HorthyMiklosKatonaja
No bio...
User ID: 540
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
If I could tinker with history, I'd really love to see what would have happened had Thomas Jefferson's early-1780s plan to free the slaves and then repatriate them all to their African homelands been adopted.
I'm picturing a time-traveler handing out to Southern (and other slaveholding) members of the Continental Congress Civil War histories and copies of Gone with the Wind , accompanied by unvarnished descriptions of the nation's demographics and race relations circa 2023, how they are viewed even by their own descendants, some footage of the 1992 Rodney King riots, and possibly selected clips from gangsta rap.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
Back in the old days, when often no candidate had a clear mandate going into the convention, and it was there that the deals were hammered out - things were just more interesting back then. Every election cycle, it seems to me, the D and R candidates are decided earlier and earlier, and the national conventions became pointless coronations by 1988.
Now the nominees are set in stone even before the election year and all we get to look forward to is month after month of attack ads and partisan news leaks. I wish I could go to sleep and wake up on the morning of November 5.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
Professional shoplifting gangs are active in DC and Northern Virginia and some of those are male.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
In ~99% of Texas, a car is necessary to live, and loan payments, maintenance, fuel, insurance, etc. eat up a huge amount of money compared to public transit costs in Copenhagen or Hamburg.
Not to mention the whole healthcare-prices debacle, or daycare for any kids.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
In stores and malls, I haven't heard any religious Christmas music since sometime in the 1990s. It's just one billion repetitions of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", "Chestnuts Rosting on an Open Fire", and various pop abominations.
My two local malls (Tysons Corner Center and Tysons Galleria) and the stores in them, in fact, have really been skimping on Christmas decorations in the past few years. In the 1980s, the whole place used to get transformed: tinsel and colored lights everywhere, decorated trees in every shop window. Seeing this used to be one of the things I most looked forward to about the Christmas season.
Nowadays, there are just a few anemic strings of white lights hanging from the ceiling (colored lights seem to be permanently out of fashion for some reason) and almost no stores have any decorations put up at all!
I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the area now has a sizable Muslim population (when I go there now, maybe a quarter to a third of the women are wearing headscarves or hijab) who'd rather not see a Christian holiday celebrated, although I doubt anyone would admit publically that that's the reason.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
4mo ago
I thought it had something to do with "getting up to didoes".
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
Not since 1965 or so in DC itself. School desegregation in 1954 caused the trickle of white flight to turn into a torrent, making for the "Chocolate City/Vanilla Suburbs" that obtained until:
1973 in Prince Georges County, when school busing was introduced to achieve racial balance and created an even greater surge of white flight there, and
The early eighties in the rest of suburbia, when the first wave of Central American immigrants started pouring into the affordable garden apartment complexes, displacing the whites from there and pretty soon taking all the fast food, landscaping and physical labor jobs. Nowadays, on the buses and at the bus stops in Fairfax County, you will not hear one word of English (even the drivers are all foreigners now! (And most of the taxi drivers are African immigrants and Afghanis.)), nearly all small shops are owned and staffed by immigrants, and Fairfax County schools are maybe 35% white, down from ~80% in my high-school years forty years ago. Less than that in Montgomery County and in the low single digit percentages in DC and Prince Georges.
Pretty much all the whites here are white-collar PMC types, and the white working class has decamped to remote trailer parks many miles from the nearest public transit.
Here in the Washington DC area, everyone's taken it for granted for decades: carjackers, robbers and other violent criminals (except the occasional domestic murderer), and professional thieves/shoplifters, are never white.
Edit: And of course, you'll never find anybody drawing attention to that fact in public, as that would be "hate speech"; the metro area is 99% blue tribe.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
I can't recall any way Munroe went off the deep end. Unless abandoning the What If column without explanation counts.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
In The Jungle, Jurgis' mortgage was 20% down ($300) and $12 a month for eight years and four months (plus interest at 7% per year which the agent never told them about).
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
Who By Very Slow Decay
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- yeah.
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Thankfully my mother passed before she deteriorated that far, but many years ago I decided that at the first serious downturn in my health, I will euthanize myself in the quickest, most painless way I can (that doesn't leave a mess or inconvenience other people). I will do this with a clear conscience, as I have no children or other dependents and have never had a Significant Other.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
5mo ago
countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite.
That ingrained assumption completely blew my suspension of disbelief in Neill Blomkamp's Elysium.
Sure, medical care doesn't actually cost anything!! It's just the fault of the nasty bad evil rich capitalists who are selfishly refusing to treat every little twinge and hangnail of ten billion people!!
I felt dirty after having watched that.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Specifically it's supposed to be used by Native American/First Nations people, some of whose tribes were reportedly accepting of transgender people before the term was invented.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
They've aimed brickbats at Przewalski so I guess there's going to be a call to take his name off the horse too.
And of course the bloody article has a trigger warning for the exceptionally faint-hearted.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
I like "Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Blunders". I was never much of a sports fan, but I saw this in the store and liked his writing style. Sort of approaching the subject from the back, so to speak.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Interesting fact - up until the 2021 Tokyo games, every swimmer who competed for Zimbabwe in the Olympics was white!!
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
I've never seen any progressives raising their voice about the plight of the few remaining whites in Zimbabwe, though . . .
(That might have changed had Mugabe forbidden them from leaving the country, but it's still a stretch of imagination.)
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Rootless cosmopolitans, even!
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Looking outside Muslim communities, Tamil terror in Sri Lanka was successfully eradicated through incredible violence.
Also, how the British managed to stamp out the Mau Mau in Kenya.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Seemed to work in the Northlands - bloodthirsty Vikings becoming orderly, peaceful Scandinavians.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
Not until after a coup. Syngman Rhee wasn't interested in raising the standard of living of the peasants.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
I thought the invasion would have started within a couple of days after the first attack, and certainly within a week.
Surely Israel has detailed war plans ready for such a scenario. They certainly struck back lightning-fast in 1973.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
6mo ago
That tweet got memory-holed.
HorthyMiklosKatonaja
7mo ago
"Tifo"?
I've never driven, or owned, a car.
I hate "car culture" as it developed in the years after 1945 because of how ugly and unlivable it made nearly every American community. Six- or eight-lane arterial roads, lined with strip malls, fast-food places, Walmarts etc. (interspersed with car-related businesses such as gas stations, auto dealerships, tire stores, muffler shops, etc. which take up huge amounts of space), every one with an enormous parking lot that one has to walk through (I can't even count how many hours of my life have been wasted just walking through parking lots) while keeping an eye out that some distracted moron might run me down.
The sidewalks are invariably empty except for the homeless, the poorest of the immigrants, or once in a great while a dog-walker.
All that wasted space which could have been used for housing.
Bus stops, most without a shelter, for buses that run every half hour or even every hour (less than that if it's snowing or raining).
Neighborhoods with nothing but houses, on winding streets (many without sidewalks). For mile after mile after mile. No corner grocery stores, no corner pubs, nothing to walk to unless you're buddies with all your neighbors.
In the US, there is no such thing anymore as an affordable, safe, walkable urban neighborhood. There are smaller cities and towns with affordable housing - but with no jobs, very little shopping or cultural institutions, with a huge fraction of their population bombed out on opiates or meth.
If I want to visit any "outdoors" destination - beach, mountains, national parks - that's just out of the question because there are no trains or buses that go there.
Thanks a fucking heap, Henry Ford and postwar urban planners.
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