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I don't know if an entire city can be a lolcow, but Brighton, in Sussex, certainly tries.
Back in November, in fact, on the day of the American presidential election, I went on a job interview with a firm in Brighton. I didn't get it. The bloke who interviewed me looked like a hobbit. But that's beside the point. One thing he did say was that he warned me that Brighton was an expensive place to live and that I should have a look around first before deciding whether or not to move there or even if it was affordable. So I did. As a result I've been brewing up this thread for months.
For those of us who don't know of its reputation, allow me to elucidate. Brighton is sometimes nicknamed "London on Sea" because it's a city of 250,000 people on the south coast of England which is popular for Limousine Lefties to move out to. It has frequent and reliable railway services to the capital but is by the seaside and is less dirty and more progressive and tolerant than the Smoke.
The side effect of all of this is that you pay London prices for everything because rich Londoners have all moved in en masse and priced out the locals. They've opened hipster clothing emporia, art house cinemas, a shop that glories in the name of Choccywoccydoodah which sells organic fair trade hand-produced chocolate which tastes no different to Dairy Milk but costs twice as much. They've set up safe spaces and vegetarian shoe shops and radical co-operatives because they clearly represent the downtrodden and oppressed in society when they're all fucking loaded. The local university is renowned in liberal arts and humanities and attracts spoilt rich brats who virtue-signal like mad about their progressive chops while Mummy and Daddy make sure they never have to actually get jobs while studying to pay their way like some of us did. They then go and get jobs in said progressive spaces and pay themselves huge wages or get Mummy and Daddy to buy them a house - pricing out the locals in the meantime.
Meanwhile they sneer at the locals as being the racist sexist Brexiteering lumpenproletariat, and patronise them, and demand they check their privilege, even though it was they who marginalised said locals.
You can tell a lot about a place by its local paper. The local one in Brighton is called the Argus and here's a picture of its office:
Yes, that's a fixie bicycle on the wall. Oh dear.
I had a wander round Brighton after my interview. The first thing I noticed was the colossal quantity of Good Boy Points it will cost you even to rent there:
£1,850 per month for a 2 bedroom flat is pretty much inner London territory. And the London property market went stupid for years. The outskirts and outlying villages are cheaper. But suppose you're a monied Hampstead parent whose darling child has a place to do Gender Studies at Brighton uni. You wouldn't let xir have to live out there with the lower orders, would you? Heavens no! That's just not on!
Then again, the locals, or should I say, the London transplants, don't like the city's seafront and associations with a day at the seaside. The organiser of the Brighton Festival (a multi-day debauch of masturbatory pretention) caused much drama when he said that the seafront and the pier should be demolished because he didn't want the Primark-clad plebs shitting up his city. This didn't go down well with anyone outside of, well, Brighton, really.
A large number of very annoying people call Brighton their home as well. Zoella, Pewdiepie, Denise Van Outen, Nick Cave, and various other pointless wankers call it home. It also has the dubious distinction of containing the first state schools in the UK to allow parents to put down their kids as trans. Despite the fact that most so-called "trans kids" are simply questioning their gender identity or confused, your average 5 year old wanted to be a fire engine when it grew up, and "hatching an egg" exists amongst the transtrender community. This act of municipal virtue signalling boggles the mind.
While on the subject of municipal virtue signalling, here's a photo of the city's aggressively inclusive Christmas lights that I took when I was there:
Can't see them all from here, but they say, "Believe," "Wish," and "Ding dong."
Oh dear.
Then there's the locals. Many are the hipsters and obvious SJWs who inhabit the city who came down from London and priced out the locals. While I was there on the eve of the US election I saw a woman with green hair and a shirt saying, "This pussy grabs back." I didn't get a picture because she was built like a brick shit house. Speaking of hipsters, the above mentioned Choccywoccydoodah, a restaurant at which you could actually get a deconstructed lasagne served on a shovel (which I thought was an urban legend), and this shop which sells glasses, and at which you can buy any glasses you want, as long as they're SJW danger glasses. (I did get a picture but my reflection's in it and I don't want Based Sam et al to have an excuse to harass every bloke in a suit he comes across.)
Speaking of shops and things, here's a random selection of the other things they have:
I think this sums up Brighton's shopping selection, in all fairness. Hipster cafes, wanky overpriced gastropubs, and head shops.
Of course, despite the fact that the most visible Brightonians are hipsters and dangerhairs, they are of course all right on and ultra leftist (probably to annoy Mummy and Daddy) despite the fact they're clearly well off enough to do this sort of thing. Or are students. Found on the back of a bin while wandering round the city:
Yawn.
Indeed, this sort of empty gesture politics is typical of Brighton, where the local MP, one Caroline Lucas, is of the Green Party, and where the city Council is run by the Green Party. As a result of this, failure to recycle properly is punishable in theory by up to £50,000 fines yet because of this everyone bins everything in other people's bins so no conviction is ever going to stick, and as such the city is now one of the least recycling friendly in the land. The Green Party has an obsession with bus lanes and bicycles (natch) yet has done nothing to try to bring in jobs that aren't make-work for hipsters and SJWs. The London transplants all have well paying jobs in the cre8tive or media sectors or commute up to the Smoke every day while the locals... well, they are vilified by the powers that be as stealth racists and lumpenproletariat and generally ignored. Brighton therefore has one of the largest wealth inequalities in the UK because of this, and they cover it up with a culture of rampant virtue signalling and slick PR boosting the place as a creative, progressive hub.
Indeed, the virtue signalling is so bad that the local branch of American Apparel put this on their store front, which I've seen nowhere else:
Also, I was in Burger King after my interview because I was craving a grease stop and noticed that rather than have canned music or Heart Radio, they'd installed a big screen TV showing Channel 4 Music, so I was subjected to a side order of hipster tosh with my Double Whopper.
But the reason why Brighton is a lolcow city? The constant bitchiness and judgementalness of its denizens - cf. that article from the festival organiser above. The chimpouts from the powers that be therein whenever anyone criticises it. The virtue signalling and inability of its denizens to take responsibility for their actions - here's a classic example, where the writer blames Tory benefit cuts for increasing levels of poverty in Brighton without acknowledging that the reason for spiralling cost of living and low pay is because all the locals are being priced out the market by London hipster transplants with loadsamoney like himself.
TL;dr - A city that uses rampant virtue signalling to deflect attention that it embodies the worst things about gentrification, and is full of hipsters and SJWs.
