tldr; As someone who has lived in Portland for the last 18 years, I find the liberal gaslighting about my home insane! 34% of commercial real estate is vacant, we have 7,000 unhoused people (many of whom are severely drug addicted and/or mentally disturbed), we stumble over possibly dead "tranq-ed" out psychopaths all across the city, we now require constant security on public transportation, and there's literally trash everywhere. Plus, our downtown is a ghost town. NONE OF THIS WAS THE CASE IN 2019! If you're defending any of that as normal, that's batshit.
The situation with Portland is in many ways a microcosm of the forces which conspired to re-elect Trump—and the role Fox News and right wing propaganda played in all of it.
In particular, it relies on an obsession with the moral panic of the early 2020's, when social media excesses of the late teens combined with COVID and the murder of George Floyd to produce an incendiary and divisive rift in American culture.
It can be fairly said that around 2020 to 2022, some of the left's most corrosive culture warriors exploited real tragedy to produce an atmosphere of coerced groupthink, which mostly resulted in liberals and progressives punishing their own allies while juicing the careers of their opponents. America got sick of this in fairly short order, and with Trump out of office, it was easy to paint the left as the real tyrants threatening cultural cohesion and democratic values.
People like me, willing to call out and criticize my own side and yes, initially subscribe to Bari Weiss's Substack (then called "Common Sense") ended up feeling used and played for fools by people who claimed to be standing up for traditional liberal values yet were increasingly oblivious to the incompatibility of that mission with support for Trump.
But even though the ills of left wing cancel culture have been gone for several years, on Fox News and the other MAGA satellite outposts on the Internet, it will always be 2020, with every BLM protest like the insanity in Portland, people still losing their jobs because of rabid Zoomer mobs on Slack, and the media still too petrified over the prospect of cultural ostracization to even openly discuss the more controversial issues around gender dysphoria and gender affirming care.
And through it all we have to listen to broken records like Ruy Texiera et al, constantly reminding Democrats of their legitimate branding and polling issues, yet never seeming to contemplate the question of whether the problem is really the largely invisible activist NGOs whose cultural dysfunction chased them away in recent years, or our ever-worsening loss of control of our own image among the growing segment of America trapped in the epistemological bio-dome of MAGA Earth.
i’d always thought the Portland of Portlandia was at least one third Austin, but that’s prolly because i lived in Austin for most of the show’s run. one notable difference between the two cities now is i don’t think many would turn out to protest in Austin in those inflatable animal costumes. those things just look like wearable ovens to me.
I have to go to my dumbass job (yes, all jobs are dumbass, don't make me explain it) twice a week in the Pearl District. It's burning to the ground!!!
LOL - nah. This whole thing is so silly and dumb. The fact that there are actual real people who have skin and organs and supposedly brains too, believe any of Dementia Donald J Trump's BS shows how ridiculous our current timeline is. God I wish I lived in a different reality.
How funny. We watched Portlandia last night just as a palette cleanser after a show about a serial killer. It still fun and great quirky show. To portray it as a hell hole is still a stretch. My husband said they should reboot to show but let’s let it sit where it landed. The fact that they’re still keeping it weird there is good enough for me.
One thing I loved about Portlandia is it was created by liberals who were willing to laugh at the excesses of liberals. When the last time you saw a conservative comedy that poked fun at the excesses of the Right? An inability to laugh at or be critical of your own side is a hallmark of a mentally broken movement.
Ridicule is the way to go—Trump desperately wants to incite violence knowing the feds can easily stomp down rioters, but an obvious campaign of mockery just exposes the whole charade. It only makes Trump and his thugs looks sillier and more impotent. And the more impotent they look, the more normal people join the opposition.
Love the "good trouble" the protesters are getting into. The inflatable costumes are genius. And of course, Faux News and the rest of the rightwing media human centipede need to run file footage of that one fire in 2020 because it helps keep the unreconstructed frothing. When you run on sadopopulism, the unreconstructed want to see some Democratic skulls cracked and if there's no modern footage to justify it old footage will.
Keep showing the world how pathetic trump,ICE, puppy-killer Noem, and the rest of the maladministration are, Portland! Love and solidarity from Upstate SC.
"Artisanal light bulb store?" Why yes we do - it's on Mississippi in North Portland. The thing "visitors" to Portland REALLY need to grasp, is Portlandia was more documentary travelogue than "satire". That "women's bookstore" existed on Hawthorne Blvd and Dick's Meats - a restaurant where portraits of "Famous Dicks" (men named "Richard") hung on the wall and the menu described the origins of the "meat offerings" on the menu actually existed on Belmont in Southeast.
Even today, driving instructions from my old house in Southeast to my new house in St. Johns include..."Take Cesar Chavez Avenue north...to Rosa Parks Blvd west..."
tldr; As someone who has lived in Portland for the last 18 years, I find the liberal gaslighting about my home insane! 34% of commercial real estate is vacant, we have 7,000 unhoused people (many of whom are severely drug addicted and/or mentally disturbed), we stumble over possibly dead "tranq-ed" out psychopaths all across the city, we now require constant security on public transportation, and there's literally trash everywhere. Plus, our downtown is a ghost town. NONE OF THIS WAS THE CASE IN 2019! If you're defending any of that as normal, that's batshit.
The situation with Portland is in many ways a microcosm of the forces which conspired to re-elect Trump—and the role Fox News and right wing propaganda played in all of it.
In particular, it relies on an obsession with the moral panic of the early 2020's, when social media excesses of the late teens combined with COVID and the murder of George Floyd to produce an incendiary and divisive rift in American culture.
It can be fairly said that around 2020 to 2022, some of the left's most corrosive culture warriors exploited real tragedy to produce an atmosphere of coerced groupthink, which mostly resulted in liberals and progressives punishing their own allies while juicing the careers of their opponents. America got sick of this in fairly short order, and with Trump out of office, it was easy to paint the left as the real tyrants threatening cultural cohesion and democratic values.
People like me, willing to call out and criticize my own side and yes, initially subscribe to Bari Weiss's Substack (then called "Common Sense") ended up feeling used and played for fools by people who claimed to be standing up for traditional liberal values yet were increasingly oblivious to the incompatibility of that mission with support for Trump.
But even though the ills of left wing cancel culture have been gone for several years, on Fox News and the other MAGA satellite outposts on the Internet, it will always be 2020, with every BLM protest like the insanity in Portland, people still losing their jobs because of rabid Zoomer mobs on Slack, and the media still too petrified over the prospect of cultural ostracization to even openly discuss the more controversial issues around gender dysphoria and gender affirming care.
And through it all we have to listen to broken records like Ruy Texiera et al, constantly reminding Democrats of their legitimate branding and polling issues, yet never seeming to contemplate the question of whether the problem is really the largely invisible activist NGOs whose cultural dysfunction chased them away in recent years, or our ever-worsening loss of control of our own image among the growing segment of America trapped in the epistemological bio-dome of MAGA Earth.
Could you imagine the outrage if Joe Biden had mistaken a news clip from five years earlier as the present and then based policy on that stupidity?
i’d always thought the Portland of Portlandia was at least one third Austin, but that’s prolly because i lived in Austin for most of the show’s run. one notable difference between the two cities now is i don’t think many would turn out to protest in Austin in those inflatable animal costumes. those things just look like wearable ovens to me.
I have to go to my dumbass job (yes, all jobs are dumbass, don't make me explain it) twice a week in the Pearl District. It's burning to the ground!!!
LOL - nah. This whole thing is so silly and dumb. The fact that there are actual real people who have skin and organs and supposedly brains too, believe any of Dementia Donald J Trump's BS shows how ridiculous our current timeline is. God I wish I lived in a different reality.
Still keeping it weird here in Portland!
How funny. We watched Portlandia last night just as a palette cleanser after a show about a serial killer. It still fun and great quirky show. To portray it as a hell hole is still a stretch. My husband said they should reboot to show but let’s let it sit where it landed. The fact that they’re still keeping it weird there is good enough for me.
One thing I loved about Portlandia is it was created by liberals who were willing to laugh at the excesses of liberals. When the last time you saw a conservative comedy that poked fun at the excesses of the Right? An inability to laugh at or be critical of your own side is a hallmark of a mentally broken movement.
Ridicule is the way to go—Trump desperately wants to incite violence knowing the feds can easily stomp down rioters, but an obvious campaign of mockery just exposes the whole charade. It only makes Trump and his thugs looks sillier and more impotent. And the more impotent they look, the more normal people join the opposition.
This is fascinating, I never heard of Portlandia.
Love the "good trouble" the protesters are getting into. The inflatable costumes are genius. And of course, Faux News and the rest of the rightwing media human centipede need to run file footage of that one fire in 2020 because it helps keep the unreconstructed frothing. When you run on sadopopulism, the unreconstructed want to see some Democratic skulls cracked and if there's no modern footage to justify it old footage will.
You are in for a treat if you can find some Portlandia re-runs.
Keep showing the world how pathetic trump,ICE, puppy-killer Noem, and the rest of the maladministration are, Portland! Love and solidarity from Upstate SC.
"Artisanal light bulb store?" Why yes we do - it's on Mississippi in North Portland. The thing "visitors" to Portland REALLY need to grasp, is Portlandia was more documentary travelogue than "satire". That "women's bookstore" existed on Hawthorne Blvd and Dick's Meats - a restaurant where portraits of "Famous Dicks" (men named "Richard") hung on the wall and the menu described the origins of the "meat offerings" on the menu actually existed on Belmont in Southeast.
Even today, driving instructions from my old house in Southeast to my new house in St. Johns include..."Take Cesar Chavez Avenue north...to Rosa Parks Blvd west..."
https://sunlanlighting.com/
"Put a bird on it."
The feminist bookstore is commemorated on it's own Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Other_Words_Feminist_Community_Center
Are you saying Portland doesn't have an artisanal light bulb store?
We visited Portland in like 2005, fantastic city. Stay strong, love from SoCal!