Country music started to suck not when it became political, there was always political country music. It started to suck when it became the refuge for conservatives and no other viewpoints were allowed.

But there was a real hunger in a lot of parts of America for representation, and country music did offer a landscape that was talking a lot about old-fashioned values.

…

I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that country radio, which remains very corporate, does have a lock on who can become a superstar and who cannot. And so, if you get sort of an organized fan backlash against a musician over their politics. their career is done. And the most – the high-profile example of that that people will be familiar with is what happened to the Dixie Chicks during the Iraq War.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/segments/how-country-music-went-conservative

Country music from before 1970 can be good. There are occasionally things post 1970 that are also good, but they’re much harder to find because it has become a style of music that caters to conservatives, and they expect it to glorify their values.

https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/both-kinds-of-music/

The mother’s work.

Wait, now they’re plural?

Interesting that you use the word “chord”, because guitarists and piano players have been remembering chords forever based on the position of their hands, not based on some letters and numbers. Your version isn’t more easily memorized, it’s just different.

Which is something you have to memorize. Do you honestly think that that is somehow easier to memorize than say “Ctrl-Shift-5”?

Rather than memorizing ctrl+shift+alt-style keybinds, you decompose stuff into chainable actions.

By memorizing something else that’s equally or more obscure.

Actual conservatism is just as “logical” as libralism / leftism, or whatever you want to call the other side. Old fashioned conservatism is just the idea that traditional ways of doing things are good, so we should be slow in adopting changes.

Modern American conservatism isn’t conservatism. It’s an incoherent philosophy that resists some changes while making a lot of other very radical changes. There’s no plan behind it. Even their “gameplan”, project 2025, is a mess of contradictory ideas. The execution depends on the whims of an idiotic, incurious, and possibly altzheimer-addled man.

The mom’s worked what?

Like their mother’s what?

That’s a really weird metaphor. It doesn’t really make any sense.

There’s a well known metaphor about burning your own boats so that you’re unable to retreat. But, those aren’t lifeboats.

If you’re talking about not letting people get rescued, why not “sink the lifeboats”? Setting them on fire would be annoying, but a fire would be easy to put out if the boats are out at sea. There’s water all around. The article seems to be more about not allowing people who have abandoned the sinking ship to come on board. So, why not just “ignore the lifeboats”. You don’t have to approach them and set them on fire. You can just refuse to rescue the people in those lifeboats and leave them floating out at sea.

And if it is trump cultists who write the history books, they’ll openly admit to a lot of stuff that only their cult thinks is OK. (And the writing in crayon will be a dead giveaway.)

What we need to do is convince them never to vote again.

If you were fooled by mango mussolini, you don’t have the brains to make good decisions when you vote. Surely you have family or friends who have been warning you about Trump for a decade now. They were right, you were wrong. Take your hands off of the steering wheel and let those more informed people drive.

Which church would you go to?

Even if you believe that the only way that Trump could possibly die within the next 24 hours is the act of a god, which god was it? Maybe you’re supposed to go to a Hindu temple, maybe it’s a Jewish one, maybe it’s Ra or Thor.

Wow, I’m impressed, you actually managed to mention one city that isn’t either in the far north or on the beach. (And it’s not Mexicali, even though you mentioned it twice). It’s almost like you’ve actually visited Mexico before!

When a public utility or something is sold off, then yes, as soon as the privatization happens the service has to get shittier.

But, I don’t think it’s true that the moment there’s a private alternative the public version stops working. I think it’s often just that the public version starts to decay because it doesn’t get the investment it needs.

For example, if you sell the postal service to a private company, it’s going to get either more expensive, or not work as well, or both.

But, if you allow a private parcel delivery service to compete with the post office, for a while you can have both working fairly well. The private service might offer much faster delivery that you can track, while the post office offers slower delivery for a much lower price. For a while the two services can coexist, and people can choose which one they want based on their needs. But, over time you’ll get underinvestment in the public postal option. People will demand that it be run as a business and won’t take into account that it acts as a public service and does things that are unprofitable but good for society.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear, I meant to say that if the public system and private system were equal but you had to pay for the private system, nobody would use it. Sure, if the private system is faster then people will use it even if the public system is free.

In places that allow a mix of private and public, the private system basically finds some flaw in the public system and allows people to pay to bypass that flaw. Things like wait times are one of the main issues. But, it’s sometimes something like certain expensive tests being hard to get in the public system (CAT scans or something). In the public system they might only order those when they’re obviously needed. The private system can let you have one whenever you want, so if your doctor says “well… it could help, but it doesn’t meet the threshold the public system sets” some people will pay for it out of pocket. Or it can be more privacy, or more luxurious hospital rooms. Even if the treatment is otherwise identical, some people will pay for that.

If the private system is allowed to exist, it will always exist. Someone will find something that isn’t done quite as efficiently as the public medical system and charge privately for doing it. Anywhere the private system exists will be better than the public system by definition. Nobody would pay to use the private system if they could get their needs met for free in the public system.

Because of that, if there is a private system, some people will use it. Those same people will vote to try to limit the taxes they pay for the public system, because they’re not using that system. People who can pay for the private system are going to be the richer people, and so their decisions about where their tax money goes has more of an impact. So, eventually, the public system starts to crumble. When that happens, more people use the private system, and the problem gets worse.

I’ve been to Mexico City. It’s absolutely huge. There are probably neighbourhoods where “nomads” are pricing out the locals, but the vast majority of the city isn’t affected. What’s driving up rents in Mexico City is that it’s Mexico City. Most of the people moving there are Mexican.

As for other tourist destinations, yes in tourist destinations there are tourists! Wow. But, there’s a lot of places in Mexico that aren’t tourist destinations, or are destinations only for Mexican tourists. There are entire cities with millions of inhabitants where you’re very unlikely to ever see an American / nomad.

Mexico already has a constitutionally guaranteed right to healthcare:

Every person has the right to health protection. The law shall determine the bases and terms to access health services and shall establish the competence of the Federation and the Local Governments in regard to sanitation according to the item XVI in Article 73 of this Constitution.

In practice, this has meant a bare minimum level of health care is theoretically available to everyone, but most working people have private insurance on top of that, or see private doctors. For the poorest people it has often been very difficult to get the care they need, even if it’s theoretically available and constitutionally guaranteed. It’s also different from American / Canadian / European hospitals in that family is expected to play a major role doing things that in richer countries are done by nurses or orderlies.

IMO, universal healthcare only really works if the middle class / upper middle class and the poor are all in the same system. If the people can pay more and get better care, they’ll do it, and the system used by the poor will be underfunded. You can’t do much about the truly rich. They’ll always just fly to other countries. If this is just filling the gaps between the various reasons people can use the state system, it’s not going to help that much, even if that kind of fix is necessary.