Birthers scare the fuck out of me

[Triple Zero]

to be fair when i said "intellectual elite city people", my emphasis was on "city people", it's more like the rural/urban divide (or perhaps what Iptuous says, individual/collective), and "intellectual elite" not really based on intelligence but on the way both parties talk and present themselves, which has not much to do with intelligence and there's enough dumb people in the city too. hm wait this is also wrong, but they arent my words but those in the documentary

also, as an outsider, it is the enormous gap in the divide that i found interesting, not whether one party or the other is more right.

[Cain]

Personally, I like how Thomas Franks examined it, in What's the Matter With Kansas?  Essentially, the big divide between rural and urban groups is cultural, for a number of reasons (the necessity of cosmopolitanism in urban areas etc).

One of my favourite Lefties, HTML Mencken, also helps explain it a little from a non-wingnut POV, here:

When I hear the phrase "latte-sipping elitist," I think of several things. Culturally, I think of scenesters or scenester wannabes, arbiters of taste, awful people very much on the make, navel-gazing yuppie scum... Fuck it; I could go on and on, but here's a good shorthand: I think of people who write for Gawker. Politically, I think of people in the professions, some of them moving in and out of government, or otherwise involved in policy-making, who are very attuned to and conscientiously follow conventional liberal positions on cultural issues but are clueless — and often more than a little callous — when it comes to class issues. The shorthand here is "Brad DeLong." I myself never use "latte-sipping elitist" but I have and do use "technocrat elitist," in the exact same spirit I recognize in the former phrase, when describing such people who regard their poor countrymen with only a bit more humanity than Trevelyan and Lord John Russell had for the Irish.

...

What I'm saying is that a *lot* of college professors have more in common with the back-room businessman than they do with the underclass. Indeed, a lot of college professors work to ensure (whether they know it or not) that the smoky back-room businessman triumphs. After all, when the businessman (who is too stupid to do it on his own) wants the system that he benefits from defended in Op-Ed pages and sustained by Conventional Opinion, he usually hires someone from Academe.

At any rate, both the businessman and even the best of the college professors fear and loathe the underclass on cultural grounds. Really. Hey, so do I, but that doesn't make it right. And at least I know it's wrong to go from that position to then say "fuck those Kansans," because it's *never* right to abandon poor people — even "culturally primitive" ones.

....

It's not just wingnuts who go around making fun of working class beer, getting all appalled at working class fast food/fried food/southern food/soul food, sneering at or paternalising over working class vices like playing the lottery and smoking cigs and their putting a premium on admittedly pathetic status symbols like cars or clothing. Be honest, how many people do you know who think something nasty (and I admit, funny: I am most emphatically *not* a speech or humor policeman; all I'm after here is some empathy) when they hear of a tornado hitting a trailer park? Be honest. And it's not as if this phenomenon is confined to whites: urban blacks also often have a lot of contempt for their rural (and poorer) counterparts.

I mean, the cultural signifier thing goes both ways. All I'm saying is, the poor aren't wrong to respond to the resentment and in turn, resent. A lot of ppl on this thread are responding as if I'm some troglodyte redneck wanting to hang the professoriat en masse. It's not true. If anything, I share the cultural biases of the upper-middle class. But I also see its faults. The Jesus Freakery, racism, homophobia, etc, etc, that I see in everyday life around here does drive me batty. However, that's not all I see; I also see a shitload of poverty. But urban elitists, I think, tend to only *see* the cultural traits they like, again not unreasonably, to sneer at. The class issue aspect, OTOH, they only see dimly if at all, and then only in the vague "I know it's there in theory" sense. Remember a few weeks ago when the Obama-Appalachia thing came out? Josh Marshall, bless him, diffused a lot of the bullshit with his intial post but still, I could feel and see the knee-jerk response, and most predictable it was: the basic Tom Schaller thesis that means in practice "Fuck the poor white trash; let them have their Jesus and NASCAR." There's an itch, an irresistable itch in a lot of people (cf. Farley's post) to blanketly call a bunch of *poor* people horrible racists. That way it's easier to hate them and pretend that the Left has no responsibility to all poor Americans.

In re: college professors, bear in mind where I live. A common belief is that the most cushy job there is is being a professor/schoolteacher. You can consign that to simple envy and misguided class resentment but consider: most of the superwealthy farmers here are married to teachers. And as for the larger picture, again, from a poor rural person's point of view, what have intellectuals-professors-creative class (ppl need to stop getting hung up on the terminology: everyone knows what I mean) done for them in the last, say, twenty years?

The megarich, no one sees. The creative class/New Class, by its nature, is visible. And again, *a portion* of it is who does the megarich's dirty work. Sure, absolutely there are liberal — even radical — professors. How many of them [I really hate to argue like this but I don't see any other way to drive the point home] are on food stamps? And sure, a lot of them are very moral in the "fight the man" sense, and it's done a lot of good for a lot of people, but in the end, minority/gender/sexual orientation studies only help the poor indirectly in the sense that minorities constititute such a large portion of the poor. Actually, far too much of that stuff is about culture (cf. the Ampersand-Shakesville preoccupation with inspecting art for evidence of some or other form of bigotry) rather than economics. Solve the class issue and you solve probably 90 percent of bigotry issues (the megarich are not actually bigots in any meaningful sense, but they exploit and inculcate bigotry in the lower classes as a way to divide them; please excuse my very old socialist reasoning), but that ain't as much fun as deconstructing Simpsons episodes and James Bond movies to their ideologically satanic roots. Anyway, there is a huge cultural divide and I dunno how to bridge it. I am not saying elitist liberals should pander to something they're uncomfortable with; I am saying that, even so, it would be easier and better for them to attempt to empathise with the poor than expect the poor to empathise with them. But it has to be done somehow. The liberal elite, to its great credit, can empathise with (poor, exploited, and yes often but not always bigoted) Iraqis. So understanding culturally retrograde (to be mean about it) people, and taking responsibility for them, is possible, yet when it comes to understanding (as opposed to demonising) our own poor, exploited, gun nutty, religious, yes, often — but not always — bigoted folks... well, fuck them. So the creative class — the non-wingnutty side of them — is disgusted by the poor on cultural grounds, and can't identify with them on class grounds.

I think that sums up some of the legitimate gripes from the labelling, even if they are only tangenitally related.

[Kai]

Based purely on urban vs rural, yes, it's a HUGE divide. I was distracted by the "intelligence" part of your post.

Growing up in a town brings a completely different worldview than growing up in a city. I grew up in a town. It wasn't until I went off to college and traveled online and overseas that my rural worldview started really changing.

The biggest fear of rural people is to see things happening and being placed upon them as law by the people far away in a city, people who are as far from understanding rural life as they are from understanding city life, and they are powerless to do anything about it. Fear builds anger and lashing out and group think (religious more often than not, but not necessarily so) and ALL these things we associate with The Movement. It also builds contempt.

Of course there is no real end to this. The Movement becomes the primary mover of the nation and....then what? People are still moving to cities, rural towns are still disappearing, population centers are still growing. No matter what happens, they are loosing.

Things are going to get more nasty as time goes on.

[Thurnez Isa]

People in the city have NO idea how nature works. They have some idealized hippie bullshit idea... Don't even get me started on the northern Ontarian/ Southern Ontarian rift

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Dear government,

I am very (tick all that apply):
[] shocked
[] upset
[] angry
[] amused

that you could deceive the American public to such a large extent.
I am of course referring to:
[] the supposed moon landing
[] Obama's nationality
[] the black helicopters you use to spy on us
[] the flouride in the drinking water
[] letting corporations use dihydrogen  monoxide

We of course will not stand for it. be prepared to have every:
[] mother
[] republican
[] god-fearing patriot
[] crazy guy who yells at people on the subway
[] /b/tard

be called to action to bring the truth to the people.
Thus we give you an ultimatum, call a press conference to address the issue, and tell everybody the truth, by next week, or prepare to face:
[] mass protests
[] strikes
[] boycotts
[] a nude march
[] a mass death stare

Do not try to contact us, we will be in touch.

Sincerely,
_____________________________

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

This needs to be PDF'd

[Triple Zero]

I grew up in a town.

me too. little village of 6k inhabitants up until 11, medium town of 25k until 17 and then a city of 200k, 20% of which are students.

but I guess it's different in the Netherlands as all of this took place in a radius of 62 miles

People in the city have NO idea how nature works.

could you specify what (kind of) city and what (kind of) nature?

for example everyone that grew up in NL with high school education, city or village, has a basic understanding of irrigation and dykes

[The Good Reverend Roger]

People in the city have NO idea how nature works. They have some idealized hippie bullshit idea... Don't even get me started on the northern Ontarian/ Southern Ontarian rift

I spend two fucking years in Hillsboro, Ontario.  This was in the 70s, before it was a bedroom town for Toronto.

I had all the fucking "nature" I could stand.

[Thurnez Isa]

could you specify what (kind of) city and what (kind of) nature?

for example everyone that grew up in NL with high school education, city or village, has a basic understanding of irrigation and dykes

rocks, trees, swamps... no irrigation, just rocks, trees, swamps, and mines

[Thurnez Isa]

People in the city have NO idea how nature works. They have some idealized hippie bullshit idea... Don't even get me started on the northern Ontarian/ Southern Ontarian rift

I spend two fucking years in Hillsboro, Ontario.  This was in the 70s, before it was a bedroom town for Toronto.

I had all the fucking "nature" I could stand.

so I guess it would be pointless for me to try to convince you to move to Thunder Bay this winter....

[Thurnez Isa]

could you specify what (kind of) city and what (kind of) nature?

for example everyone that grew up in NL with high school education, city or village, has a basic understanding of irrigation and dykes

rocks, trees, swamps... no irrigation, just rocks, trees, swamps, and mines

lets put it this way
you ever watch those nature documentaries where they show some lake in Canada, where you see nothing but rocks, trees, water and wildlife... you may see a wooden house on a cliff or something...
that's where I live

Well this summer Im actually in a large mining city (160 thousand people)

[The Good Reverend Roger]

People in the city have NO idea how nature works. They have some idealized hippie bullshit idea... Don't even get me started on the northern Ontarian/ Southern Ontarian rift

I spend two fucking years in Hillsboro, Ontario.  This was in the 70s, before it was a bedroom town for Toronto.

I had all the fucking "nature" I could stand.

so I guess it would be pointless for me to try to convince you to move to Thunder Bay this winter....

No, the fucking Inuit would eat me.

[Elder Iptuous]

TGRR suet bars will keep you going through the cold winters....

[The Good Reverend Roger]

TGRR suet bars will keep you going through the cold winters....

They're chock full O' HATE^TM!

[Thurnez Isa]

Ironically it was an half Inuit who taught me how to spear fish

but that is whole other thread jack

[Bruno]

to be fair when i said "intellectual elite city people", my emphasis was on "city people", it's more like the rural/urban divide (or perhaps what Iptuous says, individual/collective), and "intellectual elite" not really based on intelligence but on the way both parties talk and present themselves, which has not much to do with intelligence and there's enough dumb people in the city too. hm wait this is also wrong, but they arent my words but those in the documentary

also, as an outsider, it is the enormous gap in the divide that i found interesting, not whether one party or the other is more right.

As a resident of the dirty south, I'm pretty familiar with the loathing of city folk by rural, well, elitists. There is a perception that city folk have more "book learnin'", but country people have more "common sense" and are morally superior.

They are, of course, willfully ignorant of the fact that crime rates are higher per capita in rural areas than in urban areas.

Also, there's the whole urban = black subtext.