Maybe, but you are also advocating for climate arson. Every person who leaves NYC for any other American city other than Berkeley is raising their carbon footprint, dramatically in the case of most cities. So that isn't great.

The other perspective that you need to consider is there are huge populations who simply will not consider living in the cities you mentioned. Women, for example, do not want to move to Ohio. Homosexuals would rather not live in Oklahoma. People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities. It's true that a single, straight, white male with no children can pick up and move anywhere, but that's a relatively small fraction of the people.

Look, I'm as pro-urbanism as any online nerd. I don't own a car and I bike everywhere. But nobody has a fucking moral obligation to live in NYC and dump all their paycheque into their landlord's pocket, so they can "save the planet". That's just insane. Batshit crazy. You sound like Pol Pot in reverse.

> People who are not white can rule out a happy existence in 90% of American cities

Why in the world would that be the case?

Because America is built on, and much of it (and not only the historically obvious bits) is still drowning in, racism.

It is not just the racism but also practical facts. There are American cities without a black barber. A given city may lack the food culture or language of some ethnic group. The incredible whiteness of some cities is self-perpetuating.

Do you think that "whiteness" is a bad thing? What is wrong with white people? Do you not like us for some reason?

> Do you think that "whiteness" is a bad thing? What is wrong with white people?

“Whiteness“ is not the same thing as “white people”. There's nothing wrong with white people qua white people. (There's lots of things wrong with people as individuals, some of which are significantly more common among White people than other groups—e.g., sealioning about racial issues on internet fora—but that is a different issue.)

There's something in particular wrong with whiteness, which is grounded in identifying with, valorizing, and perpetuating shared experience as the oppressing class under the system of White supremacy.

Well I remember people used to say the same thing about other groups -- they'd say "oh it's not that I don't like Jews, I just don't like Jewishness", whatever that means. And then that Dave Chapelle routine about black people. I don't see how what you're doing is any different.

I hadn't heard of that "sealioning" term before, and honestly I'm just even more baffled having Googled it. I guess I'm like the sealion in the comic, and the sealion is meant to be ... obviously in the wrong? But ... he's not? People are mouthing off about him and he wants them to explain themselves. Why is he in the wrong? You're mouthing off about me and people like me, where I can hear you, and you think you're just entitled to do that and nobody can say a word? If you have a problem with people like me, why don't you be a man and say it plainly? Instead of trying to squirm out of it with these silly little clique terms.

And "oppressing class under white supremacy"? What is this gobbledegook? My family is working class, I come from a long line of iron-mongers, my great grandfather had rickets because the smog blotted out the sun. They peddled this same race-war nonsense back in Czarist Russia, all the Elders of Zion conspiring to keep everyone down, it's a siren call of hatred. Snap out of it.

It's possible for there to be no problem with white people, regardless of how "white" they are being, while there is still a big problem with structural barriers to others moving to areas that might otherwise be the best choice for themselves and their family. I think the parent intended the latter, pointing at overwhelming prevalence of white people (rather than - as you seem to have read it - overwhelming... intensity(?) of white people) as being an indicator of the persistence of such barriers.

There isn't anywhere near enough space in this box to answer the question "What is wrong with white people" and that isn't my purpose here. I'm trying to tell you why there are non-obvious reasons why people don't just immediately move to Lincoln, Nebraska, when the rents change in Manhattan. It's because there aren't any Persian restaurants, or whatever people view as an amenity.

But you do think there is something wrong with white people? You actually do think there's something wrong with me, on account of the colour of my skin?

You're not going to have any more luck reasoning with them than a black person would have trying to reason with a klan member. If you've decided you hate people because of the color of their skin, no online discourse is going to change your mind.

Yes it just seems like he's prejudiced against certain people and he's invented some complicated-sounding intellectual justification for it.

He's mistaking the invisible hand of individual incentives etc for some sort of coordinated "attack" on "non-privileged". It's funny because in NYC you see tons of people of all different types of backgrounds making it, and also not making it.

Doesn't really sound that complicated, people wanting to live in a place where barbers know how to style their hair and restaurants serve the food they enjoy eating.

Whenever someone wants to talk about what's wrong with group of people with skin color (X), you already you're talking to someone with the wrong priorities.

Sure, but this is totally antithetical to american culture which is extremely selfish, entirely oriented around acquiring money, and obsessed with pop culture which generally leads people to pursue positions that are high paying and locales that are “the place to be”.

When the only values that remain are the acquisition of capital, self-love, and fame, the majority of the population will elect to be in the places that present those possibilities to them, even if it requires making short-term decisions that harm them (absurd renting costs), because they believe they might make it work given time.