Berkeley ‘instructor’: ‘Rural Americans’ are ‘bad people’

I always wondered where Cliff Clavin went after cheers tv show ended. now I know, he came here.

 

As opposed to the urban elite who only read Salon.com and listen to Air America Radio? Oh wait, they failed.

 

From Berkeley.

 

Yes. Entire swaths watch only CNN or NPR or Huffpo or read WaPo or the NYT or watch late night talk comedy. They think Trump hates gay people because hey, some guy on TV told them. They don’t know what he said or did but they just know he is homophobic or hates Immigrants. No actual examples to support this but they, who needs facts? They think people like Joe Rogan or Ben Shapiro are alt-right white supremacists. Shapiro was just called one. A Jewish guy is a white supremacist? You can’t make this lunacy up. Trump is accused by elected officials of being one too. It’s insanity.

Only one side refuses to talk. Only one side refuses to listen. Only one side wants to silence the other. Only one side wants to control and change the 1st and 2nd Amendments. Only one side wants us all begging at the hand of govt to give us whatever scraps they choose we need. Only one side wants us paying for the education and healthcare of ANY person who happens to crawl their way into the country. Only one side wants small pockets of densely packed together people with little knowledge of what it’s like outside their bubble to control the lives of the entire country. Only one side wants people who never created a job. Never paid anyone. Never made anything themselves. They want people like that to control everything.

You want uninformed and ignorant. Simply look at who the Democrats are giving you as options for president. You want hypocrites? A man who committed quid pro quo accusing some else of it? A woman who lied about her identity to exploit her career plays identity politics? Another woman who champions women’s right who slept her way to a career with a married man. Look no further.

 

I worked in San Jose many years ago. Occasionally I would ride BART. One of the stops was Berkeley.. We could always count on some very strange people getting on at the Berkeley stop. Very entertaining.

 

Does that refer to one coast or both? Either way, you should be thankful to them for supporting the rest of us with their hard work and taxes. America would not be great today without the great innovations taking place not in the bread basket of the plains, but on the west coast in particular. Our economy would not be nearly so great without them and our global standing would be negligible.

Why don't you try to have some appreciation for your fellow Americans instead of treating them like scum when you don't even know them to begin with? Enough of this nasty divisiveness that serves only the interests of America's enemies.

 

I don't know about the gay stuff, but it's clear from Trump's inhuman immigration policies that he has no regard for the human rights of immigrants. He has taken the worst way of thinking about illegal immigrants in particular - namely as "criminals" - and taken it to extreme action, treating them like criminal offenders with detainment, confinement and family separation. Even those simply coming to seek asylum have been so treated. Such people do not deserve such treatment and these policies are akin to the internment of Japanese in WWII or the Nazis' imprisonment of their target groups. People who are simply seeking to live and work in the US don't deserve such treatment. Families who have been living and working here without legal residency do not deserve such treatment. It is authoritarian and an abuse of government power and authority.

 

its the leaderless collective mentality and it will be the demise of many, I fear.
Puerto Rico is a good example. Refrigerated semi trailers full of food were shipped there along with trailers full of fuel. The refer units ran out of fuel and the food spoiled because nobody had the leadership potential to hop in a fuel truck and refuel the refer units. It was someone else’s job,

But this nonsense of claiming California is great because it is blue is moronic beyond imagination. California has the weather, it has the pacific with many ports, it has a rail system, it has the most productive piece of farm land in the world, it has timber, it has oil, it has resources, that long predates the liberal madness going on there today.

 

Denying it is moronic. Blue States are what drive the economy and liberals are the ones who made them,

 

Lol

 

You're absolutely right. It's working just fine. Don't change a thing.

 

Yes. Sadly “reality” for such folks is what they construct from emotion and base desires in their heads. I hope for everyone’s sake they are able to cling to and derive comfort from those constructs indefinitely.

I find it fascinating that confinement feeding of cattle was invoked in this thread. Even though most of what was said is incorrect, I think there are a lot of interesting analogies that can be made between feedlots and cities.

For example, feedlots serve the same purpose as cities in that surplus populations can be supported in a manner that is more efficient and allows for greater population overall. Also, resources are delivered to those that aren’t able or willing to provide them for themselves. It’s symbiotic because cities do provide some value the same as cheap, highly marbled beef is a value derived from the feedlot model.

The thing is, we don’t need cities. We don’t need prime beef. Cities can not survive without rural. Rural can live quite well without cities.

 

Cities are voter ranches. The people are not ranched for milk or eggs; they're ranched for votes. If we were to 'set those people free', there would be the same scale of die-offs that we'd have if we set all of the cows and chickens free. It's been too many generations. They've become a domesticated constituency. They simply cannot survive unless they produce milk, eggs or votes for their benefactors.

 

Those were Obama's policies, not Trump's. Obama and his administration built those cages and family separation is nothing new. It has been going on a long time because it's almost impossible to tell if a family crossing illegally into the United States is actually a family or illegals masking as a family. They use children as tactic and a weapon to get in.

Illegal immigration needs to be stopped and curtailed. Go listen to Bill Clinton address the Union about this very problem way back in the late 90's. Yet, very little has been done. Now you are angry that President Trump is actually trying to do something about it. If Democrats really cared, they would be passing bills and working out solutions to the problems. Instead, they are more interested in making this a political football to kick around.

The US is not running Nazi death camps or Japanese intermittent camps on our border. If those illegals trying to come in want to leave, they can go right back to the country they were fleeing from without any problem. Fact is, they want to stay because they get free food, free beds, protection and a possibility of becoming United States citizens.

The misinformation and disinformation that is posted in order to vent rage at the President is astounding. It's Communist style propaganda and it just hurts American citizens.

 

He still said it and he meant it. What sort of idiot actually believes that people don't mean what they say or write the first time? The information age is not a place for second chances, this guy is scum and has no business in any class room...

 

The Haber Bosch process for nitrogen fixation was invented by German Chemists whoile working at a public university. Today, it uses about 2% of total world energy production. Why? To make fertilizer for mechanized agriculture.

Overall, today's mechanized agriculture uses about 30% of the world's energy supply. Thus, it is ludicrous to assume that farmers could do the work they do without the advances that have been made, both at universities and in the private sector. So, not, it is not a one way street that rural folks make the food and urban folk do noting, it is a cycle from which both benefit.

Pitting rural and urban folk against each other is not productive. Both make contributions.

As to the graduate student from the topic of the original post, who made these comments in class: He has a lot to learn. There are some things you cannot say in class. Political correctness in the classroom has gone quite far, mostly for the better, but sometimes it prevents people from saying what is right. I am not saying that what he said was right, but people can't rail against political correctness, and then turn around when that lack of political correctness is against their interest.

 

If I wasn’t feeding you I wouldn’t need synthetic fertilizers or energy consuming equipment. It is you who demand such things.

A number of years ago there was a piece in Smithsonian Magazine bemoaning the invention of nitrogen fertilizer that you reference. It stated unequivocally that the invention of that process has been more detrimental to mankind than the invention of the insecticide used to kill Jews during the holocaust. It was a scary piece of work.

I am not anti city. I’m just pragmatic about the relationship between urban and rural. If you scroll back in my posts you will notice I used the term symbiotic to refer to the urban/rural dynamic. That was intentional.

My premise that rural dwellers can thrive without cities while cities would die fast agonizing deaths without rural stands. It isn’t debatable. But that doesn’t mean I don’t attribute value to cities or think human life in them is less valuable. Again, my assertion in a past post that I hope the current paradigm continues was a clue to that belief.

 

apparently indoctrinators at Berkeley are bad people

 

They stay because they want to live and work here. There is no need to detain them and separate families during the process, but it's what Trump has opted to do as a deterrent. You can't tell me that after all of his bluster and all, this is Obama's policies.

And I actually disagree that it is so important to stop illegal immigration. It is nowhere near the problem that it is being made out to be by angry, misinformed conservatives and the man who glibly manipulates them to his own ends today. Illegal immigration is no worse a problem today than it has ever been historically, and historically those people have simply joined the population and contributed positively to it, just as they do today. The occasional criminal exception is not reason enough to get obsessive about illegal immigration and imagine that they all must be stopped, which is actually impossible to accomplish anyway. Realistically, it will never happen.

 

I am living in a rural area, btw. We have chickens and a vegetable garden.

Good luck, however, to find farmers who can make a living without fertilizer, GMO crops, large, fossil fuel powered machines, etc. The reality is, the rural folk need the urban folk as much as the other way around. For example, 80% of US adults over 50 take medication. Where do you think these drugs come from, and how invents them? Surely not the farmers.

As to Haber Bosch: The world population was about 1 billion at the tie of invention. Without it, we may still be close to, or maybe double that number. We may not have iphones today, if 50%+ people had to work in agriculture, compared to 6% of all people today. So, yeah, if you want to advocate for people who would like to go back to a time when people had to manually labor hard in the fields to make a meager subsistence, then be my guest.

Note in edit: I realize that you have a relatively balanced view, which I appreciate.

 

They are coming through illegally and therefore need to be properly vetted. Either come in legally or stay out. Enabling illegals, like it seems you want to do, is not the answer.

Yes, it was Obama's policy. He built those cages.

Yes it is. It is a huge problem that costs us billions and billions of dollars per year that could be better spent elsewhere. It is not an "occasional criminal" problem since everyone that came here illegally is violating US law and therefore a criminal. Maybe you like MS13 destroying communities and killing people, but I don't.

 

That’s good. I believe everyone should grow some of their own food. It’s good for the body and the mind.

Nah. I can make a “living” without GMO, tractors, fertilizer, etc. The efficiency they provide is so others (cities) can eat, too. It sounds like you could do the same, but it wouldn’t be in the city. Just curious why you think only farmers live outside of cities? What about most of the people in the energy sector? Transportation that allows cities to exist? Many of these people live predominantly outside cities. What about manufacturing? My state has historically had quite a bit of manufacturing to take advantage of the rural work ethic. Of your 80% on drugs, what percentage wouldn’t have to be if they were living a healthier lifestyle? But none of this is my point. Of course there are valuable things that come from the city. Again, symbiosis. But only one organism can can survive without the other. And it is not the city.

Yes, that was the point of the piece in Smithsonian. Nitrogen fertilizer synthesis has allowed overpopulation of the earth to the point human existence itself is worse than the holocaust. That conclusion is a bit frightening in my opinion. Not too different than little Greta Thunberg chastising us for caring more about iPhones and the economy than the earth. There is an element of truth in both the Smithsonian piece and Greta’s opinions. But it seems most want to twist that truth to match their preconceived biases, not actually think through the logical conclusions of where application of humanism to those truths may lead.

I’m not advocating for depopulation or sustenance agriculture. I’m just pointing out to the clowns that think cities can survive without rural dwellers they are not living in reality. If one believes in the evolutionary model and has delved at all into the transitions of humans from hunter/gatherers to agricultural societies, it is clear cities are the dependent organism. The symbiotic relationship now is mutualistic not parasitic. But the rural setting is certainly the host and the only organism of the pair that can survive on its own.

I’m working at my profession because it’s fun and rewarding. At some point in the future I will probably revert to sustenance agriculture just to exit the rat race. But don’t worry, city folk won’t have to if they don’t want to.

 

Our birth rate is at an all time low,white male sperm viability is at an all time low and so far no one knows why.We do have have enough births to match the number dying off.We are discouraging immigration both legal a nd illegal so at this particular time in our history we could use all the live births with far fewer abortions. An abortion should not just be a decision arrived at on a whim.

 

Don't know what source you are using but the one i found has California at 20th for meat production.

 

Never mind 99% of meat is a “corn product”.

And CA wouldn’t have much dairy or meat without imported feeds.