Heartland Amuricatm‘s recent displays of smug stupidity are threatening the hipster tolerance-above-all comity of our coastal elites (/snark). Hamilton Nolan, at Gawker — “Dumb Hicks Are America’s Greatest Threat“:
…[Y]ou, our elected officials, are embarrassing us. All of us, except your fellow dumb hicks, who voted for you in large numbers. You—our racist, xenophobic, knuckle-dragging ignorant leaders—are making us look bad in front of the guests (the whole world). You are the bad cousin in the family who always ruins Thanksgiving. Go in the back room and drink a can of beer alone please.
Some will say it is rude to point out that many of our leaders are, in fact, stupid hicks. I say it is ruder to block a war refugee from coming to your unattractive state due to the fact that you, personally, are dumb. Some may disagree.
We do not need a national debate about whether it is “good” to, at the first sign of danger, retreat into a cocoon of viciousness and stupidity and label every less-than-white foreigner a danger to us from which we must cower in fear. It is not good. What it is is stupid. Because the people reacting this way are stupid hicks. America is a big place. We have thousands and thousands of elected officials. A statistically significant number of them are bound to be dumb hicks. It’s just math. I was born and raised down south and I can testify that it is full of dumb hicks, running things. There are regional variations in all other parts of the country as well. It would be better if we could keep the dumbass hicks at, say, the County Commissioner level and below. But sometimes they filter all the way up to governor and whatnot. Chris Christie, warning us against the dangers of five-year-old Syrian orphans, is little more than the New Jersey version of a loud, dumb hick. That’s democracy in action I guess.
The important thing I want to communicate to the world is: these are dumb hicks. Many Southern mayors are dumb hicks. Many lesser known state representatives are dumb hicks. The governor of Texas has traditionally been, with notable exceptions, a dumb hick. It is wrong to think that our political leaders should be smarter than us. In fact, they are roughly as smart as the people who elect them—us, a nation that boasts large and coherent pockets of dumbass hicks, running things…
Stupid hicks have been fucking shit up for centuries here. Now is no different. Banning poor, penniless refugees from coming to your shitty little town due to terrified, aggressive ignorance is a shameful thing to do. But that is what we get for putting dumb hicks in charge of things. In fact, putting dumb hicks in powerful positions has been the single most damaging thing in the history of America. For us, it’s what we deserve. There is no reason to make refugees suffer for our demographic sins, though. Sorry for that…
In before someone else has to point it out: Chickenshit Charlie Baker, Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is not technically a dumb hick. He just belongs to a political party which insists that its members must at least pretend to be dumb hicks, because that’s where they find their voters. So we can expand the category of Greatest Threats to include “dumb hicks and the cowards-cum-grifters who pander to them“.
***********
Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln, what’s on the agenda for the weekend?
ThresherK (GPad)
Monday went to my fave pet supply store to
see if someone adopted the adorable tortie yetbuy more cat toys. Going back today tolook at promised litter of new kittensrestock cat food.Baud
Dumb hicks vote! Maybe this Gawker piece will get people to wake up to that fact.
I have to go to social gatherings this weekend. Blergh.
NotMax
VERY early alert for two – count ’em, two – unusual-for-TCM movies next weekend. All times Eastern.
Sunday, Nov. 29, 2:30 a.m. – Polyester. Divine at his diviniest, Tab Hunter at his campiest.
Monday, Nov. 30, 2:00 a.m – Fellini Satyricon. Style is elevated over story in a (not always successful) bold and lush orgy of excess. Fellini described his film as a science fiction movie set in the past instead of the future.
OzarkHillbilly
Speaking as just another dumb hick, let me just say that supercilious assholes like Hamilton Nolan are a far far worse threat. There is a breed of people who think they are better than everyone else and just can’t wait to tell you how much better than you they are. You know the type, disagree with them on something, anything, and the reason you disagree is not because you have different information, or that you have a different way of looking at things, it’s because you are an idiot, and the Nolans of the world just can’t wait to tell you that you are an idiot. Except you aren’t an idiot and he, while maybe very intelligent isn’t anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is. If he was, he would have shut the fvck up.
Because I can tell you that as a dumb hick who agrees with about 95% of what he says, all I want to do is bitch slap the stupid right out of his head before anymore of it leaks out. Quite an accomplishment, wouldn’t you say?
ThresherK (GPad)
@Baud: “I have to go to social gatherings this weekend. Blergh.”
Isn’t that in Mitt Romney’s journal from 2012? You’re supposed to pretend you like pressing the flesh if Baud 2016! Will steamroll to victory.
Baud
@ThresherK (GPad):
I’m running to be America’s first virtual president. In the 21st century, Americans don’t press the flesh; they communicate with each other through the prophylactic that is cyberspace. I’m forward looking while all the other candidates are stuck in the “real world.”
ThresherK (GPad)
@NotMax: Tab Hunter was pretty much a delight in Grease 2, a movie that was pretty much a chore, interspersed with moments of the saddest of all phrases for us movie geeks, “I can see what they were trying to do”.
ThresherK (GPad)
@Baud: You have the guaranteed votes of everyone who doesn’t giggle at “prophylactic”.
ixnay
Well, the hicks may not be actually dumb, but many of them are uneducated (or educated exclusively by Fox News), and proud of it. Epistemic closure applies everywhere. I speak as a person from Maine, where our governor is a certified dumb hick, and the incumbent mayor of Lewiston has accused Ben Chin, who is a certified Episcopal lay minister, of being an atheist who hates ‘Murka.
Baud
@ThresherK (GPad):
But I need the gigglers if I want to win.
NotMax
@Baud
Sir, Max Headroom on line t-t-t-two.
Elizabelle
@Baud: I dunno there, Baud. I remember Chris Stein of Blondie saying, at the advent of music videos, that “touring is for morons.”
How did that work out?
Good morning all. Crisp clear sky here. Lots of constellations out.
Elizabelle
@NotMax: Thanks for the head’s up. I missed Amarcord a few months ago; there will be another opportunity. The ecclesiastical fashion show. Probably on youtube.
@OzarkHillbilly: Agreed. There has to be some way to reach the uneducated or Fox-miseducated. Talking down or sneering does not work, on a person to person basis. (Sneering at the worst of ideas, a different matter.)
Baud
@Elizabelle:
The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. They had some good years after that.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
There not the ones who need to be reached. It’s apathetic Dems who need to be woken up.
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle: Raining here. Supposed to turn to snow as the temps drop with winds gusting to 38 mph. And I am working on a 150 yr old barn today. Oh joy.
Gator90
Kevin Drum and Bob Somerby fret that mocking those who fear Syrian refugees is bad politics. And maybe they’re right. On the other hand, conservatives have been savagely mocking liberals since about forever and paid (to my knowledge) no political price for it, so there’s that. Besides, mocking them just, you know, feels good. Is that wrong?
Elizabelle
WaPost “developing” story, posted at 3:45 a. Brussels on high alert today. Well, well.
and
So it’s confirmed a terrorist did enter on a fake Syrian passport? Have avoided the cable wankfest; quite behind on fearfulness. So Greece has become a conduit.
and
OzarkHillbilly
@Elizabelle: The thing that really pisses me off about people like him is I live and work with these people and these discussions come up. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, but now I don’t have a chance because we’re all just dumb stupid hicks. Way to go asshole.
The point of his little tantrum was merely to make himself (and the people who agree with him) feel superior, not to actually accomplish anything.
Elizabelle
@Gator90: Suspect educating the public about how low the threat from vetted refugees would go a lot farther than sneering.
And maybe we don’t take the lead, at this time, in a heated up election year, on homing Syrian refugees. A Democratic president would have another 4 years — and possibly a better Supreme Court — to work for the better.
Douglas
Couple of threads back there was a discussion about whether mockery can work or mostly harms.
Obama showed how it can work – mock their leaders, show why what they’re advocating is dumb as fuck.
Here now we have the example for the opposite… I’m not even from the states and all I can think of when reading this is “wow, what an arrogant prick”.
Elizabelle
@OzarkHillbilly: Loved your use of “supercilious.” It fits.
@Baud: Very true about apathetic Democrats. Would love a thread or two on ideas that would work there. Maybe we should put some paid organizers in communities, in non-election years as well. Instead of just funding the permanent campaign types in DC and on media.
MattF
I guess Nolan left the South, and I guess he had his reasons. Or maybe… he discovered it’s hard to leave home– just physically being someplace else isn’t enough. And gnawing at the ties that bind doesn’t work either.
Baud
@Elizabelle:
I didn’t think there were any anymore, with all these off-year elections we seem to have.
MattF
@Elizabelle: I’ve worried about the apparatchik. problem in the D party. People who have contributed time and money to an organization should be promoted and rewarded– but it can be dysfunctional politically.
NotMax
All the King’s Men, the hick speech.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: It probably hastened their breakup though.
Zinsky
Going to see Les Miserables at my kids old high school, who fortunately has one of the best musical theater programs in the state of Minnesota. Just wonderful! In fact, two of my three grown kids are coming and bringing their significant other with them. Should be great! We will probably either grill chicken and have oven-roasted vegetables or get Thai food to carry out. I can’t wait. Love to all!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: Today is election day after all.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I thought the rule was that we had to put 100% of the blame on Oko (and Obama).
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Should be an interesting one.
NotMax
Reminder, per earlier notice from those in the know, that around 4 p.m. today will be server maintenance and upgrades.
Site could well be wonky for a while.
Baud
@NotMax:
Thanks. I missed that.
Amir Khalid
@Zinsky:
I lurvs that musical, which I saw in a cinema more times than I care to admit, but I have never seen it (or any other) live. I hear the original book is pretty good too.
bystander
@NotMax: Always wished I’d gone to see Polyester when it was first released. IIRC your ticket came with a scratch and sniff card and the movie signaled what aroma to scratch. The theater supposedly smelled like a garbage heap by the end.
Gimlet
Probably naive since I assume I know the answer, but is there an official “demand” of the terrorists that will cause them to cease the attacks?
Frankensteinbeck
@Elizabelle:
The problem is, reason and attempting to convey the facts works even less than sneering on a mass level. This is well proven psychology and sociology. We like to think that we’re rational animals, but we’re only animals capable of reason. When you try to argue with them with facts, most people actually become convinced of their original position more. The Republicans specifically cultivate that section of society, and attract them with the kinds of issues most likely to create that response. It’s not calculated, it’s just what pandering to worst impulses means if you break it down to that level. One on one, you can find ways to get through, sometimes, but on a national scale, forget it. We need to try to convince these people, but damned if I know how.
Baud
@Baud:
Yoko.
bystander
@Amir Khalid: There is a recording of the 25th anniversary concert that has actors from around the world who have performed it. Very touching, especially Colm Wilkerson with a boatload of Jean Valjeans.
NotMax
@bystander
Still have an original unscratched card in a box somewhere. Felt no need to scratch it as enough others did that there was no mistaking or avoiding each aroma. One of which was, yes, pungent eau de dogsh*t.
OzarkHillbilly
You gotta be fvcking kidding me. I sh!t you not,
The Real Men Conference
Leave your daughters at home.
Elizabelle
@bystander: Odorama.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
I hate to beat a dead horse, but you convince them by obtaining and maintaining political power — in other words, winning elections and reelections. Too many liberals think that the right is dumb and incapable of reason. That’s not true. The difficulty with reaching conservatives is that they only (or mostly) respect reason that’s backed by power or authority (really, the same thing here). That’s why trying to “educate” them in the abstract is ineffective and comes off as condescending — unless there’s some sort of enforcement mechanism behind it, conservatives don’t respect it.
BTW, I think this is mostly a human condition that we all suffer from to some extent. It’s just that the right exemplifies it more.
NotMax
@OzarkHillbilly
David Vitter spent election eve in attendance.
Baud
@NotMax: Ha. That’s awesome.
Amir Khalid
@bystander:
I reckon you’re referring to the Valjean quartet performance of Bring Him Home, which is on YouTube (don’t tell Cameron Mackintosh!) and is absolutely sublime. But I don’t think any live performance of I Dreamed A Dream can outdo the one in the movie. Anne Hathaway only had to do it for one day’s worth of takes; she said no singer could shred her voice like that eight shows a week for months on end.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: You know, there’s a Japanese town named Obama.
The Beatles not touring allowed them to grow more apart from each other. There were many reasons the band broke up: Yoko, Brian Epstein’s death, the guys just growing up…
Amir Khalid
@OzarkHillbilly:
Is Hamilton Nolan calling them dumb hicks worse than Obama calling them shameful and un-American?
ETA: Not that I disagree with either characterisation.
BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: Guess his favorite hooker wasn’t working tonight.
Amir Khalid
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I was surprised to learn that the surname Tomei is Italian and not Japanese. I have only ever come across it with the actresses Concetta and Marisa Tomei, who are mother and daughter.
OzarkHillbilly
@Frankensteinbeck:
Question asked and answered. That is how you do it. And the Nolans of the world should just STFU, or at the very least, do those of us who are actually trying to change some minds the courtesy of venting in private, because it’s hard enough as is.
A long time ago, a buddy of mine went off on some homophobic rant until I finally stopped him and said, “What do you care what other people do in the bedroom?” Decades later his wife told me that simple question changed his entire attitude about gays.
Just recently I was talking to a guy who hunts out this way and he said, “I always carry a gun because of bears and wild pigs.” I looked at him and said, “I live out there and I don’t carry.” It stopped him dead and he said, “Fair enough.” while his wife muttered under her breath, “Thank you, Tom.” When I went out to their hunting cabin last wkend (opening day deer season) he wasn’t carrying.
You do it one at a time, and you do it by not insulting them.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Amir Khalid: Not too surprising, take Lee; could be Chinese, Korean, or European.
ETA: Kim on the other hand, is Korean.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: That’s how I found it. I’m still dumbstruck by it.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
He’s reformed and forgiven. He told us so.
Satby
The snow is going to be falling for the rest of the day, and I’m now waiting for my exchange daughters to wake up and see it. I know there will be immediate rushing outside to touch and play in it, they were anxiously checking right up until midnight last night for it to start (it must have started later). Seeing a child’s first “whatever” never gets old for me, that wonder and delight is so contagious!
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
Q: What happened after the cannibal dined on Marisa?
A: Acute Tomein poisoning.
Baud
@Satby:
How awesome.
OzarkHillbilly
@Amir Khalid: Obama is calling the actions of the Republican politicians shameful and un-American, not the Repub pols themselves. There are many ways of saying the actions you are engaged in are counterproductive, but calling people “dumb hicks” is not one of them and is in fact, counterproductive. If you are trying to actually accomplish something other than masturbating your own ego that is.
I repeat, what one says in private conversation is one thing, what one broadcasts to the world is another.
Satby
@Baud: I know, right? And the best part is they’re old enough that I don’t have to carry them or bundle them up!
BTW, thank you for that beautiful video of the little French boy and his father. So moving, I get teary when I just think of it…. whoops, they’re up!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Satby: My gf in grad school in Seattle was from Malaysia, her first reaction to snow was interesting. Even though I’m from LA, we get snow in the local mountains.
OzarkHillbilly
@Satby: (smiling)
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly:
That can rather pleasurable, at least that’s what I’ve heard.
JGabriel
Seeing as it’s an open thread:
NY Times:
Great, just what the world needs: terrorist groups competing with each other to see who can kill more.
NotMax
@BillinGlendaleCA
Snow up on the volcano on Maui.
Baud
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Why do you think I’m really running for president?
Baud
@JGabriel:
Jeez, being caught in the middle of the Transformer/Decepticon war was bad enough. Now this.
Satby
@OzarkHillbilly: totally true… but people just get so frustrated. I aspire to the patience of people like you and Scott. But I have red hair.
Cervantes
@OzarkHillbilly:
Oh-oh. You may not like this, either.
Whereas with this you might agree.
Baud
@Satby:
Who is Scott?
BillinGlendaleCA
@NotMax: Knew they got snow on the Big Island, didn’t know they did on Maui.
OzarkHillbilly
@BillinGlendaleCA: It is, and I have engaged in it, but only in private. Even I have limits of decorum.
Cervantes
@JGabriel:
Similar to the “Cold War,” different in scale.
Tom
We’re going to see “The Night Before” this morning while my famous slow cooker chili fills the apartment with delicious smells. I also have to make some quiche for tomorrow’s breakfast.
Beside that, my department chair is leaving next week (on his own volition) and he’s recommending that I take his position. I’ve started the paperwork process and now I just have to wait and see what happens next.
My feelings are mixed about the potential new job. On the one hand, it’s full time (I’m currently an adjunct), definitely better money and security, I can work from home (with occasional trips to Minneapolis) and I’d be doing what I love (for the most part). Not only that, but my soon-to-be-former boss and I have a shared vision for where we want the department programs to go, so if the school likes what he’s been doing then I’m definitely the right fit.
On the other hand, change is scary.
BillinGlendaleCA
@OzarkHillbilly: Heh, I come from a long line of Hicks from the Ozarks.
Betty Cracker
@Satby: What fun! Hope you have a nearby hill they can sled on.
My 17-year-old has still never seen snow, and she resents that fact. Maybe this year I’ll finally get off my butt and drive north one weekend so she can finally see it!
Cervantes
@Tom:
Congratulations and good luck, in that order.
Will you inherit his flak jacket and bullet-proof gear or will you be getting your own?
Cervantes
@Baud:
He who still can’t decide whom he wants to be.
Satby
@Baud: @Cervantes: I was going to answer, but Cervantes got there first.
Satby
I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet is Scott (he signs his comments)
Baud
@Cervantes:
@Satby:
Thanks!
Cervantes
@NotMax:
Q: What happened after Marisa dined on the cannibal?
A: A full Tomei.
Cervantes
@NotMax:
Q: What happened after Marisa dined on the rancid cannibal?
A: An upset Tomei.
Cervantes
@NotMax:
I’d better stop there.
Botsplainer
The sneering actually has a valid point – polite disagreement with conservatives gets you nowhere. In fact, acquiescence by silence or thoughtful dialogue gets confused with agreement, and then they steamroll you.
Frankly, this country should have been nearly ungovernable from 2001-2004 – which would have resulted in a turnover in 2004. Instead, there was a metric shitton of polite engagement, and look what that got us.
Next conservative president won’t be so lucky.
NotMax
@Cervantes
If Marisa had married Claude, her name would be Tomei-Akins.
(rimshot)
MattF
@OzarkHillbilly: Ted Cruz evidently takes it personally. Make of that what you will.
Villago Delenda Est
@OzarkHillbilly: You’re not a dumb hick. You might be from deepest Hickistan, and be a hick, but you just aren’t dumb.
But there are a hell of a lot of dumb hicks around you, who elect shitstains like Justin Harris to public office. Shitstains like Tom Cotton.
Cervantes
@BillinGlendaleCA:
How about MacArthur Park?
debbie
@MattF:
And when Obama turns around and starts walking toward Cruz, you know Ted will run off like a little girl.
Baud
@debbie:
Screaming “thug, thug, thug” all the way home.
Gator90
Conservatives for decades employed sneering mockery in their campaign to demonize and delegitimize liberals and liberalism. As far as I can tell, it worked pretty well for them. Why shouldn’t we sneer and mock right back?
bemused
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’ve lived in a rural area all my life so I get what you are saying. Your simple, non insulting remark to the homophobic ranter stunned him and got the wheels turning. However, those light bulb moments for people are pretty rare from what I’ve observed. The resentment is very deep with a lot of people, resentment of those just below them getting “free” handouts and those above who “think they are better than me” and they’re not going to “tell me what to think”. I’m guessing at least some of your successes have been with people who know you well and vice versa so they don’t think of you as some kind of a lecturing liberal and occasionally a mild remark will land and stay.
Not everyone has your patience or restraint. A whole lot of conservatives’ beliefs are so entrenched, it’s highly unlikely they will ever experience a light bulb moment. I can understand the frustration ranting especially if one has a family member or friend whose rightwing views are directly impacting them negatively, being their own worst enemies.
Matt McIrvin
@Elizabelle: I figure we’ve already lost the election, so we might as well go down advocating what’s right, so that when the real shitstorm comes down we look like the sensible ones.
debbie
@Satby:
No matter how old the child!
debbie
@Baud:
Reminds me of:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqwXRtiVHzY
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer:
If another Republican gets in and his bumbling gets us another 9/11, most of the Democrats will roll over again. Maybe it won’t be quite so universal.
Cervantes
@debbie:
Little girls have nothing to apologize for!
Can you picture zombie Maurice Chevalier singing “Thank Heaven for Ted Cruz”?
debbie
@Cervantes:
Chevalier would have been laughing too hard to get the words out!
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone.
Off to swim and run errands.
NotMax
@satby
If there are any of those wildly over the top holiday light displays on houses anywhere in your neck of the woods, a tour by car for the two girls is definitely in order next month.
Germy
Democrat Declared Winner in Deadlocked Mississippi Election After Pulling a Green Straw Out of a Bag
Democratic incumbent Blaine Eaton II was named the winner in a key Mississippi House race Friday after the contest reached a peculiar climax: A mathematically improbable tie forced candidates to draw straws — yes, actual straws — to determine the winner.
Eaton and his Republican challenger, Mark Tullos, each received exactly 4,589 votes in the election to the state’s House of Representatives earlier this month. According to state law, the winner had to be determined “by lot,” meaning, in this case, by the candidates blindly drawing either a green winning straw or a red losing straw from a bag, the New York Times reports.
Germy
@rikyrah:
Once sea levels have risen sufficiently you’ll be able to do both at the same time.
mai naem mobile
Well, per intructions from my chickenshit, never a profile in courage Congressional Rep.Kyrsten Sinema,I went to my local CVS and Walgreens for Depends yesterday and they’re all sold out. I’m going to go to the ghetto Walgreens today because they’re used to all these violent threats so I’m sure they won’t be sold out of the Depends.
pluege
“America had a dream for the many
Until conservatives made clean things dirty”
https://soundcloud.com/dave-cadaqu/conservatives-make-clean-things-dirty-dave-cadaqu-c-2014
scav
It is apparently a truth not universally recognized that not all public speach is uttered with a instrumental, tactical, political end, let alone a pursuasive one. Sometimes words are just words that have to come out.
hoodie
@Elizabelle:
Yeah, that German austerity plan was such a great idea.
rikyrah
Legendary photographer Ansel Adams visited a Japanese internment camp in 1943, here’s what he saw
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-sight/wp/2015/11/20/legendary-photographer-ansel-adams-visited-the-japanese-internment-camps-in-1943-heres-what-he-saw/
The Pale Scot
Word
Germy
Attorney, bailiff scuffle in San Luis Obispo courtroom.
msdc
@Amir Khalid:
Obama was talking about policies proposed by his political opponents. Nolan is talking about a huge swath of voters. Without making at least some inroads into those voters, we will never, ever retake a legislative majority, and so we will never be rid of the GOP’s disastrous policies.
So yeah, it’s worse.
Botsplainer
One other thought – a positive aspect of the sneering can knock that “authentic heartland rural ‘we’re the only REAL Americans'” shit down several pegs.
bystander
@Elizabelle: Leave it to Waters to thumb his nose at suave, sophisticated Mike Todd’s Sensorama for IIIRC the only other movie with cued odors, Scent of Mystery. Bombs away!
scav
@hoodie: Well, they didn’t have a Donald EuroTrump to get the Terrorists to pay for the YUGE Classy seawall arounf Greece.
msdc
@Botsplainer: In what universe? The sneering only intensifies the resentment of the “decadent liberal elites in their coastal enclaves,” etc.
It’s long past time to stop treating Republican politicians and policies as if they deserve respect, civility, polite consideration, etc. This country won’t turn around until enough of us decide to banish their superstition and xenophobia from the bounds of political acceptability.
But the second we turn that contempt on the voters, we lose.
OzarkHillbilly is exactly right. The point of these tantrums is to make the people throwing them feel morally superior, usually after they have given up on exerting any influence on our politics; it’s the last resort of the habitual loser, and we cannot afford to lose to these assholes any more.
Botsplainer
@msdc:
Forty years of polite engagement hasn’t worked. To steal from Churchill, the conservative is either at your heel or at your throat, so kick the shit out of them at every opportunity.
WaterGirl
It’s snowing! Our first snow of the year. If it has to be cold, I want snow.*
*unless I am traveling long distance :-)
Brachiator
For every dumb hick there is an equally dumb ass hipster sophisticate. As the wise Jedi WC Fields noted, never give a sucker an even break, especially the guy who thinks he or she is too smart for the room, and has the game figured out.
Kay
Don’t worry though because they found some free labor they haven’t tapped:
rikyrah
I recognized the homes that they showed in the article
…………………..
At Home in Chatham: A Bounty of Mid-Century Modern on the South Side, Where the African-American Elite Once “Strutted Their Stuff”
By Krisann Rehbein
The conversation about preserving mid-century buildings is growing by the day. Generally defined as the era after World War II and through the late 1960s, these buildings are now old enough to be eligible for historic designation—and seem to be getting their just due. Landmarks Illinois, the state’s leading organization for historic preservation, put a select number of mid-century homes on their annual list of “most endangered” buildings this year. And recently, the City of Chicago’s Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted unanimously to grant landmark status to Bertrand Goldberg’s iconic corn cob towers, Marina City.
On the South Side, a significant collection of mid-century homes are worth adding to the conversation. Located in Chatham, these architecturally significant homes tell a story of the city’s twentieth-century black economic and cultural elite.
Chatham—bordered by 79th Street to the north, 87th Street to the south, King Drive to the east and State Street to the west—is striking. Its blocks are filled with bungalows, Georgian revivals, and other solid brick homes. Residential streets are completely uniform, with each house set back exactly the same distance from the sidewalk, creating a visually harmonious streetscape. Block clubs organize the purchase of the distinctive globe street lamps that line front yards. The large front lawns and wide parkways create a feeling of urban regality.
Roosevelt University history professor Christopher Robert Reed is an expert on twentieth-century African-American Chicago. In the early part of the 1900s, he explains, African-Americans had been living in cramped conditions and substandard housing in Bronzeville. After World War II, the community moved directly south down King Drive to Chatham, then a largely undeveloped area.
“In Chatham, the upwardly mobile could ‘strut their stuff’ architecturally, and build homes that had never been seen there before,” Reed says. “It was the fulfillment of a dream to live in a community where you could live in a home that was architecturally commensurate with your success in life.” The African-American elite of the mid-twentieth century strutted their stuff in high, mid-century style.
http://design.newcity.com/2015/11/19/at-home-in-chatham-a-bounty-of-mid-century-modern-on-the-south-side-where-the-african-american-elite-once-strutted-their-stuff/
Botsplainer
@msdc:
They’re going to do that anyway, regardless of how you put it. They despise polite condescension even more than abject scorn, and with scorn, you peel off fairly independent “fellow travelers”, who can realize when something is truly stupid.
msdc
@Botsplainer:
Um, clearly you are responding to someone else’s comment.
But by all means, continue insulting one of the largest demographics in our electorate. It’s gotten us this far!
Scratch
I did my last run before the half-marathon tomorrow. Again thank you to those who contributed to the JDRF.
My thoughts before tomorrow and a final plea for a few more contributions: So tomorrow, finally
Germy
@Kay: I try for the most part to avoid my nearest walmart, but there have been times when the supposed convenience got the better of me.
But after I get in there I get the distinct impression that I’m sort of an afterthought; that the customer is an annoyance on their way to profit and shareholder happiness. Same as the employees.
Botsplainer
@msdc:
I’m not going to be happy until people point and laugh when one of my maternal cousins drawls “Ah’m a conservative, and Ah’m more Real ‘Murkin than you coz mah great great uncle rode with John Hunt Morgan and wiz out and whuppin’ Yankee ass”.
scav
Have we finally arrived at the essential crux of this whole matter as revealed by a bombing in Paris? That a certain poertion of the American electorate isn’t be wooed (and reassured about their legitimacy) in a properly deferential manner at all times? O plain red coffeecups!
hoodie
@scav: Maybe sharks with frickin’ laser beams.
Srv
Out before Obama?
Chris
@OzarkHillbilly:
Speaking as just another dumb hick, let me just say that supercilious assholes like Hamilton Nolan are a far far worse threat. There is a breed of people who think they are better than everyone else and just can’t wait to tell you how much better than you they are. You know the type, disagree with them on something, anything, and the reason you disagree is not because you have different information, or that you have a different way of looking at things, it’s because you are an idiot, and the Nolans of the world just can’t wait to tell you that you are an idiot. Except you aren’t an idiot and he, while maybe very intelligent isn’t anywhere near as smart as he thinks he is. If he was, he would have shut the fvck up.
I was going to post something similar when I read the original post.
As I point out whenever this topic comes up, I tend to be uncomfortable with the “hick” and “white trash” lines of insult because of the obvious class overtones… but also because, in my anecdotal experience, the most stereotypical Brain-Dead Republican Assholes among white red staters tend to be country clubbers and middle class suburbanites more than the working class and poor whites who’re lumped under labels like “redneck” and “hillbilly.”
khead
People are mad at this? Y’all don’t get over to Gawker much, do you?
Eric S.
@ThresherK (GPad): I giggled and Baud 2016 so gets my vote. In fact, as Chicagoan he gets my votes early and often.
hoodie
@scav: We’ve been headed that direction for awhile. I’ve been in organizations that start out with creeds that are boldly liberal but eventually dissolve into puddles of insecurity. Part of the problem is that the creed has always been somewhat misleading (e.g., a country with an Enlightenment constitution maintaining the most barbaric of institutions in slavery) and, over time, the adherents become engaged in increasingly desperate self-denial because recognizing reality might entail a loss of privilege. The self-denial usually ends up with actively cultivating ignorance.
Botsplainer
@scav:
Cracker-Americans MUST be reassured of their primacy in the American social and political order at every turn. Their icons must be venerated by all, lest their precious egos be wounded. They must be told that theirs is the most authentic expression of Americanness, their zeal to propagate their shitstain of a hypocritical and pharisaic faith through organs of government politely tolerated. When their policies bring ruin, they must be thanked for their efforts and the failures blamed on filthy libruls and an inadequate application of conservatism.
Another Holocene Human
Good grief, Anne Laurie, HamNo has never been about comity. He’s not just some ragey snide jerk but confronting what he considers to be sacred cows is part of his shtick. And as one of Gawker’s longest tenured bylines (omg–the turnover) he comes from the era when Gawker FP and comments resembled the mindset of that famous New Yorker cover that showed the vast wasteland west of the Hudson. Just tribalistic ragging on the rurals 24/7. Couple of commenting systems later and that has changed.
Chris
@ixnay:
Well, the hicks may not be actually dumb, but many of them are uneducated (or educated exclusively by Fox News), and proud of it.
Ding ding.
There was a popular quote a couple years back to the effect that “it’s not the low information voters I’m worried about, it’s the high misinformation voters.” Also a study done sometime during Obama’s first term that pointed out that not only were Fox News viewers more likely to be misinformed about basic facts, but the more diligently they followed their chosen news sources, the more likely they were to be misinformed.
cokane
meh i read that, it’s a pretty shittily written essay honestly
bemused
Seriously, what doesn’t make heartland conservatives feel talked down to? Trying to avoid getting their backs up is like walking a tightrope, extremely delicate and difficult if you are not a pro with years of training and experience.
Botsplainer
@Chris:
Those are the ones I work to peel off with the scorn. That demographic is sensitive to mockery, and they can be taught.
Put another way, it took a lot of quiet middle class acquiescence in the 1933-1936 era for Hitler to consolidate.
Another Holocene Human
@Baud: I think you’re damn right about that.
Botsplainer
@bemused:
I’ve always said that all the ragging on “political correctness” was merely projection.
Chris
@bemused:
Not everyone has your patience or restraint. A whole lot of conservatives’ beliefs are so entrenched, it’s highly unlikely they will ever experience a light bulb moment. I can understand the frustration ranting especially if one has a family member or friend whose rightwing views are directly impacting them negatively, being their own worst enemies.
This is true too.
Honestly, part of the reason I barely talk to conservatives anymore is that I know I don’t have the patience for the kind of interaction OzHill was talking about. I’m not willing to listen to somebody babble ignorantly about moochers on welfare and Religion Of Peace for years on end in the hopes that maybe one day there’ll finally be that one lightbulb moment. More power to all those of you who can do that.
Another Holocene Human
@BillinGlendaleCA: Yoko claims the reason that she was at all those rehearsals is because John made her be there. He was very insecure at the time about their relationship and didn’t want her out of his sight. Of course that caused friction. But she wasn’t the instigator of that friction. Just the victim of male insecurity. (To be fair to John, I’m pretty sure all four of them had first marriages that were shit shows. Yoko might have been wife #2.)
Another Holocene Human
@Amir Khalid: Dumb hicks is falling back on tribalistic insult, which can backfire as OzarkHillbilly’s comment shows. Shameful is an appeal to universal values.
cahuenga
And with the way education is being handled in this country, dumb hicks seems to be the intention.
Matt McIrvin
@msdc:
We lose no matter what, so who gives a crap? Throwing races to sharpen the contradictions is stupid, but if you’re in a no-win situation, keep telling the truth and wait for the world to burn.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: You don’t have to be dumb exactly to be a stupid bigot. Just a venal pustule on the ass of humanity. As Socrates opined some 2500 ya, being a human pig rooting in the dirt is a choice.
HRA
I am sure there will be a stampede to vote for the D candidate now by those who do not want to be pegged “hicks” from either party.
Actually by now it’s fairly obvious of preaching to the choir or the drip drip drip of water torture.
Right now I am seriously thinking of writing in Baud for president.
.
Chris
@bemused:
Seriously, what doesn’t make heartland conservatives feel talked down to?
This. (Although again, the word “heartland” isn’t really necessary. Is there anything more fragile and delicate than a Wall Street banker’s feelings?)
“It is one of the biggest dividing lines between liberals and conservatives; sensitivity. Liberals are supposed to be the sensitive ones, but even the liberals who worked themselves into a froth over George W. Bush never really cared very much about what he thought of them. But conservatives care what President Obama thinks. They care to the point of imagining what he thinks.”
Another Holocene Human
@Matt McIrvin:
Is it the 3 month window before election day? No?
Change your underwear. Some day an election will be lost but that day is not this day.
Rohan!barbequebob
@Elizabelle: Just pulled out my Odorama card, which I always keep handy, and tried it out.Most smell like mildew but #4 smells like oregano, must be the pizza delivery scene, #7 smells like natural gas, and 10 is pine scent.
This was really the start of John waters becoming socially acceptable.
Germy
@Another Holocene Human:
George Harrison’s sister appeared at a recent Beatle fest:
Germy
did anyone else here experience a “lights out” moment here?
Error message?
Chris
@JGabriel:
Great, just what the world needs: terrorist groups competing with each other to see who can kill more.
Yes, jihadism seems to have been having its own SHIELD v. HYDRA civil war for a while now.
The thing is, a lot of the “al-Qaeda” groups weren’t actually outgrowths of Bin Laden and Zawahiri’s movement. They were local jihadist insurgencies with their own agendas and priorities, which just happened to adopt the brand name and swear allegiance to those two when they seemed to be the hottest game in town. But now Bin Laden’s dead and there’s a new kid in town.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I know I’m a godless leftist, but even some in the Village must be thinking Big Chicken is approaching Peak Rudi
bemused
@Chris:
Oh yes, the bankers/investors too! They have that in common with Fox educated conservatives. Me think they doth protest too much.
khead
@Germy:
Yup.
Germy
@khead: They must be working under the hood
max
@Germy: did anyone else here experience a “lights out” moment here?
Ate my comment!
max
[‘What’s the rate I’ve been getting? Maybe one in three lost?’]
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Good christ, the media did more to puff this man up than anyone since McCain
C’mon Bridget, David, put this man in an orange jumpsuit. For me.
Eric S.
@Scratch: Have a good run tomorrow.
WereBear
@ThresherK (GPad): Good for you! I have been sick and cannot get to my PO Box but I thank you pre-emptively. That means you get another when I do get my hands on it. :)
Botsplainer
@bemused:
Ever notice that when a conservative talks about “tough choices”, he means that a splintery baseball bat is going to be shoved up the collective asses of the working class? That the conservative never calls for sacrifice on the part of the investor/CEO/banker class?
Kay
@Germy:
We still have a locally-owned supermarket which is (actually) union – it’s a fairly decent job- so I go 90% there but I have to go to Walmart for some things unless I want to drive 25 miles. I noticed it getting dirtier, always a bad thing for a food retailer. A friend of mine is convinced they changed the lighting- it’s dimmer, she says. She thought it was to hide the dirt but I bet it’s to save on energy.
We used to have two locally-owned supermarkets, one on the west side and one on the east side. The east side is the poorer part of town- it’s mostly rental properties. When Wal Mart came in the east side supermarket failed, leaving the poorer people there with no close-in fresh food retailer they could walk to. It’s a shame.
WereBear
Gosh, yes. That’s one of the drawbacks of democracy. People like to see themselves reflected, above.
benw
@Scratch: break a leg!
max
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Good christ, the media did more to puff this man up than anyone since McCain
And he has so plainly tanked and tanked hard and yet he sticks around and they still love him.
They so love him and so despise Trump!
max
[‘Jesus Christ, he tried to hug Jerry Jones.’]
p.s. My comment survived being eated!
Germy
@Kay:
I’ve noticed the dimmed lighting, as well. I suspect they’re trying to save every penny. And yes, the walmart I visited is filthy. The frozen food section, there is filth that someone apparently pushed with a mop up against the freezers. I do NOT purchase meat there.
I go there infrequently (maybe every other month) and I notice an entirely different workforce every time. People aren’t making careers there.
Germy
Where do lost comments go? Reminds me of this old song lyric recorded by Charles Boyer:
Amir Khalid
@Germy:
Internal server error, this time. I wonder what sort of server hiccup awaits us next.
Germy
@Amir Khalid:
I feel like a dinosaur who looks up at the sky and asks “does anyone else see that meteor?”
MomSense
@Baud:
Exactly. There are more of us but we just can’t be bothered to vote every GD time.
jeffreyw
I’m boiling this humongous ham hock until I can pull the meat off and then I’ll be simmering it with some butterbeans, soaked overnight, until the cheddar/jalapeno cornbread is ready.
danielx
@Germy:
Yeah, and it wasn’t even a FYWP moment. And right when I hit the post button too, naturally.
@OzarkHillbilly:
If you haven’t, you should read the late Joe Bageant’s work Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America’s Class War. All too familiar to those of us with Scots-Irish forebears; ignorance – nay, proud ignorance – and stubbornness all wrapped up in one not-very-neat-package. Classic case in point: the recent Kentucky gubernatorial election, in which a great many people voted for a guy who proclaimed loudly, proudly and repeatedly that he was going to take away their insurance if elected. And so he was, and so he will.
Kay
@Germy:
I was pleased to see they’re worried about the negative PR of that- they provide bad jobs. They ran an ad during one of the debates that was a response to liberal ad that ran at a prior debate. They’re so sophisticated with marketing now that I was pleased to see they feel they have to respond to that. They must believe it matters to people or they wouldn’t spend the money. It reminds me of when voting rights activists went after Coca Cola on ALEC and voting rights. It’s nice when “markets” work- Coca Cola does not want that brand associated with denying certain people the right to vote, probably partly because they don’t just sell in the US. They have to think about how people perceive them all over the world- that’s the newer market they want and it’s not white people. There’s a real blindness to the global nature of a lot of these companies among conservatives here. They may be *technically* US companies but they are really global brands.
Botsplainer
@danielx:
Yeah, but in the words of my mother, negroes and loafers taking tax money. Conservative harder!!!
ruemara
@msdc: white conservatives are the largest part of our electorate? Who knew?
Sorry, I’m in Nolan’s camp. These are dumb people who revel in dumb. They love being dumb, like a pig loves mud. They can ignore facts and bypass truth to argue a dumb thing for hours. They hang with each other, building a reinforced wall of dumb to block any information out. In other words, dumb. They have their partnership with fact-free liberals who want to believe dumb things like an executive order is what should happen if the president has to actually wait for Congress to not be fucking enemy territory to get something done. Or GMO panic. But for the most self-destructive and community destructive bunch are these dumb mental hicks. They sneer at us, threaten us, do shit like run their trucks on Earth Day to piss off liberals, when their neighborhood hasn’t had a liberal walk through since the 1800’s. I have some that I care about and after much patient explanation of why Obama isn’t taking your guns and Swiss gun laws, they spout the same shit, the next day. They hate, they don’t want facts, they are unbelievably happy to destroy this country to bring everyone to where they think we should be. The worse ones are “reformed” republicans who acknowledge every fucking dumb, evil, reviled thing their party has done, is doing and will goddamn well do, then still vote for the republican and tell you with seriousness that the Democrat didn’t really offer them much choice. Last converted republican friend went on to do that in 04, 08, 12 & 14. All while calling her party of choice dumb hicks too. They’re not even trying to sink the boat, they’re stocking it with explosives but we’re supposed to be respectful and polite. Good luck with that, but sometimes calling people out is better than a gentle patient “but we’re all equals here”. Which I also find hilarious when liberals are always mad that elected Dems are being nice and polite towards elected dumb people.and chasing their dumb bigot base.
Davis X. Machina
@Srv: Vulgus vult decipi.
Amir Khalid
What your president has been doing in my country today. Because everyone here loves pictures of Obama with kids, and I’m no different.
Chris
@JGabriel:
Also;
I KNOW it’s not a funny topic, but I cracked up when the article ended with a quote from a Twitter-jihadist saying “I just wish we could all be brothers again and not argue.” Jihadist hippies? Can’t they all just get along…?
RSA
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m coming late to this discussion, but I have to say that the “dumb hick” parts of Nolan’s piece were cringeworthy. As an in-group term, sure, country people might call each other that, but as an insult from an apparent outsider? It’s like a Republican talking about “urban youth”.
Another Holocene Human
What does it say about today’s GOP that the last decade’s heralds of inflammatory rhetoric, Jonah Goldberg and Ewick Ewickson are expressing qualms this weekend about this week’s wave of xenophobia?
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
Does it say that they’re both rooting for someone who’s not Donald Trump and are worried that the super-xenophobia will benefit him and not their ponies?
(I’m asking; I don’t actually remember who either of them supports).
MattF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: And… none other than George Will believes that Christie is da man. No link, but at the WaPo– if you must.
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer: You hate Negroes when they’re loafing, but just wait and see how you feel when they’re doing better than you. ///
bemused
@Botsplainer:
Heh. Pretty hard not to notice.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Cervantes: Hey, I’m trying to be anonymous here!
:-)
Cheers,
Scott.
WereBear
@Baud: The powers of Baud! will appear limitless!
If you still have problems, you are simply not subscribing to the correct channel. :)
Another Holocene Human
@Chris: Not sure but I don’t think infinite Ericks likes Trump especially.
Erickson has been doing correspondence divinity school or something and pushed back against anti refugee rhetoric re: Centralamericanos. Now he’s tweeting his exasperation at his followers wanting to shred the Constitution and round up all Muslims. Jonah suddenly popped up with this stuff this week, maybe guilty Jewish conscience about the whole fleeing Semitic refugees being barred by self-righteous USA thing. Apparently he does know what actual fascism is, his idiotic fucking book notwithstanding.
Amir Khalid
@Another Holocene Human:
The times have passed them by, and these days they are but moderates despised by all true believers.
Another Holocene Human
@Kay: Kay, don’t forget African Americans. Coca-Cola has been dogged by accusations of being racist for years, which Pepsi has capitalized on. They have not given up on the domestic market yet.
scav
@Amir Khalid: That man is graciously fighting an uphill battle.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Satby: It’s easier to be patient when one doesn’t have kids. But there are disadvantages, too. ;-)
It’s great of you to be so giving to your animals and the people you invite in your life. It’s quite inspiring.
Cheers,
Scott.
MattF
@Another Holocene Human: Which reminds me– a dogwhistle word you once in a while, Obama is ‘feckless’. It’s a word one sees only in comments about them.
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
Edited for misunderstanding of your original post.
Yep, it’s always reassuring when they won’t go ALL the way into fascism.
Another Holocene Human
@Germy: The kids inherited this behemoth but lack daddy’s business acumen. They really don’t know how to run a business.
For one thing, daddy never paid well but he used to practically run this Wal-Mart cult to make them feel like valuable team members anyway. As you’ve noted, it’s now turnover city.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: I’ll look for it. That’s a word I’d free associate with freshman frat boys. (The white, polo wearing kind.)
Mandalay
@RSA:
The entire article was cringeworthy:
The article is a worthless rant of name calling, sneering and condescension. There is plenty to criticize about the Republican position on Syrian refugees but that is the worst possible way to go about it.
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer: I had a coworker walk in one day and tell a “joke” about bums. When I stared at him blankly, he repeated it.
For a while we were short a supervisor so he was an acting supervisor. I needed something from his department and nobody answered the phone so I took a hike and walked into his office.
He was watching DVDs of Star Trek (probably DS9) instead of working.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris:
One of my inlaws (who is doing quite well for herself, TYVM) opined during the recession that Europe was too unsafe to visit because unemployed youth were protesting in Spain.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@bemused:
It’s understandable to feel that way, but it’s not universal.
When something affects an elected GOP official directly, they can get out of their “Frank Luntz approved talking points” mode and actually think about the impact of their statements and policies on real people. Look at what happened with the Charleston church shootings. One of the victims was a universally known and respected minister with the church who also was a member of the legislature. After a Republican finally spoke up and said the Confederate battle flag should come down, there was a quick consensus among the GOP that it would happen quickly even after decades of saying it would “never” happen.
The group-think among Teabaggers can be an advantage when it comes to quick changes. It often simply comes down to convincing a single legislator (or presidential candidate) to change their mind for change to come. Of course, that change often doesn’t happen until some tragedy happens to them personally…
Of course, we also know the “group think” can be a brick wall when it works the other way…
Finding a way to turn on that spark of recognition that things need to be changed is difficult. Evidence often doesn’t help. Insults usually doesn’t help. Gentle shame and mocking, like what I think Obama tried to do, can be effective. (The pushback against it seems to indicate that he did hit a nerve and that’s a good thing.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Holocene Human
@rikyrah: wow those homes are fabu
The Other Chuck
Oh hey, lookie all the pearl-clutching about alienating the hicks with our elite language. Tell ya what, when the conservatives offer up an inkling of rapprochement themselves, maybe I’ll play ball. Til then, you turn on Fox News, you’re a fucking hick I’ll give a state to only if we can wall it off. Liberal elite? If being able to locate my own country on a globe, or remembering any of the constitution beyond he second amendment makes me elite and better than you, then guess what, I am better. Hick. As for those enclaves? That’s where people live. And make money to send to your moocher hick states.
russm
@OzarkHillbilly:
Want people to stop calling yall dumb hicks? Stop being dumb hicks. I know its hard to admit but hey, thats what confession is for. I’ll start.
I have been dumb because I believed that the media was fair.
Then I turned 12.
See? We all can grow
Mandalay
@MattF:
A serious question: why is it that folks here will pounce on dogwhistle words against blacks, yet the word “hick” – a pejorative word for rural uneducated white people – is not only accepted, but warmly embraced?
JGabriel
@Another Holocene Human:
Probably that Goldberg and Erickson will be the next Conservative pundits labelled RINOs (or CINOs?).
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@OzarkHillbilly: Safe space for men. Jesus G*d, that’s offensive to many, many women.
scav
@Mandalay: I think there’s a bit of sauce for goose, sauce for gander in the current instance. When the other side is agitating for their right to say racist and mysogynist things without repercussion, chiding lectures about political correctness run sane over hick get right up the nose.
JPL
TPM had this story about trying to fly while brown…
American Exceptionalism…
My future daughter-in-law is half Lebanese and a man who was pulled aside for additional checks in an airport, pointed to her and said she looks more like a terrorist, than I.
WereBear
@bystander: It was glorious! For years I kept the card.
Cervantes
@msdc:
Is that self-evident?
Depending on who exactly “those voters” are, what would it cost you to attract their votes? Is it easier to attract them or to attract people who should naturally vote for you but who simply have not been voting? Which group is larger? Can you appeal to both groups at the same time, while also not losing your base?
Steeplejack
@rikyrah:
I love that mid-century style.
Cervantes
@Another Holocene Human:
McCartney’s first marriage lasted three decades. It ended only when his wife died.
Cervantes
@Amir Khalid:
Emancipating the slaves? Ending persecution of Shias? Speaking out against corruption?
Probably not!
Plangent
So *hicks* are the problem? Because naturally there are no racists on the coasts, or fools with impressive diplomas. The really important thing is the population density where you live and where you went to school. Got it.
What this country really needs, then, is a cosmopolitan leader who lives in the very heart of one of our great coastal cities, and who was educated at an Ivy League school.
I guess Gawker wants us to vote for Donald Trump.
Botsplainer
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Clearly, slutty temptresses need burkas lest honorable Southern Christian men be overly tempted.
Amir Khalid
@Cervantes:
There’s a link. You could have taken a look.
RSA
@scav:
I think that’s right. There’s also tribalism. And it might also be that some people don’t realize how broad a brush “hick” paints. For example, one out of ten white voters in Mississippi went for Obama in 2012. Exceptions to the dumb part, I guess, which is how the cited article handles Anne Richards.
Botsplainer
@JPL:
I’m half Lebanese. My dad does OK because he bears a an unfortunatel fair resemblance to Ron Jeremy, but my uncle looks VERY Arab. Some of my cousins got it bad, too.
dww44
@Chris:
And, my somewhat more than anecdotal experience proves you are correct about who populates the Republican stronghold on all things political in this red state. Yesterday I got a survey sent to constituents by my congressman, himself white and middle class. The question:
Sadly, the results were over 79% in favor of halting with just under 2 % undecided. I always knew I was a gerrymandered voter into his district from this minority-majority small redstate city (he doesn’t even have an office here, as all his predecessors did) but this little survey proved it.
Cervantes
@Mandalay:
My only objection to the statement “Obama is feckless” is that it’s ridiculously, stupidly false.
The word “feckless” is a perfectly good word. Use it accurately.
Another Holocene Human
@Botsplainer: I got schooled when I was 18, 19 working in Boston in a kitchen. “Where ya from?”
“QUINCY.”
Cervantes
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q):
Which is precisely why those men need a safe space!
Another Holocene Human
@Another Holocene Human: It was a wakeup call–I grew up in a nabe where Irish Catholics were actually a minority. In fact my kindergarten teacher pulled my mother aside early on, thinking she was Irish Catholic too, and suggested that she move the family to the NIMBY paradise of Arlington, MA since our area was, how do we put this, you know, so many of those, —-j—-e—-w—-s—–. But in West Roxbury Irish people could act like total assholes–and did!
Fair Economist
Mockery is the way to go dealing with the yellow-bellied cowards who make up the Republican party, but mocking “dumb hicks” isn’t the way to do it. Insofar as people are “dumb” they can’t change it, and there’s nothing wrong with being a “hick”. In the Civil War, it was the hick Southerners who mostly supported and sometimes fought for the United States.
Mock these folks as cowards, chickens, spineless, bedwetters, yellow-bellied, and Chicken Littles. And NEVER let anybody forget it. In six months to a year most voters will have come to their senses and realized that Syrian refugees whose families have been raped and shot by Daesh are our friends and allies. The Republicans and the media will try to pretend this hysteria never happened, like they do with the Ebola business. It’s our responsibility to say, 10 years from now “Of course I never vote for the Republicans. Why should I be scared of 5 year old girls?”
Another Holocene Human
@Cervantes: Hey, the Maenads weren’t playing.
Gimme that old time religion.
Another Holocene Human
@RSA: You’re making a good point, but throwing MS white voters in there is the ultimate in glass half full thinking. 90% of white voters in Mississippi would not vote for the greatest president of our life time solely because they couldn’t stomach having a Black dude in charge. 90%!
And no, all whites don’t do it, read the exit polls. ODS is highly regional.
(Note, I am not bantering with the “hicks” point–every state has hicks. This has to do with race hate that is “carefully taught”, a stupid grudge to cover up for the fact that yore great great great grandpappy was wrong, let it go already.)
Another Holocene Human
There’s a good rant on Salon about Woodrow Wilson on Princeton, clearly making the point that, no, Wilson’s racism wasn’t a personal matter and it wasn’t just good old fashioned old-timey comical racism that everyone indulged in. He was a leading racist crusader who aimed to spread his cancer from the South throughout all national institutions and internationally as well.
Someone who is a determined and effective activist for a thing does not get to be covered in the shroud of “it was the time”.
MattF
@Cervantes: I agree, actually, that, used correctly, ‘feckless’ is an excellent, useful word– and maybe I should have said plainly that I’m unhappy to see an excellent, useful word used as code for ‘lazy you-know-what’. But I don’t think there’s much doubt that it is often used that way.
Mandalay
@Chris: “white trash”, “redneck”, “hillbilly” and “hick” are pejorative terms for poor uneducated rural white people which are freely used by some BJ posters. But I’m sure they they wouldn’t dream of speaking about black people as “black trash” or “thugs” or “porch monkeys”.
It’s an interesting double standard.
Another Holocene Human
@Mandalay: Right, class based pejoratives that conjure up the dominant racial group are totally equivalent to racial slurs.
Beam eye mote. Yours.
Botsplainer
@Another Holocene Human:
Heh – yeah, people screw up on that in the burbs around here from time to time. Inside the rings, not so much – it’s a pretty diverse city.
MattF
@Mandalay: I agree, it is a double standard. Maybe, around here it’s a signifier of some sort. Worth looking into, actually.
ETA: Not saying racial and social prejudices are equivalent, though.
Another Holocene Human
@Cervantes: Guess he beat the odds.
Cervantes
@MattF:
Not much doubt, maybe, but how much data?
(I haven’t the vaguest idea.)
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: Maybe because institutionalized racism against Black people IS A THING THAT HAPPENS.
Go cry in your beer, white concern troll.
Mandalay
@Another Holocene Human:
They are not only class based pejoratives. They are also race based pejoratives.
Which races you think the term “white trash” is being used against other than whites?
WereBear
@Frankensteinbeck: In addition, convincing them means somehow persuading them to join us.
They don’t want to join a coalition made up of women, and people of color, and QUILTBAG folk, and pointy-headed intellectuals, and those damn bleedin’-heart liberals.
They would rather roast their sparrow on that curtain rod and listen to the lies of people who tell them they would be at the very tippy-top of the food chain if it weren’t for People Like Us.
That’s a real Gordian Knot of a problem.
Betty Cracker
@Another Holocene Human: Oh chill the fuck out. MattF is a frequent commenter and not a troll of any type.
Another Holocene Human
Wake me up when the house of a woman who adopted a rural child has “HICK” and “DIE FARMBOY” spraypainted on her garage door.
Wake me up when police start targeting white pickup trucks (with confederate flag stickers) for traffic stops.
Wake me up when a white rural guy made good launches an enormous EEO lawsuit against a Fortune 500 company citing incidents like a can of skoal left on the breakroom table.
Mandalay
@Another Holocene Human:
You have completely lost the plot.
WereBear
@Baud: This is why I am a Baud! voter.
Another Holocene Human
@Mandalay: The fact that you have to start with a racial modifier is one of those things we call a “clue”.
The fact that you’re dodging my point about institutional racism and racial violence is another clue.
“Those who have ears to hear…”
CaseyL
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m sorry, but after the last few elections, and particularly after the last week of braying xenophobia, I have very little patience for the delicate feelings of people who keep watching Fox News and voting Republican. I’m out of patience with most of the US of A.
Yes, there have been waves of Big Stupid before. Many of them. But it seemed each one got beaten back a little more thoroughly, and people emerged a little better informed and a little less small-minded. Now it seems (to me at least) that the great arc of liberalism that ran (very roughly) from Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting to LBJ’s Great Society was the anomaly, not the willful ignorance and oligarchy that liberalism triumphed over during that span of time.
I’m no longer interested in talking to people who knowingly repeat lies and celebrate ignorance, or to the people who eat that stuff up and let it shape their worldview.
Maybe ours is a sclerotic nation, like Russia but with a few outposts of dynamism here and there. I’ll just be thankful I live in one of the latter.
kc
Fuck Gawker in general and Ham Nolan in particular.
Germy
@WereBear: Baud! is a uniter.
MattF
@Betty Cracker: Thanks.
@Another Holocene Human: Not thanks.
I don’t see anything wrong with noting how different groups are treated around here. The world is what it is, and I’m allowed to be observant and remark on what I see.
sharl
@OzarkHillbilly:
I normally like Hamilton Nolan, but you make a really, really good point here. When he made his forays into your neck of the woods, e.g., to the KKK’s HQ near Harrison AR, and to Branson MO, it apparent was for mockery material rather than any genuine understanding of “the hicks” who live there. I wonder if he would have been interested in such understanding, if he were allocated a larger travel budget and more time to find and interview folks like you? I’m not confident I would like the answer to that question.
But as folks upthread have noted, this is Gawker, a very NYC-centric media outlet. HamNo certainly knows where his existing readers’ interests lie.
MattF
@Cervantes: Went and looked up ‘feckless’ in my online county library account, which has access to the OED. OED is informative, and subtle, as usual. One of the meanings cited is ‘shiftless’.
Btw, many public libraries offer on-line access to the OED, fyi.
Botsplainer
@Another Holocene Human:
Louisville’s Catholics didn’t really do ethnic enclaves. I suspect it was a lingering reaction to the Know Nothing riots of 1855. Instead, our heavily Catholic population did integration and assimilation based around high schools.
Johnny Coelacanth
Oh boo hoo, somebody said something mean about the hicks. How ever will we get them to vote for their own self interests now?
Chris
@Botsplainer:
Louisville’s Catholics didn’t really do ethnic enclaves. I suspect it was a lingering reaction to the Know Nothing riots of 1855. Instead, our heavily Catholic population did integration and assimilation based around high schools.
And the WASPs let them?
kc
@Another Holocene Human:
Aren’t you white?
EriktheRed
@OzarkHillbilly:
Wow, talk about lack of self-awareness!
Another Holocene Human
Let’s start over, shall we?
Hick is no more racial than doctor is gendered.
If you picture a man every time the word “doctor” is uttered, that’s your problem.
If you picture white people every time rural life is brought up, that’s your problem. And these folks will want a word with you.
As for white trash, did HamNo use that term? Or anyone on this thread to attack their voting habits? The working poor and below don’t really vote much, but when they do, they’re more likely to vote Democratic than the petty bourgeois Yohos and Gohmerts that HamNo was attacking. Why would Dems go after white trash except when it’s time to GOTV?
kc
@Another Holocene Human:
Wake me up when you surrender all the benefits your white privilege has gotten you
Cervantes
@MattF:
Observing (as a dictionary might) that one sense of “feckless” is “shiftless” tells us nothing about (1) how often “feckless” is used that way; and (2) how often that (frequent or infrequent) usage is racist.
PS: Glad to hear your county library offers access to the OED.
Another Holocene Human
@kc: Aren’t I now?
Johnny Coelacanth
@EriktheRed: I like this line from their FAQ: “Due to the topics of discussion and our desire to create a safe place for men, we ask that if possible you leave your daughters home for this one.” Not enough safe spaces for men in this society, that’s a real problem.
sharl
@sharl: Coming as I do from ~The Heartland~ (Rust Belt section), I both relate to the criticism of the “hicks” who live there (it’s basically one of the major reasons why I moved away), while being concerned about the lack of interest from people who wish to not trouble their own beautiful minds with knowledge about what makes them tick. If for no other reason, there should be a purely utilitarian reason for understanding such people, who go to the polls in sufficient number to have an effect on all of us.
Understanding such folks can be difficult while yielding troubling results (Michael Moore has worked these toxic fields); doing something about it will be long, unpleasant, and profoundly frustrating work. Some of the people who comment here (e.g., geg6 in western PA) have touched on this, when they talk about their political campaign support work.
kc
That article was stupid, but it was just Ham Nolan wanking in public. At least Gawker didn’t out any private figures in that piece.
MattF
@Cervantes: Welp, that about exhausts the definitional resources I have at hand.
FlipYrWhig
I really don’t think “we” need to worry about offending the poor dears to the degree they won’t vote for Democrats. They already don’t vote for Democrats. They’re the base of the Republican Party. They’re not waiting on the just-right rhetorical approach to convert. They’re diehards. Mock away. We need to outvote them and wait for the old ones to die.
The Other Chuck
@Johnny Coelacanth: @sharl:
And look how they’ve paid Moore back. Fuck them with a rusty hoe.
Botsplainer
@Chris:
WASPs couldn’t affect the enrollment of the Catholic schools, and the number of German and Irish Catholics at the time was pretty large, when combined. Later, that was augmented by early wave Lebanese who converted in good numbers before an Orthodox congregation came into being in the early 30s (my great grandparents).
EriktheRed
@Another Holocene Human:
Yoko WAS wife #2. John’s son Julian is the product of marriage #1.
sharl
Here’s a millenial well known in Weird Twitter world, who also originates from Northern Hickistan, responding to HamNo’s piece on twitter:
While that’s a gross over-generalization IMO, I understand where he’s coming from. Felix (his real first name fyi/fwiw) couldn’t wait to get out of the midwest (his final days there were at a college in MN), and for about a year now has been a flat-broke guy sleeping on a mattress on a floor in shared living space in Bed-Stuy, dreaming of having a real bed and making it as a writer (AFAICT, like a huge number of other aspiring young writers). He spent part of his youth in rural IL, and later did fun stuff like working as a bouncer in a bar servicing oil field workers in ND (he got a knife wound out of that).
I understand his response to HamNo, and it reminds me how so many things involving economic, social, and racial oppression are team efforts, with elites with ill-intent knowing just how to pluck the strings of Dark Resentment of the “hicks” that HamNo writes about.
While I confess I still actually need to read the whole damn thing, not just detailed summaries, I think Bob Altmeyer’s The Authoritarians largely gets at the dynamics involved here.
Cervantes
@MattF:
Not to worry. We can keep looking.
sharl
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, I’m afraid you are correct, at least where the age demographics are concerned. So many of these people are supported by Social Security and Medicare, which they happily assume is their right (which is correct) and that, unlike “those other people”, they have worked so hard to earn these government* benefits (which they often heatedly deny…cognitive dissonance is one hell of a drug).
So with their government subsidies, lots of these folks feel they have the luxury of ignorance, which I suppose they do. Sucks to be their kids and grandkids though.
I wish I could find the after-action report Medea Benjamin of Code Pink wrote after her crew visited a Washington DC Tea Party “Tax Day” gathering in 2010; I’ll post it later if I can find it. It was one of the best acts of journalism by non-journalists I’ve ever read. Here’s Weigel’s account of it, during his ill-fated short tenure with WaPo. Unlike so many “professional journalists” who took Tea Party leaders at their word that theirs was a noble grass roots organization (no such breaks from journos for the Occupy Wall Street people!), Code Pink interviewed those folks in detail and found a more complicated and sordid situation. These (mostly) older and financially comfortable folks – whose best years found them in stable, well-paying jobs while the rest of the world (i.e., our would-be economic competitors) were still getting off their backs from WWII – are ignorant, angry, and just plain mean about why “those people” want the same things that they
earnedwere provided by virtue of a fortunate (for them) blip in history.Their passing on to the Great Beyond (or dirt naps, or wherever) is not a sufficient, but definitely a necessary condition for things to improve. And I say that unhappily, as a guy right in the middle of the Boomer demographic.
sharl
@sharl: I found the write-up by Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin on their visit to the 2010 Tea Party Tax Day rally in Washington, DC. As one would expect from Code Pink, their effort was focused on U.S. military spending and activities. An excerpt:
With the benefit of hindsight, I think Benjamin was a tad over-optimistic in that second paragraph, but otherwise I found her observations spot on.
I’m quite certain that lots of those people vote, but do so in a rather rote fashion, based on what their favorite “news” and “information” sources inject into their willing brains.
:-(
sharl
I have an absurd and unhealthy fascination with Gawker, as I’ve noted in other comments at B-J. I think former/fired Gawker writer [as well as former Florida Hickistan (
Tallahasseeactually Gainesville, I think) resident] Adam Weinstein made a valid point in his tell-all post about his firing and other inner workings of that media company: for so many of their writers and editors, there is New York City, and then there is (waving hand vaguely in western and southern directions) the rest of the country. There are even some funny cartoon maps of the U.S. available online – by self-aware NYC cartoonists IIRC – that I’m too lazy to track down at the moment.HamNo is one of the few Gawker writers I’ll still look forward to reading, having survived the post-David Geithner outing debacle staff buyouts, and the more recent staff firings as Gawker plans to go to a politics-oriented outlet. He is in his wheelhouse when addressing issues of economic disparity, a fact recognized by his invitation to the White House to participate in a forum arranged by the Secretary of Labor.
I just hope that no one reading that more recent post of his thinks they learned anything from it, although it could serve as a springboard to enlightenment. It would be like a group of schoolchildren going to the zoo, and laughing at the behavior of monkeys throwing their shit at the window, or lions scratching their fur until raw patches of skin are left. Well maybe some of those kids will go home, thinking about their day at the zoo, then going online to learn how animals (including the human variety) respond to the stress and despair of captivity.
Believe me, a lot of us who escaped Hickistan know about the kind of flaming assholes who live there, and we understand the dynamics of media and human nature well enough to know how the assholishness of that relative minority gets them a level of attention that makes entire geographic areas look bad. But hey, if pointing-and-mocking gets your rocks off, well, knock yourselves out.
And on a personal note, anyone who frightens my online crush automatically gets on my bad side, so that’s another reason to for me to be mad at Gawker at the moment.
Betty Cracker
@Another Holocene Human: Interesting theory that “hick” doesn’t have racial connotations, but it’s pure bunk. Thought experiment: read HamNo’s piece, replacing every reference to “hicks” with “the diverse rainbow of people who live in rural areas.”
Doesn’t have quite the same kick, does it? FWIW, I’m not butt hurt a bit by HamNo’s anti-hick jeremiad, even though at least one frequent commenter here calls me a hick on ocassion.
rikyrah
@bystander:
Both anniversary DVD’s of Les Miz are must haves.
henqiguai
@Mandalay (#202):
No, Mandalay, ‘hick’ is a sometimes dismissive term for *anyone* exhibiting certain behaviors and attitudes. Irrespective of race or ethnicity. Sort of like back in DC when I was growing up, ‘bama’ was a dismissive term for someone exhibiting country or otherwise unrefined (i.e. what passed for local citified sophistication) attitudes, behaviors, and fashion sense. Was an urban version of ‘hick’, usually applied to fellow Blacks.
Barry
@Mandalay: “A serious question: why is it that folks here will pounce on dogwhistle words against blacks, yet the word “hick” – a pejorative word for rural uneducated white people – is not only accepted, but warmly embraced?”
Because there’s a huuuuuuge segment of white, rightwing Americans who look at such stereotypes, and say ‘I can do worse’ – and they do.
Because we’ve been bombarded with ‘Heartland America’ and ‘Real America’. And those tend to be nihilistic people who take and destroy, and/or vote eageraly for those who do.
Because we saw ‘Heartland America’ despise NYC (fulla Jewz and Niggers) for decades, until it was attacked. Then they took NYC to their breast for long enough to justify a f*cked up war, and then kicked it to the curb.
Because we saw ‘Heartland America’ talk real big smack about patriotism, and sh*t all over any Vietnam Vet politician who was a Democratic politicisn – frequently favoring Joe ‘I had other prioritites’ Schesskopf.
Because we saw ‘Heartland America’ worship Dubya as he f*cked the place up, and then go into a howling temper tantrum when they lost some elections. They mother-loving Tea Party was up and running and shocked! shocked, I tell you! about government powers before Obama took office. Government powers about which they didn’t care, while worshipping in the House of Bush.
Because we saw ‘Heartland America’ talk really big smack about takers, but never saw a corrupt banker whose shoes ‘Heartland America’ would not lick.
Because we saw ‘Heartland America’ lick the boots and aid the crimes of every single Boss Man who broke the laws and people to make money.
Because we saw ‘Heartland America’ take our money, and talk sh*t about us, and whine if any money went into the pockets of people whom they didn’t like.
Barry
@Another Holocene Human: “What does it say about today’s GOP that the last decade’s heralds of inflammatory rhetoric, Jonah Goldberg and Ewick Ewickson are expressing qualms this weekend about this week’s wave of xenophobia?”
Every so often these people (and others, like Rod Dreher at The American Conservative) have a moment of clarity, and realized both how low they’ve sunk, and the direction in which their movement is going.
However, the moment passes, and listening to it would cost them money and status, so they can bury the memory.
Barry
@RSA: “I think that’s right. There’s also tribalism. And it might also be that some people don’t realize how broad a brush “hick” paints. For example, one out of ten white voters in Mississippi went for Obama in 2012. Exceptions to the dumb part, I guess, which is how the cited article handles Anne Richards.”
Um, one out of ten white people voting for Obama *is* a broad brush. They are painting themselves.
Uncle Cosmo
@MattF: (Um, I thought better of this post–it was a dumb joke that’d be misinterpreted by most of the Juicery & wasn’t all that funny to begin with.)
rikyrah
@Cervantes:
I really think they were soulmates.
Barry
@Barry: (d*mn, but I need to slow down and spell properly)
Cervantes
@rikyrah:
I agree.
Wish I could stay longer to comment more, but I can’t.
Have a great evening.
sharl
Heh