solowingpixy
No bio...
User ID: 410
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
1yr ago
Per the power company I pay 10.6 cents/kWh, but once one tosses in the minimum fee and whatnot it winds up being between 15-17 cents/kWh.
Fortunately, my apartment is an upper-floor unit that stays remarkably warm during the winter with minimal (heat pump or electric, Hell I don't know; as far as I'm aware it's a heat pump with an emergency electric strip that never gets used) heating.
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.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
As a young (well, 30-ish; I was recently called out for the fact that most of my favored "new" music dates from the first half of the 2010s) person who drives a lot, Youtube and Youtube music (formerly Google Music). I pretty much only listen to the radio for college football (and pretty much only watch football on TV).
On that note I must say that I'm impressed with the sub $100 head unit my shitbox car came with. If it had a backup camera (haven't fooled with it to see if that function exists yet) and a slightly better interface than the low-end Pioneer I usually stick with I wouldn't even think of replacing it, and as it is the car phone is better than in the more expensive (but five year old) unit.
solowingpixy
1yr ago
I'm not sure that this is a behavior exclusive to progressive women. I delivered pizza during college in a mixed Southern town where the local black population is fairly ghetto, and the amount of whining about how dangerous delivering to the hood is (from an almost exclusively male delivery staff) was off the charts compared to how dangerous it actually is. To be clear, the amount of danger is non-zero (probably more than more people realize, though the occasional reddit talking point that delivering pizza is more dangerous than being a cop is incorrect and stupid. Cops would die in droves if they tried to do their jobs unarmed like pizza drivers do.) and I have been robbed at gunpoint on the job (Once in five years of delivering in that area.) but objectively the driving part of the job is more dangerous than the local crime threat (Birmingham, Alabama, on the other hand? Fuck that and RIP Najeh ). The real problem is that delivering to these customers is a money loser (These customers don't tip.) and often profoundly unpleasant. You're going to get harassed by the local street presence and customers are constantly trying to scam and get shit for free. You're not allowed to say that though (Hilariously, black drivers will and are highly sensitive any perception that they're getting stuck with the hood deliveries.) while you're allowed to refuse deliveries that seem unsafe, so there's a culture of hyping relatively tame but not nice places as dangerous (while we redline places that are actually dangerous). I'd imagine that dealing with the local losers on public transit is somewhat similar. You're probably not in much outright danger but you're going to be dealing with a lot of unpleasantness.
With that, in my experience women are more sensitive to danger in general, especially middle class and up white women, and they do deal with annoying behavior from customers that our male drivers don't (Porn is lying; nobody wants to fuck the pizza guy.). I've goofed as a dispatcher and sent one of those to a mid-tier hood at night and she called the office flat out terrified and hyperventilating. Lower class women complain less about this, especially lower class butch lesbians from the hood.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
1yr ago
All the people who teased me in high school didn't somehow have more willpower than me, they were fucking playing on easy mode!
I feel this, as someone who is occasionally sanity-challenged (more on that coming next Wednesday!). Long story short, depending on my mental state my appetite will either be excessive (if bored/depressed, enough to be your average overweight American) or nonexistent (if anxious) such that I'll barely or not eat for a few days and only really notice when I wonder why I'm suddenly so tired.
When I was in my early 20s I had some life circumstances change (escaped abusive mother for good) and suddenly switched from being awfully depressed to suffering from PTSD and lost 70lbs in ~18 months without really trying while having picked up an awful drinking problem (aka 1-1.5K calories a day worth of cheap beer). People were complementing me and asking me for my secret; I was just mostly living on cigarettes and beer (Fun fact: Natty Ice is a bit more calorie efficient for the alcohol content than Michelob Ultra.).
The craziest I've pulled (again, thanks to a wild mood swing) was losing 25lbs in six weeks.
I'm presently falling (okay, kind of already there) in love with a woman way out of my league and think I have a chance so once again my appetite for things that aren't alcohol barely exists and I'm dropping weight without trying.
As someone who works in a bar, I'm somewhere between amused and annoyed by the Bud Light thing (much as I was annoyed as a pizza delivering college student to hear about John Schnatter from people blissfully unaware of Tom Monaghan's politics). The place I work at is one of the more liberal bars in town, or at least liberal enough that Bud Light is one of our worst sellers. We keep it in stock for the occasional large party of tradesman types who will come in and drink lots of Bud/Bud Light, but for whatever reason Bud is so "redneck" coded that our patrons (mostly Millennials; happy hour is mostly Boomers) mostly don't touch it. Why Miller Lite isn't coded this way, why our customers have no idea that Kid Rock name-dropped PBR in a song, and why Yuengling's owner actually having endorsed Trump seems to have been forgotten all escape me. Caveat here: the local Miller/Yuengling/PBR distributor sends us 16oz cans for the same price as Bud sends us 12oz bottles, a price differential that only Michelob Ultra (Greeks and middle-aged former Greeks are loyal to it.) seems able to overcome (darkly amusing, as IMO Mich Ultra is even worse than Bud Light; Hell, I'd rather drink Natty.).
I've heard lots of jokes about Bud Light that get old fast, one regular who repeatedly announced his boycott in annoying fashion, but otherwise I sell no Bud Light and tons of Miller/PBR/Yuengling as per usual. I've heard more dramatic things from the sort of bars that do sell Bud Light (and wouldn't be surprised; this is an SEC college town), but people say lots of things. Concerning Gen Z, they either choke down $2 PBRs like the rest of our budget-conscious customers or drink fancy crafts (Sours seem to be in style now and IPAs out of fashion/relegated to alcoholic Millennials.)/mixed drinks. Hard kombucha is a surprisingly big seller along with the expected ciders for people (usually young women) who don't like beer. We sell surprisingly little Whiteclaw (mostly to one regular, and then the bar manager drinks it on the job because it looks like water in a cup); maybe it's class-coded in a negative way toward dilettantes in the same way Bud Light is.
For fun, my preferred domestic/InBev product (aside from Elysian Space Dust IPA) is Natty Light, because it's cheap, IMO no worse than other light beers, and does its job, i.e. one or two to finish off a night upon returning home from the bar won't get me too fucked up to work the next day. I'm not tough enough to drink Natty Ice any more, and as a rule I don't keep liquor at my house (My drunken idea of a good gin and tonic is not conducive to being on-time/sober enough to work the next morning, and I frown upon getting drunk and morose by myself these days.)
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
9mo 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
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.
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