@kontextmaschine: she’s right - in general the credentialed professions are in for a big decline relative to the skilled trades.

Okay, let’s do this here. You know that vegan strip club in Portland, Casa Diablo? I know a girl who dances there. Well, danced, back when she lived in the polyamorous dancer commune in that big Victorian off North Killingsworth. (Now she tends at the Dr. Who themed bar) Portland has more strip clubs than anywhere, mostly cause OR has free speech protections so strong that we effectively have a constitutional right to brothels staffed by high schoolers. So they compete on stage shows. A lot of it is basically very good naked acrobatics, but CD’s known for multi-girl performances with penetration.

That’s all true but I phrased it to push your buttons cause here’s the kicker - Greater Cascadia in general, and Portland in particular, is the most consciously thedish part of America. I have never seen somewhere so committed to the primacy of male Scando-Germanic small business owners who read books, work with their hands, create for fun, and fuck women. Even if you’re a few of those things it’s great, and if you’re none you’re welcomed as a courtesy by a hegemony under no existential threat.

Everything works like it’s supposed to only better, under a weirdly functional libertarian technocratic social democracy. The polity is aggressively reasonable - sure the last mayor had a gay relationship with a high school intern (and a previous one turned governor with his junior high babysitter) but the REAL scandal is how he overprioritized worthy capital improvements in the face of an expenses crunch.

Not everyone’s totally satisfied - the socialists and tea partiers frown, the anarchist antifa and WN fa fume, the official history has it that the city ended segregation by asking the landlords and realtors to stop in the mid-1990s, the unofficial history is no, that’s just when the ghetto was gentrified. The system listens politely to challenges and ignores them. More exit than voice - under state land regs you can’t turn farmland into subdivisions but you can build your freehold or commune in the woods on the condition that you declare independence from government services like utilities, roads, fire, and police.

High income tax, capped property, no sales, state gets most of its money from drinking and gambling, and most people are mid-functioning addicts of something and there are 3 bars on each commercial block. If they run out of money they just stop - school let out months early one year. Love learning but skeptical of education, which tends adult and vocational. Lot of autodidacts.

Few national chains, most stuff is made and sold by local farmers, artisans, artists, and shopkeepers. What isn’t is often bought used and repaired for decades. Lot of skilled and semiskilled labor.

There is a social justice tint but less tumblr than communitarian, partly an artifact of so many of the women working in caring or charming professions that can schedule around childraising. People pair and breed early, but usually only 1-3 and they still sleep around with their friends.

The sticks are surprisingly cosmopolitan, the core pretty redneck, people like to drink, fuck, fight, hike, and read. It’s like if Germany won the World War — the first one. Watching people get that wrong from afar makes me really eyebrow at /pol/ types going off on Sweden. Think you’d like it. Even if none of us go to church. LOL.