Haha, that was a good autocorrect. Didn't notice it until you called it out and I got a chuckle.
It should say decriminalization. I was typing the on screen document from the video into a list and failed there.
Political Discussion
- Thread starter David A.
- Start date
Haha, that was a good autocorrect. Didn't notice it until you called it out and I got a chuckle.
It should say decriminalization. I was typing the on screen document from the video into a list and failed there.
mdmost
Well-Known Member
Love it or leave then I guess. I could say the exact same thing about living in an urban city in red state Texas. You don't see the blue cities of Dallas, Houston, Austin, and San Antonio all banding together to try to be a separate state or part of blue state New Mexico. If I don't like living in a state run by right wing morons, I can either try my luck at the ballot box or move. The exact same thing that the rural people are saying is happening to them, happens in this state to people in Dallas. We can't choose the protocols at the local or county level for Covid any longer. Hell, if we were a part of New Mexico, our power grid would actually work if there's a freak snow storm.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
It wasn’t the alto correct, just the idea that attics are gonna flock in from overseas.
folsom_lives
pretty_lil_dirt_boi
Lol what?
Yeah, not going to happen. Also, correct me if I'm wrong. But doesn't rural America have higher rates of drug use / addiction when we are talking about the opioid problem?
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
I was a victim of autocorrect. Also and addicts were the words
folsom_lives
pretty_lil_dirt_boi
I figured it out quick. The irony was too sweet.
Dtknuckles
Well-Known Member
Who knows but when counting addicts the ones that most obvious are the ones needing services. The rich ones that are insulated from the criminal justice system or can get services on their own typically aren’t counted.
folsom_lives
pretty_lil_dirt_boi
To chime in on the rural/urban debate...
Should the wants of a few outweigh the wants of the majority? Land doesn't vote, people do. If y'all want to start gerrymandering state lines too, I guess go ahead, see what happens.
Should the wants of a few outweigh the wants of the majority? Land doesn't vote, people do. If y'all want to start gerrymandering state lines too, I guess go ahead, see what happens.
Chucktshoes
Well-Known Member
It won’t be allowed to happen because if it was it would start a chain reaction and you would have a whole lot of cities all of a sudden being states in and of themselves. Most every state I travel in the folks in the rural areas seem to universally hate the one or two major cities in the state. Given half a chance, they would expel them from the state without a second thought.
Moreso, there are large swathes of people who see that government isn't functioning for a majority of Americans. They see tax breaks and contracts go out to people and businesses that contributed campaign funds and rules being rewritten for high paid executives regardless of how terribly they are steering our economy into peril. They see a country in which the middle class has to be a stable tax base because we are too afraid to ask corporations and the wealthy to pay their fair share. They are sick of failed programs and projects wasting tons of tax dollars. They would rather not fund yet another failed social program or whatever new pet project from some wealthy urbanite. It's not that these naysayers don't think these projects or laws are not good ideas, often, they do agree and understand that this is what we need, what they object to is that they believe that the current ruling body cannot be trusted (yes, TRUSTED) to actually do what they say. This is the impasse we are at right now. The lack of trust.
I argue, however, that a large reason that these conditions exist are due to both neoliberals (Democrats) and neoconservatives (Republican) shifted to a governing model where they decrease government and replace with contractors. This along with not enforcing anti trust laws and letting financier capitalism go amuck which has put us in the inequality mess we are now. And yes, these sorts of social divides and lack of trust is all fueled by mass inequality and more and more capital matriculating to the top. Pair this with a legislature that is guilty of insider trading, and you get a corruption machine.
Here's some national data on drug use. It's from 2016-2017 but that's the newest iteration of this study (or the newest they have put out results for).
2016-2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health National Maps of Prevalence Estimates, by State, SAMHSA, CBHSQ
2016-2017 National Survey on Drug Use and Health National Maps of Prevalence Estimates, by State, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Reports from SAMHSA's Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality
www.samhsa.gov
There's a lot of maps, but most suggest that drug use is higher in the PNW than anywhere else. So if we then cross these trends with overdose deaths, we get this:
I'd like to unpack this for a minute. More people in the West and Northwest seem to be drug users, yet the deaths all concentrate around middle America and into the Northeast. Drug users are not concentrated in places like West Virginia, they are just dying at greater rates where communities are poorer.
Here's the first study that popped up, but there are several studies that all come to the conclusion that drug use is actually higher among richer teens/adults: Findings based on three indicators of family background SES—income, wealth, and parental education—converged in describing unique patterns for smoking and for alcohol and marijuana use among young adults, although functional relationships across SES measures varied. Young adults with the highest family background SES were most prone to alcohol and marijuana use.
Socioeconomic Status and Substance Use Among Young Adults: A Comparison Across Constructs and Drugs
Little consensus exists regarding the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and substance use. This study examined the associations of three indicators of family SES during childhood—income, wealth, and parental education—with ...
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
Urbanites use more drugs than people in rural areas. People in rural areas die of overdoses at greater rates than people in urban areas. If you go back a page or so, we talked about how rural hospitals were dying. These two things are not unrelated. Rural America has seen their factories shut down, their best and brightest go off to the city just to make a living, and their services like hospitals and utilities crumble. Their infrastructure is falling apart, and the Dems seem to only be worried about making sure the Kennedy Center gets funding to make it through Covid. Do you see how someone from a rural community would reject urban rule? It only ever made them poor, sick, and hopeless.
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
All completely true and there are plenty of large rural states already in existence for people to move to. I used to live in Central IL and part of the draw to moving out West was living around more likeminded individuals. Instead of redrawing maps where everyone always gets what they want. These folks that find Oregon or Washington unbearable can move a little further East and live in their rural utopia (just keep away from the urban hellhole of Boise). Most of these pushes are really just politicians trying to fundraise. All show and ways to rile up a base. It’s the same type of thing that last summer led to armed patrols of townsfolk in small rural areas. The people pushing these ideas were the same people that were on Facebook claiming that ANTIFA were on their way from the big city out to the middle of nowhere down to burn down their Walmart.
folsom_lives
pretty_lil_dirt_boi
I agree it would never happen. I just think maybe the hatred/disdain for city folk is misguided. Don't equate city living as a pact with the 1%. Most of us are all fighting the same fight. Sometimes though the ideological differences overshadow that.
mdmost
Well-Known Member
I miss the conspiratorial Antifa/BLM brick piles that seemed to be plaguing parts of the DFW metro area last summer. My favorite was the pile of bricks in some random development in Frisco that was in fact a brick pile put there by a contractor who was redoing a brick wall that bordered the development.
Check your privilege there.
A large number of people cannot afford to move as they most likely inherited their house/land. They cannot sell for one of many reasons including that no one is buying, or that it was never a formal inheritance and therefore if it's sold the land must be broken up into many different shares, thus leaving the original inhabitant with no money to move.
I do agree that this is just someone riling up people to sell their own brand of politics to the masses. It's much easier to create an enemy to pit people against than it is to actually talk about inequality and how much of what we are seeing is due to our current system only really working for about 10% of our population.
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
Exactly everyone south of I-80 in Illinois blame everything that is wrong with the State on Chicago and would be happy jettison Chitown off into Lake Michigan.
Also, you could take it to absurd levels to prove the point and say their are parts of Cities that are more Conservative than the cities they reside in as a whole, do they then become states unto themselves and whatabout households that are more Liberal that reside in Conservative neighborhoods of the Liberal Cities of their Conservative States…
Chucktshoes
Well-Known Member
The divide isn’t as overhyped as you may wish to believe. It isn’ just about economics, but morals and culture. I lived in Memphis for over a decade and a half before moving out to raise children. My wife was born and raised in Memphis and we left because we didn’t want to raise children in that kind of environment. We made economic sacrifices to live where we are out of an intentional rejection of city life and what it entails.
folsom_lives
pretty_lil_dirt_boi
I feel like you need to elaborate on "what city life entails" and "environment". What do you think we do in the cities that doesn't happen on a smaller scale in BFE?
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
You are ultimately correct. However I am sure there are still lots of people that could move if they wanted to. Especially most of the people getting riled up about this specific issue. Many of the poor folks that would not have the means to relocate have bigger fish to fry than getting riled up about a Greater Idaho Movement.
mdmost
Well-Known Member
Or in the case of Texas, you can have both. Voting restrictions about to be passed by the Legislature and the Texas GOP chair talking about Texas needing to succeed from the U.S.