TRIGGER WARNING: The Most Politically Incorrect Post I've Ever Written-- Apologies In Advance To Progressives in The South
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• KentuckyThere were strikingly similar, albeit unsurprising, results when states were ranked according to obesity and unhealthy habits. Again, they are listed from worst to slightly less worse. This time Mississippi takes it's rightful place on the top of the shitpile:
• Mississippi
• West Virginia
• Louisiana
• Oklahoma
• Arkansas
• Tennessee
• Alabama
• Indiana
• South Carolina
• Texas
• North Dakota
• MississippiWow! It's all the same states! God must really, really, really hate these people. I'd move today. Can you name the 5 states with the greatest percentage of residents who are physically inactive? (In order of worst it less worse-- Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana.) How about the 5 states with the greatest percentage of adults eating less than 1 serving of fruits and vegetables per day? (Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, South Carolina.) I wish I had a list of states where Fox News had the greatest percentage of viewers or where Limbaugh has the greatest listenership. (I did find one source that says Fox's biggest influence is in Mississippi, Alabama and South Carolina.) Anyway, I found a list in an article by Philip Bump in last week's Washington Post that ranks states by their residents' intelligence. And would't you know it... none of the dozen states with more intelligent people are on the lists of states where people, for example, eat themselves to death. Conversely, all of those pathetic red states that keep electing Republicans to kill their children are pretty down low on the smart-people rankings. These are the states with the bad health rankings from our lists above, rated by intelligence:
• Louisiana
• West Virginia
• Tennessee
• South Carolina
• Arkansas
• Kentucky
• Alabama
• Oklahoma
• North Dakota
• Texas
• Indiana
• Mississippi- 48th smartest
• Alabama- 47th
• South Carolina- 45th
• West Virginia- 44th
• Louisiana- 43rd
• Texas- 39th
• Arkansas- 36th
• Tennessee- 33rd
• Indiana- 32nd
• Kentucky- 31st
• Oklahoma- 30th
• North Dakota- 14th
Labels: dumbest states, Neil Young, Philip Bump, statistics
posted by DownWithTyranny @ 9:00 PM
3 comments
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3 Comments:
I read the previous post you mentioned and agreed with it and I agree with this post also: Why do normal people stay in places like my home state and former state of mississippi?
The answer is that they don't stay, or at least the great majority of them don't stay. And the great majority of those who do stay certainly aren't progressive. They've long since become and then remain complicit and merely go along to get along with no risk of letting their conscience be their guide.
A very few do remain to fight the good fight, actively - not passively and self-defeatingly by merely voting, if even that. The fighters are the rare exception. The fighters are activists in their chosen fields, mounting legal challenges and such. And some start food banks. And some are social workers. And some still persist at great risk pressing the case for civil liberties. Etc.
But the great majority of so-called progressive southerners are happy just making rancid drawling jokes about how bad things are and making flaccid proclamations about how much better they are than the rednecks who are stinking the place up in the first place. Waste of space, those faux progressives are. If you live in those states and think you are a progressive and haven't been arrested for civil disobedience, you're just fooling yourself and are an integral part of the problems.
I remember Ray Mabus running for Governor of Mississippi on the slogan "MIssissippi Will Never Be Last Again," to which Molly Ivins' comment was, "Uh oh. Somebody has to be last."
I think Anon 9:29 post is right on the money about why normal people stay in these places: They don't or they join the looters or they just turn off their consciences. I always had a bad reaction to WEB Dubois' contention that merely being a soldier in the Civil War wasn't enough, because I'm always a little hesitant to tell other people what their moral duty might consist of though, especially when one has given up and left.
I worked a race in NE Georgia a few years back, in a district that contained some of the smartest people in Georgia in Athens, and some of the dumbest everywhere else. One Sunday morning, in my huge local United Methodist church, the Assistant Pastor, who wanted to be some kind of Old Testament prophet, thundered, "We have lived in a democratic society for far too long." I went to the Pastor and said I didn't know all of the tenets of our Church but was pretty sure the UMC was good with democracy, and quoted her Assistant and his context back to her. No matter how I explained it, she just didn't understand what I was getting at.
So I found a new UMC down the road, where the wonderful tiny congregation was working hard to take whatever care they could of old people and poor people and children ignored by the system. And that was Georgia - by no means the dumbest, meanest state in the Union.
Iowa has the highest High School graduation rate in the country. The former slave holding states in the above lists, not so much. Conclusion: High Correlation between obesity, fidelity to the republican party, and lack of a High School education.
http://www.governing.com/gov-data/high-school-graduation-rates-by-state.html
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