Life in a small town isn’t the pastoral paradise some think it is

I’m an authority on small town living and big city living. I spent years in big cities like Seattle and Salt Lake City and Philadelphia (also in the in-between kind of place, like Eugene, Oregon), and I’ve been living in a small town with a population of 5,000 for the last 20 years. I know them all. I know without doubt that there are good people and bad people in all of them, and that small towns do not have a lock on virtue.

So I tried listening to this new country song by Jason Aldean called “Try that in a Small Town.” It is so much bullshit. It’s popular among right-wing jerks who think urban is a synonym for un-American violence — you know, the same people who think the January 6 Insurrection was just a few tourists visiting an architectural attraction. The people who like it are the kind who want to roll back progress to 1950, when white people could use a firehose on black people, and occasionally lynch one as a lesson.

Here’s a sample of the lyrics:

Sucker punch somebody on a sidewalk
Carjack an old lady at a red light
Pull a gun on the owner of a liquor store
You think it’s cool, well, act a fool if you like
Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, you think you’re tough
Well, try that in a small town
See how far you make it down the road
‘Round here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won’t take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don’t
Try that in a small town

Hey! Why is your paean to the bucolic pleasures of simple country life so violent? It’s all about retribution, and about an imaginary city where carjacking and liquor store robberies are common. Liquor stores get held up in small towns, too, and when they happen in big cities the cops will probably shoot you. Don’t try it in a big city, either.

I live in a small town, and I could tell you stories about the chronic alcoholism here, about people who hate gay and trans kids, about church sermons that tell women to be subservient, about confederate flags flying on trucks, about ugly attitudes towards diversity and large cities (but then, the song tells you that), about Latin laborers treated with contempt, about Trump voters who want civil rights revoked for everyone but them. Of course, I’d also tell you that those hateful people are a vocal minority; there are also good people here. But small towns are not the model of kindness and self-reliance that that song makes them out to be.

In fact, they are dependent on the economic surpluses of the big cities. There’s a reason you can’t keep the kids down on the farm — the farms are dead boring, and are run by people who hate change and excitement and novelty. Our kids here can’t wait to grow up and move somewhere, anywhere else, and one of the reasons is the self-righteous attitude of people like Jason Aldean. We raised three kids here, and if we were to suggest they move back to Morris, Minnesota, they’d laugh at us. They’ve all moved to bigger towns. They had enough of the petty, bigoted life with the people they went to school with.

A gay black man, Brian Broome, writes about growing up in a small town in Ohio. It’s representative.

All the Black people lived on one side of town, and all the White people lived on the other. Our churches were separate. We went to school together, but it was at school that I was called or heard the n-word from White students on a weekly basis. The racism of my small town was naked and powerful; seething hatreds were baked into its soil. And when all the steel jobs disappeared, leaving many on welfare, in poverty or desperate, those hatreds deepened and the n-word flew more freely than ever.

As I got older and realized that I was gay, my small town became for me a coffin lined with razor blades. But it wasn’t just my sexuality that made it uncomfortable. I was different. I thought differently. I began to question the things I had been taught, and I found no one in my hometown who offered good answers. I was just told to be quiet: by my teachers, by my friends, by my church and even by my parents. And then the smothering feeling set in, the wondering whether there was more to life than what I was being shown. And I knew I had to escape. I wanted to meet different kinds of people, I wanted different experiences, I wanted to learn new things, and none of that was going to happen in a small town in northern Ohio. I couldn’t wait to leave.

The only thing that makes me at all comfortable living here is that this is a college town, and the university community is a small island of tolerant cosmopolitanism, it’s the only anchor holding me here. I work with gay and trans and minority students, and they know far better than I that stepping out into the small town community is hazardous…and not a one of them has any desire to sucker punch anyone, or pull a gun in a liquor store, or spit in a cop’s face. That’s what the more arrogant, intolerant residents of a small town might try to do.

Also, I listened to that Aldean song. It’s a dreadful, unmusical hash of country-western noise, lacking in charm, melody, and anything catchy at all. It relies entirely on resentment and bitterness to appeal to a certain mindset. I think I’d rather listen to Prince.

It’s all about ethics in war

I guess we aren’t supposed to worry. ‘Judeo-Christian’ roots will ensure U.S. military AI is used ethically, general says.

A three-star Air Force general said the U.S. military’s approach to artificial intelligence is more ethical than adversaries’ because it is a “Judeo-Christian society,” an assessment that drew scrutiny from experts who say people from a wide range of religious and ethical traditions can work to resolve the dilemmas AI poses.

Lt. Gen. Richard G. Moore Jr. made the comment at a Hudson Institute event Thursday while answering a question about how the Pentagon views autonomous warfare. The Department of Defense has been discussing AI ethics at its highest levels, said Moore, who is the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for plans and programs.

“Regardless of what your beliefs are, our society is a Judeo-Christian society, and we have a moral compass. Not everybody does,” Moore said. “And there are those that are willing to go for the ends regardless of what means have to be employed.”

Fills me with confidence, that does. After all, we have a long history of devout Christian soldiers always being ethical.

Hey, the Nazis were part of a Christian society, you know.

No! Not a professor!

Ignore that awful RateMyProfessor website. I do, and I don’t even know my score there, and no, don’t tell me. The recipe seems to be to teach an easy class and give out lots of As, and then students will go on there to tell their peers what courses to take. For instance, here’s Steven Smith, a former journalism professor at the University of Idaho.

Wow! 4.5 out of 5, making him an awesome professor. That praise has to be muted a bit, since three of his peers in the same department got perfect 5s.

Of course, when you step out into the real world, you get a rather different perspective. Steven Smith has been arrested.

An account in Smith’s name for a mobile cash payment service was linked to an investigation into children using social media to send sexually explicit photos of themselves in exchange for money sent to them via the app, according to court documents.

The victims, 10-to-14-year-old girls, sent images to an Instagram account and received money through a cash app account. Internet activity of both accounts were traced to Smith’s Spokane home, the documents said.

Chat conversations showed Smith was aware of the girls’ ages, the documents said.

He had a “very large amount” of images depicting child sexual abuse and was actively downloading more when investigations searched his home Thursday, the documents said, adding that when a detective asked if he knew why they were there with a search warrant he replied, “yes, it’s probably from what I have been downloading.”

That’s Professor Steven Smith on the right, looking awesomely professorial

That’s something I’ll remember any time anyone brings up RateMyProfessor. Also, any time someone assumes that being a professor makes you smart.

Suckered!

The question is, who is getting suckered? And the answer is…journalists. Or maybe I should say “journalists”. Maybe “newsreaders” would be more accurate?

I have seen so many so-called news stories that are basically reporting that TikTokkers said “X,” as if it’s news. TikTok is the babbling of attention-seeking children who will say anything to get a rise out of you. No, really — I got a TikTok account when I heard how popular it is, and I watched some of these videos, and believe me when I say that they skimmed the bottom-most slime from YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter from those sources and made them Tik-Tok superstars. I have not been tempted to actually use that account since.

The media have been painfully credulous, though. Don’t journalists get training in research and evidence anymore?

It seems to happen over and over again, and the mainstream media always makes it worse. The mainstream media hears about a “TikTok challenge,” reports on it like crazy, and people freak out that TikTok is destroying the children or some such.

And every single time, it turns out that the media got the story wrong. Often ridiculously so. There was the “devious licks” challenge, which at least had some basis in truth, but which TikTok cracked down on almost immediately. But when good reporters scratched the surface they found that it was mostly kids pranking adults, making them think that something bad was going to happen.

But, even worse, there was a big moral panic about the “slap a teacher” challenge that the media got up in arms about. Only, that one turned out to have been literally made up by some random adult and then spread by a school cop on Facebook, claiming that it was an upcoming TikTok challenge. Or the “school violence challenge,” which was reported all over the media, causing many schools to shut down entirely for the day, where there is no indication that it was ever actually a thing. And, if it was, the news was spread much more widely by TV news anchors freaking out about it without any evidence that it was real. And, no, the NyQuil chicken challenge was never actually a thing.

And now there’s been another one. At the Washington Post, Taylor Lorenz highlights how the Today Show did a segment about “the boat jump challenge” in which kids were allegedly jumping from moving boats into the water for clout on TikTok. Only problem it was all made up.

Remember the “Tide Pod challenge” from a few years ago? That was nothing but a moral panic. In 2018, the height of the craze,

Last year, U.S. poison-control centers received reports of more than 10,500 children younger than 5 who were exposed to the capsules. The same year, nearly 220 teens were reportedly exposed, and about 25 percent of those cases were intentional, according to data from the American Association of Poison Control Centers.

In 2018, there have been 37 reported cases among teenagers, half of them intentional, according to the data.

TikTok lured maybe a dozen or so teenagers to stupidly chomp down on a Tide Pod. If you’ve seen any of their videos, what then happens is gagging and spitting the thing out. The real danger is not the seductive allure of TikTok, which got a few idiots to do something idiotic, but that a lot of young children were tricked by the candy-like appearance of the pods to bite down on them. That’s what the story ought to have been — about bad, dangerous marketing by a gigantic corporation. Instead, a few attention-seeking twits got what they wanted, and Tide sailed on as the responsible adult in the room.

Learn to roll your eyes when someone says TikTok challenge, OK? It’s always just clickbait.

Good news from the heartland

Morris, Minnesota has won a prize!

The Morris Model team was recently notified that they were among 67 winners in the first phase of the $6.7 million Energizing Rural Communities Prize. The competition was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and is focused on supporting innovative partnership and finance plans to help rural or remote communities develop clean energy demonstration projects.

The Morris Model will receive a $100,000 prize, in-kind-mentorship services, and eligibility to compete for another $200,000.

This prize, managed by DOE Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), challenges individuals and organizations to develop partnership and financing strategies that support community-driven energy improvement projects in rural or remote communities.  The Morris Model Partnership seeks to make Morris a model rural sustainable community through clean energy and community resilience.

The DOE has a nice logo to go with it.

Yep, that looks like us. Except you’d have to erase the mountains and hills, and paste in a lot more cornfields.

The delusions have begun

In the long slow decline of Twitter, Elon Musk is now making the most superficial shufflings of the cosmetics: he’s renaming Twitter “X”. Just “X”. Except the name is still twitter, the url is still twitter.com, it’s just the bird logo is now a generic “X”.

OK, if you say so. People are still going to call it twitter until it implodes. We can’t call it “X” because that’s where we buried the treasure, marked the spot, crossed out a mistake.

Linda Yaccarino, the poor dupe Musk lured into taking over as nominal CEO, waxed rhapsodic over this change.

X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities. Powered by AI, X will connect us all in ways we’re just beginning to imagine.

No, it won’t. You’re rearranging the deck chairs on the sinking ship. You’re tweaking the font on your CV. You are totally delusional.

Notice to anti-vaxxers and other quacks

You may not post here. I have a zero tolerance policy for quacks and cranks.

This announcement was prompted by an attempted comment on this thread (I did not approve it for publication) which was loaded with conspiracy theory signs:

What is the TRUE FINAL implication of all that, which is not mentioned here (or elsewhere typically by the alleged “truth-tellers”)?

ACTIVE resistance against the criminal establishments around the world will greatly increase the sooner someone TRULY understands that the ruling cabal and their minions (in governments, big corporations, big banks, big media, big science, big religions, etc), anywhere around the globe, are PSYCHOPATHS — the evidence is OVERWHELMINGLY ROBUST.

Links to the crank’s website followed. Nah, I’m not publishing that. He is one of those vitamin megadoses can treat everything guys, whose main sources of information are his own opinion pieces and crap published in the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service. He’s mad because the BMJ wouldn’t publish his cranky letter.

A REALITY-BASED main approach to life –not an AUTHORITY-BASED main approach to life.

A LIFE-GROUNDED core alignment –not an EXPERT-CENTERED core alignment.

A TRUTH-BACKED main compass –not SPECIALIST-BACKED main compass.

A determined trust in EMPIRICAL PLANETARY REALITY –not HUMAN ANIMAL-PROCLAIMED “official science”, “consensus science”, or “evidence-based science”.

An overriding assimilation of NATURE-BASED evidence –not “civilized” HUMANS’ RATIFIED SCIENCE-BASED evidence (i.e., their self-serving science-BIASED evidence).

A primarily real life-VERIFIED personal modus vivendi versus a primarily authority-CERTIFIED personal modus vivendi.

Hint for self-proclaimed authorities in medicine: don’t complain about other self-proclaimed authorities in your manifesto, and lay off the caps-lock a bit.

I will continue to cheerfully suppress your wacko misinformation, so stuff that in your list of authorities who have silenced you.

You want my syllabus when?

The end is nigh. The university administration has requested that we submit our fall term syllabi on the 24th of July…that is, tomorrow. I am not prepared. I don’t want to think about this. I haven’t been thinking about this.

So that takes care of today, I guess. I’ve pulled up the academic calendar for the fall, and my previous version of the syllabus, and am going to sit down and reconcile lecture & exam dates and will get the damn things done today.

In other academic concerns, I’ve been invited to give an honors college lecture on the theme of…Michel de Montaigne, like I’d be qualified to discuss late Renaissance history. It’s OK, though, I’ve read his Essays, and since he was an exceptionally discursive writer, I figure I can get away with my own ramblings in the style of an old humanist. I did find a quote that might make for a good springboard:

Our utmost endeavors cannot arrive at so much as to imitate the nest of the least of birds, its contexture, beauty, and convenience: not so much as the web of a poor spider.

I’ll have to correct that back-handed compliment, but I also have a bunch of other ideas, not all spider-related, that I’ll assemble into a hodge-podge of a talk. The title: “Of boundaries and transgressions.” Should be fun. I have until October to pull it together, but I think I’d better have most of it in shape before September body-slams me.

He’s half right, you know

Mary and I saw Barbie last night. Ben Shapiro is partly right — it is the most woke movie I’ve ever seen. Although…we watched the whole thing, eagerly awaiting the gay orgy scene and the raging trans character stealing all the scenes, and were so disappointed. The closest we got to an orgy was two Kens kissing Ken on the cheek, and I guess we have to trust that there was a trans person there, but she was just playing Barbie like all the other Barbies.

It was loaded full of the Feminizms, though. And the Kens were patriarchal assholes, kinda incel-like, but the movie was also sympathetic to them and tried provide solutions to their problems. There was all this talk of autonomy and independence and freedom and positivity and kindness, though, and I can see why Shapiro would think it was garbage — he doesn’t like any of that stuff. There’s even a Shapiro joke, with one Barbie saying that she’s comfortable with both logic and emotion at the same time.

There were also some good jokes about the Snyderverse, and the last line of the movie is a killer. I felt sorry for Alan, Ken’s Buddy, and poor permanently pregnant Midge.

Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie were perfectly cast. (You should google their names right now: Google will give you a pink fireworks show.) Both were energetic and entertaining.

Recommended.

I know everyone is talking about the contrast between Barbie and Oppenheimer, but unfortunately the latter movie isn’t scheduled for a showing at my local theater. Once they get done showing that lying waste of time, Sound of Freedom, next week, maybe I’ll get to see it.

Oh, and here’s a more thorough review, if you want that.