solowingpixy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
1d ago
Shoes. I work on my feet in and out of restaurants, and the difference between shit or slippery shoes and a decent pair of non-slips is night and day, especially as the week drags on. My feet/ankles hurting for no good reason is a total mood killer.
solowingpixy
3mo ago
It's probably not everything, but it doesn't help that we've gotten a lot fatter and older on average.
solowingpixy
3mo ago
I'm bordering on shitposting here, but it amuses me to think about Woodrow Wilson the son of Southern Confederates getting his revenge on stalwart Republican Germans.
The (arguable) long-term realignment of both sides of the Civil War into the Trump coalition is something to behold. I say this as an upper Southerner whose classmates frequently wore Confederate flag T-shirts while being blissfully unaware that their ancestors hailed from the most Unionist part of my state.
solowingpixy
3mo ago
I would put huge money on that any wasp republican from that time period would say the same exact thing as you regarding those Irish and Italians.
Eh, the Italians were relatively Republican (as were the Germans) while the Irish leaned Democratic (AFAIK there's still a decent-sized partisan gap between Americans of German or Italian ancestry and those with Irish ancestry.). It's not a coincidence that Antonin Scalia and Ron DeSantis are big Republican names while the Democrats still boast politicians like Joe Biden and Mike Duggan. The GOP of that era thought that the Great Migration (Party of Lincoln!) was going to save them from the white ethnic hordes.
solowingpixy
8mo ago
A real tragedy about these dark rituals, is that unlike the nicer variety, when it's over I have no feeling of resolution.
Speaking as someone with more baggage (blah blah blah mom with Borderline Personality Disorder, child abuse, domestic violence, and dead pets; firearms aren't cool in domestic arguments and Hillbilly Elegy made me cry because it hit way too close to home) who has done his own version of the ritual (less often now) I am genuinely unsure as to how useful they were. Maybe they were and that's how I got through it (albeit terribly inefficiently; IMO I wasted an enormous amount of time crying into my river of Steel Reserve over this stuff), but early 30s me wonders if I could've had a better 20s by going straight to the professionals instead of doing it the self-reliant redneck way (i.e. never taking PTSD seriously until I was armchair-diagnosed by a veteran coworker who'd done a few tours in the sandbox).
That said, if the drunk and crying part wasn’t so productive I think that just typing it out (usually meant for reddit support groups, sometimes posted, usually not) is helpful. Maybe it’s the act of journaling or just banging away at the keyboard. Often, by the time I’m two-thirds finished or whatever I no longer feel the need to say whatever it was that I was going to say. This is better than getting drunk around people, going down a spiral of telling stories, freaking people out and then feeling like an asshole hunting for sympathy. Relating to the above, maybe I needed that sympathy at some point but now being able to shock/unsettle people is more embarrassing than anything and I know how uncomfortable I am when someone hits me with a traumatic event that I can’t relate to/one-up.
One thing I am convinced of is that resolution is to some extent impossible because I remain who I am and my mother remains who she is. There’s little point in entertaining counterfactuals of how much nicer my life would be if I hadn’t endured this or that/been made a little weird as a result. I am bound by something, be it honor/a wish to be the better person, guilt, fear, or whatever such that I will never cut my mother off unless she mortally threatens me. Sure, our relationship is mostly an unrewarding exercise of “What the Hell does she want/need now?” but I’m the oldest and only son, it’s my job to make sure she’s okay (and thank God that she’s a disabled veteran and thus mostly the VA’s problem), and I owe it to my siblings to shoulder most of the load of her bullshit now because I couldn’t defend them from her when I was a kid.
One note, as to the younger memories, I’d mostly rather not. I’ve been crushed to hear things from relatives, what they thought/felt about how my sister and I were treated when we were little. I’ve been crushed from the other end to hear things from my little sister, things I’d thought that I’d spared her from. I’ll leave it at this: I’m fairly confident that I developed speech aphasia as a two year old because I had the word “no” beaten out of me.
The final note: My father says that I should write a book about it all. I doubt that I’ll ever get around to that or that it would be worth reading, but I guess that in its own way a procession of comments nearing the character limit and half-finished ones on Google Docs is something like a book in itself.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
That's going to be tough to pull off as long as so many black Americans live in swing states (A bunch of Nigerians moving to coastal cities and doing well isn't going to change the electoral map all that much.). It can be (and has been done) with American Indians because there's not a lot of them, and Appalachian whites can mostly be ignored because they live in a handful of deep red states, but black Americans are too numerous, too strategically located (and institutionally embedded) to just ignore, and too convenient a cudgel for white liberals to wield toward white conservatives to pass up.
Maybe the Democratic Party radically changes its marketing strategy and the electoral map changes in the future such that Southern and Midwestern swing states aren't so important, but for now the Democrats are the party of Biden, and they're presently re-engineering the primary calendar to make black Southerners more important, not less.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
To be clear, I think the smart Nigerians would assimilate and do fine in America. It's just that given the choice like every other high IQ immigrant group they'll mostly gravitate toward wealthy blue cities and assimilate into that milieu (doing wonders for, say, Ivy League schools looking to become more aesthetically diverse), which doesn't really do anything to fix the problems of existing black Americans that mostly live elsewhere or to dilute the outsized political power held by that group (White Americans are also overrepresented by their political system, but they don't bloc vote anywhere near as intensely.). Black Americans (and the Robin DiAngelos of the world, for that matter) in places like St. Louis aren't going to be impressed that a bunch of immigrants that look like but don't sound or act much like them are making money any more than white Americans in places like rural Kentucky are impressed by people that look like them doing well in the Acela corridor.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
Are you going to force these elite Nigerians to live in places that most black Americans actually live and intermarry with them? If not, ADOS black Americans will remain a distinctive group, and thanks to disproportionately living in Southern and Midwestern swing states they will remain politically powerful above what their numbers would suggest.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
«These people are Calvinists. They are not religious, they laugh at religion, but they are essential Calvinists; Calvinism has reached their bone marrow and the root of their tongue, it is in their gait and their gaze and the way they shake your hand. They are genuinely modern, tolerant and open-minded. You are free to be Russian, Muslim or gay, or even all those things at once. So long as you live and breathe like a fellow Calvinist in all respects which matter, they won't give you any trouble».
I know this comment is ancient, but I strongly resonate with this as an Appalachian Southerner who grew up in the middle of nowhere outside of the church (in my family's case. Presbyterian). I am deeply, embarrassingly ignorant of theology. My ignorant working man's take on religion based on the people I've known is that "Church of Christ" means that they mean it, and I respect them for it. I was, embarrassingly, an internet atheist in the mid-late 2000s. I made my peace with God, like Lieutenant Dan in Forrest Gump. My point is that, somehow, all that conservatism rubbed off on me. I might not speak the language of the religious right that I grew up around, but I feel it, and empathize with it.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
Yeah, that was strongly worded on my part. We did democratically agree (whether we realized it at the time or not) to essentially give health insurers the power to levy something like a tax in the form of premiums, be it from policyholders, their employers, or government subsidies. Amusingly, nationalizing student loans was supposed to help pay for those subsidies, but that's turned into a debacle all its own.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
The only white (or any, for that matter) Millennials I know with lots of kids are either well off Mormon tradcon types (I don't know if he's literally Mormon, but he might as well be.) or trashy rednecks (The two I'm thinking of are indeed from Appalachia, Kentucky and West Virginia specifically, but that could be coincidence as much as anything else.) who identify as Christian but don't actually attend church regularly, but they're in the minority of both groups. If anything, the hillbillies might've retained fertility higher than northern yankees for a generation or so due to being more rural, but even rednecks generally are more exurban than rural these days.
In my experience, even "fuck it" tier rednecks are capable of shelling out $20 at Walmart for Plan B to avoid single motherhood or child support payments. Likewise, the biggest story in American demographics has been the collapse of Hispanic fertility. There's no need for 16 and Pregnant these days, because teen pregnancy has crashed from it's W era uptick, and for all the mockery of red state sex ed or lack thereof the decline has been nationwide.
solowingpixy
10mo ago
Forcible sterilizations under One Child Policy?
We probably supported that (not literally AFAIK, but I doubt that we were opposed) given that our NGOs were prodding India to do the same.
Anti-natalist policies were all the rage at the time, with South Korea's arguably looking like the biggest retrospective "whoops". Amusingly, even an Islamic theocracy couldn't stop their bureaucrats from being influenced by Ehrlich.
solowingpixy
3mo ago
FWIW, I was given IV morphine before surgery for a broken arm as a kid and still remember how amazing it made me feel. They could've marched a firing squad in there with my death warrant and I wouldn't have cared in the slightest.
OTOH, from a very small sample size it appears that I'm allergic to hydrocodone. I got some of those after having wisdom teeth yanked out and they just made me feel sick and unpleasantly intoxicated.
solowingpixy
3mo ago
I don't exactly disagree with you, nor am I a big fan of weed culture.
I was just pointing out that there were places that did take drug enforcement seriously (sort of...this was the height of the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of narcotics prescriptions such that pills were everywhere), to the point of alienating the sort of nice white collar folks whose support is needed.
Personally, I wonder how much of the drug stuff is just a byproduct of the explosion in prescribing children drugs such as stimulants and antidepressants along with the "pain as a fifth vital sign" era of doctors dishing out benzos and oxys like candy. I joke that I've never cared for cocaine because it just feels like Ritalin on steroids but IMO it's kind of fucked that I was simultaneously on Ritalin and Zoloft at the age of nine years old (Mom doctor-shopped psychiatrists until she found one who would diagnose me with OCD because I was sad about losing everything in a house fire and vigilant about checking lint filters in dryers after that; the story was that our dryer had caught fire and burned our house down.). Meanwhile, back in the early 2010s I got a script for some variety of opioid after a very minor surgery (more than I got years later for getting all four wisdom teeth yanked out) without asking, much to my confusion as the procedure had completely fixed my pain problem. I wound up selling them to a coworker for beer money for his pill head girlfriend's "headaches".
I just don't see how you keep taboos over drugs when they're so commonly prescribed. I hear so many people talking about being on this or that psych drug that I feel like I'm the only one in the room who isn't on anything. Even the druggies I know still hold the stigma over meth and crack, but that didn't seem to stop meth from taking over much of rural America. Overdoses seem to be a fairly straightforward problem of opiates and especially fentanyl having an extremely low margin for user error, but supply interdiction seems to totally failed there as well. At the same time, while we could probably kill the market for that stuff by mass-legalizing safer stuff (as with alcohol; most people don't drink rotgut vodka but something like Bud Light or Whiteclaws), but we don't exactly want a mass opiate culture, do we?
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
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
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
5mo ago
Iran is a victim of its own highly successful population control policy.
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
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.
It's going to be cold so I'm going to cook either chili, 15 bean soup, or some variety of lentil soup. The 15 bean soup in particular is a totally idiotproof way to produce something that's reasonably healthy and tasty with no real work or skill. Chili is also idiotproof, but then I have a tendency to want to stuff a bunch of crackers in it that undermines the "healthy" part.
My biggest weakness as a cook (aside from general mediocrity and occasional intoxication) is a tendency toward making things cheap and healthy at any cost, and figuring out the flavor later. Sometimes this makes for weird things that horrify my friends (savory oatmeal, for example), but that taste fine IMO. On that note, I think I'm going to try buckwheat at some point.
My friends (SEC college townies) are a mixed bag but trend toward not great given how easily they're impressed by the stuff I make.
solowingpixy
4mo ago
Even the author concedes that their strategy is only viable if the parents are paper tigers, and TBH I feel like their conception of parents who aren't paper tigers is abstract at best.
What do you do with a parent who is no stranger to breaking their own windows? Or, to get personal, what do you do with a parent who would burn their own house down (It was a shoddily executed attempt at insurance fraud in which we lost far more than the insurance paid us.) and then have the kid drugged for being sad about it (Mom doctor shopped until she found someone willing to diagnose me with OCD.)?
solowingpixy
4mo ago
To get out of the trailer park my dad joined the Marines and has since lived at least 10 hours away from his hometown in the rust belt, returning to visit maybe once a decade. Other than his mom, the one functional aunt, and intermittent periods of contact with/enabling of some cousins (including a cousin who came and lived with us Fresh Prince style for a few years) who lost their dad he has almost nothing to do with them.
It was an ugly disappointment coming from the white trash bullshit from my mother's side (See, even if you escape it's possible to wind up jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire.) to find out for myself that dad's side of the family is pretty much the same thing with more drugs and prison sentences, all the way down to both sides having a cousin named K who lost custody of her kids due to drugs.
America has more successful immigrants of color than ever before. Has the argument that America is a racist country been refuted? I don't think so. If anything, we've just imported a bunch of Saira Raos to tell us how racist we are.
There are a few probably unfixable problems here: One, other groups being successful doesn't make black Americans successful. They can easily claim that the new arrivals discriminate against them just as much as white Americans (sometime moreso; it never occurred to white Americans to monopolize the business of black haircare products like it did to the Koreans), that new immigrants didn't suffer slavery or Jim Crow or whatever, and this can't be refuted.
Two, as alluded to above, there's nothing to stop the new immigrants from claiming that they, too, are victims of racism. It doesn't matter if they are in fact "privileged" in every objective measure relative to the average white American. There's status to be had in victimhood and if anything high-IQ immigrants will just be smarter at it than the locals.
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