Obviously there are great people in Texas. And other states have blustering morons. It’s the ratios that make Texas shitty.
My example was just one of many I could pull out, but the dog one is very representative of them as well as of the community at large. There were some good people there too, a few, but they were vastly outnumbered by the pure trash in residence. And I don’t think it was just this one corner of the state. I didn’t see much difference in most other parts of the state I visited.
I mentioned the incessant bullying that prompted me to drop out. A high-school dropout, I worked several years in a dead-end job in a convenience store. Was held up three times, the third time by a regular customer! I thought I was a goner then for sure, to keep me from identifying him. Figured I was stuck there forever. If I had it to do over again, I would have just hopped a bus to New York or the West Coast and taken my chances, but back then to me, that was about the same as taking a rocket to the moon. Simply inconceivable. Eventually, a professor who stopped by the convenience store regularly convinced me I still had a shot at university. I had thought that avenue was closed to me. Hadn’t even taken my SATs. But he said I could look into taking the ACT instead, so I did. Took it, scored well, got into university and worked my ass off, finishing Magna Cum Laude. My university education was my ticket out of that godforsaken wasteland of a state, and I never looked back. Today, with my parents both dead and the property disposed of, there’s not one reason why I’ll ever have to set foot there again.
So when some Bozo suggests maybe I haven’t even been to Texas, that maybe I just like to jump on the “Fuck Texas” bandwagon, I beg to differ. I know Texas. I hate Texas. I hate all things Texan.
Poor Siam Sam had a dreadful experience in his particular fetid corner of Texas. And his father’s cowardice is inexcusable.
However, not everybody’s experience here has been the same. There are probably some folks who could criticize Thailand…
Bah! I eventually lived in two other US states as an adult, and the difference was like night and day. No one in their right mind would miss Texas if it fell off the end of the Earth.
Really? You moved from the ENTIRE STATE of Texas and later lived in and experienced two other ENTIRE STATES and found them much nicer? It wasn’t living in a shitty area and later living in a nicer area, and then in another nicer area?
I understand holding on to bad feelings after being treated shabbily by horrible people, but, fuck sake dude, if you can’t admit your feelings are too broadly applied to be rationally supported, you’re giving in to foolishness.
That sounds very bigoted to me. Imagine the consternation on this board if someone said that about Mexico for having cartels that provide gore-tastic endings to their rivals and thousands of innocents. Or about a region of the planet where gays get a modern version of walking the plank. But it’s Texas! And dammit Texas ain’t “blue” or even a tolerable “purple.” So bigotry towards Texans is fine.
Oh, you poor dear! Need a moment? Hanky? Here, take this one, its BG’s. Yeah, kinda crusty, pretty sure that’s nasal, though. No, that’s OK, you can keep it.
I’ve been lurking here an long time and I’ve noticed that Siam Siam has two obsessions:
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Threadshitting in any thread that has Texas in the title or is remotely related to Texas
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Asian prostitutes.
My theory is that he got the shit beat out of him by an Asian prostitute in Odessa so he moved to Thailand where the ladies are much more submissive because they’re not making the Texas oil patch big bucks.
Sam was evidently traumatized, and it’s caused him to engage in stereotyping. Like I said, I understand–my youth in a hick town wasn’t nearly as bad as his, but I still have my share of scars and knee-jerk reactions, so I’m not going to be a dick to him about it. I just hope he realizes that he’s not being rational about it, and can come to temper his reaction in time.
Causes me to reflect, and count my blessings that I was raised in Waco, the Athens on the Brazos.
I’m quite liberal and I think Texit (a) won’t happen and (b) would be a disaster.
It would be a disaster for the people living there. It’s bad enough that Rick Scott is the governor of my home state of Florida, if he were the President of the Country of Florida that would be even worse. The only thing keeping the state from shitting itself to death is the fact that the federal government exists to bail it out constantly with federal money, and to keep the Constitution from being torn to shreds on a daily basis in the state’s legislature. The same is true in Texas.
You have a whackjob legislature and a whackjob governor, the only thing keeping it from busting apart at the seams is that those people are not the ultimate authorities. There’s still a federal law, and a President that wasn’t chosen by hillbillies with three good teeth between the lot of them.
Why is it good for the United States, because we don’t need to lose that much of our population and economy and add a ton of additional layers of border control and policing problems and have an ultra-conservative wacko nation on our borders constantly crying for our assistance. If they were self-sufficient at all they wouldn’t pay so little into the nation’s pot and get so much out of it. At least under the current system we have some say over what happens with it. Turning Texas into Mexico, Part II, would be terrible for the nation on every level. Economically, politically, diplomatically. It doesn’t matter if half the state is filled with mental defectives. So is Florida. It’s still a bad idea to make it North Cuba.
Remember, while they’re still a part of the nation we can put adults in charge and prevent them from turning it into a nation of drug cartels, pedophile polygamist cults, forced underage pregnancies, and right-wing militias who want independence from Texas so they can form the great nation of Whitetopia, with no injuns, coloreds, and homosexuals allowed and make sure only the Bible is taught in science class.
The struggling minority of sane people who live there may outnumber the lunatics one day, and the nation will be better off. If not, letting them off the leash is still about as smart as abusing a rabid wolverine and letting it loose in a day care. Some of those people really need to be governed, giving them what they want is not necessarily good for them, or us.
Then we better send the Marines to occupy the state and get those rabid wolverines back in their cages, before they finish hijacking the school textbook industry, affecting schools nationwide.
Doesn’t your own state of California have enough clout to pick your own textbooks? The Texas Freedom Network has been following this issue for years–why don’t you read what they have to say?
Even here, school districts have freedom in choosing their textbooks. Individual schools & teachers also have choice in what they teach. *Big news: *Printing technology has changed over the years–it’s easier to prepare different editions of the same book.
You really ought to investigate how the State of California handles things before whining about being a victim. It just makes you look ignorant.
Guess so. I even saw one guy compare them to gun-toting gangsters and fundamentalist homophobes.
I’ve been all over Texas and have met the kindest and most welcoming people. I guess it’s the luck of the draw.
Bullying in small hick towns… I mean, if you think that’s just a Texas thing, you can’t have read or seen basically any form of media ever. It’s a human thing, common across all the world.
Met one of those dudes once… every family has an idiot cousin and every country has some morons they wouldn’t mind getting rid of, but most of them don’t walk around in “regional dress” unless they’re part of a show of some sort.
Yeah, I’ve never had a major issue in Texas wrt the people who live there. I’ve spent several months at a time in various Texas cities on contract for different jobs and besides being gods awful hot AND humid in some parts, it’s fine.
A lot of this discussion seems to revolve around the supposed desire of ‘a large number’ of Texans wanting to secede. I did some digging, and the latest petition for signatures garnered 75,000 from all over the state. That sure seems like a lot. But to put it in perspective on what is presumably such a deep and abiding desire in the hearts of Texans, that is in a population of 26 million people. The UK (64 million people) managed to garner over 4 MILLION signatures in a cobbled together web page (that was actually originally a Leave web page) for a new vote on the Brexit question in a couple of days…and we know that less than half of the UK, approximately, WANTS the question voted on again. I’ve seen estimates on the percentage of Texans who MIGHT vote to secede if it was ever put to a referendum vote as between 10-20% (some are lower than that…20 is the highest I’ve seen and is probably way exaggerated).
A little more fuel for that fire:
In Houston, America's Diverse Future Has Already Arrived : It's All Politics : NPR (actually grew up about a mile and a half from where the monks’ picture was taken)
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/24/us/what-ethnic-diversity-looks-like-fort-bend.html?_r=0 (FYI, there are about 3-4 mosques, 2 synagogues and a bunch of Christian churches within about 2 miles of that Hindu temple)
I think the appropriate term for what Germany would do by leaving the EU is “Fuxit”, myself.
I’ve met a couple of those. FYI, cowboy boots in a humid, hot climate = bad juju.