it often is), but how he says it. And how often. And how often he brings it back up when the conversation has moved on.
And to be fair, the people you’re wasting all our time with, day after day and post after post and thread after thread, probably don’t represent the majority of non-Refugees and more than probably don’t represent the majority of Refugees, who typically are able to just not engage with race-baiting garbage in a thread meant to discuss a fucking golf video series about uncelebrated public golf courses in Baltimore.
But you do you. But I wouldn’t spend as much time at a place that I hate as you do here, big cat.
lol ED came in hot over the weekend claiming peace and love and holiday spirit but then proceeded to reveal his ass to the world? This site fuckin rules.
So I actually took a class about online communities and then did an independent research project on them in grad school. The ‘ban people with impunity and for no reason at all sometimes’ method is actually terrifically effective. r/Polandball in particular has seen tremendous success with this.
Umm it appears there are some pretty straight forward “community guidelines” already on this site in which we have all done a pretty good job at one point or another of not following. Myself included. Maybe we need to not call it FAQ and it could get more attention.
This is a hilariously wrong take. I’m honestly astonished—you’ve ascended to a new level of asserting definitive, comprehensive knowledge in an area you clearly know nothing about. It’s admirable that you keep challenging yourself like this.
It is not about anything else than ED craving for attention with over-the-top caricature conservative takes and hounding out earnest and constructive contributions from the likes of KVV.
It would be different if ED was remotely interested in having a honest discussion on this topic the same way he has shown the ability to do in other threads. It’s pretty apparent he isn’t. That’s what makes it trolling.
A few post-Christmas thoughts here from the person who provided the fuel for some of this recent angst.
Baltimore is a complicated place. It’s very much a lightening rod nationally. One reason DJ and I thought Baltimore would be an interesting place for Strapped is it’s easy to make assumptions about it if you aren’t familiar with it. We talked a lot about The Wire in these two episodes and for good reason. The Wire is, IMO, one of the great pieces of art that entertainment has produced in the last 25 years. But The Wire is also a reason that a lot of people who don’t have much familiarity with Baltimore view it as an urban hellscape. The more interesting read would be that The Wire is really a story of almost any urban city, it’s just that David Simon wrote about the city he knew best and told a story of how the shrinking middle class and corruption (and how it’s all covered by the media) creates a cycle that’s inescapable for many people. All of that is a really interesting phenomenon to discuss socially, whether you’re interested in traveling to Baltimore or not. What irritates me, as a long-time resident, is when Baltimore’s ills become a cheap opportunity to dunk on people for political points. Can you imagine how awful it would be if Elizabeth Warren mocked rural Ohio for it’s massive heroin problem and called it a shithole? Imagine how that would be received. Yet Baltimore is frequently used as a punchline for conservatives who want to shit on the broken state of urban America. “Durr Durr, don’t you think maybe you should stop electing Democrats, look at where it’s gotten you!” is a common refrain. The whole point of The Wire is that it’s not an issue of right/left politics, it’s an issue of structural rot across American society. It would be easy if it was as simple as electing Republicans and throwing more people in prison and crushing unions. It’s so much more complicated than that, and I resent people who are so arrogant they see the solutions as both easy and the problems as a punchline.
I resent ED frequently making me out to be some liberal caricature instead of actually asking my opinions on some of these issues. That’s why I’m not interested in engaging with him. The idea I’d be against gentrification is laughably dumb for anyone who knows me. When I first move to Baltimore 20 years ago, Harbor East and Remington and Hampden were all struggling in one way or another, and all of them have improved dramatically because of significant investment into those communities. The idea that anyone should be scared to visit any of these neighborhoods (which are all in the city) is what I was referring to when I said it’s based on “bullshit.” And as several of the Baltimore people in this thread can attest to, the idea that anyone should be/would be scared to visit this places is laughable and based on fear-mongering that is — at the very least — classist. And — sorry to say — it’s usually racist. To be frank, I wasn’t even talking about tourists in that interview with DJ. I was talking about people in Baltimore County who frequently shit on the city when they goddamn know better. (Again, you’re welcome to ask my opinion on these matters instead of just assuming you know where I stand.)
Remember when politician John Edwards used to talk about how there are “Two Americas?” Well, there are probably at least four or five Baltimores. Everyone who lives here understands this. (Rocky Point, where Episode 2 takes place, is located in a poor white part of the city that’s almost never discussed when people talk about Baltimore’s problems, but it just as important to understanding the city’s complexities.) Personally, there is almost nowhere in the city I could go where I’d feel “scared.” But I also recognize that part of that is privilege. Even if I roll up into Sandtown or Cherry Hill or Rosemont, no one is going to fuck with me. Why? Because the majority of the violence in Baltimore is connected to the drug trade, disputes over territory and revenge for those disputes, not robbing random citizens. Earlier this year, we had an incident where a woman was stabbed while trying to give money to man offering to wash her windshield at a stoplight. The whole city lit up with rage. “It’s time to clean up the streets! Throw all these people in prison” the call went out. Scores of people swore they’d never go into the city again. Guess what actually happened when the police looked into the stabbing? It turned out her husband stabbed her because he wanted to run off with their stepdaughter, and he knew blaming one of the randos on the street would play well with the public. Was there every any accounting and self-reflection from the people who claimed this was the perfect example of why Baltimore was terrible? Dear reader, there was not. In fact, the same people doubled down on their point by suggesting it COULD HAVE BEEN true. The chances of bringing your family to the city as a tourist and falling victim to a random crime — which is what people mean when they say “But it’s the most VIOLENT CITY IN AMERICA!” — is way less likely than you getting in a car crash in Orlando or Jacksonville (two of the most dangerous driving cities in the US). If you come here looking to buy heroin, well, that’s another story. And to be honest, even buying heroin wouldn’t be problematic. It would be problematic if you wanted to set up your own cartel and start selling heroin, which, just a hunch here, I doubt and tourists looking for a golf vacation are going to be into, but to each his own.
I don’t know how you solve the murder problem in Baltimore. Martin O’Malley had some success driving the murder rate down by telling cops they were basically allowed to violate the shit out of everyone’s Constitutional rights, locking them up and losing the evidence. You’d think this kind of behavior would bother conservatives who claim to love the Constitution above all things, but dear reader, it did not! (It’s weird how important it is to protect the rights of some people but not others.) When the cops were told they could not (or should not) beat the ever loving shit out of Baltimore citizens and/or rob them, they responded by essentially pouting and refusing to do police work. And interestingly, the people who live in places like Cherry Hill and Rosemont wanted the cops to get back to cracking skulls. So you can see how the problem is a little more nuanced than “Just fix it!” as I said in the interview. Our governor has adopted an interesting strategy of essentially deciding he’s going to ignore Baltimore entirely, other than to use it as a scapegoat when he’d like to reinforce some anger people in the suburbs have toward the city. Meanwhile it’s the appetite for heroin by white suburban teens (and hipster professionals) that’s driving much of the drug trade in the city.
I will debate and discuss Baltimore with just about anyone except those people who have zero empathy toward those who suffer the most because of its myriad problems. If your position is “LOL, what a shithole, why would anyone go there?” then man, fuck right off. There are so many admirable people who teach and coach and work in the city trying to make it a better place, who feel the weight of the city’s problems on their shoulders every day and still keep climbing into the ring to fight, knowing they’re going to get pummeled and feel hopeless at times, but they keep doing it anyway. That’s so much more admirable, to me, than someone who says “Good luck, I have no interest in any of that, and I don’t care if it’s selfish because I like being selfish.”
None of that is really related to golf, which is completely isolated from the complexities of Baltimore in 99 percent of its existence. ED is right about one thing when he says The Refuge doesn’t rep a lot of the real world, but not for the reason he thinks. It’s because (like golf at large) it’s almost exclusively white and middle class here. And that’s not something I’m going to suggest is inherently problematic (when the reality is, it’s reflective of the sport and pretty self selecting, and broadening the appeal of the game is a much larger discussion we can’t have here, even on this thread) but it’s important to keep in mind if you want to have a debate about a city that’s 64 percent African American. I’ve never taken the position that ED get banned or that he stop sharing his thoughts. He’s obviously smart. But it’s also obvious he’s not interested in any actual discussion, a give and take of ideas. He’s only trying to dunk on people he thinks are naive or foolish libtard snowflakes while at the same time eagerly lecturing people about places he hasn’t even visited, or issues he hasn’t even read about.
