"Little did you know
Your home's really only a town you're just a guest in.
So you work your life away
Just to pay for a timeshare down in Destin."

Oh yeah, now putting this together with the fact that what set Anita Bryant off was Miami-Dade County passing an ordinance against discrimination by sexual orientation... in 1977! And that wasn't a little People's Republic of an urban area: it already had 1.5 million people that year.

People who moved to The Villages send my in-laws stuff that we have to keep rebutting. I worry about medical workers leaving the state because their jobs get harder and public sector services get worse.

In fact, it looks like in 1977, Miami-Dade County made up 17% of Florida's population.

Objectively, it might be good for the rest of the county if Florida had trouble recruiting medical people, but it would be a problem for people I know.

From the first link:

Once a top presidential battleground, the state is lost to Democrats. The party's missteps, along with demographic change, led to every one of Florida's 67 counties becoming more red.

The US is famously a one-party state where the Democrats are responsible for everything. That's how the Republicans took control.

Honestly, I'm surprised Florida's hard right turn took this long. I've only been to Florida once, 25 years ago, for a school trip, and I only know four things about it that seem relevant to politics:

1. It's a popular retirement destination.

1a. Being able to retire means being old and comfortably well-off, and both of those are correlated with being right-wing. (I'm tempted to add something about how people willing to move long distances to retire aren't very invested in their current community, which also means right-wing, but that's a can of worms I think I'd regret opening.)

2. It's close to Cuba and has a lot of Cuban refugees.

2a. Lots of Cuban refugees were fans of the Batista dictatorship, or aside from that are definitely not fans of the current left-wing dictatorship there or else they'd still be there, and they may view American politics through the lens of the systems they left behind.

The Southern strategy is also relevant but seems superfluous.

It's interesting to me that Venezuelans and Cubans are getting deported. It shows the blind, racist rage of this administration that it is eliminating people who are demographically inclined to be supporters.

Trump obviously hates nearly all of his supporters.

Hispanics swung more to Trump than ever (still unclear if actually a majority, exit polls vary), you'd think there'd be some collective striving to start to match their internal prejudices, especially with Rubio there as whisperer, but all the staffers are white-style gutter racists so they're basically doing their best for a national Prop 187 effect.

What's the gender gap on Hispanic voters? I have a belief that sexism trumped racism, which would be substantiated if hispanic men are driving the swing.

Hispanics* can be racist too! Extremely so, in some cases. Just in somewhat different patterns. Anti-Black shines through of course.

But to estimate the gender gap... CNN exit poll had Latino men 54-44 Trump, Latina women 58-39 Harris. So a gender gap of 31 points.

*I feel better about conveniently using the word "Hispanic" here because the Trump voters in question are probably less into "Latino", or god forbid, "Latinx."

I'm trying to make "Latiny" happen.

I'm trying to pronounce Latinx like Spanx.

Because Hispanic people are always right on my ass.

Everyone wants to tap that.

No more masturbating to David Horowitz.

Ogged.

I bet the "It's no big deal to say Latinx but it's ok if you don't" vote was very Democratic.

I saw a May Day flyer reading "PODER A LOS TRABAJADORXS," and now every time I go to the office I feel like a trabajadork.

I lol'd.

14: Yeah, you put the accent on the second syllable so it's luh-TINKS and then it's pronouncable. (Still stupid, Latin or Latine are obviously better choices.)

At any rate, if you look at Latin American history it shouldn't be terribly surprising that rightwing populist authoritarianism has some popular appeal among some Latin Americans. I think one reasonable lens is just Latin-US politics becoming more similar to the rest of Latin America.

That was me.

Yeah, the majority of pre-PRI Mexican history is presidents getting elected, taking way too much power for themselves, but not managing to keep it very long before they were ousted and some sort of new elections were held (except Porfirio Diaz who finessed autocratic power longer). Maybe Trump is us regressing to that mean.

I am always startled that anyone pronounce Latinx in any way other than Lah-TEEN-ex, just like Lah-TEEN-oh for Latino. I don't have occasion to say it hardly ever, but from reading it I have strong opinions about pronunciation.

I've never heard the word or used it aloud.

I was 100% joking about the Spanx pronunciation.

On the rare occasion I hear it these days, it's more like "Latin Eks", as in "Google X".

I wasn't being serious. Nonetheless that is a way to make it actually pronounceable that I have heard, but I think it's usually tongue-in-cheek.

I thought it was pronounced to rhyme with "winks"

Lah-TEEN-ex

I've probably only heard it pronounced with the emphasis on LAT, or I didn't realize someone was saying it. I hear it pretty rarely, thanks to the tireless efforts of the free speech warriors who have turned back the dictatorship of thought that was foisting it upon us. Maybe the last time I heard it was on a podcast where someone was arguing that if you're looking for an alternative to -o/-a, "Latine" - with a non-silent e - would be a better choice.

I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone tell someone else to use "Latinx", just heard people either use it or talk about the use of it.

27 is how I imagine it being pronounced.

Maybe the last time I heard it was on a podcast where someone was arguing that if you're looking for an alternative to -o/-a, "Latine" - with a non-silent e - would be a better choice.

A non-silent e? Really? I'd imagine "latine" being pronounced like "la teen", franglais for "the adolescent." A non-silent e sounds like a joke. You might as well say "latiny."

This is why Democrats are losing elections, clearly.

Spanish 'e', though. More like "Latin-ay".

Yeah, it's meant to resemble a hypothetical non-gender-marked ending for Spanish words. Probably at least partly since -e is not much of a gender clue for nouns.

(Not a productive ending like -o vs -a, but as if it were so.)

I'm just fucking with you all.

17: Wow, surprisingly close to Rush Limbaugh levels of not-sorry-he's-gone. Not even fun or interesting to hate.

17: He's busy Discovering the Networks in a warmer place.

Anyway, I will assiduously research the Question of Florida on my own time and get back to you... um, once a few more early 00s culture war figures have kicked the bucket? Once Miami Beach is underwater? If I ever-finally-actually visit Miami? (My mom warns me that Miami drivers are insane. On the one hand I drive in the Bay Area, but on the other hand I can't shake the feeling that traffic here is fairly tame and I'd be road pizza driving in, say, New Jersey. On the third hand, we're all gonna die.)

Analysis should reflect that DeSantis won over Gillum in 2018 by less than 50,000 votes and .5%. (It was the big D midterm wave year, of course.)

17: Hopefully his hell is an endless anxiety dream where he's back in college and has been skipping his Women and Gender Studies 5001 class all semester and he's shown up to class naked on the day that Andrea Dworkin is giving a guest lecture.

(Sorry if that image makes it difficult not to do some MM)

38: Sorry for not being me helpful.

And for not having grammar.

https://www.ft.com/content/66476264-bc90-4357-926f-046bcbeac534

Moments earlier, he had gestured towards another unanticipated luxury: a mattress-sized space in the interior laundry room of a $7mn flat. "This is where the South Americans put their maids," he remarked. "It's a thing."

36, 37: In "we didn't know how good we had it", I was googling Horowitz's greatest hits and came across Abe Foxman, of all people, putting out a rebuttal to Horowitz trying to stir up a 5-minute hate against a Palestinian-American NFL player; Foxman pointed out on behalf of the ADL that being proud of your Palestinian ethnicity is not remotely the same as being antisemitic.

44 they do that in the Persian Gulf too. I have one in my apartment and it's windowless. It does make for great storage space though.

OT: When did the little flag and "An official website of the United States government" start to appear on the official websites of the United States government?

Is it because they're going to start becoming hard to distinguish from conspiracy sites?

Years ago.

I guess I never noticed.

I should spend more time on the internet.

The flag might be new. Don't remember.

46: and in Singapore quite a lot

40 and 45 are doing much better with "fun and interesting to hate" than my efforts.

47-49: maybe Musk will monetize them like the blue checks on X. More chaos! More!

I'm probably not very employable if the FDA decides that the germ theory of disease is wrong.

I guess if someone runs a project that requires testing it?

Porfirio

I just started Paco Taibo's book about the chaotic years after Porfirio, Time of the Vultures (Temporada de Zopilotes). It's short, but his Spanish is a challenge for me, unsure how far I'll get. It starts out fantastic though.

...and yes, IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE substituting "zopilote" for "co-pilot" anywhere you can is a delightful pastime.

How do you turnoff Microsoft Zopilote?

RFK Jr apparently does not believe in germ theory. https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/04/rfk-jr-s-anti-vaccine-stance-is-rooted-in-a-disbelief-in-germ-theory/

Bring up Command Prompt and type "spanish -x"

60: Yeah. It's a problem.

Sorry, Moby, I now see that you alluded to this in 55.

No worries. Except for the whole dying of a preventable disease thing.

The lie that there are bits of aborted fetuses in the MMR vaccine isn't going to help with that either.

55: I really don't think I can afford Toronto. Wondering if we should try to move to Montreal. Sadly, Tim's company closed their Montreal site a few years ago to consolidate all Canadian operations in Toronto. He works on mRNA vaccines which are disfavored. His comp y have money to Novavax to help the, distribute their protein- based Covid vaccines, and because they wanted to put an individual dose combo Covid-flu vaccines on the market.

So, RFK saying Novavax needs to do placebo controlled trials to update their vaccine annually is ridiculous. His company keeps saying that the US is only one of their markets
S, but if the FDA is completely debased, why employ research people in the US instead of Europe?

The collapsing dollar will make us cheaper.

Plus, a really sick population is going to make it easier to recruit study participants.

68: But if they don't want to approve vaccines at all?

Probably take a couple of years before vaccine makers give up. I'll have college paid for by then.

I'm going to root for Toronto over Florida in the Stanley Cup.

I continue mutinyblogging:

[discussing the motives for mutiny by the regiments associated with Oudh in particular]

"Then there is Sitaram Bawa's point that the 'military classes' were enticed by the promise that the old days of licence would be restored. This is important because it identifies plunder as a motive for mutiny. By 1856, with most of India under the heel of the British, the opportunity for Indian soldiers to supplement their relatively meagre pay with plunder had all but vanished. Only the replacement of the British with Indian rulers would bring back this cycle of war and rapine..."

Again, distinctly Trump vibes coming from this.

Belaboring the obvious, not just Venezuelans. Nicaraguans, obviously, but everyone coming from violent societies, which by this century is most of LatAm and the Greater Antilles.

Maybe amplified economic cycle effects. Especially severe crash in 2008, slow shitty recovery under Obama, and the good times start rolling again just in time for Democrats to tell you to throw it all away because covid.