pink ladies are still my favorite tho

Some amount of Balkanization may well be inevitable at this point. I do think we should continue to fight it, though. The alternative, as you point out, can quickly turn horrifying.

And sorry, but you all need to do the internal work of dealing with that, rather than lashing out and threatening the most vulnerable and marginalised in our communities!

We will never return to the “Before Times” and frankly? We shouldn’t want to. We should want to be better.

I mean, arguably they already are. I'm not actually rural but I doubt NYC urbanists can tell the difference

Wow, I had no idea Vermont was such a major tourist destination. Definitely reinforces my belief that most of the urban/rural discourse on this site is not-so-secretly about other things.

There are plenty of *specific, identifiable people* who have committed crimes and should be punished. I reject the notion of enemy populations a priori; the other path leads to people saying shit like “we are justified in starving Gazan children bc their parents voted for Hamas”