Yeah, the situation sure is bad in a lot of places. Almost as if the political process can have some major impacts on life.
What would the conditions where I live be a stark reminder of to you?
Surely a 1,750 percent increase in shooting incidents is a sign of some kind.
Maybe I’m a sucker for right wing propaganda, and all of the gunshots are from some mysterious force, with no relation to the political policies recently enacted.
OK, great.
You constantly seem to think I don’t believe you about Lewiston. I have never doubted you, said you are wrong or anything else. Not sure why you keep insinuating otherwise.
Real problems in Lewiston dont mean tariffs are a good idea or make people getting kicked off social security because they are “dead” suddenly non- problems. Nor does me not becoming a maga trump republican mean I doubt you or want murders to happen
I get it, Lewiston is very important to you and you view it at a microcosm of democratic policies writ large, and are willing to basically let trump and co do anything at all to fix it, but problems in Lewiston do not make other problems not problems or make me like the poeple breaking the law so they can fix it the way they want to fix it
Its like you’re willing to let one side do what ever they want, but when the red team gets anywhere near the line of “breaking the law” you break out in hives.
If tariffs are so bad, why did so many countries have them on us?
What do you make of open border policies and Democrat efforts to empower noncitizens to vote immediately upon entering the country? Is this a good thing I’m unfairly biased against?
Do you believe we have a moral obligation to feed, house, and educate every person who can make their way here?
I do believe Maine is a very good microcosm, as they seem to be running the same playbook across much of the western world.
Tariffs can be a useful tool for certain things. The way Trump executed them was quite stupid, which he seems to actually agree with because he almost immediately reversed course when he saw how much of a shit show it was
If thats happening I would not be in favor of it. I havent seem any evidence that is happening en masse. I would not say you are unfairly biased against it
In short, no
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t the 1,750 percent increase in shooting incidents / fatalities almost exclusively explained by a recent mass shooting that took the lives of around 20 people, and was done by a single man? If a population of roughly 40,000 has a mass shooting which killed 20, the statistics are going to look like the place went to shit if you didn’t have the context of a mass shooting.
IDK, it seems like in that case, that it would be an error to blame the politicians in charge at the time. If it was 20 different shootings that would indicate different issues to me (ones related to policy), than a single mass shooter. But a mass shooting is more of an unfortunate event that could happen anywhere, and it seems unjustified to blame politicians.
No, that was one event and just a drop in the bucket. The Sun Journal newspaper article posted upthread explains the number. It is absolutely higher than 1,750 percent, as that number only includes cases where evidence was recovered. I’d say the real number is closer to 2,500 percent. Popping off rounds into the air from moving cars is a thing here, too.
Lewiston was probably among the safest cities of its size anywhere in the USA when I moved here. Years went by with no shootings.
I think we’re at four in the last week. Officially.
We’re in the trump thread and im talking about trump, insert shrug emoji I guess
Just pointing out the hypocracy. 
.
I only have the time to stay on top of local politics in one state and town, but what makes you believe that Lewiston is unique, and not simply the playbook being run everywhere it can be run?
I can say that not a single Maine Democrat is willing or capable of defending the conditions their policies have produced. You can scour the internet, email every politician you can find, demand answers in public comment and you will find no coherent explanations for why their policies are good for Maine. Woke platitudes and and “fighting fascism” is literally what they campaign on here.
It seems like they are running a script, which they are. They vote in near unison nearly all of the time, at least in Augusta. I believe the same script is used everywhere, which is part of the reason why so many Democrats behave the same way across the USA. It is why they suck at podcasting so bad, since any kind of free-flowing discussion where questions get answered quickly dissolves their entire narrative. That’s going to continue to be a problem for them, because Vance can speak for three hours, defend his line of thinking, and not sound like a moron doing it.
AOC cannot, Newsome cannot, and Bernie’s explanations of the world can only seem coherent if they aren’t challenged. The narrative is what they rely on, and challenging the narrative must be suppressed. It’s why my city council just voted to shut off comments on the LPD’s social media and it is why they pressured the newspaper into stopping the police blotter.
A friend of mine now requests the bookings from the county jail and publishes them on social media, much to the chagrin of our politicians.
The effects of mass migration might be more easily visible in Maine, since a few years ago we were the safest state in the nation, with the best public schools in the nation, and the whitest. New arrivals tend to be easy to spot here, although less so now that Maine’s whiteness problem is being solved. And yes, MANY articles in our state-subsidized media have stated in plain terms that Maine’s demographic composition was a problem that needed to be solved.
It is almost as if they were expecting people who live here to travel abroad to find spouses, instead of marrying people nearby.
I loosely follow Boston events, and the same playbook definitely exists there. Hell, the governor was asking people to house migrants. Oddly, my brother and SIL didn’t use their spare room for this purpose.
Immigration is just one aspect of the woke/Democratic Socialist policy plan. The ACLU is hard at work on the legal side to decriminalize crime. The harm reductionists are hard at work making sure our public spaces are littered with needles and intoxicated, dangerous people. The education reformers are hard at work incorporating Social and Emotional learning, wild administrative policies that prevent orderly classrooms, and implementing race-based decision making in all things, along with enforcing the vocabulary of transgenderism among students and staff.
Adding more dysfunction to an already dysfunctional place can fly under the radar. Taking one of the most functional parts of the country and turning it into an ideological playground tends to get noticed, at least by some of us. Some of us remember Maine before all of the radical policies, when nearly everyone on the planet was welcome to move here.
That few did until we began importing state dependents is not a flaw of the people who were born and raised here.
Lest we both start writing novels back and forth to each other I’ll let your post be the last word on that convo
No worries from me. Essay away if you want, or not. There’s a reason t-nation was the only social media I used until recently. I’ve never been a 240 character guy, and I’m still learning how to properly express myself with memes.
You probably know more about the details of Boston than I do, but I thought it a little funny you brought them up considering they are currently experiencing historically low levels of crime:
Boston’s Homicide Rate Reaches a Historic Low | Vera Institute.
So whatever they are doing in Boston apparently is working quite well.
Typical unthinking lemming, posting idiotic sources.
My initial take on that is that they’re comparing year-on-year data, and not the situation before whatever radical policy enactments have happened.
It would be like calling yourself a savior if you reduced the shootings in Lewiston to 3/4 of what they are now. Tell that to people when they get woken up by shocking acts of violence, and to all of the people who remember it being a regular American town with a highly prestigious college.
My second take on that is that I have serious questions about nearly everything supporting that article you linked. It seems to reek of the same stench of propaganda I’ve grown accustomed to in Maine, where there’s often more to the story than what’s presented. I do not have the time to follow the rabbit hole of the links or offer any meaningful commentary on Boston.
Grok/google The Vera Institute of “Justice” (my quotation marks added lol) and you’ll understand.
Ive never heard of them myself, they were just the first google result posted for the info I wanted. I can post a different source if that makes you feel better. Did you have a comment on the actual information contained in the link?
Theres a link to the actual source material if you prefer: https://majorcitieschiefs.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/MCCA-Violent-Crime-Report-2024-and-2023-Midyear.pdf