5 Reasons to Stop Talking Sh*t About People From the South and Midwest

[whatthehey]

164. I've visited lots of forums. This one has a defining blindness

And no that blindness is not regionalism, elitism, classism or whatever you want to call it. It's also far less sexist, racist or misogynist than just about anywhere else with general access despite repeated complaints to the contrary.

It's really this strange. This place is full of insightful, informed, well-written opinions in great part. A touch histrionic at times but far less wild and extreme than most other major political messageboards. But, collectively, you guys are seemingly incapable of recognizing the difference between the general and the personal. Everything and anything here, written without a shred of personalization, is seen by someone here as a life-shattering attack. I have never seen the like, and I've been on internet message boards since the early 90s.

Here's the problem: "Texas is deeeply Republican and gives us lunatics like Cruz and Perry" is both true and not insulting. There is not a single person capable of typing "Texas" who does not know there are millions of Dem Texans, and heavily blue subsets of Texas. But "Texas" is a noun referring to the whole state NOT every individual in it, and the whole state IS deeply Republican and does give us lunatics like the above. It doesn't mean every single Texan is to blame, just that Texas as a whole is.

The South IS poorer, less well-educated, less culturally sophisticated than the North in toto. But there are many many examples of the inverse. That changes nothing however. Rural Pennsylvania is in the North but not the whole North. The Research Triangle is in the South but not the whole South. Certainly there are individual variants by the millions of cultured geniuses in Atlanta and knuckle-dragging imbeciles in Manhattan, but please understand this: the way, the ONLY way, to seek to rebut the statement at the start of this paragraph is to look at REGIONAL statistics, not metro statistics or individual anecdotes, and there is nothing, not one single damned whisper of an implication, in that statement that suggests EVERYBODY in the South is poor, uneducated and simple or that nobody in the North is.