The day the Supreme Court decision came down - almost 11 years ago now - I glossed it on social media as "Roberts to Southerners: Drop Dead." That's held up.
And it's not even part of a daily panic. Like, there should be daily breathless articles about how the state government letting people die unnecessarily for no good reason. But it's not novel and there's no new hot takes left to take. IT'S WORTH TAKING THE OLD TAKE, JOURNALIST-DUDES.
Death comes for us all. The hard part is bankrupting the whole family first.
Paraphrasing myself elsewhere, but both unfortunately and legitimately, it's not a crisis such that an attitude of panic would land. Crises are defined (maybe not in the dictionary, but in practice) as getting progressively worse in an out-of-control and unpredictable way. But if it's just an inordinate number of people suffering or dying and the rates are level, the situation turns into just a sucky way the world is, and people get used to that.
Things that should be treated with the seriousness of a crisis, but by being livable and level are not crises, and even if the mass attention of the professional and/or organized left turned to making it so, the public and decision-makers would not accept it as such:
- Traffic violence
- COVID deaths/disability
- Police violence
- Death/debt avoidable with more Medicaid
Climate change is still a maybe, since it is always getting worse and showing itself in new ways.
It's not a bad situation according to the people who created the situation. If you attach positive value to making poverty painful, the system is working.
Anyway, we're fifteen years out from the last time the Republican Party was trying to argue that they could provide better care though something-market-something-competition. It's now just Calvinism without the warmth.
10: I have a vague memory of Trump saying he was going to fix healthcare and everyone would have health insurance without any of the evil socialism of Obamacare -- something like that, but a little less coherent.
True. But there was no attempt to give any substance to that.
Medicaid expansion has passed every time it was on the ballot -- it would almost certainly win in every single state, right?
Also all the closures of rural hospitals. Their funding was tied to the expansion, though I have forgotten the details. I gather that there have been various stopgap measures, but those may finally be running out. I saw over on the twitters that more than half (53% is the figure that sticks in my mind) of Mississippi's rural hospitals are in danger of closing in the next year or two. I wonder if Texas is significantly (or indeed any) better.
I guess I really should read that Dying of Whiteness book that Loomis at LGM praises from time to time.
It's really weird to be in a situation where politics is aligned around urban/rural divisions, but the "rural" party is completely uninterested in actual issues faces rural people.
How does this compare to like WJB era Democrats? Maybe that was also purely scam-based and not policy-based?
Like I just want the Republicans to start punishing companies who only have locations in the largest cities. Put a special tax on Apple Stores and Trader Joes until they start opening more locations!
Even just sticking with medical stuff, the problems with rural medicine are bigger than just medicaid expansion. Here we've expanded medicaid, but there's still like a 4 or 5 month wait for new clients for any doctor.
How does this compare to like WJB era Democrats? Maybe that was also purely scam-based and not policy-based?
No, WJB-era populism definitely represented the economic interests of small farmers in concrete ways. The Dixiecrats later on might be a better comparison.
Although they supported the New Deal and so forth so they certainly weren't as disconnected as today's GOP.
I think the real answer is that the GOP plays up rural cultural tropes and does get genuine support in rural areas, but numerically its real base is in the suburbs.
17: Republican officials have explicitly argued against Medicaid expansion as a way of making doctors more available to the olds.
Yeah, I guess 20 is right, or rather of a particular sort of lower education suburb/exurb.
Yeah, there just aren't that many people living in truly rural areas these days. The white ones vote overwhelmingly Republican but that's not enough to sustain a national party. Very different from WJB's day, when the rural population was a significant majority of the country.
Rural people stayed out of the cities for fear on being nailed to a cross of gold.
Anyway, white people are broken. But I bet if I mention that at my cousin's wedding, I'm the asshole.
It's really mind-boggling how much the well-being of the country has been driven into the toilet by the sheer power of selling the salt-of-the-earth/pick up truck/Jesus/mama brand to people. And the degree of disconnect between mama/Jesus/pick up trucks and what the politicians actually accomplish with the votes cast for that brand. Even when Fox News is drumming up hate on a very specific, tangible topic, the new hate-object only gains traction insofar as it stands in opposition to mama/Jesus/pick up trucks.
I mean at the reception. Not like I would be shouting during the ceremony this time.
Well, they do give you an opportunity to speak or forever hold your peace.
They never actually do give you that opportunity at a Catholic wedding. Or any other wedding I have been to.
Probably only happens at weddings for your emotionally repressed ethnic groups where nobody gets drunk before the ceremony.
Could be. I don't think I've ever been at a wedding that did it either.
They print engagement announcements before the wedding, but I think the "Please call if you or someone you know is already married to one of these people" is only implied.
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I cannot believe I didn't take a picture, but I met Teo's Mexican doppelgänger a few days ago in a bar in Guanajuato. A little darker complexion and hair, as you might expect, but I did a double take.
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With a national park ranger hat and everything?!
Teofilo's Mexican doppelganger is surely just named Theo. Or maybe Phil.
It's really weird to be in a situation where politics is aligned around urban/rural divisions, but the "rural" party is completely uninterested in actual issues faces rural people.
Capital, rural people, old people, white racists, and Christian extremism all became aligned maybe through historical circumstance or pure coincidence or for the very general fact that they all push towards reactionism, but once they were aligned, it was very easy for capital to capture all the power and authority from the other three in that alliance. I don't know if it's any more complicated than that. Yeah, America's 18th-century institutions are painfully out of date and its dominant style of Christianity has particularly problematic elements and the Bowling Alone trends are probably unusually strong in America for various reasons, but in the end, capitalism isn't good at sharing.
23
The white ones vote overwhelmingly Republican but that's not enough to sustain a national party.
It might be enough to maintain a stranglehold on the Senate though. So maybe the problem is America's institutions at all...
To be fair to Texas, the cost of denying medical care is less than $9,000 per person. Aggregating the happiness gained by Texans from the act of denying medical care, subtracting the pain suffered by those denied medical care (both measured in mouse orgasms), and it's an efficient, welfare-maximizing expenditure.
35 took me this long to figure out.
38.last: Even then, there's only two states that are above 52% rural, and both of them vote Democratic (VT, ME). Then there's WV and MS at 51%. Above 40% you also have MT, AR, both Dakotas, Kentucky, and AL, but it still doesn't get you that far if you're not seriously competitive in the suburbs. Especially when you consider that AL, AR, and MS have large numbers of rural Democrats.
Looks like those numbers are slightly old, but the current numbers don't change the situation that much (and even add NH in place of ND in the most rural states).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_the_United_States
Yeah, the Senate disproportionately benefits small states but it doesn't particularly strongly benefit rural states just because there aren't very many of them. The majority of the population in the vast majority of states states is in cities and suburbs.
That's why everyone goes to Omaha and Lincoln all the time, even though it's not near the farm.
Also there are states that are both small and urban: Rhode Island, Hawaii, Maryland.
Maryland's not small.
But Nevada is another example of somewhere small and extremely urbanized. Utah kinda counts too (it's a little larger than the others, but more urban than Hawaii and almost as urban as RI).
46: I guess it isn't, but it looks small because it's got so many little parts.
And that whole, ridiculous peninsula is easy to forget and huge.
Maryland is #42 of 50 by area, fwiw. Teo's Mexican doppelgänger actually was named Felipe, but that didn't even occur to me.
This is a lovely just-so story, except that the South had terrible credit scores much farther back than 2014.
Here is an example from showing 2004 data. Consider Figure 3.
It is possible that medical debt is driving the difference between the North and the South! But the notion that something in 2014 is responsible for this difference seems far-fetched, given that this difference was was present far, far earlier.
Maryland would be bigger if the bottom 15 miles of PA hadn't been stolen from it by those dastardly Mason Dixons.
50: Senate isn't based on area!
51 might be right, otoh it might be that if you correct for race and poverty then you don't see the effect in 2014. The map in the link sure looks like a map that's highly correlated with race and poverty!
Amusingly, the wedding-objection trope was used as an analogy in an article today.
To Assembly Member Matt Haney, San Francisco's insistence on giving anybody the right to make a fuss at any stage of the housing construction process is like that old-fashioned wedding tradition in which the minister asks guests if there are any objections.
The custom rarely stopped a marriage. But San Francisco's antiquated allowance for people to appeal housing permits even after a project is entitled -- a bizarre rule that exists nowhere else in California -- does in fact delay construction.
"Your crazy uncle doesn't get to actually stop the wedding, but in this case they do," Haney told me. "Or at least you're going to have to have a separate hearing where your uncle gets to present his case, and all the money you've spent on this fancy wedding goes to waste, and you have to invite everybody back six months later."
I think it would be great to object to a housing development by accusing it of bigamy.
Attic-wife, but it's literally an attic.
No spoilers. I haven't read Jane Eyre yet.
Never mind. I read the Wikipedia summary.
Honestly "She died in a fire and now I can marry you" just makes me wonder who really started the fire.
It is one of the virtues of that book that you really never give a moment's thought to that scenario. "Villette" is better, though. I also probably got more out of "Wide Sargasso Sea" at the end of the proverbial day.
"Yes, it's big of me as well." - Rochester
So, I saw "Wide Sargasso Sea", but apparently I'm oblivious to plot.
I bet there was more naked time in that movie than in every adaptation of Jane Eyre ever made.
I never read the book or saw the movie. Also I never "the Sargasso Sea". A sea within an ocean?
It's also called the North Atlantic Garbage Patch.
67: I left out a verb. "Got"? "Understood"? "Sailed"?
68: The Wide North Atlantic Garbage Patch is also one of Trump's nicknames.
The reputation of the film was vague and lurid enough when I was in middle school that I always envisioned some kind of hentai involving eels; later I learned that Jean Rhys can write pretty well, and it's hard (for me) to jump back from modernist to Victorian prose so it pays to observe chronology.
Yeah. I don't recall exactly how it was advertised, but you went in expecting to see nudity.
Maybe if you knew literature, you went in with "I can't wait to see how she got locked in the attic".
There's a famous anthology of English poetry called "Other Men's Flowers" (from a remark by Montaigne, 'I have gathered a posy of other men's flowers and only the thread that binds them is my own') and it strikes me that if you were to compile a similar anthology of untranslated prose and poetry from classical Greece, you could call it "Flowers in the Attic".
That's a thing that should exist, yes.