Rov_Scam's profile

Rov_Scam 1yr ago

The invasion makes more sense if you consider the underlying assumptions at the start of the conflict. Everyone expected the Russian army to roll up the entire country in a matter of weeks if not days. Furthermore, America hadn't sanctioned Russia in any meaningful way after the 2008 invasion of Georgia or the 2014 annexation of Crimea, and it was unclear whether Europe, let alone the world, would go along with anything more sweeping in the event the US tried to do something. It was assumed that Germany's dependence on Russian gas, not just for energy but for the feedstock of its chemical industry would leat to a split in NATO that could potentially be exploited later. All of these assumptions turned out to be wrong, and Putin didn't seem to have had a contingency for the possibility that he wouldn't be able to take Kiev.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

I reran the data except instead of using the variable "to this point in the year" that was all different dates and a series of arbitrarily selected cities, I used the year-end data for all cities in the top 75 US Cities by population plus Buffalo plus whatever else was in the list you had. Then I got rid of any cities that had fewer than 10 murders in either year because any movement there can be chalked up to random variation and not trends (though the numbers were so low I can add it back in if you want; it won't make much of a difference). I also cut Riverside because Rusty Bailey is an independent and I couldn't tell whether he leaned liberal or conservative (for the few other independents it was pretty obvious that they all leaned liberal, but I can take them out if you'd like; it won't make a difference). Then I used your methodology and I came up with... a 23.58% increase in Democratic cities and a 34.33% increase in Republican cities.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

There are two implicit assumptions buried in your analysis, though:

Voter fraud disproportionately favors DeSantis's opponents, and
The fraud is of such a scope to have an effect on an election

To the first point, there's no real evidence that this would be the case. I looked at cases of what I call "casual voter fraud" from the 2020 election in Pennsylvania. By Casual Voter Fraud I mean things like ineligible voting, impersonation at the polls, and mail-in or absentee ballot fraud; in other words, the kind of voter fraud a normal person could attempt without much difficulty. There are other cases of voter fraud, but these all either involved insiders or were part of large schemes that involved a certain amount of organization. Out of five total cases four involved registered Republicans and one didn't specify the party affiliation of the defendant. Given the small sample size, I'm going to conclude that there's no conclusive evidence that deterring voter fraud would help DeSantis's party in any way.

To the second point, again, I point to the small sample size, and to the fact that the incidents in question were distributed throughout the state. If they were concentrated in one area then it's conceivable that five votes could impact some local election, but that simply wasn't the case. More importantly, though, it speaks volumes that DeSantis is making this point by arresting people whom he knows are unlikely to be convicted. If he wants to send a message about voter fraud, then why not have a mass arrest of people who actually committed voter fraud? I understand that maybe it's a difficult thing to catch, but Pennsylvania managed to catch five people in a single election without really trying (there was no statewide crackdown and the only case that got even got significant news coverage was one that Fetterman memed about). Florida is larger than Pennsylvania and if you go back to the start of the Statute of Limitations it shouldn't be too hard to come up with 20 cases of real voter fraud if you were to actually try.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores the reality on the ground. You can talk all you want about some theoretical shared history and kinship among whoever he considers white people, but it has little tangible effect on my everyday life. Compare me to an American black person — we speak the same language, share similar religions (i.e. we're both Christian), consume similar pop culture, eat the same food, etc.Why should I feel more of a sense of kinship with a Finn? He speaks a different language, has never been to my country, let alone my city, has no sense of shared civic responsibility, no sense of my country's history, and he's probably never even eaten peanut butter before. If a random black guy from Pittsburgh ends up in my living room, I guarantee I'll be able to relate to him better than a random guy from Finland with whom all I really share is skin color and the fact that our ancestors emigrated from central Asia some time in the distant past. At the very least, the black guy isn't going to complain when I offer him Miller High Life. This article is nothing more than the author trying to fabricate an intellectual justification for his own irrational prejudices.

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Rov_Scam 4mo ago

covid heavily influenced my political choice

As a "COVID Voter" (for lack of a better term), what is it about Desantis that makes you like him so much? Yes, I understand that at a superficial level he waged the most opposition to restrictive COVID policies among politicians who had actual influence over those policies (i.e. not Trump, who was powerless at the state and local level), but I didn't really see any fundamental differences between him and anyone else. Insofar as I can tell, there are two categories of COVID skeptic:

The kind of person who believes restrictions such as stay at home orders and broad business closures are antithetical to basic principles of liberty and shouldn't be on the table in a democratic society, and
The kind of person who thinks that the response was overblown in proportion to the threat, i.e. that there may be some circumstances where restrictive interventions are justified, but COVID wasn't one of them.

In my admittedly limited experience, the kind of person who is still bitter enough about COVID restrictions in 2023 is the kind of person who fits more into camp #1 and believes that the restrictions are evidence of our tolerance for creeping authoritarianism. To that end, I don't see what Desantis has to offer. He had no problem issuing stay-at-home orders and business closures early in the pandemic, and he didn't change his tune until six months in. By that point, existing restrictions in Florida were more of a mild annoyance than anything else, and loosening restrictions was the norm in most places, even those with Democratic governors.

The point I'm trying to get at here is that his anti-restrictionist sentiment always came across to me more as political posturing than as an expression of underlying principal. If that were the case, he'd never have implemented any restrictions in the first place and would have stood firm when there was pressure from practically everywhere in the country. But he didn't. He was certainly smart enough to realize that the existing restrictions were more theater than anything else, and that there was widespread recognition that they were such and there was corresponding pressure to get rid of them, and he responded to that pressure because he also recognized that it was unlikely to lead to the disaster some were predicting. But that's not principle, it's politics. It doesn't make him any different than governors of more restrictionist states who were walking back the restrictions more slowly because they knew they needed political cover in the event cases spiked.

By comparison, I live in Pennsylvania, and Tom Wolf took a lot of heat for the restrictions he implemented in March of 2020. But the more rural areas of the state were fully open by the middle of May, and the more urban areas were open by early June (except Philadelphia, but Philadelphia is kind of its own thing so we don't talk about it). After that, the only serious restriction was a bar and restaurant (and, oddly, courthouse) closure from early December to early January, which was implemented when cases were out of control and things were expected to get worse around the holidays. But once that expired things were pretty much over. Other restrictions lasted into spring of 2021, most of them dumb, most of them more annoying than restrictive, none of them seriously enforced. Like capacity limits. Restaurant owners bitched about these to no end, but if you went out you weren't waiting for a table. People who were concerned about the virus weren't going out, period; the capacity restrictions did nothing to allay their fears, but they also did nothing to restrict actual business.

Yes, a lot of this stuff was dumb to the nth degree and largely unnecessary, and I assure you that a lot of people on the left who were otherwise concerned about COVID thought that at the time. But that seems more like an argument that would work on someone who falls into camp #2, i.e. the problem with the COVID restrictions was that they were dumb and unnecessary. This is where Desantis seems to fall, but it seems odd to me for this to be the main reason to vote for the guy. I mean, I'm sure there are plenty of dumb and unnecessary laws on the books in Florida right now that Desantis isn't exactly making a priority out of addressing, so I don't know that his stance on COVID speaks to some greater strength regarding dumb laws. And it's not like COVID-style pandemics are expected to come around every few years where he can put his opposition to specific dumb laws in action. All it really shows is that he took a particular stance on an issue that was relevant for about six months, and not that relevant in most places. It doesn't say anything about his stance on fundamental issues of freedom, because we know he had no problem implementing the restrictions when he thought they were necessary. Sorry, this went on longer than I expected it to, I'm just confused by how someone can think Desantis's stance on COVID is relevant in 2024 and not be concerned that for fully half the time his stance on COVID actually was relevant it wasn't any different from anyone else's.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

I've been wondering for the past few weeks whether there's a chance that Democrats would find an acceptable moderate Republican from the Cheney/Kinzinger mold and try to peel off enough moderate Republicans to give him the win. Unanimously voting for Jeffries is a nice symbolic gesture, but there's no real chance the guy is going to win. It would be a win for the Republicans in swing districts whom the party owes its majority to; they can claim that McCarthy made too many concessions to the MAGA wing and wasn't going to win anyway, so better to have a speaker that accurately reflects the values of the majority of the chamber. For Democrats it would be a total coup, since, even in victory, the Republicans still don't really control congress in any meaningful way. Even if it doesn't work (i.e. AOC and other proggies can't stomach voting for a Republican and it derails the whole plan), I don't really see any downside. Even the possibility of it working would be more exciting news than McCarthy winning on the 189th ballot.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

The question of whether Disney is entitled to having a special district or whether such districts have a place is wholly irrelevant to the topic at hand because DeSantis's actions don't really address it. There are over 1800 such districts in Florida, some of them in favor of entities like NASCAR whose contribution to the public good, to the extent that one exists, is roughly on par with Disney's, and to my knowledge there's no movement from DeSantis or anyone else to do away with them. If DeSantis had made a principled argument that such public-private partnerships were antithetical to the spirit of liberal society and pushed legislation to do away with all of them, to the extent that it was feasible, then my opinion would be based more on practical concerns, i.e. whether the state was taking on an undue burden by assuming services that had previously been provided by private entities. But that isn't the case here; the action is wholly retaliatory. DeSantis himself certainly had no qualms about granting Disney special carve-outs in the past.

And if the state is going to allow such districts and partnerships and special privileges to exist, then no, those privileges shouldn't be preconditioned upon the holder of them to conform to the political whim of those in power. Should a bar owner lose his liquor license for putting a Trump sign in the window? Should government employees be required to work on their bosses' campaigns as part of their jobs? Should government contracts be awarded based on who said the nicest things about the elected officials responsible for granting them? The worst part of all of this is that it's antithetical to the standard line conservatives have been giving about corporate speech for the past ten years (and a line that I personally agree with). Should Citizens United be overturned? Should bakeries be compelled to bake cakes with messages they disagree with? Should Catholic employers be forced to pay for their employees' abortions? Conservatives have insisted for decades that companies are entitled to the same First Amendment rights as individuals are, and courts have largely agreed with them, but when they find the speech in question disagreeable all that goes out the window.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

I agree with your premise, insofar as you're arguing that Twitter engaged in censorship for political purposes that can't be justified by normal standards of rationality. What I don't understand is why I should care. Businesses make decisions all the time, both political and otherwise, that I find disagreeable, but only rarely do they rise to the level that some sort of public call to action seems warranted. And what action is warranted vis a vis Twitter? The people who put these policies into place no longer run the company. Some would argue that government intervention is warranted, but it seems unusual that those (such as yourself, presumably) who are coming at this from a more conservative position would really find this to be the ideal solution, especially considering that a large component of this scandal is that there was already too much government influence of Twitter's content policies.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

Part 2

With no other teams making offers, and Jackson’s relationship with the Ravens deteriorating, it’s expected that he will refuse to sign the tender offer and sit out the season. This expectation was bolstered today by Jackson posting that he had requested a trade at the beginning of this month, and subsequently had the tag slapped on him. While the 2020 CBA technically ended contract holdouts, Jackson’s situation is different because he’s not currently under contract. He’s subject to the tag rules, but the league has no basis for fining him for missing team activities.

This refusal to sign has only happened once before, and with disastrous results. In 2018, Le’veon Bell was one of the best running backs in the league. He had already played one season on the franchise tag, and, unable to come to terms on a deal, the Steelers tagged him again (it can be done two years in a row but it’s significantly more expensive). The Steelers purportedly offered him a deal that would have made him the highest-paid RB in the league, but this wasn’t enough; he was also a key component of the passing game, and thought that he deserved RB money and WR money.

Bell entered 2018 as a training camp holdout, not unexpected since this was still common. What was uncommon was that he didn’t show up for the first game either. Or the second game. It was speculated that he might come back during the bye week. He didn’t. He came back to Pittsburgh in early November, as he had until the 13th to sign his tender offer before forfeiting the season. But he never reported to the team. When the Steelers said in early 2019 that they wouldn’t tag him again, Bell had technically won.

But then came reality. Bell had lost out on roughly $14.5 million in salary from not signing the tag, and an estimated $19 million from not taking the Steelers up on their offer. When he hit the market in the Spring of 2019, he signed with the Jets, who offered him a deal worth an average of $13.1 million a year, less than the $14 million on average the Steelers had offered. And the first year of that deal paid roughly what he would have made on the franchise tag the previous year. And only some of that money was guaranteed. Little more than a year into his time with the Jets he demanded a trade, realizing he didn’t like playing for an awful team. His own production had suffered in the absence of a decent O-line. The Jets simply released him, and he signed with the Chiefs, a good team, but found himself at the bottom of the depth chart, and later made critical statements about Andy Reid.

In the span of 4 years Bell went from being the kind of player who could credibly demand becoming the highest-paid player at his position to having completely burned his bridges with 3 different teams and being out of the league entirely. The holdout was an unmitigated disaster. Like Jackson, Bell was injury-prone, which may have had something to do with the Steelers’ reluctance to give him what he wanted, but it’s hard to see them making him a better offer in any event. The one crucial difference is that Bell was hit with the exclusive tag, meaning he couldn’t negotiate for other teams and can thus be forgiven for thinking his market value was higher. There’s no excuse for Jackson; if teams are unwilling to negotiate with him now, it’s unlikely that they will after he sits out a year. And Jackson has a recent example of how that works out that Bell didn’t. Complicating matters is the fact that Jackson is acting as his own agent. Any agent worth his salt would have told him that the strategy he’s been pursuing thus far is a bad one and probably would have signed him last offseason. Any agent also would have told him that his request for a trade was inappropriate since he wasn’t under contract at the time and thus couldn’t be traded until he signs the tender offer.

The interesting thing to me about this, though, is the reaction. Most situations involving pro athletes elicit one of the following responses:

Fans and media mad at players for acting unreasonably, e.g. Antonio Brown
ans and media mad at team for not treating player fairly, e.g. study clauses, voided guarantees, etc.
ans and media mad at league for collusion, e.g. Colin Kaepernick, every threatened lockout

Instead, there’s a sense of sad resignation. Lamar Jackson was supposed to win Super Bowls. Instead Ravens fans got one playoff win and 2 unfinished seasons due to injury. But still, Jackson is nonetheless one of the most talented and exciting WBs in the league, and is very much deserving of a nice contract. But nice wasn’t good enough, and he seems intent on throwing his career down the toilet to prove it. And he doesn’t even have the courtesy to become unlikeable. Prior to his holdout, Bell had been publicly dissing the team for years for supposed lack of respect, and during his holdout he claimed to be staying in shape but was evidently spending a lot of time at strip clubs. When he came back to Pittsburgh, his first public sighting wasn’t at the team facility but playing pickup basketball at a local LA Fitness. That may not seem like a big deal (he is exercising), but coaches hate it when players do stuff like this because they have a tendency to injure themselves.

Jackson remains appreciative of the fans, if not the team, but seems to be taking advice from friends and family rather than an agent, which is inexcusable because NFL agent fees are capped at 3%, and a high-earner like Jackson can probably get 1%. The Ravens seem determined to do everything they can to prove to Jackson that he won’t get a better deal elsewhere, although the terms of the non-exclusive cap may limit that since the teams most likely to sign Jackson are rebuilding teams that can’t afford to give up draft picks and are reluctant to put out offer sheets that the Ravens will probably match. The most logical thing would be for the 49ers to offer Trey Lance and draft picks in exchange for Jackson, but that would require Jackson signing a tender offer first, and wouldn’t give him a new deal, just a chance to play for a different team and maybe negotiate a long-term deal. It’s complicated, and who knows how it will play out.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

I think it's worth recapping American political history during the period during which Millennials became politically aware. While there was contention surrounding the election of George W. Bush, things went back to normal pretty quickly. The most exciting thing to happen during the early Bush administration was the Hainan Island Incident, and that was viewed by the media more as a test to how the president would respond rather than a serious culture war item. Then 9/11 happened, and Bush became incredibly popular, even among liberals. These high approval ratings would slowly atrophy over the next 2 years but were still around 50% at the time of the 2004 election, which he won by a decent margin. But this wasn't enough to stanch the bleeding. While the Iraq War is largely blamed for this downfall, particularly the unexpected insurgency and misconduct issues like Abu Ghraib, these only seemed to alienate liberals. What did him in among Republicans was a series of unfortunate events that occurred in the fall of 2005—the insufficient response to Hurricane Katrina, the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination debacle (Miers was a close associate of Bush whose qualifications for the court were highly suspect, and the nomination was withdrawn in the face of bipartisan criticism), the Social Security privatization plan, the Medicare Part D rollout, and the Plame Affair (which resulted in the indictment of the Vice President's National Security Advisor and implicated Bush's Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove). Any of these incidents wouldn't have been more than a minor scandal (particularly the Part D rollout, as problems are to be expected when introducing a complicated new government program), but since they all happened within a span of weeks they made the whole administration look incompetent. By the 2006 midterms even staunch Republicans had begun distancing themselves from Bush, and he spent the last years of his term as a sort of zombie that everyone hated but nobody really cared about. By the time of the 2008 financial crisis he was already so unpopular that it didn't seem to effect him much, especially with everyone's eyes on the next election.

So now we come to the 2008 election. Every pundit agrees that the Republicans need to move on from Bush and the neocons (though it should be mentioned that Bush wasn't a neocon himself), but there is disagreement on which direction the party should take. And by disagreement I mean that nobody has a fucking clue. Most Republicans in the primary try to distance themselves from Bush but endorse similar policies. There are two outliers. The first is Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor who represents the voice of the Bible Belt. The guy has no money or institutional support but makes a splash because Evangelical Christians had been rising as an electoral force for decades, before finding a kindred spirit in Bush. They have now proven that they are a constituency that can't be ignored, but the traditional GOP base has no room for someone as blatantly theocratic as Huckabee. The other is John McCain, who has staked out territory as a "Maverick" by bucking his own party over the past fifteen years, but still being incredibly conservative in other areas. He wins the nomination but suffers from three critical weaknesses: The first is that he wants to send more troops to Iraq. The second was that the GOP was in the doghouse and he was running against a younger, much more charismatic, Barack Obama. These were important at the time but have little relevance to your question. The more salient problem, though, was that he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. Palin initially seemed like a good choice—his campaign was already at a disadvantage so picking a woman with executive experience might win him some votes, and her lack of national prominence meant she had few enemies or skeletons in her closet. The problem was that she used her role in the spotlight to blatantly wage the culture war while demonstrating that she lacked basic policy knowledge. When newscaster Katie Couric asked her which newspapers and magazines she read, her response was "all of them", a response she refused to clarify upon further inquiry. Centrists who feared that Obama's superstar status was a mask for his lack of experience and vague policy proposals now found they couldn't vote for McCain, as it would put a demagogue like Palin one heartbeat away from the presidency. McCain lost in a landslide.

Now it's 2009 and while McCain is back in the Senate like nothing happened, Palin and Huckabee are on speaking tours in an attempt to stoke the flames of the culture war. The Tea Party has come into existence, a loose movement that is ostensibly in favor of returning to the libertarian principles of the Founding Fathers but is in reality a lowest-common-denominator culture war movement. The salient feature of the Tea Party is that they aren't just opposed to Obama and the liberals, but also to Establishment Republicans, who they brand "RINOS" (Republicans in name only) and blame them for enabling the liberal agenda. Over the next several elections, numerous Tea Party backed candidates will be elected to office, many of them replacing more moderate Republican forebears. In 2012 the Republicans nominated Mitt Romney to challenge Obama. Romney only won the nomination after a slogfest with approximately 742 other candidates, most of whom were culture warrior flashes in the pan like Tim Pawlenty and Michelle Bachman. Romney himself was a traditional New England Republican who had served as governor of a liberal state. But in the political environment of the time, he had to pay lip service to more traditional conservative ideas. This put him squarely in a position where he had no real chance of winning; he was too traditionally conservative to win over liberals who were tiring of Obama, and too close to the Republican Establishment to inspire anyone on the fringes. It was an election of two boring candidates, and to the incumbent went the spoils.

Given that Tea Party rhetoric seemed to be paying better electoral dividends than traditional Republicanism, candidates for the 2016 Republican nomination would all have to move in that direction. The problem with Tea Party rhetoric, as I alluded to earlier, was that it seemed geared to primarily stoke the culture war. It was ostensibly libertarian, but not in any truly principled way, only to the extent that it would serve culture war ends. So taxes and regulation were obviously bad, but not to the extent that anyone would promote policies that would actually impact anyone. Keep the government out of my Medicare. What's more important is that you brand Democrats as socialists for proposing any additional spending. Call for tax cuts and a reduced deficit but make no attempt to touch programs that are actually expensive, just programs that your opponents pushed through. Add in a healthy dose of Judeo-Christian reverence (to appease the Huckabee camp) and nationalism. Almost every GOP candidate in 2016 was running on some variation of this theme, but Trump found the magic formula—he ditched principle altogether. All the traditional politicians had tried to incorporate the new ideas into a consistent platform. Trump just went for applause lines. Back in 2007, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo ran for president on a campaign of reducing immigration and kicking out illegals. It went nowhere. Looking back at his old speeches, it's clear that his problem was that he made actual, principled arguments against immigration. Trump knew that there was little call for that. It's much easier to say that the Mexican government is sending rapists and that building a wall will cure all our ills, and tell your critics to piss off rather than try to actually address their concerns.

I'll stop there because we all now what has happened since then and it's more current events than history. The point is that since the oldest Millennials came of age there hasn't been a time when it's been attractive to become a conservative, and the prospect has gotten continually worse as they've gotten older. During the early 2000s, the primary criticism of Bush had to do with the Iraq War. Now that our Middle Eastern adventures have ended, it wouldn't surprise me if some older Millennials turned to traditional neoconservatism as an antidote to contemporary progressive politics. The problem is that the Republican party has spent the past 15 years distancing itself from neoconservatism and making all the old favorites never-Trumpers. The party has come to represent few of the things more moderate liberals find attractive about some conservative candidates and nearly all the things they find repulsive about them. Contrast this with Boomers; if you were 30 in 1980 you spent your early adulthood in a dismal 1970s economy and probably staked a lot of hope in Jimmy Carter. After his lone term is worse than anyone can imagine a fresh conservative party comes in with new ideas and by 1984 makes the '70s a distant memory. Or imagine you're a Gen Xer, who came of age at a time when Clinton became one of the most successful presidents in recent memory by outflanking his opposition on the right. So far in the 21st Century, the Republicans have yet to produce the kind of Reagan/Clinton figure who wins reelection easily and leaves office at the height of his popularity. The Republicans have been trying to reinvent themselves for the past 15 years, and until that happens, it's going to be very difficult for someone who started off as liberal shift to conservative. For Millennials, that ship may have already sailed.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

I honestly don't know how a guy who derisively refers to Harvard graduates as mere "midwits" can fail to recognize that the GTP's responses are crafted in much the same way as those of a political huckster or PR rep—just restate the same thing over and over again to avoid answering the question at hand. I don't have any doubt that regardless of how incisive or specific a question I ask, the response will be something along the lines of "The purpose of this problem is to reduce fraud and waste while ensuring continued access to those truly in need". Great, tell me that again in case I didn't hear the first time. The reason it drives people nuts isn't because you're murdering them with their own rhetoric, it's because it's like talking to a wall.

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Rov_Scam 10mo ago

The people in power most associated with the Iraq war were George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice, and John Bolton, not a Jew among them. No Jews on the entire National Security Council, either. The idea that none of these people actually wanted the war but were talked into it by the likes of Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz is ridiculous. I could just as easily make an argument that the war was completely the work of blacks.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I don't know that Vance is the best example. While he called out hillbillies (and I use that term loosely because the Rust Belt white trash he's describing in Ohio are decidedly different from Appalachian white trash) in his book, his actual politics started veering into the "lack of agency" lane as soon as Trump's success made it a veritable requirement for him to do it. I can't tell you how many times I heard from conservatives that nobody owes you anything, stop whining, buck up and take that menial job because you aren't above working at McDonalds just because you have a college degree, nobody wants to work anymore, etc. (not to me personally, but the sentiment). One night I was at the bar and a bunch of them were bitching about immigration. They weren't white trash, but obviously successful guys from a wealthy suburb. My view on immigration are complicated, to say the least, but when they started about Mexicans taking jobs from Americans it pissed me off so I turned it around on them: "Why do we owe them jobs? Why should I pay more for stuff because some whiny American doesn't want to work for what I'm willing to pay. Those Mexicans are damn glad to get my money, and besides, they do the work and don't complain. Besides, they're the only ones who seem to want to work anymore." Or something along those lines. It didn't work, of course, because as soon as anyone brings up market forces to a conservative in an argument about immigration, they just do a u-turn and talk about welfare instead, not realizing the inherently contradictory nature of those arguments. And, as a putative conservative, I couldn't really argue back.

The same thing applies more directly to employers. There's one older guy I know we call "Pappy". He's big in the whitewater community arouind here and is an excellent boater, and teaches free lessons at the park and cheap roll lessons at a scum pond on his property (only charging to cover the insurance). He's very generous with his time, especially considering these lessons are always 8-hour marathons. Not so much with his money. He owns a garage and auto body shop and refuses to pay his employees. He also constantly bitches about the quality of the help he gets. I once couldn't help but comment that maybe if he paid more than ten bucks an hour he'd find decent people. I knew this would get him fired up, because he was great at going on these kinds of rants; "Hell, when I started out I made 2 bucks an hour and was glad to get it. When I opened this place you couldn't ask no god damned bank for any money because they wouldn't give it to you. I had to save my money to buy all this and earned all of it. These people don't want to work, they just want to sit on their asses and collect a check. And you lawyers are half the problem. When my wife and I bought our first house the mortgage was one page. One. When I took out a loan last year it was a god damned book. And it's all because you lawyers found lazy fucks who didn't want to pay and tried to weasel out of it, and now the banks have to make sure that you can't."

I wasn't thrown by the change of tack because he never missed an opportunity to dunk on my profession. I would note that my brother was an inspector for a major industrial company that does global business and they had him paint some equipment. The quality steadily deteriorated over the years to the point they had to cancel a very lucrative contract because nothing he did would pass. I've known a few people who took their cars to him for work and now aren't on speaking terms after the work was so bad they had to withhold payment. His intransigence is literally costing him money, but he won't budge on principle.

I bring up these examples because they're evidence of this mentality not among the white trash that Vance talks about, but among normal, successful people. As for Vance himself, he plays into the same ethos wholeheartedly, and doesn't seem to understand the contradiction with the argument that gave him fame. If he continued in the Reagan mold of bold free market principles, or took the opposite tack of siding with the lefties in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" sense, I could take him at face-value. But instead he's latched onto the same victimization worldview of those he previously complained about. He was once a moderate and anti-Trumper; now his "National Republicanism" is just an amalgamation of the worst protectionist ideas Trump had to offer. Maybe it's a cynical response to give him more political credibility, I don't know. But it's certainly a contradiction with what he used to be.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

It's not even DeSantis's problem. One thing that's often left out is that the Martha's Vineyard immigrants originated in Texas, not Florida. Florida evidently doesn't have enough of a migrant problem to make it worthwhile to find 50 illegals in Miami for his publicity stunt. If DeSantis, Ducey, and Abbot were actually trying to solve the problem and make some political hay out of the alleged indifference of northern states, they would have said "Hey, our resources for dealing with migrants are stretched to the breaking point and we're on the brink of a crisis. Would it be possible for you to accept some of them so that you can provide assistance?" If New York et al. had said no then the GOP governors would have a point. Now the Democrats can simply say that their anger isn't about the migrants themselves but about the lack of preparation they were given and the cavalier way these people are being treated. Taking families in dire situations and busing them to places that you know aren't prepared for their arrival (and going to the lengths of avoiding busy areas to drop them off on middle-of-nowhere residential streets because they're close to the houses of politicians you don't like) suggests that you're more interested in "owning the libs" than in the people actually involved.

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Rov_Scam 5mo ago

I can assure you that if you successfully complete the Hock and then get a girlfriend it will have nothing to do with the Hock itself. I don't know how to tell you this without hurting you deeply, but most women don't give a shit about stuff like this. I'm an advanced skier. I've not only skied some of the gnarliest in-bounds terrain in North America, but I felt completely comfortable while dropping in even when I hadn't seen it before. I couldn't tell you the last time I stared down a line trying to get myself psyched up to do it. I don't generally mention this to women I'm trying to date. Hell, I was out with a girl last weekend and while the subject of skiing came up, I only mentioned it because she asked me about my hobbies. I left it at "skiing" and didn't elaborate. And I was hoping more that she skied as well because I have a great group of ski buddies and we have a lot of fun in the winter and it would be nice to include her in something like that. If I had brought up all the gnarly shit in a desperate attempt to prove what a badass I am, at best she would have ignored it, and at worst it would have made me look like a self-aggrandizing asshole.

You're also forgetting that if it even were something that impressed women, you still have to get the date in the first place. Unless you're going out a lot already you better solve this problem before you do anything. What are you going to do, approach women at bars and tell them apropos of nothing that you went on a survivorman expedition and by the way, do you want to go out with me? Also, keep in mind that even if this does work, unless she's already well-versed in outdoor survival it's not going to make much difference what you actually do. Any girl who doesn't ski isn't going to be impressed when I tell her I ski the Pali face at A-Basin because to her that's completely meaningless. To her, even an intermediate run would look like instant death. The only girl who I could see that being a positive to is one who skis about as well as I do and is excited to have someone to share those experiences with. In other words, any girl who is going to be impressed by the Hock will probably be equally impressed by a guy who's been winter camping a couple times, unless she's also into that sort of thing.

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Rov_Scam 11mo ago

Even if it has predictive value I don't see what the point is. Either people causing disruptions that make the general public do so at their own risk of consequences up to and including death if anyone feels the least bit threatened or they don't. Even if someone can make an accurate predication about another person's criminal and mental health history we have to establish criteria under which he can operate. Do we really want to go down the road of defining how many arrests it takes before someone is legally considered scum and forfeits basic civil rights most of us enjoy? And what happens if someone's wrong? If Neely was really just a normal dude dealing with some personal problems that expressed themselves in an unfortunate way, do we then bring the hammer down on Penny for wrongfully assuming he was some homeless wino? If not, then do we just give everyone the benefit of the doubt and lose the distinction entirely? When dealing with matters involving human life I don't know if this is a road we want to go down.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

Continued...

136 Nick Drake – Pink Moon (1972)

The latent potential that was evident in Drake’s previous two albums comes exploding to the surface here. The more conventional production of those albums is replaced with just guitar and vocals, and while such spare arrangements have the tendency to make songs sound like unfinished demos, here Drakes guitar playing, particular the use of nonstandard tunings, makes the accompaniment sufficiently interesting without distracting from his voice, which is much further to the forefront here than previously. Its conciseness is also an asset—eleven songs, none longer than four minutes, less than a half-hour total running time—as the record keeps moving and is over before it starts to drag; the sound is great but it’s not something that would be great for an hour. The troubled Drake never released another album and passed away within a few years of this release, which remains the truest expression of his artistic vision.

135 Cat Stevens – Teaser and the Fire Cat (1971)

Cat Stevens’s career can be described as a public spiritual quest, albeit one that culminated with his conversion to Islam and subsequent departure from the industry. This spirituality had started seeping in on the previous year’s Tea for the Tillerman and would become more profound on subsequent recordings, but here is where it reached its apex, being omnipresent without being dominating. Only Stevens could take a Protestant hymn like “Morning Has Broken” and incorporate it seamlessly within a secular work without irony, and giving it the reverence it’s due without coming across as preachy.

134 Nitty Gritty Dirt Band – Will the Circle Be Unbroken (1972)

Country music is beyond the scope of this list, but this album is a special case. The country scene entered the 1970s in a state of crisis. Nashville had been moving toward a smoother sound since the mid-1950s and by 1970 it owed more to traditional pop than to its honky-tonk roots. The rest of the industry was at a loss for how to cope with the rise of rock, especially psychedelia, which captured most of the youth market and took it in directions that seemed diametrically opposed to country tradition (this made for some rather interesting recordings). The irony was psychedelic rock had a much stronger folk and country influence than most would have guessed, and country rock had been bubbling underground in California since at least 1968. Hence, it was a group of Bay Area hippies who got started as part of the jug band tradition who would bridge the divide, uniting with members of country’s first generation to create an album that would jumpstart an interest in roots music that still hasn’t died.

133 Commodores – Commodores (1977)

Some groups reach their pinnacle when the tendencies of their early years are balanced by the tendencies of their later years. The Commodores started out as a pedal to the metal funk band but gradually got smoother and more pop oriented until culminating in the lite R&B which was Lionel Ritchie’s solo career. This is the point where Ritchie’s songwriting chops were starting to develop more fully, getting beyond typical funk rhythms but still retaining enough of it to keep the music from feeling schlocky.

132 Tom Waits – Blue Valentine (1978)

Tom Waits albums of the 1970s show a gradual progression toward the Tom Waits of the 1980s and beyond that he is best know for today. He started off as a piano-based singer/songwriter with a heavier than usual jazz and blues influence, but his albums would become increasingly abstract until the first traces of his classic “junkyard sound” were heard on 1980’s Heartattack and Vine. Blue Valentine is his final album before this transition. His trademark growl was nearly perfected, and songwriting leans more heavily on the blues than previous efforts, but it’s a slick, jazzy blues with more piano and sax than guitar. This is probably the last Waits album that can be described as “accessible” by any stretch of the imagination.

131 Neil Young and Crazy Horse – Ragged Glory (1990)

The album that solidified Young’s reputation as the Godfather of Grunge. In 1977, punk rockers had felt that the contemporary rock scene had become too decadent and had fallen too far afield from its roots as aggressive, youth oriented music, so they sought to strip out all the unnecessary fluff while retaining its essence. Grunge largely arose from the same ethos, but with one crucial distinction—it wasn’t about to throw away 25 years of musical development to achieve this goal. Reform, not revolution. Neil Young provided the template on how this could be done. As a classic rocker himself he couldn’t deny the past without denying his own part in it, and seemingly had no interest in doing so anyway; he was merely trying to find his own way after a decade in the wilderness of horrid genre exercises. He could provide a sound that was stripped-down and grungy but capable of sophistication, not deliberately eschewing complicated song structures or solos, and it set the template for rock’s last major revolution.

130 Black Sabbath – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973)

The early 1970s is normally viewed as a time of specialization in rock, when the music split from a somewhat unified mainstream into an array of distinct subgenres. While there is a great deal of truth to this, there was still a great deal of cross-pollination, if not full-on hybridization, and in the days before punk, the guiding spirit still led towards increasing sophistication. If progressive metal a la Dream Theater is now a recognized subgenre, this is one of its early prodromes, as Black Sabbath sought to maximize their sound by diversifying their song structures and instrumentation, and brough in Rick Wakeman of Yes to play synthesizers on one track. Sabbath couldn’t keep it up and would never come close to these heights until 1980’s Heaven and Hell, but by then Ozzy was out of the band, and metal was in an entirely different place.

129 Eric Clapton – Slowhand (1977)

While Eric Clapton may have spent the first part of his career as a blues rock guitar god, his solo material seems more interested in conforming with a lighter, mainstream sound than in inducing fits of unrestrained air guitar. That doesn’t mean it’s bad, though, as there’s a lot more to interesting guitar playing than shredding, and songwriting counts for as least as much as skill and inspiration. What we end up with is a record that works incredibly well as an album—“Cocaine” demonstrates that Clapton can’t go wrong when covering J.J. Cale, “Lay Down Sally” has a sneaky good guitar solo, “Mean Old Frisco” shows that he hasn’t lost his blues touch, and “The Core” may simply be the finest performance of his career.

128 Alice in Chains – Jar of Flies (1994)

Grunge wasn’t exactly known for being happy, positive music, but Alice in Chains was excessively dark and aggressive even when grading on a curve. This album demonstrates that loud guitars and pounding drums aren’t necessary to achieve this effect; it’s as dark and aggressive as anything in their career but is based largely around acoustic instruments. It’s also a testament to the Achilles Heel of the ‘90s, the CD. They had better sound, but they also held 74 minutes of music, and many albums from the decade suffer due to the temptation to fill as much of this space as possible. At 7 songs and 30 minutes this was technically an EP, but it’s longer than a lot of albums from the 60s, and its brevity means the quality never suffers.

127 Jimi Hendrix – Axis: Bold as Love (1968)

Hendrix’s status as a Guitar God meant that he often substituted instrumental talent for songwriting talent. His albums are uniformly excellent, but most suffer from enough bits of self-indulgence that it detracts from the whole. This is the exception. Despite including the fewest stone classics of any of his albums (“Little Wing” is the only song on here that’s reasonably well-known), it manages to stay engaging from top to bottom.

126 Bob Marley and the Wailers – Live! (1975)

Bob Marley’s 1970s material is Marley qua Marley, the Bob Marley that’s played on the radio and that college kids have posted on their dorm room walls. But he had a prehistory recording low-budget records in Jamaica, and some fans feel that the slickness of his ‘70s albums detracts from his Jamaican essence. But it nonetheless can’t be denied that he wrote his best material in the ‘70s. Being outside the confines of the recording studio limits the slickness of the production and shows what the songs can be when the band just plays. And the compilers had an ear for quality because the selections are among the best Bob had released so far, including the definitive version of “No Woman, No Cry”.

125 Little Feat – Dixie Chicken (1973)

Little Feat was an atypical southern rock band. They started off as a roots band in the style of Ry Cooder, but for this album they added a healthy dose of New Orleans funk in the style of the Meters or Dr. John. The title cut and “Fat Man in the Bathtub” are classics, and the sound of this record set the template for the rest of the band’s career.

124 Donald Fagen – The Nightfly (1982)

Steely Dan broke up after 1980’s Gaucho and Donald Becker’s first solo album continues in much the same vein. But there’s one crucial difference: While Steely Dan, even at its most upbeat, was always dark and cynical, this record, a loose concept album based on the Kennedy Era, is unabashedly optimistic. The traditional Dan elements still remain, though. The songwriting exhibits a heavy jazz and R&B influence, the production is slick and nearly flawless, and the ironic (or is it sardonic?) sense of humor is intact, complete with lines like “Hello Baton Rouge—would you turn your radio down?”

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

Regarding the NYTs, the NYTs is popular in part because it produces so much content, which is not specifically news-related but includes op-eds, general interest pieces, and such that are of a less topical nature. This is not the same as the NYTs being honest, because it's not news.

The NYT is also one of the few publications that still actually produces news content. News gathering is expensive, and a lot of publications are cutting back on anything that requires more work than paying a 24-year-old 35k/year to sit in an office and and of course their main office in New York. CNN has 19 domestic bureaus, 49 international bureaus, ant their Atlanta headquarters. NPR has 18 domestic bureaus and 17 international bureaus in addition to their DC headquarters, plus the news departments of the various member stations. The only conservative news organization that even comes close is Fox News, but at 9 domestic and 3 international bureaus plus the New York headquarters they aren't quite in the same league. Most conservative outlets have nothing that isn't local. The reason the "liberal media" continues to dominate is because the reputational advantage gained by having real reporters writing real stories is difficult to match. Any hack can paraphrase a wire story but it takes actual journalistic skill to spend time developing sources and going through the drudgery of, say, sitting through court proceedings or city council meetings and coming out of them with an interesting story. So I'm inclined to believe that these news organizations are "mostly right" because they have entirely too much invested in being mostly right. Fox News can certainly afford to spend as much on actual news gathering as its peers but it won't because it doesn't need to; people who turn to Fox do so not because they expect it to be right but because they expect everyone else to be wrong, and aren't looking for news so much as invective. That being said, their news department still invests enough in actual journalism that they're mostly right. The other conservative outlets are purely bush league or worse, almost without exception. They don't have the money to actually invest in real news gathering, but either way no one is tuning into OANN for news anyway.

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Rov_Scam 22d ago

Pittsburgh: An Urban Portrait

For a while I've wanted to do a comprehensive survey of a city to examine it in terms of urbanism and the principles of what make a place a good place to live. In particular, I want to examine what makes certain places "trendy", and what causes some neighborhoods to gentrify while others stagnate or even decline. Most examinations of the urban environment are merely case-studies of a few neighborhoods that have seen change in the past several decades, for better or worse. But I think that those kinds of studies, while instructive, miss the big picture. Most cities are composed of dozens of neighborhoods, each with its own story and its own potential, and most are simply forgotten about. I've selected Pittsburgh for this exercise, for the simple reason that I live here and can talk about it as an insider rather than someone relying on news reports. You can talk statistics until the end of time, but the only way to properly evaluate a place is if you have a pulse on what the common perception of it is from those who are familiar with it. Before I get to the neighborhoods themselves, though, I want to give some preliminary information about the city so those who are unfamiliar (i.e. almost everyone here) can get the view from 10,000 feet. It also gives me the opportunity to present a few general themes that I've noticed during the months I spent researching this project. Note to mods: A lot of this survey will touch on a number of culture war items like crime, homelessness, housing, density, traffic patterns, etc. For that reason, I'm posting this in the culture war thread for now. That being said, there will be large sections where I look at nondescript parts of the city where I expect the discussion to be more anodyne, and I don't want to be hogging the bandwidth of this thread, especially in the unlikely event that I can crank out more than one of these per week. I can't really anticipate in advance what's most appropriate where, but I'd prefer to post these as stand-alone threads once I get past this initial post. If the mods have a preference for where I post these, I'll adhere to that.

I. The Setting Pittsburgh exists in a kind of no-man's land. It's technically in the Northeast, but people from New York, Philadelphia, and the like insist that it's actually more Midwestern. They may have a point; we're six hours from the nearest ocean, and the Appalachian Mountains are a significant barrier to transportation and development. No megalopolis will ever develop between Pittsburgh and Philly, and we're much closer to places like Cleveland and Columbus. We're also not assholes. That being said, nobody here thinks of themself as Midwestern. First, it's possibly the least flat major city in the US. Second, most Midwestern cities act as quasi-satellites of Chicago in the way that Pittsburgh simply doesn't. Additionally, being in the same state as Philadelphia makes us much closer politically and economically to that area than we are to places that may be closer geographically. Some people try to split the difference and say that Pittsburgh is an Appalachian city, but this isn't entirely correct, either; Pittsburgh is at the northern end of what can plausibly be called Appalachia, and is a world away from the culture of places like East Tennessee. There are close ties to West Virginia, but these are more due to proximity than anything else; for most of that state, Pittsburgh is the closest major city of any significance, which is reflected in things like sports team affiliation. And the Northern Panhandle (and associated part of Ohio) is practically an exurb of Pittsburgh, with a similar development pattern around heavy industry. But for the most part, West Virginia swings toward us rather than us swinging toward them.

The physical landscape can best be described as extremely hilly. For reference, I describe a "hill" as any eminence that rises less than about 700–1000 feet above the surrounding valley, with anything in that range or higher being a mountain. The area is built on a plateau that has been heavily dissected by erosion. Relief is low to moderate, ranging from about 200 feet in upland areas to 400 feet in the river valleys. The natural history results in an area where the hilltops are all roughly the same height, about 1200–1300 feet above sea level, while the valleys range from a low of 715 feet at the point to about 900–1000 feet at the headwaters of the streams. And there are streams everywhere. The most prominent ones are the three rivers (the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio), but there are innumerable creeks that spiderweb across the landscape. The upshot is that flat land is rare around here, and traditional patterns of urban development are difficult to impossible. Most people live on hillsides since the little flat land available is often in floodplains. Roads are windy and difficult to navigate; you may miss a turn and think that if you make the next turn you'll eventually wind up where you want to be. Instead, you find yourself winding down a long hill and end up in one of three places: In view of Downtown from an angle you've never seen before, at the junction with a state highway whose number you've never heard of, or in West Virginia.

What this means for the urban environment is that neighborhoods are more distinct than they are in other cities. While flat cities have neighborhoods that blend into one another seamlessly, Pittsburgh's are often clearly delineated, with obvious boundaries. The city is defined by its topography. One advantage of this is that a lot of the land is simply too steep to be buildable, even taking into consideration that half the houses are already built on land that one would presume is too steep to be buildable. The result is a lot of green space. Another advantage is that it means you get views like this from ground level. The actual green space itself is typical of a temperate deciduous forest, but with a couple of caveats — there's plenty of red maple, sugar maple, red oak, white oak, black cherry, black walnut, and other similar species, but not as much beech as you'd see in areas further north, and not as much hickory as you'd see in areas further south. There are conifers but most of them are planted landscaping trees. White pine and eastern hemlock are native to the area, but they're much more common in the mountains to the east. I should also note that the topography means that there are some weird corners of the city that have an almost backwoods hillbilly feel.

II. The Region

I'd describe the larger region as a series of concentric rings. First is the city proper, which is small for a city of its size. While that seems like a tautology, what I mean is that the actual city limits are, well, limited, giving the city itself a proportionately low population compared to the total metro area. This is because PA state law changes in the early 20th century made it difficult for the city to annex additional territory. The result is that the boundaries were fixed relatively early in the era when America was urbanizing rapidly, and only sporadic additions were made thereafter. The next ring would be what I call the urban core. This is the area where the density and age of the housing gives what are technically suburbs a more urban feel than traditional suburbs; in many cases, these suburbs feel more urban than the later-developed parts of the city proper. These would include typical inner-ring streetcar suburbs, though Pittsburgh has fewer of these than most cities of its size. Most of the areas thus described are towns that developed as the result of industrial concerns, or suburbs of such towns. These are most prominent to the city's immediate east, and also include the innumerable river towns in the river valleys. These towns extend along the rivers for a considerable distance, but there's an area close to the city where they form an unbroken geographic mass. If not for limitations on expansion, they would likely be part of the city itself.

Next, we obviously have the true suburbs, by which I mean areas that developed after World War II but still revolve around Pittsburgh more than a regional satellite. Then we have the exurbs, which I define as areas that are developed, but more sporadically, and are often revolve around a satellite county seat rather than Pittsburgh itself. This is the area where couples looking for an extended date will get a hotel in the city for the weekend (My family makes fun of my brother for doing this because he lives in one of these areas but always insists that he's close. Nevermind that it would be ridiculous for any of us to get a hotel room in Pittsburgh if we weren't planning on getting seriously wasted.) Finally, we have the much broader greater co-prosperity sphere, which is roughly everywhere that falls within Pittsburgh's general influence, be it rooting for sports teams to being the destination when you need to go to a hospital that isn't crappy.

III. History I'll try to make this as quick as possible, since there are obviously better, more comprehensive sources for people who want more than a cursory review. The city was ostensibly founded when the British drove out the French during the French and Indian War and established Fort Pitt. The war began largely as a contest between the British and the French for control over the Ohio Valley, a vital link between the interior northeast and the Mississippi River. The site of Pittsburgh was particularly strategic, as it was at the confluence of two navigable rivers. The surrounding hills were rich in coal; combine this with the favorable river network, and the location was perfect for the nation's burgeoning iron and steel industry. This new wave of prosperity attracted waves of immigrants from Italy and Eastern Europe, who later came to define the region. A number of satellite industries developed as well, including glass (PPG), aluminum (Alcoa), chemicals (Koppers, PPG), electrical products (Westinghouse), natural gas (EQT), etc. Pittsburgh's place as an industrial powerhouse continued until the triple whammy of the energy crisis, inflation, and the Reagan recession sparked a wave of deindustrialization that turned America's Rhineland into the Rust Belt. By the '90s the region was bleeding jobs, and much of the working-age population decamped for the Sun Belt. The outright population loss has stabilized in recent years, but the region is still slowly losing population.

The odd thing about this, though, is that in 1985, at what should have been the city's nadir, it started ranking high on the "liveability" lists that were becoming popular. The city had been making a concerted effort to reduce pollution since the '50s, and by the early 2000s it had become a bit of a trendy place to live. I don't want to speculate too much on why this is, but I think there are a few factors at play. First, the crime is low for a rust belt city; there aren't too many really bad areas, and the ones that exist are small and isolated. What this means is that there is a certain freedom of movement that you don't have in other Rust Belt cities like Cleveland or Detroit with large swathes of ghetto. Even in the worst areas, the only time you might find yourself in trouble is if you visit one both at night and on foot. Even the worst areas are fine to walk around in the daytime and I wouldn't worry about driving through anywhere, which is more than I can say about friends of mine's experiences in Cleveland or Chicago. Second, the housing stock is more East Coast than Midwest. Many of the neighborhoods have architectural character, as opposed to other Rust Belt cities that are nothing but rows of nearly identical derelict frame houses (though we have plenty of those, too). Third, the housing is actually affordable. People have been bitching in recent years about significant price increases, but it's still nowhere near the level the major East Coast cities or the trendy western cities. Years ago I met a girl who moved here from New York because she wanted to live in a brick row house but it was simply unattainable where she was. She looked at Baltimore and Philadelphia, which are true row house cities, but the ones she could afford were all in the endless expanses of ghetto. In Pittsburgh, meanwhile, you could snatch a renovated nee in a good area up for well under $200k, and rehabs were being sold for under $50k. You aren't getting them for anywhere near that now, but $500k gets you a nice house in the city, and if you want to do the suburbs you pretty much have your pick of 4BR 2000 square foot homes in excellent school districts. Finally, the outdoor recreation is better than you're going to get in a city of comparable size or larger anywhere east of Denver, and the hotspots don't get the crowds that the western areas do. In the Northeast you have to drive a lot father to get anywhere, and the places are busier. In the Midwest the cities are surrounded by corn, and the areas worth visiting are few and far between. In Pittsburgh, the mountains are only about an hour away, and the general area is hilly enough and forested enough that a typical county park has better hiking than anything within driving distance of Chicago. The mountain biking and whitewater are nonpareil, and that's still a secret to most locals.

I've gone a bit off track here, but I want to make one general observation that I've noticed when studying the history of the city: Everything changes all the time, and there are no meta-narratives. The first statement may seem obvious, but when discussing urban dynamics, people often act like there was some golden era where everything was in stasis, and if we're still in that era then any change is bad and disruptive, and if we're not in that era then any change should be aiming to get back to that era. The meta-narrative is simpler: American cities developed in the 19th century, and grew rapidly during the industrialization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This was largely due to high immigration. Few had cars, so people needed to live close to where they worked, and public transit networks were robust. Blacks lived in segregated neighborhoods, and this was a problem. After The War, people started moving to the suburbs, a process which was hasted by not wanting to live alongside black people, who were gradually getting better access to housing. This white-flight drained cities of their economic base, and the new suburban commuters demanded better car access to the city core. Once decent neighborhoods were turning into black ghettos. The response of municipal leaders was to engage in a number of ill-advised "urban renewal" projects that which were blatant attempts to lure white people back into the city by resegregating the blacks into housing projects so they could build white elephant projects and superhighways. Then in the 90s hipsters were invented and they looked longingly at the urban lifestyle. Hip artist types moved into ghettos because they liked the old architecture, could afford the rent, and were too cool racially to be concerned about black crime. Some of them opened small businesses and white people started visiting these businesses, and the neighborhood became a cool place to live. By 2010, though, that neighborhood was expensive and all the cool spots were replaced by tony bars and chain stores and all the bohemes had to find another neighborhood. Meanwhile, the poor blacks who lived here before the hipsters showed up started complaining about being displaced from their homes, and now the same hipsters who "gentrified" the neighborhood are concerned about the effects of reinvestment on long-time residents.

This narrative probably fits somewhere, but the reality is often more complicated. One common refrain I heard from older people in the '90s was "neighborhood x used to be a nice place to live and now it's a terrible slum". Usually, the old person in question was the child of an immigrant who grew up in the neighborhood but decamped to the suburbs in the '50s. She'd return regularly to visit her parents, and watch what she saw as the decline of the neighborhood firsthand. The problem with this is that most of the neighborhoods I heard people talk about like this growing up were always slums. The only thing that changed about them was that they got blacker and don't have the business districts that they once did. Second, in Pittsburgh at least, the changing demographics in some neighborhoods is more in relative terms than in absolute ones. While some places did see an increase in the black population in the second half of the 20th century, most places did not. Before World War 2, Pittsburgh only had one truly black neighborhood, and even that was more diverse than one would expect. Blacks normally lived in racially mixed neighborhoods alongside Italians, Poles, Jews, etc. of similar economic standing. The changing demographics were oftentimes caused more by whites leaving than blacks moving in. It's also worth noting that some areas went downhill long before any of the factors cited in the meta-narrative really kicked in. People tend to be ignorant of urban dynamics in the first half of the 20th Century, which is viewed as this juggernaut of urban growth. No one considers that a neighborhood might have peaked in 1910 and gone into decline thereafter, because the meta-narrative doesn't allow for it. But in Pittsburgh, I see these sorts of things time and time again.

IV. The Housing Stock I mentioned housing stock in the last section, but I want to go into a bit more detail here because it's important when evaluating a neighborhood's potential for future growth. When Pittsburgh was first settled, most of the housing was simple frame stock. Most of this is gone, but, contrary to what one might think, the little that's left isn't particularly desirable. These houses tend to be small and in bad condition, essentially old farmhouses from when most of the current city was rural. Later in the 19th century, brick row houses were built in the neighborhoods that were relatively flat lowlands. Almost every row house neighborhood in the city is desirable, as these neighborhoods have a dense, urban feel. It should be noted, though, that through most of the 20th century this was housing for poor people, as most middle-class and above felt these were outdated.

Also from around this time is the Pittsburgh mill house. These are similar to what you'd find in most Rust Belt cities, and are proof that not all old housing has "character". These were houses built on the cheap and have often been extensively remuddled to keep them habitable. Most of these in the city aren’t exactly true mill houses, as they weren’t built by steel companies as employee housing, but most 19th and early 20th century frame houses fit the same mold. These were mostly built on hillsides and hilltops where building row houses was impractical. Not a particularly desirable style.

Combining the two is the frame row. These were built during a period in the early 20th Century when the area was experiencing a brick shortage. They aren't as desirable as brick rows but still have more cachet than mill houses, although the purpose for which they were built is similar. Most of these were remuddled at some point (by this I mean things like plaster walls torn out in favor of wood paneling and drop ceilings, window frames modified to fit different sizes, wood siding replaced with aluminum siding or Inselbric, awnings, etc.). By the 1920s and 1930s, the classic streetcar suburban style took over. These include things like foursquares and bungalows, the kind of stuff you see in old Sears catalogs. The brick shortage had ended by this period and the houses were larger and better-appointed, making them popular for middle-class areas. The remuddling on these was limited, and they’re highly desirable. After the war, more suburban styles took over, though by this point the city limits were mostly built-out so they aren’t as common as other styles. Most of the suburban stuff was built during the first decade after the war in odd parts of the city that were too isolated to have been developed earlier, though a fair deal was built in neighborhoods that were rapidly declining into ghetto in an attempt at stabilization. There’s nothing wrong with these houses in and of themselves, but they aren’t particularly desirable, as this is exactly the kind of development urbanists hate most.

There are obviously other styles, but the rest of the housing is either multi-family or infill housing that may or may not have been built with consideration given to the vibe of the existing neighborhood. The city has gotten better in recent years about building new houses to match what’s already there, but there are plenty of hideous miscues out there.

V. Neighborhood Dynamics

Pittsburgh is roughly divided into four geographic quadrants, based on the points of the compass. The East End roughly includes anything between the Monongahela and Allegheny rivers, and is where most of the trendy neighborhoods are. The North Side is anything north of the Allegheny; the neighborhoods in the flat plain along the river are mostly desirable, if less obnoxiously trendy. The South Hills are roughly everything south of the Monongahela; most of it isn’t trendy at all. The West End is everything south of the Ohio, and is beyond not trendy; it’s basically terra incognita to most Pittsburghers, as the neighborhoods are boring and obscure.

Pittsburgh officially recognizes 90 distinct neighborhoods, but the official geography isn’t entirely accurate. First, the official boundaries are based on census tracts that don’t always line up neatly with a neighborhood’s generally-accepted boundaries. Second, there are a number of bogus or semi-bogus neighborhood designations. Large neighborhoods are often split up into smaller geographic divisions (e.g. North Haverbrook, South Haverbrook, etc.) that may or may not line up with the way people actually talk. Conversely, some neighborhoods include areas that everyone treats as distinct neighborhoods but are officially unrecognized. Some neighborhoods had their names changed because the residents didn’t want to be associated with a declining part of the neighborhood; in some cases these new names caught on but other times they didn’t. For this project, I will be discussing the neighborhoods based on what makes sense to me based on having lived here all my life and knowing how people actually treat the matter. When necessary, I will use historic designations that don’t necessarily match up with the official maps, but this is rare. I will always make reference to the official designations to avoid confusion for those following along at home.

As I was examining the neighborhoods in detail in preparation for this project, a few things jumped out at me with regard to gentrification, stability, and decline. First, a gentrifying neighborhood needs a relatively intact business district. This could be nothing more than boarded up storefronts, but the physical structures need to be there; there has to be some indication that the place has potential, and it’s much easier for businesses to move in when they don’t have to build. Some depressed areas lost practically their entire business districts to blight, while others never really had a business district to begin with. This second scenario decreases the chances of gentrification even further, as there is often no logical place to even put a business district. The presence of a business district is important for two reasons. First, walkability is a huge selling point for people who want to live in a city as opposed to suburbs, and an area that’s dense but unwalkable is the worst of both worlds. Second, neglected neighborhoods don’t get “on the map”, so to speak, unless there’s something to draw in outsiders. Related to the above, there are two general kinds of businesses that can occupy a business district. The first are what I call Functional Businesses — grocery stores, dry cleaners, corner bars, banks, professional offices, hardware stores, etc. The second are Destination Businesses — restaurants, breweries, boutiques, trendy bars, specialty stores, performance venues, and other miscellaneous stuff that will actually draw people in from outside the neighborhood. There's obviously a continuum here, as, for example, a coffee shop could be either depending on how much it distinguishes itself, but you get the idea. Both are essential for a neighborhood to fully take off. There are plenty of areas with perfectly functional business districts that don’t get a second look because there’s no reason for anyone who doesn’t already live there to go there. But if a neighborhood consists exclusively of destination businesses then it will feel more like a tourist area than a real neighborhood; it’s a hard sell for someone to move to a place where they can get artisanal vinegar but not a can of baked beans. Often, the presence of a robust functional business district will stymie a neighborhood’s potential for gentrification. One thing I’ve noticed is that destination businesses rarely replace functional businesses, usually moving into abandoned storefronts or replacing other destination businesses. Functional businesses just sort of exist and don’t move out until the neighborhood has declined past the point of no return.

As I mentioned in the previous section, housing stock is another major contributor to gentrification potential. Urban pioneers have to look at a neglected neighborhood and see the potential to return to a faded glory. Houses that are worth restoring, not dumps that should have been torn down ages ago. The one exception to this is the spillover factor; if a neighborhood with bad housing stock is close to other gentrified neighborhoods that have great amenities but have become too expensive, nearby neighborhoods will get a boost from this, especially if they have intact business districts.

On the other side of the equation, decline follows displacement. The story of declining neighborhoods in Pittsburgh follows a pattern. First, in the 1950s and 1960s, civic visionaries sought to clear slums by replacing them with ambitious public works projects. Forced out of their homes, the residents of these slums needed somewhere to go, and moved to working class neighborhoods that were already in a state of instability, if not minor decline. (It should be noted that slum clearance was much rarer in Pittsburgh than in other cities, though some wounds still run deep). More recently, the city has demolished public housing projects that had become crime-ridden hellholes, but their problems only spilled out into low-rent, working class neighborhoods. What results is a game of whack-a-mole, where revitalization of one area simply leads to the decline of another. That’s why I’ve been less critical of low-income set-asides than I was in the past. I used to be totally free market on the housing issue, but it seems like an inflexible standard only ensures that poverty will remain concentrated, which does little to improve the situation of the poor. Section 8 was supposed to address this problem by getting people out of public housing hellholes and into regular neighborhoods, but it’s only worth it for slumlords in declining areas to accept the vouchers, and the result is that entire neighborhoods go Section 8. I grant that it’s better than things were previously, but I think things could be better still if we agreed that every neighborhood was going to subsidize the housing of a certain number of poor people. That way we can at least make it so the honest, hard working people don’t suffer unnecessarily, and the kids grow up in a more positive social environment. Maybe I’m being too idealistic, but it seems better than any of the existing alternatives.

Finally, a brief note on stability. Stable middle-class or working-class areas tend to be boring areas that are too far away from bad areas for any spillover or displacement to affect them. There may be some long-term factors that may lead to their eventual demise, but there are no obvious causes for concern. The flip side is that as much as some of these places have been touted as the next big thing, the same factors that keep them from going down also keep them from going up. One factor playing into this is the number of owner-occupied houses and long-term rentals. New residents, whatever their economic condition, simply can’t move into a neighborhood if there are few rentals and little turnover in ownership.

VI. The Neighborhood Grading Rubric

The initial goal for this project was to discuss what the future holds for these neighborhoods, and to discuss special considerations that factor into the whole thing (actually, it will mostly be about special considerations, at least for the big neighborhoods). One thing that’s important to this exercise is to discuss where the neighborhoods are at now. I initially developed a complex classification system, then scrapped it because it was too complicated and still didn’t explain everything. But as I got to thinking about it, I decided that some sort of grading was necessary to put things in proper perspective rather than rely on qualitative description. So I developed a much simpler rubric that should catch everything. I would note that the below isn’t to be construed as a ranked desirability ranking, although it will be made apparent that some of the categories only describe undesirable areas.

Upper Middle Class: This includes upper class as well, but truly upper class areas are rare enough to make this a distinction without a difference. These are highly desirable but may have gone past the point of trendiness to the point of blandness (though not necessarily). These include places where gentrification reached the point where it’s all chain stores, but also places that never really gentrified because they were always nice.

Gentrifying: These are the hotspots that everyone knows about. What separates them from the upper middle class areas, even if they are more expensive, is a sense of dynamism and a raffish air. Students and bohemian types still live here. There may be older working class homeowners who never left, and poor renters who haven’t been forced out yet. There may still be a few rehabs for sale at somewhat decent prices. Most of the businesses are locally owned, and it probably still has a functional business district from the old days.

Early Gentrification: This is the point where a neighborhood starts making the transition from working-class or poor to middle-class or trendy, but isn’t quite there yet. Most of the businesses are functional, but there are a few cool places for those in the know. The hipsters are starting to move in. People are buying derelict houses at rock-bottom prices and fixing them up. But the normies don’t know about it yet; tell most suburbanites you’re going to a bar there and they either think you’re going to get your wallet stolen or wonder why you want to hang around old people. The neighborhood is still rough around the edges, and may still have a decent amount of crime and a high minority population. It probably still looks rather shabby. It’s perfectly safe for those with street smarts, but it’s still sketchy enough that you wouldn’t recommend it to tourists.

Stable: Not necessarily boring, but not going anywhere. There’s probably a good functional business district, but few destination businesses. Every once in a while one of the destination businesses might become popular enough that people think the whole neighborhood is going to go off, but it never seems to happen. And that’s if it’s lucky. The upside, though, is it’s very safe, and affordable to buy here. This also includes middle-class black areas that suburban whites assume are hood but are actually rather quiet.

Early Decline: These are the neighborhoods that just don’t seem like they used to. Crime is up, property values are down, and the houses are starting to get unkempt. Most of the long-term residents are elderly, and the newer residents are transients who are of a distinctly different class than the elderly ones. They may be blacks who were displaced from nearby ghettoes, or they may be white trash. There’s increasingly conspicuous drug activity, but no gangs yet. There still may be a functional business district, but there is rarely anything destination, maybe an old neighborhood institution that is still hanging on. These are perfectly fine to rent in if you don’t mind a little excitement in your life, since they’re still relatively safe for normal people, but they aren’t places you want to commit to.

Rapid Decline: This is the point where gang activity has become a problem, and gunshots are no longer a rare occurrence. If there was a white working class here they’re now dead and gone, and if there was a black middle class they’re very old. Residential sections are starting to see blight and abandoned houses. There’s still probably a reasonably intact business district, but it’s entirely functional at this point and mostly caters to stereotypical ghetto businesses. It is, however, still well populated.

Ghetto: A neighborhood that has bottomed out; it can’t get any worse than this unless it disappears entirely, which seems almost inevitable at this point. Few intact blocks remain. If there’s any business district left it’s scattered remnants (though there’s almost always some kind of newsstand). There’s probably gang activity, but there’s little territory worth defending. The atmosphere is desolate and bleak, as the remaining residents are only here because there’s nowhere else to go. Crime, while still a problem, is probably lower here than one would think, simply because there aren’t too many people here to be criminals, and equally few available victims.

The below ones are special cases that don’t fit into the above continuum particularly well.

Deceptively Safe: These are areas that look sketchy as hell but are actually decent places to live. They are usually poor neighborhoods where the properties are in somewhat shabby condition but are occupied. Unique to Pittsburgh (probably), this also includes places that look like part of West Virginia was transported into the middle of the city. These are mostly very small micro-neighborhoods that are poor but just don’t have the population or foot traffic to support any serious crime. Buy low, sell low.

Projects: Pittsburgh has a few “project neighborhoods” that only really exist because it built most of its public housing in odd places where nobody wanted to build before. Most of these projects don’t exist anymore, so saying these are invariably bad areas is a misnomer, especially since one of the few remaining projects is a senior citizen high rise. Most of these are an odd mix of different uses that merit individual treatment.

Student Areas: Transient population, unmaintained properties, exorbitant rent for what you get, multiple unrelated people living together common, noise, public drunkenness, vandalism — everything a real ghetto has except violent crime and gang activity. This doesn’t describe all student areas, but areas where the percentage of students reaches a certain threshold have a much different dynamic than regular neighborhoods. First, these areas are relatively safe considering how dysfunctional they are in every other respect, and second, while the properties are in poor condition, there is little blight or abandonment because the slumlords know they have a captive audience. Also, the presence of a university usually means that the area sees a lot of outside visitors so more destination businesses develop, and there are plenty of places catering to students. Altogether a unique dynamic, though no one not in college would even consider living here.

That’s it for the preliminaries, stay tuned for Part I, where I discuss Downtown and the other “tourist areas” in its vicinity.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I'm not a conservative so I don't worry about these things. As for them, I don't expect them to do anything other than stop bitching about people who need handouts and then asking the government to set policies that are basically handouts for them. And if you want AI to do legal services, be my guest; I'll make more money undoing the mess...

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Rov_Scam 4mo ago

It is quite unpleasant to argue against the core assumptions of veganism in a way that is epistemically rigorous. One has to tear down the entire concept of ethics as it is typically understood, then rebuild some sort of timeless decision theory-based normative system that reproduces the common-sense undisputed norms of "ethical" human behavior, but hopefully without the gaping security hole of giving in to utility monsters and bottomless pits of suffering.

That's one of the pitfalls of atheism. As a Catholic, I just tell them that animals don't have souls and that they're meant to serve people. It's obviously a little more sophisticated than that, but that's the gist of it. God told Adam and Eve to "fill the earth and subdue it." This doesn't mean that wanton cruelty or destruction of nature is permissible, since it's still part of God's creation and under our stewardship, but it doesn't mean that every tree is sacred or that animals have the same status as humans.

If you want to take a more secular tack, I'd try to bait them into taking the "every tree is sacred" path. First, vegans eat plants. So find out what their justification is for eating plants that were once as alive as the animals were. I'm on my way out the door but I trust you can take the argument from there, but it's much easier if you have religion on your side. Then all of the sudden they're arguing against your religion which is much more daunting than than simply arguing against meat-eating. Since most people assume I'm not religious it usually stops them cold.

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Rov_Scam 9mo ago

To those people who are suggesting that library science isn't a real thing, I have a simple exercise for you: Suppose you are managing a very basic, but busy archive that adds dozens if not hundreds of new documents per day. Each document is assigned a sequential number, and has several names associated with it. When each document is entered, an index entry for that document must be created. Without a computer, how would you organize such an index to make it quick and easy for someone to find documents associated with a particular name?

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Rov_Scam 10mo ago

The Texas independence movement always amused me because of what an utter disaster it would be were it actually implemented. The independence types make a good argument about how Texas has a large economy blah blah blah and could totally stand on its own without help from Uncle Sam. Yeah, probably. But that doesn't happen overnight, especially if if the US doesn't coddle you on the way out. I don't think there would be a war, but when the mail stops being delivered the next day and all the rest of the states Federal employees are laid off as well, things aren't going to look so hot. Texas can talk all it wants about how it's a net contributor of tax revenue but when the Federal funds are cut off it will find itself without a way to capture that excess income; the first order of business for an expressly conservative regime would be to institute sweeping tax increases plus building an enforcement mechanism from scratch. And they'll need that money to build that wall when the Border Patrol up and leaves for Oklahoma and migrants start flooding in unopposed, though after a few months Mexico might start looking like the better option anyway.

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Rov_Scam 1yr ago

In other words, you hope your country loses a real war in order to make some parallel statement about culture war politics? That's in the same league as the assholes who hoped Trump would lead the country into a recession so it would help them win midterm elections.

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Rov_Scam 1mo ago

I tend to dislike biopics for the simple reason that they seem to lack focus. They're slow to get started because they have to focus on marginally relevant bits from their childhood or early adulthood, and the crux of their professional life is represented by a series of only semi-related vignettes. Sometimes, like in Gandhi, this ends up being okay because their entire life was really leading to one thing, in Gandhi's case Indian independence. The way to do it, though, is like in Lincoln, where you focus on one aspect of their professional life that could be a movie in and of itself.

As far as propagandistic ones go, though, Walk the Line has to be the worst example. By all accounts, Johnny Cash was a horrible human being throughout most of his life, yet the movie makes it seem like his life was a redemption story when he met June Carter and found Jesus. The movie conveniently ends before the part where he has an affair with his wife's sister while his wife is pregnant, and that whatever redemption he found came in like, 1992. But after that movie came out I had to endure people playing the same three songs on jukeboxes in bars while telling me that he knew pain and was a great man, etc., etc.

Of course, whatever you think about him as a person, Cash at least is one of the most important figures in 20th Century American music. The same can't be said for Queen (and not just because they aren't American). Bohemian Rhapsody probably has to be the worst example of this kind of propagandizing, and also one of the most effective. First while I understand that Hollywood is going to take some liberties with historical facts to make a more compelling story, I don't expect them to play copy and paste with a band's chronology. This is easily verifiable information that everyone with a certain degree of familiarity with the subject already knows. It's like making a film about the American Revolution that tells you the war began with Washington crossing the Delaware and has them signing the Declaration of Independence in 1780. They also relied to heavily on first-hand accounts from Brian May to get the inside story of the band. I know you have to get it from somewhere, but I doubt Freddie Mercury apologized to them as much in real life as he did in the movie.

But the real travesty of this film is that it created the myth that Queen were an iconic band up there with the likes of Led Zeppelin and The Who. I've listened to their entire catalog and well, they aren't. When they started out they were a pretty good hard rock band, but the only songs from this period that anyone still talks about are Killer Queen and maybe Keep Yourself Alive. Then they made what are supposed to be their best two albums, A Day at the Races and A Night at the Opera and they're... good. But they aren't iconic albums. Even if my dislike of Bohemian Rhapsody the song is due merely to overexposure, most of it is just unmemorable. They'd make a series of okay albums with hits of varying quality and plenty of padding until the '80s were in full swing, at which point what would have been padding started to sound substantial in comparison to the dross that made up the majority. By the end even their hits were unlistenable. I don't hate Queen, but I don't know why some people consider them better than, say, The Doobie Brothers, who made at least three albums that are better than anything Queen ever did.

Some people will argue that those who dislike Queen simply have a distaste for the theatrical elements of their performances, particularly the strong allusions to opera and musical theater; if you don't like either of those, you won't like them integrated into your rock music. While I agree with this up to a point, and agree that they started to go downhill when they became "theatrical", it's not because of a dislike of theatrical element per se, it's that they do it badly. Their understanding of opera is surface level, not going beyond what you see in a J.G. Wentworth commercial. And while some Beatles fans will complain about what John Lennon referred to as Paul's "granny music" (Your Mother Should Know, When I'm Sixty-Four, Honey Pie, etc.), it's sincere, borne out of an appreciation for the music he grew up listening to. With Queen, on the other hand, it's pure kitsch. There's nothing wrong with kitsch, but there's a low ceiling for how great it can be. This kind of got off the rails, but I don't think any of this happens without that stupid movie.

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