Plenty of people do leave but, move , isn't a systemic solution for people in the inner city, anymore than it is for people in the third world. I mean if your looking for reasons to blame huge numbers of people for being poor, sure why not, it's basically the national past time.
Are you saying that your normal situation is frequenting gloryholes?
It must be possible to obtain from the results of national elections something other than "Fuck those stupid hicks" or "Nazi supermen stupid hicks are our superiors," but we don't seem inclined.
how much resentment of immigrants is resentment of brown people who don't even speak English doing what the stay-behind folks don't have the guts to do.
It's tempting to sign on to this reading, but I think many people who resent immigrants haven't even thought through the challenges said people have taken on.
I mean: when I visit the local wine store and chat in a friendly manner with its proprietors, I'm thinking that I'm in the presence of my superiors: they're bilingual (at least) -- from Korea originally -- and I'm freaking monolingual. I feel generally humble because I register what they've accomplished. I very much doubt most Americans do.
Allow me to introduce a radical theory: people who resist just DOING SOMETHING ELSE tend to feel that life shouldn't be a constant uprooting, reshuffling, rebuilding, as though nothing is stable. And they're right. Younger people in our society are more used to this conception of things, I gather.
wonder how much resentment of immigrants is resentment of brown people who don't even speak English doing what the stay-behind folks don't have the guts to do
None of it you fob. What they resent are all of you trying to implement sharia law and driving around shooting all the jobs.
I heard Thomas Friedman say something just like this on On Point Radio. He was trying to say nice things about how we hadn't listened to the struggling people of the midwest, when someone called in to talk about her immigrant students who were working 100 hours a week and going to school, saying that they had the kind of drive America needs. And Thomas Friedman was practically jumping up and down, saying how glad he was that she had called. He was criticizing the people who thought that their government ought to ensure a decent standard of living.
All I could think was that that's not a good life for anyone and the goal should be to make it possible for everyone to live ok if they work 40 hours a week.
I refrained from joining in a FB thread of HS classmates discussing impact of Obamacare. The village idiot said how at the start of ACA he had 2500 out of pocket max but his company had to change to another insurer because of the Cadillac tax and his OOP went to 6k and now he owes 30k for the two kids he's had since then. I so wanted to call bullshit, no way he was anywhere near Cadillac threshold with an OOP of 2500, his company was most likely blaming ACA for pushing more costs onto their employers and he's to stupid to realize it. He went on to claim that people on welfare get free housing, utilities, food, healthcare, essentially getting the equivalent of $15/HR in free govt goodies.
Basically, if people are so ignorant of their own situation, how can you expect them to empathize with people in totally different situations?
Yes to #6
Yes, yes, yes.
Certainly it is possible to find a better life -- sometimes -- if we move. I moved. I found a better life than I would have if I had stayed in New Orleans. But notice what I gave up by moving, which my siblings got to keep. The family support system, the web of friends and relatives, which has helped them raise their children and make it through some very rough times (including Katrina and some terrible health problems).
I also have this problem with the "Just move, losers!" solution, which is if all the losers move, where do you think all the jobs will come from? (See also: Grapes of Wrath.)
It's like when we start telling everyone to major in STEM. Or computer programming. Never mind that not everyone has that skill set. If we suddenly started turning out nothing but engineers and programmers every year, what do you suppose that would do to the job market for engineers and programmers?
Not to mention, yeah, we do in fact also need social workers, art historians, and English professors.
7: I so wanted to call bullshit, no way he was anywhere near Cadillac threshold with an OOP of 2500, his company was most likely blaming ACA for pushing more costs onto their employers and he's to stupid to realize it.
I hate to say it, but maybe part of resistance is not to refrain from replying along those lines on that FB thread. (Without the remark about stupidity, obvs.)
But I'll check back with you when I have the guts to do the same kind of calling out, of course.
I pity the poor bastards who moved to North Dakota as a result of the last round of "just move"
I live in a heavily immigrant neighborhood. I used to live in a really pretty crummy apartment building. Right below us was a Somali family with nine kids - they were actually very unusual, because the father had been able, through luck, smarts and organization, to bring all the kids with and no one had been detained or died. One day I got back home and the mother was crying on the porch, just crying and crying, and what she kept saying was, "I want to go back to Somalia."
A lot of my other neighbors are Mexican, Guatemalan and Ecuadoran people whose work and lives are pretty precarious. Those are some hard-working people, I've got to say, and honestly their lives are too hard - driving around in broken down cars to remote jobs, or biking to remote jobs and just always working all the time, with very little discretionary income. It strikes me that with that kind of life you have no time to produce art seriously, no time to write seriously, no time to study seriously, not even much time to engage in civic life or political organizing. You're forced to be nothing more than a good worker because just reproducing your labor eats up all your time.
I don't think it would be so terrible if people got, like, some meaningful government assistance so that they could be more than stalwart worker bees.
I mean, being a middle class person who emigrates from a tolerable situation to a better situation is not the same as being someone
1: I don't think ogged's talking about "people in the inner city" (inner cities are typically pretty close to lots of service-sector jobs, anyway). Suburban Detroit or coal country, more likely.
I'm an immigrant kid too (though with a much easier integration). While I understand this point t of view, pulling up stakes has a big impact too - and significant risks of its own. It's not crazy to worry about also.
I also think the view of successful immigrants suffers from a lot of selection bias.
14.last is a good point. People still have this idea that immigrants say goodbye to their homelands for ever and get on the big steamship to their new lives. But there are planes now, which fly both ways. Lots of immigrants oscillate between countries, often several times.
Even the steamship allowed for some back and forth. Despite not being very well off, my grandma's parents took their family back to Italy for an extended visit. This would have been between the wars. When my great uncle was in Italy toward the end of the war, he knew them well enough to visit.
I don't recall if he was born for that visit or not. I could ask him if I see him again.
Anyway, I don't think it is easy to pull up stakes and start over from a declining rural town and go east (young man). And even after you get adjusted, you have to deal with how to handle the situation when you have a family in one state and parents unable to care for themselves in your original state.
I don't want to blame the people who didn't move on for failing to move on, but I think it is worth remembering that in many places the only residents are people who lacked the ability or desire to move elsewhere. This is as true of much of rural America as it is of inner cities.
It's the general problem of looking at a big societal issue (life expectancy declining for the bottom half of the income distribution) and deciding the problem is the shit-character of totally powerless people.
Trump people are all special snowflakes. They think that they, and only they, should not have to endure the evils of the capitalist system they worship. You'll notice that they never say when America was great. That's because they'd have to admit that it was back before they dismantled the system that privileged them rather than letting any of its benefits go to others.
They should either suck it up and admit that capitalism sucks and needs to be reformed, or stop whining. They rigged the game so that they would lose, and lose they did.
20 was pretty much my point. I don't think rapacious capitalism is a fact of nature, and hey, suck it up everyone. It's that people saying, "neoliberals underestimate how hard it is to move" seem to forget that we have this whole other heroic narrative about people who did just that and built this country; no one underestimates how hard it is, they just don't think it's unthinkable for it to happen to a rural white person.
Anyway, I go back and forth, thinking about the folks in Oklahoma who stopped to help me when the roof rack broke off my car on a cross-country move, and then thinking, "white working class, you say? Didn't I see your granpappy's smiling face in those famous lynching photos?"
The real evil are the fucks who design medical equipment they know will mostly be used by the elderly without paying the slightest attention to ease of use or ergonomics or any kind of obvious markers for which end is up.
Not quite as evil as lynchers, but more evil than people fixing the car roof rack.
21.2: The thing is (living as I do about .25 miles from Oklahoma, and essentially among the very same people) about 70% of the (white) folk you meet in these parts are, in fact, the kind of people who will help you when your car breaks down, or you get sick, or lose your job, or whatever.
The other 30% are the sort who will stab you in the back, steal from your sick mama, call your child a cheap Jew, and yeah, probably if they could still pull it off, lynch you.
The trick is telling them apart, because both sorts will usually smile real sweet and call you honey to your face.
Bless their hearts.
I mean, I've never once broken down by the side of the road without having at least three people (many of them white men! though often they are black women and Indian women) stop to offer me help.
Since I have a crap car, I long ago invested in AAA, but still, it will restore your faith in your fellow human.
I mean, I've never once broken down by the side of the road without having at least three people (many of them white men! though often they are black women and Indian women) stop to offer me help.
Since I have a crap car, I long ago invested in AAA, but still, it will restore your faith in your fellow human.
If you invest in Baa, you are just one step above junk bonds.
I just called AAA today to tow my car to my mechanic. It's been broken down for a couple weeks but I haven't gotten around to doing anything about it until now.
AAA is terrible; don't use AAA.
(They're anti-public transit, pro-various bad things I can't recall.)
They're only one-eleventh as bad as KKK, so I'm sure teo is fine.
29. I didn't know. Although I guess it's probably obvious. I confess I really like their magazine. I received a subscription to Real Simple from a family member as a Christmas gift a year ago, and seriously that is the dumbest magazine imaginable, the AAA flyer was like 1000 times better.
27. Poor baa, surely he is at least two steps above junk bonds? (What's happened to baa, I haven't seen him around in a while?)
I've moved for work-related reasons a bunch of times. So have four of my five siblings, so did my parents, and their parents moved a few times as well. So, I kind of lean toward the "suck it up" end of the spectrum.
(They're anti-public transit, pro-various bad things I can't recall.)
They were pro-towing my ass of the side of the New Jersey Turnpike that one time, which is enough for me to overlook the other flaws.
33. But I bet you had the jobs lined up first. If you simply take a flyer on moving from Detroit to Pittsburgh (or Oklahoma to California), there's no guarantee that you'll find gainful employment when you get there, plus your support network is a thousand miles away, you know nobody to give a landlord a reference and, depending on your skill set, you might have to find money to get certificated all over again. It would give me pause for reflection.
We have active help for resettled refugees in our smallish town. It should be possible to set up similar networks for internal migrations. But it does seem different somehow.
36 all true. I lined up a job which fell through, and was able to get another one because my field was a small enough one that all the available jobs could be found on a handful of websites. I was lucky though, and that approach won't work so well with less specialized people and less credentialed careers than mine.
37: There were place-of-origin support networks for migrant workers all over Africa, and I assume are such for immigrants all over the world today. There's no reason such things can't be formed for internal migrants in America or elsewhere. And those all self-help, not public, and I think self-help would get far more traction in the US.
Better World Club is a good alternative to AAA (I'm a member). Most of the time the roadside assistance is just contracted out to someone local anyway, so you're usually picking which middleman to use rather than picking who provides the roadside assistance.
You know who else moves around a lot for jobs? Those special snowflake liberal elite academics. I had 5 different jobs between 1999 and 2003 and lived in 3 different states. Oh, and my children were born in 1999 and 2002 (in two different states). I also changed my specialty twice to adjust to changing needs in my discipline.
So, suck it up, buttercups.
Snowflakes who are also an immiserated precariat. The American Dream is nothing if not consistent.
Yeah, let's all live like academics and refugees!
I don't think your unthinking bigot is thinking enough to be aware of the capabilities and accomplishments of immigrants of color. As a class: once they meet and have a chance to talk, even your unthinking bigot is likely to come away with 'well, this one is different . . .'
In my cousin hunt, I've recently run across two news stories, the male protagonists of which are my 4th cousins of similar age (to each other):
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/12/fashion/weddings/what-are-the-chances-pretty-good-it-seems.html
We each of us are a point in a similar range of outcomes.
People's identities are often caught up in their jobs and homes. I haven't lived in California for fifteen years, but I'm a Californian. I haven't coded anything for a while but I'm a programmer. If what you and your father and grandfather do/did and are is no longer valued, you're likely to be pissed. If your entire town in the same boat, you're going to get the message that your town is shit. Maybe it might make sense to leave it all behind and move to Exurbville, but you're not likely to feel good about acquiescing to the demands of the system. It would be a betrayal of yourself and your home.
44.3: That's one hard to beat headline right there.
41: I did the multiple jobs in multiple states thing after graduating as well. Doing that as part of chasing the (possibly imaginary) carrot of a fulfilling, stable job in the field of your choice is a bit different from doing it simply because "chronic instability and transience is your life now, sucker!"
41: With the right hospital location, you can have one child born in two states.
Four states, if you don't mind shocking the tourists.
45 is true. Migration is something I think one never really gets over. But migration could be seen as temporary, something one does to earn enough to get ahead back home, even if that story turns out to be fictitious. IIRC most Mexican migrants actually do this these days.
It's funny, the side of my family that uprooted and emigrated around 1900 has been almost -shockingly- static since, including me, which I'm not exactly pleased about. The other side has been in the US forever (after you know, Switzerland) and has done -a lot- more relocating though just from one trash pit to another. Relocating rarely translated into prosperity. 95% I'm actually related to ogged's car rack people. You should have come over for some ring tum ditty though we made ours with Ritz crackers not bread crumbs.
You know, ogged's claim (in the post, if what he really meant is 21.1, I don't think that came through) is one often made by schmibertarians in response to workplace exploitation or other workplace ills, and we recognize "just pull up and get another job!" as a shitty, point-missing response in that context, and it's much easier to get a new job than to move from one state and industry to another. (45's point, mutatis mutandis, was made in the course of this post.)
My common ancestor with the murderer ran a chandlery on the docks of New Bedford during and after the time Melville shipped out. He never recovered after the bottom dropped out of the whale oil market. I blame Pennsylvania.
"I haven't lived in California for fifteen years, but I'm a Californian. I haven't coded anything for a while but I'm a programmer."
But you fuck ONE goat...
Hmm, that might sound rude if you don't know the joke.
If what you and your father and grandfather do/did and are is no longer valued, you're likely to be pissed.
I recently saw this essay, "This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson." which seems like something Bob would appreciate, and addresses that point.
Most people read Hell's Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What's truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their "ethic of total retaliation" against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they'd been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.
... For Thompson, the Angels weren't important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell's Angels, that kind of politics is "nearly impossible to deal with" using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left. Hell's Angels concludes when the Angels ally with the John Birch Society and write to President Lyndon Johnson to offer their services to fight communism, much to the befuddlement of the anti-Vietnam elites who assumed the Angels were on the side of "counterculture." The Angels and their retaliatory militarism were, Thompson warned, the harbingers of a darker time to come. That time has arrived.
45 is true. Migration is something I think one never really gets over.
I may have mentioned this before, but a little over a year ago I was listening to the Christy Moore song "City Of Chicago" and was hit hard by the refrain "In the city of Chicago ... there are people dreaming of the hills of Donegal" It's such a simple and powerful image of the immigrant experience. I immediate thought, "in the city of Minneapolis there are people dreaming of Somalia."
One can be expected to know that joke.
51: I think the context is more a workplace in terminal decline than merely a shitty one. Whale-oil processing, for instance.
I'm actually related to ogged's car rack people
"Car-rack people, up and down the interstate."
Maybe what The Liberals need a biker gang. They could ride electric Vespas or something.
46: Fair enough, but in my defense, that 5 years, 3 states, 2 kids time was a time when I did not have a permanent full-time job. I felt pretty damn transient.
I too consider myself a New Yorker despite not having lived there since 2000. Actually, I have lived in NY for only 5.5 years since 1987. But I'm still a New Yorker. You know it's true because I can get very snobby about pizza. I've given up on bagel snobbery, though. If it's round, bread-like, and has a hole in the middle, I'll eat it.
That Goatse Rolls are usually the last to be taken.
"Asshole bread-rolls, up and down the si-ide board."
ogged's claim
There's definitely some tension between "we don't have to submit, willy nilly, to global capitalism" and "suck it, you whiny little bitches."
In fact, I'm going to argue that listening to Journey (or Foreigner, if you can stand the punishment) is the functional equivalent of moving to an area with predominately disadvantaged white people and learning their culture.
51: I think the context is more a workplace in terminal decline than merely a shitty one. Whale-oil processing, for instance.
You know, ogged's claim (in the post, if what he really meant is 21.1, I don't think that came through) is one often made by schmibertarians in response to workplace exploitation or other workplace ills, and we recognize "just pull up and get another job!" as a shitty, point-missing response in that context,
I've bolded the word that lets you know that I'm talking about a different, less weighty context in which the same response is also inappropriate.
It seems apropos to mention I had lunch with one of Italy's leading scholars of Italian-American studies. She said that 64% of Italian migrants actually returned to Italy, and that Southern Italians in particular came to the US with the plan of saving up some cash and returning home. She says this in part explains the difference in assimilation rates between Northern and Southern Italians, since most Southern Italians saw themselves as temporary migrants, so weren't every interested in learning English or giving up the more obscure "exotic" homeland traditions. She's actually publishing a book comparing migration of Southern Italians with South/Central American migration to the US.*
*She's also looking at Northern/Central Italian migration to South America, which happened earlier than Italian immigration to the US and was also fairly permanent. Basically, Northern Italians went to the New World to settle permanently lured through the promise of cheap land, and ended up first in Argentina, where they became wealthy landowners, or later California, where they also were often wealthy land or business owners (e.g. Bank of America was founded initially as Bank of Italy).
My grandma's mom didn't bother to learn English until she figured she'd better act more American.during World War II. She was Sicilian.
South/Central American migration to the US
Plenty of these are expecting to move back some day. I know several Venezuelans who hope to move back home after the current unpleasantness has past.
They're waiting around for Trump to go away?
A guy just told me that his old house in Buffalo was on the other side of the door I let him through. I need to remember to subordinate manners.
Unemployment and industrial decline needs systemic political solutions, and not victim blaming.
But .... on a purely personal (being a bad person etc) level ...
I had a comment something like the OP a while ago. A bunch of friends and I were in the pub before Christmas talking about our families. None of us live within 300 miles of where we grew up*, we all spent years getting education and training. Our life experiences are much more like the stereotypical immigrant experience than they are like our family members who still live in the same towns, and who moan about the lack of work.
"Yes, xxxton is shitty, so fucking move."
I'm empathetic, but I have a nephew who struggles to find decent gainful employment, when, for fuck's sake, he could move 25 miles and be in Glasgow or 25 miles the other way and be in Edinburgh. And then when that possibility gets raised, he complains about not having qualifications to get a decent job.
"Well fucking get some then." isn't really a very diplomatic answer.** I went to university at 20 after working for 4 years, and I started on a 27 quid a week YTS, so it's not as if someone just handed me a university degree. And he's a bright guy. He'd just have to work quite hard and keep his shit together for 5 or 6 years instead of losing jobs every time he can't be arsed to go in or he has a bad hangover.
This isn't "move to another country and lose touch with your entire family", and leave your elderly relatives to fend for themselves. It's "move to a place a 30 minute journey away".
* one Scot, two Irish, two Mackems.
** and I didn't say that, because I don't want to be a Horatio McAlger dick.
There are people like ttaM's nephew who seem like with encouragement/guidance/magical bootstraps could do all right and people where even that wouldn't be enough. As someone from and in the sort of state you'd expect people to leave, a lot about this makes me feel itchy. Just one anecdote is that one of the girls is having some health problems and the doctor wanted to know if I could find out about family history of related problems. We went to the restaurant where her mom works and I asked a coworker we'd met before when she'd be working since it wasn't her shift. She heard that when she got to work, borrowed a phone from a friend and called me back to give me the information I needed. I sent a text to my daughter's dad, whoare girlfriend sent a fb message in response. I have the flexibility to move if I wanted to (and if the family court judge approved it, I guess) but they don't as easily and my leaving would sever a lot of ties to them that wouldn't hold up long-distance. (I guess an exception is the aunt who left town to do sex work. She's asked me to like her professional page on fb but I can't quite go there even though I'm FASCINATED.)
It's a step up from the people with FB "events" to sell candles.
Re ttaM's nephew, I have a relative (I won't be more specific) who did all the right stuff: got a degree, moved to where the job was, even GOT the job, and still ended up broke and homeless, because the economy collapsed and their company went bust. That started a downward spiral that ended with them drinking and smoking themselves to death.
Yes, citizens should do their part. But if the government pisses off and leaves us dying, in the long run nothing we do will help.
Oh, I'm not saying that the bootstraps stuff is remotely a real-world solution for lots of people. And I'm an old-fashioned British leftie who believes in the welfare state, including of course, free health care, generous unemployment provision, and all that. At a systemic/global level, I'm for as much support and intervention as the next person. And that might include a lot of active industrial policy, internal redistribution within the country, higher taxation of the more wealthy, etc.
But ... I can't help but remain pissed off (even if I'd never say it to their face) at people in my own family who really _could_ have a much better life* if they could get off their own arse, without deeply severing family or social ties.
* by the standards they themselves claim to want.
I have no opinions on this topic worth sharing, so I'll pass along a link-dump I got from the UC Press mailing list.
http://www.ucpress.edu/blog/24489/integrating-current-events-in-your-courses-labor-and-work/
53 was awesome.
72: My working theory is that the answer to "why don't people in Rural X just move" is that the ones that could, did, so now they live in cities where by default, they're out of touch, and can't know what it's like in Rural X.
40: In MA they supported a ballot measure to require auto companies to share repair codes with independent mechanics which seemed sensible enough to me.
Who are you to decide which independent mechanics are sensible?
Did someone link the awful thing linked here:
https://twitter.com/leyawn/status/817911302966415360
She already kinda apologized. https://twitter.com/mjb_sf/status/818221857497223168
I mean, the whole thing is nutpicking, but even the nut is sorry.
84 True enough though it did get over 1,100 retweets and twice as many likes. That's a lot of nuts.
84 True enough though it did get over 1,100 retweets and twice as many likes. That's a lot of nuts.
Am I going to be the dedicated bitter middle American? There are probably worse roles, but sheesh.
Bitter about what other people think, I mean. My life is fine except the parts that aren't.
My common ancestor with the murderer
You know, I used to think your family were all classy and WASP-y. I guess you're not as respectable as I had (mistakenly!) assumed.
To the OP, I am genuinely torn. I do have some sympathy with ogged's argument here, but I feel as though I shouldn't.
It's wrong to blame to the victims of economic downsizing (and of shareholder capitalist greed, and so on); and it also makes for very poor progressive politics (if your goal is to strengthen and expand the social safety net, 'stop being so entitled' is not much of a rallying cry, after all). And yet. And yet. Plenty of people do move in search of employment for themselves and/or better prospects for their children; and as ogged points out, they move not only from the USian rural heartland to the cities, but from faraway places to America.
But ogged, those who resent immigrants for being brown people who don't even speak English probably don't base their resentment on any notion of the courage and fortitude of said immigrants. In my experience, anti-immigrant white people have no idea of what it takes to pull up stakes and move halfway across the world. If anything, they resent the immigrants for having such an "easy" time of it, what with all the govt handouts and the hard-earned tax dollars going to "those" people and etc.
Gah. I understand where pretty much everyone is coming from in this conversation, but that doesn't make it any less annoying. And I don't have much time to comment, since my white working-class girlfriend is on her way over. (In a couple of days she's leaving for Juneau to work as a legislative staffer during session, so I'm trying to see her while I can.)
And now she's here, so bye for a while.
When did this happen? Were we consulted on the early dates?
Don't put out until Heebie signs the form.
88-89: I'm afraid you, who are not made of straw, will never understand the straw middle American's deep existential identification with his role in these debates. Also the straw middle American really can't play the oud.
However let me commend the post title. It took me a minute.
If this political situation leaves me more annoyed ed with the assholes on the blog than the assholes in real life, something is really wrong. But I suppose something is, whether it's that thing or not.
93 not to mention the awarding of a blog appropriate pseud (though I think it's safe to say nothing will ever approach the awesomeness of "Boss Niece").
As an academic who has done the standard academic migration thing, it was easier for me than most because I had resources and I like new experiences. But even so it still sucked bitterly at times and could have sucked even harder if I'd ended up in different places. And I always had something lined up.
Migration to where the jobs are is a big part of what economists have classically said was the strength America had over other places, but for some reason that migration has slowed substantially.
My family tree has done it in spurts. Immigrants in the mid-19th century, they then proceeded to stay in their corner of Appalachia for 100 years. But my generation have all finally packed up and left. Even my uneducated cousins found a way to get jobs elsewhere. Moving is definitely hard, but it can be the key to building the best possible life for yourself.
I often think we'd be better off if we forced everyone to live somewhere else for a while. Some people get to do that in the form of university, but many don't. Some people used to get to do it in the military, but that's problematic. As dictator, I'd mandate it as part of my required national service. 2 years required public service, no closer than 500 miles from your hometown.
Plus, if it were required for everyone, we'd develop resources to help those people out.
I've mentioned her before, I'm pretty sure. In any case, she's great.
Immigration in the mid-nineteenth century surely does count any more? But if so, I guess I am descended from the agrarian underclass of County Tipperary.
Insufficiently specific trigger warnings on 82, Barry. I'm dying.
99: Anecdotally, US military postings don't have much of that effect anymore. Wherever they are, they just live in a chunk of America.
Sorry lk, I did call it awful though.
90.last is right. Trump voters are thinking: "I'd find it easier to live in Wisconsin than in Somalia, so why wouldn't they? It's so much nicer here."
82 is pointing at something real, though: look at all the companies that thought again about investing in North Carolina after that ludicrous bathroom law. Terrible education systems are not a great way of attracting good jobs.
Also the thing about fiber investment is real. But you have states shooting themselves in the ass by denying municipalities the right to build broadband networks where telecommunications companies won't.
My common ancestor with the murderer
You know, I used to think your family were all classy and WASP-y. I guess you're not as respectable as I had (mistakenly!) assumed.
There is no contradiction between being classy and WASP-y and being related to a murderer. Honestly, it's like you've never even read any Golden Age detective stories!
72.1 is a pretty common experience for Londoners - very, very few of the people I work with or know socially here were actually born in London, and most of them (including me) have moved well over a hundred miles to live here.
re: 109.last
Yeah. My broad circle of friends (not just that particular group) includes only a handful of people who are native Londoners.* At work, in an office of about a dozen people, there are two people who are Londoners.**
* ironically, _I_ was born within 7 miles of where I now live, but I moved to Scotland at 4 weeks old, so I don't count myself.
My family also have moved in waves. I think 8/8 great-grandparents migrated (7 of them intercontinentally) 1/4 grandparents (country to city) 0/2 parents, looking increasingly like 2/2 children.
My father was born in the big city (Omaha), but because of what was then known as "Late Capitalism", his dad took the family back to the farm before my dad was old enough to talk. My dad's sisters, who were both old enough to have remembered life in the city, left the farm as soon as they had a good opportunity (World War II) and never came back until they retired. The brothers grew up to be farmers, except for my dad.
Because of later capitalism, one sister lived in Iran for several years. Used to send us things that we never heard of before such as pistachios that weren't dyed red.
111: figures for my lot differ depending on whether you mean "moved forever" or "moved at some point in their lives to work and live in a place more than 100 miles away" but if the latter, it's 3/3 children, 2/2 parents, 0/4 grandparents (not counting moves due to The War, in which case it's 4/4), and I think 2/8 great-grandparents.
I meant 'moved forever'. That's old world/new world, I guess. For my great-great-grandparents I don't know, but I'm pretty sure either number would be 0/16. I had a great uncle who I think never left his village in England.
Because of very late capitalism, only one of my grandparent's descendants is still farming that land, having combined what would have been three or four farms at the time he was born. He's over 50 and his kids are all launched into not-farming. Maybe I'll try to steer my son into it?
Thought my farmer cousin was actually a banker when in his twenties.
112: What was your grandfather doing in Omaha? And who was running the farm in his absence?
He was a cattle buyer. At the time, Omaha moved more beef than Chicago. I have no idea who was running the farm before. Probably some relations of his but it may have been not fully used (because of the Dust Bowl).
It's interesting how people could go back to the land. Probably less than half of all people can do that now, for the first time ever.
I don't have the complete picture from my family history. But, to the best of my knowledge, much of the English side of my family moved north in the mid to late 19th century from London (where they'd been working in an around Enfield in the 'traditional' industry of that area) to work in the mills and other factories in the north of England. My grandmother and grandfather then moved south again post-WWII to work in the nascent aviation industry. There was certainly a fair bit of migration back and forth, and if you go a bit further back on that side, you get to Wales and the Welsh marches, I think.
Scottish side, some combination of the west coast of Scotland and back and forth to Ulster, over generations. My grandfather basically 'lived' in Glasgow all of his life, but he spent almost 30 years in India, so I don't know if that counts as migration or not?
But certainly, lots of movement to follow work and changes in industrial patterns over generations.
Maybe the complaint is less about people being unprepared to move, and more generic old-man moaning about 'millenials' on my lawn.
I don't even have a lawn, but I'm borrowing my parents' lawn for now.
122 is very interesting. Maybe frequent (on a multigenerational scale) migration is just the norm for non-agrarian people, and all the things we've been talking about are just ups and downs in push and pull factors.
Everybody eventually winds up in Omaha for at least a bit.
Regarding 82, I'm not sure I understand the objection. I mean, we ought not say mean things, I suppose, but I've spent more than half of my life in two red states and the red part of a purple state -- 30-plus years. I'm one of the virtuous people that the OP contemplates who moved around considerably to advance my career.
And -- as the linked item points out -- red statism doesn't just suck, it's costly to its residents. I haven't seen any rigorous research on the subject, but I'd bet you that you can reasonably ascribe the rise of Atlanta and the contemporaneous stagnation of Memphis to Memphis' comparative refusal to deal with its social problems.
Of course, I know a lot of lovely people in deepest Redistan -- and, like some folks here, they are loyal to their roots. But sorry, I ain't going back. I've done my time.
Lost amid his other commentary, bob has been right to focus on the The Big Sort. But what bob overlooks is that people have damn good reasons for leaving red states, and within red and blue states, people have good reasons for not wanting to interact with their abusive neighbors.
Yeah, yeah, I know that the objection to Ms. Byerley is, at root, similar to the complaint about the New Atheists: Sure, they're right, but do they have to be assholes about it? Streep's speech last night was lovely, but did she have to dis football and MMA?
I don't care any more. Reaching out to the troglodytes has limits, and we long ago passed those limits. Now it's finally down to the question that the cavepersons have been trying to force all along: Who is going to win?
I'm not optimistic about the outcome, but They have made it clear that there's no point any more in trying to get beyond Us and Them.
re: 125
There weren't really many non-agrarian people, statistically speaking, until the late 18th century, I suppose.* But yeah, from what I know of basically all of the family history I'm aware of going back that far, regular movement was the norm.
* merchants, artisans, and the like, but statistically, that's not a huge percentage.
There were only like three statisticians in the late 18th century. One of the things that struck me as strange about statistics is how much stuff is named after people who haven't had time to die yet.
I wonder if Prof. Bootstrap is still working?
Hmm, two of my brothers have moved, one across the country and the other 90 minutes' drive or so, another state. But that's the one who married a woman who grew up in my town, so we're all sort of retroactively accepted as really part of the community. My parents moved here right before I was born for an academic job. I never felt from here until I had children who were from here and still tied to people and history here, and now it feels like it would be hard (and selfish and wrong) to leave.
On my dad's side, 5/7 siblings relocated and the ones who are in the hometown are there after living more than a decade away. Those grandparents stayed in the area except to live in Japan for a few years for a military posting in the early '50s. On my mom's, 4/7 siblings have left the state where they grew up and 2/3 within it are away from the city where they lived. They moved as children (my mom was 12 or so) from NY to WI, where the parents had met, and those grandparents relocated three times as I was growing up, first to retire to where they wanted to be (still with their youngest children in high school) and then eventually twice to live closer to family as their health worsened.
I definitely grew up thinking relocation was normal, but after college I was afraid my health was getting worse and then I got sucked in by the low cost of living and decency of life here. Now I'm going to end up some sort of evangelist for the place, though I really would maybe prefer to be in Buffalo.
Maybe frequent (on a multigenerational scale) migration is just the norm for non-agrarian people
Well, what ttaM said. Plus at least one migration would be involved for each family, because in order to be non-agrarian you have to stop living somewhere agrarian and go and live somewhere non-agrarian. Like London, that great cesspool into which all the loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. /watson
Relatedly, Unfogged, this isn't in my size but I think someone here needs it: https://www.etsy.com/listing/488733059/vintage-pendleton-wool-shirt-mens-small?utm_content=buffer4fade&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer
128: Yes, and the proportion rising drastically over time. But there was still movement, even among those few. In the Middle Ages there were people moving all over Europe: merchants, master craftsmen, military people, clergy. And merchants (and presumably others) bouncing all over the Indian Ocean and China seas for millennia.
125: Even agrarians can move, though possibly not so far. My mother's great-grandparents and grandparents were small farmers who gradually moved from the Welsh borders to Cheshire, selling up and buying new smallholdings a number of times and moving east each time, before my grandfather and his brothers finally made it off the land and into the lower middle class via grammar school scholarships.
His sister, my great-aunt, who as a girl wasn't eligible to go to grammar school, left school at 14 to study cheese-making at agricultural college, married one of her father's labourers, and inherited the farm. I think she only travelled more than 50 miles from her birthplace once in her life, in her 60s, when she came with us on a family holiday to Devonshire.
Now the ramshackle farmhouse where my grandfather and his siblings all did their homework together round a single oil lamp in the kitchen has been done up as a posh home for Manchester commuters, with its own gym.
133: Nitpick, artisans living in a village aren't agrarian.
137: I wonder how common that pattern is. One branch of my family had a pattern like that, over longer distances, but mostly pastoral rather than agrarian.
Even agrarians can move, though possibly not so far.
Speak for yourself
129. Statistics was invented in the middle of the 17th century in order to rip off the Irish more efficiently.
141: Also the Parisians, IIRC.
140: Stand to be corrected, but I think the current consensus is that the völker wandered quite slowly, mostly trickling forward generation by generation, tens of kilometers at a time.
Your etymology puts you on the wrong side of it, Don.
Trump is from from Drumpf. Very barbarian.
And merchants (and presumably others) bouncing all over the Indian Ocean and China seas for millennia.
Yes, bouncing. Hence "Wider still and wider/ Shall thy bounds be set".
I had great grandparents who emigrated from county Fermanagh to Ontario, and then returned when times were better; an ancestor on my father's side who was a Moravian, and emigrated in the early nineteenth century from Silesia through Leeds to Jamaica, where I believe he died, as a missionary. How that branch got from Leeds to Belfast, I don't know, except that Liverpool was involved. Meanwhile, of the Fermanagh family, one went to Bangladesh, as it then wasn't, and his children ended up in Cork (via Hollywood), London, and assorted home counties. But none of these people were peasants, exactly: the farming ones owned land, if not much. I guess the missionary's parents must have been purely agrarian.
To the extent that 148 has a point, it is that empires make it possible for all sorts of people to move and better themselves, often but not always at the expense of the indigenous inhabitants. You don't have to be a peasant or even an ostrogoth.
142.2 In the case of the Goths and Franks, that's largely true, although the Gothic army led by Alaric I moved from Thrace to Calabria via Greece in about 15 years. The Vandals and Suevi crossed the Rhine in 406, and occupied the Iberian Peninsula by 409; later they took ten years to move en bloc from Andalusia to Tunisia. The Angles and Saxons weren't in a great hurry, but they had to cross the North Sea to get where they were going, so they couldn't really stop on the way. The general pattern seems to be reasonably stable occupation of an area with limited movement caused by things like soil exhaustion, with brief bursts of major relocation caused by things like the Huns coming at you from the other side. The Frankish occupation of Gaul was very gradual.
148-50: Kulaks did sometimes move great distances as late as the twentieth century.
And then there's all the people displaced by the enclosures.
Anyone know the return rates for southeastern Europe (mostly Slavs from the soon-to-be-former Habsburg empire). I've never heard stories about those folks going back in any significant numbers.
In case 153 isn't a joke, let me make clear that 152 is.
I often think we'd be better off if we forced everyone to live somewhere else for a while. Some people get to do that in the form of university, but many don't. Some people used to get to do it in the military, but that's problematic. As dictator, I'd mandate it as part of my required national service. 2 years required public service, no closer than 500 miles from your hometown.
Totally agree with F.
I kept thinking I would move away, but never really did. I kept thinking I would go to college far away. But I didnt. Then, I thought I would go to law school far away. But I didnt. Then I thought I would go work away from VA after law school. But I didn't. I spent a summer in Tucson, a summer in NYC, a summer in DC. But I always came back.
157 was me, until a year ago.
Lessee: My dad's dad lived in Chicago his whole life; his mom went to Chicago from micropolitan SE Wisconsin. My mom's mom was a New Englander who was briefly at Oxford and married* a guy who'd been brought from England as a baby in 1915 or so. They moved to an industrial town upriver from here when my mom was 14 or so; that was a transfer by GE, though (after a divorce, he was transferred again to KY, where he lived until shortly before his death). My dad's sister ended up returning to WI, albeit not the ancestral town. They are all red staters, and I haven't seen a single one since 1990.
Anyway, my dad took his first job in NYC, away from anyplace he'd ever lived, and then got transferred twice. It was always a given that my sister and I would go away for college and end up somewhere other than where my parents lived. I went to CMU and my sister did a Masters at Northwestern in some part due to familial ties, but only tenuously (we identified semi-strongly with Chicago, only barely with Pgh).
Anyway, to the extent that I have a point, it's that, once location continuity is broken, I think it's pretty easy for subsequent generations to be mobile. Constant moving is disruptive, but one or two moves in your 20s? That just seems normal/natural to me.
OTOH, it'll be interesting to see what happens with our kids, who will grow up with great stability, plus less connection to mobility in the extended family (that is, my sister and dad basically haven't and won't relocate while my kids are growing, and their extended families aren't going anywhere either; AB has 4 cousins on each side, and in each case 3 still live in the towns where they grew up). But AB & I encourage future mobility.
*come to think of it, I've no idea when, where, or how they met.
On the rant in 82: isn't it just a poorly expressed version of Richard Florida's schtick?
157 is almost verbatim what Mary Hatch says to George Bailey the night they first kiss.
to the extent that I have a point, it's that, once location continuity is broken, I think it's pretty easy for subsequent generations to be mobile.
Yeah, but difficult to isolate that from just the general observation that it's a lot easier to be mobile now than it was.
There is no one in my family who is living where they grow up until you go back to Russia in the 1800s, at which point maybe, I don't know. I can't think of anyone who is living within easy driving distance of their hometown, even. (That's not entirely true - both my brothers' spouses are pretty close to home, and I have some second cousins who are living in the same brownstown in Queens that has been in the family since the 40s. It still has a landline that starts F-L-.)
164 Yes. I suspect though if one did the digging one would find a disproportionate number of migrations in the most mobile families. And there could be a selection effect, where those who migrate most successfully are best positioned for subsequent migration.
I've never felt a part of any community at all -- well, any geographic community anyway (I'm a part of the Unfogged community, aren't I?
My family moved from DC to the Detroit suburbs when I was 6, and then we moved back to the DC-area (Bethesda) when I was 14. And I wound up in Columbus, Ohio more or less by chance, and even though I've lived here for over 25 years, I don't feel I'm part of any community here, . Perhaps, I don't have a gift for friendship or community.
My siblings are in Madison, Wisconsin, Oak Park Illinois, and Charlotte, North Carolina, and their children are spread out all over the country.
I can trace all this rootlessness, to my mother's decision to leave Israel in her 20s. I'm not certain, but my sense is that she left to get away from her mother, and because she wanted to see more of the world. The irony is that now she's back living in the apartment she grew up in in Tel Aviv.
My family has been in NYC since my grandparents on my mother's side, and a few generations more than that on my father's. I don't know if the kids are either going to want to, or be able to, stay, though, what with real-estate prices.
My initial impression from thinking a little about China and Japan is that agrarians moved a lot, en masse, every other generation or more: cause flood, drought, famine, war, plague, oppressive and exploitative landowners, primogeniture etc etc etc. It was not usually considered a good thing by peasants, cause see above, and in part politics and the state was developed precisely to create forces good and bad to tie workers to owners lands and prevent movement, including serfdom and slavery, cause land is worthless without people to work it. We are all helots. Sometimes it was positive, when better land or other resources and opportunities or easier conditions became available either in the next village or hundreds of miles away.
Landowners very often moved to towns or cities, became absentee owners, the next generations became merchants or lawyers etc. Landowners also of course bought distant undeveloped property, then sought immigrants to work it.
Enclosure, say the classic British form, is only partially about forcing peasants to move. Importantly it is also about limiting where peasants can usefully move to, and what kinds of controlled conditions and opportunities there are when they arrive.
Which is perhaps a key to understanding Redistan. Perhaps they understand that if their current location and condition has been made a desert by the Powers that be, it is unliely they are creating a utopia just waiting for their arrival. More likely fucking Manchester.
My father was born in north London and his home (with a brief stay in Kent as a child) remained in north London until he retired. But he spent WWII in various parts of north Africa and mainland Europe, and in the way of work afterwards he spent considerable time on three other continents. So not a migrant as such, but not a stay at home either. I don't think that pattern is all that rare in the middle classes (academia, civil service, senior management), whereas the working class/peasantry tend to either stay put or go for good, because there are fewer jobs openings available to them which would enable such ongoing mobility. But as JR says, it inclines middle class parents and communities in general to be more encouraging of mobility in general.
I know where there is cheap real estate.
My early life story is a John Melloncamp song.
Yeah, well my family:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scudder_family_of_missionaries_in_India
My family didn't rate a Wikipedia page, possibly because they weren't as successful at shooting the British as their neighbors.
127: my objection is that it's simplistic, triumphalist, and dripping with unearned self-satisfaction of a sort that I see all the damn time around here. Incurious, reactionary, smug bullshit, with jaw-droppingly naive faith in the benevolence of corporate interests. The point about fiber is probably true; there have been a few high-profile cases (IN, NC) of people pulling out of areas due to local laws, but I am very skeptical that liberal culture on its own is a major attractor of corporate investment. Argument also completely ignores outsourcing/offshoring (unless that's "diversity!") and... look, the fucking tech companies can't even be bothered to move offices to the fucking East Bay, let alone Ann Arbor, let alone Memphis. It's not that this woman is "mean," it's that... oh I give up. The lazy Fortress California thing is going to drive me insane sooner rather than later.
I may at some point get past the initial violent allergic reaction and mount a sober, detailed, data-driven counterargument. Not there yet.
France, and to a lesser degree Japan, is considered historically remarkable in part for the degree to which farmers retained control of their political circumstances. I think a case can be made that it is not Paris that made France however nice it is, but the peasants retaining a larger part of the surplus, and demanding a wider distribution of political and economic advances. Yes, they were a conservative force, but they conserved some nice things that also benefited urban dwellers.
Whatever.
172.1: I was thinking about that too. Scott's Art of not being governed apparently is all about periodic movement to escape state exactions in SE Asia. From what little I know from South China you have both patterns, people moving into the frontier to escape and being sent there to bring it under control, in both cases migrants from the same origins tending to end up in the same destinations. Also in Taiwan at least temporary migration to make money, even seasonal migration to plant and harvest, on quite a big scale.
detailed, data-driven counterargument
I recommend using R. There might even be a pre-written "Counterargument to Smug Liberals" package available.
I have dreamed, while following this thread, of all the naturally superior types moving to Manhattan and California, in the tens of millions, enough to bring about, umm, radical geological events by sheer lemming weight. Manhattan is pretty fucking solid, I guess.
A sense of community has always been an important part of my outlook, and yet I've moved from one state to another nine times as an adult. Three of those times, I've moved to Maryland, where I currently reside and which I consider home, to the extent that I have one.
My younger brother stayed in Maryland the whole time, and if one of us is spiritually stunted by our life choices in this regard, it's surely me.
A sense of belonging is under-rated by you rootless cosmopolitan elites, and while you can become a Real New Yorker after a few years, you can spend decades in Mississippi and never become a Southerner.
This thread is making me feel slightly embarrassed, because my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents all did a fair amount of moving around, bit I live in the town that I grew up in (and it probably would have been better for my career if I'd moved to a larger city that has more of a programming community -- but, all-in-all, it's worked out okay).
But I don't know that I have much to say about that, so I'll link to another Christy Moore song, his cover of Ian Prowse's song "Does This Train Stop On Merseyside" a song about the sort of city which lots of people pass through (which, as this essay points out was made famous in part because of the effect it had on John Peel, "When his widow Sheila appeared on Radio 1 after his tragic early death on holiday in Peru she said 'Whenever John played it, whether it was live on air or just in his room I had to go and give him a hug because he'd be in floods of tears, because it was just so Liverpool.'")
If your cat had kittens in the oven, you wouldn't call them "biscuits." Unless you were really hungry.
183: Recently, of course, the Barrington Moore, which I have usually abbreviated. It is The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy
He spent a lot of time for instance comparing early and late Prussia to the citystates along the Rhine, Alsace-Lorraine area I think, why there were peasant rebellions (13th-14th?) in the latter but not the former.
France had particularities in the relationships of landed aristocrats to peasants and the sovereign, but they all do.
I don't think that pattern is all that rare in the middle classes (academia, civil service, senior management), whereas the working class/peasantry tend to either stay put or go for good
This makes sense. Apart from anything else, the middle classes would, a lot of the time, have the formative experience of going away to university.
183 is funny.
My family has a peripatetic branch (mine) and a sedentary one. The sedentary types are descended from the same bunch of Okies as me (so there's your farmers moving - their farm dried up and blew away in the dust bowl), but wanderlust only really got to one side of the family. We lived in Zambia and Botswana, with regular short consulting stays by my dad in Burkina Faso, Niger, and a few other places I've forgotten. My cousins OTOH live within 10 miles of where they were born and have a lack of curiosity about the world that's just stunning. Trump voters, naturally.
Personally, I'm done with travel. I've seen a lot of the world and it's mostly shitholes. I have no desire to visit new places just to visit. There was a time when I really loved new places, but now they just bore me. I'd move for work if it was sufficiently lucrative, but that's the only thing that's going to get me to move.
A sense of belonging is under-rated by you rootless cosmopolitan elites, and while you can become a Real New Yorker after a few years, you can spend decades in Mississippi and never become a Southerner.
...which is why my true self is vaguely a fraud.
My family has a peripatetic branch (mine) and a sedentary one.
Just like killer whales!
It is a good rule of thumb that if you have more, it is not because you are a special snowflake who is supersmart and work really hard with oodles of courage, but because in some direct or indirect fashion, you are wielding the whip for the owners.
Whether the masses you exploit are in Detroit or Szechuan, the metropole prospers by imperialism and brutality.
This is as true for the $100k class, Hobson's aristocracy of labor, as for the billionaire.
178:I am very skeptical that liberal culture on its own is a major attractor of corporate investment.
We know that correlation is not causation, and causation surely runs both ways in this matter. But the correlation is hard to deny: Broadly speaking, corporations gravitate toward liberal culture, and liberal culture flourishes in places with concentrations of corporate money.
I'm sure that's not a law of nature. You can certainly have agrarian populists who aren't assholes, and there are lots of such folks out there. But the predominant strain of rural populism in my lifetime has tended toward asshole-ism.
And (getting in way over my head here) it seems obvious that in order to even have a city, you have to have more liberal attitudes. That's just built-in.
Nobody is talking about the "benevolence of corporate interests," but corporations have some important biases in common with liberalism.
My rootless non-cosmopolitan ancestors appear to have been chased a few hundred miles by pogroms every third generation or so.* Most recently my grandfather, a German/Yiddish-speaking Jew left his native Ukraine for New York City in 1922. He expected to return but didn't, remaining in the Yiddish speaking world to his death in 1980.
My father went to Yiddish speaking school through eighth grade, second language Ashkenazi Hebrew (not what those upstarts in Israel were speaking at the time). He arrived in the high school a block from his home barely understanding the language spoken there. Dad later received a Doctorate, and became a professor, of American Studies. But I digress.
Re: 67. A heartbreaking number of their social circle, and their fellow immigrants, had returned to Eastern Europe early in the Depression, which they (mistakenly?) believed wasn't so bad back there. Consequently, thousands of U.S. citizens were interned in concentration camps.
*So it seems to be my turn.
My fiance's grandfather's family were fabulously wealthy Armenians in the Ottoman empire, and they used to country-hop in the way rootless cosmopolitan elites do. Some of the moving around was to avoid ethnic persecution, which they did as expats rather than refugees. IIRC his great-great-(great?) grandfather had citizenship in at least 4 countries, the Ottoman Empire, France, Italy, the US, and possibly Germany as well. Their last time fleeing was in 1915, when they came to Italy to escape the Armenian genocide. They tried to return to Turkey in 1922, but the Turks had confiscated all of their properties and refused to let them back in. They stayed in Italy, although my fiance's great-grandmother ended up living in a hotel in Switzerland, as befits a wealthy exile. Interestingly, this great-grandmother spoke French as her primary language and had quite poor Armenian and mediocre Turkish. My fiance's grandmother, who was from a small village in the Dolomites, spoke better Armenian than her MIL from Istanbul.
On the other extreme, my family has been land-owning farmers for the past 600 years or so, and did very little moving around. On my father's father's side, we have the family tree from the village church bible going back to the 15th century, and we would probably have had older records except there was a fire back then. My mother's mother's family bought their farm in northern Sweden in the early 1700s and mostly stayed put ever since.
One thing I've been thinking about is how we confuse rising standard of living with upward mobility. My life is considerably more comfortable than my ancestors', but once we account for different social structures, I would say that I would say that I probably occupy a comparable social class.
the Depression, which they (mistakenly?) believed wasn't so bad back there.
In macro terms, the Depression was much worse in the US (and Canada) than in most other advanced countries, partly because other countries hadn't had the same boom in the 20s. Poland probably looked pretty good compared to the US in say 1932.
It's really weird to flip through the old family photo albums and see pictures of impossibly wealthy Ottomans riding on camels and elephants and being carried around by Egyptian porters. I mean, looking at old photos of my relatives is a bit weird too, I suppose, but their lifestyle doesn't seem as unimaginable or disconnected from my own.
Liberalism, in all its aspects is just another later form of social control and worker oppression, much cheaper and more efficient because the richer peasants and labor aristocrats will fund it from their own pockets and provide most of the resources and call it freedom.
Meanwhile the Clintons are still worth hundreds of millions and is going to the Inauguration. Will she dance with Trump?
Also of course, Pelosi, Maxine Walters and the House were begging for one Senator to help them just generate a few hours of discussion of Trump's legitimacy.
Couldn't get one Senator.
Kill that Party with fire.
Broadly speaking, corporations gravitate toward liberal culture, and liberal culture flourishes in places with concentrations of corporate money.
Yep. Not only because you want to set up shop somewhere with a well-educated local population to hire, but because these investment decisions are very often being made by the senior managers who will actually have to move there and live there with their families*, and they like the things that come with a liberal culture, such as good education systems, a welcoming attitude to outsiders, a flourishing art and entertainment sector etc.
*One of my favourite economics findings and I wish I could find the paper - there is a very strong tendency for corporate headquarters to move in such a direction that the CEO ends up closer to where his parents live.
199: now that's just defeatism. If you really applied yourself you could be riding a camel this time next year.
199: now that's just defeatism. If you really applied yourself you could be riding a camel this time next year.
My great-grandfather worked for National Geographic. I'd have a hard time matching his photographs.
202
I could also probably get a fez too. The mustache would be more challenging. Not sure that I can grow enough hair anywhere on my body over the course of my lifetime to recreate the full splendor of an Ottoman mustache.
I'm part of the 'go to the US for a job' family tradition, as well as the 'leave the US when the politics get weird' tradition. The latter includes the Loyalists in the family of course.
There's always some core of the family that sticks to NS so we can say that we're NSian. Much like the NLers that go to Alberta and are always and still NLers.
I'm still suffering from a bad cold but I wish I could make an interesting comparison to NL and NS after the cod collapse. I remember a lot of talk about how the jobs just weren't coming back in a lot of towns. And the fishers agreed so it wasn't like they were in denial (like the autoworkers). But I think there was an acknowledgement in government and in some society that keeping those towns 'alive' was beneficial. Also that people that wanted really good jobs would always leave but that some people wanted to stay close and they did deserve working post offices, school, stores, etc, which meant they had to be supported by tax payers. Anyway, some of those towns have branched out (Fogo) but a lot of them are just where the oil workers return in the off-season (although you could make an argument those towns have always been where men have returned in the off-season).
It's true, senior managers are constantly discussing not just the quality but the diversity of local schools, and whether the local orchestra is flourishing or any new galleries may be opening soon. Mother of God, have you met any American businessmen? Gated community, Catholic schools, admittedly need a local airport, pro sports team, good BBQ joints, vacation home within 3 hours' drive, opportunity to purchase bigger house in general area. Gswift, where are you? Help me out here.
Just to be clear, I am not being 100% earnest, but am flimflamming in an amiable way about a topic that is, in certain respects, somewhat, it must be said, somewhat serious. "Flourishing art and entertainment sector" did crack me up though.
Oh! Fancy alcohol. The managers also like the highfalutin alcoholic beverages. This crosses class lines to some degree.
206: well, yes. They sponsor museums and exhibitions and have events there. They take business contacts to shows. They buy stuff from galleries and high end jewelers and tailors and so on. Haven't you ever met any rich people ??
Yes, dear. I am just being playful. (I have also met plenty of rich people who couldn't give a single fuck about that stuff; it isn't literally all of them.)
Bentonville, AR now has what appears to be a sort of major art museum. Due entirely to one of the Walton heirs, but that's one of the traditional birthing means.
206: But seriously, they want their employees to have a certain vibe and they're seeking cities that trasmit that vibe, they're not thinking very closely about what makes that vibe. There are more conservative businesses that want a Texan vibe, and end up in a basically liberal city. There are middle-of-the-road businesses who picture their employees as being urbane, who end up in a midwestern big city. But there aren't many Caterpillar Factories who picture their employees being redneck good ol boys.
Even though you said you were being playful.
I'm always surprised by who orders the fancy alcohol brands in the bar. It seems to correlate with youth and being not white. The people with better jobs seem to drink cheaper stuff.
On reflection, I think the real factor is people on dates versus regular people.
Guy at the next table is recommending Nebraska wines, so maybe a taste for high quality alcohol is universal.
Anyway, can we all at least agree that it doesn't make any sense to expect "improved schools" and "progressive city council" to be preconditions for business investment for poor towns and cities? How are you supposed to improve schools and enact progressive reforms with no additional investment? Mass conversion on the road to Damascus San Francisco? Do we set up some kind of Camino de Santiago to the coasts, above and beyond our vaunted university system?
The business across the parking lot from where I had lunch was called "The Waxing Room." But it stayed the same size.
I have a picture of my mother riding a camel when she was a grunt in the army and hadn't got sixpence to bless herself with. There are ways to do stuff.
How are you supposed to improve schools and enact progressive reforms with no additional investment?
There is a lot that can be done without needing investment. With regard to improving schools, its basically cost free for the school board to not have its primary focus be figuring out different way to weasel out of teaching evolution.
217 last was presumably the true purpose of the Interstates.
On the veldt, nobody taught evolution.
I pulled up stakes and moved my ass to where I can ride a camel pretty much whenever I want to. It ain't all that.
Though I enjoy ability to travel again a great deal.
I feel comfortable filing 220.last under "mass conversion experience." Show your work, miraculous/revelatory or otherwise!
Also that people that wanted really good jobs would always leave but that some people wanted to stay close and they did deserve working post offices, school, stores, etc, which meant they had to be supported by tax payers. Anyway, some of those towns have branched out (Fogo) but a lot of them are just where the oil workers return in the off-season (although you could make an argument those towns have always been where men have returned in the off-season).
My family in Shelbourne is completely encompassed by that paragraph.
Shelburne Been so long I've forgotten how to spell it.
225: Oil companies aren't known for their liberalism, even in matters of science, but they don't hire creationist geologists. Again: It is not a question of corporate benevolence, it's a matter of recognizing that corporations and liberals are often fellow travelers.
228: Finished the Exxon book, and that was one of the major takeaways: a remarkably effective organization built entirely out applied science, yet conservative to the bone. Which moved its headquarters from Manhattan to Texas.
I don't think even Chamber-of-Commerce Republicans are comfortable having the local schools run by snake handlers.
Are there alternatives to AAA for the "my car broke down and I have no wrenching ability so please come fix it without spending a half hour on the side of the road looking at yelp" services?
After the recent election, who knows?
I feel comfortable filing 220.last under "mass conversion experience." Show your work, miraculous/revelatory or otherwise!
This is Heebieville - we're constantly told that the reason we can't get any businesses that pay above minimum wage is that our schools are too shitty. (Ie too poor and brown.) We're very purple, but there are very concrete progressive reforms that are being fought for. Should classroom size be a hard cap at 23, or should principals be able to override this? Should we accept federal dollars to shore up our free breakfast and lunch programs? On the city council side of things, should we end our $250 million payout to the generic Yay Businessmen! local grifter operation that promises to bring businesses to the area but never seems to deliver?
How are our parks and rec doing? If we build nicer parks, we're allowed to require developers to put in matching parks. How is our public transportation doing? You have to find a way to self-fund a new route for a year in order to demonstrate need in order to apply for grants that will then pick up the cost.
I don't know where I'm going with this, except that we're a poor city with a progressive-ish council trying to implement progressive reforms on a small budget with very little help from the state.
Finished the Exxon book, and that was one of the major takeaways: a remarkably effective organization built entirely out applied science, yet conservative to the bone.
To that end, I've been looking into Rex Tillerson. My verdict so far: highly competent, yet amoral. He wouldn't have an ethical problem with turning public schools over to snake handlers, though he might oppose it because its bad PR.
What did you think of the Twitter rant, heebie?
(I am actually thinking now of the art collection of a rich Trump voter of my acquaintance, two thoughts: a) none or very few items purchased locally; b) except for the impressionist sketches, woof.)
228: A little confused if we're still imagining that change is possible without investment first. Is your point that the school boards should be able to see that their students won't get jobs in the oil industry if they're taught incorrect geology, which will inspire them to teach proper basic science so the students can go to college, then come back and get jobs in the oil industry once the industry detects a pipeline of promising geologists in the area...? Isn't it much more plausible that an oil company moving in (say because there's oil there), bringing its externally-educated employees, would change the culture of the schools and the town? I have no idea what mechanism would be proposed to bootstrap the rubes out of their bigotry, only after which economic opportunity will follow. What's the incentive? (And this is my question for the disavowed, ill-considered Twitter rant, not for any of you, so again, it is not as DEADLY FUCKING SERIOUS as THE WHIP I AM HOLDING THIS MINUTE.)
232: see 39?
Should we accept federal dollars to shore up our free breakfast and lunch programs?
Uh, yes?
237: It was the most unbelievably frustrating school board debate. Ultimately we did, but it seemed irresponsible to people who believe themselves to be fiscally responsible. I mean, what if we get used to this money.
A little confused if we're still imagining that change is possible without investment first.
The point is that there are a shit-ton of cultural war issues that get dumped on the schools. Relocating from the right wing to the center of those debates doesn't cost any money and makes your community more attractive to outsiders.
239: okay, fair enough. I'd believe that most towns have some number of reasonable people who can see that, and would try to push back against the rightmost wing. It is probably still not enough for the ranter, but it might be enough for Exxon.
235: I didn't get a clear picture of Tillerson. He seemed competent, but seriously limited; it seems to me the Russians might be so chuffed not because they own him but because they think he's naive and they can play him. Morally he struck me as not amoral but moral in a broken way. I would be surprised if he turns out actually to be a Russian agent, for instance. Avid lifelong boy scout (FFS); clearly a true believer in Texas and in Exxon, but neither of those things is America, and I don't know if he can tell the difference.
I actually read an article somewhere by a oil geologist who started out as a creationist, until it finally got through his thick skull that the reason they can find the oil is because evolution is true. He might even have been a Young Earth Creationist.
What did you think of the Twitter rant, heebie?
There's some truth to it. Take SadTown, where Heebie U is. Until very recently, they had a rule that you could not develop along the highway for some fucking reason. It was just ugly dry wasteland. It wasn't out of preserving some existing neighborhood or beauty. The town square is about two miles from the highway. The only explanation I've heard was that it was a general anti-outsider sentiment.
In the last five years, they've begun to put in the most minimal of parks around the river that runs through their town, and they built a new library. But it's a very recent inkling of a notion that maybe quality of life of residents is something that a city council could pay attention to.
I mean, she could have said it more tactfully, of course. But that's a separate issue, whether or not one is sick of phrasing things gently for the poor little wingnut ears.
Right now we're having a debate about where to put the new public elementary school. Do we put them on the poor side, where there is need? Or do we put one in the fancy neighborhood that's still being built, where the developers want it, so that they can point to the fancy new elementary school and reassure fancy people that their kids can go to school for free with fancy kids, and these fancy people will bring fancy businesses to town? The answer is probably to have a bond that funds two jointly, so that the developers are on board and a school on the poor side gets built.
That's probably the most generic school board issue possible, and says very little about urban vs. rural.
242: Maybe Satan put the oil there. Didn't think of that, did you?
230: My dad worked for them in Manhattan for a dozen years. My understanding has always been that there were two sides to the company: the (relatively) cosmopolitan corporate managers & planners and the reactionary producers. The relocation to Texas was precisely the product of the ascendancy of the latter. By the time my dad was done (retired Jan 2000), he was pretty alienated from the upper management.
When we were in NY, the company was famously generous, not only directly supporting museums & such, but also matching employee contributions and practically insisting that they volunteer; my folks got go to a party at Jack Lemmon's apartment (indirectly) because my dad volunteered at Channel 13. By the late '80s, much of that had been stripped away. Interestingly, they do still triple-match donations to universities.
AIMHMHB, even within the world of oil companies, Texaco was famously reactionary/callow/racist/sexist. When there was that big scandal 20-odd years ago (with IIRC recordings of HR types openly disparaging black applicants), my dad said nobody in the industry was the least surprised.
BTW, I asked my dad about Tillerson, but they never had any contact whatsoever.
Ultimately we did, but it seemed irresponsible to people who believe themselves to be fiscally responsible. I mean, what if we get used to this money.
Same people have a running protest at the off-ramps from the interstate, right?
245 is consistent with the book. The drop in generosity also tracks massive cost-cutting in the 1980s, during the trough in oil prices and after the Middle East fields had been nationalized.
246: Tillerson was based in Texas his entire career, which is kind of startling for the CEO of such a global company.
Thanks heebie -- that's all quite interesting. You can't sell businesses on "diversity" and "lack of bigotry," though? I thought that's what Byerley was saying you need! Don't bother with the fancy neighborhood, just sell the newcomers on Wonderful Diversity (TM). Are you skeptical? Sigh.
(My daughter attends Wonderful Diversity (TM) school, and this morning declared that she hates it, so I decided today would be the day for me to deliver the Malala Yousafzai-got-shot-in-the-head-for-your-sins speech. First grade is supposedly much better than K.)
I remember some true story about a Texas farmer who celebrated the oil coming in on his new farm well by going to the store and buying all the bananas he could eat. It's like the Horatio Alger version of "Krapp's Last Tape."
251.last- What, in solidarity with other industries that have horrible human rights and environmental records?
something else that seems more important now is that childcare is very expensive, and if both halves of a couple will be working grandparents and/or siblings being local is an important source of childcare
252: can't say they weren't consistent...
244: I think if you're an oil geologist, that would be sufficient reason to partner up with Anton LeVey.
245: When that came out, Steven Landsburg wrote a column in Slate saying the real victims were the shareholders, which was simultaneously the most libertarian and most Slate article ever written.
$250 million payout to the generic Yay Businessmen! local grifter operation
Heebieville has that much money to give away to anyone? How? Why? That's a huge amount of money.
Uh, maybe thousands, now that you draw my attention to it. I'm bad with scale.
But not for flooring supplies. Maybe let someone else measure for you first.
I didn't get a clear picture of Tillerson. He seemed competent, but seriously limited; it seems to me the Russians might be so chuffed not because they own him but because they think he's naive and they can play him. Morally he struck me as not amoral but moral in a broken way. I would be surprised if he turns out actually to be a Russian agent, for instance.
I don't see any need, or frankly much likelihood, to postulate him being an agent/puppet/whatever. Russia's entire economy is dependent on two things. Ending sanctions, and keeping the price of oil and gas high. Both of which are policies you would expect the CEO of Exxon to be fully on board with.
260: Right. The key, however, was finding an Exxon CEO who was willing to become SoS in order to advance those interests over national interest. I mean, maybe they all would have, but I feel as if we might be at risk of retconning a lot of bad faith/unpatriotism onto pre-Trump figures.
That is, it's all well and good to say that Trumpism is just the endpoint of post-Nixon/Reagan/Gingrich Republicanism, but that doesn't mean they were all the same thing all along. Although Tillerson's predecessor, Lee Raymond, was fucking awful.
The key, however, was finding an Exxon CEO who was willing to become SoS in order to advance those interests over national interest.
SoS aside, isn't that what Exxon CEOs have always done?
What's good for General Motors Exxon is good for the country
Just a wild idea to keep in mind, but Dmitry Orlov of Club Orlov speculates that Trump/Putin/Big Oil are all friendly and Imperial Democrats are panicking cause the secret plan is the looting and plunder of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. Cause they are fragile and ripe and before they get nukes. Could be just regime change and chaos, boosting oil prices and whoknowsthefuck to SWFs and dollar and metropole real estate prices. Could be another 9/11/false flag and war of conquest, the Arab Streets rising to free Mecca a plus for white nationalists.
Cause big-time crooks think trillions anymore.
We will be the last to know. Watch Bibi.
Here's the Orlov Article
What makes this project shovel-ready is that Saudi Arabia is a very soft target. First of all, it is stocked with imbeciles. People there marry their first cousins all the time, and after a few generations of such inbreeding one's IQ can be counted on one's fingers and toes--if one can still count that high. The Saudi educational system doesn't help either: it's focused largely on rote learning of the Koran and related texts, with precisely zero emphasis on critical, independent thinking and the sort of strong-minded rebelliousness that makes countries hard to conquer and control. The economy is almost completely dependent on foreign labor, since the Saudis themselves don't like to work too much, and this pool of foreign labor can be easily spooked and sent packing. Lastly, the Saudis are miserably weak militarily, as has been shown during their ongoing failure to make any headway in Yemen (besides causing a humanitarian crisis). All of their weapons systems are US-made and can be disabled in short order by cutting off the flow of contractors, consultants and spare parts. (Unlike Russian-made stuff, which can operate autonomously for decades and can usually be fixed with a hammer and a screwdriver, American weaponry tends to be high-touch and finicky.)
Orlov is actually pretty funny, and goes way past cynicism and nihilism and approaches my comfort zone of King's Trashcan Man. Nuke em all!
That actually makes a weird sort of sense, more than those kinds of theories usually do.
Though it would go a long way to alleviating my boredom here.
You could probably make decent bank as an imperial sub-sub-proconsul.
Unlike Russian-made stuff, which can operate autonomously for decades and can usually be fixed with a hammer and a screwdriver,
OK, this is kind of hilarious to anyone who actually, you know, saw Kuznetsov, pride of the Russian Fleet, shambling slowly through the Channel last year, its boilers emitting huge clouds of black smoke, followed by two anxious heavy tugs in case it finally conked out for ever.
I mean, anyone who thinks all Russian mil-tech is this glorious indestructible stuff put together out of old boiler plates in the Red Banner Tractor Factory and Armaments Collective that works for decades and can be fixed by hitting it is getting their information from Bruce Willis films, rather than, you know, actual readiness rates, or maintenance requirement data, or experience trying to get the stuff to keep working.
272/3 seem to be partly missing the point, which is not that Russian military kit can match American (or French) in the field - nobody would buy that - but that American hardware is extremely complex and needs a lot of highly trained and highly paid specialists to maintain it, whereas the Russian stuff may be entirely inferior in every field test, but at least you can make it go by kicking it.
274: yes, but that's not true, though. Any Russian kit more complicated than small arms requires maintenance and operation by highly-trained specialists, and, even when it gets it, is very often less reliable than its Western counterpart.
274
That was true back when Andrew Cockburn wrote "The Threat" (1983) but today they are spending a lot of money on modernization, and that means complexity. Doesn't mean every piece of Russian kit is now like the F-35, of course, but they are heading that way, as are the Chinese.
Well shit, the heavy metal hardons here have got me all scared, guess the Sauds would just kick American+Russian ass all to hell. Better call off the war.
276: even back then it wasn't really true of much more than small arms. You cannot make the radar on a MiG-23 or the nuclear reactor on an Akula-class submarine go "by kicking it".
263/264: Sure, in the actual job as CEO. My point is that IMO there really was a time when elevating a CEO to a government role would usually mean that he'd focus more on national interest than personal/corporate. Granted, those guys are going to believe that there's more overlap than I do, but "more drilling is good for America" is a different animal from "lifting sanctions on a territorial aggressor that's undermining democracy around the world is good for America." Trump wants to lift sanctions because he's effectively a pawn of Putin; Tillerson wants to do it for pure monetary reasons. No Americans think it's actually in the national interest (GOP toadies are moving that way because they're toadies; they're not even trying to articulate reasons in favor).
Hey it's cool I understand every season Japan puts out an anime series for the miltech otakus who would rather jerk off to pictures of stealth bombers and mobile howitzers than pretty girls. You guys need your own letter at the end of LGBTQP.
I understand every season Japan puts out an anime series for the miltech otakus who would rather jerk off to pictures of stealth bombers and mobile howitzers than pretty girls.
Well, I'm not an anime fan myself, but I bow to your clearly extensive knowledge of the genre.
282:You're welcome. Sometimes they combine interests seeking a broad audience, this season it is Youjo Senki set in an imaginary WWI. A quote:
"You don't know love until you've witnessed some fantastically modelled French 75s."
I am not even going to look that up. I lie:
"The Canon de 75 modèle 1897, an innovative design that introduced, for the first time in field artillery history, a hydro-pneumatic recoil mechanism keeping the gun stable during firing and thus permitting high rates of accurate shell delivery. Variants and descendants, in the French Army alone, included among many others"
I encounter the Osprey freaks in other contexts.
280 Girls und Panzer means I can have both.
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NMM2 Clare Hollingworth. 105. I had no idea she was still alive.
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283 I encounter the Osprey freaks in other contexts.
You haven't lived until you meet a fan of the A-10 "Warthog."
To be serious for a moment, your source's disdain for the Saudi military is justified. They are moderately good at bombing Yemeni civilians (not for the first time, either) but little else.
"At the time, the British embassy in Warsaw was so disbelieving of her account that she was forced to hold her telephone receiver out of her hotel window in Katowice for the diplomat to hear the Wehrmacht tanks for himself."
I thought this was good. Bob might like it. http://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/09/future-crimes/
Of course I liked, but Matt Stoller on Obama from 2012 was better. Saving it for the post-mortems.
"A necessary chaos? The fuck does that mean? I ask that sincerely, sort of."
If you have to ask, you can't afford it.
Traut's Sleeping Giant got better as it went on. At one point she mentions the 700 labor strikes and 71 Bank of America bombings that happened in 1970 and the point kinda is how much crazier this world is than that one.
I keep obsessing on the word "meretricious"
Meritricious is the adjective for US neoliberals who laud meritocracy.
SO HERE IT IS MERETRICIOUS EVERYBODY'S HAVING FUN
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Trump is nominating an anti-vaxxer to the panel on vaccine safety and scientific integrity. Make America Poxy Again!
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Finished the Simon Frith, Art into Pop, which is excellent, and now get to move to a book I've been drooling over
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth 2011, (settler colonialism)
Between the 1780s and the 1920s these rankings reversed. The population of old Britain grew faster than that of old Spain, and that of the new Britains grew far faster than that of the new Spains. From rough parity in 1790, Britain in 1930 had twice as many people as Spain's 23.5 million. From one-fifth the size of Spanish America in 1790, Anglo-America was now well over twice the size--152 million compared to about 65 million. In addition, Britain, but not Spain, had grown fresh clones of itself in Australasia and South Africa. In all, the Anglo-world grew, from the 1780s to the 1920s, from about half the size of the Spanish world to over twice the size, overtaking the 'Russian world' as well. It was not that Spain and Spanish America grew slowly--their populations increased over 350 per cent, 1790-1930,from 25 million to about 90 million. It was that the Anglos grew explosively. Leaving aside the 400 million people in Britain's subject empire, English-speakers grew over sixteenfold in 1790-1930, from around 12 million to around 200 million--a far greater rate than Indian and Chinese growth, as well as Russian and Hispanic.
New York London Chicago Melbourne
White Supremacy was Global, and created the modern world. To focus only on the legacy of Dixie Slavery just reinforces American exceptionalism, and perpetuates America Empire...cause we can do better! Cause America fuck yeah!
America is and always will be about White Supremacy even if there were no longer any whites. "Whiteness" was and always will be liberal diversity, aspirational difference, meritocratic multiculturalism. Give me your tired, your poor...the melting pot is racist.
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292
He's reaching across the aisle to the dumbest person in the entire Kennedy family tree. /golfclap
One begins to wonder if Trump is trolling everyone, or replaying Graves' Claudius: "Let all the horrors that are lurking in the swamp crawl out."
"Let all the poison that lurks in the mud, hatch out."
I guess it's far too much to hope that in Melania we have our Livia.
Julia Domna, or possibly Julia Soaemias.
He's reaching across the aisle to the dumbest person in the entire Kennedy family tree. /golfclap
I was going to say the one who fatally skiied into a tree while playing football was dumber, but anti-vaxxing harms everyone.
295. It was a free translation from Graves' original Latin... Besides, I had to get the swamp in there somewhere!
296. "Who is the Messalina of the Russians?"
299 Good translation, what with the swamp and all. I'm not complaining. Just a huge fan of the book (and the TV series).
It occurred to me earlier that Ivanka fits the Messalina role but I hesitated to say it.