That map looks to me like places that are very racist but also don't actually have large black populations. Maybe if you're a racist but live near black people you're more likely to already know whatever people in Appalachia are googling?
That map looks to me like places that are very racist but also don't actually have large black populations.
It's a mix. Louisiana and East Texas certainly have plenty of black people, the UP not so much.
I'm not interested enough to look at the paper, but what the hell are those clusters? MSAs? They certainly aren't state or country boundaries.
22: Appalachia is right -- the red stripe up the East Coast looks like exactly the Appalachians.
It's fantastic that the southwest has gotten rid of racism. The local Latino community must be thrilled with the news.
I had to search for the word just to see what pops up. I'm glad to see in my first page of search results the Lee Atwater usage of the term. The rest is mostly definitions, a link to this piece and a few other random things. The image search was a mistake, as it turned up tons of nasty memes.
I believe this is the same as the map of places where John Kerry got more votes than Barack Obama.
2. We all know that the south votes...etc
that are very racist but also don't actually have large black populations.
It amazes me the degree to which black and minority populations, including minority rural populations, are written out of white liberal conceptions of the South.
East Texas looked like one of the uglier sections, and is 18% black, 14% Hispanic at least.
Beaumont is 34% black, 17% hispanic
Infamous Tyler is 25% black.
The other brown or burnt orange streak looks like it goes north following the Miss/Ala border
Meridian, Miss 44.4 AA
Tuscaloosa 29.3 AA
Although it's kind of funny phrasing in the article to describe the big hot spot as 'not in the South' but the Appalachians running from Georgia up to NY. That's a lot more "Not entirely in the South" than "not in the South", no? Also, what the hell Rhode Island? The rest of New England looks so civilized.
I don't understand the Northeast comment. It's more mid-Atlantic which starts to blend into Appalachia. Except for RI but who gives a shit about them.
Bob, it appears that you are talking to me about writing minorities out of Texas. Would you like to try again?
Whatever, LB, at least I don't live in a salmon colored region.
There are certainly plenty of racists in NY, both in the urban areas and when you get outside them.
but there are other factors at play, like contempt and suspicion of federal government and desire to screw over the poor.
You acknowledge that the anti-federal sentiment has its roots in racism. And I know I don't have to tell you that the anti-poor thing also is strongly associated with racism. So I'm not quite getting your point.
I say it's racists all the way down, and that most of the pathologies of the US are undergirded by racism. I honestly can't think of anything vile about the US that isn't closely tied to racism. Warmongering? Imperialism? Exceptionalism? Elitism?
Sure, racism expresses itself in different ways in different places, and you can always frame one area's racism as worse then another's. One can make an entirely plausible case that the US is less racist than, say, France.
Still, I think it's hard to deny that the US - and the US South in particular - has a very special relationship with racism.
I say it's racists all the way down, and that most of the pathologies of the US are undergirded by racism. I honestly can't think of anything vile about the US that isn't closely tied to racism. Warmongering? Imperialism? Exceptionalism? Elitism?
I'll go out on a limb here with sexism. (Not limited to the US here.)
13:OP:We all know that the south votes counter-productively on every last matter possible, and certainly racism is a common factor
H-g, I dislike formulations like "The South votes" ,"the South is x."
The "South" is at least, and very definitely, two overlapping places, a white conservative South and a minority moderate to liberal South.
Since I would love to see Texas flipped in my lifetime, and believe it is very possible, it is important to me that the North or coasts don't write off and abandon the "South."
I kinda buy the map, with those streaks running from the Texas-LA border up into OKC, and the other running north thru Miss/Ala. Those are the scarey places for me. Of, course Appalachia.
Looking around, you also have what San Diego to Palm Springs, and what El Paso to Amarillo?
Not limited to the US here.
Right. I meant to be talking about pathologies specific to the US.
H-g, I dislike formulations like "The South votes" ,"the South is x." The "South" is at least, and very definitely, two overlapping places, a white conservative South and a minority moderate to liberal South.
Well, I certainly agree with this. It is not a monolithic place whatsoever.
The policies enacted in Texas are largely monolithic because power is disproportionately concentrated in a narrow demographic. I'd also love to see this flip and think it is possible but tricky.
21: Yup. I think that racism expresses itself in a way that is unique in the US, and that sexism isn't nearly so peculiar to the US.
I don't suppose I have a good way of demonstrating that. Certainly nothing scientific like the OP.
16:I say it's racists all the way down, and that most of the pathologies of the US are undergirded by racism. I honestly can't think of anything vile about the US that isn't closely tied to racism. Warmongering? Imperialism? Exceptionalism? Elitism?
Getting the head out of the US, there is a case that racism is a consequence result and tool of imperialism and acquisitiveness, if not also modernism.
Japanese prejudice against Chinese/Koreans grew in the late 19th to the degree the Japanese wanted the land and resources. Or study the British and French empires, like Toqueville and Algeria.
Racism and prejudice usually have a point and a purpose, something to be gained by othering, or lost by egalitarianism.
But never mind, there are all kinds of pathologies and exceptionalisms in the US.
I sort of see what you mean, to be non-belligerent for a second. United State sexism is truly run-of-the-mill sexism in a lot of ways. It's awful, but it hasn't shaped the trajectory of the country the way racism has.
That said, Jade Helm and other paranoia (about, say, environmental regulations) do put some daylight between things that were borne of racism and those reflecting currently entrenched racism (housing discrimination, prisons, etc would be over here. )
16.2 is basically correct.
Even so, I'm going to go ahead and be happy that nearby Robert E. Lee park is finally getting it's name changed (and it only took a bunch of people getting shot for it to happen!).
And there's also a thing where American racism, as it's directed toward blacks specifically, is, I think weird by international standards. Not necessarily worse, but weird. People from other countries talking about racism there, it sounds like a recognizable version of how Latinos, Asians, Middle Easterners and so on get treated here. Issues relating to African-Americans, though, seem very America-specific, and inextricably tied up with all the contingent historical background about slavery and the Civil War and and and.
Isn't Jade Helm paranoia basically because Black allegedly-Muslim President, so racist?
25: To be fair, it took a bunch of people getting shot for the park to be given that name in the first place.
27: A bit maybe but it's not like those exact same people weren't completely bonkers back during the Clinton administration. Obama's hands-off policy to them is probably based on looking at what happened when Clinton treated them as if they were criminals or something just because they were violently breaking a lot of laws.
26: We are, and always have been, also an infamously and astoundingly very fucking capitalist imperialist libertarian country, with never a dream of a Labor party or real social democracy. The best we have ever gotten is Bismarckism.
A classic extreme settler colonialist country. There are others, Australia, South Africa, Israel.
It is worth it to not over-link racism and the south. Racism is virulent beyond..
While this is true I also see this warning way, way more often than I see people actually calling out the South for being racist (because either the two come together, or someone says the second one whenever it looks like someone might be going in the direction of saying that the South has a serious problem with racism). I'm not sure if it's an actual misconception that people have, as much as a general (and kind of accurate sadly) rule of thumb about the more egregiously racist things they see, namely hat they're more likely to have occurred in the South than anywhere else in the country.
I'm pretty sure I'm in the little blue less racist area.
The best we have ever gotten is Bismarckism.
Now I want a pastry.
The best we have ever gotten is Bismarckism.
Don't you mean Marky-Markism?
A classic extreme settler colonialist country. There are others, Australia, South Africa, Israel.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how to fit the fact Israel was ruled by a socialist party for its first 30 years, in with that.
A lot of this discussion is kind of vague and stupid. Assume that the map does show that Appalachia, north and south, is particularly racist. That means that (depending on where you look) your most racist region is a region that was (in, say, West Virginia or East Kentucky) highly unionized, enormously supportive of the New Deal, etc, voted consistently Democratic for generations until about 2000, etc. Or, that in the North (ie, Western NY, Pennsylvania) was a home of radical Republicanism in the 19th century and standard business Republicanism through most of the 20th century. It's of course true that America is profoundly shaped by being a former slave country and that this has affected its attitudes in a whole host of issues, but Bob is right -- "racism" generally has a purpose and the political effects of being a white oligarch in majority-black Mississippi in 1880 or 1930 vs a self-identified redneck in central PA in 2015 vs a white ethnic Rhode Islander dealing with the aftermath of the great black migration north are pretty fucking different. Not to mention what drives politics in other parts of the country (Stanley makes a good point that the Southwest and West are definitely differently racist in a way this map just misses).
I do think that the conflict over slavery is probably the single biggest and most important thing about American history, if you had to pick one. But ever since the 2000 election there's been this weird tendency to stare at red and blue on the electoral map, get a basic-level understanding of history through say 1865 (maybe 1875), and then just roundly ignore everything that's happened since, particularly in the North and West and Midwest, as meaningless, as well as writing off the actual history of the (especially urban) south since 1965.
(Stanley makes a good point that the Southwest and West are definitely differently racist in a way this map just misses).
Cough OP.
Anyway, if 33 is right, it's more support for me position that police should continue to face a residency requirement if they work for Pittsburgh.
Bob is also right that if you want to explain the (relative) failure of social democracy in the US, being a settler nation based on highly abundant land, and genocide, is also a decent place to start.
I'm pretty sure the reason why some of areas of the country are showing up as non-racist is because this study is only looking at one kind of racism -- that is, they are only looking at racism against black people.
I haven't seen the actual paper, so I can't swear that this is true.
When I taught in Pocatello, Idaho, the racism against black people was (fairly) mild, because about two black people lived in town. But the racism against Indians was open, virulent, and unabashed.
I still remember the freshman paper I got, written by a man in his late 20s, not by any means a stupid man, in which he told me Indians were lazy drunks, that's why they were so poor. Since I hold conferences with my students, I worked with him over multiple drafts on this paper, and tried, in my liberal patient way, to persuade him out of this view. I spoke of history. I spoke of rhetoric. I spoke of injustice. In the final draft, exasperated, I just wrote a note on the comment, FIND SOME OTHER WAY OF EXPRESSING THIS. His final version? "Indians are shiftless, worthless, useless, filthy alcoholics."
He wasn't, by any means, the only student to express opinions like that during my three years in that state. It was common, is what I am saying; and they were obdurate.
If this study wasn't looking for anti-Indian and anti-immigrant/anti-Latino and anti-Muslim and anti-Asian racism, that's why they would find a lot less in areas that weren't Southern, I expect.
A bit maybe but it's not like those exact same people weren't completely bonkers back during the Clinton administration.
But a big reason for the Clinton craziness was that he was perceived as sympathetic to black people. I'm tellin' ya, it's racists all the way down.
Westerners really do appear to have a grievance with the federal government that is, on its face, entirely separate from race. Yet somehow, their antifederalism also seems to be inextricably tied up with racism.
So I'm going to go even further out on my limb and say that absent racism, a guy like Cliven Bundy finds it much harder to concoct a narrative where his thefts are legitimate. He takes from the government in an entirely different way than black people do, so he's just a rugged individualist and not a moocher.
I'm pretty sure the reason why some of areas of the country are showing up as non-racist is because this study is only looking at one kind of racism -- that is, they are only looking at racism against black people.
No really, there's like a whole post on the front page.
This is interesting, but I'm not sure how to fit the fact Israel was ruled by a socialist party for its first 30 years, in with that.
Actually, I think what this shows is that you can take a bunch of hardcore socialists, the sort of people who, in tiny numbers, did more to push the US in that direction than anyone else, and place them as colonialist settlers, and within 3 generations they're Likudniks.
I'm not sure what Australia is doing in that list, though, unless it's simply describing Oz as being an outlier along various apolitical dimensions (e.g., largest houses in the world), because it's not politically to the right of UK AFAIK, and I'm not sure racism there is any worse than it is basically everywhere (it has its own particularities, but every racist country is racist in its own way, &c.).
42 is right, does no one remember, "Clinton is the first black president"?
45: Toni Morrison said that, not the conspiracist Republicans.
A classic extreme settler colonialist country. There are others, Australia, South Africa, Israel.
This is nuts. On what possible scale is Australia a country of extremists? Or (to pick some settler countries inexplicably omitted) Canada, New Zealand, or Singapore? In all these countries the settler population is a huge majority and politically dominant over the indigenous population, but their politics are not and have never been "extreme" by world standards.
you can take a bunch of hardcore socialists, the sort of people who, in tiny numbers, did more to push the US in that direction than anyone else, and place them as colonialist settlers, and within 3 generations they're Likudniks.
Are Likud's supporters really third-generation sabras whose parents and grandparents were kibbutzniks, rather than a combination of lower-income Sephardim and recent Russian immigrants? The latter was my impression but I'd be interested to see some numbers.
Russia, on the other hand, is a classic extremist settler colonialist country.
Actually, I think what this shows is that you can take a bunch of hardcore socialists, the sort of people who, in tiny numbers, did more to push the US in that direction than anyone else, and place them as colonialist settlers, and within 3 generations they're Likudniks.
There may be some truth to this, but the Likudniks may not be the descendants of the socialists. Israel has lot of immigrants since independence, and those from the Arab world and the former Soviet Union tend to be the core of the right wing.
On preview see that I'm pwnd but I'll post anyway to confirm.
Although it's kind of funny phrasing in the article to describe the big hot spot as 'not in the South' but the Appalachians running from Georgia up to NY. That's a lot more "Not entirely in the South" than "not in the South", no?
Not in the sense that the point is that the 'The South' is the wrong concept for the pattern. Besides, the dark red cluster overlapping appalachia really only begins in eastern kentucky which really isn't the south as a matter of geography or 'The South' in the sense of having belonged to the confederacy, which it didn't. In fact, it's interesting that North and South in the inherited-from-the-civil-war sense are pretty difficult to tease out of this map.
This is nuts.
Not for bob, it's not.
47.last is a good point. My vague impression is that the country took a right turn in the years after the fall of the USSR, which is suggestive. I mean, lots of important local politics at the time as well, but I'm pretty sure it was a very different electorate in 1990 vs. 2000.
Note that it's not so much "the Northeast" but Pennsylvania and New York (and more so upstate NY at that). So, the Midatlantic, and mostly the not urban-East part of it. If we follow the entire red area, we get, as others have mentioned, Appalachia and adjacent parts of the Rust Belt.
(Okay, also Rhode Island. I don't know what the hell their problem is.)
I'd like to see the mortality rate map.
Moby, I figure you're probably joking but Pittsburgh is definitely in the deep red part on that map. However, it's not pulled out from surrounding Western PA at all, which is weird. I'm not sure what "little blue less racist part" you're talking about, except for possibly the small no data region. Thats far to the southwest of us (the vertical line in the red is the western PA border), probably somewhere on the relatively unpopulated part of the WV-OH border.
44: White Australian culture is really fucking awful to Aboriginal Australians, and most definitely deserves to be on the list. Bob is right that it's a classic "extreme settler colonialist country". I mean, they treated the land as terra nullius and didn't recognize Aboriginal culture in the slightest. Outback Aboriginal stations have horrific alcohol abuse rates and absurdly low life expectancies. Think of it as the worst of Native American/First Nations reserves, compounded with anti-black racism already endemic to Anglo culture at the time of settlement, along with whites being unable to handle contact with a culture not focused on material complexity.
50: What's fascinating to me is that the part of Virginia that seceded from the state in order not to secede from the country has turned into such a hotbed of Confederate sympathy. I mean, I get the SES dynamic, but still.
54: I wonder how much of this can be explained as Appalachia being the part of the country that traditionally practiced "as high as they want, so long as they're far away" racism more common in the North instead of the "as close as possible, as long as they're low" racism traditionally of the South, while otherwise having a culture with more Southern elements. Then the urban North experienced the Great Migration but Appalachia largely didn't.
I don't know that Bob's settler theory works as a general rule, but you do see oscillations between agrarian collectivism and insistent agrarian libertarianism in Australia and New Zealand and Canada that aren't that different from the rural, particularly Western, parts of the US. And, of course, similarly awful policies towards native populations (Canada's politocal history looks a lot more extreme if you are a Cree, or for that matter a French Canadian). The main difference, to my mind, is (a) slavery but also importantly (b) that the US industrialized much earlier and on a far more massive scale than those dominions, which were basically prosperous agriculture and resource extraction lands for global capital (and still to a large extent are that) and (c) the difference of not being in the British Empire, including eg parliamentary systems and affected by Labour Party socialism.
52, don't the recent Soviet immigrants in Israel mostly vote for overtly racist parties? Forming a government with Likud but not actually Likud.
53.last: granted, but extreme? There aren't many countries that don't have a fairly horrific record. Is Australia really politically extreme in a way that, say, Algeria is not? Or Burma? Or China? You could literally go through the alphabet and find a country for almost every letter that has treated people like shit within living memory.
Delagar you taught in Pocatello??? When were you there?
I don't know that Bob's settler theory works as a general rule
Of course it doesn't. There's no list of "countries with extreme politics in the 20th century" that doesn't include China, Germany, Japan, Cambodia and North Korea, and none of those are settler states. But if you're saying Australia is an extremist state then, well, who isn't? Switzerland maybe?
44: White Australian culture is really fucking awful to Aboriginal Australians
Also to asylum seekers.
58: They can be extreme, too. At worst the word is redundant. I'd dispute the degree that those countries are settler colonies; while there may be settlement, it's a relative minority (I mean, yeah, fine Han China is a heck of a lot bigger than it used to be, but we're limiting ourselves to recent history, right?)--I think I'd rather be a Uighur or a Tibetan than an Aboriginal Australia.
In Algeria, the attempt at making it a settler colony was also awful but it failed. Unless you're referring to, I dunno, Arab marginalization of Berbers? I'm very ignorant there, sorry. Likewise with Myanmar--sounds pretty awful, I don't know much about it, but it sounds like a somewhat different problem.
The majority of people using the N-word are actually black kids.
I think this is what this map measures.
But ever since the 2000 election there's been this weird tendency to stare at red and blue on the electoral map, get a basic-level understanding of history through say 1865 (maybe 1875), and then just roundly ignore everything that's happened since, particularly in the North and West and Midwest, as meaningless, as well as writing off the actual history of the (especially urban) south since 1965.
To good accuracy, one can ignore history more recent than 100 million years.
62: sorry, I wasn't clear - I was citing those as examples of non-settler countries which are none the less pretty extreme and horrible. I said it better in 60.
hist either can't read a map or doesn't know where black people live. Not so many Black teenagers in eastern Kentucky, West Virginia, or western Pennsylvania.
65: Comity. It's possible that everywhere is awful, but I'm generally more concerned with the types of awful people of my culture (and our close cultural cousins) practice. I don't see what's so bad about the word "extremist" if the kind of awfulness is in fact extremely so. But whatever, that's a quibble. Maybe I'm just excited that I'm actually on the same page as Bob is on something.
66: hist sure sounds like a crazy grandpa troll, so here's a better crazy grandpa joke.
No really, there's like a whole post on the front page.
When I made comment 7, I was being snide, because I hadn't understood what you meant by this line in the OP: "different racist pejoratives search with map of where the corresponding minority live." So you did address the point, and I'm a jerk who don't read good.
Just what you'd expect from a Polack.
On what possible scale is Australia a country of extremists? Or (to pick some settler countries inexplicably omitted) Canada, New Zealand, or Singapore?
A scale with neoliberalism/ordoliberalism/something similar on one end and democratic socialism on the other?
Nothing maps perfectly, nor on a left-right wing axis, nor on an authoritarian axis. And I would include the failed or fallen empires (Germany, Britain, Japan etc). And the thesis is long and slow in coming.
But something like recently imperialist/colonialist nations tend toward racism, libertarianism and neoliberalism because they are useful ideologies.
Singapore is fine as an example.
(Incidentally, if I were in the mood, I would discuss much of American politics as quasi-neo-imperialist, with blue states at the metropole and "darkest deepest mysterious backward just begging for enlightenment" red states as the colonized periphery.
I have never been one to grant any moral superiority to victims or the colonized as such. They are also assholes, denied equal opportunity.)
55: Seems too sophisticated. You can just map the thing onto appalachia's entrenched poverty and isolation over a couple of centuries. Northern vs. Southern worldviews/flavors of racism seems like a dispensable addition to that explanation.
The regions are "DMAs"--Designated Marketing Areas from Nielsen. The weird mix of sizes is because they follow media boundaries--the small ones tend to be small-mid-size cities that for usually geographic reason have an independent media presence. So the small "No Data" one that Moby hoped to claim is Parkersburg WV, and not very far north of that Zanesville has its own. They are not always geographically contiguous (if you hover over them in the map I linked above they highlight and give the name and some TV statistics (try Denver).
Or to put it another, scofflaw, analogical way...
...how has the meta-empire, like US + EU, maintained and supported stable resource extraction (including cheap labor) in the colonized nations, like the oilarchies and South American mineral states? Chile, SA, Pahlavi's Iran? Does that metropole have any responsibility for maintaining authoritarian regimes and preventing leftish alternatives from gaining traction?
So, I look at the red states, all resource extractive, with as I said above, enough liberal minorities that with help they might be able to gain more local control...and I look at the American metropoles, all cosmopolitan and servicey and so much richer and more egalitarian...and I compare the discourses of the blue states toward red "superstitious, violent, tribal, authoritarian etc" with the broad bush othering that erases the complexity...and I compare it with say British Imperial discourses toward Africa, India, China in the late 19th...
...and I see a colonial relationship, to the benefit of the blue metropole and elites in the red states.
73: Enh, sure, but something needs to explain why despite that Appalachia as far south as Tennessee was pro-Unionist. And maybe just that they didn't have a strong economic interest in succession is sufficient, but given that we've shown that it's more racist by some measures than other regions I think more explaining is needed.
75: How has the Northeast worked to prevent liberal minorities in red states from gaining ground? Virginia, North Carolina, and possibly even Georgia gaining purple/blue state qualities has been celebrated.
I guess your argument would include that the rich have been happy to see auto jobs move south out of more unionized states, and that has increased the power of local anti-leftists, including politically via donations and such, while the Rust Belt is not part of the metropole but more like a ignore ex-colony. Enh. Too conspiratorial for me.
That discourse comparison really fails in that the United States and the individual states have republican governments.
9: I believe this is the same as the map of places where John Kerry got more votes than Barack Obama.
It overlaps to some extent but the region inthat map is skewed to the south and west (so E. Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas and SE Oklahoma describes the main "Appalachian" arc). SW PA does not come out well either.
I did an analysis using some exit poll data and voting demographics to try to estimate change in White voter % from Kerry to Obama and it did show white vote movement more broadly in the south than on the overall map (in Mississippi, increased black voting and black Dem % masked the change in white vote % to a fair extent).
78: Very interesting that it's precisely the suburban counties, neither Allegheny nor the rural ones that don't have a large suburban component. Probably the most notable shift is Fayette County, which is probably the most heavily unionized/Democratic in the state outside of the rich (sub)urban counties. I guess it had a lot more room to shift due to racism.
79: And there may be some confounding with the continuing loss of union jobs in coal (and associated industries) occurring through that time period as well. Pretty sure there is a much longer time span slow leak away from Dems in those areas independent of racism (or maybe the loss of the strong economic incentive allows the underlying racism to have more influence on voting choices).
76: Right, northern appalachia was pro-union. I guess I just don't understand what it is you're trying to explain. So, is the theory proposed in your 55 that 'traditional northern racism' failed to die off in northern appalachia because it never saw industrial migration (and then it finds an affinity in a specific case for confederate nostalgia because fuzzy other affinities for southern culture)? I guess I just don't see what the carve up in terms of gestalty worldviews gets you. Poverty and isolation seem likely enough to explain racism. The confederacy is an avatar of racism. The end. You don't need vague stuff about the careers of traditional northern and southern racisms as distinct organisms. Besides, your implicit premise that the great migration decreased northern white racism in the typical case is seriously questionable.
On what possible scale is Australia a country of extremists?
Ever heard of the White Australia Policy or the stolen generation?
Settler extremism may be a bad term for it but there's definitely a common thread of people with a relatively liberal/progressive outlook (Australia had the first Labour government in the world) who nonetheless believe that they have a god given right to walk into populated territory and drive the people who live there out for their own benefit. Canada and New Zealand are exceptional in that the settlers hands were tied by treaties largely negotiated by the home government, and which were far from popular with all the settlers.
81: I'm trying to explain what I was responding to in 54. Yes, the Confederacy is an avatar for racism and always has been. WV (not just northern Appalachia--as I said, at least as far down as Tennessee, and possibly further south--weren't there a few county-based counter-successions?) was pretty explicitly against the Confederacy. I didn't claim the Great Migration reduced northern racism, but it might have changed how it's expressed. Other places are poor and isolated (rural Maine, chunks of the West) but are not represented on that map so no, I do not think poverty and isolation is sufficient to explain racism. But I have nothing additional to support my explanation so I'll accept it's silly and move on.
82: if you can only think of seven examples and out of those only four actually work and you have to hand wave or just ignore the other three, then I would argue that you don't really have a meaningful trend at all.
Not to mention that simply "doing bad things" cannot be your definition of being an extremist country because then almost every country is extremist.
I don't know what "extremist" means here, but there are certainly commonalities between Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States that have to do with their role as anglophone settler colonies, with the US and Australia on one end of the genocide-and-assume-land-is-empty spectrum, Canada somewhere in the middle, and New Zealand on the other side (due to treaty arrangements), but all countries are based at least in part on a theory of equality through widely available, "empty" (because inhabited by primitives) land.
Not to mention that analogies between the settlement of Australia and the establishment of Israel are so misguided as to make the need for the ban unmistakable. There is a meaningful difference between a few thousand peaceful Stone Age nomads and several million modern civilised people armed with state of the art combat aircraft, tanks and artillery.
Not as much of a difference as you might expect, successful resistance-wise.
Palestinians have state of the art combat aircraft, tanks and artillery?
I know you said "establishment of Israel" but this is an ongoing thing.
All I'm saying is that if you play Civ as the Egyptians, after 1940, you should face a -75% combat modifier.
as to make the need for the ban unmistakable.
Oh my goodness
59: nosflow, I was there from 1995-1998, teaching in the English department.
Do you know Pocatello? I still miss it sometimes. It had its charms.
I spent a couple of days in Pocatello before and after a camping trip in the Sawtooth Wilderness. A friend of mine and his now-husband then-boyfriend were living there (the friend had moved out there; the boyfriend was getting a master's degree). They reportedly got some puzzled looks when looking for an apartment.
Oh, yeah, not cool on the LGBT, at least when I was there. I taught a course in Utopian / dystopian lit, this would have been 1998, the year my kid was born, and included Joanna Russ's The Female Man.
I had 9 students enrolled, the only 9 Goth students in the entire valley, I think, and I am *almost* sure several of them were gay; but none were out (at least to me). It was a great class, and I did not get reported to the dean. I don't think I could have managed that book in any other class.
I did have one disgruntled straight white conservative guy in there who was always arguing with the rest of us. But even he was relatively cool.
The camping and hiking and mountains in general, not to mention access to parks (like Yellowstone) -- all of that was just great. That I miss.
And the university community. ISU had a great community.
Heebie -- sorry, I missed that part in your post. Mea culpa!
Big chunks of Australian history look more like apartheid-era South Africa than Australians are really very comfortable with, especially the literal genocide in Tasmania. I mean, not extreme given everyone was doing it at that time, but definitely deeply awful.
60:
I know that it's not really relevant to either the sense of "extremist" or "settler" that are in dispute here, but worth noting that Switzerland is far and away the most overtly, in-your-face racist place that I've ever lived. And easily the most sexist of the developed countries I've lived in.
78/79/80: In that region, the long process of white working-class communities being destroyed by globalization and becoming Republicans was delayed and all happened at once after local hero John Murtha died.
Everybody beat me to it, but people and government policy here in Aus can be racist as hell. And not just white people - I know older immigrants, even former refugees, who have really nasty attitudes about current immigrants.
Canada also has a horrible history wrt Natives such that I don't understand why we'd be considered mid or less extreme. Newfoundland - Natives all killed. Nova Scotia - bounty on scalps. Arctic - forced settlements, forced movement of settlements, generation plus of residential schools. I'm not up on history in other provinces but that's 3/3 in the areas I know about.
I don't know if small pox blankets were used in Canada but I wouldn't be surprised.
Basically the entire Canadian West was considered 'empty' for settlement purposes.
Anyway, I totally disagree that US/Australia should be on one end based on their settler mentality. I think the U.S. is on one end because of things other than 'settler' but now I've lost my train of thought and have to reread the argument.
Have you ever noticed Australian news mentions Canada more frequently than US news? Also that in old-ish British mystery novels, Canada is almost always is mentioned as a place where e.g.cousins disappear to/appear from? Also Argentina or Australia or New Zealand.
Also that in old-ish British mystery novels, Canada is almost always is mentioned as a place where e.g.cousins disappear to/appear from?
I have noticed that. Unless they reappear rich. Nobody comes back rich from Canada. They come back rich from the "diggings" in Australia or South Africa.
96: One canton gave women the vote in 1990, or rather, was forced to by a federal judge.
101: That's definitely worse, as these things go - but they also have this really super system where if you have a child out of wedlock and one partner dies, the other has no claim over the kid at all and the kid goes to the state (this is hearsay from two Swiss friends who rather grudgingly got married over exactly this issue) BUT if you're married and have two incomes, your tax, like, doubles and you each have to chop off a little finger and send it to the revenue service or something PLUS Swiss schools typically have very long lunchbreaks, during which time you're supposed to take your kid home and feed them, with no provision for working parents.
Obviously there's no reason that you couldn't have a stay-at-home Dad (see, who's the sexist now, eh?), which I'm sure is what proponents of the system would say if challenged re the overt social engineering.
I won't start on the racism (and its baby brother, xenophobia) because I wouldn't do it justice and there's so so much, but suffice to say that the SVP adverts - there were more than just the famous "sheep" ad - weren't unrepresentative of the place. When I was there the SVP was the largest party in parliament, although kept away from the levers of power by mutual refusal to work with other parties.