Rural America.

Heil Tweetler

Heil Tweetler

Well-Known Member
Enigma said:
Also, notice how you can only use what I used to put you in your place.

At least make an attempt to be original.

You can swing from abandon's nutz but not from mine.
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Original? Using cock, dick and cum as your big slur guns screams youre a a fucking spineless pussy,even worse youve got the wit of a juvenile dolt
 
Enigma

Enigma

Well-Known Member
Heil Tweetler said:
Original? Using cock, dick and cum as your big slur guns screams youre a a fucking spineless pussy,even worse youve got the wit of a juvenile dolt
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If that is true, and you couldn't come up with anything better so you decided to copy me..

Sounds more like you are projecting an inadequacy that only the lack of your mother's love and father's respect could retard.

You even type the way a child writes with crayons.

I'm waiting until you accidentally press the CAPS LOCK button and can't figure out how your letters "got tall" all of a sudden.

Go back to hating other people based on the colour of their skin, you aren't properly equipped for a battle of the wits nor do you have the emotional wear-with-all.
 
Unclebaldrick

Unclebaldrick

Well-Known Member
whitebb2727 said:
I love some Amish food. I grew up working for the Amish.
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I have heard that Amish food is supposed to be good but I have yet to see it. It is quite possible that the Amish have kind of sold out to provide food better suited to the tastes of the local non-Amish. I gave a quick Yelp search for Amish restaurants within a hundred miles of me and saw that none of them exceed the 3.5 star range. Typical criticism is that the food is bland and tasteless and usually out of a can. Almost all of them seem to be using rehydrated potatoes for their mashed potatoes and factory purchased meat in a bag.

We have a large commercial Amish fruit orchard here that is highly regarded. I like their fruit, it is very good. But their pies are literally terrible. They remind me of the pies we made in boy scout summer camp out of canned filling. Tons and tons of gloppy syrup. Every single Amish seller at the local farmers market sells them this way and they cost about $14.

It is tempting to say that they are tailoring their tastes to the local market, however last week my in-laws (who are certainly not epicureans and are quite frugal) bought one and literally threw the whole thing away after two pieces because it had all the appeal of a large sized Hostess fruit pie. And yet the sell them by the hundreds.

I just don't get it. American tastes in food have become far more sophisticated in the last four decades in most places - but not here. So fine, is it fair for me to criticize people on their tastes? Well, yeah, kind of. When I see that about half of the people in my town are obese with half of them in the morbidly obese range, I can say that their food choices leave something to be desired.

That being said, many of the yelp reviews I have read imply that the restaurants in question used to be good but that they have sold out to large corporations that now operate them as "tourist traps". Except we don't get much tourism here and the crowds I see seem to be non-Amish locals who are wistful for the terrible foods of the 1970s. Shit, I remember this kind of crap in the city in the 1970s - it's the same thing - heavy reliance on processed food full of hydrogenated fats and full of sugar.

There is an Amish "deli" here. I assume that there is an entire network of them pimping the Amish products of a large local Amish company (which also operates a chain of the above described restaurants). The deli offers a lot of good things in the way of bulk staples but the meats are horrific and the cheese is totally uninspired and commercial. Rainbows belong in the sky, not on the cold cuts. The turkey is slimy, the beef is watery and tasteless and the salami has about triple the salt that it should - but they are doing gangbuster sales.

I like the Amish though despite my disappointment in the foods their businesses offer. I suspect that there is something going on at a corporate level. My in-law's neighbors are Amish and I buy from their farm regularly. They operate a very tight farm, really well managed. Their prices are excellent. I am perfectly willing to believe that they eat much better than anything they could get from any local Amish business. I think some of the Amish have learned American ways of business and are cashing in. They certainly give me every indication of being smart with their money.

A funny side note. A lot of people are doing Uber down here. I was surprised, it did not seem like Uber would be remotely lucrative. I met one of these Uber drivers in town recently. It turns out that their clientele are almost exclusively Amish. The guy told me that the first thing he learned was that you should not drive the Amish without a leather interior - "on account of the smell".
 
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Unclebaldrick

Unclebaldrick

Well-Known Member
Fogdog said:
Rural-Urban divide has always been around.

City life is fast paced, complex and competitive. In a city of hundreds of thousands or millions, you will find the very best at whatever their trade or profession is. Competitors will notice, learn from the very best and bring up their own standards. Those that can't compete are washed out. And so, food, culture, and the mundane such as car repair are simply better in the urban areas. Not saying excellent everywhere, just people have more choices and they won't come back if they can get better service or better deals elsewhere. The environment is fast paced, stressful, crowded, dirty, and ironically with all those people around, isolating, especially for newcomers.

Rural life is slower paced, simpler and cooperative. In a town of a couple thousand (maybe less), cooperation is a way of life. Neighbors helping and watching out for neighbors. And, key to what @Unclebaldrick is saying, striving to be better than others is viewed as a negative. Value is placed on being viewed as a good old boy, one who helps others, not the top performer. I've seen both the excellent and the atrocious in rural towns. Certain specialties based upon local ingredients and recipes honed for generations are excellent. Barbecue, for example. That bottle of sauce is crap. Home made sauce from the family recipe with slow cooked ribs or beef brisket are about as good a comfort food as any can be found. A mess of greens well cooked are ambrosia. And then, PBR beer by the case. Not everyone appreciates or can afford boutique beer. Not to mention the squalor of the hoarder's house that everybody just drives by and ignores because the person that lives there is a good old boy has a few quirks. Isolation and abuse are as bad in small towns as in the city. The difference is that the whole town knows about it and looks the other way. Cooperation has it's downsides.

Just saying neither setting is perfect and there are reasons why each environment produces a different type of person.

What I think Baldy is also seeing is the economic collapse of the rural world. The demand for cheap food and farm products, produced by automated farming is destroying the economy of the rural community. This isn't new. The trend began about a hundred years ago. The rural Mississippi county where my family lived for generations is practically empty now. None of my immediate family live there. My dad left there seeking a better life as soon as he could. He eventually found it in California and we never went back as a family to visit. I only ever saw the place when I drove through on a road trip. What's left is the remnant of a community that was robust and proud more than a hundred years ago. It's not an ideal place to live anymore, and wasn't when my dad grew up there, from what he said.

The people left behind in many rural communities are the least able to leave. When people don't have a good education and good income, family support is a survival strategy. Grandparents watch kids when parents are working. When your beater of a car needs to be repaired, your cousin has one to loan you while you get your own running again. The vegetable patch, fishing and hunting help make up for low income. That sort of thing. It's a hardscrabble life but the move to the city isn't necessarily the best choice for those suited for country life.

And do we really want everybody living in more and more crowded urban areas? Why should people have to leave a nice environment where they know their neighbor, have family connections and leave mom to age alone simply because people want cheap mass produced and awful tomatoes or wheat grown at the lowest possible cost on non-sustainable highly automated farms? On the Urban side, people learn to live well in close quarters with others. A good life can be found amid the fast and varied pace in the city too. Baldrick is missing the city. He moved to the country, why? I'm guessing the reasons are based upon what the country life had to offer. Just saying each place offers different ways of life. Not perfect, just different.
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I can see the appeal of living in the country. The land here is beautiful. Another thing I like is that people are not total dickheads in traffic. The cities have gotten real bad this way. It seems that people in the urbs have little or no respect for each other in traffic and I think it is getting worse. It doesn't help that my former city has gone the way of many and put cameras all the fuck over the place. So now if you run a red light it costs you $100 but nothing goes on your record. Predictably, people who can afford it have taken advantage of this and now treat it as a toll. So if they are late for an appointment or just whatever, they just speed through the light and pay the ticket later. A few hundred dollar tickets per day means very little to a lot of the people in the city. A local paper did a study (which I cannot find) that implied that the likelihood of somebody blatantly running a red was directly proportional to the cost of their vehicle. Who could have predicted?

But here in the country I see little of that. It is much more likely that I will be behind somebody doing 20 in a 35. It is very likely, and baffling, that I will have a couple people waiting behind me when I am making a left turn despite the fact that there is an open lane next to me that they could easily use to proceed through the light.

The reason I moved here was entirely family based. My wife grew up here and her parents still have a farm (though they now rent the land out to one of the local large-scale farmers). She has four siblings who all bucked the local trend and are childless despite all being 40 or above. None of them live here either, they are scattered to places like San Fran, Denver and Cleveland. So her parents have one grandchild - our kid. We wanted him to have a sense of family as he will have zero cousins and that makes us sad. This way he can both enjoy farm life and get a sense of what family is by forging a strong relationship with his grandparents. It has been worth it.

Also, the city schools utterly suck. The solution is easy, move to the burbs. But I hate the burbs. The schools here are not much, if at all, better. They are underfunded and lack the facilities of the schools I grew up in. Many of the people here that we meet will be home schooling. Why? Because, Jesus.

I did not mean this thread to be a "rip on the country" thread or a "let's compare the city and the country" thread. But the fact remains I am still scratching my head and wondering why and how time has stopped in the country. I know that places like this have always tended to lag behind in styles and trends (for example, hair metal is still quite popular here - I have heard Ratt's "Round and Round" blasting from passing car stereos at least a half dozen times this summer and only about half the time from middle aged people) but I cannot help but wonder if it has taken on another tone since I first noticed this in my youth. Instead of just being "behind the times" (I mean this in a neutral sense - who gives a fuck if these people still wear bell-bottoms in the 90s?), it feels more like there is an effort to stay behind that is being proudly promoted and guarded - and now it has a political locus. While America has moved forward in general in regard to our knowledge and considerations about the rest of the world - this seems like a rejection of all other ideas and cultures and a flag-wrapped pride in the absolute worst of American culture and foreign policy - the mean, pig-headed rejection of other ideas (including civil rights) other than that which grandpaw and grandmaw grew up with without the recognition that they were unjust and unsustainable.
 
Unclebaldrick

Unclebaldrick

Well-Known Member
420God said:
Wisconsin is nice and has a lot of culture being a vacation state. You can find any type of restaurant within an hour from almost any area and for most of the Summer you see more out of state plates than regular ones. Lots of farmers even have open house for the tourists from the cities to see what the simple life is all about. Definitely not all rural areas are as "retarded" as the area you live.
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I hear ya. My thread title is woefully inadequate. I have regrets. But most of America's rural areas are not like those in Wisconsin or Michigan. My area is much more like West Virginia - the sort of place where people mostly only leave. But I think there are many more areas like the one I currently live in that the ones like you live in. Whole states are like this.

The farm community that used to exist here has been devastated. All those family farms that have been sold off due to competitive pressures have left a lot of families here with no anchor. Consequently the overwhelming majority of jobs are your chains (food service and retail) or factories (which don't pay anything like they used to). Factories here typically top out below $40k per year after five years. $30k is just not enough to raise a family even here. So the kids are being raised largely by the grandparents.

I don't see myself moving to one of the large urban cores anytime soon - if ever again. If we had no child I would probably be in Detroit carving out a nice garden.

Cities have their problems, I know it. I did not intend to tear "the country" apart But that doesn't mean I can't wonder aloud what the fuck is up with rural Americans and what the fuck happened.
 
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Unclebaldrick

Unclebaldrick

Well-Known Member
bundee1 said:
1945
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good one.

As I pointed out to @SunnyJim, @MMJ Dreaming 99 has no intention of answering our question because he is talking through his Breitbart-tainted ass again. What a shock.

Their are a lot of these types of dick-holes down here. The "but Obama!" crowd. When you ask what Obama did that was so bad, they can't tell you. I know what it is. He was black and he let "fucking queers" marry and "what about all the Trans?"

Knuckle dragging pricks that form their entire worldview by memes.
 
Unclebaldrick

Unclebaldrick

Well-Known Member
captainmorgan said:
If you look at the bell curve of the human IQ the peak is at 100 which explains a lot. Many of the the rural young that go to college get a taste of the possibilities in the big cities and the rest of the world and don't go back, they want more than cow tipping in their future. There is still plenty of crime in the rural areas, it's just more spread out.
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The opiate thing probably affects more people per capita here than just about anywhere else.
 
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