Uncle Orson on Obama's "bitter" speech

[james_davis_nicoll]

Unlike the inner cities, where many of the poor stay on welfare as long as they can and do drugs and crime and all the other things that the statistics say are endemic to the inner cities, in the small towns the people who don't have jobs move to a place where they can find work.

Comments

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

He's never actually been to America, has he? He's living in an alt-history novel and sending messages through a transdimensional warp.

Praising OSC with faint damns

[the-blue-fenix.livejournal.com]

OTOH he's _slightly_ more realistic than "Mother Earth News." Which seems to think that the rural poor can stay home and subsistence-farm/barter for most of their groceries, with a side business in gourmet organic star-fruit or some such to provide what little cash they'll really need.

TBF, whose dad's grew up on an off-the-grid farm doing sustainable organic agriculture. They called it "The Great Depression."

Re: Praising OSC with faint damns

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

There's that UN report that talked about migration from farms to cities, admits that cities are centers of economic activity and IIRC that people move to cities, even the terrible ones, because they are looking for better lives, and then spends the rest of the article trying to think up ways to keep people on farms.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Uh huh. Riiiiiiiiiight. So this explains why small towns don't have a problem with meth labs and unattended cabins being stripped of valuables. (When I was living in Portland, I used to love driving to the coast to see Seaside and Cannon Beach, but I detested the drive back. This was because if I left by the time the area was getting dark, the drive meant driving more than ten miles above the speed limit among twisty, curvy mountain roads because of the problems with being tailgated by idiot Washington State tourists in monster SUVs. The biggest problems came from the fact that the roads weren't labeled or railed anywhere, because any highway light poles or guardrails put in those areas were promptly stripped by the locals and sold for scrap. It's nice to know that they'd just pack up and move somewhere where they can find work.)

from Seaside

[dr-dgo.livejournal.com]

Not having been on any of the coast roads in a few years, I will take your word that guard rails and other metals are missing. The speeders have always been there. I have pissed off many a driver by going the speed limit on the two lanes from the coast. To the point that more than a few passed me in very dangerous places. As to it being the "locals" taking the metal, it could just as easy be some one from the the Portland Metro area that has a car or pick-em -up truck.
Metal thieves are not unique to meth heads. It is a chronic problem in africa, where AIDS is much more of a problem than meth. That and the custom that the higher your position, the more relatives you have that "need" your assistance.

Re: from Seaside

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

Actually, as far as "local" is concerned, I kinda meant the Portland area as well. When I was trapped out there, I worked as a contractor for a while for the Intel R&D facility in Hillsboro, and this was right about the time that the expansion of Highway 26 was starting to move past the Tualatin Mountains tunnel. The light poles go up and the guardrails go in, and they'd be gone the next day to assist with financing someone's heroin habit. (My personal favorite was up in the St. Johns area of Innsmouth West Portland, where the junkies were stealing security gates and window bars and selling them to the scrapyards. I remember looking at a duplex to rent when I first moved there, where a guy sauntered up from the street to the window, grabbed the bars and gave them a good stout yank, and wandered off, the whole time idly noting that my ex-wife, the realtor, and I were looking on in horror. The bolts holding the bars were protruding nicely, suggesting that he'd been doing this for a while, and I figured that the bolts would snap one of these days and he'd haul off to the scrapyard with the bars and trade them in before returning to clear out the duplex.)

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

You don't just post the links now. Now, you've added quotes.

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

Eviiiil James. I thought I'd escaped by not clicking.

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

Most people just stick to Rickrolling.

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Yes. That would be why when we visited a grocery store in Westport, Washington, we discovered that they kept the whipped cream behind the customer service counter, because otherwise people would steal the NO canisters right out of the containers.

(Mr. Darcy, bless his heart, didn't understand this until I explained it to him. The recreational users of NO that I know just buy the canisters in bulk from some supplier or other, but I'm guessing your average small-town user isn't that savvy.)

Oh, and then there was the time I was staying at my folks' mountain redoubt near Franklin, West Virginia. They've got a lovely view of the valley below their cabin, further mountains in the distance, and so on. On one of my visits, they pointed out what looked like a farm down at the bottom of the valley. Dad: "See that? Right there? That's the meth supplier for the entire county."

[ross-teneyck.livejournal.com]

I'm told that if you're careful, you can nudge the nozzle of a whipped cream canister and get a blast of NO propellant but no actual whipped cream. Of course, if you do this wrong you get a bunch of whipped cream up your nose, but this affords harmless entertainment to onlookers so it's not entirely a bad thing.

However, the whipped cream canister thing reminds me of a True College Story:

One day in college, I happened to be talking to someone I knew, who had spent the previous evening amusing himself with recreational substances. He told me, "Man, I had the weirdest dream last night. I was at [the local 24-hour grocery store] walking up and down the aisles with a big armful of whipped cream cans. Weird, huh?"

Later that day, I ran into another friend of mine, who remarked, "You know, I was at [the local 24-hour grocery store] last night, and it was the strangest thing... all through the store, I kept finding used whipped cream cans hidden behind things on the shelves."

[catbear.livejournal.com]

Huh. My uncle has a cabin in Great Cacapon, WV. Gorgeous scenery up there.

[(Anonymous)]

Do you suppose it's possible that he is being deliberately ironic when he makes broad, sweeping generalizations about "intellectual elites", charging them with making broad, sweeping generalizations, or is that just a happy accident?

- Ken

[wakboth.livejournal.com]

Intentional, deliberate irony and. OSC havent' belonged to the same sentence in a long, long time.

[daystreet.livejournal.com]

Hey, they don't just move when they don't have a job. Sometimes they move if they can't have multiple wives.

From Card's biopage: "Born in Richland, Washington, in 1951, he was named 'Orson' for his grandfather, Orson Rega Card, who was a son of Charles Ora Card, the founder of the Mormon colony in Cardston, Canada..." which was one of the extra-U.S. colonies founded when believing in polygamy was making things a bit too warm for some people here in the good old U S of A.

There's summa that small town gumption for ya.

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

Oh, Cardston. Several of my friends come from Cardston Mormon families who fled to the big city (I can only assume the migration is why Cardston is so small, since it feels like every third person I meet in Edmonton is from Cardston or area). But it's not a good stand-in for most small towns.

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

I was thinking the same thing many posters have enumerated - OSC hasn't actually lived in a small town recently has he?

[(Anonymous)]

IIRC, Card lives in Greensboro, NC, population ~237000

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

Being from Winston-Salem, just west of G'boro, I can say emphatically say that it isn't a small town. Hasn't been in decades..

[thebitterguy]

I think having a population of a quarter million disqualifies it for 'small town' status, unless you guys have blown rural population scales way out of whack.

[(Anonymous)]

Well, when I posted that population estimate, I thought it was self evident that 237,000 people = city. That estimate apparently doesn't include the surrounding suburban sprawl, because in 2006 Guilford county had a population of 451,905 according to its official website (which also calls Greensboro a city). Bucolic small town America it ain't

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

So that explains why so many people from small town USA have moved to China and India recently

[del-c.livejournal.com]

Small town jobs don't just sit around on government assistance when they can't find enough poor people. They get up and move to where they can find them.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

How often to "jobs" need government assistance? Mills and factories (and insurance offices and programming centers for that matter) go where they can get enough qualified labor to do the job in the cheapest manner, taking into account transportation and other delivery factors, such as tariffs.

There were and are plenty of poor people looking for work near the recently closed textile mills in the American south. They are just not capable of working for as cheaply as an equivalent worker in China or Viet Nam. Even factoring in the costs of shipping and the minimal tariffs that are imposed on imported goods here.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I was parodying OSC's style. Overanalysing the ways it doesn't make sense wastes your time and misses the joke.

[galbinus-caeli.livejournal.com]

Sorry about that, I missed the funny hat you were wearing. I thought you were serious.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Here in Pennsylvania "jobs" do get government assistance sometimes. It comes in the form of the local municipalities and/or the state agreeing to give companies tax breaks if they locate their jobs here.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

I don't agree with the rest of his statements, but rural flight is well documented. I can only speak from my experience, but the small towns of the great plains are shrinking because they ain't much money there. It isn't because factories are closing, because there weren't factories there before. Instead, farming takes fewer people, and can support fewer people.

There are towns in western Kansas that will give you enough land to build a house, if you just move there. There are towns of a couple hundred that had opera houses in 1900. My home state has a steady population, despite the major city having one of largest growth rates in the country.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

About two years ago, ReadyMade magazine ran a very interesting article about an artist couple who've bought several elementary schools in Kansas and converted them into artist enclaves. The schools are empty because the towns can't find teachers willing to move there, as well as the number of kids who grow up and move from the area as soon as they're old enough to do so, and so the schools are ridiculously cheap. Considering that (a) the Interweb gives plenty of opportunities for interaction and cross-pollination that wouldn't have been available fifteen years ago, (b) the old schools have a ridiculous amount of room for such things as clothing design or metalworking, and (c) being in the middle of nowhere means that you actually have to create instead of wanking about creating "one of these days", I think it's a very smart option.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

...except when they don't?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

Do you get paid to promote OSC?

[goldjadeocean.livejournal.com]

"Promoting" does not feel like the right word.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Huh.

Quite often they stay in place to cook up meth.

[sclerotic-rings.livejournal.com]

For several years, I worked for a call center for a company that facilitates online payments for utility companies, and the worst calls came from customers of American Electric Power in southern Ohio. It'd be easy to describe the idiocy simply through some of the calls (my favorites were when I'd have to ask for the state the customer was calling from, and the Ohio residents would answer "The United States", but then there was the woman screaming because our automated system asked for the customer to enter a contact telephone number and she exclaimed "I ain't got no 'contact telephone number'! I jest got the one up on the wall!"). However, the best confirmation I had that I needed to get away or lose my sanity was that AEP actually had to buy TV and radio time to run ads telling their customers that pulling down electrical lines and tearing up transformers for the metal was potentially dangerous. The absolute clincher involved a customer literally so stupid that he had to have someone else dial our telephone number for him: I remembered his name because of that call, and I wasn't really surprised to see that name in an article linked to from Fark.com stating that he'd electrocuted himself by attempting to pull down power lines with a clothesline and a homemade grappling hook.

[yorksranter.wordpress.com (from livejournal.com)]

...they move to where the jobs are, like a city. His argument is self-refuting; if people leave the small towns because there are no jobs, why would anyone leave the city to go there?

[daev.livejournal.com]

Well, his Obama honeymoon sure didn't last long.

Card keeps claiming to be a Democrat but I can't see how.

He's not a Democrat on the war.
He's not a Democrat on civil liberties.
He's not a Democrat on equality for minority groups, like gay marriage.
This basically leaves good old-fashioned New Deal populist liberalism.
(Send that man a copy of "What's the Matter with Kansas," which is what Obama was summarizing here.)

But no, he clearly believes that capitalism works fine without government economic policies.

So what makes him count as a Democrat? The environment? Nostalgia? A wild, heraldic preference for the color blue?

I'm going to stop now. This is making my brain throb and squirm and attempt to crawl out my eye sockets.

[(Anonymous)]

He's not a Democrat, Daev. He's just messing with people's heads. He does it instinctively, fearlessly, and surprisingly accurately.

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

If OSC had even the slightest clue of what things in Pennsylvania were like, he might be able to make a better argument about Obama being wrong. Obama's big mistake was saying "small towns" as opposed to "small cities and the surrounding townships".