solowingpixy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
1yr ago
Anecdotally, we're what, two weeks into this? One of my acquaintances works for a Budweiser distributor in west Alabama and from what he tells me (while being beyond tired of talking about it) things are apocalyptic, his employer is tightening the belt, they're not getting help from AB, he gets accosted by randos for wearing Bud Light shirts, etc. We're talking multiple bars pulling all In-Bev products, a whole Walmart selling two cases of Bud Light (on Rollback!) in a week, customers sitting on pallets of unsold product, nobody hitting sales quotas. At the least, this is worse than the Papa John's N-word saga and much worse than the John Schnatter comments about Obamacare (I delivered for a Papa John's while in college at the time; hearing about his antics semi-regularly got deeply annoying after awhile.)/hosting Romney in his mansion.
I don't have a dog in this fight (other than being deeply sympathetic to the local distributors who are, at this point, the ones taking it in the ass, not InBev, and who tend to be pretty red in my experience), but I agree that it may take time for the effects of a boycott to make their way up the chain.
solowingpixy
7mo ago
He needs to reach people who think wokeness is bad, but don't understand why every single institution has adopted it. The book explains why.
The problem here is that he viscerally hates that would be audience, and would sell them down the river for a fancy gummy worm, if that. Speaking as a working-class conservative, not only would I support Hanania being canceled, I would support his execution and gladly volunteer to do it myself. He's that much of a sneering asshole. He's the kind of guy to make racists defend black people to avoid the sheer embarrassment of being associated with him.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
I've felt this, coming from a mediocre rural area in Greater Appalachia (where both the top and the bottom were white and the black people I knew were in similar circumstances to myself; they mostly lived in modest houses like my family did, not in trailers or mansions) to an old Southern port city. The racial inequality there was very in-your-face along with the juxtaposition of dilapidated shotgun shacks being all but adjacent to million dollar historic mansions. It was deeply jarring and remorse-inducing (as was witnessing the poverty of the Black Belt, a region depopulated by the Great Migrations and which is probably about as bad and forgotten about as native reservations or the worst that Appalachia has to offer).
By contrast, IMO successful integration happened mostly in the New South. It's still a little weird due to the fact that underclass blacks tend to live in inner city apartments while underclass whites tend to live in trailers out in the country but once you get above that level (and ignore the mostly white elite, which are as out of view to the middle as the underclass) you get working and middle class white and black people who interact and get along with each other well on a day to day basis and as /u/faceh puts it, there's more shared culture and experience papering things over than there is racial divide. We all want our kids to go to good schools and do well, we all want nice houses and fancy cars or trucks, we love Jesus (but are imperfect sinners), and want our football team of choice to win.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
I suspect that even if you dropped a free crate of condoms right beside every bed in the country you wouldn't get a factor of two reduction in the rate of unprotected sex.
We actually kind of did that already by making Plan B over the counter along with a strong anti-natalist campaign aimed at youth. The results have been stunning. Relative to Gen X, teen pregnancy has been all but wiped out.
IMO this is the oddest thing about Dobbs and its aftermath. Abortion rates had already dropped to pre Roe levels. In light of ubiquitous contraception availability and the internet probably having provided far more sex-ed than any high school class abortion is nearing obsolescence outside of lizardman constant cases or medical necessity.
Now we're stuck with the fun part, figuring out how to convinced 20-something women with career ambitions that having a kid isn't A. borderline trashy or B. a life-ruining event.
solowingpixy
4mo ago
Iran is a victim of its own highly successful population control policy.
solowingpixy
11mo ago
A net benefit to whom? The government's balance sheet?
No. IMO the lifetime prisoner's goal should be repentance, as they have souls like the rest of us.
Ideally, (and my God I'm overdosing on idealism here), the goal for the lifer should be to shepherd those serving shorter terms through and out of the prison experience, guide them into reformation. The lifer should read letters from those he has successfully guided and feel accomplishment from this.
This would work better if we had a quicker/cheaper mechanism to execute the truly irredeemable.
solowingpixy
7mo ago
Yes, the LS-swapped Miata is our generation's Shelby Cobra. I'd love to drive one.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable.
As am I. I am disturbed by how much "I have been a good Bing." made me feel genuine pity.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
Critical race theory dates back to the early 80s, and the wildly oversimplified explanation of that is that it took feminist critical theory and replaced "patriarchy" with "systemic racism".
Gay marriage was imposed by judicial fiat, but it didn't matter because its opposition was mostly shallow and gays, as it turns out, don't really marry that much so it changed little. No-fault divorce was a much bigger deal.
With abortion, the problem is that a huge number of women consider it their right and a large number have themselves had abortions. There's probably more social stigma to euthanizing unwanted kittens than having an abortion.
The right has been relatively successful with gun rights, though there's work to be done with the right to self defense and they're in danger of losing there. There's little point in owning a weapon if exercising self-defense lands you in prison.
Otherwise, the modern right has been stuck waiting for the left to screw up because its actual policy stances are mostly unpopular. Immigration? The right never actually delivers there, because a big chunk of its leadership are pro-immigration libertarians, and the optics of actually enforcing immigration law are generally bad. Crime is unpopular, but so is enforcing the law and imprisoning criminals. Fiscal conservatism (another thing the right seldom actually delivers on) is deadly unpopular.
The right's problem is that outside of the gun rights issue they have no cultural power and therefore no ability to move public opinion.
solowingpixy
8mo ago
I find it perfectly believable that Russian commanders would say "fuck them kids, fire the missile" when they notice a school being used to host troops.
More to the point, the front lines have been relatively static for a long time. There won't be kids in those schools, so it's just another building that if anything is less likely to be occupied by civilians.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
Coming from a Southerner in a medium-sized college town, I think your impression is pretty spot on and if I had dictatorial powers you and the GF would have a green card yesterday, instead of my annoying third worlder south Asian (from where and how they got papers, I have no clue; I'm guessing it has something to do with the local university) upstairs neighbors who don't grasp basic concepts like "Don't do your laundry in the bathtub, leak water all over the place, and fuck up my ceiling.". You and the girlfriend (She could bond with the car-hating ex-pat professor from the UK.) would do well socially at the bar I work at and I'm sure that the local hospital or doc-in-a-box could use your help if you're not inclined toward opening up your own practice.
I'm drunk and not overly energetic at the moment but I'll say a few things: Concerning gun homicides, you're absolutely correct. It's a non-issue outside of a few hotspots if you're not an underclass criminal type or suicidal. Concerning abortion, Plan B is like $20 at Walmart, and if you fuck that up Illinois isn't that far away; it isn't as if abortions were overly accessible within Alabama to begin with. As for food, if you can cook or like lowbrow American cuisine (which includes Americanized Chinese and Mexican, maybe a Thai or Indian place if you're lucky.) you're fine. Otherwise, good luck and don't expect to find good Italian food here.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
This reminds me of my favorite crime-related statistic of all time, which is that white Alabamians are four times as likely to be incarcerated as white Minnesotans. The black incarceration rate for the two states is fairly close. source I guess there's something to "Minnesota nice" after all.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
I wouldn't say that the GOP is so much the "white" party as the "settler" party. This is to say that if your ancestors were around to fight the Civil War on either side, you're a lot more likely to vote GOP. One could argue that this is a distinction without a difference (and I believe that liberals mean "settlers" when they think of "white", and that settlers are most strongly conflated with Southerners because they most strongly embraced that identity/were late to urbanize) given that the settlers were white and that Yankee descendants of settlers are well represented in the liberal camp, but roughly speaking I suspect that this is A. true, and B. most of the culture war in American today, aka. a contest between two blocs of whites with highly divergent views as to what the founding was and what the country should aspire to in the present. White liberals are a minority of white Americans, but white settlers struggle to gain support of non-whites. Hispanic Americans can be either one (given that most are descended from both natives and white settlers), and the black American experience can likewise be viewed from either lens. The latter is especially true given that in the liberal north/west, black Americans arguably were immigrants, with mostly black Southerners having served as a substitute for immigrants from the 1920s-1960s (The white Southern Great Migrants were more likely to move west, as settlers.).
Conveniently, this is something agreed upon by both the woke left and paleoconservative right, the only bone of contention being whether the settlers were good or bad/whether they have a unique claim of ownership upon America and what it means to be an American, and perhaps a secondary front concerning which groups of Ellis Islanders have more room to claim credit for civil rights or dodge guilt concerning the white supremacy question. Broadly speaking, "but my ancestors were Irish or Italian, not those damned Southerners" doesn't count for much these days, and being Jewish comes with more flexibility in that regard.
White descendants of settlers (This is something of a choice of identity, most strongly espoused by those white Americans who put their ethnicity as "American" on the census.) would be the ones who don't share negative in-group bias with white liberals. Much of their gnashing of teeth as of late has come from the belated realization on their part that they themselves are a minority among the American populace (albeit the largest plurality), and while the white settler ethos has historically had high capacity to assimilate non-English settlers (see the Germans of Cullman, Alabama ) this ability has declined along with rural America's cultural power. While not all descendants of settlers are rural/exurban/suburban, the more rural in America one goes the more likely it is that the entire population consists of settlers (some of them of Mexican descent in places like rural Texas). Given their limited ability to court outsiders into their coalition, their future consists of being the largest but continually shrinking plurality with limited elite patronage and ever-growing political irrelevance.
They (and Republican Party officials, stuck with being the settler party in most of the country whether they like it or not) may cope about Hispanics turning right, or even more fantastically toward the prospect of flipping the black vote, but I have my doubts. The GOP may convert enough settler-adjacent Hispanics in places like Texas along with Cubans in Florida to hang on in those states, but results elsewhere (the west coast and southwest in particular) have been discouraging. It's very hard to assimilate new voters into your party when it doesn't even win with the local whites, and the GOP's high water mark with the Hispanic vote, W '04, was still a 9 point loss. Other relatively pro-immigration Republican tickets fared even worse, as did Bush in 2000. Reagan '84 lost Hispanics by 32 points and Bush '88 by 40. Trump 2020 was the usual over 30 point loss.
Relating to your frame of identifying as white, the number of Hispanics and Asians who identify as white (the latter likely for college admissions purposes) will be outnumbered by the number of mostly white Americans who discover some non-white heritage, and the latter will be wealthier and more important than the former.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
The belief that blacks harbor antipathy towards whites may also be overstated.
Per capita and adjusting for blah blah blah black Americans are if anything over contributors to the American story. Hell, they're practically the only ones left who still buy American-made (or American branded, anyway) cars.
Beyond that, I'll be brief because what I have to say exceeds my energy to type at the moment, but as a white southerner (with rather reactionary right-wing inclinations at that) living in a roughly 50/50 town I agree with this statement. I go about my day and I just don't see the hostility that I read about. Be nice and you'll get nice; act like you belong and you'll get treated like you do. We're all Southerners in the end.
I will say that I believe in MLK day. I have my differences with the man and what he really stood for (as opposed with the sanitized, moderate-friendly MLK that we now celebrate) but what it means (reconciliation) matters.
On a side note, as crazy as it is to see present-day Republicans quoting MLK, we are the country that put Andrew Jackson, hater of banks, on the $20 bill.
solowingpixy
11mo ago
If I had all the money to spend I'd have a nice enough house that fit in the neighborhood with a big and well equipped shop out back within walking distance of my favorite bar.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
It's not so much that terrorists are popular (though I'd bet that some among the left don't mind having "dial a riot" in their deck of cards), as the fact that the center-left feels vastly more secure in its control over the direction of leftist politics than the center-right does. Realistically, any far left policy that gets memetically popular will be sanewashed into something the center-left either already supports (e.g. they might not want single-payer healthcare, but they would like a universal system) or can accept (race and gender grievance stuff). Bernie got swatted like a fly by the DNC whereas the GOP is praying that Trump gets imprisoned or killed because their other standard-bearers can't beat him (assuming the polling is remotely accurate, a fact about which I am presently agnostic). All those boomer bombings are easily forgotten about because all put together pale in comparison to one Oklahoma City Bombing. Joe Biden's anachronistic affection toward organized labor is a bigger threat to neoliberal economics than every commie professor in the country combined.
I don't think that the center right really thinks that some sort of far right is a serious threat (though it's entirely possible that they've been repeating it long enough that they believe it themselves), but a populist right very much is, and they're more than willing to conflate the two to stay in power. This isn't anything new. Not so long ago, Trump himself was calling Pat Buchanan a Nazi.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
Being dumb and emotional is no excuse.
Correct, and there is no excuse for catering to "dumb and emotional". What, were the Democrats going to run a pro-invasion candidate in '04? I suppose it's possible given that Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in the first place but it strikes me as rather unlikely.
US foreign policy is somewhere between loosely controlled by elections (Democrats and Republicans differed in the 2010s over our our approach to Iran, for example.) and not at all. The Bush administration didn't invade Iraq because Americans were mad (Afghanistan, yes. Ron Paul of all people voted for that AUMF. Even today I don't think there are many who criticize the initial invasion, more that it mission-crept into a failed attempt at nation building.), but because they'd been wanting to invade Iraq for years. Neocons exploited anger over an unrelated event and stoked fears over nonexistent WMDs to get what they'd wanted all along.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
A lot of self-identified "libertarians" from the Ron Paul (appropriate enough given that I'd describe Paul as more an anti-federalist than a libertarian, even though he ran on the LP's ticket once) era were just disaffected paleocons (think Pat Buchanan) who'd lost the power struggle with neoconservatives in the 90s. Trump rolled in an more or less ran on a Buchanan style platform and ran away with that group.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
This is my understanding as well; most of the emissions come from what you're cooking rather than the heat source. I've definitely smoked up my apartment a time or two searing steaks on an electric stove.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
In particular, there is an enormous political benefit to moving redistribution "off budget" by doing it via employment law. Minimum wages, the Obamacare employer mandate to provide health insurance, unemployment insurance, etc.
Correct. Particularly concerning employer-provided healthcare insurance, it's a convenient way to bypass democracy and de facto raise taxes (Given the wild inequities in healthcare consumption, insurance premiums are as much a payroll tax as Social Security for the average employee.) on corporations and the upper-middle class without Congress taking a beating in the midterms (Sure it happened in 2010, but premium increases since have been a non-punished exercise in boiling the frog.). I seriously doubt that the US would be willing to sustain its present level of healthcare spending if it weren't obscured by employer-provided health insurance.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
It's not so much that the Ellis Islanders were the nationwide core of Democratic power, as that they were decisive for FDR in the northeast. The New Dealers are littered with the names of Ellis Islanders and their descendants, people like James Farley (who did much to build on Al Smith's strength in cities are solidify the Democrat/Immigrant marriage) and Robert Wagner. Al Smith got nominated in '28 for a reason, and it was that he'd flipped New York at the state level, very nearly took it in '28, and did take Massachusetts (something Woodrow Wilson failed to do in '16, and only did in '12 thanks to the Roosevelt/Taft split). Not bad against a popular almost-incumbent in the form of Herbert Hoover. You can't tell the story of 20th Century politics in Massachusetts without talking about James Curley any more than you can tell that of Michigan without Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Alabama, and whose brand of politics probably drove Michiganders to vote for another politician from Alabama in the '72 Democratic primary, the infamous George C. Wallace).
FDR (and Harry Truman) was wildly popular with Southerners and lavished much patronage on the region, such that contrary to popular conception the South remained Democratic-leaning long after their temper-tantrum over civil rights. IMO the strength of Nixon and Reagan's coalition gets somewhat overrated by big electoral victories against generally mediocre Democratic candidates when in fact neither ever won the House. The GOP would have to wait for all the Southerners who came of age under FDR and Truman to start dying of old age before they really took over the South.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
When those people are used to traveling the same distance in five minutes, yes. I've done a similar walk many times, from an apartment I lived at to my favorite bar. It really sucks to wake up and remember "Fuck, I've got to walk back to the watering hole to pick up my car.".
That said, I've never had a commute that was more than a 10 minute drive in my adult life, and my commute time is usually zero (walk out of my apartment to my car that I use for my delivery job). My sister drives an hour one way to commute to her job and I think she's insane.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
Concerning diabetes specifically (and of diabetics, type II is the bigger problem even if type Is are more expensive per capita as pretty much all American diabetics are type II), the numbers will only get worse even if the US does everything right due to demographics, i.e. the fact that non-Hispanic whites are much less susceptible to diabetes than most of their black and brown counterparts (Chinese-Americans are the exceptions to this, Indian-Americans not so much. A similarly huge disparity exists between Cuban-Americans and Mexican-Americans.). Note, I'm not sure if the ADA is adjusting (I don't think so.) for how old and fat white Americans are compared to their non-white counterparts; if not this gets worse.
Is the private sector also in war more efficient than state bureaucratic militaries?
Executive Outcomes was a lot better at fighting than the state militaries of Angola or Sierra Leone. That said, state armed forces usually make up for being inefficient by being able to marshal vastly more resources than any company could dream of and it's rare that a PMC/political paramilitary is bestowed enough resources to really compete on a major battlefield (the Waffen SS is the example of this).
Also, it could be the case that both Executive Outcomes and Wagner derive much of their effectiveness from being able to pick from manpower/leadership pools that are either elite (veterans, often of special forces), motivated (Right Sector militants like the Azov Battalion or their copycats on the Russian side like the Sparta Battalion) or expendable (Wagner's convicts) instead of having to start with average raw civilians.
It'll be interesting to see if Wagner can leverage its competencies (I'd caution that PR may be one of these. Prigozhin seems to at least know the value of a photo shoot.) into getting a bigger share of the Russian military resource pie and what they can do with it.
I'm biased because I own one, but an 8th gen Civic Si can be found in reasonably good shape for $8-10K and bad shape for about $6K. It's not a fast car unless you put money into it, but it's fun to drive (8K RPM red line and VTEC, yo!), gets reasonably good gas mileage, and is reasonably easy to maintain (There's a Youtube video that tell you how to fix almost anything on it.) while having lots of airbags unlike the Fast and the Furious era cars from the 90s and early 2000s. A 7th generation Si isn't as much fun without mods (The stock one I had felt pretty slow and I traded out of it quickly but the other one I had with a 6 speed swap was super fun and felt like you were going fast.) but is basically an uglier Mini Cooper that's way more reliable.
An NB Miata (1999-2005) can be had in decent shape for $5-6K if you're willing to be cramped and have parents who don't care about safety, and in my experience a mildly tarted up one gets more attention than much nicer cars that cost more money. Like the Civic, you can find a video that'll show you how to fix almost anything on Youtube.
More options
Context Copy link