How divided is the city/town/quaint hamlet where you live?
- Thread starter Chew Toy McCoy
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I fear we may have a second civil war coming, regardless of the outcome of the election.
Something's going to happen, that much is for sure.
Eric
Mama's lil stinker
I was just talking to my son in Portland and it sounds like a bunch of Trump "patriots" are going to counter protest this weekend. If it's anything like it has been they'll be armed and plowing through people in their trucks.
We'll consider it a preview of what's to come.
Thomas Veil
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I just got a Biden sign and put it in my yard and I’m feeling so much better. 
(Yes, I got a backup sign as well.)
(Yes, I got a backup sign as well.)
U
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Natural selection in action.
SuperMatt
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I thought maybe the folks in PRSI were part of a radical wing of conservatives. Sadly, I think these are common points of view. How many millions of Americans believe baseless conspiracy theories? We are becoming the dumbest country in the world, with about 40% of the population believing many things that are easily proven false.
The home-school movement is growing because people think the evil liberals have taken over schools and are teaching their kids to hate Jesus and America. And the people doing the home schooling are NOT our best and brightest, obviously given the nonsensical reasons for doing it. A generation of poorly-educated children who will have to attend for-profit colleges like those in league with Betsy DeVos.
China will be the dominant power because the Republican party, Fox, and Facebook are apparently more harmful than communism.
The home-school movement is growing because people think the evil liberals have taken over schools and are teaching their kids to hate Jesus and America. And the people doing the home schooling are NOT our best and brightest, obviously given the nonsensical reasons for doing it. A generation of poorly-educated children who will have to attend for-profit colleges like those in league with Betsy DeVos.
China will be the dominant power because the Republican party, Fox, and Facebook are apparently more harmful than communism.
The funny thing is that the only person I know who home schools is very bright and very liberal. She’s done an amazing job with her children.
I live for the day that Betsy fades back into anonymity.
SuperMatt
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I used to work at a conference center and one of the conferences was home-schoolers. It was a Christian conference, and there were lots of books about creationism instead of evolution, etc, etc. The history books would have been approved by Trump for sure, since they didn’t talk much about mistreatment of native Americans or the evils of slavery.
U
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All the homeschooled people I know had bachelors' by age 18 and double doctorates by 25. They aren't even too awkward socially (not more than me...). But obviously they are also extreme outliers.
lizkat
Watching March roll out real winter
I just got a Biden sign and put it in my yard and I’m feeling so much better.
(Yes, I got a backup sign as well.)
Hell I'd have to get backup ammo I did that.
U
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Trump is actually walking talking stereotype of an american in the views of my country of origin. Tall, fat, under-informed, overly confident, aggressively ignorant with an upbringing of privilege deeply conflated with personal quality. I used to explain that this is a very limited perception, but I think this became pointless exercise since Trump.
Thomas Veil
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The shorthand for what you're describing is The Ugly American. And yeah, it was hard enough to get non-Americans to like us when George W. Bush was president, never mind Trump. I'm sorry to say that on the whole it's an image that is deserved and something Americans abroad have to live down. The burden is on us to prove we're not uneducated boors.
lizkat
Watching March roll out real winter
There are a whole lot more Americans putting Trump up on a pedestal than I had ever dreamed possible. Some of them probably see and celebrate themselves in how he speaks and acts, and some of them even now may have started to live vicariously through him as they watch the never ending reality show he puts on for them.
The lives of some of Trump's rally followers (as interviewed and seen in videos etc) do strike me as a weird cross between the Stockholm syndrome and Walter Mitty.
If I had a dollar for every time I've read of something Trump said, did or tweeted that I was pretty sure would be the end of his political career --even before he was somehow the F elected!!-- I could upgrade from my iPad Pro to a top of line newer model by now and have $$$ left over.
But the beat goes on. I am so appalled and so alienated by it all. I lived shoulder to shoulder with daily random selections of the millions Americans in NYC for 35 years, had my disappointing moments with a few here and there, but never spent time with people as consistently boorish, selfish, thuggish or just plain delusional as this President. And to say that about NYC in the late 1970s, just for instance... is really saying something.
I never thought enough fellow Americans would find Donald Trump a suitable leader. I still don't. That is not what they're about in celebrating him. It's something else. He's the sort you make room for on the train because your gut just tells you he's a wrong guy. I swear we have a whole lotta folks in the USA living vicariously, celebrating the apparently exhilarating feeling of being a really wrong guy.
OK so this rant belongs over in Arkham. The mods are free to move it if they're still standing.
U
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America is a nation of life-long learners and Americans age ridiculously well intellectually. I think this is understated. Both of my bosses are way past 60 yet insanely sharp intellectually. These guys accumulated an insane amount of knowledge (which is a given), but what really impresses me is how they are still able to do paradigm shifts over weeks, if evidence justifies it..something I already find increasingly harder in my thirties. And it isn't just my bosses.
It's a justified rant and I share your shock about this. There's a lot of duality in this nation, intellectualism vs. anti-intellectualism is one of these. Anti-racism vs. deep racism. Humanism vs. sadism. This is what I in part refer to a reactionary culture. The extreme views get amplified and reverberated.
SuperMatt
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Here‘s an interesting piece about the culture of Trump supporters.
Thomas Veil
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Harlan Ellison used to refer to these people as the boobgioisie...ignorant fools who think of themselves as rebels and avatars of "real America" vs. those high-falutin' people with college degrees. It varies by era. Remember the nitwits who used to complain about Birkenstock-wearing, Volvo-driving liberals? Whatever happened to those guys? Whatever it was, they've been replaced by spoiled brats who act like they still think it's funny to draw on the walls and poop on the living room floor, who've blossomed from social media with their maturity stunted, their opinions fully formed and a congenital aversion to facts.
Part of it is reality TV, which seems to have dumbed down so many people by positioning everything as a win-at-all-costs competition. Another part of it is social media, which grants lunatics and con men the same audience reach it gives to scientists and true journalists. And there waiting to use them both was an egomaniac ready to use both of those mediums to induct people into his cult. Yeah, it's scary how fast it happened.
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So almost their entire vote is based on spite, that and the delusion that Trump is a great businessman. I'll at least admit that their savior operates on the same half cylinder with all his opinions, worldview, and polices being spite based. In that regard he hasn't really let them down.
I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but what the fuck are confederate flags doing so far north? Those people should at least admit they are pro-slavery. There's really no other reason.
lizkat
Watching March roll out real winter
There are still folks flying confederate flags in northern reaches of the Appalachian chain.
Families of many here in the Catskills arrived from more southerly areas of the Great Appalachian Valley... some after the Civil War, and many still have kin in the South. There has seemed to be a lot of local interest in identifying ancestors who fought in the South on the side of the confederacy, and there are some enthusiasts of re-enactments of various Civil War battles that took place in the area.
The original immigration of this group was to the central colonies from the British Isles, mostly England and the north of Ireland, and at the time the major influx occurred in the 1700s, their families had spent many generations in warfare and so brought readiness or at least expectation they'd have to engage in it.
Many were herders rather than farmers, so used to a harsh life that asked them to be ever prepared to fight for what they had acquired, whether against two-legged or four legged foes. They were appreciated by coastal colonial governments for willingness to defend westward-expanding settlements that encountered resistance by Native Americans.
So today, descendants of these particular Scots-Irish Americans, who while definitely not a voting bloc --and don't get me wrong, many are "Yankees" and some do vote blue-- often still have a distinct streak of anti-authoritarianism to central governments, even as they also expect allegiance to local customs and tend to resent "outsiders". And, some are definitely not Yankees, and make it clear by flying the flag of the war that to some is still not over.
Interesting piece on all that:
Also some chapters in this book about American regionalisms by Colin Woodard:
Local experiences in the Catskills:
Families of many here in the Catskills arrived from more southerly areas of the Great Appalachian Valley... some after the Civil War, and many still have kin in the South. There has seemed to be a lot of local interest in identifying ancestors who fought in the South on the side of the confederacy, and there are some enthusiasts of re-enactments of various Civil War battles that took place in the area.
The original immigration of this group was to the central colonies from the British Isles, mostly England and the north of Ireland, and at the time the major influx occurred in the 1700s, their families had spent many generations in warfare and so brought readiness or at least expectation they'd have to engage in it.
Many were herders rather than farmers, so used to a harsh life that asked them to be ever prepared to fight for what they had acquired, whether against two-legged or four legged foes. They were appreciated by coastal colonial governments for willingness to defend westward-expanding settlements that encountered resistance by Native Americans.
So today, descendants of these particular Scots-Irish Americans, who while definitely not a voting bloc --and don't get me wrong, many are "Yankees" and some do vote blue-- often still have a distinct streak of anti-authoritarianism to central governments, even as they also expect allegiance to local customs and tend to resent "outsiders". And, some are definitely not Yankees, and make it clear by flying the flag of the war that to some is still not over.
Interesting piece on all that:
Also some chapters in this book about American regionalisms by Colin Woodard:
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America - Kindle edition by Woodard, Colin. Politics & Social Sciences Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com.
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America - Kindle edition by Woodard, Colin. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading American Nations: A History of...
www.amazon.com
Local experiences in the Catskills:
The annual county fair where I live has still not banned sale of Confederate paraphernalia inside the fair grounds, thanks to a bunch of good ol' boys in charge of the fair.
The school principal of one of the nearby public schools took hours and hours to require that any Confederate flags that had bloomed on farm kid's tractors a few years ago on the school's Tractor Day be removed "promptly). That's a day that kids are allowed to drive one of their family's tractors to school and park along the main semicircular drive of the school. The school is on elevated land, and the flags could be seen from both a local and state road below. A number of the hill farms still sport Confederate flags stenciled on their barns or flying from their homes or outbuildings.
Up in the hills it's not expected you'll go up on someone's porch without being invited. Think scenes from the film Winter's Bone and you'll be roughly tuned in. On the other hand if you get to know some of these folks there's nothing they won't do to help you if your harvesting machinery breaks down or you break a leg and can't get the cows milked and so forth. Go figure. But if you go there in 2020, don't wear a Biden-Harris bumperstick.
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