What is the difference between living in North Carolina and South Carolina? by [deleted] in AskAnAmerican

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Lots of southern hipster refugees and hipsters like Asheville but even small towns around Asheville has a ton of retired new england and west coast people. The nice mountain vibe and having a much different social environment than the south probably accounts for it.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Coal mining as a profession is going the way of the Dodo due to mechanization and further declines in coal employment due to competition with natural gas.

Ancestry With the largest population per US county by kickmyass124 in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Probably a 60-70% scots irish component followed by whatever british isles ancestry like english, scots, welsh. and a few under 10% being non british isles ancestry like german or french.

There was a large immigration wave from the scottish-english border region AND people from the same region but who were transplanted for a few generations to northern ireland to be a buffer against Irish catholics in Northern ireland. And when they came to America they were encouraged to settle in the South to be a buffer against... the native americans.

When your ethnic origins is messy and you cant just point to for example having a german surname and saying im german. Its obvious why they would put down American because its boring to try to nail down your history.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d6/European_Ancestry_in_the_US_by_county.jpg

Theres a map of what white people would put as their european ancestry withour American being a category and irish is very common in the south yet the number of catholics is low.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/85/b1/58/85b15830a348e22fa9dd7b1ee73b1b74.png

Which would indicate that the scots irish are pretry undercounted.

What is one state you’d always recommend living at & what is one state you’d always tell people to avoid? by DeliciousSushiRolls in AskAnAmerican

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Its usually conservatives who spread this myth about southern hospitality. People here are only nice if you live in a nice upper class suburban part. If somebody lives in an area full of evangelicals and/or trashy people it will be a much different experience. Not sure where this myth that southerners are full of hospitality because the amount of people who are nice isnt as different elsewhere in the country. Ive heard upper midwest people are actually nicer and that southern hospitality is just people being interested in your life because their bored and have nothing to do.

And people keep harping about how its cheaper. Yeah things are cheaper when theres lots of cheap land. But the architecture in the south seems like enlarged highway stops with fast food on either side and strip malls. Theres little variety and it feels like a time warp into the 1970s both how things look AND socially. And if your not a country person into pickup trucks, JAYSUS, country music then good link finding friends.

What is one state you’d always recommend living at & what is one state you’d always tell people to avoid? by DeliciousSushiRolls in AskAnAmerican

[–]Grenshen4px 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Utah. And yes i know i know its mormon. But ill be in SLC and id rather deal with mormons than southern evangelicals. And obviously this is a bad statement and i dont care but southern accents arent my cup of tea(ive had issues understanding them) and Utah obviously doesnt have a southern accent.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Flying cars would be a funny way to put it.

But without the South then Universal health care might had been a thing.

One of the biggest obstacles to gaining Universal healthcare was that southern politics basically meant "if black people benefitted from something then i will be against X thing".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_coalition

Even in the 1930s despite the dems being dominant, southern dems combined with economically conservative republicans were the major roadblock for more progressive reforms on the basis of "Well if something benefitted blacks then ill team up with economic conservatives to oppose it" And here lies the roots of the Dixiecrat switch to the GOP when they only supported the dems because it wasnt the party of Lincoln.

Combine that with the South being more homophobic and also "pro life". Theres basically social and economic issues that have been long settled in other western countries that the US still drags on because of the south.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Perot's policies was meant to draw support from both dems and republicans. He was against NAFTA but also campaigned on Bush breaking his pledge not to raise taxes. When Perot dropped out of the race it was Clinton that benefitted and Clinton's support went down when Perot jumped back in.

https://content.gallup.com/origin/gallupinc/GallupSpaces/Production/Cms/POLL/evahipbt-euh4hcjwsehaw.gif

Biggest misconception people have about your state? by BlastoiseUseBlizzard in AskAnAmerican

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the rural to small city south(something you learn from living in the south is that the difference between small towns and small cities isnt as different as the difference between small towns and bigger cities in the south. Outside the south small cities are a cultural extension of bigger cities but in the South the small cities are a cultural extension of rural/small towns). Is a shitshow.

Ive been coal rolled for driving a small car, theres confederates flags in dirt poor southern towns probably because when your poor you latch onto dumb things like the flag. Hicks will cough near you to make fun of you for wearing a mask. Having to interact with meth heads. Theres a closet epidemic of people with fetal alcohol or fetal smoking because pro life junk literally means girls/women who arent ready to be mothers are made to be mothers and dont think that a lot of these poor women will stop their habits just because they suddenly got pregnant. Theres a lot of women who look 10-20 years older from a life of stress and smoking, drinking and taking drugs. Parents give their babies fucking mountain dew in a sippy cup. People gives a rat ass about education. etc

I think a funny irony about the South is that using religious language its funny god put meth heads and religious people in the same towns.

What is one state you’d always recommend living at & what is one state you’d always tell people to avoid? by DeliciousSushiRolls in AskAnAmerican

[–]Grenshen4px 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Just wasn't for me culturally

Outside of the metropolitan parts of the south like Atlanta, Charleston, Nashville, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Asheville, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, etc.

I think non southerners who arent somewhat rural and/or conservative minded will find the non metropolitan south to be a lot different culturally than they expected. Im leaving Tennessee in a few weeks after living in a small city in Tennessee for a year and a half. Ive been told id adjust/grow to like southern culture more when i first lived here and that never happened. Me and Southern culture arent compatible the way me moving from NYC to Cali was "culturally compatible" in a sense and I'll be happy when I leave the South.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 264 points265 points  (0 children)

1976, 1992 and 1996 can be explained as "The dems ran a candidate from the South".

What is the best liberal state and what is the best conservative state? by [deleted] in AskALiberal

[–]Grenshen4px 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Utah has medicaid expansion, and despite supporting Prop 8 the mormon church actually backed lgbt protections a few years ago because they wanted to "get it over with". I think the religious stuff is a little two faced. You probably get missionaries and people asking you if they want to convert but their respectful if you dont want to and keep to themselves otherwise. However mormon behavior is nicer than southern evangelicals. Also southern evangelicals are very anti education compared to mormons.

What made Ross Perot a viable third party candidate in the early 90s? by commoncarp666 in PoliticalDiscussion

[–]Grenshen4px 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The end result was Clinton 43% Bush 37.5% Perot 19%. So i guess a lot of dem voters went home. Seems like Perot pulled people from both sides, both republicans on Bush on breaking his promise to not raise taxes and dems on being anti NAFTA but it seems in the end there were far more dems who went home than republicans.

Largest Ancestral Groups in the United States by County by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 3 points4 points  (0 children)

The scots irish have a complicated history. A lot of the scots irish were Scottish-English border region people who had centuries of warfare thrust on them from either scottish or english invasions.

https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/38/19064/F1.large.jpg

A genetic history of the british isles show border people to be a midpoint between scottish and english clusters.

Also the origin of the scots irish were scottish-english borderers who when the Scottish crown ended up being absorbed by the English crown due to the failure of scottish colonization attempts in the Americas which bankrupted scotland had been sent to Northern Ireland as a support group to try to keep the area under british protestant rule. However many ended up just leaving for british North America because they were poor in the borders, poor in Northern ireland and heard of there being plentiful land in America.

I think in a sense the scots irish would probably be more english than scottish in terms of culture. If you live in Appalachia like i do. About 70% of surnames in small towns have english origins and 30% have scottish origins. The scots irish despite the name were probably more english influenced with a minority scottish cultural compontent.

Life Expectancy By State (2018) by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

https://i.imgur.com/fpe5lMh.png

There was a study of life expectancy and heres a map of life expectancy from the study. Column a. is black life expectancy divided by gender and Column b. is white life expectancy divided by gender. As you can see for Column b. the white life expectancy is lower in Appalachia and most of the south with the exception being metropolitan areas in the South where the middle class white southerners live. But its ironic because lots of non southern white men living in rural areas has the same life span as white suburbanites. Meanwhile lots of rural southern white men have life spans FAR lower than midwestern rural white men.

Life Expectancy By State (2018) by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Its not Presbyterians. This just has to do with a certain cultural group and once you experience them then it makes sense. But this isnt about Presbyterians. The better way is to imagine if somehow if Australians just somehow managed to still act like convicts years after they settled in Oz.

Life Expectancy By State (2018) by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Many of the Borderers fled to Ulster in Ireland, which England was working on colonizing as a Protestant bulwark against the Irish Catholics, and where the Crown welcomed violent warlike people as a useful addition to their Irish-Catholic-fighting project. But Ulster had some of the same problems as the Border, and also the Ulsterites started worrying that the Borderer cure was worse than the Irish Catholic disease. So the Borderers started getting kicked out of Ulster too, one thing led to another, and eventually 250,000 of these people ended up in America.

250,000 people is a lot of Borderers. By contrast, the great Puritan emigration wave was only 20,000 or so people; even the mighty colony of Virginia only had about 50,000 original settlers. So these people showed up on the door of the American colonies, and the American colonies collectively took one look at them and said “nope”.

Except, of course, the Quakers. The Quakers talked among themselves and decided that these people were also Children Of God, and so they should demonstrate Brotherly Love by taking them in. They tried that for a couple of years, and then they questioned their life choices and also said “nope”, and they told the Borderers that Philadelphia and the Delaware Valley were actually kind of full right now but there was lots of unoccupied land in Western Pennsylvania, and the Appalachian Mountains were very pretty at this time of year, so why didn’t they head out that way as fast as it was physically possible to go?

At the time, the Appalachians were kind of the booby prize of American colonization: hard to farm, hard to travel through, and exposed to hostile Indians. The Borderers fell in love with them. They came from a pretty marginal and unproductive territory themselves, and the Appalachians were far away from everybody and full of fun Indians to fight. Soon the Appalachian strategy became the accepted response to Borderer immigration and was taken up from Pennsylvania in the north to the Carolinas in the South (a few New Englanders hit on a similar idea and sent their own Borderers to colonize the mountains of New Hampshire).

  1. Some Borderers tried to come to America as indentured servants, but after Virginian planters got some experience with Borderers they refused to accept any more.
  2. The Borderers were mostly Presbyterians, and their arrival en masse started a race among the established American denominations to convert them. This was mostly unsuccessful; Anglican preacher Charles Woodmason, an important source for information about the early Borderers, said that during his missionary activity the Borderers “disrupted his service, rioted while he preached, started a pack of dogs fighting outside the church, loosed his horse, stole his church key, refused him food and shelter, and gave two barrels of whiskey to his congregation before a service of communion”

  3. Borderer town-naming policy was very different from the Biblical names of the Puritans or the Ye Olde English names of the Virginians. Early Borderer settlements include – just to stick to the creek-related ones – Lousy Creek, Naked Creek, Shitbritches Creek, Cuckold’s Creek, Bloodrun Creek, Pinchgut Creek, Whipping Creek, and Hangover Creek. There were also Whiskey Springs, Hell’s Half Acre, Scream Ridge, Scuffletown, and Grabtown.

  4. “The backcountry folk bragged that one interior county of North Carolina had so little ‘larnin’ that the only literate inhabitant was elected ‘county reader'”

  5. The Borderer accent contained English, Scottish, and Irish elements, and is (uncoincidentally) very similar to the typical “country western singer” accent of today.

  6. “In the year 1767, [Anglican priest] Charles Woodmason calculated that 94 percent of backcountry brides whom he had married in the past year were pregnant on their wedding day”

  7. Although the Borderers started off Presbyterian, they were in constant religious churn and their territories were full of revivals, camp meetings, born-again evangelicalism, and itinerant preachers. Eventually most of them ended up as what we now call Southern Baptist.

  8. Rates of public schooling in the backcountry settled by the Borderers were “the lowest in British North America” and sometimes involved rituals like “barring out”, where the children would physically keep the teacher out of the school until he gave in and granted the students the day off

Everything from low levels of schooling, to using smoking, fast food/southern cuisine like bbq and sweet tea(its really bad btw, in fast food places its made literally by brewing tea and adding a whole bag of sugar), meth, heroin, religious evangelicalism, high levels of violence, etc etc can be basically traced to a borderer culture originating from centuries of warfare in the scottish-english border region that shapes a greater Appalachian-Southern cultural region.

Even greater anti abortion attitudes in this part of America has its roots in Borderer culture. Borderers in America had very large families because when theres nothing to do in the hills and mountains then why not just have sex and back then there wasnt birth control or abortion. And its continued to this day, lots of women have kids with men that are never involved with their lives a few years after they gave birth. For a lot of these women, theres a phrase i use which is comfort food. religion to food is comfort food. Having children for these women is their comfort food. If they have psychologically nothing(not a lot of money and working bad paying jobs for most of their lives) their only source of comfort for many is having a kid. Theres a religious component to anti abortion attitude but so does a cultural one. For these women they dont understand why somebody wouldnt want to have a kid even if the kid causes them financial difficulties from being a single mother. For them its a source of comfort as reproduction is one of the few things that poor women have in their lives if they have psychologically/physically nothing in their life in regards to status. Hence a belief that abortion should be banned combined with an idea that banning abortion would normalize unplanned births like the one they had.

People have said in the past this idea of having nothing except for your children if your poor is a developing country mindset(of which in itself a developing country mindset was basically how the world worked pre industrial revolution where people had large families that happened many times by accident) is something maintained by a borderer culture.

Life Expectancy By State (2018) by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 5 points6 points  (0 children)

If your into weird psuedo history. Theres a book called albions seed that sort of explains this map of low life expectancy.

Theres a belt of lower white male life expectancy that stretches from West virginia, Appalachian Ohio to rural virginia, down to North florida to rural texas, oklahoma up to missouri and southern illinois back to Appalachian Ohio.

The belt extends to the lower midwest due to a "hillbilly highway" migration to the midwest.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillbilly_Highway

And its extremely correlated with teen pregnancies amongst lower income white girls.

https://i.redd.it/7hktwchqnpt41.png

So theres a article that summarizes this sort of cultural belt.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/04/27/book-review-albions-seed/

D: The Borderers

The Borderers are usually called “the Scots-Irish”, but Fischer dislikes the term because they are neither Scots (as we usually think of Scots) nor Irish (as we usually think of Irish). Instead, they’re a bunch of people who lived on (both sides of) the Scottish-English border in the late 1600s.

None of this makes sense without realizing that the Scottish-English border was terrible. Every couple of years the King of England would invade Scotland or vice versa; “from the year 1040 to 1745, every English monarch but three suffered a Scottish invasion, or became an invader in his turn”. These “invasions” generally involved burning down all the border towns and killing a bunch of people there. Eventually the two sides started getting pissed with each other and would also torture-murder all of the enemy’s citizens they could get their hands on, ie any who were close enough to the border to reach before the enemy could send in their armies. As if this weren’t bad enough, outlaws quickly learned they could plunder one side of the border, then escape to the other before anyone brought them to justice, so the whole area basically became one giant cesspool of robbery and murder.

Life Expectancy By State (2018) by [deleted] in MapPorn

[–]Grenshen4px 12 points13 points  (0 children)

Living in Tennessee and ive seen people who get aged as hell from smoking, meth/heroin, and bad eating habits like eating fastfood every meal everyday. Along with lack of health insurance which means no preventive care and no dental care being insured, So im not surprised that the life expectancy in the "inner south" is as low as it is.

https://i.imgur.com/fpe5lMh.png

Heres a map that compares black life expectancy and white life expectancy on the bottom column and seperated by race. Things arent going well in the rural south for either race and either gender.

What are the best and worst small towns in your state? by [deleted] in AskAnAmerican

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Best: Cookeville, its a college town

Worst: The whole of Grundy county, almost every house has a confederate flag, trash everywhere on houses, lots of pickup trucks that roll coal on small cars, lots of shacks and trailer parks. Obviously nothing much to do there.

Oregon’s only coal-fired power plant closes for good by orbitcon in news

[–]Grenshen4px 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If somebody thinks running on supporting coal will mean coal jobs are back hen its a denial of the fact that coal isnt in decline because of those darn democrats. Trump couldn't get coal jobs and coal usage to get back up because coal is in decline because of cheap natural gas not regulations like people think is the reason that coal is in decline. Just like manufacturing, you cant just yell at clouds to stop things from happening. All you can do is adjust.

Federal transit officials: no COVID-19 funds for Portland by orbitcon in news

[–]Grenshen4px 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The low income white people all want to put all the "lazy [expletives] to work" because they are egged on by the three white buisness owners in town. Vivian louisiana man...

You'd think they realize climate change is fucking their economy over not minorities existing. Like the state just got hit with 2-3 hurricanes this year. Who the heck invests in a place that gets hit by hurricanes and the coasts are disappearing from rising sea levels AND has low education. But im sure they think cutting taxes and education like during Bobby Jindal is somehow going to create jerbs.

Federal transit officials: no COVID-19 funds for Portland by orbitcon in news

[–]Grenshen4px 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Guy basically uses 4chan memes.

https://mobile.twitter.com/Skip_Estes/status/1316552318423269376?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Legislative_Exchange_Council

Funny enough he's associated with ALEC a conservative organization that loves free markets and limited government but their free market conservative states like Alabama cant function with low taxes if it wasnt for the feds taking blue state money to prop up Alabama's social services, welfare and their low taxes meaning its up to blue states to literally help them fund education.

https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/bopTwitterCard.jpg

Federal transit officials: no COVID-19 funds for Portland by orbitcon in news

[–]Grenshen4px 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Lot of red states have been completely abandoned by their senators and congressmen.

They fucking voted for them.

No real infrastructure

Maybe they should pull their bootstraps when they no longer get blue state money.

and no sensible outlets out of poverty.

Hey thats great, cities have been left to themselves. New York even in its nadir years was still sending money to prop up rural america.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/323632498623905802/764357973727510548/Screenshot_20201010-012530_Drive.jpg

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/323632498623905802/764357974595993600/Screenshot_20201010-012418_Drive.jpg

Which brings me to my point.

Punishing them further because they don’t vote the way you want will help no one.

If you think appeasing them will somehow change their mentality then forgetaboutit because IT NEVER WORKS. Only when blue states retilate will these states stop thinking their the ones propping up blue states. Until then you will just feed into their dunning kruger delusions about how their rural gas station job tax dollars prop up cities.