I love hicks - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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By QatzelOk
#14888167
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I actually love hicks, as well as being one myself. I was born in a suburb of a hicktown, and spent much of my childhood doing hick things and thinking hick thoughts.

This thread was provoked by another poster (who I like) who casually linked hicks with racism in another thread. I took umbrage with this because it's not fair to either hicks or to racists to associate one with the other.

Most of our racism-defining media (and this includes religion) comes from very educated people who live close to the centers of power. Not hicks themselves. Rich, well-connected and educated people created the racism-defining Orientalist literature that Edward Said warned about, for example.

Hollywood and TV are made in America's (and Europe's) largest cities, by people who have traveled and who have money and sophistication. This is who puts black men into thug roles, Arabs into murderer terrorist roles, and nice rich consumers into superman roles.

They don't actually believe any of the racist lies they promote. They just promote these lies to make money for themselves and their associates. The racism they create is strategic and self-interested.

Big city racism-producers find their best audience in small towns because small towns (and rural places) create trusting people. In hick towns, trusting other people is necessary because cooperation is necessary. So this "trust others" is built into the hick lifestyle. What a disaster when slick city racists can penetrate into the hick universe through television and radio.

Result:

Look where the rich get all their dumb warriors: from hicktowns who have watched their big-city lies and believed them because "we are happy because we believe."

...

Famous and important hicks include: Fidel Castro, Rene Levesque, Joan of Arc, Mickey Mantle, Jesus, Mohamed and Moses.

There are many more.

Urbanites often find their success in parasitism, which is easier than morality, but seldom leads to lasting improvements for the human condition.

Viva los campesinos!

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By quetzalcoatl
#14888211
Hicks don't all come from small towns. There are also the hicks from Southie, Hell's Kitchen, or most any other major city. The city I grew up in (San Antonio) was almost entirely hicksville.

But the hick culture is fading. Republicans have been starving rural parts for decades, while ag-giants absorb all the farms. And the hickish parts of cities are being diluted by the internet and video culture. I think it's more than just nostalgia on my part - something authentic is being lost.
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By QatzelOk
#14888585
quetzalcoatl wrote:Hicks don't all come from small towns. There are also the hicks from Southie, Hell's Kitchen, or most any other major city. The city I grew up in (San Antonio) was almost entirely hicksville.

But the hick culture is fading. Republicans have been starving rural parts for decades, while ag-giants absorb all the farms. And the hickish parts of cities are being diluted by the internet and video culture. I think it's more than just nostalgia on my part - something authentic is being lost.

I think radio, and then television, did a major job on ruining the individual cultures of hicks.

Rather than associating with locals and listening to the wisdom of olde people in their communities, the car-bound hick watches TV for socialization, and then his "real" hick world starts to look fake, while the fake mass-media constructed world becomes more "real."

This has lead to the loss of a lot of hick knowledge.

We are going to have to re-learn farming techniques and homeopathic medicine eventually, along with how to cook and repair all our own things. Hicks knew this more than anyone in the past, but today, like you say, they're as ignorant as big-city parasites - eating at drive-thrus, and listening to urban hiphop on their Ipods.

Mass media turned a lot of people off hicks, and it did this in order to kill the community. As well as to sell hicks all kinds of things they didn't need back when they cooperated with other people.
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By Crantag
#14888607
I do agree with you. Oregon hillbilly here, checking in.

You also answered some of my questions in another thread, simply regarding my thirst for insights on how people can better exist and coexist, essentially.

One thing which strikes me is the faulty nature of the entire paradigm for analyzing economic well being, with respect to the abject reliance on the persistence of measurable financial (i.e. money-based) transactions.

We have all heard the stuff about "such and such number of people live on less than $2 a day", but this sort of statement only considers assessed transactions. Growing food doesn't figure into any of the equations. Neither does raising chickens, and bartering some of the chickens, or eggs, which traditional rural people anywhere do a lot of. These sorts of activities simply do not exist.

This is an age-old critique to be sure, but when this sort of paradigm is at the center of so-called economic development agendas, the salience of these critiques is more considerable, and the effects of the objective missteps of logic, with respect to the genuine economics of a given locale, becomes devious.
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By QatzelOk
#14888748
Crantag wrote:...One thing which strikes me is the faulty nature of the entire paradigm for analyzing economic well being, with respect to the abject reliance on the persistence of measurable financial (i.e. money-based) transactions.

We have all heard the stuff about "such and such number of people live on less than $2 a day", but this sort of statement only considers assessed transactions. Growing food doesn't figure into any of the equations. Neither does raising chickens, and bartering some of the chickens, or eggs, which traditional rural people anywhere do a lot of. These sorts of activities simply do not exist.

They do not exist... in the mind of the big-city, well-meaning journalist, or skip-a-year university student.

Because not only has hick culture and knowledge been down-graded by big-city media, the degradation continues even among ex-hicks who've resettled as urban parasites.

When comfortable urban parasites visit real-world hickdom, they freak out at what these poor, ignorant people DON'T have: large salaries, a subway system, acquaintances from Russia and Austria. They are fairly blind to the things hicks DO have because they have been conditioned themselves (by media and media-based social norms) to only notice "progress" when it's urban and modern.

Social progress doesn't make money for megalomaniac private investors and their mafia associates, and that's what the big city lives for, as does its media.

Letting tribalism enter hick social space (through tribal big city media) has been a social disaster for the entire earth.
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By Crantag
#14888793
I have a good friend from rural Sichuan Province, China. I heard a BBC 'expose' on China's plan to eliminate extreme poverty in China by 2020. Where did the BBC head out to? Rural Sichuan, in order to gawk at the supposed conditions of the people they found there.

My friend lives in Guangzhou now--but she's in Sichuan at the moment and sent me some photos and videos from basically exactly where the BBC people went, and none of it looks bad to me; nor does she or any of her family seem hopelessly poor. They more seem to me like typical Chinese people, and dare I say 'middle class'?

Anecdotes are kind of dumb I know, but I think the BBC reporting method I raise here was a case in point. They clearly set out to China to try to find poor people, and this mission of theirs--I suspect--drove the entire report. That's the opposite of how an investigation is supposed to be conducted.

However, if they wanted to look at poor people they could've just stayed in London. No fringe benefits in the hotels though in the form of evening visitors for doing that.
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By QatzelOk
#14889287
Nick Pemberton wrote:We Shouldn’t Believe The Elite’s Lies About The Rural Poor

I read a terrific article in The Guardian called “Passive, poor and white? What people keep getting wrong about Appalachia”. The author Elizabeth Catte rightly calls the talk about “Trump Country” an elitist fetish. The myth that Trump was the poor people’s candidate was debunked nicely here on Counterpunch. How do the elites explain that poor rural people went for Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton. Weren’t they as the old saying goes, choosing Love Over Hate? Of course Sanders over Clinton is merely choosing the Imperialist Pig over the Queen of Chaos but it’s better than anything the elites came up with.

It is true that some of these people blamed women, gay people or minorities for their lives that are supposedly such big failures. Maybe if we didn’t have a culture that hated poor people, or as they are called by the politically correct, trailer trash, we would not have so many people feeling like they needed to explain their life through a plot against them. Of course there is a plot against all of us and it is called capitalism. But this is not a conspiracy, it is a system that plays out as it is designed to. And who gave people the idea that they were lesser because they didn’t profit off of this system? It’s the loving elites who hate the poor.
...

An article that suggests that mass media has redefined what "rural" means for the last few generations of American consumers. And that tribal interests in large urban centers have been smearing the very lifestyles that used to feed us before mechanization, chemical fertilizers, and cheap-and-precarious foreign labor were mandated from up high, and made a handful of tribal urban predators rich.
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By Beren
#14889338
After the great cataclysm, which you suggest is on its way, we all, or rather only a few of us, will be hicks again, so you just have to live long enough to see it @QatzelOk. What a luck your biking, posting, and veganism can't save mankind from its fate!

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By QatzelOk
#14889581
Beren wrote:What a luck your biking, posting, and veganism can't save mankind from its fate!

Biking and vegetarianism have great advantages for hicks.

Vegetarianism means not sharing your house with pig shit. And cycling means that you don't have brake fluid and other car chemicals contaminating your fishing sites.
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By Beren
#14889593
QatzelOk wrote:Biking and vegetarianism have great advantages for hicks.

But we need methane-farting cows and cars polluting the earth to have a cataclysm after which we all will be hicks, otherwise urban parasitic culture and civilisation survives. Or do you think prophets can change the world with their prophecies and good example? You should rather be an advocate for Donald Trump and Rob Ford. You also should have a car.
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By QatzelOk
#14889609
Beren wrote:But we need methane-farting cows and cars polluting the earth to have a cataclysm after which we all will be hicks, otherwise urban parasitic culture and civilisation survives. Or do you think prophets can change the world with their prophecies and good example? You should rather be an advocate for Donald Trump and Rob Ford. You also should have a car.

This irony is very urban, Beren.

I am also urban right now, and so I understand how angry and empty you feel, and how irony can act as a temporary pain-killer against these very urban existential dilemnas.

But the world has no time for urban ennuie or irony.

This part of me surrenders.

Surrenders to love in the first degree - the love of the hick life.

Susan Roberts wrote:...Mathis Wackernagel, describes modern cities as “entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it.” According to Rees, New York requires a supply base almost 1000 times the geographic size of the city itself. Tokyo requires an area twice the size of Japan to maintain it. A recent study showed that the 744 largest cities worldwide require more carbon dioxide sequestration than the entire world’s forests could provide. ...
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By Beren
#14889787
QatzelOk wrote:Surrenders to love in the first degree - the love of the hick life.

I wonder whether you could be a real hick or just an old hippie.
By SolarCross
#14889791
Beren wrote:I wonder whether you could be a real hick or just an old hippie.

I guess a real hick should be able to turn a living chicken into roast meat on their own without the aid of supermarkets and without balking, fussing, crying or bodging it messily. Likely Qatz is a hippy not a hick then.
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By Tainari88
#14889793
There is an official word for 'hick' in Puerto Rican Spanish--it is called "Jibaro".

A great thing to be.

Though it doesn't exist anymore.
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By QatzelOk
#14889795
SolarCross wrote:I guess a real hick should be able to turn a living chicken into roast meat on their own without the aid of supermarkets and without balking, fussing, crying or bodging it messily. Likely Qatz is a hippy not a hick then.

This thread isn't about me. If it was, there'd be a lot of pictures of me on my bike carrying a small dog in a pouch.

And the mild personal attack on me above is, once again, urban ironic and thus inappropriate in this thread.

This thread is about being a good and successful hick.

Vegetarian hicks don't have to deal with chickens, so they can really fine-tune the art of small-scale agriculture and food preparation.

Los jibaros vegetarianos no tienen que sufrir con pollos, por lo que realmente pueden perfeccionar el arte de la agricultura a pequeña escala y la preparación de alimentos. (Tainari88? Could this work?)

Vegetarian cooking requires less refrigeration technology and fewer hygiene issues. Fish can be consumed fresh, and seafood can be reserved for restaurants.

Yes, urban features can punctuate sustainable farmland.
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By Tainari88
#14889800
QatzelOk wrote:This thread isn't about me. If it was, there'd be a lot of pictures of me on my bike carrying a small dog in a pouch.

And the mild personal attack on me above is, once again, urban ironic and thus inappropriate in this thread.

This thread is about being a good and successful hick.

Vegetarian hicks don't have to deal with chickens, so they can really fine-tune the art of small-scale agriculture and food preparation.

Los jibaros vegetarianos no tienen que sufrir con pollos, por lo que realmente pueden perfeccionar el arte de la agricultura a pequeña escala y la preparación de alimentos. (Tainari88? Could this work?)

Vegetarian cooking requires less refrigeration technology and fewer hygiene issues. Fish can be consumed fresh, and seafood can be reserved for restaurants.

Yes, urban features can punctuate sustainable farmland.


QatzelOk, when one studies rural people in Latin America meat is a rarity eaten for special occassions only. It is rare to eat meat even once a week in many towns in Latin America. Mostly due to poverty and that farm animals are expensive to buy and they are far more valuable as a source for eggs, milk and butter than for meat that once consumed you don't get again.

The problem with Puerto Rico (my home nation) is that the USA economic setup for us has discouraged agricultural domestic consumption completely. To the point that hardly anyone grows their own food anymore. It is discouraged. Dependency on the USA imports that are keeping the USA Merchant fleet very wealthy is the norm of the day. Puerto Rico has land that is fertile. But if you never have anyone willing to work it? It will never produce. The USA deliberately destroyed any agricultural farms that were productive on the island. That is the reality.

My aunt was a vegetarian and my family practiced yoga and were vegetarians for many years. I find it a better way of living in general.

Many Americans and Canadians are surprised to learn that in many cities in Mexico, South America, and the Caribbean that are Latino have a lot of vegan/vegetarian restaurants and practicing vegetarians in their ranks. I was born in 1966 and in Bayamon, Puerto Rico at the time there were yoga centers and vegetarian people. That is not something unknown in Latin America.

Rural doesn't mean racist. If you were thinking I was equating being a 'hick' with racism? No. But Hindsite is a racist Christian who grew up rural. Racists are urban they are rural and they are everything in between. It doesn't have to do with rural people being strictly racist.

I don't think it is good for rural living being seen in an idealistic way either. Nothing about human beings is ideal. It never has been and it probably won't be ideal in the forseeable future. But it is good to encourage people to eat right. Meat is not only expensive but it can be very bad for your health over time if consumed all the time. What creates health in abundance are fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, and beans and avoiding drinks that are filled with chemicals, sugars, corn syrups and dyes and high acidity and lack of nourishing ingredients.

Deep frying, additional salt and added sugars are all bad ways of eating food. The healthiest I have experienced living has been when I was a vegetarian and or vegan. And drinking a lot of water and doing a lot of healthy exercise that I enjoyed. It is sad, when one's modern environment makes living like that extremely difficult. But for many? That is what happens.

That is why I am retiring Q, and dedicating my life to healthy habits only. It is the only way to guarantee a great life.
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By Beren
#14889816
QatzelOk wrote:And the mild personal attack on me above is, once again, urban ironic and thus inappropriate in this thread.

This thread is about being a good and successful hick.

Do you think hicks wouldn't be ironic about or with you? Do you believe they would ever consider you one of them in Cuba or somewhere else? You're from the urban heart of French Canada for god's sake! :lol:
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By QatzelOk
#14890043
FROM THIS
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Beren wrote:Do you think hicks wouldn't be ironic about or with you? Do you believe they would ever consider you one of them in Cuba or somewhere else? You're from the urban heart of French Canada for god's sake! :lol:

First of all, this is a hicks thread. The Cuba thread has its own cachet and mission. There are non-hicks in Cuba, and there are hicks in every other country in the world (except the Vatican and Monaco). So your mixing "Cuban" and "hick" suggests that you have an opinion about Cuba which I don't share.

Also, when traveling in rural areas full of people who have the self-confidence and open-mindedness that comes from a widespread general education level, you lose the need to express bitter irony. Bitter irony is mainly for urban dwellers in decadent countries who have no power to impact the environment in which they live. So, when you notice how dysfunctional it is, all you have is bitter irony.

Irony is like pride in its relationship to great falls. (and I'm not talking about the marvelously hick city in the Dakotas here)

...

My feeling is that a lot of people in large, developed cities and their sparwling burbs, realize that the machine-dominated urban landscape is unhealthy and decadent, society-destroying and numbing. The problem is that most of our rural areas in rich countries... have become exactly the same, but with even fewer social activities and even fewer unprogrammed places to relax and contemplate actual nature.

The traditional hick lifestyle of Quebec was also full of social amenities. Our farms were all laid out as long, skinny spaghetti farms so that all the houses could be bunched up together along roads. This allows cooperation and social activities, seafood restaurants and home-based manicurists, bike shops, and bed and breakfasts.

Air B n B, car sharing, bike sharing, uber, Facebook, .... all of these technologies seem to be pointing towards a strong longing for a time of community, sharing, and trust.

TO THIS
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