Still not sure how this isn't the top headline on every American news station
Really I know it's going to get ugly and quick. I am just dismayed how the federal level is so apathetic over this.
Personally I find it gross that the governor of NM whom poorly handled the pandemic by being AFK again says she is open to be the HHS cabinet seat
Realtors pay for a lot of ads. Evicted people pay for none.
A good lesson in how bipartisan the support for landlords is in this New York Times article about the possibility of breaking a lease due to Covid. The Times commenters are super liberal and fall over themselves to hate on Trump. They also believe leases are sacrosanct so fuck you if you want to get out of them:
I just don't get what these people think is going to happen? Tens of millions lose their homes and will just all be able to go find friends or family to bunk with? We're gonna see shanty towns from this.
I just don't get what these people think is going to happen? Tens of millions lose their homes and will just all be able to go find friends or family to bunk with? We're gonna see shanty towns from this.
A major thing I have realized during this is that there is a huge percentage of Americans who do not understand/believe that events can deviate life from what they consider normal. They scoff at the idea of change and disruption, and do not believe that this pandemic, climate change, or an economic depression are really going to change their lives in any way.
if people think the civil unrest is bad now ...
The degree to which right wing governments feel no sense of responsibility for their citizens is, frankly, breathtaking.
I just don't get what these people think is going to happen? Tens of millions lose their homes and will just all be able to go find friends or family to bunk with? We're gonna see shanty towns from this.
A major thing I have realized during this is that there is a huge percentage of Americans who do not understand/believe that events can deviate life from what they consider normal. They scoff at the idea of change and disruption, and do not believe that this pandemic, climate change, or an economic depression are really going to change their lives in any way.
it's really impressive the way the US has constructed an all-pervasive cultural memory that is, at most, 40 years deep. Probably less. The era from the post war boom through to the 80s has been not only normalised, but somehow back-projected as the natural state of things.
I just don't get what these people think is going to happen? Tens of millions lose their homes and will just all be able to go find friends or family to bunk with? We're gonna see shanty towns from this.
A major thing I have realized during this is that there is a huge percentage of Americans who do not understand/believe that events can deviate life from what they consider normal. They scoff at the idea of change and disruption, and do not believe that this pandemic, climate change, or an economic depression are really going to change their lives in any way.
It's the extrapolation of the feeling that one can't possibly be inconvenienced. The mentality that life is like a reality show where the idiot public should be able to phone in and vote to make things happen how they want. And it's definitely not just American.
I just don't get what these people think is going to happen? Tens of millions lose their homes and will just all be able to go find friends or family to bunk with? We're gonna see shanty towns from this.
A major thing I have realized during this is that there is a huge percentage of Americans who do not understand/believe that events can deviate life from what they consider normal. They scoff at the idea of change and disruption, and do not believe that this pandemic, climate change, or an economic depression are really going to change their lives in any way.
It's the extrapolation of the feeling that one can't possibly be inconvenienced. The mentality that life is like a reality show where the idiot public should be able to phone in and vote to make things happen how they want. And it's definitely not just American.
It seems like another iteration of the "too big to fail" thinking.
Anybody who actually pays attention knows that no, nothing is too big to fail.
I just don't get what these people think is going to happen? Tens of millions lose their homes and will just all be able to go find friends or family to bunk with? We're gonna see shanty towns from this.
A major thing I have realized during this is that there is a huge percentage of Americans who do not understand/believe that events can deviate life from what they consider normal. They scoff at the idea of change and disruption, and do not believe that this pandemic, climate change, or an economic depression are really going to change their lives in any way.
We are the This Is Fine dog
Our face has melted off and now we are a skeleton that is on fire.
But not the cool kind of skeleton that is on fire.
Having sort of come out of the modern US conservative movement when I was younger I can speak first hand that the whole thing is built on a very, very deep foundation of selfish fear. Mainly that the liberals, the immigrants, the poc, one or all of the LGBTQ+ community, etc etc is coming to take something away from us WASPs or do in some small measure to us what we've done to them throughout history.
Also, the fist pumping "America is the GOAT" is still very pervasive and very unironic. So the idea that we can fuck up and fail or that something like a pandemic could come in and turn everything upside down is completely foreign to that line of thinking. If it ever enters their mind its in the form of "_____ is trying to ruin America for... reasons but us good patriots will thwart them." So yeah, it very much is a "Too Big to Fail" mentality. America is and always has been therefor it shall always be. Its a scientific fact, like gravity or your bread falling peanutbutter side down while making a sandwich. There's no need to really do anything, maybe vote once in a while, share a meme on Facebook in your particular political flavor of choice, but otherwise that's it. The political and economic engine of America is perpetual. This is all completely flying in the face of the fact America as a free and wealthy superpower has only really been a thing for 70-80 years or so and only for a very select group of people at the very top of the food chain.
Hell this could even stem from the fact that the super rich have sucked so much of the life force out of America that the white, upper middle/middle class are misidentifying their sinking down with the undesirables rising up. Pretty soon we'll all be at the bottom together.
Also I'm preaching to the choir here, I know everybody probably already knows all this stuff. Ya'll smart.
it's really impressive the way the US has constructed an all-pervasive cultural memory that is, at most, 40 years deep. Probably less. The era from the post war boom through to the 80s has been not only normalised, but somehow back-projected as the natural state of things.
It's Flintstones and the Jetsons. America (nuclear family suburbia) has always been and always will be.
We'll get back there someday.
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
John Oliver literally just did his show on holes in American history.
The USA loves to paint over any bad or even just complicated stuff in its history
It not really a vast conspiracy, most of the time, it's the way schools have so much to cover and so little time to do it, it's a lot of glorifying certain parts of the past and ignoring other parts
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
I would say all countries do their best to smooth over bits of history that doesn’t want to be seen, but people throughout the world are getting better at communicating more history with more nuance.
The US is unique with the South losing and controlling a lot of the narrative though.
The USA loves to paint over any bad or even just complicated stuff in its history
It not really a vast conspiracy, most of the time, it's the way schools have so much to cover and so little time to do it, it's a lot of glorifying certain parts of the past and ignoring other parts
Whenever vietnam was mentioned at ALL in high school it was always extra confusing, we went there to...fight bad guys? Maybe commies=bad? And some people protested, and then (not really connected to the protests?) we...left? Anyway here's fortunate son. Granted, I wouldn't even really envy a college professor taking a full semester just on vietnam to be able to get through that complicated morass, there was no chance my jingoistic and overworked U.S. History teacher was going to do much.
A big talking point on my Dad's side of the family, who almost exclusively live in rural Pennsylvania, was "the Republicans freed the slaves, why are Black people voting for the Democrats?"
Such willful ignorance, even after I explained the betrayals of Reconstruction and the 1960s flip of the Republicans and Democrats
And these are people who lived through the Goldwater and Nixon campaigns
The USA loves to paint over any bad or even just complicated stuff in its history
It not really a vast conspiracy, most of the time, it's the way schools have so much to cover and so little time to do it, it's a lot of glorifying certain parts of the past and ignoring other parts
I don't think "consipracy" is the word I would us, no, but only because it happened in broad daylight with the approval of a big swath of the white population. One of the biggest drivers was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a women's group that worked very, very, very hard to make sure that the narrative around the Civil War turned towards that of northern aggression and euphemisms like state's rights. From the wikipedia:
he group was founded on September 10, 1894, by Caroline Meriwether Goodlett and Anna Davenport Raines as the National Association of the Daughters of the Confederacy. The first chapter was formed in Nashville.[11] The name was soon changed to United Daughters of the Confederacy.[3] Their stated intention was to "tell of the glorious fight against the greatest odds a nation ever faced, that their hallowed memory should never die." Their primary activity was to support the construction of Confederate memorials.[12] The UDC argues that its members also support U.S. troops and honor veterans of all U.S. wars.[2]
In 1896, the organization established the Children of the Confederacy to impart similar values to younger generations through a mythical depiction of the Civil War and Confederacy. According to historian Kristina DuRocher, "Like the KKK's children's groups, the UDC utilized the Children of the Confederacy to impart to the rising generations their own white-supremacist vision of the future."[13] The UDC denies assertions that it promotes white supremacy.[14]
The communications studies scholar W. Stuart Towns notes the UDC's role "in demanding textbooks for public schools that told the story of the war and the Confederacy from a definite southern point of view." He adds that their work is one of the "essential elements [of] perpetuating Confederate mythology."...
The organization was in bed, often literally, with the KKK and other neo-confederate and white supremacist groups. Recently they've been leading the lawsuits against removal of confederate monuments from public spaces. In 2016, when Vanderbilt University removed the word changed the name of Confederate Memorial Hall, the UDC sued and won $1.2 million, or what the $50,000 they donated back in 1935 would be worth today.
As I've had to learn with my own father, for some people, very little about argument is about logic, reason, or valid conclusions. It is however, about winning. And doing the first has basically nothing to do with the latter. It will never matter that there is a cogent argument for the US being a poor democracy, because we SAY we are a democracy. Equally, it will never matter that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea SAYS it is a democracy, because they know that it is not. These two things have no intersection in their mind, or if they do, they shrink from the cognitive dissonance. It's a messaging and education (education much more broad than just school here) problem for sure, but it's also just a human one. If you do not practice dealing with cognitive dissonance, it feels fucking BAD and you don't wanna do it! And that excuses none of the terrible action that follows, just acknowledges these people are still humans just ones operating differently.
My favorite piece of bullshit history is the Alamo and how the Mexican army was held off for days and nights through the valor and fortitude of the whites Texans
When in reality the Mexican army didn't actually storm the Alamo until they finally did because it was a fucking church
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said "remember the Alamo" and I was like oh shit I had actually legitimately forgotten the Alamo
Favorite joke of my family is when we'd go down to San Antonio to go to some of the markets and art museums my dad would go "wanna see the Alamo?" and we'd drive by out front and he'd say "okay y'all remember it good" and we'd just keep on driving
In elementary school we got some new computers for the computer lab that had fancy new options like color and sound, and we found that one of the programs was an encyclopedia sort of thing. Anyway it had a voice clip of a guy yelling "remember the Alamooooooo" and we would just play it over and over again, from one side of the lab to the other.
The next time we had computer lab, all the speakers were removed.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said "remember the Alamo" and I was like oh shit I had actually legitimately forgotten the Alamo
I read an SF story when I was a kid where I guess the premise was someone had gone back in time to be present at the battle and had accidentally changed the outcome and it was called Remember the Alamo
but being a kid from Australia I had no fucking idea what the Alamo was or who any of these people were or why any of it mattered. I just knew that the American version of history was so culturally dominant that we in the rest of the globe were expected to be instantly and fully invested in this tiny slice of the westward expansion.
Anyway it was all pre Google, so I have spent years vaguely wondering what was so memorable about the Alamo, but never actually cared enough to find out.
WeaverWho are you?What do you want?Registered Userregular
Bunch of whites teamed up with some brown people vs some other brown people and then after beating the second group of brown people, started telling all brown people to get out because it was always white land. Then years later they paved over a good chunk of the state and invented Ford truck month.
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Brovid Hasselsmof[Growling historic on the fury road]Registered Userregular
Huh, yeah, I definitely know the phrase "Remember the Alamo!" from somewhere but I don't know what the/an Alamo is. I feel like it has something to do with Mexico? Alamo sounds Spanish.
Bunch of whites teamed up with some brown people vs some other brown people and then after beating the second group of brown people, started telling all brown people to get out because it was always white land. Then years later they paved over a good chunk of the state and invented Ford truck month.
Texas revolted because Mexico outlawed slavery. That's what the war was over - the freedom to own slaves.
Yeah the whole History is written by the victors thing absolutely does not apply to the US Civil War.
Its a bizarre and fascinating topic.
One key thing to realize is that the Southern propaganda coincided with a massive wave of ethnic cleansing. More than 20 million African Americans fled the South because of Jim Crow and the right wing terror campaigns of both the Klan and legitimate authorities. That allowed the South to legitimize the rebellion by demonizing Black people - "We were right that these dangerous people need to be controlled. Now that they are your neighbors, you need to know this!"
The other side of this is that it turned at least two Black majority states into white majority states and diminished the Black population throughout the South. The entire modern power structure of the U.S. is based on this wave of ethnic cleansing.
Bunch of whites teamed up with some brown people vs some other brown people and then after beating the second group of brown people, started telling all brown people to get out because it was always white land. Then years later they paved over a good chunk of the state and invented Ford truck month.
Texas revolted because Mexico outlawed slavery. That's what the war was over - the freedom to own slaves.
I believe you mean "Mexico Oppressed the White People Texans"
The main thing I remember about the Alamo is Ozzy Osbourne getting arrested for drunkenly pissing on it
The main thing I remember is that the Alamo doesn't have a basement and that you shouldn't trust fortune tellers while conducting a private investigation to retrieve your stolen bicycle.
Posts
Satans..... hints.....
Realtors pay for a lot of ads. Evicted people pay for none.
A good lesson in how bipartisan the support for landlords is in this New York Times article about the possibility of breaking a lease due to Covid. The Times commenters are super liberal and fall over themselves to hate on Trump. They also believe leases are sacrosanct so fuck you if you want to get out of them:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/realestate/can-I-break-my-lease-because-of-coronavirus.amp.html
A major thing I have realized during this is that there is a huge percentage of Americans who do not understand/believe that events can deviate life from what they consider normal. They scoff at the idea of change and disruption, and do not believe that this pandemic, climate change, or an economic depression are really going to change their lives in any way.
The degree to which right wing governments feel no sense of responsibility for their citizens is, frankly, breathtaking.
edit:
it's really impressive the way the US has constructed an all-pervasive cultural memory that is, at most, 40 years deep. Probably less. The era from the post war boom through to the 80s has been not only normalised, but somehow back-projected as the natural state of things.
It's the extrapolation of the feeling that one can't possibly be inconvenienced. The mentality that life is like a reality show where the idiot public should be able to phone in and vote to make things happen how they want. And it's definitely not just American.
It seems like another iteration of the "too big to fail" thinking.
Anybody who actually pays attention knows that no, nothing is too big to fail.
I thought have a miniature real star would be the perfect lobby item
We are the This Is Fine dog
Our face has melted off and now we are a skeleton that is on fire.
But not the cool kind of skeleton that is on fire.
The shitty kind.
Also, the fist pumping "America is the GOAT" is still very pervasive and very unironic. So the idea that we can fuck up and fail or that something like a pandemic could come in and turn everything upside down is completely foreign to that line of thinking. If it ever enters their mind its in the form of "_____ is trying to ruin America for... reasons but us good patriots will thwart them." So yeah, it very much is a "Too Big to Fail" mentality. America is and always has been therefor it shall always be. Its a scientific fact, like gravity or your bread falling peanutbutter side down while making a sandwich. There's no need to really do anything, maybe vote once in a while, share a meme on Facebook in your particular political flavor of choice, but otherwise that's it. The political and economic engine of America is perpetual. This is all completely flying in the face of the fact America as a free and wealthy superpower has only really been a thing for 70-80 years or so and only for a very select group of people at the very top of the food chain.
Hell this could even stem from the fact that the super rich have sucked so much of the life force out of America that the white, upper middle/middle class are misidentifying their sinking down with the undesirables rising up. Pretty soon we'll all be at the bottom together.
Also I'm preaching to the choir here, I know everybody probably already knows all this stuff. Ya'll smart.
It's Flintstones and the Jetsons. America (nuclear family suburbia) has always been and always will be.
Satans..... hints.....
It not really a vast conspiracy, most of the time, it's the way schools have so much to cover and so little time to do it, it's a lot of glorifying certain parts of the past and ignoring other parts
The US is unique with the South losing and controlling a lot of the narrative though.
Satans..... hints.....
Whenever vietnam was mentioned at ALL in high school it was always extra confusing, we went there to...fight bad guys? Maybe commies=bad? And some people protested, and then (not really connected to the protests?) we...left? Anyway here's fortunate son. Granted, I wouldn't even really envy a college professor taking a full semester just on vietnam to be able to get through that complicated morass, there was no chance my jingoistic and overworked U.S. History teacher was going to do much.
Its a bizarre and fascinating topic.
*shoots pistols into the air Southernly*
A big talking point on my Dad's side of the family, who almost exclusively live in rural Pennsylvania, was "the Republicans freed the slaves, why are Black people voting for the Democrats?"
Such willful ignorance, even after I explained the betrayals of Reconstruction and the 1960s flip of the Republicans and Democrats
And these are people who lived through the Goldwater and Nixon campaigns
It's up on his YouTube channel now.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsxukOPEdgg
I don't think "consipracy" is the word I would us, no, but only because it happened in broad daylight with the approval of a big swath of the white population. One of the biggest drivers was the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a women's group that worked very, very, very hard to make sure that the narrative around the Civil War turned towards that of northern aggression and euphemisms like state's rights. From the wikipedia: The organization was in bed, often literally, with the KKK and other neo-confederate and white supremacist groups. Recently they've been leading the lawsuits against removal of confederate monuments from public spaces. In 2016, when Vanderbilt University removed the word changed the name of Confederate Memorial Hall, the UDC sued and won $1.2 million, or what the $50,000 they donated back in 1935 would be worth today.
Congrats we get to spread our Texan Propaganda across the country!
Lookin at mexico like that's some nice land you got there, shame if somebody manifested some destiny on it.
Ah you mean the War from Freedom and Oppression by the Brown People
When in reality the Mexican army didn't actually storm the Alamo until they finally did because it was a fucking church
Favorite joke of my family is when we'd go down to San Antonio to go to some of the markets and art museums my dad would go "wanna see the Alamo?" and we'd drive by out front and he'd say "okay y'all remember it good" and we'd just keep on driving
The next time we had computer lab, all the speakers were removed.
I read an SF story when I was a kid where I guess the premise was someone had gone back in time to be present at the battle and had accidentally changed the outcome and it was called Remember the Alamo
but being a kid from Australia I had no fucking idea what the Alamo was or who any of these people were or why any of it mattered. I just knew that the American version of history was so culturally dominant that we in the rest of the globe were expected to be instantly and fully invested in this tiny slice of the westward expansion.
Anyway it was all pre Google, so I have spent years vaguely wondering what was so memorable about the Alamo, but never actually cared enough to find out.
Texas revolted because Mexico outlawed slavery. That's what the war was over - the freedom to own slaves.
One key thing to realize is that the Southern propaganda coincided with a massive wave of ethnic cleansing. More than 20 million African Americans fled the South because of Jim Crow and the right wing terror campaigns of both the Klan and legitimate authorities. That allowed the South to legitimize the rebellion by demonizing Black people - "We were right that these dangerous people need to be controlled. Now that they are your neighbors, you need to know this!"
The other side of this is that it turned at least two Black majority states into white majority states and diminished the Black population throughout the South. The entire modern power structure of the U.S. is based on this wave of ethnic cleansing.
Which is a weird coincidence because that's exactly what the US Civil War was about and absolutely nothing else. Wooden legs, man. Crazy stuff.
I believe you mean "Mexico Oppressed the White People Texans"
That is how it was taught to me growing up
The main thing I remember is that the Alamo doesn't have a basement and that you shouldn't trust fortune tellers while conducting a private investigation to retrieve your stolen bicycle.
But I dunno what to eat