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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Look I’m from such a small Pennsylvania town. Rural Appalachian. Coal mines and specialty steel production most notably.

    Both of you are right, and the problems feed back into each other to some extent.

    After my family migrated west more than a decade ago, every single time we go back to PA to visit family, attend a funeral and so forth — it just keeps looking more and more run down. Honestly the place is a shit-hole nowadays. I’m sad to see my old county went for Trump by 70%. You couldn’t pay me enough to move my family back.

    The young, educated, smart, and compassionate folks leave and GTFO asap — both for jobs, and for more diversity and tolerance. The sad part is I remember watching a slew of documentaries in the early 2000s forewarning of what would happen to these small-towns…

    • Because of shipping manufacturing off elsewhere.
    • Because of big box corporate eating up local shops, eroding community and draining out the money.
    • Because administrations were unwilling to break the hard news that things like coal mines wouldn’t last forever and we’d have to help retrain and get them to new modern job sectors.

    No doubt these communities feel the pressures they’re complaining about; they’ve just been exploited by right-wing media about who is responsible: the southern migrant more desperate than them, the trans, the homosexuals, the liberals, etc…

    @FlyingSquid is also right that there is FAR more bigotry among these communities as well; and that ties back to not being well-traveled, our education system collapsing, and the right-wing fearmongering machine.














  • Hey, nothing wrong with being agist in this situation, let’s be honest. Nobody - not Biden, not Bernie, not Trump - will be as cognitively-sharp when they are 80 as they are when they were 50, 40, 30. We wouldn’t want an 80-year-old lifeguard or firefighter, right?

    And until an 18-year-old can be president, we’re already agist in one direction.

    That we think putting geriatrics in the White House to run one of the most stressful jobs that is on-call 24/7 is a good idea… I mean it’s absurd. Just look how much Obama aged in 8 years.

    So yeah unfortunately I agree… Bernie’s opportunity was missed. When AOC runs one day, I will campaign as hard as possible for her victory.