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Not even that, I've been into a fair few businesses that went out of their way to have signs on the bathrooms defying HB2's authority in so many words.

I was at App when it passed and they sent out a student email that basically said: "We will comply with the laws of North Carolina (yeah right jk)". Not that this stopped idiot students from being unable to read between the lines and so they protested the school as opposed to the people who actually passed the law. Like, take a fucking road trip to Raleigh and protest, it's three hours and I'm sure you'll have fun.

That would require sobering up enough to drive to Raleigh. Besides, like, all politics is local, man!

The Onion has a nice state-by-state guide to the election, for those who need some levity (i.e. ALL OF US).

And as usual, it's filled with "ha ha that's funny.....*quiet weeping*" nuggets of truth. Like this tidbit about North Carolina:

Pat McCrory vs. Roy Cooper (Governor): The outcome of this heated race could determine whether North Carolina is Virginia-level Southern or Alabama-level Southern.

I think they're being generous there, tbh. Even Alabama doesn't have a bathroom bill. 

I was 25 and at work. And had been planning to attend a protest in Washington in about a month's time, because 9 months had been sufficient to illustrate that GWB was a fucking tool.

I didn't go that October. But I certainly went next October, when it was clear we were headed for a war with a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.


There are four images that will always stick in my mind from that day:

1. Watching a plane impact the side of the tower....then the camera pulling out to show the other tower already smoking and on fire. That was the moment when my brain went "wait..what? OH SHI-"

2. Seeing the first tower come down. Live on TV. Just seemed unreal, like a bad Michael Bay film.

3. Seeing that footage from ground level a short while later, of the debris cloud rushing through the streets and just engulfing everything.

4. Getting home and seeing a completely blue, completely empty, completely silent sky. See, I lived about two miles from RDU airport, and grew up about three miles from PTI airport. Air traffic noises were just a normal part of life, even a comforting thing. It was just...unsettling for that to suddenly be gone. I'm not even sure how many days the national flight ban lasted....three? A week?

If I could afford to travel, I'd be more than willing to use some violence as an educational tool. For Caroline's sake.

+1

What, no biowarfare used on Clinton conspiracy theories yet?

The discerning conspiracy theorist prefers the "Putin's agents poisoning Clinton with polonium to secure his puppet on the American throne" theory. Just sayin.

... didn't that quoted bit, like. Answer the question posed in response to it?

E: Actually, now it feels like that was an amazing example of exactly what the quoted bit said. If that was intentional, bravo.

It's kinda difficult to articulate an anti-globalist POV without coming off at least partially nationalist (unless you delve into pure Marxist critiques of "exploitation of the global worker class by the wealthy"). Wasn't meant to be nationalist so much as pragmatist.

I mean, seriously...what is a country supposed to do if a quarter of their citizens are unemployed because the jobs that that quarter would normally fill have been offshored? And the loss of income tax revenues makes it doubly harder to support a social welfare system to keep those unemployed in a decent standard of living? It's unsustainable without some new sector of the economy arising (the way that the boom of IT and biotech helped soften the blow of losing basic manufacturing for the US). If somebody invents cheap energy and viable space travel, then hey sure...the rest of the world can build stuff and keep it running, and we'll all go colonize space. But until then, we have a problem.

In my mind, "nationalist" critiques of globalism seek to assign blame to the workers. Rhetoric about stolen jobs, "unfair" competition, etc. I have no problem with the guys in Chennai or Bangalore who are filling the IT jobs that used to be here. It's not their fault. They're good people who just want a good standard of living for themselves and their families, and they're typically hard workers. But their ability to work for $6/hr is directly harming my ability to make a decent salary. Or even keep my job. I don't see rational self-concern in this instance as selfish, racist or nationalist.

Rightist rhetoric on this pits workers against workers (and sometimes governments), while leftist rhetoric pits workers against employers (and sometimes governments). It's that "sometimes governments" where you see the weird marriage of the two, as in opposing free trade deals or regulatory things like opposing H1B visas.

Not incongruent.

The anti-globalist left typically talks about how it exploits people in developing countries.
The anti-globalist right typically talks about how it "steals" jobs from developed economies.

They both have valid points, although the reality is a lot more complicated.