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I think the OPs original question in this thread was is Alabama becoming a serious competitor now? And this question was asked in the context of it attracting foreign automakers. The answer to that question has to be heck yeah, of course!! That's because these Japanese, Korean and even German automakers aren't looking for the location with the best education, infrastructure, progressiveness, etc. They are simply looking for the places with the lowest cost, hardest working people, and best incentives. That is why they love places like Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina.
Well Georgia is in the boat now with Kia.
But the question was really posed in the context of big manufacturing outfits in general, not just automakers.
But the question was really posed in the context of big manufacturing outfits in general, not just automakers.
The story on the ground is that one of the bigwigs with Hyundai (which owns Kia) was on the way from Atlanta to the Hyundai plant in Montgomery when he saw the parcel along I 85 in West Point and decided it would be a good fit for the Kia factory. So, if Alabama did not already have the Hyundai plant, a good chance Georgia wouldn't have landed the Kia plant.
The story on the ground is that one of the bigwigs with Hyundai (which owns Kia) was on the way from Atlanta to the Hyundai plant in Montgomery when he saw the parcel along I 85 in West Point and decided it would be a good fit for the Kia factory. So, if Alabama did not already have the Hyundai plant, a good chance Georgia wouldn't have landed the Kia plant.
Well it's often a little bit of serendipity with these types of things, unbeknownst to us. It's not always that automakers are scouring the South to find a state that will offer the most in incentives. For instance, in the case of BMW in South Carolina, then-Gov. Campbell actually approached BMW; they didn't express any sort of interest in building a plant there as I understand it.
Public schools don't teach complete history and leave out very important dirty facts about our nation especially in regards to Native American's , Blacks and economic warfare on 3rd world countries.
Public schools don't educate properly on finances in order to create debt ridden consumerist society.
Public schools don't encourage critical thinking, instead they op for "teaching to the test" and memorization that require little original or logical thought in order to keep as complacent.
The way they are ran is built around conformity instead of individualism. The goal is to create a unthinking populous so the elite can keep control.
We argue over partisan system, or over left and right without critically thinking and looking for the best solutions. That is how they want it.
This post rings true. Check out this article that explains the background of why the South hates the federal government. It explains that American politics are so volatile today, because the Southern states have infiltrated the GOP.
My favorite part:
But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).
Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.
In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.
When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.
Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.
When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.
This post rings true. Check out this article that explains the background of why the South hates the federal government. It explains that American politics are so volatile today, because the Southern states have infiltrated the GOP.
My favorite part:
But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).
Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.
In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.
When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.
Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.
When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.
This post rings true. Check out this article that explains the background of why the South hates the federal government. It explains that American politics are so volatile today, because the Southern states have infiltrated the GOP.
But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).
Individuals were expected to balance their personal needs and desires against the greater good of the collective -- and, occasionally, to make sacrifices for the betterment of everyone. (This is why the Puritan wealthy tended to dutifully pay their taxes, tithe in their churches and donate generously to create hospitals, parks and universities.) In return, the community had a solemn and inescapable moral duty to care for its sick, educate its young and provide for its needy -- the kind of support that maximizes each person's liberty to live in dignity and achieve his or her potential. A Yankee community that failed to provide such support brought shame upon itself. To this day, our progressive politics are deeply informed by this Puritan view of ordered liberty.
In the old South, on the other hand, the degree of liberty you enjoyed was a direct function of your God-given place in the social hierarchy. The higher your status, the more authority you had, and the more "liberty" you could exercise -- which meant, in practical terms, that you had the right to take more "liberties" with the lives, rights and property of other people. Like an English lord unfettered from the Magna Carta, nobody had the authority to tell a Southern gentleman what to do with resources under his control. In this model, that's what liberty is. If you don't have the freedom to rape, beat, torture, kill, enslave, or exploit your underlings (including your wife and children) with impunity -- or abuse the land, or enforce rules on others that you will never have to answer to yourself -- then you can't really call yourself a free man.
When a Southern conservative talks about "losing his liberty," the loss of this absolute domination over the people and property under his control -- and, worse, the loss of status and the resulting risk of being held accountable for laws that he was once exempt from -- is what he's really talking about. In this view, freedom is a zero-sum game. Anything that gives more freedom and rights to lower-status people can't help but put serious limits on the freedom of the upper classes to use those people as they please. It cannot be any other way. So they find Yankee-style rights expansions absolutely intolerable, to the point where they're willing to fight and die to preserve their divine right to rule.
Once we understand the two different definitions of "liberty" at work here, a lot of other things suddenly make much more sense. We can understand the traditional Southern antipathy to education, progress, public investment, unionization, equal opportunity, and civil rights. The fervent belief among these elites that they should completely escape any legal or social accountability for any harm they cause. Their obsessive attention to where they fall in the status hierarchies. And, most of all -- the unremitting and unapologetic brutality with which they've defended these "liberties" across the length of their history.
When Southerners quote Patrick Henry -- "Give me liberty or give me death" -- what they're really demanding is the unquestioned, unrestrained right to turn their fellow citizens into supplicants and subjects. The Yankee elites have always known this -- and feared what would happen if that kind of aristocracy took control of the country. And that tension between these two very different views of what it means to be "elite" has inflected our history for over 400 years.
Read the whole article, not just your excerpt. I haven't read such a complete crock of $h*t in a long time. Maybe ever. Completely ludicrous at every point, don't even know where to start.
Read the whole article, not just your excerpt. I haven't read such a complete crock of $h*t in a long time. Maybe ever. Completely ludicrous at every point, don't even know where to start.
This post rings true. Check out this article that explains the background of why the South hates the federal government. It explains that American politics are so volatile today, because the Southern states have infiltrated the GOP.
My favorite part:
But perhaps the most destructive piece of the Southern elites' worldview is the extremely anti-democratic way it defined the very idea of liberty. In Yankee Puritan culture, both liberty and authority resided mostly with the community, and not so much with individuals. Communities had both the freedom and the duty to govern themselves as they wished (through town meetings and so on), to invest in their collective good, and to favor or punish individuals whose behavior enhanced or threatened the whole (historically, through community rewards such as elevation to positions of public authority and trust; or community punishments like shaming, shunning or banishing).
The world would be so much better for the rest of the country if Southerners would simply accept the fact that they are responsible for most of the world's ills. Folks would no longer have to write lengthy blog posts pointing out that modern plantation owning aristocrats are still trying to subvert the legacy of cool guys like Woodrow Wilson and Poppy Bush.
Location: The Greatest city on Earth: City of Atlanta Proper
8,485 posts, read 14,987,215 times
Reputation: 7328
Quote:
Originally Posted by arjay57
The world would be so much better for the rest of the country if Southerners would simply accept the fact that they are responsible for most of the world's ills. Folks would no longer have to write lengthy blog posts pointing out that modern plantation owning aristocrats are still trying to subvert the legacy of cool guys like Woodrow Wilson and Poppy Bush.
I think the world would be a better place (or at least C-D) if Virginians would stop acting like their state isn't in the South, that they aren't Southerners, and that the Insurrection could have lasted more than 10 minutes without Virginia. Hello, Robert E. Lee anyone!?
Location: The Greatest city on Earth: City of Atlanta Proper
8,485 posts, read 14,987,215 times
Reputation: 7328
Quote:
Originally Posted by Saintmarks
Read the whole article, not just your excerpt. I haven't read such a complete crock of $h*t in a long time. Maybe ever. Completely ludicrous at every point, don't even know where to start.
I'll give you props for getting through more than two pages of that bile. I wonder if the idiot who wrote that ever heard of a bunch of Southerners named Martin Luther King Jr, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, and whole bunch of other folks who basically make up the brain trust that created the modern Democratic Party and the current Progressive movement in this country. Oh, I guess they don't count.
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