But the parts of the UP I've seen have mostly been flat, featureless and boring.
You don't know flat, featureless, and boring until you've driven across South Dakota or Nebraska.
I think the Canadian SSM side is ugly as shit as well
And you don't know ugly as shit until you've been to Louisiana or Florida. Or Mississippi. Or Alabama. Georgia. Arkansas. You know what that whole quarter of the country is basically just swamp and mosquitos.
Sure, is Vancouver pretty? Yeah, mountains everywhere. And it's full of fucking crazy leftists. Cross the border and you're in Seattle where there's MORE fucking crazy leftists.
Canada has no equivalent (that I'm aware of) of Appalachia.
SSM also has shitty air service
On the Canadian side, yes. Cross the border and drive for twenty minutes and you've got the Delta puddlejumper to Minneapolis (and Detroit, but, well, fuck Detroit), which is the Delta hub. From MSP you can fly just about anywhere.
Why Sault Ste Marie?
Because just across the border is the nicest parts of the US. Notwithstanding the fact that their governor is an idiot, Michigan is some of the best outdoors living in the country. Sure, you can't live there, but you can visit there visa-less anytime.
I think we might have different conceptions of what is desirable and acceptable travel distances. Being American and from flyover America, I'm entirely used to having to use a connecting flight to get anywhere, it's just how our air system is structured. I also regard getting away from civilization as inherently good. There's nothing in the cities worth staying in the cities for. A small city, as long as it has a daily scheduled puddlejumper, is more than enough for me to move in as long as I can find work.
In my line of work it's a lot harder to avoid civilization unless I go full remote. I'm in Green Bay, and that's about as small as a city can get and still need software developers.
The problem is that the US economy has been stuck in a pattern of extremely short term thinking.
Cheap foreign labor does have the immediate effect of raising the material standards of living for the lowest rung. But measured in terms of decades this effect is only temporary as it erodes manufacturing jobs.
Worse, when combined with a persistent trade deficit it also erodes investment. The lower classes primary form of investment is in their home, but massive foreign reserves of US currency leads to property speculation, pricing people out of the market.
Historically economic forces like these would have been reset with a good war (giving the state a reason to screw over foreign players), but nuclear weapons have taken war off the table.
So, we're forced into a situation where the only viable path forward is to go through hard withdrawal. Cold turkey, cut off the cheap labor supply and force price discovery to occur for domestic labor. In the short term, that means giving up ALL the material improvements that were gained from the cheap labor.
Trust us, there is light at the end of the tunnel. But the tunnel might be a few decades long.
I thought Quakers were against predestination/calvinism
It's more that Calvinists are "THIS IS HOW IT IS" and we're more like "eh, maybe".
Islam is taking over so it must be God's will.
In the face of how liberalism is utterly destroying our ability to form families, yes, I do believe that they have something right that we have wrong.
You sound pessimistic.
For christianity, yes. For humanity, no.
Why not just say what you want to say?
What's there to say? We all know the west is a ruined experiment corrupted by the assumption that women are equal in reasoning and morality to men when they absolutely are not. We can find no precedent or even support in our cultural foundation to justify the actions needed to fix this problem.
Those before us failed in headship while creating a culture that condemns any attempt to take back headship.
MM, don't make me repeat again what we've been over before. I'm a bad Quaker from Iowa. Always have been, always will be.
Both my faith, and whatever atheistic liberalism you profess, we're doomed. But I at least have the humility to acknowledge that they've got it right and will succeed where we failed.
I didn't say anything about the church.
If you think christianity is going to survive liberalism you're betting the lame donkey in a horse race.
Here's my prediction. By 2030, there will be an openly pro-sharia islamist party in Britain with at least 5 unassailable MEPs.
But it's not a tale of two animes, it's a tale of THREE animes...
Because the third is Apothecary Diaries, which has culturally accepted prostitution, monarchical polygamy, "I can't believe it's not slavery", and is toping every chart in rankings and sales.
avoid admitting you were wrong
Nothing I said is wrong. You started from a false assumption about me.
your indefensible position
I'm an indifferent ex-white knight who simply doesn't give a shit about what TERFs do. I am beyond their ability to harm, short of them setting the national forest around my house on fire.
You argued that allying with feminists against trannies would help defeat trannies
No, I argued that letting feminists use the system to abuse trannies would harm trannies. Fullstop.
Nothing more nothing less. They would be successful at it, and I consider that end inof itself admirable and wish them luck in their endeavor.
WHAT DO I HATE?
Liberalism. And letting the terfs go all nazi on the trans people is the best poison to liberalism I can think of. They will shred the country and burn the constitution in their hatred of trans people, and I won't have to lift a finger. God speed you psychotic bolter bitches.
The insane people are an easier target.
This is not the Victorian era. We do not have legions of anti-suffragettes on our side to make the fight with the feminists appear "fair" (by fighting them with their own).
So unless you are willing to go full patriarchy fuck yeah, which will mean fighting a real civil war, men against men to change the state in order to deprive women of rights...
Unless that, we're debating between the win we can get (against the trans) and the win you want but can't get (against the terfs).
Now, if you were here advocating for all men to go muslim or someshit because sharia is a faster path to destroying the terfs, then fine. But you're not.
Despite the fact that they will also continue to use that power to abuse and denigrate you and every other man and boy with impunity.
They think they do. Maybe even you think they do.
But where I'm sitting I just see an angry chihuahua.
You can never permanently
Why the fixation on permanent fixes?
A status quo where the feminists get to have their delusion, while simultaneously using cultural and state power to abuse every trans person that pops up...
Them having to live with that hypocrisy is sufficient for me.
And I don't doubt that they can live with it. And the trans people will hate them. They will hate them more than the terfs hate you or me.
Radical feminists were the originators of the idea that gender is not tied to biological sex
Yeaaaaaah but they didn't actually believe that was a two way street. They just had to say it was a two way street to pay lip service to liberalism.
They were never about equality, they were about female supremacy; and I can respect that if they're willing to own up to it now and throw the trans camp under the bus.
TERFs will never be a part of the solution
I think you are GREATLY underestimating women's capacity to simultaneously hold mutually incompatible ideas.
I think there are plenty of TERFs who are willing to go 100% Magda Goebbels on trans people.
Yes, Newton is quite bad. Driven through there many, many times.
The Maytag factory was ultimately repurposed by Arcosa, a manufacturer of wind turbine towers. It employs only a fraction of the employees.
On the outskirts of town, a 7/8ths mile racetrack was constructed in the early 00's in the hope of boosting tourism. That mostly failed. While it does get a couple races a year, it has suffered financial issues basically from the start up to now.
There is really only one saving thing to say about Newton and that is at least they never built a mall to let die.