The Dark Rigidity of Fundamentalist Rural America

a reply to: ketsuko

They wanted to go... based on the idea that because it was fellow gamers it would be people just like them. Then when they did they were absolutely terrified of the city. The LA convention center alone holds more people than my towns entire population. One of the people actually didn't even leave the hotel room one day because they couldn't handle culture shock. That person was very religious, and it literally shattered his entire world view when he saw two men walking down the street holding hands. He thought he was in Gomorrah and that God was about to strike down everyone in the city due to the sin taking place.

I ended up going again the following year, and of the group of 6, only 3 were interested in repeating the experience because they didn't like being around people who despite some shared interests were different.

a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

I'm not sure about that. I was raised in a very rural part of one of the US' most rural states: New Mexico. I now reside in the most rural state in the US: Alaska. I do fairly well for myself and there are plenty of opportunities for my kids to do the same. The advantage of living where I do is that, if my profession (engineering) ever goes heels to Jesus, there are plenty of alternative ways of making a living available to me. Fishing, mining, logging, oil fields, subsistence living... it's all there. Not real sure people in America's more urbanized regions can do that. Certainly the subsistence living isn't a viable option for any of them without a very healthy dose of welfare assistance.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of Americans who simply want to be left alone when they want to be left alone. I can do that with a chunk of land and a cabin miles off the road system that requires a boat in the summer or a snow machine in the winter to get to... how does someone living in a tenament building in NYC do that?

a reply to: Aazadan

I still have a very hard time believing that. For one thing, someone that religious is unlikely to be a hard core gamer because the themes of most games are going to be against their religion. How did they become gamers?

a reply to: ketsuko

Thanks for the Bain Joke. lol

Actually brain scanning only builds on the work of almost 100 year of neuropathology. It is a recognised science as opposed to pseudoscience. You do not understand the level of modern peer review especially in novel or controversial areas of research findings.


Your capacity intellectual gymnastics does you credit. Are you a fundamentalist?

a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

What an idiotic generalization. The author claims anyone Christian and white is a racist.... Looks like HE is the racist one.

a reply to: Aazadan

Great post. It is supports my point. Fundamentalism is the big issue not living in the country. The groupthink then forms around the fundamentalist beliefs as it would for any group the subject in hand is rural fundamentalism.


I experienced a similar thing moving from a country village where I was working on a 6 month project back to the centre of a metropolis one summer's day.

originally posted by: Ameilia
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

What an idiotic generalization. The author claims anyone Christian and white is a racist.... Looks like HE is the racist one.

Please read the title. It is really about fundamentalism!!

originally posted by: Tiger5
a reply to: ketsuko

Thanks for the Bain Joke. lol

Actually brain scanning only builds on the work of almost 100 year of neuropathology. It is a recognised science as opposed to pseudoscience. You do not understand the level of modern peer review especially in novel or controversial areas of research findings.


Your capacity intellectual gymnastics does you credit. Are you a fundamentalist?

No.

Just that it's been a known problem for a while. Just because we can scan the brain and get it to light up doesn't always mean we are correctly interpreting what we are seeing or even that we are seeing what we think we are at the time of the scan.

So the idea that particular brain regions are involved in particular cognitive functions can be a statistical fluke. The results that Ethan Kross and his colleagues obtained at the University of Michigan add another dimension to the problem. They showed that the brain can't tell the difference between emotional and physical pain as it turned out that same brain regions light up whether you're burned by hot coffee or you think about an unwanted break-up. This creates a problem: it certainly suggest the possibility of what’s called reverse inference. Even if there is a very good correlation between a particular cognitive task and a brain pattern, we can't possibly conclude that when the particular brain pattern in question is observed, the very same correlated task must be happening. Furthermore, another dilemma that always haunts correlational research such as fMRI is that because two things occur at the same time does not prove that one thing causes the other. This is one of the old clichés but also traditional tenets of science that correlation is not causation.

This is the part the I think most directly addresses the issue, but the whole article talks about a bunch of issues with using brain scans in studies this way.

a reply to: Tiger5

Yes, you are still missing the point that someone that fundie is hardly likely to be a hardcore computer or console gamer. The themes of the games alone are going to keep them from it.

I do have some experience with this is the sense that my husband's family are fairly religious. They're Southern Baptists. They aren't deeply fundie but they're close.

He and I went to GenCon and we have yet to tell them for a couple of reasons. One of them is that they are unlikely to approve of the mere fact we went to a gaming convention for all the anti-D&D reasons.

originally posted by: pyramid head

originally posted by: JohnnyCanuck

originally posted by: pyramid head
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck
I was on topic, and replying to your thread. If your going to start a thread labeling a group of people from a position of arrogance, expect people to challenge you on your opinion.
Not being able to defend your opinion doesn't mean I'm "pushing buttons".

Sorry if you are seeing any arrogance from me. That is not what this thread is all about. It is about perception and conversation, and...

Of course it seems that way to you. You have no idea of the concept of freedom. You don't even have the basic right of free speech. Your in a cage telling someone on the outside how great the inside of your cage is. You can keep your "educated" lack of freedoms granted by inbred pedophile kings and queens in england. We'll continue to "enthusiastically vote against our own interest"(freedom). - White Christian God King Worshipper

...has got Jack # to do with it. In the words of the Prophet, of course.

It is, and your being disingenuous. Your labeling a group of people that you ideologically disagree with as less intelligent.
Now you don't want defend your position anymore. That's fine, just don't make it like I'm somehow off base.

OK, Buddy says:
When a 2,700-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, and edited with political and economic pressures from popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, respect or evidence is going to change their minds and assuage their fears."

Do you disagree that this is a pretty good assessment of Christian Fundamentalism? Do you see this as a major influence on rural America? How would you categorise that worldview in terms of dealing with the demands of modern society?

Me, I'm not going to call it less intelligent...that's your terminology. I think I can get away with calling it narrow, though.

originally posted by: Ameilia
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

What an idiotic generalization. The author claims anyone Christian and white is a racist.... Looks like HE is the racist one.

Not exactly. Not here at any rate. Although, I suspect that his personal opinion is rather in line with your own generalization.

What he's saying is that most people that are white, (this next bit is important) fundamentalist christian and (even more important) rural are probably racist. In my experience, which is my whole life, literally, lived this from my first breath, he's right. There is some nuance, but more or less, he's correct. That Children of Canaan thing still has prevalence in the collective psyche/culture/consciousness/what have you.

Also, rural America is often geographically isolated and we maintain the same value system as our grandparents or even great grandparents or even further back. These are, in spite of the internet, pocket populations, that are culturally stable on one hand but stagnant on the other. My husband, from California, has always teased me for speaking and even acting like an 90 year old woman.

What he doesn't get into in the article is that these pocket populations are rejected by the broader culture, which causes them to seek stability in that cultural identity and sense of shared community. In fact, they double down and maintain some values that are incompatible or even antithetical to mainstream, especially values that the most tangibly reinforce that sense of identity, like, race for example. Although, I will say that the ridicule and rejection is exactly what he is perpetuating with his condescending tone.

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: Aazadan

I still have a very hard time believing that. For one thing, someone that religious is unlikely to be a hard core gamer because the themes of most games are going to be against their religion. How did they become gamers?

I honestly don't know. I couldn't tell you what games he played, if any. I think he went more out of professional interest than anything. I do know that a big factor was his parents pushed him to go, largely because they wanted him to see how sinful the outside world is.

This is a person who gave a member of our group a lecture on the dangers of alcohol because he had a Dos Equis with his dinner at a Mexican restaurant, and on another occasion (the subway incident, the first day there) wouldn't even step into Chipolte with the group because he was so uncomfortable with white people being the minority in the building... I actually had to walk him to the Subway (the sandwich shop, I wouldn't dream of taking him to an actual subway) a few blocks away, and then back to the hotel so he could eat lunch... he wouldn't even take the nearby Quiznos... too unfamiliar, so it wasn't just a case of him wanting a sandwich.

I don't know how he ever would have handled a job out there if he had gotten one (not that E3 is the best place to network in the first place, though it is possible). After seeing LA though he completely changed his career path, he stayed in the program which was a digital art program but started looking nearby for jobs and ended up working at some shop making custom graphic t-shirts instead.

I've been misunderstood in this thread about the forming of America, where I was pointing out that it was built on cheap labor. And in the deep south and Appalachia the repeated exploitation caused a "god will even the books" attitude. And worse, it made innovation a dirty word, because almost every change that came had a high cost in lost jobs and lost lives.
Add to that the repeated personal intrusion of profiteering interests that seemed to only worsen their lives incrementaly, and you have a recipe for some strange results.
Yet it's not all "yankee carpetbaggers " at fault. These were poor illiterate immigrants often preyed on by religious zeolots. Education mostly was not an option because serf wages were a deterrence.
And even if you busted your ass and managed to save a few bucks, a local bank failure could still wipe you out. And you couldn't really leave. In those days a mobil southerner was another rube to be fleeced ,( think " Grapes of Wrath ") Poverty enforced from the gov down is multi-generational because it forces a "closing of the ranks" if people want to survive. And such "turning in " hardens into a shell that resists reopening.
There are many reasons rural areas are the way they are, and JC's quote of someone bemoaning their own past leaves out real dialog.

VF

originally posted by: redhorse

originally posted by: Ameilia
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

What an idiotic generalization. The author claims anyone Christian and white is a racist.... Looks like HE is the racist one.

Not exactly. Not here at any rate. Although, I suspect that his personal opinion is rather in line with your own generalization.

What he's saying is that most people that are white, (this next bit is important) fundamentalist christian and (even more important) rural are probably racist. In my experience, which is my whole life, literally, lived this from my first breath, he's right. There is some nuance, but more or less, he's correct. That Children of Canaan thing still has prevalence in the collective psyche/culture/consciousness/what have you.

Also, rural America is often geographically isolated and we maintain the same value system as our grandparents or even great grandparents or even further back. These are, in spite of the internet, pocket populations, that are culturally stable on one hand but stagnant on the other. My husband, from California, has always teased me for speaking and even acting like an 90 year old woman.

What he doesn't get into in the article is that these pocket populations are rejected by the broader culture, which causes them to seek stability in that cultural identity and sense of shared community. In fact, they double down and maintain some values that are incompatible or even antithetical to mainstream, especially values that the most tangibly reinforce that sense of identity, like, race for example. Although, I will say that the ridicule and rejection is exactly what he is perpetuating with his condescending tone.

Yes exactly. Sounds like you must have missed it, but here it is, you can use Control F to find this sentence in the article if you're having a hard time spotting it:

Another problem with rural Christian white Americans is they are racists.

Generalization = fail.

originally posted by: burdman30ott6
a reply to: JohnnyCanuck

I'm not sure about that. I was raised in a very rural part of one of the US' most rural states: New Mexico. I now reside in the most rural state in the US: Alaska. I do fairly well for myself and there are plenty of opportunities for my kids to do the same. The advantage of living where I do is that, if my profession (engineering) ever goes heels to Jesus, there are plenty of alternative ways of making a living available to me. Fishing, mining, logging, oil fields, subsistence living... it's all there. Not real sure people in America's more urbanized regions can do that. Certainly the subsistence living isn't a viable option for any of them without a very healthy dose of welfare assistance.

The bottom line is that there are a lot of Americans who simply want to be left alone when they want to be left alone. I can do that with a chunk of land and a cabin miles off the road system that requires a boat in the summer or a snow machine in the winter to get to... how does someone living in a tenament building in NYC do that?

Your world is big. I get where you're coming from, and it looks to me that you are making educated choices based upon life experience. I think that's great. I have friends who until very recently lived in this town 2 hours out of Toronto during the week, and went to their waterfront condo in the city on the weekends. Called it their cottage. Yes, it takes some dough to be able to enjoy the best of both worlds like that, but in the end, they moved entirely to the city. Here's why...
I've also experienced the boreal forest of northern Alberta for a couple of seasons so I have an inkling of your world...though just an inkling. The article we're discussing refers, I think, to those whose world is a lot smaller and that appears to be a matter of choice, too..

originally posted by: Grambler

Lets go through his bullet points at the end.

- Their economic situation is largely the result of voting for supply-side economic policies that have been the largest redistribution of wealth from the bottom/middle to the top in U.S. history.

No they are poor because people on both parties have worked with the federal reserve to enact economic policies that benefited the wealthy banks and their globalist agenda. As a result jobs are disappearing and wages are stagnate. Obama was instrumental in helping these bankers


- Immigrants haven’t taken their jobs. If all immigrants, legal or otherwise, were removed from the U.S., our economy would come to a screeching halt and food prices would soar.

Wrong. Immigrants directly compete with low skill labor like in these rural areas. And I made an article on the racism of statement like this, that say we should have basically indentured servant illegals work for next to nothing to keep food prices down. Who would have thought, this educated liberal wanting his life to be easier off of the back of illegals.

www.abovetopsecret.com...

- Immigrants are not responsible for companies moving their plants overseas. The almost exclusively white business owners are responsible, because they care more about their shareholders (who are also mostly white) than about American workers.

True. And who was pushing the TPP that would have made this worse. Who did Nafta? Oh yes, democrats.

- No one is coming for their guns. All that has been proposed during the entire Obama administration is having better background checks.

The liberals will never be satisfied until gun ownership is nearly impossible. Here is my thread on Obamas gun town hall.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

- Gay people getting married is not a threat to their freedom to believe in whatever white god they want to. No one is going to make their church marry gays, have a gay pastor or accept gays for membership.

True. I am for gay marriage. I live in a rural area, no one really cares about gay marriage. But gay people going outrage shopping to find a bakery that wouldn't serve them is an outrage. And this author had to throw in "white" god. he sounds like a racist.

- Women having access to birth control doesn’t affect their lives either, especially women they complain about being teenage single mothers.

No one i know is against birth control. They are against abortion.

- Blacks are not “lazy moochers living off their hard-earned tax dollars” any more than many of their fellow rural neighbors. People in need are people in need. People who can’t find jobs because of their circumstances, a changing economy or outsourcing overseas belong to all races.

First this is true. But how big of this guy to speak of equality after he got done calling all rural white conservatives as dumb racist. So his point is someone labels blacks moochers = racist, someone lablels rural whites dumb and racist = educated opinion.


- They get a tremendous amount of help from the government they complain does nothing for them. From the roads and utility grids they use to farm subsidies, crop insurance and commodities protections, they benefit greatly from government assistance. The Farm Bill is one of the largest financial expenditures by the U.S. government. Without government assistance, their lives would be considerably worse.

Of course the government helps and hurts all of us. So what, these people who are losing jobs and their homes should praise the government for the crumbs they are given?

- They get the largest share of Food Stamps, Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security.

Yep. Because government policies from people like Obama have devestated them. And knowing this level of poverty exists in these areas, why are they ignored by politicians? And why is crime not as bad as in urban areas? I mean, they are all just uneducated racists, so you would expect huge levels of violent crime.

-They complain about globalization, yet line up like everyone else to get the latest Apple products. They have no problem buying foreign-made guns, scopes and hunting equipment. They don’t think twice about driving trucks whose engines were made in Canada, tires made in Japan, radios made in Korea, and computer parts made in Malaysia.

Trade among countries is different than globalization. So what is the argument here? Like your I-phone? Well then submit ti international control! You must now make room for any number of refugees we want.

- They use illicit drugs as much as any other group. But when other people do it is a “moral failing” and they should be severely punished, legally. When they do it, it is a “health crisis” that needs sympathy and attention.

Like this author is discussing the moral failing of poor white people? And if its such a huge problem (which it is) why is it largely ignored well urban problems are constantly focused on? And why is crime so much lower than in other drug infected communities?

- When jobs dry up for whatever reason, they refuse to relocate but lecture the poor in places like Flint for staying in failing towns.

I don't ever here rural people telling urban people to move. I think this author is projecting. So what is this, is the author saying that these poor rural people deserve to be poor as revenge for supposed dumb things they say? What an ass.

-They are quick to judge minorities for being “welfare moochers,” but don’t think twice about cashing their welfare checks every month.

Ironically this whole article is asserting poor whites are welfare moochers and more. But I guess it ok for this guy to do it because he is an educated liberal. But yes, many rural people do say stuff like this. And many urban people speak of rural people in contempt. GThis has a lot to do with the identity politics like this article is preaching.

- They complain about coastal liberals, but taxes from California and New York cover their farm subsidies, help maintain their highways and keep the hospitals in their sparsely populated rural areas open for business.

And yet the work that these dumb people do is what makes the elites way of life possible. By the way, these people are so poor but again this wealthy liberal thinks they should be thankful for the crumbs they are given. And he conveintly leaves out how coastal liberals speak of fly over country and the deplorables that live their with such contempt.

continued below

Great post, you put a lot of thought into this and I agree with it wholeheartedly.

a reply to: Aazadan

Of course, the thing that is being missed in all this is that the in-laws I mention are all very urban folks who live in a large, well-known city while the one person I can think of who might display the sort of fear of urban areas you are thinking of and attributing primarily to fundamentalism is actually my brother-in-law and I know why he's not crazy about urban areas and it has nothing at all to do with religion since he actually has none at all.

So a lot of these generalities being displayed in this article are very narrow minded and being painted with a broad brush.

originally posted by: JohnnyCanuck

originally posted by: generik
a reply to: D8Tee

not any that i have ever known. relatives of mine have recently stopped farming. they were getting too old and their kids all were not willing to do the hard work, for the low pay, ie barely making ends meet. i hear the same story from farming families i know both in the US and Canada. i don't know any of the rich land baron/factory farmers.

I'm close enough to the locals to hear the joke:
Q - How do you define child abuse in the country?
A - Leaving the farm to the kids.

The average net operating income in 2015 is forecast to be $77,287.
The average net worth per farm is expected to reach $2.7 million this year.

Those numbers are below your payscale?

I've also experienced the boreal forest of northern Alberta for a couple of seasons so I have an inkling of your world...though just an inkling.

Let me guess, you have something bad to say about the people that live there as well? Or why else would you have pointed it out?

a reply to: ketsuko

Nothing says urban people aren't crazy either, they do tend to be a different type of crazy though.

a reply to: Grambler

Funny how i took the time to go through every bullet pint in this article, and all of the people defending it have not one comment on it. Just ignore it,

mkay....

tldr, man. I saw your lengthy posts. I saw you were responding to each bullet point individually. And good for you, that takes some time and attention! It's cool that you would do that.
I just wasn't interested in it because I think I know how you are.