solowingpixy
No bio...
User ID: 410
solowingpixy
9mo ago
Speaking as a Southerner, it's the petty vindictiveness of (literally, this time) beating a dead horse. The Confederacy has been dead a long time. Jim Crow has been dead far longer than the average black American has been alive. Banning rednecks from flying the rebel flag at Talladega and cooking up a noose hoax to try and shame the audience into submission (something I felt actual feelings about; it's irrational but it was infuriating) isn't going to do a damn thing to improve things for black Americans. At some point you're going to have to quit blaming those pesky Confederates and either come up with a solution or admit that you don't have one, because it's not our fault that black kids in Baltimore can't read.
As I like to remind my northern relatives (My parents met in the military so half is from Alabama and the other from Michigan.), once they got a taste of Coleman Young (first black mayor of Detroit, born in Tuscaloosa, Alabama) they voted for George Wallace in '72 (and George Wallace came home with a GM plant that my grandfather worked for, completely turning around the economic fortunes of my family; no shit they liked George Wallace.). Don't pretend that you're innocent and that your statues aren't next. You're not and they very much are next. We're in the same boat here.
As for the good old days, I'd settle for the pre-2010s racial truce.
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
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
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
3mo ago
IMO while Trump is most likely going to lose, I'm not convinced that either Haley or Desantis have a chance of winning either. While I personally like Desantis he might be the least personable candidate since Richard Nixon if not Barry Goldwater. Haley, meanwhile, appeals to a coalition that's won the popular vote in a Presidential election once in the last 30 years (Dubya would get stomped in 2024 in the Electoral College as well as the popular vote if he performed as he did in 2000 given contemporary demographics.).
Put bluntly, save for a time in the 1990s when fiscal conservatism got trendy and people were really sick of crime and a shorter time in the 2010s when people were mad about Obamacare (which the GOP did a good job of milking for House purposes with REDMAP) the Republican platform has been dreadfully unpopular since the 1930s. For a Republican to win the Presidency they either need a God-tier candidate (Eisenhower and Reagan come to mind here.) or for the Democrats to self-destruct/be in office when something really bad happens. Richard Nixon didn't magically become more telegenic from 1960 to 1968, for example.
So, counterintuitively, Trump supporters aren't exactly wrong to value style over substance. A non-stylish Republican isn't going to win. Unfortunately for them Trump seems to inspire his opponents as much if not more than his supporters and was largely incompetent at governing, but it isn't as if the GOP had been putting forth an all-star cast before he showed up.
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
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
9mo ago
From a cursory look at Facebook Marketplace, another problem is that golf carts are kind of expensive. A decent used one seems to run about $3000, and they can cost over $10,000 for a new one. That's a lot of money for a vehicle that's useless anywhere the speed limit is more than 25MPH. $10,000 will get you a decent used car.
If you're already spending thousands of dollars plus a car-sized space to store the thing, you might as well just get a compact car that can go on any road in most-likely air-conditioned comfort.
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.
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
7mo ago
The GOP has a much deeper bench of Presidential people
Does it? Trump stomped the 2016 field and appears poised to do the same in 2024 for a reason, and it isn't that the Republicans have a great bench. Looking at his closest competitors, DeSantis appears to be a walking charisma deficit and clueless at the art of campaigning, which is a shame because I like the job he's done in Florida a lot more than I like Trump's record in office. Ramaswamy possesses a brain and is willing to say interesting things, but is a transparently flip-flopping con man. Nikki Haley is only getting attention because the other options (Is Youngkin even running? He's undercooked even if so IMO.) are total non-entities (Doug Burgum? Lol.).
I'll grant you that the Democrats have troubles on their end (though I think Newsom is underestimated at one's peril), but it's more because being a successful Presidential candidate in the TV and post-TV age is HARD. Since Nixon (who more or less won 1968 by default as the Democrats imploded; note that he lost in 1960 against better put together candidates), the Republicans have had one great TV politician (Reagan) and the Democrats two (Bill Clinton and Obama). 2016 Trump gets half-credit because he created enemies as fast if not faster than supporters and only barely beat Hillary. Dubya IMO was passable but had the fortune of running against weak opposition (He barely beat Al Gore, the personification of boring, and still enjoyed the rally around the flag effect against Kerry.).
solowingpixy
7mo ago
To add, in most places there is A. more traffic and with that B. more cops on the roads and insurers that are less forgiving than in the past. Even in rural areas (and most teenagers don't live in rural areas, but either in cities with heavy traffic or suburbs that are likely to have plenty of bored cops) you'll get caught eventually if you make a habit of having too much fun, and my teenage hooliganism reached a fairly quick end upon getting slapped in handcuffs for speeding.
"Slow car fast" at least means you can hit the redline in second or third without going fast enough to be in "reckless driving" ticket territory whereas pushing something mundane by performance car territory like a Mustang or Challenger will get you "license revoked" territory quickly along with really outstripping the skill of your average driver (as compilation videos of Mustangs spinning out and crashing into stuff can attest).
solowingpixy
8mo 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
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
1mo ago
IIRC most of the reduction in US fertility has just been the result of a very successful campaign to reduce teen fertility. Nobody wants to be a trashy mom trapped with a loser boyfriend like on 16 and Pregnant.
Arizona, for example, had their teen fertility drop by nearly 75% from 2005-2021. Texas had theirs drop by 2/3rds. Alabama today has a lower teen pregnancy rate than New York did in 2005.
The catch, it seems, is that it's hard to turn off that "You're fucked if you have kids before you're ready" propaganda merely by reaching one's early 20s. It doesn't help that young adults are spending more time in school than ever before.
solowingpixy
4mo ago
I wouldn't go so far as to say Christmas is fully Grinchified, but I would say there's been a shrinkage of Santa. what's the point in Santa for people without children? For that matter, what's the point of a Christmas Day gathering when there aren't any nieces, nephews, or grandkids?
solowingpixy
4mo ago
Correct. Due to irresponsibility on my end (roommate had one cat, I adopted a stray cat, didn't get one of them sterilized in time, and the female had a litter of seven of whom all survived), I wound up with nine cats in a similarly-sized condo. It was a nightmare. Once the kittens grew enough to walk the place was permanently trashed. I spent a fortune on food and litter. It was very difficult to find homes for them in a town that's overrun with stray/feral cats.
I've since gotten it down to three (still pushing it IMO; two are being babysat until roommate moves in with her boyfriend and the end goal is to have one cat) and it's a night and day difference in terms of QoL.
Happy side story though: One of my friends took the worst, most feral of the two kittens I had for barn cats, and over a period of months the worse of those two has become an adorable, fully domesticated housecat. I didn't believe it when she told me until she showed me pictures of it.
solowingpixy
7mo ago
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.
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
6mo ago
Right. I'm highly confident that Wagner executed some of its fighters for desertion/surrender. It wouldn't surprise me if Storm Z (whatever the Hell that is) has done the same. It wouldn't surprise me if Ukrainian ultranationalist units have done bad things to reluctant conscripts. I don't think that either the normie Russian or Ukrainian armies are shooting their own soldiers.
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
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
2mo ago
FWIW, back in my youth in a deep Southern college town in the early 2010s the local cops still took the War on Drugs pretty seriously and weed was still very much illegal. I had multiple otherwise law-abiding friends get raided by the local narcotics task force and/or go to jail for simple possession. I myself had my apartment get raided by five undercover cops (aka. roided up thugs) because one of my retarded roommates sold a few Xanax pills to a confidential informant (I didn't go to jail because I didn't have anything illegal but it was a thoroughly unpleasant experience.).
Amusingly, aside from the driver's license impacts, the conditions to get a possession charge dismissed are virtually identical to those for a first offense DUI, aka. having to go through the local drug court's CLEAN program (at the cost of several grand). My buddy who'd been caught with a gram of weed and maybe drinks a six pack of beer a year was having to attend AA meetings.
The drug task force had their Pickett's Charge moment when they did a big raid on campus. They must've arrested a fed's kid or something because the FBI very quickly busted the former head of the force for embezzling seized funds and wound up throwing him in prison for a year.
A decade later and you can legally buy Delta 8 gummies that are vastly stronger than weed used to be (I don't habitually smoke weed, but the last time I took some of those gummies I was too fucked up to drive 14 hours later.), so I guess the cops gave up on weed enforcement, judging by how nonchalant the normies I know these days are about having it in their vehicles/on their person. Hell, one of the former cops who frequents the bar I work at usually has a weed vape on him.
solowingpixy
3mo ago
Yeah, I also find myself incredibly cynical over this having been raised by a parent who was not, as Aella's article put it, a "paper tiger".
My youngest (half) sister actually went through a process something like this when our mother and her father divorced. He hired a tough talking idiot of a lawyer and proceeded to sue for custody based on allegations of child abuse (I wasn't told about this before they went through with it because they mistakenly assumed that I would side with my mother. I wouldn't have, but I would have told them that they were embarking on something very dangerous and foolish in the name of assuaging my stepfather's ego over getting screwed in the divorce. Mother didn't give a shit where my sister stayed as long as the child support and alimony checks kept coming in.).
Long story short, being intimately familiar with our mother's character I have every reason to believe my sister's accusations, but they were thin on physical evidence and in my opinion argued the case completely wrong. My sister was arrested as a runaway and then returned to our mother's custody, at which point my mother called her father on sister's phone, told him he would never find her, and chucked the phone out the window going about 70 miles an hour down the road. There was a struggle over the phone during which my sister was punched in the face, but it didn't land directly so there weren't any dramatic bruises for me to take nice pictures of. I got called in by our mother when little sister allegedly started threatening to kill herself (I have no clue whether to believe that or not.).
I got her out of there the next day and talked to his lawyer, a CPS case worker, and so on.
Mother hired a better lawyer (One would think that my stepfather would have learned something from mother running circles around my father in court for 15 years, but apparently not.), said lawyer successfully derailed my sisters' attempts at testimony (I wasn't there because it was supposed to be a preliminary hearing, not the actual custody trial.), and the judge told my sisters to their faces that he didn't believe them, dismissing the whole thing as some variety of teenage drama.
There was no heroic validation for my sisters, no revenge upon our mother, and in fact all they accomplished was putting my sister in actual danger.
To end, I'll just say this. There's never going to be any imposition of justice upon our mother. The only thing to be done is to try to live well and remember that once you're out it is you who is the author of your life story and you who can be your own worst enemy.
Our mother is now in her mid 50s, alone, and living on disability. She is clueless as to why her daughters want next to nothing to do with her. This isn't some grand act of karma, it just sucks.
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.
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