maxparrish
Veteran Member
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2005
- Messages
- 2,262
- Location
- SF Bay Area
- Basic Beliefs
- Libertarian-Conservative, Agnostic.
California has always been a leading example of the "Blade Runner" fate that awaits the nation over the next half century. Is this gonna be great or what?
Funny, I hadn't noticed killer cyborgs roaming the streets. Or flying police cars. Blade Runner (1982) was set in 2019. In Los Angeles. More accurately, a Los Angeles where it rains all the time and is apparently never sunny.
Maybe in the next four or five years Southern California will be plunged into a rainy darkness, but will that be because of illegal immigrants? Probably not.
While we're at it, if the effect of an executive order granting a sort of amnesty to millions of illegals is enough to turn a city or even the entire nation into a post-apocalyptic wasteland in a mere 50 years, then why is it that we're not halfway there already?
Four years after Blade Runner hit theaters, St. Ronald Reagan granted amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. That was almost 30 years ago. You'd think by now we'd be seeing at least a little bit of an apocalypse, right?
Well the forecast today for LA is partly cloudy and 67, with a 10 percent chance of precipitation and zero chance of replicants.
So you thought Ridley Scott's most personal film was about 21st century weather and flying police cars, do you?
"While we are at it", you might also note that it is a dystopian imagining of an post-industrial decay - a society of ethnic ghettos, populated by Chinese, Latino, African, and Arab service sector poor who makes the future of the first world, a third world. A mish-mash of languages and cultures living in an endless urban landscape of congestion, pollution, crime, and multi-cultural mutations.
Ridley got the gist of decay correct, but rather than dominated by Chinese culture and Japanese technology LA is dominated by Mexicans and Central Americans (their talents at technology, beyond that of low riders and auto upholstering, being less than iconic). In any event, it is no longer a place where Anglos (or Blacks) can randomly exit freeways in confident assurance of safety. Much of California, especially southern California, are sprawling 'hearts of brown darkness' broken by islands (enclaves) of the more well off who can afford to live in places like Malibu. For the rest, it is a zoo.
The five million new supplicants will not create what is already a dystopian reality, it will merely accelerate it.