Monday Link Salad
Nov. 22nd, 2010 10:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chris_gerribIt's rainy and damp, but warm (for now), so [insert witty and/or logical transition here] I give you Link Salad (tm):
1) As I said Friday, I am no fan of the new TSA screenings. However, anybody who tells you that TSA is exempting Muslim women from pat-downs is wrong. Muslim women, even in burkas, get a pat-down if the screening machine says so.
2) Back in the day, I wrote a couple of articles about how, if (as their governor threatened to do) Texas seceded from the union, they'd be a warmer, bi-lingual Canada. Well, via Strange Maps, I give you US States with equivalent foreign GDPs. Note please that Canada and Texas have about the same GDP, with California having twice the GDP of Texas.
3) An interesting diary from a Southerner who grew up during the tail end of Jim Crow. It's worth reading the whole thing, but what I took from it was this:
And suddenly it hit me: There is no difference between the poor whites and the poor blacks. They both are wretchedly poor. Both suffer from malnutrition. Both drop out of school to work fields that long ago played out from too much of the same crop. Both drag cotton sacks behind them in August, picking cotton until their fingers bleed, hoping they can get a bale an acre and pay what they owe the landowner for rent and furnish.
To this day -- I am now 66 -- I marvel at the ability of the white power structure to keep poor whites and poor blacks from joining forces against them.
1) As I said Friday, I am no fan of the new TSA screenings. However, anybody who tells you that TSA is exempting Muslim women from pat-downs is wrong. Muslim women, even in burkas, get a pat-down if the screening machine says so.
2) Back in the day, I wrote a couple of articles about how, if (as their governor threatened to do) Texas seceded from the union, they'd be a warmer, bi-lingual Canada. Well, via Strange Maps, I give you US States with equivalent foreign GDPs. Note please that Canada and Texas have about the same GDP, with California having twice the GDP of Texas.
3) An interesting diary from a Southerner who grew up during the tail end of Jim Crow. It's worth reading the whole thing, but what I took from it was this:
And suddenly it hit me: There is no difference between the poor whites and the poor blacks. They both are wretchedly poor. Both suffer from malnutrition. Both drop out of school to work fields that long ago played out from too much of the same crop. Both drag cotton sacks behind them in August, picking cotton until their fingers bleed, hoping they can get a bale an acre and pay what they owe the landowner for rent and furnish.
To this day -- I am now 66 -- I marvel at the ability of the white power structure to keep poor whites and poor blacks from joining forces against them.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 02:21 am (UTC)American political ideology is soaked with this sort of thinking, particularly that wealth distribution reflects the moral qualities of individuals. The rich got there because they worked hard, and the poor are lazy, looking to sponge off government largess. In his excellent article (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/politics/news/17390/232611?mostpop=1) on the fraudulent and predatory practices of banks in the ongoing foreclosure crisis, Matt Taibbi sums it all up -
"Because in America, it's far more shameful to owe money than it is to steal it."