Joe Money, Joe Problems: the November 2021 U.S. Politics Thread

the rest of y'all know where I'm politically at

we need outrage! we need clicks!!

I misread this, thanks for new display name KM

Yes I chose to buy a huge SUV and to live 40 miles from my work because I needed more Sq footage to store all my crap/kids but it's the guvmint's fault I ""can't afford"" gas.

^ Ngl, blaming people for the misdeeds of city planners, NIMBY types, and the automobile industry is kind of ugly.

Lol Neanderthal

For anyone who needs to hear it, VP is a vital partner of POTUS: US Politics December 2021

it seems like people are way more concerned with the price of gas than the fact that we probably won't have a democracy in about 3 years

something something material circumstances yada yada yada

Something something Mussolini made the trains run on time.

xp to table

we blame people as much as city planners and nimbys because those same people are deeply invested in the policies advocated by those latter groups. our fox news radio station has a local morning show that i would occasionally tune into on the way to work, and their only talking point for over a year was recode, an effort to update and modernize our zoning laws. it's no mystery why the local pundits were so invested in this particular dog whistle. recode is not only a harbinger of right wing culture war boogeymen, threatening eg their right to barrel around town in a coal rolling four ton truck because the city narrowed the street and put planters in by the sidewalk; it also raises the possibility that a non-white person will move in next door in a newly affordable apartment, townhouse, duplex, ADU or what-have-you. and local non-pundits have these same concerns and will express them in explicit terms.

i choose disunity over empathy for someone who would sooner see me and my loved ones dead than ride a bus. i don't have patience for concern over the proverbial trump voting diner patron, but from the left, and certainly not when the matter at hand is the desire for cheap acreage.

pretty sure i can never afford to live near my job in DC and i live on .008 acres rn but yeah everyone concerned about gas prices chose to live far away from work so they could cheaply store their kids in their SUV/mcmansion and is in a trump diner. just to add to the series of strawmen set up here.

I mean, also sometimes companies move their offices/warehouses/headquarters/whatever and most don't bother to ask their employees if that's convenient with them before doing so. All of that without getting into people who are asked to work shifts that are incompatible with public transportation schedules/options, etc etc etc.

Which isn't to say I defend people driving monstrous pickup trucks or gigantic gas guzzling SUVs just because, but there's a whole lot of ugly strawmen in that argument.

Yeah, sorry, but setting up all people who don't live in cities as relentlessly fascist hicks who don't care about the planet is fucking idiotic, period.

Beyond that, it's also untrue.

It's also not something anyone has said but go off son

Fortunately there's an alternative, and it's called the electric car

...which is overwhelmingly a luxury product for rich people

Personal consumer choices still don’t matter.

I can’t wait for my apartment complex that hasn’t been remodeled since 1975 and has probably 600 cars parked on the lot every night to install charging plugs for all of them.

Yeah close-in, mixed-use, high-density development that is engineered for walkability? Unfortunately, it's still largely a luxury product, mainly consumed by rich people.

New urbanism is great but even I can barely afford it, and I'm pretty well off.

My office is 30 miles from Chicago. There's plenty of single family homes within short drive of it. Yet many of my coworkers choose to live in what are basically rural areas so they can afford a larger home. None that I know of drive anything other than a huge suv. Obv this isn't all or even most ppl! But they're out there and they tend to be the ones I hear bitch about gas prices. Ymmv Har Har.

Imo this isn't an either/or situation, it's a both/and one. Sometimes people's choices are limited by things outside of their control so we shouldn't rest blame on anyone at the bottom of a power structure, AND ALSO some people make bad & selfish choices and are proud of doing so for reasons that are incompatible with community survival and that's not a value-neutral choice they're making.

This isn't really a strawman in my experience. The white flight from cities to suburbs has clearly moved on out to rural areas and townships where the taxes are low and minorities are rare. More and more farmland is being parceled up for them and boy oh boy do they love putting Trump signs on their oversized lawns.

I don't think anyone is arguing that this isn't happening, more just that those are not the ONLY people who live in far-flung suburbs and rural areas.

More and more farmland is being parceled up for them and boy oh boy do they love putting Trump signs on their oversized lawns.

Was in the Fresno/Clovis area for Thanksgiving, and I can confirm this is true. Former orchards now sprouting beige, enormous faux-tuscan abominations

If a development is called Quail Brook, you can surmise that quail used to live by a no longer existent brook

yeah, any subdivision named after an animal comes about when the animals are gone.

“Quail Brook” sounds like the title of a lame solo Malkmus c-side from 2003

in orbit otm

the assholes are just louder, maybe more likely to be in the office workplace, and have land to put their trump signs on. it's selection bias.

If they all moved back to the suburbs or cities, it also wouldn't matter (to the climate or anything else), aside from making the rapidly diversifying suburbs as unaffordable as the cities.

En route to Fresno, saw a bunch of variations of this: "Newsom! Stop Dumping Our WATER INTO THE OCEAN!"

Even ancient watersheds and rivers are now the democrats' fault

idk how much I trust the whole yard sign thing my area was fucking slammed with Trump shit in 2020 and he wound up actually losing here by a small amount. Trump is just an entire identity to some people. It goes way beyond politics and policy. as crazy as the people putting up the Trump/Rambo flags are if I ever saw anyone do that with Biden I'd think they were fucking insane

those are not the ONLY people who live in far-flung suburbs and rural areas.

Did someone say that though? I thought it was an example of a person ironically complaining about gas prices and that is exactly what you will hear out there. They gotta have at least one truck, an ATV and a lawn tractor but they aren't farming anything. They like being able to shoot their guns in the back yard. And family farms that can no longer stay afloat are understandably cashing out by selling their land to them. The rural midwest is increasingly becoming a conservative/libertarian playground and they blame Biden for the higher gas prices that are cramping their rugged individualist lifestyle.

Top House Democrats are considering whether to take action against Lauren Boebert for her “harmful and dangerous” comments implying Ilhan Omar is a terrorist threat, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer says.

https://t.co/gII8QYhcMT

— Axios (@axios) November 30, 2021

hmm gonna have to mull this one over

Has the sitting President ever not been blamed for gas prices? I don't see that as telling any greater narrative - Bush's popularity (or lack thereof) correlated strongly to rising gas prices from the start of the war on terror onward. The 2006 blue wave midterm came around the same time as record per gallon prices.

"oh no don't censure me" she says as she readies the fundraising emails

Jesus

.@IlhanMN just played a voicemail she received a few hours after she got off the phone w @RepBoebert:

“There’s plenty that would love the opp to take you off the face of the earth… you’re a fucking traitor, you will not live much longer bitch. I can almost guarantee that.”

— Jacqueline Alemany (@JaxAlemany) November 30, 2021

VM not left by Boebert, kind of a confusing tweet

Still though..

Jfc

Boebert is garbage, but that's also a bad tweet

I didn't appreciate how Biden has all but halted the drone war, especially compared to Trump https://t.co/kjTNuWdw3r pic.twitter.com/wE7qyqjAmO

— ryan cooper (@ryanlcooper) November 30, 2021

NEW: Patrick Leahy, the longtime former Senate Judiciary Committee chairman + longest-serving sitting U.S. senator, says it's time for Native American activist Leonard Peltier to go home after 44 years in prison. https://t.co/jrNBVJ6uS6

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) November 30, 2021

past time, I'd say. the FBI agents deserved jail time at least as much as the AIM resistors did.

"more just that those are not the ONLY people who live in far-flung suburbs and rural areas."

Do you genuinely believe anyone was under that impression??

Of course I didn’t. But every time it was pointed out that these lazy, broad brush stereotypes were lazy, broad brush stereotypes someone had to chime in with, “gee I dunno, all the rural people *I* know are Trump supporters with massive SUVs”, so I thought it a point worth belaboring. But ilx loves few things more than sneering disdain of anyone who doesn’t live in an urban center.

and with that I want to just bid this thread farewell

may this be its last dying breath

good night sweet thread

may flights of angelzzzz

Going... going...

Come ooooooon, the suspense is killing me. Plus I have to post a thing.

Someone else start whatever this thread is gonna be

"I have had it up to here waiting for the U.S. Congress to be remastered"