InfectedWithRealNiggaits

formula 1 is now a survival horror game where you never have enough resources to be comfortable when you get into a new combat encounter

This 200%. It's the final form of evangelicalism. No theology, no knowledge of any part of Christianity that isn't bizarre takes on revelation and 19th century premillennialist dispensationism.

a lot of discussion about how "cosmopolitan" urban dwellers are, but a really underdiscussed trend is the homogenization of culture across *rural* areas of the USA - replacement of once-distinct regional cultures with generic "redneck" accent and culture, regional religions with evanglicalism etc

When the money is there again, we can unfuck this and restore a lot of these areas.

While the money isn't there, we're just shifting pain around.

I think you fundamentally misunderstand what I'm saying.

You need to destroy right-wing patronage networks, orient the political economy around liberal urban centers, and create structural political-economic incentives for the suburbs to join coalitions *against* the rurals.

You need to do this *in addition* to reforming the administrative state.

Every Dem needs to be asking themselves in the aftermath of the Trump Regime, first and foremost: "What can I do to permanently weaken the power of the populist Right in America, and permanently strengthen the center-left?"

This is about whether we have a goddamn country at all.

You have to hoard enough power to keep the fascists at bay, though. Any less than that and you're saying goodbye to civil rights and everything else.

The reason we didn't have a second Civil War is that the North hoarded enough power that even after Reconstruction failed the South remained puny.

The something that happened was desegregation. Southern whites decided they would rather not have public services than for Black people also to have services. I’m not at all persuaded that this sentiment has changed in the intervening decades.

Here we go, its never our fault

Oh so the white racists do?

That's because we lived under ZIRP for a decade, haven't had a real fiscal scare since the 90's, and haven't had an inflationary crisis since 1973.

Dems facing those things ultimately imposed lots of sacrifices that hurt poor areas (including poor rural areas).

I don't really give a fuck about vengeance. The political economy of these places is toxic and a crucible for fascism, so it can't go on.

And we don't have the fucking money to make it go on anyway. We used to be able to accept, as a nation, that some locales collapse even as others thrive.

I don't plan on living next to terrorist Trumpistan. And I'm certainly not cutting off water or electricity. But super expensive infrastructure upgrades? No. Rural hospitals? It'd be cheaper to subsidize transport to hospitals in cities (or at least large towns in especially rural regions).

Fuck coercion. We can't coerce these ppl any more than we can coddle them. So we might as well leave them to their own devices and try to save as much of the country as we can.

The problem is that, under a much tighter fiscal constraint, it *is* at the expense of others.

Also, the money isn't fucking there and if someone has to suffer, it might as well be the ppl who've both been consistently a drain on the public coffers and a font of evil politics.

Destroying the MAGA millionaire class--which is highly ruralized and dependent on subsidies to rural areas--would be a huge plus for the US.

especially when they themselves are fighting it tooth and nail. Why are we trying so hard to make their unworkable lifestyles workable, against their own wishes, while they punish us for trying to help by voting to dismantle the government we’re using to help them? 2/2

Trump is some form of weird modern test of virtue that embodies every Greek myth about hubris, where the protagonists are convinced that while many, many people have been struck down by the gods for defying fate, they're actually just built different so it's gonna be ok.

The way I see it, people who choose to live in a run-down shack in the middle of nowhere are choosing to opt out of society, and for the government to chase them down and build a hospital in their backyard so they can stay there forever is a little weird, 1/2

I don’t think these people will change for anything, at least not the older generations. What we need to do, bluntly, is let them die. Their kids need to go off to college and then move to cities or suburbs, and the towns themselves need to be allowed to become ghost towns.

The Dept. of Education isn't contributing much to this hole, and has good long-term fiscal effects. So no.

Red state governments are perfectly capable of handling that themselves if they give a shit. Which they honestly might if they have to reckon with the specter of the alternative.

Dems can't invest in saving deranged ppl from themselves when we'll barely have the political capital to stabilize shit.

The very idea of a "rural community" is an outdated concept best left to British period dramas and not the modern age.

(I’d personally go a step further and go like drinking laws & make good provisions of the laws only apply to states that implement D social policies)

Maybe China has it right, and you need to treat rural people as 2nd class citizens.

We should spend tons of money on blue states so that we can point to them and say “Look at how great Democrat governance is.” vs pouring $ into red areas that makes them look better off than NYC.

The biggest thing about trying to convince conservatives that a government program will benefit them is that even if you do, even if they absolutely understand that their very lives depend upon this program, the second they see a single black person gaining said benefits all bets are off

The statewide margin didn't change very much but the landscape is straight-up unrecognizable.

Social media has enabled isolated rural people to be fully steeped in false victimhood + violent fantasies about subjugating "the wacko queers in the cities that stole their jobs" and they vote like it.