[Politics] The Urban Archipelago

[digitaldiscipline]

http://www.urbanarchipelago.com/

This, right here, is why lefties are pissed off, in general and in the occasional specific.

Feel like you're surrounded by folks who Just Don't Get It? It's because you are.

Comments

[baobh.livejournal.com]

I don't know if this elicited the response it was supposed to in me. Frankly, I'm more prone to flip off the people who wrote this with their cavalier disposal of the heartland.

I suppose it's because of where I'm from and because of what I want in life. I don't want to live in the city and embrace the hive-mind mentality.

They don't want the farmers? Fine. They can fucking starve.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

It's certainly a bitchy screed. I found it to be refreshing in light of the huggy crap that seems to be the usual Liberal MO.

Then again, I have a serious case of hetero man-love for The Rude Pundit.

When you kick me for this, just don't aim for the knees, ankles, or dangly bits. ;-)

[lil-m-moses.livejournal.com]

I agree with you on this one. They also massively devalue their case by doing things like not noticing that LA and San Diego are actually quite red (not blue) and talking about how primarily rural states are "squandering" half their federal transit moneys on new roads instead of public transit (because light rail makes so much sense when there's 1 residence per mile).

I live in the big city, but I come from the rural end of a small city. I like them both for different reasons. It's not that the rural areas are inherently bad (as the article seems to suggest), it's that they necessarily have different priorities. Cities coagulate and therefore magnify the problems people face by crowding. The population of the planet is growing, so cities are further ahead on the crowding curve than the country. Liberals tend to think more about their relationship to others, so the liberal politicians play better in places where you're forced to think about others more often. Conversely, conservatives think more about the well-being of themselves and their families, which is the more relevant topic in the country, where you aren't sharing space and interacting with a lot of strangers.

[etcet.livejournal.com]

Yes, and yes, and yes.

[emzebel.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness I wasn't the only one.

[smaugchow.livejournal.com]

That was...long. And boring. So is this:

Liberals will never have a solid "core" of members because they are of a diametrically opposed mindset than conservatives. Cons are very much concerned with "Us vs. Them," and in that equation "Them" is the far larger group overall. When you dissect the "Them" into it's groups you have a big collection of little groups who see no particular connection to each other - educated whites, African Americans, Jews, Gays...these groups are not exactly brothers in arms, ya dig? Thus, Bush in the whitehouse. He scared enough people into being "Us" and demonized enough of "Them" to eek out a majority.

Libs can't play that game. How do you effectively demonize farmers, small towns, good Christian folk, and the salt of the earth? Can't do it. You can pick at the edges - racists, rednecks, the entire cast of 'Deliverance,' etc - but you can't lump a lot of other groups in with them or cut a wide swath of fearmongering across the great plains, right?

So the Libs need to win on substance and style (mainly style,) not so much with dirty tricks, exploiting fear and stupidity, and general evility. or at least, not the same evility as the Cons use.

Evility - I made that word up, but you can use it too.

[fenixinthedark.livejournal.com]

The issue as I see it is this. So long as the "Capital" of my state is what it is, and so long as that is a fairly "red" city (as they go), and so long as they keep syphoning off the money from MY area (which is far more well off, and has more in common with it's blue neighbouring state than the rest of this state, which is red) to support the rest of this crap state, the more my vote counts for shit.

I would like my tax dollars to *remain* in this area and maybe widen roads which have gone untouched for better than 30 years (yet the population/commuter numbers have many times more than doubled since then). I would also love it if my vote was simply a vote of one that would be added to the total for a "popular vote" election, and that the electoral college would be done away with permanently. I'd also rather we go back to physical "chad" voting, and have done with the whole electonic (easily tampered with) computerized voting machines too.

But, if wishes were fishes...