solowingpixy
No bio...
User ID: 410
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
8mo ago
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.
Do I believe it? No, and I assume that it originates from NAFO (American/EU pro-Ukraine propaganda) Twitter, who have also been implying that the Russians are using WWII era GAZ-AA trucks in the assault. The latter sort of obviously ridiculous claims (Sourcing WWII era trucks would be vastly harder and more expensive than just breaking some cold war era trucks out of storage, commandeering civilian trucks, or just resorting to pickup trucks.) lead me to dismiss anything they say out of hand, along with the fact that Z-Twitter hasn't even bothered to try refuting them. I'd believe it if I saw broad swathes of Z Twitter complaining about the Russians doing it and/or compelling video evidence that I didn't think was staged.
More broadly, and I say this as an American that neither reads Russian or spends time combing through Telegram, IMO Twitter (which is mostly posts from Americans and Europeans, not Russians or Ukrainians) from either side provides information of limited utility. There's been an assault on Avdiivka, it hasn't yet succeeded or been called off, and beyond that who knows. I suspect that it's been a bloody slog given that Avdiivka has been an uncrackable nut for the Russians since day one. Endless videos from both sides of equipment or men being blown up may be emotionally gratifying but they don't tell much by themselves other than that this or that piece of equipment has been deployed.
More broadly than the above, I suspect that, if ever, we'll get good books with accurate information at least ten and probably twenty or more years from now after it's all over. I expect that the Pentagon, if they have better numbers than they're giving (which appear to be regurgitations from the Ukrianian MOD, who are as unreliable/prone to exaggerated kill counts as the Russian MOD and frankly every MOD in history), are keeping them classified. As of now, I have little idea of what to think of the Avdiivka assault. We'll know whether or not it succeeds or doesn't in taking the place in due time and beyond that I can't judge the rationales of either side because I don't know the real manpower/casualty situation for either side. My best guess is that the Russians achieved some initial surprise, failed to translate that into quick victory, and have been reduced to another attritional slog. Whether it's worth pursuing as the Russians appear to be or not depends on factors I don't know.
Edit: In a not surprising development, the lower quality pro-Russian or pro-Ukrainian Twitters are also liable to posting absolute garbage concerning the Israel/Palestine conflict.
solowingpixy
2mo 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
8mo 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
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.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but it's my impression that medicating children for ADHD in America (in contrast to students/professionals using the medications for performance enhancement as adults) is something of a lower/working-class thing in contrast to sending them to therapists or whatever. Indeed, it is the South (along with a few northeastern states) that diagnoses children with ADHD and medicates them for it the most frequently.
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 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
solowng from reddit
solowingpixy
7mo ago
The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.
It's a long story that involves the Great Migration and George C. Wallace, but my maternal grandfather was a GM retiree, a rarity in the south. It's not an overstatement to say that getting that GM job was the best thing to happen to my grandfather and by extension my family. My grandparents (who grew up as farmers and were fortunate for their time to have received eighth grade educations) went from a working life fit for the Book of Job to being comfortably lower-middle class with a secure retirement.
Where things get interesting is that my father (high school educated) also went from broke to "making it" thanks to the auto industry, only this time it came courtesy of working for a non-union automaker (Nissan; he presently works for Tesla). The free market worked well enough for him. Would it have for 20th century autoworkers? I suspect so. Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it.
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
1yr ago
IMO what you're seeing is that within America "not white" implies some amount of cultural commonality that isn't there with white Americans (I'm not saying it's always there but it more often is, especially for Black American descendants of slaves.). For all the racial hype American culture war is pretty much a contest between conservative whites and liberal whites. The latter are a minority among white Americans so of course they have a negative in-group bias concerning their own "kind".
Speaking for myself, and we're leaving politics out of this, I as a white working class Southerner have far more in common with my black counterpart here than I do a wealthy white liberal from one of the coasts.
solowingpixy
2mo ago
It's probably not everything, but it doesn't help that we've gotten a lot fatter and older on average.
solowingpixy
7mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
8mo 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
9mo 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
1yr ago
I know this is late, but I just...don't care. I work two jobs, as a delivery driver/owner's crony for a local doordash clone and as a barback/bouncer at my favorite bar. I work, make the boss happy, get paid, end of story.
At my best I enjoy my jobs. When I was a kid I wanted to be a wheelman, and delivering food is kind of the legal version of that. I get paid to be outside all day and drive a (not very nice, mind you) sports car in circles. At the bar, I get paid to hang out and drink at the place I was probably going to be anyway. I card people, make some drinks, haul ice, and clean up. It isn't really hard.
At my worst, at leas my jobs are easy and my bills are paid. I feel resentful for not having enough free time but I probably would've wasted it anyway.
solowingpixy
9mo ago
What interests me most about the whole immigration rigmarole is what I can only describe a lack of will to power on the part of these right wing parties. Surely they don't expect these immigrants (or, more to the point, their kids) to actually vote for them, right?
This to me is the most baffling part of the Reagan-Romney era GOP, their seeming total lack of concern for preserving their power base. Reagan '84 lost the Hispanic vote by 28 points, he signs an amnesty in '86, and the GOP is rewarded by Hispanics voting for Dukakis by a 40 point margin. At this point the GOP was freshly sniffing power (never mind that they couldn't win the House) after having been wiped off the map by the Ellis Islanders for half a century. '92? Same story, 36 point loss. '96 was outright comical, a 52 point loss. Goodbye California! I bet Pete Wilson was regretting his vote for the '86 IRCA at that point. W in 2000? Another over 30 point loss. W '04, the best a Republican has ever fared with the Hispanic vote? A 9 point loss if you're optimistic, more like 20 points if you're not. Meanwhile, as refugees from Communism have become less represented in the Asian-American vote they've done nothing but trend left and now vote Democratic almost as strongly as Hispanics. From McCain onward, the story has been the same, 33-36 point losses in the ever-growing Asian and Hispanic vote. At no point in this time did the GOP above the House level see a problem with this.
Worse yet, the economic winners of Reagan/present-era neoliberalism and free trade have been blue cities while Republican-leaning interests constitute an ever-shrinking portion of the American economy. The Republicans conserved next to nothing (They did relatively well with gun rights, but IMO this is massive cope relative to everything else they lost.) and their voter base is now outnumbered and relatively poorer than their opponents. What was the point of it? They've converted precisely zero leftists and shit on their own voters so long that they are now hated and lose their own primaries to whatever populist loon rolls into town. I get that big business thinks they're winning and can just cozy up to the Democrats, but what happens when they no longer have credible opposition? Surely a half-century of being taxed and bullied by the FDR coalition wasn't the plan.
The only thing keeping the GOP going since 1988 is that their base has become more geographically efficient faster than it shrank, and REDMAP and Trump 2016 were probably as far as that was going to work. It's going to take an epic act of self-sabotage by the Democrats, one such that they outright lose the Mexican-American vote, to bail out the GOP, and I don't see it happening. Nixon/Reagan arguably only happened because the Irish and Italians hated black Great Migrants enough to start voting Republican, and there isn't another Great Migration in the cards.
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.
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