Mine's been cold 🥶

Just gonna keep this short and to the point.

We all know FDR only went so far with including black people in new deal programs to appease the southern coalition of Dems. He also denied entry for Jewish Refugees and deported many Mexicans during the Great Depression.

Once LBJ passed the Civil Rights Act, Dems essentially lost the South forever.

Nixon pulled federal funding from affordable public housing in black neighborhoods and it strengthened his base.

Reagan blamed the aids epidemic on gay people and was embraced by the country.

Obama had to run on being anti-gay marriage in 08, but ran on being pro-gay marriage in 2012 and lost some support.

Trump spent millions in anti-trans ads. And leaned into the trans panic.

I know social issues aren’t everything, but it seems like that’s the direction America has gone post Civil Rights.

Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1i611hm/americas_digital_dialects_how_reddit_reveals_the/

From the author:

"Hi, everyone—This map is based on my 2024 Linguistics PhD dissertation, A geographic analysis of lexical variation in North American English using Reddit corpora. (You can read it here.)

For this project, I extracted huge amounts of text data from top-ranked posts for subreddits dedicated to cities in the US, Canada, and Britain (although my project focused on North America). From each subreddit, I counted the usages of particular synonymous word pairs, like cute and adorable, or forest and woodland. I then calculated the ratio between the two words in each pair for each city subreddit. With each city subreddit corresponding to a real-world geographic location, I was able to run statistics to identify regional clustering in the usage of each word pair, and aggregate the overall patterns. This map shows the groupings of cities in the US that emerged from that analysis.

During my time as a grad student, I taught a course on the history of the English language for several years, and one of my favorite topics to cover was variation in American English. So when I did a dissertation project that combined linguistics, social media, and geography, I knew that I wanted to share my findings with others in order to promote engagement with linguistics and maybe help spark someone’s interest in language.

I have a Twitter thread up where I talk a bit more about the project, and I also have some slides on my personal website where I go into more detail about the methods and findings. You can also find maps of results for some of the individual variables on this page of my website."

Genuinely can't figure out how other people develop active social lives. The most common advice I get is to look on Meetup, but I found pretty much one group and while I had fun, halfway through the event they started making fun of liberals for not having friends. I'm genderqueer so that ain't gonna work out. Everything else on Meetup is scientology garbage.

I go out and do things on my own and try to be open to people who approach me, but on the rare occasion someone wants to talk to me it's because they're horny and they've mistaken me for a straight woman. I can be out in the mud picking up litter and someone will strike up a conversation about the environment, something I'm interested in, and it turns out it's because they think I'm doing this to get the D.

I'm getting crazy bored. Does everyone just work a 9-5 and then go home alone? Except for when they have sex with the occasional random straight man??

I’m a 21-year-old guy and since they unfortunately didn’t teach us about American history in school I wanna learn it all on my own from the beginning to the present.

I’m really looking forward to a deep dive to not only understand American history better but also to get a better grasp of the culture, people, economics, politics and social aspects that influenced America to become what it is now.

I was wondering what the best ways and resources are to do this. Maybe someone can recommend some good media resources. It doesn’t matter what it is, it could be books, videos, podcasts, documentaries, documents, articles, movies and so on.

I’m open for everything :)

I was just watching "American Primeval", when it occurred to me (again) that the US was a place where oddball religions could prosper. Two recent successful examples of very weird ones being Mormons and Scientology (although the latter is a bit less successful lately).

Why is it that weird things catch on so readily in the US?

Of course, the "founders" were people that were kicked out of everywhere else because they were trying to convert them to their extremist religious views (and yet US people are fond of trying to find family ties to them... "hey, my great, great, great grand father was a religious lunatic! But yours wasn't")

So now, Mormons (Jews totally rowed to the US, for some reason, and then Jesus came there, and there were horses, and cities, and there's absolutely no archaeological trace, probably because god) have an astounding foothold despite their creed (I'm saying this because I have read the book of Mormon).

Then there's Scientology, and I don't even know where to begin with that one, given how fucked up it is... If you don't know about it, start with Wikipedia.

Also (probably not finally, there's certainly more) there's the innumerable bizarre Christianity stuff in the US. It's such a mess. I don't even think that most of the evangelical groups are technically Christians.

So apparently,, in the US, anything goes. The holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, blessed be it's meat balls, showed us that. But then what?

The problem with the typical US "let anyone do whatever" is that vulnerable get fleeced at best.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/37369245

There are many reasons you might have unclaimed funds (abandoned accounts, uncashed checks, misspelled names, incorrect addresses, misplaced inheritance and trusts, etc), and your state is required to hold your property until you claim it.

They will not seek you out, and most people are completely unaware they may have lost funds or property being held by the state.

Every state has an official (.gov) website where you can check whether you have unclaimed property and submit a claim. Just search ‘[my state] unclaimed property’.

e: make sure you go to the official state website; I just noticed some state search top results aren’t the official (.gov) website.

e2: also, check every state you’ve lived in. Moving state is one of the major reasons this happens, and your unclaimed funds will not move to a new state with you.

e3: if you find unclaimed funds, please comment! I’m fascinated to know, no matter how large or small.

https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-trump-biden-china-bdc79b7ce741a81761f67ea56d410103

Next week will have lots of political excitement going on, I'm sure. Despite that, hopefully you're having an OK week

Coming from this post:

https://lemmy.world/post/24352555

Ordering coffee in the USA triggers me

I went to dunkin’ the other day and asked for an iced latte with less ice because it’s winter and I wanted less ice. They gave me a cup that was halfway full of coffee. So I asked why and they told me they press a button on a machine, it fills it halfway full with coffee and then they add ice. So when you get a medium iced latte, you’re not actually getting a medium latte, you’re getting a small or a kids size nowadays of coffee, and then they just fill the rest of it with ice. If you ask for less ice, no screw you, you’re not getting the full amount of coffee that you paid for…

I have never heard of this in any other country. What the hell?

Hi European here.

I always heard America is pretty competitive and that the people are very direct/speak their mind.

I'm quite the sensitive person, so I was wondering if it could be hard for me if I would ever go to America and if I needed to become more "tough".

And would someone like me even be welcomed or would I be rejected?

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/nearly-half-of-u-s-adults-say-dating-has-gotten-harder-for-most-people-in-the-last-10-years/

https://www.forbes.com/health/dating/dating-statistics/#footnote_15

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/27891382

My social media environment (mostly Lemmy for the last year, after I left Reddit) is very leftist. I'm finding myself floating more and more left because y'all have a point and there's not many counter-arguments in this social media environment. I sometimes wonder if that's how MAGA folks feel--floating more and more right because that's what they're surrounded by.

Of course, my floating is (naturally /s) based on reason and leftists making good memes/arguments.

Anyways, that's this morning's introspection.

Side showerthought: my convictions are based on memes. Anyone have nice, accessible resources for giving those convictions a more solid base? I'd love something like a graphic history of leftist thought (similar to Queer: A Graphic History). Something approachable but with citations. Thanks :)

Anything exciting/good/bad happen? My excitement for the week was playing this trick-taking game for the first time, it was pretty fun:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/324856/the-crew-mission-deep-sea

Beer, wine, liquor, whatever your favorite drink is. What are specific good products/brands/whatever?