It isn’t, just pointing out that major upheavals to political structures do happen and that the consequences are not always disastrous.
I should have guessed that US-centric Google wasn’t perhaps so hot on what was perhaps the most important year in European history before 1914.
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When one party wants to eliminate people like me (with respect to my gender, sexual orientation, neurology, and yes, politics), and another party wants to ban certain pesticides to keep from creating people like me (with respect to my neurology alone), I know which side my bread is less likely to get killed on.
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So this weeks business trip took me to the South.
Hadn’t been to this facility before, so that’s always fun. Flew out on Monday, plant tour in the afternoon.
Huge facility covering acres. Original bits of it are over a century old.
Again, in the South.
Employee parking is 2:1 ration of pickups to other vehicles. A few Maga and Trump stickers. Didn’t see any confederate flags, but wasn’t looking for them.
Tour was hot and dirty, but when we lingered in the control rooms ( We’re from Corporate IT and here to help) there were more Trump stickers.
Next to the UNION meeting reminders.
Had to make sure as the company as a whole is pretty anti-union. Enough that smaller sites have been shuttered when they voted to unionize. But, again, the place has been there over a hundred years. So, even that far below the mason-dixon, a union wasn’t out of place.
But they still want Trump.
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“A few Trump and MAGA stickers” means that like any other company the employees are diverse. It’s true the folks who do the stickers are not the folks who might choose to have their own stickers if they felt safe having them, or were willing to provoke something.
The problem with the “let Dixie go” crap is you abandon all dissidents to general misery and death in a totalitarian shithole. Even more of a shithole than America had been.
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I WOULD PREFER THAT THE PLACE I LIVE BE
- part of the United States
- part of Canada or Mexico, whichever is closer
- an independent country with its own embassies and passports
0 voters
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Even if an independent country with its own embassies and passports was the good old U. S. of A.
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Note that I voted for “independent country” on the grounds that Oz has not been one for the last two hundred years.
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I voted for Canada to be part of Canada.
It’ll be an adjustment, but I think it will be worth it.
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I’m sorry if this is impolite, but may I ask you to elucidate on that? (Feel free to say no if you don’t want to - that’s an acceptable answer.) I don’t know how pesticides affect neurology. But maybe I should.
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What about an Eric Flint 1632-style scenario? Is the Thuringian Wald an option? I’d trade a lot of my surroundings for some healthy primeval forest.
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Careful not to die of smallpox or kill with flu…
There are a lot of subplots on medicine after the Ring of Fire but I haven’t seen any addressing that.
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There are two sides to that.
Democratic officials tend to see autism as a bad thing, and conversion therapy/applied behavioral analysis as a good thing, deserving support at every level. (Which has created a situation where there’s a lot of funding for abuse, and therapists who don’t want to abuse children have to say they do abuse children.)
Democratic-leaning groups often push the idea that chlorpyrifos causes autism. (It causes a lot of problems, and autism is not one.)
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I want to live in a better United States. One where a misogynistic white supremacist mobster reality show host would get laughed off any primary ticket. One where the debates are about how to fix climate change, income inequality, and racial and gender injustices, not whether those things are real.
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I’m not trying to be snarky here (okay, maybe a little), but: in what sense would that still be the United States, other than geographically?
What exactly is it about the US, as it currently exists as a country, that you’d want to keep?
From an outsider’s view, it looks like much of the stuff that defines the US as being “exceptional” is the problematic stuff.
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It would be the US where Jed Bartlett was president, as opposed to the US where Donald Trump is president.
It’s the US we long for, and claim we have, and even sometimes honestly believe we have, even though our system is set up to give us the polar opposite of that.
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As someone who never (or maybe “very rarely;” it was a long time ago) watched The West Wing, could you please provide more detail?
How would Bartlett, and America-under-Bartlett, have been different from Obama, and America-under-Obama?
That’s just as vague, and presupposes the idea of a single national vision of what the United States of America should be. I’ve heard a lot of American viewpoints, and I haven’t seen much evidence of such a unified “we” that shares a conception of what the U.S. is, or should be.
So, there are certain aspects of the country that aren’t living up to your vision of what it should be. Fine. So, what is that vision? What do you long for the US to be? What is this nation that you feel the US claims to be, that you’d like to see it actually become?
And how much of that country is present in the United States as it exists today; is it enough that it would be accurate to call it by the same name if such a country sprung to existence in the same geographical boundaries?
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Exactly. There are some aspects of the US I’m fond of, probably for nostalgic reasons.
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The geographic aspect is important. I expect that the government and culture of Finland would suit me pretty well, but moving 4600 miles away from every place and everyone you have ever known, and switching languages and cultures entirely, is kind of a big deal. We have family, we have dogs and a cat and multiple aquariums, we have a house we like, favorite restaurants and venues and events, and so on.
Secondly, this is my home as much as it is Trump’s. I’m not going to become an actual refugee because this one scumbag whose days are numbered – in terms of time in office and time on Earth.
Third, there are some things about our culture and even our history that don’t completely suck.
Fourth, neoliberalism and the populist fascist resurgence seem to be a global thing now; fleeing from Trumpland isn’t going to fix that.
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I was interpreting smulder’s question as "You live in the State of West Dakota1. Without having to move from where you currently live, you’re given the choice of staying the “U.S. State of West Dakota,” becoming “the Canadian Province of West Dakota,” or becoming “The Independent American Republic of West Dakota.” Which would you prefer?
That’s why I was asking about “apart from the geography.” What is it, not about the place, but about the institution (government, culture, traditions, etc.) of the United States of America that you would like to retain into the future?
So far, I’ve just been getting answers like:
…which, I suppose, technically answer my question, but doesn’t give me any more information beyond, “Yes, there are things unique to the United States that I’d want to retain as part of a hypothetical future ideal country.”
What is it, specifically, that makes you want to retain your identity as a US American, rather than becoming part of a new and different territory, assuming you could keep your house, job, friends, social life, etc. if you chose the latter?
1Yes, I know. I used a non-existent State for a reason.
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