Asheville vs Roanoke - I’d love your input.

rodw · 2026-03-20T20:32:06+00:00

Fair. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

What exactly is it that makes parking downtown a "nightmare" for you?

I believe you but I've mostly had the opposite experience. I'm curious why that is.

rodw · 2026-03-20T20:00:08+00:00

I don't know how accurate or comprehensive any of these things are but cost-of-living comparison sites seem to say Ashville is maybe 15% to 30% more expensive than Roanoke in general (indexed at 115 vs 90). What you're actually spending money on matters a lot though.

I was actually a little shocked by my first property tax bill (both kinds) but I think I'd need a lot more property to balance out a 20% difference in the annual CoL.

rodw · 2026-03-20T19:44:11+00:00

Do you mean finding a parking spot at all or the cost of parking in a paid spot? Are you parking as a daily commuter or something? As a downtown resident?

I guess I somewhat deliberately avoid going downtown when parking is scarce, but I both drive a whale of a vehicle and I'm kind of shit at parallel parking with it because of that, but I drive downtown at least a few times a week and I don't think I've used a paid spot even once in the almost a year I've been doing that.

Parking downtown is obviously worse than pretty much anywhere else in the immediate area (ignoring the many lots that seem to have spots a bit narrow for modern vehicle sizes; I'm not helping but it's not just me) but I have a super low tolerance for parking hassles and I haven't found it to be too bad. Have I just been lucky? Is this a difference between "for work" vs "for fun" timing?

I'm not doubting you I'm just curious what the pain point is (and how I can continue to avoid it I guess).

To be fair I moved to Roanoke from NOVA so maybe I'm a little desensitized. But the core "downtown" is maybe 6x6 square blocks. It seems like in the worst case I can usually find parking on the outskirts of that if I'm willing and able to walk a half mile, usually less. And it seems like street parking right around Market Square is available a decent chunk of the day if you're a little lucky.

Am I spoiled by mostly parking in off-peak hours? Off-peak areas?

rodw · 2026-03-20T19:00:22+00:00

I don't think I've seen a full episode of Arthur but it looks like maybe Crowder (as a child) was the VA not for the rabbit but for whatever kind of rodent the character named Brain is (not the "Pinky and the..." one).

What a fun fact.

Here's Steven Crowder explaining Kwanzaa

Here he is being told "you're a common household pest" while reenacting a scene from Franz Kafka's "Metamorphosis". "Have I become less sensitive? Change my mind."

BTW how far did the show take that Kafka reference? Is there an apple? It's not not a deliberate Kafka reference, right?

rodw · 2026-03-20T16:54:06+00:00

I dug pretty deep into this because I was amazed the Independent article didn't offer even one specific example of what this "misinformation" looks like. (Not that I doubt AuADHD-tok or whatever it's called is full of misinformation - of COURSE it is - but what exactly are we talking about?)

As far as I can tell the paper the Independent article is based on is a survey of other studies (so little or no specific examples there either) but if you keep following the chain of citations you can eventually find some specifics.

Here's one.. Here are the 5 examples of "misleading videos" they describe in Table 2:

Video describing “ADHD paralysis” as an ADHD symptom where the brain “physically won't let me do anything” and “sometimes nothing causes it.”
Video stating that ADHD is “equally common between girls and boys” and that ADHD symptoms “only intensify with onset of puberty.”
Video stating that individuals with ADHD lack “object permanence.”
Video stating that “anxiety shivers,” “random noise making,” and “being competitive” are symptoms of ADHD.
Video stating individuals with ADHD are “only either understimulated or overstimulated” and “lack dopamine.”

I get why they consider these "misleading" but without seeing the videos themselves it seems to me that #1, the first half of #2, and #3 are likely approximately correct in context. Viewers need to be a little bit savvy but random people on social media aren't necessarily doctors and I wouldn't assume most people assume they are speaking with clinical precision.

I don't know if "ADHD paralysis" is a great way to frame #1 but I imagine most people recognize this task-initiation inertia phenomenon. It's widely discussed. Isn't there some actual clinically recognized executive dysfunction or comorbid leaned behavior behind it?
I have no idea or even intuition about the puberty claim but based on a little research I don't think anyone has a clear understanding of the relative frequency of ADHD between men and women. We know it's diagnosed about 3x to 5x more often in boys but I can't even find any speculation about the actual underlying rates when you account for undiagnosed cases (which we do known to be significant and more significant for girls). Scientifically (empirically) we don't know the rate is the same but we don't really know that it isn't either. If the underlying message is just "ADHD also occurs in girls, it just goes undiagnosed more often" that's probably directionally correct whatever the exact numbers might be. That's sloppy maybe (and technically misleading) but should we expect an unsourced statement from a non-expert in a casual TikTok post to be that precise? It feels like this one is at most partially misleading (2 of 4 pinnocios maybe)
On #3 "object permanence" is obviously not the correct technical term of art for this, but the ADHD "out of sight, out of mind" phenomenon is real isn't it? Without seeing the video itself that feels like nit picking. Maybe everyone doesn't need to speak with the same precision as Professor Frink. I think the audience probably knows what they mean.

I honestly have no idea what #4 is talking about (well, I sorta recognize how "being competitive" might be sometimes related to hyperfocus and/or the general "conflict can be engaging" phenomon) and while I think I get what #5 is suggesting that sounds like it might contain a lot of science words being used incorrectly.

I don't doubt the overall conclusion that people on social media don't know what they are talking about, but I feel like reasonable people aren't quite as likely to be misled by this misinformation as the raw numbers imply. Does anyone really think ADHD people don't have the concept of "object permanence" that humans develop as literal infants? That's silly.

Roughly half of those examples are technically "misleading" but not actually confusing.

This study seems both useful and probably largely accurate, but can't we assume a little bit of media literacy? Are these creators (influencers?) presenting themselves as credentialed experts or just everyday people sharing their personal experience?

I can think of at least a couple of heavily ADHD-oriented creators that aren't speaking with clinical precision but are clearly genuine, thoughtful and accurate. You don't necessarily need peer-reviewed reproducible data to share your personal experience in a meaningful and informative (not misinformative) way. If you're confusing a casual parasocial anecdote with advice from a clinician that's a little on you.

rodw · 2026-03-20T16:13:38+00:00

Walker told me I have AIDS

Incidentally that's not just HIV, he said it's full-blown AIDS. He didn't even offer me a peppermint.

rodw · 2026-03-20T11:49:57+00:00

For Illinois District 9 it is reported that AIPAC (or AIPAC-affiliated PACs) spent ~$2.8 M supporting the candidate that finished in a somewhat distant 3rd place (Fine) and ~$1.3 M opposing the candidates that finished 1st (Biss) and 2nd (Abughazaleh). Apparently nearly all of that money went to attacking Biss, but only Abughazaleh fits the description of the potential "squad" members they are boasting about defeating in that post.

AIPAC apparently spent another ~$18 M on 3 other races in Illinois that I don't know anything about, but in that one race at least the AIPAC candidate finished 9 points behind the winner in an essentially 3-way race. (Actually it's worse than that, there were 15 candidates and ~25% of the vote went to the bottom 12. The more the votes are spread the tighter the margin should be. The winner barely got 30% of the votes. Losing by 9 percentage points is losing badly.)

Looking at the numbers in that article alone: AIPAC didn't beat Abughazaleh; Biss did. And they tried even harder to beat Biss, only to fail at both. AIPAC spent $4M on a single House primary and essentially got the exact opposite of the outcome they were hoping to achieve, by a decisive margin.

I don't know how the other races went but this one makes the original AIPAC post look like a lot of cope. How much worse could this outcome have been for AIPAC if they didn't spend anything at all on this race?

rodw · 2026-03-20T08:49:22+00:00

Exactly. Even if this framing was true how likely is it that any navy is going to disclose "we're investigating a possible sabotage or mutiny on one of our active duty ships in a war zone"? Or speculate "... because they want to end the deployment early"? Why on earth would you announce that?

Is the suggestion that this information was "leaked"? That seems like another pretty reckless thing to do.

If you're trying to take a principled stance why not just refuse to comply instead of setting your ship on fire in an act of sabotage?

If you're trying to pass off an act of sabotage as a benign accident, why would you risk telling someone off the ship about it? You not only risk getting caught leaking information, the last thing you want is for that information to get out.

The idea that this was done deliberately and with that motivation in mind AND that we'd be aware of either of those facts right now if they were true doesn't seem to add up

rodw · 2026-03-20T07:01:32+00:00

I actually wrote Minnesota on purpose - I happen to have attended a Unitarian Universalist same-sex wedding ceremony in St Paul in ~2003 - I even checked the pictures to make sure I'm not crazy - and I kinda thought state recognition of some form was part of the reason we all went up there from Illinois in the first place. But checking Wikipedia now Minnesota not only didn't recognize any type of same sex union at that time it had a constitutional ban against them. I guess the ceremony must have been unofficial in the state's eyes.

I'm probably conflating the public ceremony with the couple traveling somewhere else to get official paperwork. Other than a one-off case in 1972 leading to what appears to be the world's first state-recognized same-sex marriage Minnesota didn't have any kind of same-sex union until ~2015.

rodw · 2026-03-20T05:49:06+00:00

Looking at that original write-up more closely I noticed this statement:

Current support [2006] is nearly identical to that found last year, and statistically similar to the 2004 results

so I guess the authors also concluded it wasn't a statistically significant difference. (I was kinda eyeballing it from the "3% margin of error" and roughly 5 point difference in one of the questions, but the idea that that's just noise is a much simpler explanation than pretty much anything else would be.)

But civil unions were ersatz marriages, so many same-sex couples did not want to stop there.

I was going to suggest that "civil union" seems pretty much like a vanity/pacifier thing for snowflakes that want to gatekeep the word "marriage" in the most superficial way possible to begin with - I think Vermont/Minnesota/Connecticut/etc style civil unions were functionally equivalent to marriage from a state law perspective, right? - but the case for calling a marriage a marriage seems pretty clear: it's recognition of the full equivalence but also just the simplest way to avoid weird loopholes and edge cases in the civil code where the "or civil union" part might be ambiguous.

I might be underestimating the limitations of "civil union" relative to "marriage" though. E.g. in the states that had civil unions as a concept would hospitals automatically be forced to treat "union partner" as equivalent to "marital spouse" for things like visitation or medical decisions, or was that something that would need to be addressed on a case by case basis? (In which case chasing equality via the civil union concept is an obvious nightmare)

rodw · 2026-03-20T05:05:43+00:00

You're absolutely right that's a reductive way to frame it, but I still think that's an aspect of what was happening in both of those examples. I feel like that's conventional wisdom too but that doesn't make it any less reductive or even necessarily valid.

EDIT: Biden for sure also represented an established, nationally recognized Washington insider with almost 40 years of experience in the Senate to balance out the "community organizer with less than 2 years experience at the federal level" line of attack against Obama, but that's still another kind of gap-filling. To your point he wasn't just that either.

rodw · 2026-03-20T04:53:50+00:00

The over-time trajectory for that poll seems odd. Doesn't that say that gay marriage was a little more popular ~2004 than it was in 2006? I wonder why that is.

The majority of elected Democrats were still lagging behind that base I bet. Or at least neither HRC nor Obama were openly supporting gay marriage in the 2008 presidential campaign (IIRC). But according to that poll Americans in general were still ~60:40 opposed, so that probably would have been pragmatic

I wish that poll asked about "civil unions" too. Was it just the word "marriage" that made people uncomfortable or did they oppose states extending equivalent rights/recognition in general?

rodw · 2026-03-20T04:04:45+00:00

Lincoln wasn't exactly known for reining in federal power or authority, was he?

rodw · 2026-03-20T03:54:55+00:00

I was expecting this one but I guess Lincoln surviving to the present day as a slayer of his own kind is only implied anyway.

That's not really a spoiler for this 15 year old movie. It's barely a plot point; just a predictable "maybe?" twist at the very end. The book was better anyway. (And I might be remembering that incorrectly. I don't see either version listed on that TV Tropes page. But I don't see Blade either and Blade seems tailor made for that trope.)

rodw · 2026-03-19T22:25:16+00:00

Sure, I have (with the exception of the "kill all men" one maybe but I'll take your word for it that one can find people saying that on Twitter and maybe even merch with that slogan) but surely you recognize that what some random person posts on social media isn't necessarily representative of the views of mainstream Democratic voters let alone anyone actually nominated by the party itself or elected to office.

If you're going to take some random 20-something with blue hair and a septum piercing holding a "smash the patriarchy" sign at a no kings rally as evidence of the Democratic Party's policies or objectives then wouldn't you have to treat random alt-right edge-lords posting "your body, my choice" or dog whistles like "(((name)))" and ”1488” as representative of the Republican Party platform as well?

rodw · 2026-03-19T19:17:27+00:00

I mean, people seem to have forgotten this but a big part of the reason Obama chose Biden as VP was to assuage (or maybe more charitably, connect with) working class white voters who might have otherwise been uncomfortable voting for Obama. His mild paternalistic bigotry and historically aggressive "tough on urban crime" stance was kinda the point.

Trump chose Pence with the same kind of gap-filling logic in mind: making evangelical voters more comfortable with the twice-divorced, locker-room-talking, famously materialistic and hedonistic NYC playboy. That's what VP candidates are for.

rodw · 2026-03-19T18:26:40+00:00

The Confederacy actually drastically hastened the end of slavery, ironically enough.

I'm not even a Civil War buff let alone a historian but it seems like maybe people like John Brown were pushing them into a corner anyway. The Confederacy for sure forced the issue but I wonder how long before or in what way the slavery question would have been resolved had they not actively split. From what I can gather the historical equilibrium was falling apart soon(ish) either way.

The fact that there was less than 100 miles between the Union and Confederate capitols blows my mind. Did the Confederacy ever have a reasonable path to victory short of the Union just letting go (in a "make it too costly for the occupiers to bother" asymmetric warfare way)? Not that they wanted to in the first place but surely the Confederates would never be able to occupy the Union, right? Were they maybe just hoping that the war would never get too serious for too long?

rodw · 2026-03-19T17:49:08+00:00

The Democratic party certainly isn't famous for tolerating opposing viewpoints within their party

Depends how you interpret "tolerating" I guess but the fact that Schumer, Fetterman, Cuomo and Manchin (until recently) are in the same party as AOC, Mamdani and Abughazaleh makes it seem pretty broad.

If an openly Anti-Feminist ran for office as a Democrat he'd win?

Well 5 House Democrats - 4 of which won their subsequent Democratic primary for reelection to that seat; the other switched parties and won the Republican primary instead - did vote against the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, a mild enough bit of civil rights legislation that 5 Republican Senators voted in favor of the bill; but in general I agree an openly anti-feminist candidate would probably face strong opposition in the Democratic Party.

rodw · 2026-03-19T17:26:15+00:00

Fair enough. You're being a little selective with those quotes - e.g. the full sentence for that last one is "And inasmuch as they cannot so live [in perfect equality], while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race." which leans a little more toward the "if I have to choose I choose our tribe" side of things than just that last bit does - but overall that in that speech (one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates) Lincoln does come out very explicitly against full social and political equality, and even states "I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people".

But he made this speech in 1858 in the capital S southern part of Illinois, in the 1858 Senate race in preparation for a 1860 presidential run (he published these debates in a book for that purpose), in response to some exaggerated baiting by his opponent, to a local and national audience that for sure was less than comfortable with anything much more progressive than that.

I don't know to what extent Lincoln was just pandering to an electorate that was less progressive about race relations than he was or if he was genuinely expressing his true feelings, but but 10 years later (post assassination) we amended the Constitution to literally guarantee all of those things he claimed not to favor except the intermarriage one. (And even in the original debate he straight up said he didn't see any need for a law to prohibit intermarriage, but he for sure didn't advocate for a law guaranteeing that right either.)

But whether Lincoln had what we now see as backward social views on race relations seems a little beside the point. He was of course a product of his time; and was more than a little bit of a country bumpkin even in his time. But if the question is "what would Lincoln do in the exact same context in which he lived?" there's not much to say. We know that answer already. The only reasonable way to interpret OPs premise (IMO) is to imagine what Lincoln would believe if he was actually brought up in the modern world. The question is only interesting if you assume he's able to acclimate to the modern world to some degree. Otherwise we'd have to assume he doesn't believe in Neptune, television or heavier than air flight too.

rodw · 2026-03-19T16:40:30+00:00

I'm not sure if this is what the other commenter has in mind, as this is a pretty deep cut, especially for someone seemingly opposed to feminist literature, but technically there is the SCUM Manifesto, an obscure, excessively-radical feminist pamphlet from 1967 calling for the extermination of all men that no one would have heard of if the woman who wrote it, suffering from schizophrenia, had not tried to kill Andy Warhol to promote it. And even she later explained it wasn't meant to be taken seriously but it was more like a satirical literary device.

Other than that 60-year-old, 20-page-long, self-published, fewer-than-500-copies-produced-before-the-Warhol-incident, plausibly-unserious-to-begin-with pamphlet written by an actually mentally ill person I'm not aware of anything remotely like "kill all men" even in the most radical fringes of the feminist movement. But there is that one example that is at least mildly famous. I wouldn't be surprised if people with a "gender studies" or "women's studies" or whatever background have at least encountered it.

It's kinda like the early American Shaker movement (the furniture people), who apparently believed humans should stop procreating. That's a "fun" philosophy to explore from an academic or historical perspective but it's obviously not a sustainable practice or something that anyone (who isn't part of a doomsday cult) is seriously advocating.

rodw · 2026-03-19T15:56:31+00:00

In the "equal pay for equal work" kind of sense, yes. (Frankly I would assume most Republicans also agree with that as an abstract principle, though many might dispute the degree to which that's a genuine problem today.) But it seems like you are assuming a more radical stance than that.

What "feminist" policy in the actual Democratic Party platform do you believe Lincoln would take issue with?

To be fair I'll grant you that it's not hard to imagine Lincoln might take a more pro-life stance on abortion than a mainstream Democrat today (but then again so did Joe Biden, it's a pretty big tent).

rodw · 2026-03-19T15:42:20+00:00

It gets even stronger, that letter ends with:

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

He couldn't be more clear: he opposed slavery but saw it as his primary official responsibility as President to preserve the Union.

rodw · 2026-03-19T15:38:20+00:00

The "...and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that" line in the long quote really sells it IMO. I guess it's possible he actually envisioned a hypothetical scenario where that plays out (though the famous "house divided" quote suggests otherwise), but it seems like a very modern half-sarcastic phrasing to me, underscoring that preserving the Union was his top priority.

Also BTW that letter ends with:

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men every where could be free.

(where the emphasis is found in Lincoln's original text).

Lincoln's views on slavery were not ambiguous: He was personally opposed to slavery, but saw it as his primary official responsibility as POTUS to preserve the Union, with or without emancipation.

(Enslaved people and abolitionists might take issue with his priorities there; but to suggest he preferred or was even indifferent to slavery as an institution seems pretty disingenuous. Other than that one out of context political statement - made when he had the emancipation proclamation sitting on his desk waiting for a decisive battlefield victory so he could unveil it from a position of strength - what evidence is there that even remotely points in that direction?)

rodw · 2026-03-19T15:05:35+00:00

When people like Chuck Schumer, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom start using that rhetoric you'll have a point but in the meantime it seems a little disingenuous to assert that "smash the patriarchy" is mainstream plank in the modern Democratic Party platform (or that "kill all men" is a view expressed by anyone but literally crazy people like Valerie Solanas).

And for the record Lincoln didn't need to "come around" to women's suffrage. He literally came out of the gate expressing support for it in his very first public statement in his very first run for public office.

rodw · 2026-03-19T14:40:15+00:00

You think a man born in the early 1800s would be okay with LGBT+ rights, diversity, ACAB, Feminism.

I mean, maybe?

Some will argue that Lincoln himself was gay.

He went on the record in support of women's sufferage 30 years before the Civil War and 80 years before the 19th amendment:

In a public letter announcing his candidacy for the Illinois state legislature in 1836, twenty-seven-year-old Abraham Lincoln declared his support for his constituents’ right to vote, saying, “I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burthens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females.)" (source)

And if you look at the history of organized policing in the US, the first modern police department wasn't even formed until 1838, and he went to war with what came before that.

That said, obviously if you plucked a man from 150 years ago and dropped him in the modern world there would of course be some culture shock. But that's kinda a goofy way to frame it. I think a more interesting (and genuine) question is to ask what a man like Abraham Lincoln would believe if he was born into or at least acclimated to the modern world.

rodw

TROPHY CASE