What a brilliant observation.
[image or embed]— Anita (@anita1956.bsky.social) February 11, 2026 at 10:24 PM
===
Please keep repeating that we’re in a perfect economy. That will resonate with everyone and ensure election victory.
[image or embed]— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 11:46 AM
Listening to Trump Admin officials, you’d never guess that the US stock market underperformed the rest of the world in 2025.
[image or embed]— Patrick Chovanec (@prchovanec.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 8:16 PM
Donald Trump ran for President saying he would lower costs “on day one.”
What's happened since he took office a year ago? Costs are up, up, up.— Elizabeth Warren (@warren.senate.gov) February 15, 2026 at 5:13 PM
Trump can gaslight about a “golden economy” that doesn’t exist, but the American People know the truth: thanks to his stupid tariffs & his Big Ugly Bill, basic necessities have never been more expensive.
— Rep. Jim McGovern (@repmcgovern.bsky.social) February 14, 2026 at 12:00 PM
— Henry (@henrythedog.bsky.social) February 14, 2026 at 9:48 AM
The vibecession was primarily driven by lower sentiment among the upper and middle classes, not the lower classes.
[image or embed]— Matt Darling (@besttrousers.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 4:13 PM
I agree with this argument (and wish it hadn’t damaged Joe Biden so significantly):
“People were doing materially better in significant ways but economic sentiment was in the toilet during COVID” really feels like maybe the issue is COVID and not other stuff.
— Mikhail Gorbaechev (@mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:45 PM
The world went insane in the decade immediately after the last global respiratory pandemic of their type (Spanish flu), I think there’s something about this kind of collective trauma in modern societies that had managed to reduce that kind of mass mortality that does this to politics.
— Mikhail Gorbaechev (@mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:46 PM
Every incumbent party suffered a substantial setback post-COVID, pretty much.
— Mikhail Gorbaechev (@mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:49 PM
“Americans are to a greater and lesser extent all psychologically traumatized from watching more than a million Americans die from COVID, and explain that general sense of malaise through economic sentiment” has always struck me as a parsimonious explanation.
— Mikhail Gorbaechev (@mikhailgorbaechev.bsky.social) February 15, 2026 at 6:48 PM
On The Road – Albatrossity – Some more fishy birds
Baud
Maybe that’s why RFK Jr is trying to create another pandemic.
Suzanne
Thank you, Sen. Warren and Rep. McGovern. “Gaslighting” is the perfect way to put it.
The Skipping Dipshit xheeted this:
I left off all the flag emojis.
Defining American as English and Scots-Irish is a big giveaway for a number of reasons.
In better news, I didn’t know that 10 Downing Street had a First Feline, Larry, and I am now a Larry fan. Apparently the Brits have welcomed their Feline Overlord.
satby
@Baud: Three’s the charm?
Or maybe both RFK and Oz are just con men who caught a break beyond their wildest dreams.
Elizabelle
I have never been so ashamed of American voters.
satby
@Suzanne: Larry has been at #10 for 15 years.
Elizabelle
@Suzanne: Meanwhile, Palmerston, the UK’s Foreign Office cat who retired to Bermuda (seriously), died this month. Maybe aged 15 or so.
Palmerston and Larry famously got into it a few years ago, although no fur actually flew.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Sounds like they’re losing the Scots-Irish.
chemiclord
While it’s fine on its own to attack Trump’s shitty economy… it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to start embracing things that could actually address affordability, things that not even Democrats have been particularly keen on doing.
Layer8Problem
@Elizabelle:
“Palmerston and Larry famously got into it a few years ago, although no fur actually flew.”
Probably a dispute over who was the best British Prime Minister. I know who’s side Palmerston would have been on.
Shakti
RFK Jr only exists because his family protected him.
We need to claw back the wealth stolen by these people and escheat them and their descendants:
Their descendants and spouses should not get to keep a penny of their ill earned wealth.
newrepublic.com/post/206559/russ-vought-usaid-funds-security
Geminid
@chemiclord: Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger centered the affordability issue in their campaigns for governor of New Jersey and Virginia, and in their inauguration addresses as well. You can see for yourself how they deal with affordability in their legislative agenda.
They can’t help it if “national” news sites don’t bring you this information but you can. Just look them up on state and local news sites.
randy khan
Not so fun (and underreported) fact – during the first year of the Trump Administration, job creation in the U.S. dropped by nearly 73%, to just over 20,000 per month (which is a miserable number). And that includes the January jobs report, which is meh by most standards but by far the most jobs created in any month of the Trump Administration. In 12 months, Trump had three months with actual job losses, compared to one in the entire Biden Administration.
jlowe
@Baud:
futurism.com/science-energy/epstein-climate-change-population
Douglas Rushkoff was right. The wealthy elites are trying to kill off all of us NPCs.
RevRick
@Elizabelle: But it wasn’t just American voters. What happened in the United States was part of a global phenomenon.
The skeets about COVID need to be taken seriously. That pandemic drove us nuts. You see it in the sudden spike in the murder rate.
Booger
@Baud: You know, when you read Webb’s “Born Fighting,” you really come away with the sense that a whole lot of our national pathologies are rooted in that demographic. There’s a bunch of that book which to me comes down to ‘Not the flex you think it is, Jimbo.’
Baud
@jlowe:
Updated Jay Gould
RevRick
@Baud: Scots-Irish = Appalachia = stupid and impoverished.
Suzanne
@Geminid: How can we phrase “wanting to see more and larger-scale action on affordability than what Spanberger and Sherrill have put forward so far, without coming off as dissing Spanberger and Sherrill”? Discussions around here always seem to break down on this binary, and I wish they wouldn’t.
Baud
@RevRick:
Last state poll I saw, West Virginia is Trump’s best state. But that doesn’t mean he’s not down from his highs there.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Push the issue, ignore the office holder.
But it’s not possible because people are motivated by demonization, not ideas.
Professor Bigfoot
@Shakti: I have been wondering… we know that associates of Vladimir Putin tend to “fall” out of 10th story windows, for example— I wonder if Vought is worried about a professional hit team.
Hmmmm….
Eyeroller
@Suzanne: According to Ancestry I am 85% English-ScotsIrish (34% Scots-Irish alone) and it is absurd to claim that “my people” are the foundation of the culture. At least as many white Americans have significant German ancestry. Plus all the other European ethnicities that make up the “melting pot.” And that’s just whites, of course our culture has been heavily influenced by African and Latin American cultures.
Also they misspellied “Scots.” Our culture apparently was created by some guy named Scott.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: But whiter than white, and therefore good.
Trivia Man
@Layer8Problem: Pitt. The. Elder.
?
Professor Bigfoot
@Eyeroller: According to Ancestry, I am 19% English/Scots-Irish.
Ain’t that some shit? 😂
Baud
I don’t mind the idea of a more common American culture. But Trump and his cohort have no place in any culture I’d voluntarily be part of
ETA: Start with Dolly Parton and build from there.
Suzanne
@Eyeroller: The Skipping Dipshit is also a Dumbass.
I have said for a long time that our discussions of whiteness sometimes collapse the intra-white hatred stuff that is still pretty potent for some idiots. I genuinely do not know why anyone gives even an iota of a shit anymore; most white people in this country are like me and my husband, with mixed-up ancestry and raised in generic American neighborhoods, with only the most tenuous connection to European heritage. Like maybe a family recipe handed down from Grandma. The divisions among white people are much more cultural and class-based at this point.
But dumbasses gotta dumbass, I suppose.
moonbat
It’s not rocket surgery. Biden was building up the economy for the working class. The rich elites felt threatened by the idea of paying their workers a living wage and so sandbagged him by any means necessary. Enough of the post-COVID traumatized populace was convinced to go along because Biden couldn’t do the impossible of instantly making ‘everything go back to the way it was before’ and the racists were suspicious/angry that POC were going to have it better too.
RevRick
@jlowe: The wealthy really are exceedingly stupid. Their wealth depends upon us NPCs buying their stuff/services, because we first made their stuff/services. I wonder who they think will grow their food for them when they are hiding in their bunkers. That is, until their security detail just decides to unalive them and take their stuff for themselves.
Professor Bigfoot
I’ll buy that.
And Southern culture shouldn’t be the Stars ‘n’ Bars, it should be cornbread, mac&cheese, pulled pork sammiches, ice cold watermelon, ALL the music.
Eyeroller
@Booger: I am not entirely familiar with that book but I think the “Albion’s Seed” hypothesis, which from the title it sounds like it’s promoting, is not taken very seriously by most professional historians.
The history of the Scots-Irish was mostly about displacement and relative poverty. The Scottish themselves don’t consider themselves English at all. Conflicts with the English were about nationalism and territory, not English internal civil wars.
satby
@Eyeroller: English and Scots-Irish aren’t even compatible with each other as ethnic groups, much less being foundational to American culture. Just a complete ignoramous’s take
Edit:as your comment at 31 explains well.
NotMax
Holiday read.
26 Presidential Firsts You Didn’t Learn About in School.
I’ll add a 27th. John Quincy Adams – first president to be inaugurated while wearing long pants.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: as one of my favorite comedians says “the Irish have shagged their way into every group”.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: The Scots and the Irish were the most loyal soldiers of the Crown in India, even more so than Englishmen.
General O’Dwyer of the Jallianwalla Bagh fame is but one example.
Professor Bigfoot
It’s really remarkable how very stupid that guy is… but he’s got a talent for taking other peoples ideas and then convincing OTHER people to give him even more money for them.
Him, the Trumpies… you step back and look at them and you cannot NOT see just how very dense they are; but they’re still achieving “success.”
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: Oh yeah, with banjo music from Deliverance playing in the background.
Eyeroller
@Baud: The part of my family that is from West Virginia is not of Scots-Irish descent at all. They are Welsh and English and some northern Europe. My definitely Scots-Irish ancestors immigrated to North Carolina and then moved west from there.
Baud
Hillary was awesome.
danielx
Yes, I did have to look up Skipping Dipshit. Yes, it is accurate. Yes, there is a t shirt.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
I feel like the Scots and the Irish must have kicked out all their trash, because the ones actually in Scotland and Ireland seems like decent folks.
Trivia Man
@NotMax: XKCD also looks at ‘firsts’ in the context of winning presidents. https://xkcd.com/1122/
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: According to Ancestry, I’m 25% Askenazi Jew, 46% Slavic, and the remainder, Germanic from scattered regions of Eastern and Central Europe.
Geminid
@Suzanne: This is what I responded to:
I just pointed out two Democrats who have demonstrated keeness to address affordability because the commenter did not seem to know about them, even though those two women won two of the three most important races last year.
The binary question wasn’t wheher we should embrace larger reforms than what Sherrill and Spanberger are pushing. It was whether Democrats are embracing the affordability issue at all.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: And dammit, the banjo is an African instrument!!!
THEY STEAL EVERYTHING!! 😂
Shalimar
@Suzanne: If you want more, you better be all-in on what Spanberger and Sherrill are doing as a starting point. Because we definitely aren’t getting more if they fail.
kalakal
@Eyeroller:
To be fair old Walter did basically create the whole Clan MacSporran, Claymores, & Shortbread romantic Highland Scots culture once the real Highlanders had been stomped flat after Culloden
Professor Bigfoot
Fixt. ;^D
(that woman is HIGH on my list of BABs and I’d follow her and the rest of the BABs right to the gates of Hell.)
Anne Laurie
Well (said the Celtic-American), that certainly helps explain your pugnaciousness!
But seriously… a big chunk of the people I’ve met with my (Scottish) last name have been African-American (plus a few whose Jewish ancestors got renamed at Ellis Island).
IIRC Annette Gordon’s book on the Hemmings, the first ‘one drop’ laws in Virginia were written to official,y exclude the children of a Scots-Irish immigrant and his Black wife from the privileges of ‘Whiteness”…
Baud
@Shalimar:
Excellent point. One that should have been learned in 2009.
Shalimar
@Professor Bigfoot: As someone who owns 2 banjos, I would be ok with someone stealing them.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
You should change your nym to Professor O’Bigfoot.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: Scot-Irish are a sub-group of Protestants shipped to Ireland from Scotland to occupy confiscated land from the native Roman Catholics.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: YOU EARTHER! YOU TERRAN! YOU DENIZEN OF SOL III!!
😉
(the SF fan in me will always be “Terrans Uber Alles”)
Belafon
@Suzanne: The Roman and British Empires would like a word.
hueyplong
@Eyeroller: Because of mining, you’re not alone when it comes to people in WV who can trace an ancestor to Wales.
And I suspect Trump has no clue whether “Scots and Irish” describes something different than “Scots-Irish.”
The wannabe Nazi pig can’t croak soon enough for my taste. A fine compromise would be to bury him in whatever Nevada mountain is used for nuclear waste. Burial spot isn’t Arlington, but also isn’t particularly suited for repeated human waste deposits.
Suzanne
@Shalimar: I am all-in on what Spanberger and Sherrill propose. 100% in support.
I also want to be able to discuss bigger, bolder, necessary actions/goals of government without it devolving into binary nonsense. We here are smart people and I believe we can hold two thoughts in our head at the same time.
Baud
@Suzanne:
Wait, what’s the second thought I’m supposed to have?
jlowe
@RevRick:
futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/billionaires-preparing-for-end
Sam Altman says he has a “. . .big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to. . .” when the balloon goes up. Unless that big patch extends east over the Gabilan Mountains into the Salinas or San Benito Valleys and includes a bunch of serfs to work the flat land, he’ll eventually starve and good riddance. Not terribly much for peeps to eat in Big Sur unless they’re few in number and proficient hunter-gatherers.
RevRick
@Baud: Policies, schmolicies. The vast majority of people don’t care one iota about policies, and when offered some, their eyes glaze over.
The general public wants a sense of direction, not specifics. FDR didn’t lay out an extensive policy platform. He said New Deal and that was all he had to say.
Baud
@RevRick:
It helped that the Depression was raging for three years.
I’m not even sure the commenters on this blog wouldn’t freak out if the Dem nominee didn’t make specific promises on policy.
Professor Bigfoot
So, you DON’T hate waffles? (giggles, ducks, runs)
Yells from outside of fisticuffs range “BUT I REALLY DO AGREE WITH YOU!!”
Quiltingfool
@Suzanne: I have Scots-Irish ancestry. I don’t even know what that culture is, tbh. Wearing kilts? Eating oatmeal? Potatoes? Thatched cottages? Bagpipes?
Don’t get me wrong, there are some delightful aspects to a Scots-Irish and oh yeah, let’s include the English, culture. But who wants that to be everything? There are delightful things about all cultures.
Skipping Dipshit *may* have Scots Irish ancestry, but I’m not sure the Irish or Scottish folk would claim him.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: Ahh thanks for the clarification. So are all SI protestant?
hueyplong
@RevRick: Haha, and what FDR actually laid out during the 1932 campaign was at times contradictory (no one could square what he said in Pittsburgh with anything else he said).
chemiclord
@Suzanne: Especially since to genuinely tackle affordability, it needs to be at the largest scales possible. Individual states can somewhat impact things, but this economy is so inexorably entwined that there needs to be a macrocosm-level effort.
Now, admittedly, a huge part of the problem is that the American people as a whole haven’t been willing to do what needs to be done, and the few times that they were, it was only by freezing out minorities from the bulk of the benefits.
prostratedragon
@Professor Bigfoot: Prof. Gates was appalled to find that genetically he is more than 50% European.
Anne Laurie
Seriously, as a member of that clan: The ‘Scots-Irish’ being discussed by Elon are the descendants of many generations of marginal ‘losers’ who got kicked from the steppes to Roman-era Gaul to the ‘British’ Isles to the imagined savage hell of pre-Revolutionary America. The successful Celts managed not to get evicted in favor of sheep, or busted for poaching, or caught doing sex work as their only survival choice, or just being in the wrong place when some dipshit aristocrat was in a bad mood. We’ve got a genetic *and* a cultural tendency towards anarchy.
It’s like the joke about the Dutch: They’re a ‘peaceful’ nation now, because they sent their criminals to England (the Orange monarchy) or South Africa (the Boers).
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: LOL. I am #teamfood. Pancakes, waffles, Freedom toast. What architect Robert Venturi referred to as “both/and solutions”.
Social media has made discourse so dumb, in addition to more hostile. It’s a real bummer.
hueyplong
@chemiclord: Nothing quite like having strict segregationists as the chairmen of each and every committee. The south figured out that having dynastic political families in one-party states led to their kind holding every position of seniority other than the presidency itself.
jowriter
@moonbat: I want to frame this explanation and hang it on a wall in my house.
Eyeroller
@Professor Bigfoot: My understanding is that most American Blacks are up to 50% white. We know why.
But hey! Welcome to the tribe!
RevRick
@Suzanne: The Democrats were in the political wilderness throughout the 1920s, but behind the scenes their intellectuals had developed a suite of policies that they believed would build upon what the Wilson administration had started. FDR was the smiling face that enabled those ideas to take shape, but it’s worth noting that when he ran against Hoover, he attacked him from both the left and the right about his response to the Great Depression and the commmentators of his day saw FDR as a lightweight.
chemiclord
@Geminid: I meant the party as a whole, which I admit can be tricky to parse in a sentence, especially when I don’t give any good context clues.
Eyeroller
@Suzanne: Sounded more like Stephen Miller, who is neither English nor Scots Irish but would likely want to center them.
Dumbass himself is near-half German and half Scottish.
RevRick
@Professor Bigfoot: Why don’t you drum it into me?
Professor Bigfoot
It’s difficult to process nuance in this environment; and I am constantly torn between “Americans are really that dumb” and “Americans aren’t that dumb but they are constantly manipulated by bad actors who take advantage of the human desire for simplicity.”
I don’t even know if it’s possible to quantify how much of “social media” is literally driven by bad actors, but I’d bet it’s a lot.
Suzanne
@Quiltingfool:
If you believe the way some of the proudest American Scots-Irish define themselves, it’s this:
Some basis in “honor culture” is probably a broad-but-fair assessment. I have seen it described as “the most naturally libertarian American subgroup”, though I don’t remember where I heard that. The areas primarily settled by the Scots-Irish are still pretty strongly GOP-voting, though I don’t know if that has always been true.
Dave
@RevRick: There was a discussion at Davos regarding this that went particularly off the rails but in a way that is entirely predictable if you understand the mindset.
The baseline assumption they operate on, and is seems to grow worse as it they entomb themselves further and further from everyone who isn’t them or directly in service to them, is that they are the only real people.
Everyone else exists to serve or impede their whims not true internal life no value outside of whatever metric is most convenient for them. So really according to Pratchett the origin of all sin.
I’m just aware enough to see the millennialism built into the SV Bros attitudes just reshaped with tech and AI (not the reality of it but the pure platonic ideal of it they know exists) as God and them it’s true elect or perhaps them as the progenitors of the wellspring itself.
It’s the same source of the war on empathy the outrage that they would be called on to actually constrain their wants because of the sheer gall of those not in the elect to demand that yes they matter as well.
The obsession with eugenics that they must be superior in some essential way that demands moral weight. It’s all destructive and all serves to radicalize me against the excessive concentration of wealth beyond the entirely sufficient easily measurable harm it does but also the psychological, spiritual, and more esoteric harm it causes as well.
Jeffro
@Geminid:
you KNOW affordability is a hot-button issue when even MAGA psycho John McGuire has dropped just about 99% of his culture-war BS in official communications to constituents and has shifted hard towards pretending to care about affordability.
Anne Laurie
Holding grudges. First & foremost, holding grudges, as we say, as though the grudge was your first-born child. All else — and there is much else — is commentary.
Eyeroller
@satby: Except of course the Scots-Irish aren’t Irish at all. They were settlers.
My Ulster ancestors were dour Presbyterians.
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:
This ‘culture’ talk of theirs gives me hives. It’s even on the dhs.gov front page: there’s a poster-looking thing that says, “PROTECT THE HOMELAND – DEFEND THE CULTURE – JOIN USCIS.” Argh.
First of all, it’s not like culture is something that can be controlled or defended. Second, it hasn’t been just English/Scots/Irish for a good century and a half, since we got waves of immigration from central, southern, and eastern Europe between the Civil War and WWI, waves that incidentally included two of my grandparents.
Each wave of immigrants has added to, broadened, our culture, bringing new life to it, making it more than it used to be. I’m old enough to remember the culture of suburbia in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it was fucking bland. Who wants more of that? I sure don’t.
NeenerNeener
@Geminid: There’s a recall petition for Spanberger on NextDoor right now. MAGA being powered by grievance is a real thing.
Suzanne
@chemiclord:
Agree. I often think that what Democrats propose is “necessary but insufficient”…. but I am aware that there are many factors that make the sufficient nigh impossible to achieve at that particular moment. And that “necessary-yet-insufficient” critique is not intended to ever imply “vote for the GOP”.
I just….. understand why people find the political sphere of life demoralizing.
Jeffro
MAGA: “Scots-Irish are the real Americans”
Italian-Americans: “the fuck you say?”
German-Americans: “oh that’s it”
and so on
please proceed, MAGAts
Eyeroller
@Baud: I assume you’re not counting Ulster as “Ireland,” which would be fair as things stand.
That said, I am surprised that the Irish would be enthusiastic Empire supporters. The Scottish I could see, there are still famous Scottish regiments in the UK army.
Dave
@Eyeroller: Albion’s Seed was a fairly decent book that got over it’s skis in the way that pop-history and sociology often will. Some wonderful bits about how physical culture recreates itself and some interesting thoughts about how more esoteric elements can be surprisingly durable in how people perceive the world.
All taken to unreasonable places by malignant yahoos desperate to rationalize themselves and to give cover for the simple fact that they are racist (race and ethnic essentialists really) and afraid of anything different outside of their control.
And who further reduce an already simplified narrative to do so.
Professor Bigfoot
@RevRick: Soon as I get done wiping off my tablet and keyboard. 😂😂
As an aside… I believe that Shady V is completely wrong and actually, if we can define a uniquely American “culture,” it is Black culture.
From literature to music to sport- if you’ve been watching the Winter Olympics, you have to have noticed that ALL the athletes and their coaches and trainers interact with “daps,” very much a Black American thing that’s percolated to sporting events and athletes worldwide.
Music, from blues to jazz to rock to hip hop— all Black music; and all of it went on to conquer the world.
Literature, language— Black people are why there IS an Urban Dictionary; who have defined popular language since before it was groovy, baby.
Just like Black history is American history, Black culture is American culture.
there go two miscreants
Nooooooo! Having been raised on the horror films of the 1950s, I would be afraid of creating an even worse monster!
sab
@Suzanne: @Professor Bigfoot:
Britain during the Roman Empire had a lot of Africans. Roman troops were from all over their empire.
tobie
I’ve found it hard to gauge what’s happened to prices because the media isn’t pushing any one product to look at to raise alarms. Under Biden it was eggs,. Under Trump, no one item has really been singled. Maybe beef roasts??? So I just checked my previous payments for propane. In 2024 I locked in at $1.99/gallon; now it’s $3.14/gallon. So much for the golden economy.
Snarki, child of Loki
Okay, true history about Scots+Irish, but little known.
The Irish invented the bagpipes, then gave them to the Scots, who didn’t get the joke.
zhena gogolia
@moonbat: Good analysis.
Jeffro
here’s a little Scots-Irish for this fine morning:
“And I hear we weren’t welcomed here, at least not in those days
No one needs our drunken, fighting, thieving kind
But we settled in this new place and we worked it in our ways
And we spread our kin upon it in due time
Spread our kin upon it in due time…
Ever southern in my carriage, ever southern in my stance
In the Irish of my complexion and the Scottish in my dance
In the way I bang my head against my daily circumstance”
– Drive-By Truckers, ‘Ever South’
Geminid
@chemiclord: I was afraid you were ignoring Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger. Everyone else seems to have. Maybe it’s because they’re women, or maybe it’s because they’ve considered “Moderate,” but they don’t seem to count for national media sites.
RevRick
@Baud: Yeah, like all five of us will decide the election. Voting is emotional, not rational.
Going back to FDR, he really believed that the Great Depression was caused by structural issues in the economy and many of his policies were simply Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance on steroids. And many of his Brain Trust agreed. None of them understood that the real problem was a shortfall of demand, which is why they slashed spending in 1936, causing the sharp recession of 1937. Wartime Keynesianism solved that problem.
I’m all in favor of letting folks talking about what they would like to do, but when it comes to winning elections, that doesn’t matter very much. If at all.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: My Facebook memories served up a thought I had after the halftime show a few years ago, the hip-hop-focused one with Dre, Snoop, Mary J, Eminem, and Fitty. I had written that I was genuinely shocked by the mashed-potato-people freakout about it. Don’t all white Americans love hip-hop by now?! Damn!
My college dorm was full of young people of every color, and we all loved that stuff. OutKast, Nelly, Ludacris…..is the soundtrack of those years to me.
zhena gogolia
@Baud: That guy is so disgusting.
Dave
@Professor Bigfoot: They hate that this is true. I didn’t understand in the past why something as simple as noting that people clambering (usually disingenuously) for Black Americans to assimilate are ridiculous since the Black-American experience and culture is as distinctly American as any other and more than most.
In my innocence I didn’t understand why it generated such a hot response from people. Didn’t even claim it was more American that others though in practice I believe it is for a variety of reasons that don’t delegitimatize others experience but people that sentiment upsets aren’t thinking they are emoting vomiting anger and essentialism and denied superiority
Edit: it’s a strange sort of resentment because that happened because the ancestors of many Black Americans were trafficked and treated as property and had their cultures sundered (not completely of course there are certainly echoes of where they came from that have survived and been reimagined and exdapted) and so of course whatever culture they forged would reflect those very specific experiences.
Quiltingfool
@Professor Bigfoot: I welcome you to the group, but I suspect joining the group was not voluntary. I can’t imagine the sorrow.
My birth name is Scots-Irish origin (starts with Mc). Many years ago I was visiting a friend in Detroit and noticed a large auto repair company with my last name, exact same spelling (my last name is not exactly the Scottish spelling). I found out that business was owned by a Black family. I wondered what the circumstances were that a Black man would have that name. I was sure it wasn’t nice. I was also hoping that my ancestors were not party to that circumstance. I’d say probably not, though. From looking at what records I’ve found, my ancestors were all dirt-poor white folk.
TS
@Baud: And the man she was debating was awful – trump was entitled to do what he did because things were too woke, because there were too many sex variations – and the rest of the social nonsense attacked by trump. As Hilary said – “Is this a reason to let Ukrainians die fighting Russia”
MoCaAce
@Professor Bigfoot:
I do love me some pale man’s music but I’m all in on your culinary suggestions… and I’ll wipe my ass with their treason flag.
zhena gogolia
@Professor Bigfoot: Amen.
schrodingers_cat
@moonbat: Agreed and he elevated non-white people, mainly black women to positions of power that they had not held before.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I was so proud of his cabinet.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat:
The commander of the troops at Amritsar was Colonel Dyer, his boss as Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab was General O’Dwyer – both were Anglo-Irish*. O’Dwyer was a real piece of work, he backdated his declaration of martial law to cover Dyer’s actions and later ordered an air strike on civilians in Gujranwala. He was in favour of Home Rule for Ireland but opposed Indian Indepdence on purely racist grounds
* The Anglo-Irish were the ruling class of Ireland consisting of a mixture of old Gaelic nobility, Anglo Normans and English Protestant settlers since Tudor times, united in opposition to Catholicism. They’re not really the same thing as the Ulster Protestants who were mostly lowland Scots.
prostratedragon
“Rocky Road to Dublin,” Sinners soundtrack
chemiclord
@Professor Bigfoot: I’d argue they are one and the same; that the Average American’s desire for simplicity is because of their profound stupidity.
Twitter became the standard for online discourse because it discouraged nuance. The limiting of characters in any given post appealed directly to the demented goldfish brain that inherently loses interest the instant something encourages them to actually think beyond the superficial.
The Average American not only doesn’t know how anything works, they don’t want to know how anything works, and they get extremely angry when someone suggests that they should at least have a minimal understanding of the basics.
tobie
@chemiclord: Kamala Harris did go BIG when she proposed a program to end price gouging on food and groceries and ensuring competition in the grocery industry by limiting mergers. She got absolutely roasted for that proposal and accused of introducing communist style price controls.
She went BIG on eldercare but that proposal was largely ignored.
Americans don’t vote based on policy. They vote based on how much they like the messenger and vibes. This is a problem. A healthy democracy can’t survive if the public takes little interest in what govt actually does.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: originally. Though some could have converted as time went on. But that identity as a Protestant was central to the continued suppression of Roman Catholics up to the independence of the Republic, and afterward in British Northern Ireland until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.
Fun fact, the area of Ulster the Scots were sent to starting in 1609 was called the “Ulster Plantation”.
Professor Bigfoot
@Quiltingfool: Four generations on, “it is what it is,” y’know?
It’s a very common experience among American Black folks.
Here’s the horror— obviously the slavers raped Enslaved women who begat the slavers children, and the slavers would sell their own offspring.
Quiltingfool
@Professor Bigfoot: You forgot fried chicken.
I know that Southerners like greens with their fried chicken, but I go to my Irish roots with mashed potatoes and cream gravy.
My Arkansas grandparents referred to potatoes as “Irish potatoes” (pronounced as Arsh Taters) so as not to confuse them with sweet potatoes. Also, sliced white bread was called “light” bread; they ate corn bread every day.
Suzanne
@chemiclord:
Bingo.
The uppity, elitist idea that expertise matters is related to this, and it makes me crazy. This is (at least in my thinking right now), the distinguishing feature between populism and what I would just call good governance on behalf of people.
Eyeroller
@satby: From the still very recent history, it doesn’t seem like there was a whole lot of conversion by Protestants in Ulster. Romances between Protestants and Catholics were frowned on to the degree that sometimes they produced violence.
Kalakal’s explanation of the Anglo-Irish (in Ireland proper) was helpful to me in understanding some of this also.
schrodingers_cat
@kalakal: All this after using the British Indian Army as cannon fodder and using Indian wealth to fund WWI.
Jallianwalla Bagh was the beginning of the end for British Rule in India.
Kipling hosted the equivalent of Go Fund Me for the miscreants.
RevRick
@tobie: We all can’t be philosopher-kings. Successful campaigns create broad brush strokes and leave the details to be worked out later. You first need to attain power, and that requires finding a hook that engages the electorate. The winning electorate then creates a permission structure for the elected officials to carry out their policies.
A lot of evidence suggests that the electorate will align their views after the election to correspond to what their side is doing policy wise.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: The English Crown is a gift that keeps on giving. I wonder how many current conflicts can be traced to the seeds sown by them.
Professor Bigfoot
Bloody hell.
I remember my grandmother using this phrase when I was really young and NEVER had any idea what she was saying. 😳
Another one from my Tennessee family; calling it “light” bread.
Dang. 😁
satby
@Eyeroller: TBF, in medieval times parts of both what is now Scotland and Ireland were ruled by Gaelic tribal chieftains as the kingdom of Dál Riada. Lots of cross intermarriage since.
kalakal
Scots-Irish history is best explained by Sellar and Yateman in 1066 and all that
moonbat
@schrodingers_cat: For sure. I should have written that ‘women and POC were going to have it better too.’
It’s pathetic how many peoples’ self worth is built solely on witnessing someone else having it worse.
Suzanne
@Eyeroller:
One thing that I have wondered about but have never seen much data around….. the Scots-Irish were primarily Presbyterian, but have largely fallen away from that tradition. Part of that is certainly the rise of the “nones”…. but I wonder if they are also moving more to the generic Evangelical megachurch model.
I remember as a kid, when I moved to Arizona, someone asked me what church I went to, and I replied Presbyterian. Literally no one at the lunch table had ever heard of it. That is a very megachurchy part of the world. But here in western PA, there’s much more of the various mainline denominations and less of the megachurch.
satby
@schrodingers_cat: agree
Baud
In all events, Scot-Irish > white South African.
satby
@kalakal: That’s a great book (I have it), but keep in mind it’s recycled Punch Magazine articles. The Mad magazine of the 1800s.
marklar
@RevRick: “According to Ancestry, I’m 25% Askenazi Jew,…”
Well, if your maternal grandmother contributed that 25%, you are Halachically Jewish! Ms. Marklar teaches Bar and Mat Mitzvah lessons in the Lehigh Valley, and it’s never too late to get a fountain pen (that’s an old Borsht-belt joke reference for those who don’t know the punchline “today I am a fountain pen”).
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: Not quite sure how the English Crown was responsible for the Wars of Religion that wracked Europe from the Reformation until the end of the 17th Century which was the main driver for the settlement of Scots Protestants in Ulster
Baud
@RevRick:
You don’t have to tell me. My support goes to the first candidate that throws Balloon Juice under the bus.
Dave
@Baud: Talk about this. You want to be a Mr. Essentialist Xenophobe while also being Johnny Foreigner yourself GTFO. I have a very broad definition of American but if you don’t then White South African scumbag isn’t going to cut it pal.
Honus
@Jeffro: McGuire also embraced Black culture, without asking:
m.richmondfreepress.com/news/2026/feb/12/centenarian-rejects-mcguires-black-history-month-honor-of-h…
Karen Gail
I found this, it popped up on feed on facebook when I opened facebook and thought would share.
It is long, to me it explains the attitude and actions of “christians” that we see in media each day.
Benjamin Cremer wrote this:
Eyeroller
@jowriter: I think it wasn’t just the elite. It seemed pretty clear at the time that an awful lot of ordinary but well-off people (mostly whites, of course) were big mad that the lower classes were getting more money so they had to pay more for services, and that they couldn’t go to restaurants bars and events.
tobie
@RevRick: I get that people have their own lives to live and that brings with it all sorts of concerns, obligations, worries, expectations, pressures, etc. Not everyone will be interested in or even have the luxury of following politics closely. But you should be able to tell who speaks with some authority and in some detail about the burning issues of the day like how I can afford to put food on the table. I am disheartened that we as a nation seem so prone to propaganda. Whenever I phonebank or canvass, people don’t tell me they’re not following politics. They tell me what they saw on YouTube or read on Facebook.
Quiltingfool
@Suzanne: All I know is that my family can hold onto grudges indefinitely. Is that a Scots Irish trait? lol!
Grandparents were FDR democrats; some of their children and grandchildren have gone to the dark side, unfortunately.
My paternal grandmother really liked Bill Clinton, which discombobulated several of her Reagan/Bush loving children, who happened to be very churchy folk, if you know what I mean.
schrodingers_cat
@kalakal: IDK about all the minute details of religious infighting in Europe. I was speaking more generally of current flashpoints.
Also, wasn’t the method of genocide by starvation perfected by the English in Ireland?
chemiclord
@tobie: 1) You’re right in the sense that vibes are what drives this country’s electorate and that its stupid as hell. I have been beating that drum for years.
2) Kamala went “big,” but simply didn’t go nearly big enough. She went as big as she thought she could get with the state of the electorate (who again, despite all the griping, doesn’t want to do much of anything that would genuinely fix the problems they are griping about).
Suzanne
@Quiltingfool:
Yes, actually. Grudge-holding, strong clan and family affiliations…. those are definitely associated with that cohort (broadly speaking, of course).
satby
@kalakal: Henry the 8th was directly responsible, as his offspring Elizabeth ruthlessly suppressed Roman Catholics and warred against Catholic countries; and later his great nephew James1 of the United Kingdom began the Ulster Plantation project.
Eyeroller
@Quiltingfool: My Arkansas grandparents also referred to Irish potatoes and also English peas, to distinguish them from “yams” (darker sweet potatoes, all they ever ate) and black-eyed or crowder peas. But I never heard them refer to “light” bread. They didn’t eat all that much cornbread.
Some of the associations of Southern cuisine were consequences of poverty. Watermelons are indeed native to Africa, but apparently they became associated with African Americans because they were easy to grow and profitable (since all ethnic groups like them) in truck gardens. Similarly rural families, including Black families, could raise chickens. I’m not sure why frying, but Southerns fried all sorts of things, possibly due to lack of ovens or at least reliable ovens.
As to vegetables, most “standard” European-central Asian-origin vegetables prefer a colder climate and don’t grow all that well in a hot climate. Most of the coles other than collards, for instance. White potatoes. Carrots. Watermelon and okra and some others are native to hotter climates.
Another Scott
@kalakal: Now do the Celts. And red hair.
(I know almost nothing about them, or red hair, but they apparently moved all over, and the norm now is very much not the norm of the beginning, also too.)
People are weird.
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
chemiclord
@tobie: Being politically engaged is hard work. It takes time, money, and energy that a lot of people simply don’t have due to the stresses of their daily lives.
Being politically informed isn’t particularly hard at all. You just have to want to look. It requires more than just blindly turning on [insert single outlet here], and unfortunately, most Americans don’t even particularly want to blindly turn on a single outlet.
The number of people whose only exposure to the news is whatever channel is on the TV of the bar or restaurant or dentist’s office or whatever they are waiting in is staggering. We are a nation of profoundly incurious people who don’t even want to do the bare minimum.
Kathleen
@Elizabelle: Amen to that.
lashonharangue
@Professor Bigfoot: I once told my racist ex-BIL that without blacks, Jews, and gays, America would not have any culture at all. He was not pleased with that comment. I still think that to a first approximation that is correct.
satby
Yes. Though outside of Ireland, it’s still not classified as a genocide, since people starving wasn’t the primary purpose of exporting the food not affected by potato blight to England. According to experts on genocide anyway.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊 😊 😊
Kathleen
@chemiclord: Democrats have been talking about affordability since Trump took office. I’m old enough to remember Democrats were mocked and called feckless by The Pures for not meeting the moment because they were talking about “kitchen table issues” instead of the evil oligarchy.
rikyrah
@Baud:
Tell that truth
Suzanne
@Eyeroller:
Many cuisines, including ones we think of today as “fancy”, were poverty food. Boeuf bourguignon and pizza and burritos (and countless other things) are all borne out of the forced creativity of limitations. And they are all great.
No One of Consequence
Loved that first post about the halftime. I think that’s awesome and made me cheer.
Let me share with you something else awesome I was lucky enough to catch. I was watching the 2026 Iowa Boys Swimming State Meet on Saturday. They had a freshman, one Sawyer Corcoran from Centerville, who swam the 50-yard freestyle para race. He didn’t win. youtu.be/-t83PizLrd0?t=2833
But as you can see, Sawyer has a bit more of a challenge than his competitors.
Then this badass swam the 100-yard freestyle para. He didn’t win that one either. His only competitor in the race set a state record. youtu.be/-t83PizLrd0?t=6103
Now, a lot of people might not realize that the starting blocks are textured plastic/rubber. They are meant to be rough in a marine environment, so they provide the swimmer with friction for their feet. Must be quite rough on legs apparently amputated at the knees. For his 100 race, a teammate put a towel on the blocks for him, which I imagine helped.
As a state swimmer myself a few decades ago, I can attest to the feeling of that moment. However, what absolutely floors me is what that young man is dealing with as far as the physics of moving the human body through the water. Legs, if kicked even slightly, can keep the body on waterline, which is where you want to be with most strokes (save breast). This young man has no means of keeping his back half on waterline. So he is constantly swimming uphill. That is extremely tough to do. You can see how he has modified his stroke to provide some lift/thrust to try to counteract this, and I am just in awe of the bravery and badassery of his efforts and courage.
What a fucking stud. I think he deserves recognition he may not get. Pounds of respect from me, and he has new superfans in my house. My own son is a freshman swimmer, and I hope he gets to state in his high school career so he can shake that young man’s hand at the meet.
Dunno if anyone else will dig this as much as I did, but I hope it at least inspires some of us to do and be more. I ain’t got shit on this young one.
-NOoC
p.s. The rest of the meet had some amazing records set, and some nearly missed. I dunno what they are feeding the kids these days, but some of them are damn fast.
Eyeroller
@Professor Bigfoot: The banjo is based on African instruments but it did evolve in the US, and I don’t mean just the modern version.
On some NPR show years ago I once heard a guy playing a banjo with a leather covered gourd resonator. It had a distinctly banjo-ish sound but still different from a modern banjo. One can find somebody playing something similar on YouTube fairly easily.
As to the ancestry of so many American Blacks, you are probably all too aware that until recently there was a different standard for certain blood values indicating kidney function for African Americans and everybody else. This was based on flawed (but not intentionally racist) research from decades ago and persisted because nobody redid the studies for a long time. I read about some biracial woman who was conflicted about what race to use in her medical records, but she decided on “Black” and as a result, her kidney disease was diagnosed later than it should have been.
gene108
@Suzanne:
What is it with these dipshits that can’t understand culture keeps changing.
They really want to impose some imaginary “European” culture that all white people have in common, but even Europeans don’t have a common culture and shared history. Each part of Europe has its own unique history.
They are so desperate to impose their imaginary “Western culture” and “Western values” on the rest of us. They’ll keep gaslighting us until we understand the glory of a white conservative evangelical Christian ethnostate.
Eyeroller
@Suzanne: There are also some, uh, dicey foods that are pretty obviously poverty (edit: and/or desperation) foods but have become “delicacies” like blood curds, rotted shark, whatever that horrible Scandinavian fermented fish is called, etc.
Quiltingfool
@Professor Bigfoot: I think poor whites and poor blacks ate the same things. You know, poor people food!
My Arkansas grandpa had lots of weird pronunciations. He also cussed A LOT. He did tone it down a bit around a young me, when I referred to something as a sonofabitch when I was 3 or 4.
schrodingers_cat
@satby: Amartya Sen got his Nobel prize partially for proving how famines are not “natural” but engineered by a government that does not care about whether people they are responsible for live or die.
British were experts at creating those conditions.
Kathleen
@Suzanne: That certainly worked for Biden and Harris!
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: No, you skipping dipshit. Just…No.
The very idea that you can just skip (like a dipshit) over the First Nations and the Spanish and “forcibly emigrated” BLACK Africans in your idea of “America” is so insulting and fatuous, I would like to personally hork over your go-go boots.
Kathleen
@Anne Laurie: As an Irish on dad’s side and Scotch Irish on my mother’s side I consider myself an expert and will add it’s not just having the grudge it’s remembering the grudge until you die.
jonas
Yes, it’s definitely the Scots-Irish stuff that made America great. *Eyeroll* I’m sorry, but the real answer is that “American” culture — the stuff that’s fun, popular, famous around the world, what people (used to) come here to experience is, frankly, Black culture. Maybe classic Hollywood film is the one not-predominantly-Black mainstay of American culture. And some of the biggest creative forces behind that were…Jewish. “God Bless America” and “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” were written by Irving Berlin, ffs, from a Russian-Jewish refugee family.
There are some interesting and unique things about Scots-Irish and Appalacian culture, particularly the musical traditions, but to say that this is the bedrock of “American culture” is unbelievably, laughably ignorant. And not to mention pretty fucking racist.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@gene108: They have some Platonic idea of culture that they think we should aim for, but really, American culture is what America is. It’s what we do. Like the Republican party is what Republicans do, not what they claim.
kalakal
@satby: Oh I know. it’s a satire on how English history eas taught in Schools during the early 20th Century. I love it
Suzanne
@gene108:
Yeah. And….. most white Americans have very little connection to Europe left. I was born in 1980, which makes me older than the median American….. and all of my grandparents were born in the U.S. That’s pretty typical for white people. And most of us don’t live in ethnic enclaves anymore (and we aren’t one thing anyway), and many of us have relocated from where our immigrant ancestors once lived. I am not more than 1/4 anything from Europe. I am 100% American.
We whiteys are sorting ourselves out in different ways, though. Geographically, educationally, economically, politically.
schrodingers_cat
@Kathleen: I must be Irish in spirit then.
prostratedragon
@Karen Gail: Aha. As usual, “femme fatale” == “woman going about her business.” FWIW, I only encountered the plain scripture in my Sunday schooling, with the admonition that anyone might sin.
Just look at that parking lot
@Eyeroller: The blues player Otis Taylor was on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert Series some years back. I don’t think that who you’re talking about here, but he plays the banjo on this set & always talks a bit of banjo history during his shows. I’ll look for what your referencing to.
youtu.be/am4GcbBrdMA?si=rhLG8WtLuWOyjsXT
jonas
@schrodingers_cat: On a per-capita basis, the Irish famine, which, as you note, was very much the product of intentional economic and agricultural policies imposed by the English government, was worse than the great famine in China (1959-61) that resulted from Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Yet that’s always trotted out as proof of the failure of Communism. The Irish famine is blamed on the potato blight, but never on the capitalistic philosophy driving the English response.
The Pale Scot
Impoverished to the point of starvation by turning the commons into private property, encouraged to take the king’s shilling, no Celt fought for the King (some officers excluded)
Kathleen
@chemiclord: I agree!
prostratedragon
@Eyeroller: Fried foods keep longer without refrigeration.
sab
@jonas: Scotland had the exact same potato blight crop failure, but they had roads and responsible government so they didn’t all starve.
LAC
@chemiclord: 💯
Suzanne
@Miss Bianca:
The Skipping Dipshit is speaking up on behalf of America’s downscale losers who need to feel good about themselves despite never contributing anything of value to society.
Elmo looks like a human pile of mashed potatoes and I think he knows it, and feels bad.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: LOL! Welcome, O’S_C!
Baud
Birds of a feather.
jowriter
@Eyeroller: Many fairly well-off ordinary white people do consider themselves to be among the “elite.” They also wear blinders.
ArchTeryx
@jlowe: Quote with a great deal of salience:
“We’re better than you. We’ve always been better than you. Nothing you do matters.”
— Techbro or fictional character?
gvg
@prostratedragon: Skin color is when you think about coding instructions for building something as complicated as a human so superficial. It’s this thin surface of a really really complicated organism. Like a coat of pain on top of a whole industrial economy. The genes have instructions on how to build blood, veins, each organ, the nerves, the bones, what order, where to put them, how to repair them (somewhat), how to turn intake into useful fuel and new cells and eliminate waste, how to think and breath and create new babies. A few or more extra spots of darker melenin are just not very much of the code list. This seems so obvious to me. But I don’t think most people appreciate how much work must go into each of us. They also can’t seem to grasp that its common for things to go wrong and spontaneous abortion in the first couple of weeks is completely normal along with pregnacy never being guaranteed a good result.
Sure Lurkalot
@RevRick:
This is not altogether true in this day and age. The uber wealthy finance their lifestyles using stock as collateral and P/E ratios are ridiculously skewed by the same wealthy people and their toadies.
RevRick
@tobie: @chemiclord:
I don’t know how far you’ll get with “I wish humans stopped acting like humans” as far as politics go.
When it comes to how people vote there are four things that the vast majority care about:
1). Identity. Who’s my tribe?
2). Economic conditions.
3). War and peace.
4). Social order/disorder.
satby
@No One of Consequence: that was inspiring!
Lacuna Synecdoche
Aaron Rupar via Anne Laurie @ Top:
There’s a word for this … dammit, what it is … when assholes accuse other people of what what they themselves do all the time … oh right, now I remember: PROJECTION.
Really hope someone puts this guy in prison.
Again.
No One of Consequence
@satby: Glad you found it so too. At least one person did, so that comment was not a wasted one. Thanks for letting me know!
-NOoC
RevRick
@marklar: She was my paternal grandmother. My wife also had a paternal Jewish grandmother. And like me, she grew up in a two-family home with her grandparents living upstairs!
schrodingers_cat
@Kathleen: Actually, I do give people many chances, but once they use up those chances, they are dead to me.
Do you know the story of Krishna and Shishupal?
jonas
OT, but I was sad to read today that Michael Silverblatt, the low-key but brilliant host of the KCRW (LA’s major public radio station) show Bookworm has died. His show was somewhat like Terry Gross’s Fresh Air, but with less focus on public affairs and more on literature for literature’s sake. He was a great interviewer of writers and poets, a witty raconteur himself, and you always learned something when you tuned in, even if you had never heard of the author he was speaking with.
RevRick
@Sure Lurkalot: Stock markets can become hugely irrational, but eventually they have to be based on the real economy. Bubbles all will burst. And what is the worth of money if you can’t use it?
Karen Gail
@jonas: It wasn’t just the potato blight but the weather as a whole; agriculturally the weather was “perfect” for all the exported crops and terrible for potatoes. So the English land owners stripped the crops that grew abundantly and left behind the potatoes.
thruppence
@Suzanne: Great to see a Robert Venturi reference early in the morning. I’ll bet he was fun at parties.
ironcity
@hueyplong: I vote for the golf course corner in NJ. They seem to be fated totake the trash from NY.
trollhattan
That’s what the drugs are for.
#NeverABadDayWhenYouRichAsFuck
Omnes Omnibus
@RevRick: Keeping score.
Gretchen
@Suzanne: My Irish parents loathed the English all their lives for the 400 years of oppression and the starvation that landed our family here, and he wants to say we’re a united common culture, symbolized by the No Irish Need Apply signs
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat:
Yes and no. There were successive waves of Potato blight devastating the potato harvest worldwide leading to pan European hunger*. It was by far the worst in Ireland as the populace was so dependent on that one crop. Initially the British Govt in 1845 handled it about as well as any mid nineteenth century govt eg they barred food exports from Ireland, repealed the corn laws, imported maize from the US
Unfortunately there was a change of govt in 1847 and the new Whig administration was all in on laissez-faire economics, in US terms this would be swapping FDR and Hoover chronologically.
With a strict policy of ‘no interference in the free market’ plus slash all govt spending by the end of 1847 the results were horrific.
Relief only really came when the blight receded for a few years.
The Whigs of the day were the original Liberals** and believed in ‘drowning govt in a bathtub’ as the modern day GOP would say. The Tory govt did a fairly good job of relieving the initial famine, the Whigs by omission turned it into a nightmare
* The famine & resultant deaths were a major driver of the revolutions that broke out all across Europe in 1848
** The definition of Liberalism has changed a lot, a lot of Liberarian nutters like to call themselves ‘original Liberals’
Karen Gail
Most of the crown heads of European countries can trace their roots back to a common ancestor; depending on who you read it is either King George II or Queen Victoria.
I don’t know if this the root of claiming that Europe has same “civilization” as US or not; with the First Felon’s crew it is hard to tell if they are going with any facts or pure imagination.
Gretchen
@Gretchen: I don’t suppose that he knows that the Irish and the Scots Irish are two different groups that hated each other
jonas
@Karen Gail: Another way of saying that the English landlords took the best agricultural land and used it for growing commodity crops and left Irish tenants to eke a living out of more marginal, less well-drained soils where potatoes were really the only thing that grew. Potato blights are not rare, but when they hit a monoculture like the one in 19th century Ireland that millions depended on for their daily nutrition, it was a catastrophe.
kalakal
@jonas:
Absolutely! A philosophy very popular amongst the modern Right wingers
jonas
@kalakal: In European politics even today, “Liberals” are generally what we would think of as libertarians — free-market, low taxes, minimal regulations, etc.
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: I recently came across YouTube guy (professional financial advisor) who has a series about wealth levels and the privileges and pains that come at each level. One thing he consistently points out it is that happiest people he has worked with at any level are those that can define what is “enough” for them and then decide to enjoy their “enough”. Live well, help family and friends, create a legacy, give back, etc.
People like Musk don’t have that ability.
hueyplong
@Gretchen: I wouldn’t like to be the one charged with listing all the things Trump doesn’t know.
Duke of Clay
@Quiltingfool: “All I know is that my family can hold onto grudges indefinitely. Is that a Scots Irish trait? lol!”
Most definitely! Have you ever heard of Irish Alzheimers? They’ve forgotten everything but the grudges.
Ixnay
@Professor Bigfoot:yeah, man. Don’t leave out gospel.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
In fairness, Musk keeps trying to go bankrupt and investors keep responding by shoveling more money at him.
jonas
@Gretchen: He probably hears J.D. Vance bandy about the term “Scots-Irish” but couldn’t tell you to save his life who these people were or what their history in America was. Any time he pretends to know anything, he’s just parrotting something someone tried to explain to him, but which he has no clue about. He’s extremely, extremely stupid.
Jeffro
@Honus: “recognition given without consent is not honor, it is appropriation” – YES
what a woman!
laura
@Anne Laurie: aint that the truth! My people are English Scots on my dad’s side, and as they filtered across this great land, they got really, really racist/Baptist when they hit Oklahoma, and the few Okies that made their way to California had to modulate that hate, so much so that our Dad made sure we had very little direct contact with the Oklahoman’s at family reunions- and he made sure to be present so none of us kids were ever alone in conversation with his aunts and uncles. On Mom’s side, we are Irish Irish. As such, we have low expectations and low trust in others. But there is at least one of us in each generation that was born to hold a grudge like the Balkans. I mean just polishing a ridiculous grievance to a brilliant shine and never, ever reconsidering a change of heart. Cousin Scott went so far as to claim his late mother’s grievances and carry them on to the present day.
kalakal
@jonas: Correct. I was using the US meaning
In England they’re seen as wishy-washy Guardian readers. Well meaning middle class centrists who knit their own museli.
jonas
@Omnes Omnibus: There’s been a good amount of research done on what happens when people win huge lottery jackpots. The takeaway always seems to be that if you’re already a decent human being and have a strong sense of what your values are and what makes you happy, more money makes you happier! If you’re a terrible person who has few friends and no clue what things are worthwhile in life, coming into a bunch of money makes you much more miserable in the long run.
I seriously doubt Elon Musk truly enjoys anything in his life except the perverse, if fleeting, titilation that comes from people acting like obsequious lickspittles around him because he’s rich.
trollhattan
@Omnes Omnibus:
Seems reasonable.
Dunking on Bezos because he doesn’t have as much as you do (today, check back weekly) is probably the best possible thing for a gazillionaire.
He did learn being around the current {spit} president a lot wasn’t as much fun as he’d imagined.
Duke of Clay
@Eyeroller: I think frying is a Scottish thing. In the Doctor Who episode where he first meets Amy Pond, who is Scottish, he says “You’re Scottish, fry something!”
BTW, I am a native of Mississippi, genetically mostly Scots and Irish, and culturally very Scots-Irish. Imagine my shock at 24 when someone took me to a Soul Food restaurant in Chicago, and there was nothing on the menu that I hadn’t eaten regularly at my grandmother’s table. I subsequently have come to realize that the people culturally most like the Southern whites I grew up with are Southern Blacks.
Betty Cracker
@laura:
LOL! I kept my late mother’s grievance against one of her brothers for more than a decade. It was righteous as the sumbitch fully deserved it.
But fairly recently, I decided to let it go — for my sake, not his. I think Mom would understand.
artem1s
@Suzanne:
so close down, MLB, NBA, and the NFL. NOT Making American (English-Scotts-Irish) Culture Great Again, I guess.
I guess the 1980 US Hockey Teams should give their gold medals to Russia.
Spc
@Eyeroller: Albion’s Seed errs in trying to package its central thesis a bit too neatly but still makes some interesting points in relation to regional cultures.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Baud: and Peter was a typical condescending ass hat.
Suzanne
@thruppence:
Does it make me a coastal elitist? LOL.
I recently purged some books from graduate school that I do not need to haul around any longer. Complexity and Contradiction absolutely survived that purge! What a great book.
jonas
@Shakti: Time for another round of “Could You Imagine the Reaction if a Democrat…?”
I still remember Fox turning Kamala Harris purchasing a nice frying pan or something in France into a day-long orgy of tirades about out-of-touch Spend-O-Crats and their raging elitism.
Baud
@Cheryl from Maryland:
Hillary has a lot of experience dealing with those.
Suzanne
@jonas:
We cook food, and read books, and wash our hands. Probably change our underwear and other deeply elitist things.
Professor Bigfoot
@Karen Gail: Wow.
Thank you, I’m off to find that in the wild to keep and pass on.
snoey
@Omnes Omnibus: Bob Weir once said that having money meant that you didn’t feel so bad about chucking out the hard to open pistachios.
Nick
It’s Presidents’ Day:
“America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations And Religions; whom we shall wellcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.”:
George Washington 1783
George Washington was woke. So was Jesus. I’ll take those two over Fat Donnie and any maga
Tony Jay
@Duke of Clay:
I think that’s a joke aimed directly at the propensity of some – not all – Scottish fish and chip shops to offer their customers whatever the hell they like deep-fried in thick batter.
And I mean anything. Chocolate bars. Pizza slices. Pies. Unwanted pets. Anything. Not saying those things wouldn’t be delicious, but the health implications!
Doubly funny because, come on, Karen Gillan’s Amy Pond quite clearly did not stuff her face with battered Mars Bars.
Sure Lurkalot
@RevRick: I think small business mostly operates under the old rule, basic fundamentals but the too big to fails? Not really. Mitt Romney made a shitload of money destroying businesses, and the other “PE” (private equity) is doing mightily well.
This Gilded Age is very unlike the ones before. I’m not sure how this one ends because so many systems have been captured. Even here on this left leaning blog, people balk about “eat the rich” and reinvigorating discarded policies like trust busting and deconsolidation.
tobie
@RevRick: Any reason for the repeated condescension? First telling me that not everyone is a “philosopher king,” as if I expected that, and now claiming that I have no clue how people vote, unlike you in your boundless wisdom. I dont claim to have any special insight into people’s souls but I suspect most people want security in their lives and are drawn to politicians who they believe can deliver that.
cain
@Suzanne: I suspect that the Dutch and germans are going to be upset.
laura
@Betty Cracker: don’t know why, but I had a thought about Quoyle’s aunt chucking her brother’s ashes down the outhouse.
ArchTeryx
@Tony Jay: And that’s actually how fried chicken came to America. The Scots brought it, but it was bland as heck. Slaves were not allowed any prime meat, but chicken was cheap and common, and they remembered how things were done in Africa. (Spice the hell out of it. North African dishes, especially, are hella tasty). So they took the basic Scots recipe and amped it right up, and it became a hugely popular slave dish. Which us white folks eventually adopted, though to this day racial stereotypes about fried chicken persist.
I’m lucky enough to have a first class fried chicken place close to me, Hattie’s. Can’t get enough of it.
Professor Bigfoot
@Eyeroller: I know— I promise, that quip of mine was thoroughly tongue-in-cheek. 😉
lowtechcyclist
@marklar:
My paternal grandparents were Jews in what was then Tsarist Russia (now Poland for one and Ukraine for the other), but my maternal grandmother was born and raised in Scotland, so I was baptized and confirmed in the Presbyterian church, well before I became a Christian for real.
I’ve never bothered to take one of those tests to see where my ancestry came from, given that 3/4 of it is pretty well-defined as it is. My one grandparent who was born on this side of the Atlantic was of fairly generic Anglo ancestry. Maybe there are some interesting wrinkles back there, but what does it matter?
Eolirin
@Suzanne: Public support generally isn’t there for that.
UBI, as an example of something we should be doing because the data presents an overwhelming case, is going to be resisted not just by politicians but by American voters for being too much of a handout.
We’re more likely to convince the politicians than the voters even, but then they have to weigh losing their jobs.
@chemiclord: And this is a large part of why we can’t have better anti poverty policy.
@RevRick: This only works with partisans, and we don’t have a majority of partisans. Otherwise you get cyclical shifts as policy changes occur. There was a serious push back to ACA getting passed for instance, that helped lose us seats in 2010, though it wasn’t the only cause. And you can see the pushback to Trump in the 2018 midterms as well. You can’t acclimate the public as a whole to large policy shifts unless they benefit directly, and unfortunately for much of the US electorate, there’s a willingness to burn down a lot of things if they benefit people they don’t like even if they do benefit. All of this makes big policy shifts toward greater equality very hard. It’s extremely easy to demonize a big new program. Culturally or society is primed to be skeptical. And then no one really knows how anything works, and so it’s very easy to spin whatever narrative as long as it’s connecting to some usually racially driven anxiety.
lowtechcyclist
@Honus:
From your link:
Which raises the question, “what’s a ‘Gooch’ and why did they settle in central Virginia?” ;-)
Steve LaBonne
@Eyeroller: Germans are in fact the largest white ethnic group in the US. Ben Franklin’s worst nightmare came true!
Karen Gail
I had a friend back in the 70’s; highly intelligent doctorate in engineering and otherwise full of solid advice and wisdom, but he was convinced and could convince others that the “whiteness” was not natural that this was result of a group of escaped criminals from beyond our solar system who purposely crashed landed on planet where they could inter breed with natives. By the time he would finish pulling together facts and information he would have you agreeing with him; not only that I find that at times his arguments still make sense. When it came to light that the native people of British Ilse looked more like Native Americans than what we think of as “European” looks. (Sun burn capable during full moon.) I once again found myself thinking about his crash landing theory.
Steve LaBonne
@cain: We don’t want German trash like Dwight Eisenhower in our country amirite.
Steve LaBonne
@Karen Gail: I thought we were an experiment by evil scientist Yakub.
Suzanne
@Eolirin:
I am fully aware.
But I also think there’s a value in discussing the biggest solutions to our biggest issues. Like, we didn’t get Medicare for All, for example. But sometimes windows of opportunity open up and you get the ACA instead. It’s not everything I want it to be, but it is a generational advancement, a huge improvement in our governance.
Again, we are smart people here. Our politics are too small sometimes.
marklar
@lowtechcyclist: “Maybe there are some interesting wrinkles back there, but what does it matter?”
Not much. It was just a comment made in the spirit of inclusion. I’ll make the same offer to you. In the Reform tradition, your paternal grandparents make you Jewish, if you want to be! Mazel Tov!
Tony Jay
@ArchTeryx:
One of the things I’d really love to dive right into should I ever go back to the US is the whole “Whose fried chicken is the best?” debate. I’d judge the hell out of that whole delicious question.
kalakal
@Tony Jay: The deep fried Mars bar was a joke about the crap Scottish diet of fryed everything until the day someone actually made one and the Gates to Cardiologist’s Hell were opened.*
To be fair to my countrymen it’s that or oats . And you do not want to eat deep fried oats.
*Scotland has by far the worst heart disease stats in Europe. I blame video games
Nettoyeur
@Baud: worst health and economy in US. Also high in out migration
Nettoyeur
@cain: 40ish% of all Americans have German ancestry. Over 50% percent if of white Americans.
Shakti
@kalakal: @schrodingers_cat: I keep thinking of this post from War Nerd from 2020:
The War Nerd: Amateurs Talk Cancel, Pros Talk Silence
Discusses why there’s comparatively little discussion of the Irish Potato Famine as a genocide by noting the Victorians didn’t really write about it in fiction or in public records
Adam Jones wrote textbooks on genocide studies; Niall Ferguson, not so much.
In New Jersey (wikipedia) they thought of teaching the Irish Potato famine as an example of genocide:
RevRick
@Suzanne: All discussions of policy run into the fact that Democrats never agree on the particulars and thus they come across as not being able to get their shit together.
What Democrats need to do is communicate their shared values to the public and work out the policy details later, when they’re in charge.
Here’s an example of a value-laden speech:
To provide for our posterity…we must be knit together in this work as one; we must hold each other in mutual affection ; we must be willing to rid ourselves of our excesses to supply others’ necessities…we must make others’ conditions our own and rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our common work….”
Shakti
@jonas: Such reactions are just Some People Are Allowed to Have Everything Endlessly B/c Everyone’s Money Only Belongs to Them
and Peons Should Have No Luxuries or Necessities and Be Grateful For it Even If It’s Their Own Money.
It doesn’t derive from principle, just class. Or also, the principle is that PoC shouldn’t have nice things and that’s fraud.
lowtechcyclist
@marklar:
I’ll have to take a pass, despite the generosity of your offer – if I became Jewish, I’d still be a born-again Christian, so I’d be one of those ‘completed Jews.’
I’d rather be just one thing or the other, and since what I am already is rooted in a life-transforming experience, I think I’ll stick with that. :-)
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus: keeping score….
Is there anything more pathetic than that? It misses everything about what makes us fully human and fully alive.
SFAW
@Professor Bigfoot:
With you so far …
OK, now you’ve crossed the line.
ETA: Unless you change that to gospel, as Ixnay stated in a comment
Eolirin
@Suzanne: I think the problem with some of that is the going big, like Medicare for All, is definitionally not an actual plan, because that would have sucked.
Medicare is already bad policy and would be a disaster as the bedrock to our healthcare system. Medicaid is better policy and the VA is better policy, but both of those are heavily demonized and neither would work at whole of society scale without serious revision.
But it’s also not like universal health coverage hadn’t been a policy objective since the 50s. ACA was what we could succeed with, but it was the third or fourth major attempt depending on whether you want to count the Nixon plan. Medicare for All didn’t really start being a slogan that gained much traction until after the ACA proved inadequate to fix the whole system. And it’s a lie of a slogan.
But we probably have that level of energy for things like sick leave and more labor protections, infrastructure, energy stuff, a few other things. On other objectives, like UBI or the social infrastructure part of Build Back Better we still need to build it.
The broader point though is that when those sorts of policy directions are brought into a space like this one it immediately leads to lots of arguments that are legitimately founded in good faith, but have no salience to trying to sell things to the American people.
And the story you need to be able to sell it is really incompatible to trying to come up with a workable solution for the problem. So if we’re going to have that conversation we need to decide if we’re talking about policy or if we’re talking about marketing, and if it’s marketing that’s going to be more campaign focused.
But it’s also a conversation that tends to lead one to despair, because there’s a simple way to do this, and then a bunch of complex kludges because people aren’t on board with the simple solution.
And I know there’s going to be a lot of debate about how simple solutions to complex problems are always wrong, but there’s some pretty good reason to think that’s bullshit here; tax people enough so that there isn’t massive wealth consolidation, enforce a strong regulatory body especially around antitrust issues but also predatory private equity style financial activity, and give everyone two thousand dollars every month. You claw that back in taxes for the people earning too much. After that you just need to fix the housing and healthcare markets by increasing supply (of houses and doctors, etc) and limiting how much rent seeking can go on.
That mostly boils down to doing a massive wealth transfer downward. That by itself solves most of the problem. We still have some environmental issues we’d need to sort and those are much more complex to navigate as the trade offs are less morally clear than take away rich people’s money and give it to poorer people either directly or through services.
Some of them would likely require technological solutions. We still need to grapple with the scale of human population putting a strain on Earth’s resources. But we’d have a much better environment to be making the attempt in.
Geminid
@Tony Jay: Whose fried chicken is the best? People in southern Indiana claim theirs is. They say that if Colonel Sanders had been born in Indiana he’d have been a general.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: I’m the same. No, I am not familiar with the tale.
Professor Bigfoot
@SFAW: ABSOLUTELY including Gospel— really the foundation for everything that came after.
trollhattan
@Steve LaBonne:
For my birthday I’m invading Poland then on to the Low Countries.
Traditions, you know.
trollhattan
@Geminid:
I’m fond of the mango wars. Put an Indian, a Filipino, an Indonesian and a Brazilian in a room, ask the question then clear out.
laura
@Geminid: everybody knows that my late mother’s fried chicken was the best. I mean, it’s not even a question, and it cost her one and one half eyebrows to perfect.
schrodingers_cat
@Kathleen: Its from the Mahabharat.
Shishupal and Krishna are first cousins. There is a heavenly prophesy that Shishupal will meet his death at Krishna’s hands. Krishna’s aunt begs him to forgive her son for any wrongs he commits.
Krishna says I will forgive him 100 times.Shishupal grows up to be a nasty princeling, throwing his weight around and being a pest.
When Shishupal acts out the 100th time, his time is up.
schrodingers_cat
@trollhattan: If you take 4 Indians from four different states, a full fledged brawl will break out
Hapoos is the best mango.
BTW, there are as many varieties of mangoes as there of apples.
Mangoes good for eating, for pickling, for juice, for sweet chutneys, as a souring agent (like lime) and so on
Kayla Rudbek
@Booger: yeah, Eric Flint was quite a fan of the Scots-Irish (aka Ulster Scots) and it spectacularly didn’t work in his alternative history of the War of 1812 (especially with respect to Andrew Jackson)
Kayla Rudbek
@Quiltingfool:
@Professor Bigfoot: The “real McCoy” of the famous expression was Elijah McCoy, a Black inventor who invented a lot of railroad equipment (and the USPTO branch office in Detroit is named after him).
Another Scott
@Eolirin: Speaking of sick leave… VPM.org (from November):
It’s SB2. It’s moving.
Taxes would start on 1/1/2028, benefits would start on 1/1/2029. Politics is slow, but elections matter!!1
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Suzanne
@RevRick:
I agree with you on this. Very strongly. I am a reasonably intelligent person (cue the snickers), I am more aware than probably 90% of Americans about civics and governance….. and I am in no way capable to make nuanced judgments about most policy. It requires specialized expertise. Which is fine. Values don’t require expertise, though. Talk to me about goals. Talk to me about endgame.
And, quite frankly, public policy discussions with people who are not experts are terrible. Every time I witness one, I feel like I come out dumber.
The other thing….. these discussions have a nasty tendency right now to get tribal, on our own side. Intra-Dem fighting is honestly the thing that causes me the most concern right now. If we manage to have elections, Dems will win again, maybe in 2026 and 2028. But if we want the kind of sustainable majority necessary to win elections multiple cycles in a row….. we have to have good, big public discussions about our goals and win more people over to the broad outlines of them.
Kayla Rudbek
@schrodingers_cat: I think Shiv Ramdas on Bluesky has some comments about over 100+ countries around the world celebrate the day when English rule ended
Kayla Rudbek
@kalakal: well, if England had stayed Catholic, there would have been more alliances with Spain and against the Protestant Germans and Nordics, and maybe less Habsburg inbreeding in the Spanish royal family. Not sure if swapping in the Tudor bloodline would be an improvement though.
Tony Jay
@kalakal:
(DEEP BASE VOICE)
“CHALLENGE ACCEPTED”
@Geminid:
One of the clues that a celebrity chef has made it in the UK is that the BBC will send them to the US to film a foodie road trip series. Southern Soul Food with tons of fried chicken is always one of the episodes where you can see the chef living their absolute best life.
kalakal
@Kayla Rudbek: What with the reformation, counter reformation, the rivalry between France and the Hapsburgs, Europe and England were a blood soaked mess for 200 years. Go back a century earlier and you have some pretty major hints about what the break from Catholicism would be like with the Hussite wars.
Add in the fact that England and France were at war from roughly 1109 to 1815 with the French using alliances to mess with the British Isles.
It’s really impossible to put a start point on when conflict started between what’s now England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and the Isle of Man. The Anglo Scots wars lasted on and off from about 1330 to 1603, the Irish invasions of Scotland started around 350 etc. Go back as far as you like it’s a multi cornered fight
The English under Henry II had a Papal Bull from Adrian IV to conquer Ireland to bring them back under control of the Papacy in 1138
I’ve always felt that the Welsh are the ones who get ignored in all this
Jager
@Snarki, child of Loki: I have (on paper) one Norwegian ancestor, my dad’s mom. When we did Ancestry, I found out I was 51% Norwegian, which is likely because Scottish and Irish girls seemed to really like Viking men. Something about bathing more often. I thank God that my Scots-Irish ancestors settled in Connecticut. Historians call the Norwegians the “unruly adolescents.” of the Viking Era. My wife agrees. BTW, all the major cities in Ireland were founded by Vikings, a lot of seed was spread.
kalakal
@Jager: You can get a clear idea where the Vikings were in England by place names – if it ends in ‘by’ it was probably founded by the Vikings
glc
I enjoyed the Tiktok. Which is not something I find myself saying much.
In another direction, there was a study somewhere showing that incumbents in NJ elections did worse in shore counties that had recently experienced a shark attack. This is not so different from the study showing that judges give harsher sentences just before the lunch break.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Suzanne: this thread is probably dead, but I was born in 1951 and all 4 of my grandparents were born in the United States also. 1/4 (the Czech part) were 1st generation, but the German, Irish, Scots, and English had all been here a while. But mostly too recent to have fought in the Civil War.
Another Scott
Obligatory Pitchbot:
Best wishes,
Scott.
Sally
@Baud: Hillary was/is awesome. The Czech gave himself away (again) when he argued about gender. “There is only one gender – I mean two”, he added as Hillary jumped in, eyes wide. So were mine. If ever there was a “Freudian slip”, that was it! These stupid men get away with their sweeping, nonsensical statements about “woke culture” and “cancel culture”, without ever being forced to EXPLAIN what they mean by those terms. Hillary was asking, but he was refusing to answer. These men throw these undefined terms around, without ever giving examples, and everyone winks and nods, and can interpret as suits them. To the racist it means one thing, to the sexist, another, etc. And it is all so puerile. Honestly. These guys need to grow up.
RevRick
@tobie: Yeah, I do owe you an apology. I was being condescending, for which I am sorry.