How does your theory hold up when applied to areas that are predominantly a service or agricultural economy?

The Nevada service sector is the heart of the Democratic vote in that state, just as one data point. Similarly, if you go out to California or New York, you’ll find far more service sector democrats than white collar professionals. And where do you think all those Mississippi Democrats are coming from if not the agricultural industry? Millions of African American and Latino ag workers turn out for the Ds every year.

While those conditions do allow for authoritarian regimes to maintain strength in third-world countries, they do not apply one to one to the U.S.

Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, the Dakotas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Utah, Kansas, Colorado, Texas - show me a mineral rich state and I’ll show you a right-wing mega-millionaire (maybe even a billionaire or four) bankrolling the bulk of the conservative political scene.

The US is a hodgepodge of municipal and state authoritarian regimes and has been practically since its founding. With the exception of the Lincoln-era Abolitionist movement, it took us until the Great Depression to get a popular brand of politics meaningfully decoupled from some sponsored industry. Even then, its flaky and hesitant and prone to being co-opted.

But you’re fooling yourself if you think we haven’t brought our imperialist practices home to the core. Every dirty trick and bloody fist you’ve seen employed abroad has a parallel back home - often with an individual or organization that tried it first in one place before importing or exporting it to another.

Ah, damn. Well, nevermind then.

flipping through my big list of Star Wars characters to dislike

There are so many people ahead of her on the list.

• Prequels C3PO, all the cringe and none of the comedy

• Rose Tico, the plot hook that can’t act

• Watto, the flying anti-semitism

• Snoke, what are you even doing here? The practice sphere Luke spared with in A New Hope advanced the plot more than you did.

• Porkins, the pilot who couldn’t hold it together

• Maz Kanata, a bargain basement Yoda and absolutely abhorrent waste of Lupita Nyong’o’s talents

• Jar Jar Binks

• Everyone who made the Star Wars Christmas Special possible

I get being a bit annoyed that they gender-swapped Luke Skywalker got to just kinda mime her way through the first three movies. But if the worst thing Disney did was file the serial numbers of the George Lucas originals and ad a splash of color to the cast, I can almost forgive them for it.

Even just within the third trilogy… Daisy Ridley was fucking trying to give that ham of a script some spice. And she managed to leave more on the table than Hayden Christensen did with the Anakin role. Hell, she ran circles around the desiccated corpse of Harrison Ford, an honorable mention for some of the worst performance in the series.

She’s not even in the top five worst characters in the sixth best Star Wars series. Cut her some slack.

She even had a decent character arc to become likeable.

Her whole arc was supposed to explore the idea of a kind-of rational and legitimate hatred, then see where it led.

That’s what made the latest season of Orville so fucking good.

It wasn’t just that she became likeable. Its that the guiding principles of the Planetary Union usher the crew towards a better galaxy, even when that path isn’t immediately clear from the outset.

Researching the Lie of Evolution

is such a weird turn of phrase even on its face. It is anti-science in the strictest sense. “Any amount of money investigating the veracity of claims is a waste, because we should just intuitively know the truth of all things.”

Taken to its logical conclusion, this implies Ken Ham is claiming to be omniscient.

Dividends paid out to taxable accounts are taxed.

Dividends that pay into non-taxable accounts can accumulate until they are withdrawn.

So, for instance, if you own $100 of Exxon in a regular brokerage account and $100 in an IRA, the $5 dividend you get from the first account is taxable but the $5 from the second is not.

This gets us to the idea of Trusts, Hedge Funds, and other tax-deferred vehicles. If you give $100 to a Hedge fund and it buys a stock in the fund that pays dividends, it never pays you the dividend on the stock so you never have to realize the dividend gain. You simply own “$100 worth of Citadel Investments” which becomes “$105 worth of Citadel Investments” when the dividend arrives.

Propaganda is a very well known way to enact influence on a foreign nation.

Historically, the most effective use of propaganda is by the domestic government on its own citizenry. Closing out foreign sources of media, shutting down opposition venues for news and discussion, and criminalizing private parties that attempt to distribute outside opinion tend to facilitate the imposition of a national propaganda campaign.

The people making the content have the right freedom of speech, but the people making the editorial decisions on what is / isn’t shown do not have that same right if they are not American citizens.

This isn’t simply closing off access to “free speech”, it is closing off access to reporting on world events and international opinion. American citizens do not have the right to free expression of they are blinded and deafened to any kind of outside perspective.

How, exactly, do domestic residents gain information from the outside world if the state has the right to censor anyone outside of its borders from sending news into the country?

The primary concern isn’t the content, it’s who controls the editor’s desk.

If the US policy towards international media is “only American citizens have the right to sit at the editor’s desk” then we’re not talking about free speech, we’re talking about political control of the press. The “American citizens” canard is simply an excuse to deny Americans access to outside media.

It is also highly disingenuous. Nobody is proposing the US block access to the BBC or CBC on these grounds.

The path to ending the conflict is through boycotts, not the president.

US House overwhelmingly passes anti-BDS resolution

We’ve already seen individual states go so far as to issue state sanctions aimed at BDS movements. US House Resolution 246 seems to be an exercise in vote counting by the AIPAC Lobby to advance a national bill to the same effect.

Palestinian freedom will seem impossible until it becomes inevitable.

The South African Apartheid system likely would have held up indefinitely if the US was the only country involved deciding its fate. And the Afrikaners had far less influence over the US Congress than the Israel lobby.

I don’t want that kind of blood on my hands.

The joke of the modern American electoral system is that all the “viable” candidates are bloody. And if you abstain from voting or vote third party, you’re accused of supporting the winning candidate, regardless of your personal politics.

That is, I think, a big part of what drives the street protests. Americans who don’t want to be complicit in this barbarity have no other actionable way to express their condemnation.

Excellent point.

It’s the most highly populated city in Alabama.

Then why does it have a Republican mayor? Urban + Educated should equal Democrat, right?

The question was why do rural areas typically vote Republican.

I would argue that it isn’t simply rural areas that trend Republican but mineral rich areas with exceptionally large wealth gaps that tend to have powerful GOP fundraising operations.

People who go to university and lean left usually move out of the state

That’s as much a part of the employment prospects as anything. States with large industrial and commercial centers tend to end up with the old “Blueberries in the Tomato Soup” effect. Austin, Houston, and increasingly Dallas in Texas, for instance. Atlanta in Georgia. Tampa and Tallahassee in Florida.

Basically people dont usually stay in red states if they lean blue

Some of the most populous states in the country still tilt red. Florida and Texas most notably, but Pennsylvania and Ohio and Georgia and North Carolina as well.

If the state has a lucrative industry, people move there regardless of the prevailing state ideology. That’s one thing Republicans do tend to get right. Attracting big corporate HQs to your state can make up for a lot of your shitty revanchist social policies.

If they can, I’ve never seen it. No Threads content in any Lemmy instance I’m aware of and no way to use the Threads app as a client for lemmy.world or any of the others.

Look up the definition of the word “outlier”

Is it an outlier or a counterfactual?

I could also point at the Federalist Society or the Heritage Foundation. No shortage of conservative intellectuals in these circle. Plenty of conservatives in business schools, law schools, and medical colleges. And as red states try to purge their academic institutions of “marxist” liberals, we’re seeing a rising tide of conservatives as university faculty, staff, and senior administrators - virtually all with graduate level degrees.

On the flip side, the SEIU is full of liberal democrats despite their members rarely having more than a high school diploma. The service sector is flush with low-education liberal voters. The vocational trades are flush with liberal voters. As are agricultural workers, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Georgia, and Florida.

This isn’t a good litmus test for determining ideological bias.

rural areas correlate with less educated populations

Huntsville, Alabama is one of the reddest corners of the reddest states in the country. It has the highest per capita populations of rocket scientists in the world.

The line I’ve heard is

best in the world for those who can afford it

But medicine is still an industry that benefits from economy of scale. It still benefits from public sector R&D. It still benefits from robust safety regulations and enforcement of best practices.

We’ve been chipping away at all of that. Hell, we’re straight up closing hospitals and clinics all over the country, purely because so few of them are economically viable when pitted against a ruthless private insurance market.

If they instead ranked the results by which system generated the most private profits

There are sectors that bring in big profits, but they’re extracting those profits from the sectors that deliver the medicine.

The snake is eating it’s own tail. This isn’t a long term strategy for profit. Every quarterly cycle leans harder on Medicaid and Medicare as the private systems fail.

But there certainly is a lot of overlap between Slave Owning and Republican States.

Only in the last forty years. These used to be staunchly Dixiecrat territories prior to the Southern Strategy.

But I might point you to a different map.

A huge part of the D/R switch under Nixon/Reagan came through Gulf Coast O&G tycoons. That’s what gets us Wyoming and W. Virginia as bright red. It’s why Pennsylvania - home of the Gettysburg address along with some of the fiercest abolitionist activists and civil rights organizations - into the purple category.

The degree to which the country has become a Petro-State has revolutionized politics domestically.

So long as that industry endures, the GOP-aligned land barons are going to have all the money they need for revanchist political projects.

The brightest red state in the Union is Wyoming, a state with virtually no history of slavery.

The second reddest is West Virginia, a state that exists entirely because of its abolitionist popular revolt against the slave owning rich men from Richmond.

How did you expect them to bake a a loaf that would last 2000 years?

This is a pithy retort, but it does raise a disturbing question.

Why do Republicans dominate in smaller and more rural states?