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Comment by jimmaswell | Hacker News Reader

Friendly if you're the right political party and orientation, I hear.

Seriously, Texans in the cities may be redneck compared to the rest of the country, but holy fucking shit are they friendly as hell. If you suck in social situations, you will find plenty of extroverts that will gladly make you feel included in a group of strangers.

It really is best to come experience it in person. Yes, there's always stupid people doing stupid things anywhere and it's certainly a conservative state, but people are generally much more tolerant and intelligent than the stereotypes.

The stereotypes are hilarious. I'm a computer scientist and spent 9 months at IBM's TJ Watson facility up in New York outside the city. Every person I contacted to rent a room from made a point to tell me that I'd have to leave my horse at home because they didn't have a stable. They uniformly were shocked in disbelief when I explained I owned no horses, no cowboy hat, no boots. The horror...

But boots are great! ;-)

As someone who lives in Fort Worth, I feel your pain, some folks do honestly seem to think that Texas is basically one big western still.

People here trend conservative. This cuts both ways, it means that they don't want to make a scene when they see something that offends their norms, but it also means that you have to try a little harder to open minds.

The other ruling ethos here seems to be 'good fences, make good neighbors'.

Might be the types of people I met in Texas, but I generally feel people are receptive to counter view points if you dont look down on them. I never had issues with debating people in Texas.

I'd agree, people do have reasonably open minds here, so long as you discuss with them, not dictate to them. Texans do not take kindly to dictating.

Have you ever visited? Talked to locals? You might be surprised how friendly people are IRL.

I lived in Dallas and it is the only place I've lived where people would scream homophobic slurs at me in the street. I wouldn't say I'd never move back, but the situation would have to be dire for me to consider it. Definitely cut your hair if you visit.

That's not unique to Texas, just assholes. I've seen it here in San Diego while walking through Hillcrest.

I dunno, 40 years of living in other places, stuff like this only happens in Texas and the South. There are definitely assholes in NY and Boston but they won't get up in my grill for "looking gay" on the street so that's pretty neat.

I concede and won't argue with personal experience. It sucks that it is still a thing anywhere, hopefully we'll get there some day.

It happened to me in Chicago, twice in one weekend. All I did was wear a pink shirt and walk down the street. That was enough to garner homophobic slurs.

I'm not gay and when I mentioned it to one of my Chicago friends, and he just shrugged his shoulders and said, "Yeah."

tl;dr jerks are everywhere

Dallas is actually very liberal, it's a blue city, totally blue,

When did you move away? I've been visiting here on and off for a decade before I decided to move here, and I've never experienced this.

2000 or so.

The world has changed in the last almost 20 years, the Dallas you left in 2000, is not the Dallas of today.

People can be friendly to your face and still vote for and support laws and political leaders who want you out of their area or worse.

Look at how they fought gay marriage or how they treat Mexican-American's. There are pockets of safety in that state (Houston/Austin) but as a whole it's not that great.

I lived a number of years in Idaho which has the same problem. I'm "OK" in Boise (even there things can happen) but I'm genuinely concerned for my safety when I have to drive anywhere else in that state.

You don't know anything at all about Texas if you think that. All of Texas' large cities lean liberal.

Spoken like some who has never visited!

based off the experience of soem of the LGBT people from there who've talked about it on Discord servers I'm in. Some areas are better than others but even someone from Dallas in this thread experienced issues.

Funny to hear that when we are comparing it to San Francisco. (Not trying to start a flame, I found this to be legitimately funny.)

>Friendly if you're the right political party and orientation, I hear.

Yes, it's conservatives who have done and continue to do the following:

- Attacked people in the streets over a hat they've chosen to wear. A hat merely supporting the nation's elected President.

- Deplatformed, or had banned from even attending non-political events, for wearing the same hat at an entirely irrelevant place and time.

- Cornered or essentially kidnapped college professors, and then continuing on to destroy their careers, for expressing views not even contrary to their own but merely in light conflict with it.

- Started trending topics on social media lamenting a desire to kill an entire demographic of people based on their race and gender, or denouncing a race or gender as "trash".

- Held marches in prominent cities calling for cops to be shot.

- Attacked journalists from the "opposite" side for merely being at events to report on them.

etc. etc.

Long story short, I would wager that your typical radfem socialist type, adhering to the stereotypical dress attire and appearance choices, would be a magnitude of order more safe and welcomed walking down a street, or attending a university, in a major Texan city than a conservative with a MAGA hat, or similar stereotypical signal, in a liberal city.

Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar. The GP comment was flamebait, but this comment is the bursting into flames that we're trying to avoid here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Fair enough. You can delete my original post if you so wish.

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