OT: Arrogance of Blue America

OT: Arrogance of Blue America...

...Jim Thompson

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| James E.Thompson                                 |    mens     | 
| Analog Innovations                               |     et      | 
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Jim Thompson
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"The kind-hearted blue staters have sent their industries to the abodes of the unwashed, and taken in their poor"

That's a crock of shit. The corporate and financial elites (the actual elites who run this show, not the "liberal elites" who conservatives love to gripe about) who really _did_ sell out the American worker - you think these guys and gals are liberals? LOL

"The red states, by electing Trump, seem to have lost any claim on usually wide-ranging progressive empathy."

After Trump supporters demanded their political opponent be jailed, and essentially threatened violent revolution if they didn't get their way? What the f*ck do you want, a beddy-bye kiss? You told us "Eat shit and die!" so exactly! Right back at you!

"The blue bourgeois tend to see the activities that take place largely in the red states?for example manufacturing and energy?as backward sectors."

The primary economic activity of red-states is sucking down welfare and "entitlement" dollars and jacking medical insurance costs to comp their fat-assed, truck' drivin', chicken-fried-steak chomping perpetual hater lifestyle on our dime. Tell me more about what you feel like hating today, honey.

The only thing that's consistent about this pack of self-absorbed Evangelical rapture-bunny solipsist narcissists is that they're their own worst enemies.

Reply to
bitrex

"Donald Trump is the bloated narcissist the Christian right has been searching for all along"

Reply to
bitrex

"Ironically, many of the most exploited people reside in blue states and cities. Both segregation and impoverishment has worsened during

Richard Florida now notes."

The leftys have that covered, too. "Pro-choice" is nothing more than eugenics with a smile.

Reply to
krw

So make contraceptives and sex ed widely available and easy to access. But the right doesn't want that either.

Or just stop having sex with any woman you don't intend to commit to for the rest of your life and raise children with. But straight white men on the right don't want that either - at least not for themselves.

None of the right's ideas about sex and reproduction are particularly pragmatic, realistic, or even grounded in reality, really.

Reply to
bitrex

You're just big time religious control-freaks; want to control women, control men, think you own the world and everyone in it.

Reply to
bitrex

Yeah, condoms are kept well hidden in stores. It would be impossible to find them.

Since you snowflakes will never commit (to anything), sounds like a great idea for all.

They are, in fact. It's called "don't have children until you -

1- Graduate High School 2- Have a job 3- Get married

It works.

Reply to
krw

Why can't you *ever* put, what passes for "thoughts" in one post.

Hint: I _never_ read the second.

Reply to
krw

backward sectors."

bitrex, I didn't read all of JT article, but that mostly seems right to me. I live in upstate NY.

To be honest you are the perfect example. (why do you hate these people?) Come down with me for a beer and diner at the "flip side". A local "restaurant/tavern/bowling alley" You'll have to hold your tongue at times, but these are nice hard working people. (same as everyone else I've met in my life.) The beer is good and the food is good and cheap. (I like to get the small fish fry, mash w/ gravy and whatever the veg is that night.)

Abbot's loaded wings are a treat... if you like chicken wings.

George H. This is part of America, love it or ... GH

Reply to
George Herold

an enthusiast

In other words US social security sucks. In Germany and Scandinavia they sp end more on it, and while segregation may not have changed

much, impoverishment is much less of a problem there than it is in the US, and social mobility is appreciably better.

Eugenics was stopping the genetically unsound from having children - typica lly by sterilising them. The decisions about who was genetically unsound an d who was going to get sterilised got made by other people.

Being "pro-choice" is about letting the people who get pregnant make up the ir own minds whether they want to terminate a pregnancy or not.

Contraceptive technology is less accessible to the poor in the US than it i s to the well-off, so the poor make more use of abortion than the well off.

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This isn't eugenics - it's just one more way that US society fails the less well-off.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

urban enthusiast

Condoms aren't the most reliable birth control mechanism around. The pill i s quite a lot more reliable, but getting prescription does involve negotiat ing a certain amount of bureacracy, and - typically - spending an aprreciab le amount of money.

If you can avoid sex until then. Lots of people seem to find that difficult .

The town I grew up in had the highest rate of illegitimate births of any to wn in Australia (and later the highest rate of child bashing).

The problem wasn't the number of children conceived out of wed-lock, which was right on the national average, but that the town had a lot of different religions - mostly fringe Protestant - and kids who got pregnant across do ctrinal divides couldn't get married, because their parents wouldn't agree to it.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

Observation: krw never processes the first, either. He can work up whether he's being agreed with - or not - but he's not going to think about why he's being disagreed with, probably because his brain isn't up to that sort of exercise.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

I've done a few business trips upstate and stopped to eat in what turned out to be ghost towns. Really sad. There must have been so many opportunities to keep those towns alive, and a regulation to strangle each one.

He's been indoctinated by PC teachers (now called "educators", a term with a Brave New World flavor, if not Orwellian) to think that progressivism is the only hope for humanity or the Earth or the universe, so anyone who opposes that thinking is despicable and as close to evil as anything can be. It has the sociological characteristics of a particularly intolerant religion. He hates infidels.

Reply to
Tom Del Rosso

See, there you go, acting as if I or anyone else gives a good god damn how many posts or follow-up posts I do or do not make.

Reply to
bitrex

Sure, that's fine. But if you don't want children to appear before all that stuff is set up proper you'd better find a way to ensure that your girl doesn't get pregnant. But conservatives seem to be against women having easy access to contraceptive pills, too.

So what are you saying, don't have sex with women until you're like 25? What are you, gay or something?

Reply to
bitrex

Human failure us usually best explained by stupidity. Regulations can block some innovations (usually innovations that needed to be blocked anyway) bu t working out why some ghost town hasn't found a new technology to exploit shouldn't start off with the assumption that loads of such technologies exi st and only regulations are preventing the some cash-rich local entrepreneu r from exploiting all the unique advantages of that particular site.

If you could see how somebody could make money in that town, why didn't you do it? If you couldn't see a money making opportunity, how can you be conf ident that such an opportunity could be found?

My home town went from a population 5,000 rural market town to a population 15,000 paper mill town when the paper mill had 2000 employees.

The paper mill shut down a few years ago and the town now has the country's highest youth unemployment rate of about 21 per cent. There's quite a lot of activity around the town, but clearly not enough to keep whole of the cu rrent population - now 20,000 people - busy.

Progressivism isn't an ideology. It's a recognition of the way the world wo rks. New technologies offers ways of doing things better and cheaper, and i nsisting on doing things worse and more expensively is a reliable way of de stroying whatever business you had before your set-up became technologicall y obsolete.

Germany spends a lot of it's taxpayer's money on training and retraining it 's work force so that it can exploit the latest technology and create produ cts that it can sell around the world. Germany exports about as much as the USA with only a quarter of the population.

The US does seemed to have missed quite a few opportunities. Tolerating the stick-in-the-mud attitudes that have lead to a lot of US manufacturing job s moving to China isn't exactly clever. Hating people for being stupid isn' t profitable, but stupidity is a capital crime, even if the stupid are thei r own executioners.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney
Reply to
bill.sloman

The problem with the article is that it was written with an obvious bias. As if ONLY "elitists" live in "bubbles".

It would be interesting for the author (to illustrate his ability to transcend his own biases) rewrote the article from the opposite point of view, making the same point -- but, to the OTHER half of the population:

- Do you still live within 20 miles of where you grew up?

- Have you read a piece of NONfiction in the past month? What about *fiction* (but novel length)?

- When was the last time you attended a "religious/civil" service that wasn't your assumed faith?

- How many of your 50 closest neighbors are gay? (do you even KNOW?)

- Did you marry your high school sweetheart?

- When was the last time you watched a documentary/educational program?

- How many news/opinion sources do you regularly consult?

- What was the last "thing" you learned? When? Why??

- Do you *know* what your boss does, each day?

- What does it *cost* your firm to produce whatever product or service that you're involved with? Do you know the origins of each of those costs? Do you understand them?

- How many friends do you have "of color"? How often do you engage in activities with them?

- Do you *know* what have you've paid into FICA over the years? In 2017 dollars? Do you *know* what health insurance would cost *you* in the individual market? Have you even *considered* those questions? (i.e., are you curious to explore issues? Or, happy to just pay someone else to do your thinking for you?) etc.

I.e., it's just as easy to have those "salt of the earth" types walk away worrying about how insulated *they* are from folks who "aren't like them". Feel bad. Feel VERY bad!

And, the saddest thing is the article does nothing to affect change.

Should I quickly move to a neighborhood that has more non-college educated folks? Or, farther out in the sticks? Should I take up watching NASCAR? Buy a pickup truck? Start drinking beer? Go fishing? Eating at crappy restaurants?

How are those things going to change the "thickness" of my particular bubble? Will eating at Abbot's really change my opinion of those people? Will it change their opinion of

*me*?

I've a neighbor who would score well on the published test. But, lives in probably the thickest bubble -- by his own deliberate choices. I'd wager he couldn't list the (first!) names of ten of his neighbors -- despite having lived here for 30 years. I'm sure he doesn't know my last name. Or SWMBO's. Or ages. Or where we grew up. Or, what either of us do for vocations or avocations. Or...

Repeat that for most of *his* neighbors.

OTOH, I can name at least three of the firms he worked at in the 25 years I've known him. His kids name, guesstimates at all of their ages. Where they work. How many out-of-state relatives he has that are still living. etc.

And, he has zero interest in changing any of that. He doesn't want his idea of the world to change in any way that might threaten him or require effort from him. The bubble is comforting. Reassuring. Insulating.

Despite his score! :<

Until you move off your "comfort spot" and start engaging with other people, cultures, belief systems, etc. and thinking of them *objectively* (not just looking for reasons to dismiss them), your "bubble" will be unchanged, regardless of whether you're starting off as an "elitist" or "salt of the earth".

Reply to
Don Y

Men who bring down other men, and call them Sesame Street names like "snowflakes" to build themselves up are no friends of mine.

Why should I have to "hold my tongue"? What kind of man falls to pieces over the opinions some other man has?

Guys making 100k/yr use these baby-talk names and write whiny articles like the one in the original post and still somehow look at themselves in the mirror in the morning and call themselves men?

Definitely need to look in the mirror and check. it.

Reply to
bitrex

Sorry, confused the two articles. But, the points are largely the same (JT has a one-track mind); addressing equally biased

*perspectives* with similar root issues.

I *love* hearing about immigration issues from my conservative friends thousands of miles away -- despite my living closer to the Mexican border than the nearest US city! Makes me wonder how they form these perspectives -- and how I can be so near and yet *so*, apparently, "out of touch".

Or, how my liberal friends are going to "fix" health care just by making it "free". Do they really understand the cost trends and what drives them? Gee, how is their math so different from mine? How can they "wonder" why a 10 minute office visit costs $100 -- do they not see the facility and staff as they walk through it?

Reply to
Don Y

America is a nation of vapid lazy-ass fronters with nothing to do with their time other than sit around in their 500k suburban homes and complain about shit while living a better lifestyle than anyone in human history.

America is a dog's dinner pretending like it's filet mignon.

Reply to
bitrex

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