- Kellee Speakman, a conservative elementary school teacher, moved from California to Texas in 2022 but returned after four and a half months due to Texas’s political obsession and unexpected living costs.
- Speakman found Texas to be not much cheaper than California, with high property taxes, expensive services, and lower wages, which contributed to her dissatisfaction.
- She returned to California, appreciating its lifestyle, public lands, and better teacher benefits, realizing that her idea of freedom involved peace and everyday adventures rather than political rhetoric.
Conservative decides to leave a very liberal state and move to a conservative state, doesn’t like it there, moves back to liberal state because it’s better there.
Is probably still conservative.
???
I recently had an insight on (US) politics that applies here. Our ridiculous two party system is unsurprisingly to blame for this. Both parties encompass both reasonable and terrible ideas. And members of both parties are fed entirely different pieces of propaganda. So republicans are fed the idea that all democrats embrace the worst, extreme ideas that fall under the democratic umbrella. While democrats are fed the idea that all republicans embrace the worst, extreme ideas that fall under the republican umbrella. This makes members of both parties see the other as simply evil and so the opposing party is impossible to embrace. It often doesn’t matter what experiences a person goes through.
I was trying to come up with an example of a reasonable Republican policy but I failed. Can you help me out with an example?
Right wingers have an unreasonably radical view of liberals because that’s what the right wing hate machine churns out relentlessly. Liberals think most right wingers are confused but reasonable because thinking otherwise clashes with liberal philosophy. Leftists think that right wingers are rabid fascists because right wingers always show themselves to be rabid fascists the moment someone gives them permission. Enlightened centrists think both sides have equal and opposite prejudices because they like that vibe, not because it reflects reality.
I’m sorry but this false equivalence is BS. Conservatives are eating propaganda happily and there is definitely liberal propaganda. But nobody is making up the awful things conservatives are embracing in vast majorities worldwide. You don’t need to make anything up to find awful things in the right, the way the right is making things up about liberals.
Honestly, I agree with what you’re saying. And yet, conservatives are told that liberals are killing babies via abortion. It’s a bunch of nonsense IMO. But once a person embraces an idea like that, they’ll probably never vote democrat again.
My comment isn’t saying that one side or the other is better. I was explaining why people in the US pick a political party and usually stick with it for a lifetime. It’s because they believe the other side is evil regardless of reality. We have a messed up system.
Edit: well this is ridiculous. I stumbled across this post only 5 minutes after writing this comment. Somehow, it’s actually worse that the random example I offered. I hate our political system. It’s awful.
The idea of having to deal with Texas’s power grid scares me
Yeah, people call us the Texas of Canada but we’ve had no power interruptions during those -40 and below cold snaps. Part of that has to do with natural gas being our heat, of course. But if you’ve ever been outside in -40… I’ll take the natural gas over that. It’s cold like you’ve never felt it before.
Much of the US, even Texas uses natural gas for heating. Houses in much of the southern US aren’t designed for cold weather so people add space heaters. Plus if I remember correctly the cold shut down the natural gas providers in Texas so that wasn’t even working.
Yup, I believe ten years prior the federal government told them that the gas plants were susceptible to freezing pipes of incoming gas. Since texas grid is independent, they couldn’t force the plants to winterize. After the shit show, the governor blamed windmills, even though they over produced, because a few windmills stopped working.
It’s awful. We lose power if it’s too hot, we lose power if it’s too cold.
Fucking utilities man. ERCOT has made so many recommendations over the years for the regional utilities to make changes and strengthen their grids, but short-term profit motive gets in the way of stability of an essential service. Why we privatized the grids in this country is beyond me
If I’m not mistaken, the thing that contributes to our instability is also what caused Texas to be at the front of renewables (for a while). What I’ve been told is that Texas’ power grid is pretty loosely regulated, which was why renewables took off here; it was really easy for anyone to start their own power company so small companies were able to spring up and contribute solar, wind, etc.
This was great and fine so long as we weren’t getting extreme, once-in-100-year weather every year. Thanks big oil and climate change. Anyway, now we need regulation to make power companies start planning for things they previously only needed to plan for every 100 years.
Renewables took off in Texas because it’s
- Vast
- Flat
- Hot
- Windy
It’s pretty much heaven for solar and wind, both of which have no qualms building out in the middle of nowhere.
I wonder if anyone’s going to attempt tide generators with our freshly roided up storm seasons. The whole East Coast has barrier islands that are all about to sink, so we won’t even have to go down far to anchor them.
Windmills are taking off now in Wyoming, and I can’t believe it took them this long, loaded down freighters get blown over hourly every fucking day in Wyoming. They built their freeways with massive shoulders just to wreck on. Windmill farms are all down central and Eastern Washington, central and eastern Oregon and California. I can’t speak much to the Midwest but you can’t drive 5miles thru Iowa without seeing 100windmills. In between houses and shit. I like the spirit but goddamn, Iowa needs to chill.
Solar is huge all along the sun belt. Shit I’m off-grid in Washington and I do it off 2500w of panels and 375ah of batteries. It’s not as good as having a tap to grand coulee but I don’t have an electric bill and that does more than just dry my tears, it actually makes happy.
YEP. My experience having grown up here was that Texas was cheap and pretty laid-back politically. Then something changed and the state shifted into being expensive and politically obsessed.
Edit: that’s what I used to like about Texas: everyone minded their own business. They wanted the government to fuck off and let them do whatever. Now there are a lot of people who want to know what’s in your child’s pants.
The last gasp of the ‘mind your own business’ conservatives in Texas was either the 2016 election or the one after that. There was a period of time where you had the Lt Governor trying to pass culture war bills (like anti-trans bathroom bills) in the senate and then they would die in the house when the speaker wouldn’t put them up for a vote due to it being bad for attracting businesses. Once the MAGA Republicans got voted in, it’s been full steam ahead for them.
It’s not like things were great before then, but it wasn’t this race to the bottom like it is now.
It really got rolling when Bush Jr got elected governor. It had been festering for a while.
The southern strategy merged with big oil money, and utilized the conservative Baptist churches to try to shame people into getting on board.
Exactly the trajectory Florida is on. I grew up here, we had low wages, cheap housing, very cheap groceries, ugly sprawl, beautiful beaches, so many queer people, circus folk, immigrants from everywhere and environmentalists. Rednecks in the country but cities so blue. So far south we were not the South.
It shifted right some over the years but COVID-19 brought all these racist northerners to our cities, with a lot of money, now we have cost of living average for anywhere but wages still lower than all those anywhere places. Cities still diverse but state politics ridiculous and very Southern.
I spent three months in Houston about 10 years ago and I’ve never experienced such a wild-ass level of passive aggressive probing to see if I was in their particular in-group anywhere else. I’m from the Midwest and used to some of that but it was every fucking conversation, down to getting asked what church I attend while trying to get a coffee at a cafe.
Ah yes! I also grew up in the Midwest and lived in Fort Worth for a few years and the biggest culture shock was that, “What church do you go to?” was essentially the standard follow-up to introducing myself. I always lied and said I went to a church out in one of the suburbs in the hopes that they wouldn’t try to associate…
“What church do you go to?”
And “sorry, I was raised Canadian” doesn’t work?
It’s like she somehow traveled to a political future dominated by conservative politics (Texas), hated it, and traveled back. But still gonna vote conservative. Boggles the mind.
