Conservatives and Liberals

[WaffleTwineFaceoff]

No tears for Santos who has the option of working in drag bars:



That, at the very least, is an honest living.

Darn you. I can't unsee that!!!

[Brooklyn]

No tears for Santos who has the option of working in drag bars:

https://imagez.tmz.com/image/71/4by3/20 ... a63_md.png

That, at the very least, is an honest living.

Darn you. I can't unsee that!!!

Now that he can earn an honest living that way, nobody will ever be able to accuse him of living a double life anymore.

[Farfromgeneva]

CONservative George Santos expelled from Congress:


https://www.google.com/search?q=Santos+ ... e&ie=UTF-8


Mebbe Gov Hochul will appoint a Democrat for the Long Island kooks who voted that clown into office. No tears for Santos who has the option of working in drag bars:





That, at the very least, is an honest living.

He’s interviewing at Lucky Chengs as we speak.

[OuttaNowhereWregget]

Basic common sense. So well said:

[Kismet]

GOP Reps. McHenry and McCarthy not running for re-election.

[a fan]

Basic common sense. So well said:

The problem with Bill's rant----and other right wing rants about how history should be taught------ is that he's comparing "woke" to a perfect and flawless teaching of history that we have never had in America.

We have NEVER told history accurately in America. Never. So hitting the libs for "teaching it wrong" leaves out the fact that the conservatives who wrote and published textbooks all these years were just as sh(tty and biased.

I was NEVER taught that Washington or Jefferson owned slaves, for example, in HS. "Whoops", my teachers left that part out. Was never taught the whole truth about Columbus...he was a nice guy who broke bread with the Native Americans.

Bill knows better than this, and is chasing viewers. He was a freaking history major at Cornell in the 70's.

So the part that's missing is someone asking Bill: "hey, were they teaching history thoroughly and in an unbiased manner in American Public schools when you were a kid in the 60's?"

He'd laugh and tell you "of course not". So...while I agree we need to find an accurate accounting...we've never had that, and we need to stop acting like we've been telling the whole story in American Schools before "woke" showed up.

[youthathletics]

I was NEVER taught that Washington or Jefferson owned slaves, for example, in HS. "Whoops", my teachers left that part out. Was never taught the whole truth about Columbus...he was a nice guy who broke bread with the Native Americans.

Was there a need to teach that? At that time, it was how the entire world ran...slaves were everywhere, it was practically a given...you learned that, part right? Or are you arguing, it should be a bullet point under everyone's bio, that way we can decide if they are/were racist....200 hundred years later?

[DMac]

Wasn't a need to, youth, but you have to admit that the gist of what a fan is saying is right.
The word slave wasn't even used when I was being taught about our glorious history and how
we came to be the example to be followed by the rest of the world. They were indentured
servants, took me awhile to figure out what that even meant.

[youthathletics]

Wasn't a need to, youth, but you have to admit that the gist of what a fan is saying is right.
The word slave wasn't even used when I was being taught about our glorious history and how
we came to be the example to be followed by the rest of the world. They were indentured
servants, took me awhile to figure out what that even meant.

No argument and not trying to pick a fight....revisionist history, especially when it comes to slavery, is actually part of our history. Which in the end, as we stand now, shows just how far we have come.

[MDlaxfan76]

Wasn't a need to, youth, but you have to admit that the gist of what a fan is saying is right.
The word slave wasn't even used when I was being taught about our glorious history and how
we came to be the example to be followed by the rest of the world. They were indentured
servants, took me awhile to figure out what that even meant.

No argument and not trying to pick a fight....revisionist history, especially when it comes to slavery, is actually part of our history. Which in the end, as we stand now, shows just how far we have come.

uhh ohh, you're sounding 'woke' there...

[NattyBohChamps04]

Yes there's a need to teach it. The issue of slavery was a big part of our nation's founding. It was a large issue that required a lot of compromises in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution to get all the states to unite. And the issue simmered for 70 years before boiling over with the Civil War.

The fact that some founding fathers were slave owners is an integral part of US history how they built the nation. Regardless of whether the practice was normalized in some parts of the country and not in others.

Definitely a topic worth exploring in high school level US history, possibly middle school too.

[youthathletics]

Wasn't a need to, youth, but you have to admit that the gist of what a fan is saying is right.
The word slave wasn't even used when I was being taught about our glorious history and how
we came to be the example to be followed by the rest of the world. They were indentured
servants, took me awhile to figure out what that even meant.

No argument and not trying to pick a fight....revisionist history, especially when it comes to slavery, is actually part of our history. Which in the end, as we stand now, shows just how far we have come.

uhh ohh, you're sounding 'woke' there...

Im fine with that....I am more liberal / neutral along most lines anyway. More like my parents era democrats were, but lean more towards the minimalist, fiscal, clean up your own house before you tell us how your going to clean everyone else's.

[MDlaxfan76]

Wasn't a need to, youth, but you have to admit that the gist of what a fan is saying is right.
The word slave wasn't even used when I was being taught about our glorious history and how
we came to be the example to be followed by the rest of the world. They were indentured
servants, took me awhile to figure out what that even meant.

No argument and not trying to pick a fight....revisionist history, especially when it comes to slavery, is actually part of our history. Which in the end, as we stand now, shows just how far we have come.

uhh ohh, you're sounding 'woke' there...

Im fine with that....I am more liberal / neutral along most lines anyway. More like my parents era democrats were, but lean more towards the minimalist, fiscal, clean up your own house before you tell us how your going to clean everyone else's.

sounds pretty close to my base line, though my folks were "I like Ike" R's. Of their era.

[DMac]

Yes there's a need to teach it. The issue of slavery was a big part of our nation's founding. It was a large issue that required a lot of compromises in the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution to get all the states to unite. And the issue simmered for 70 years before boiling over with the Civil War.

The fact that some founding fathers were slave owners is an integral part of US history how they built the nation. Regardless of whether the practice was normalized in some parts of the country and not in others.

Definitely a topic worth exploring in high school level US history, possibly middle school too.

Wouldn't disagree with this, needs to be taught without presentism too.

[Farfromgeneva]

I was NEVER taught that Washington or Jefferson owned slaves, for example, in HS. "Whoops", my teachers left that part out. Was never taught the whole truth about Columbus...he was a nice guy who broke bread with the Native Americans.

Was there a need to teach that? At that time, it was how the entire world ran...slaves were everywhere, it was practically a given...you learned that, part right? Or are you arguing, it should be a bullet point under everyone's bio, that way we can decide if they are/were racist....200 hundred years later?

It’s important information in understand motivations and decision making. Surely you see that.

[Kismet]

I was NEVER taught that Washington or Jefferson owned slaves, for example, in HS. "Whoops", my teachers left that part out. Was never taught the whole truth about Columbus...he was a nice guy who broke bread with the Native Americans.

Was there a need to teach that? At that time, it was how the entire world ran...slaves were everywhere, it was practically a given...you learned that, part right? Or are you arguing, it should be a bullet point under everyone's bio, that way we can decide if they are/were racist....200 hundred years later?

It’s important information in understand motivations and decision making. Surely you see that.

Teaching the context of history does not change the history itself. IMHO it is important to know that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves but only one, William Whipple of Rhode Island freed his after signing the Declaration of Independence. Also keep in mind that knowing these things does not change any of the subsequent history.

Jefferson also wrote a passage about the evils of slavery in the Declaration of Independence but it was removed.
https://www.history.com/news/declaratio ... -jefferson

Washington also specified in his last will and testament that his slaves would all be emancipated upon the death of his spouse, Martha.

[Farfromgeneva]

I was NEVER taught that Washington or Jefferson owned slaves, for example, in HS. "Whoops", my teachers left that part out. Was never taught the whole truth about Columbus...he was a nice guy who broke bread with the Native Americans.

Was there a need to teach that? At that time, it was how the entire world ran...slaves were everywhere, it was practically a given...you learned that, part right? Or are you arguing, it should be a bullet point under everyone's bio, that way we can decide if they are/were racist....200 hundred years later?

It’s important information in understand motivations and decision making. Surely you see that.

Teaching the context of history does not change the history itself. IMHO it is important to know that many of the Founding Fathers owned slaves but only one, William Whipple of Rhode Island freed his after signing the Declaration of Independence. Also keep in mind that knowing these things does not change any of the subsequent history.

Jefferson also wrote a passage about the evils of slavery in the Declaration of Independence but it was removed.
https://www.history.com/news/declaratio ... -jefferson

Washington also specified in his last will and testament that his slaves would all be emancipated upon the death of his spouse, Martha.

I'm going with this

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Ge ... f_Morality

[Seacoaster(1)]

Good column by Krugman in the Times. If you can put aside your prejudices about the publication and the author, you'll see a pretty enlightening article -- and the stuff a fan has harped on for years and years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/opin ... oters.html

"Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of creative destruction, but the process can be devastating economically and socially for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but whole communities.

This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result, there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town.”

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime-working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy but because the jobs just aren’t there. (The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because the jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in health care.)

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.

Draw attention to some of these realities, and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist. I’m sure responses to this column will be … interesting.

The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes and rural America as the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.

At this point you’re probably expecting a solution to this ugly political situation. Schaller and Waldman do offer some suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it."

[PizzaSnake]

Good column by Krugman in the Times. If you can put aside your prejudices about the publication and the author, you'll see a pretty enlightening article -- and the stuff a fan has harped on for years and years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/opin ... oters.html

"Will technological progress lead to mass unemployment? People have been asking that question for two centuries, and the actual answer has always ended up being no. Technology eliminates some jobs, but it has always generated enough new jobs to offset these losses, and there’s every reason to believe that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

But progress isn’t painless. Business types and some economists may talk glowingly about the virtues of creative destruction, but the process can be devastating economically and socially for those who find themselves on the destruction side of the equation. This is especially true when technological change undermines not just individual workers but whole communities.

This isn’t a hypothetical proposition. It’s a big part of what has happened to rural America.

This process and its effects are laid out in devastating, terrifying and baffling detail in “White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy,” a new book by Tom Schaller and Paul Waldman. I say “devastating” because the hardship of rural Americans is real, “terrifying” because the political backlash to this hardship poses a clear and present danger to our democracy and “baffling” because at some level I still don’t get the politics.

Technology is the main driver of rural decline, Schaller and Waldman argue. Indeed, American farms produce more than five times as much as they did 75 years ago, but the agricultural work force declined by about two-thirds over the same period, thanks to machinery, improved seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Coal production has been falling recently, but thanks partly to technologies like mountaintop removal, coal mining as a way of life largely disappeared long ago, with the number of miners falling 80 percent even as production roughly doubled.

The decline of small-town manufacturing is a more complicated story, and imports play a role, but it’s also mainly about technological change that favors metropolitan areas with large numbers of highly educated workers.

Technology, then, has made America as a whole richer, but it has reduced economic opportunities in rural areas. So why don’t rural workers go where the jobs are? Some have. But some cities have become unaffordable, in part because of restrictive zoning — one thing blue states get wrong — and many workers are reluctant to leave their families and communities.

So shouldn’t we aid these communities? We do. Federal programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and more — are available to all Americans but are disproportionately financed from taxes paid by affluent urban areas. As a result, there are huge de facto transfers of money from rich, urban states like New Jersey to poor, relatively rural states like West Virginia.

While these transfers somewhat mitigate the hardship facing rural America, they don’t restore the sense of dignity that has been lost along with rural jobs. And maybe that loss of dignity explains both white rural rage and why that rage is so misdirected — why it’s pretty clear that this November a majority of rural white Americans will again vote against Joe Biden, who as president has been trying to bring jobs to their communities, and for Donald Trump, a huckster from Queens who offers little other than validation for their resentment.

This feeling of a loss of dignity may be worsened because some rural Americans have long seen themselves as more industrious, more patriotic and maybe even morally superior to the denizens of big cities — an attitude still expressed in cultural artifacts like Jason Aldean’s hit song “Try That in a Small Town.”

In the crudest sense, rural and small-town America is supposed to be filled with hard-working people who adhere to traditional values, not like those degenerate urbanites on welfare, but the economic and social reality doesn’t match this self-image.

Prime-working-age men outside metropolitan areas are substantially less likely than their metropolitan counterparts to be employed — not because they’re lazy but because the jobs just aren’t there. (The gap is much smaller for women, perhaps because the jobs supported by federal aid tend to be female-coded, such as those in health care.)

Quite a few rural states also have high rates of homicide, suicide and births to single mothers — again, not because rural Americans are bad people but because social disorder is, as the sociologist William Julius Wilson argued long ago about urban problems, what happens when work disappears.

Draw attention to some of these realities, and you’ll be accused of being a snooty urban elitist. I’m sure responses to this column will be … interesting.

The result — which at some level I still find hard to understand — is that many white rural voters support politicians who tell them lies they want to hear. It helps explain why the MAGA narrative casts relatively safe cities like New York as crime-ridden hellscapes and rural America as the victim not of technology but of illegal immigrants, wokeness and the deep state.

At this point you’re probably expecting a solution to this ugly political situation. Schaller and Waldman do offer some suggestions. But the truth is that while white rural rage is arguably the single greatest threat facing American democracy, I have no good ideas about how to fight it."

Embedded in the comments there is some good analysis and perspective. Some dross, but a few kernels as well.

[youthathletics]

Seacoaster(1) » Wed Feb 28, 2024 2:14 pm

Good column by Krugman in the Times. If you can put aside your prejudices about the publication and the author, you'll see a pretty enlightening article -- and the stuff a fan has harped on for years and years:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/26/opin ... oters.html
....

Have had some in depth conversations over this very topic, for years, and often with afan.

To start, I believe it has little to nothing to do with white, rural, or even technology.....but hold that thought.

My sense, is that this snowball started building after the winddown from the manufacturing/spending boom post WWII, and the hangover never fully settled until the DOT.COM boom under Clinton. Everything post wwII was what we now call "small business', only it was rural farming, main street farm to table living Then marketing and consumerism begin to really creep in, families started the 'competing with the jones' mentality....things were going just swell; the two houses and picket fence life. Then bottom dropped out again in the 70's and 80's, as we began importing a ton of crap we didn't really need from overseas...and things we did need, came a bit cheaper...flyover America was still in a somewhat decent spot.

As consumerism ramped up, so did big box, putting more demand on fly-over/small town America famers. What was once a small sustainable farm for tobacco, corn, wheat, soy, cotton, etc. for the demands of their time, were now faced with not being able to produce the yield of the consumerism.....In comes, Big AG, to save the day...... gobbling up mom and pop farms, after leasing them high dollar equipment and high tech to gain more yield....but then came a time pay those bills and it did not bear fruit; rubbing two nickels together and lobbying congress for help.

Talk about dignity, IMO it was pulled out from under them like a rug....they were just fine up until the demands put upon them were falsely created in the name of consumerism and following the money from major manufactures of widgets. Walmart was famous for this...... they'd sell your product, then ask for a guarantee of x more than you were capable. You'd tool up to meet that commitment then they give you the Heisman and move on to someone else; your doors are not shut, struggling.

I could go on further, but you get the jest.

I personally think it is a weak argument by Krugman, trying to find a way to spin a web of something else Trump is responsible for, rather than understanding history of the last 60+ years. He certainly has nice subject to discuss, but missed the mark, IMO.

This is a brief read and I believe Sarah Pruitt could teach Krugman something: https://www.history.com/news/post-world ... om-economy