Suicides in Rural America Increased More Than 40% in 16 Years

There are also cities which offer little by way of opportunity and have their own problems with crime and addiction. Density means that, political will and money offered, treatment may be slightly more effective. It can still be an awfully bleak world.

Who is missing empathy for whom? From my perspective, the fiscal conservatives from the rural areas have relatively less empathy than vice versa.

Have you ever lived in a city? Tell black people in Baltimore that they have "the ability to direct America in a way rural America doesn't." And speaking of the ability to direct America--each person's vote in New Hampshire counts about double what it does in Maryland or New York, so there's that.

> The issues they face in rural America are completely ignored.

In what way? We spend huge amounts of money in this country on infrastructure for rural areas. A higher percentage of eligible rural residents take advantage of programs like food stamps than in urban areas. And we spend almost $30 billion dollars per year on agricultural subsidies--which go almost entirely to rural areas.

That's before we even get to wealth redistribution within states. Rural areas in most states are heavily subsidized by tax revenue raised in urban areas in those states. (Which is fine, of course--urban areas tend to be richer and should carry more of the tax burden. But to say rural areas get ignored is laughable.)

> But go to a town ravaged by heroin and lack of financial growth and bring up transgender bathrooms to them. They will be baffled by your lack of knowledge of how their lives operate.

That's an entirely self-inflicted problem. Nobody would be talking about transgender bathroom rights if people (disproportionately, people in rural America) weren't trying to ban certain people from using certain bathrooms.

How many people in those rural areas voted for a party and leader who ran on repealing access to health care and social programs, who have no qualms about trying to reduce funding to Planned Parenthood and Meals on Wheels, and use the savings to provide significant tax cuts to the super rich and building a wall that everyone knew Americans would have to pay for?

I mean, even Tucker Carlson effectively said to Trump, "The counties who voted for you will do far worse under your plan" and the Presidents response was "Oh, I know..."

And what about the trans people in those communities who are fighting against the grain of their culture to survive another day? What about their suicides?

This is of course "intersectionality 101" but you can't just write off transgender rights as something only privileged people need. Trans people still commit suicide at far higher rates than the rest of the population (looking at these numbers, especially in rural areas) and they need rights no matter where they live.

It's hard to speak with any authority about the human nature underlying politics, especially in a historical sense, as data about people's motives is non-existent, but the Electoral College is way easier to understand when you realize the elephant in the room that 18th century America was grappling with at the time.

Once you understand the sheer weight that slavery pressed down with on the entire global order, you can see what made the College necessary. Slave states simply would not willingly march into a political system in which slavery could be made illegal out of their control. They wanted a safety measure by which the will of the people could be disregarded in order to maintain the status quo.

The idea was that if the country ever really elected an anti-slave President, the College would be able to step in and set aside the election in favor of a brokered deal, the same way that these days anti-Brexiters were hoping that the government could use the rules to avoid having to actually carry it out. The slave state power brokers would work out a deal with the College electors directly if it came to that.

The College was sold to the power brokers as a way to keep their assets safe and producing, and to the rest of the country the way bald-facedly undemocratic measures are usually sold to the unsuspecting, as a way to increase democracy.

In the end, it didn't work. Lincoln won by such a landslide that a negotiated Presidency wasn't in the cards. We keep the Electoral College around to this day as a vestige of our old ways.

It's rather interesting that the states seceded immediately following Lincoln's election. His platform was anti-expansionist, not necessarily abolitionist. I suspect the tide in America simply turned towards war and there was nothing anybody could do to stop it. Much like how pre-WW1 Europe was a tinderbox ready for the first spark, mid-19th century America was just itching for a fight.

The foundation of a healthy democracy is an educated electorate. Yet, as a nation, we refuse to acknowledge or invest in public schools as a foundational insistution... We still see them as a cross between daycare and basic workforce preparation.

The public school systems need to be responsible for growing the next generation of American citizens. I find it absurd that most fresh high school graduates wouldn't be able to pass our citizenship test, much less understand principles like personal finance or critical/rational thinking.

Without those core mental frameworks, many people end up trapped by their own inability to rationally analyze their situation and plan for the future.

Drug addiction, crippling debt, suicide, high unemployment, the rise of demagogues, these are all symptoms of a populace that is ill equipped to deal with the modern world.

Unfortunately, education is also one of the hardest things to repair in a crumbling democracy... a large investment in non-voters that takes over a decade to yield dividend is a hard sell. The worse things get, the more we focus on the short term, leading voters towards snake oil politicians that further down the nation.

Do you have evidence for this? It doesn't make much sense to me as the population of even rural states is still largely concentrated in cities but I'm not sure how recent a development this is.

They actually have outsized power already.

https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/rural-economy-population/pop...

There's this onus on urban dwellers to "understand" rural America. Where's the reciprocity?

Rural America has a structural advantage in the US Government. It receives billions of dollars in subsidies which are solely for Rural America. It votes consistently against policies which would benefit all Americans, because someone believes Urban Americans are not Real Americans.

I'm done with empathy. I've moved on. Rural America can solve its own problems.

"a direct reflection of the lack of empathy people have from cities have for rural America"

When I was young, in the 1990s, I thought it was crucial to understand what was going on the Red states. I grew up in New Jersey, but I spent several years trying to help the Red states. I joined a voter registration drive and spent a year of my life in Louisiana, going door to door, talking to people about their beliefs, religion and politics. I sat in people's kitchens while they gave me coffee, and I listened to their concerns. Many of my friends did something similar. Later, I was briefly active with a labor union in North Carolina, trying to help the poorest workers unite and fight for a living wage. I felt strongly that anyone who was willing to work hard for 40 hours a week should be paid enough to rise above poverty.

At the same time, I was disheartened by the deep racism that I ran into everywhere. The white workers were loath to create an alliance with the black workers, and this racism undermined every political coalition that might have raised wages and ended poverty in the South.

Nowadays, I see things very differently. Nowadays, I ask myself, why is it always the idealists from the Blue States going to the Red States and trying to understand their concerns? Why isn't it ever the other way around? Why don't the best-and-the-brightest people from the Red States travel to the Blue States and try to understand our concerns? There is something paternalistic about thinking that the Blue States always need to figure out what the Red State folk are worried about. The whole attitude, of us Blue State people going to help the Red States -- it's as if the people of the Red states are spoiled children and those of us in the Blue states need to cater to their whims. There is no rational basis for this ongoing deference of the Blue States to the Red States.

And in electing Trump, I feel that the Red States have declared a quiet war on the Blue States. So my attitude now is far less compassionate than it used to be. Nowadays, I no longer wonder how we might better understand the needs of the Red states. Nowadays, I only wonder how their political power can be destroyed, so that their effect on national politics can be nullified as much as possible.

We have phenomenal ways to keep our connection with friends and family alive: use them and move.

Go to the south and you see this in action every second of every day. The south hates education, hates social services, hates them thar books that don't have Jesus in them.

And, lo and behold, Alabama is like 49th in education, but it's also super high in people who are on permanent disability and Oxy. Why? Because the politicians in Alabama get elected for saying "Jesus," and the first thing they do when elected is gut education and social services, making the problem worse, breeding more deeply ignorant people, who then vote for yet another Jesus hugger who cuts their social services even further.

There's a reason these states are fucked. It's their own faults. City folk have tried to help for centuries. Country folk generally don't want that city folk help, especially because it ain't coming with Jesus attached.

You know what would help with addiction? Universal health care, and treating addiction like a disease. Who has supported that: the types of politicians who get elected in cities, and who people in rural areas vote against.

Rural issues being ignored? Hillary's website is still up. Anyone with a browser can see the white papers on rural aid, the economy, drugs. The 65 policy fact sheets. 112,000 words of policy, compared to 9000 on Trump's website. Of course, one might look at deeds, rather than words. What's in the news this week? "Trump slashes billions from rural programs." Perhaps you think that the policies on the left are wrongheaded. That's fine. But to say that the politicians on the left ignore rural America is to lie.

As you note, the electoral college exists to give unjust and immoral over-representation to rural interests. And the nomination process for presidential candidates starting out in lily white and rural Iowa and New Hampshire. And of course, a small town in New Hampshire has all sorts of opportunities for local political participation: selectman and school boards, and even in a small town of 5000 souls two or three state reps. It is not the fault of people in cities that people in small towns don't use these tools and advantages to elect people who will put in place policies to make their lives better. People in cities are not stopping rural people from taking care of themselves. Rural people are ruining their lives on their own.

It doesn't prevent rural people from being trampled on by city people, it gives small states a disproportionate number of votes. Rhode Island and the District of Columbia are not rural, yet they get far more electoral votes per capita than California. And most of the rural population is actually located in the states that have fewer electoral college votes per capita, California is more than the Bay Area and South California.

Plus, the larger states can still win by themselves, you only need the 17 largest states to win the election. However, because of the electoral college you only need 22% of the population to win too.

And this wasn't what it was designed to do either, it was designed for two reasons; 1. Halfway between popular vote. This was the first time in modern history a population would have direct voting rights over the government so it was taken a bit slowly by having a buffer of electors that were free to cast the vote in anyway they wanted. 2. Handling the slavery issue. Slaves weren't citizens so they couldn't vote, but the South still wanted more influence since they represented more people than those eligible to vote. The solution was to have a base number of electoral votes even though the country had few eligible voters.

The reason it stayed is because people believe the modern narrative of representing the rural population, but it's really because no one bothered to change it since US political tactics have evolved in this ecosystem. Why change a game you already know how to play?

You paint "city people" with a large brush. And it doesn't really align with the facts. Remember, our tax dollars from the cities are where GDP growth is happening. And we pay more for services than we get back. Many of these rural areas already benefit from huge subsidies from the federal government, especially the corn industry. Many of the southern red states get back more in federal dollars than they contribute. Hillary has even talked about re-education to new industry and funding for coal country, but they didn't care and instead bought the lie that Trump was going to bring back an industry already on its way out. So I suspect they want a handout.

I do lose respect for any person who doesn't respect civil rights. I very much want to help these people, but they need to meet us half way in the 21st century. We are talking basic civil rights, to be recognized as a human. Recognition that climate change is not a hoax and humans are causing it. But even then, what are we supposed to do? Give them welfare? Why should we do that when they complain about others getting government help? Why are those good citizens deserving of help but the urban poor can be forgotten and denigrated constantly as lazy?

Just because other people don't go off in the same direction that you did, does not mean they went in the wrong direction. New Hampshire has a large number of tech companies and new ones are always being created. Anywhere there is people, there will always be opportunity; it just might need to be created or found.

> I've enjoyed my life as I've explored more of America and ended up in the Bay...

YOU and others like you are the problem. If you leave an area to find more "opportunities", then you are not helping to solve the lack of them in a given area. We are at the best point in time to create a company or startup almost anywhere in the US, but too many elitists pricks think they must go to the Bay Area or other major cities just so they get a nice payout.

If you are looking for an easy out, then go help fund the next bubble but don't try to say that "..I would love to solve this problem..." when you and many like you had the power to do so.

This is a seriously revisionist interpretation of why the Electoral College was created. Almost everyone circa 1800 lived in rural areas[1], and it would be very generous to suggest the founders predicted the massive urbanization of the population more than a hundred years in advance.

For a starting point on reading up on the arguments of the time, I'd recommend Federalist #68 [2] where Hamilton laid out his views. The Wikipedia article below also goes into counterpoints from his contemporaries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1800_United_States_Census#City...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._68

This is completely false and baseless. When the electoral college was setup we did not have mega cities that contained most of the population. The Senate was setup to give less populous areas a larger voice. The House is currently setup to give less populous areas a larger voice due to the cap of reps. We don't need every single branch setup to give less populous areas a larger voice, cities currently have extremely low representation compared to rural areas in all regards.

> And roughly 65 percent of all veteran suicides in 2014 were for individuals 50 years or older, many of whom spent little or no time fighting in the most recent wars.

The recent wars may have had a measurable impact, but I don't think it's the primary reason.

It should also be noted that you absolutely should expect the veteran suicide rate to be larger than the suicide rate of the country as a whole for the very simple reason that suicide rates are higher in the U.S. for men and veterans are disproportionately male.

This article from FiveThirtyEight is well worth a read in my opinion: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/suicide-in-the-military...

The tag line from that article:

> When service members die by suicide, their deaths look a lot like civilian suicides — the same people, the same risk predictors, and the same means.

[1] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/households-deb...

[2] Or any negative PR that happens to be recorded in the annals of google for all eternity

On the other hand, the US has (had?) an array of social programs to help people in those situations transition into new roles. The Atlantic published a pretty good piece* on why they haven't wound up working out as well as they could, and it does sound like a major reason is that people won't move to where the jobs are. And regardless of their reasons for wanting to stay, that usually is on them, isn't it? Otherwise, they're essentially asking the government to subsidize their lifestyle choices.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/10/trade-w...

Maybe a portion of Americans are more inclined to move and the economy benefits from that.

But since the 1980s the number of reliably booming areas has decreased. The current boom in Silicon Valley is not a mass phenomena -- it creates tens of thousands of jobs instead of millions of jobs. And it very much gives off the vibe of being a temporary bubble, so people are less inclined to sell their house in Iowa and move to San Francisco, as there is the risk they will arrive just when the bubble is ending.

Unless you're some starry-eyed kid that dreams of making it in Hollywood or SV or NY's art scene etc (and the people in those places rarely care for such jobs), you don't particularly like to move.

You might bite the bullet and do it if you're hopeless and jobless, but in order to move, opportunities need to be there for you elsewhere. In an era of increased de-industrialization and crushing of the working/middle class, they don't exist as much.

And I'm not sure about the past being much different. Americans used to be very concerned with getting their house with the "white picket fence" etc to just carelessly hop from one place to another. Besides they used to have jobs for life in decades past (factory, corporate, etc) -- only those that really wanted it moved to make it big, not just because they were forced (talking post-depression era of course).

Also: "Indeed, it is widely believed that internal migration rates in the United States—that is, population flows between regions, states, or cities within a country—are higher than in other countries. This belief is not exactly wrong, but reality is more complex. For example, the Dust Bowl migrants of the 1930s were not representative of their time, but rather were an exceptional case during a period of markedly low internal migration (Ferrie, 2003; Rosenbloom and Sundstrom, 2004). While the United States has historically had one of the highest migration rates in the world by many measures, citizens of some other countries—including Finland, Denmark and Great Britain—appear equally mobile. Moreover, internal U.S. migration seems to have reached an inflection point around 1980". https://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2011/201130/201130p...

And: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-f...

WP: Some of the lack of mobility is due to high rents in cities, which keeps many people out, right? You cite some research that shows if it was cheaper to move into American cities, GDP growth would be much higher, and the economy would be more dynamic.

Cowen: Enrico Moretti’s estimate is that GDP would be 9.5 percent higher. That figure is hard to estimate, but it’s not a tiny effect. Right after WWII, adjusting for inflation, an apartment in Manhattan cost $530 a month. That’s unimaginable today. It’s a big reason why mobility has become problematic.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/28/upper...

Sadly, there is absolutely no way to fix this (while Trump's plan to shut down Obamacare and effectively cripple Medicare is a step in 'right' direction LOL)

Nowadays, people move, they get a job that is uncertain to last years, while they can barely afford rent and any mortgage is over 30 years assuming you had the down payment which you don't.

Rural people really are different from urban people. There are probably brain differences here, both conditioned and genetic.

When you are in a city, how do you feel? Do you feel stimulated, energized, excited, enticed, and intrigued? Do you feel nervous, fearful, tense, harassed, endangered, overstimulated, stressed, strangely lonely despite crowds, contaminated by the filth, and vulnerable?

Normal urban people do not own the land they live on and often can not even access all sides of the building. The owner of the land and/or building gets to set rules. Is this perfectly normal or even beneficial? Is it instead a dystopian nightmare without freedom?

Do you think "There are lots of people here, so I'm safe" or "There are lots of people here, so I'd better be wary"?

Do you nap or openly use your phone on a subway? Do you clutch your belongings close, eyeing other passengers as threats, ready for fight or flight?

If the Rat Park study's conclusions [1] can be extended to humans, all addictions are symptoms of a deeper cause: Your life sucks.

From what I've read, there's a feeling that the fundamental way of life that many of these people grew up with is really being threatened. Combine that with a complete lack of ability to support your family, and a sense that tons of people in cities (which are an anathema to their value structure) are getting ahead while they fall behind... Yeah, their lives suck, and they see no way out.

Sorry to be depressing here. Hillary actually had some policies that could have helped, and still more if she'd had a friendly Congress to pass supporting legislation. Trump, on the other hand, wants to help people through an application of trickle-down economics ... sigh ...

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/johann_hari_everything_you_think_y...

I don't think so. It's hard to define what a suicide attempt is, but most definitions would see far higher than 15 attempts per 100,000 population.

EDIT: 2013 saw about 40,000 to 50,000 deaths by suicide in the US, with about 450,000 hospital treatments for self inflicted injury.

It's darkly amusing to read this because drugs have been ravaging the inner cities for decades and "city people" (as you call them) have been saying this for about 50 years. The response from the rest of the country was the War on Drugs. You might've heard of it? See, it was widely believed that black and brown people suffered from problems of "culture" and the only solution was mass incarceration.

Anyways, I don't see this sudden outpouring of sympathy for rural whites accomplishing much of anything. There won't be a "egalitarian awakening" -- political polarization and paralysis is only going to deepen and solidify. At the end of the day Americans don't give a shit about the poor whether they're inner city blacks and latinos or rural whites. The national conversation right now, keep in mind, is about whether Meals on Wheels is "delivering results" and how much to increase the military budget by.

But then even if America wanted to I doubt that America could handle the sort of systemic disaster that is runaway inequality. It's a structural issue; the country simply wasn't built for dealing with such a threat, it's too big, too decentralized, and ultimately too capitalistic. The only thing that stopped the runaway inequality of the 20s was the Depression and World War. In that light, I suppose, one could actually think the GOP's destruction of of the modern regulatory framework and the rabid anti-China rhetoric is a good thing.

The overall share of combat veterans within the population as a whole is much smaller than most people think. It's less than 1%. While the suicide rates are much higher than the general population, the total numbers are relatively insignificant.

    In April 2005, the Chicago Tribune cited a statistic that 
    35 percent of those who died in Iraq and Afghanistan were 
    from small, rural towns, in con­trast to 25 percent of the 
    population. This point runs counter to the picture, painted 
    by Rangel and others, of heavy enlistment reliance on poor, 
    black urban neighborhoods. Indeed, recruits are disproportionately
    rural, not urban, and as rural concen­tration rises, so 
    does military enlistment. [1]

Maybe, but would they return there post military service? Given that urbanization is a thing, and that most military installations are in cities, I would think this would contribute more to the urban suicide rate.

Most of the people who show no empathy to rural America are actually extremely left, self-righteous city dwellers who hate Rand.

I often get the feeling that most left-leaning people who don't show empathy towards rural America are actually only left-leaning because that's the "morally correct" stance. Evidently, they don't care at all about others and will take every chance they can get---that is, every situation in which it is socially and politically acceptable for leftists---to feel superior.

I'm not saying the right has any more empathy. I'm not saying the world needs more or less Rand.

Trump won some of both but the vast majority came from camp 2. You can't call someone who has worked 30 years in a coal mine weak. It won't work and isn't true.

What some people are facing is the crushing realization that their life's work is gone and is actually derided by a large segment of the population. It's a blow to pride and pocketbook. Additional scorn is not going to change their minds.

But strength isn't enough, and it hasn't been for a long time. You have to be smart, too, and ambitious - I was, when I moved to Baltimore right out of high school, with the idea of turning my lifelong interest in programming into the sort of career that Mississippi didn't, and so far as I know still doesn't, have the industry to support. Lot of people where I'm from had ambition, often beyond anything the local environment would support. Lot of them had the same smarts I did, too, and in many cases better - behind all the pretty talk, I'm really not all that bright.

But smarts and ambition aren't enough, either, and haven't been for a long time. You have to be lucky - I was, when I discovered at age six the avocation for programming that's since developed first into a marketable trade and then into a solid career. Not that I knew that was what I was doing, of course. I just knew I really loved writing code, and I was lucky enough to have had the opportunity to find that out and luckier still to have a family able to support it with an Apple II. Absent that luck, I'd have gone nowhere, because I'd have had nowhere to go. Maybe to college instead, and had a small chance of learning a marketable trade and a guarantee of decades' worth of debt. Maybe just nowhere. And that's not all the luck I've had - not by a hell of a long shot. That was just some of the earliest.

That's the thing about a life like the one I've built, the life you're saying that everyone where I'm from should build, as though it were as simple as choosing to do so - none too fancy a life, to be sure, but I'm in no debt, and my career is stable and remunerative enough that I can afford to send considerable money home to those among my family who haven't had my good fortune - that life is the result of good fortune, to an utterly implausible extent. Had any of an enormous number of events turned out even slightly differently than it did, I would not now be in a position to tell you what an ignorant, prejudiced jackass you must be to have said something like what you just did. At ten on a Sunday morning? I'd probably be Ubering people from brunch to shopping, or something, in a car I'd have gone into debt to buy, always counting in the back of my mind how many dollars I need to make today in order to break somewhere close to even, and it'd be a miracle if I managed in even one month to send home what I send home every month now. My laid-off mother wouldn't be getting the right care for her Graves' disease, because who could cover the co-pay? And my cousin, paralyzed last year in the sort of "industrial accident" that happens when you're so hopeless broke that cooking meth looks like an option? Well, he'd still have the communicating pressure ulcers over ~15% of his body that he got from his first, incompetent, care team. So odds are I'd have a couple of funerals to worry about pretty soon, too, and that's far from cheap, quite aside from the fact that rednecks feel the loss of loved ones every bit as much as real people do.

So, okay. You want to talk about rural people overcoming hardship to make lives of worth in the modern world? Hi there. I've done it. Having done it, I've had a great deal of opportunity to observe the degree to which doing so requires overcoming vastly opposing odds. Lest I be mistaken as arrogant, let me note this is not a boast. This luck is no cause for pride, any more than would be to have bought a winning lottery ticket. That I happened to be well placed to exploit the lucky breaks I got pales to insignificance alongside the vast, vast number of lucky breaks I've had - and much more so alongside the fact that, had matters gone only slightly differently from how they in fact have, all the smarts and ambition in the world wouldn't mean a damn thing.

And here you are, arguing whether you know it or not that that kind of astonishing luck scales. Not only that, but slandering the people left behind by the fact that that kind of astonishing luck doesn't scale, left behind with no option but to make the best life they can under the circumstances or give up, and whose circumstances have grown latterly so hopeless that many of them are giving up - and that's the thing you overlook here, the crucial point on which your ignorance or carelessness renders all the rest of your analysis worse than useless. When those of my ancestors who immigrated did so, they did it because America was a nation capable of offering them hope - hope of a better future, for themselves and their descendants, than their home countries could any longer sustain. Even those others of my ancestors who were transported under criminal sentence, who lived years or decades or the rest of their lives under effective indenture, with their liberties sharply circumscribed - even to them, America was a beacon of hope for the future. But that was many years ago, and since then, America has changed. Where my ancestors and the ancestors of my cohort found hope, that hope has gone, to be replaced by hardship that seems everlasting and in far, far too many cases is. Somehow, in spite of that, many of us survive - not all, to be sure, and fewer every year, and in circumstances which I misdoubt would horrify a lifelong city man. Shall I tell you about the shack where lived some of my happiest childhood memories, and the way black mold gets into chipboard walls? But that's not where I live any more. I had the good fortune to go on to better things. Many among my cohort did not - people whom I loved and ran with and hated and fought with all through my childhood and adolescence, people who knew me and whom I knew in the way of children who hold nothing back, in the way that later life never can quite offer, men and women who taught me how to live and understand my place in the world, how to be a worthwhile human being, who initiated me into all manner of mysteries both wonderful and terrible, and made it possible for me to attain whatever value I can ever hope to manage.

Those people, you're calling weak.

And then you wonder how a Trump happens.

Well, worse is coming, if things go on as they have. Worse first for you and then for us all. I don't want that. No sane man with any grasp of history could possibly want that. But the lie of progress, of the universe having an arc that bends inexorably somewhere, is too seductive, and the closest thing it offers to consolation is that I might get to see some people like you dragged screaming into hell before my own turn comes. I don't want that. I'd much rather none of us gets dragged into hell at all. I voted for Trump in large part to try to stave that off - in the hope that such a shocking setback might give rise to a general reevaluation of perspective on the left, to something which might lead to the realization that you cannot, you may not, simply wash your hands of whole peoples in their millions and expect to carry on as you please, never needing fear any consequence. But that hasn't happened and I don't think it will. Instead of reevaluation we see exhortations of greater energy for the cause, and instead of any gesture toward rapprochement we see intensification of the same exclusionary rhetoric and behavior that's brought us to the pretty pass we stand in now.

And I don't expect you to change your mind because of what I've said here, either. It would astonish me if you did, not least because I've been much more honest than kind, which is too common a failing on my part in any case; effective rhetoric in this circumstance requires perhaps above all that the fissures of a fragile ego not be struck. But here I've barely tried to be otherwise, because I have in large part given up - be what I may, I'm hardly insusceptible to an absence of hope in my own right, and I've long since ceased to see much cause for that in my efforts to warn people away from the abyss into which they seem hell-bent on dragging us all. But if I've achieved nothing else, as I so strongly suspect to be the case, then I may at least find whatever consolation there is to be found in the fact that, when your turn comes as a turn will come for all of us, you'll have no excuse for failing to understand what is happening, and no ability truly to say that you were never told. Meaningless as it is, if that's the best I've got, then I'll take it. And who knows? Perhaps you will surprise me after all.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13905407 and marked it off-topic.

BUT, you guys have really got to stop this godawful stupid "point of a gun" rhetoric you're all cribbing directly from Atlas Shrugged. Yes, I understand the metaphor you are trying to make, but it is a profoundly terrible way to make that argument and needlessly escalates every discussion and alienates anyone not already on your side instantly.