The author of this article lives in Canada and has written a book called "You Dumb Okie." I don't see anything constructive about his tone, nor do I find any new ideas in his writing. It sounds like criticism and resentment pointed at red states.
Umm... the article is making the case for how Oklahoma is failing it's people. A case accompanied with publicly available data. The tone seems mostly reasonable.
> It sounds like criticism and resentment pointed at red states.
You seem to be the one who's conflating Oklahoma with red states.
If you think there's something wrong about the article, maybe critique something in the article. Right now, all you seem to be doing is lobbing ad-hominem attacks.
The author explicitly links Oklahoma to Trump by describing it as having the third-largest margin of victory in the presidential election. Hence the red state comment.
I don't think you actually read the article, because you assumed that i was lobbing ad-hominem attacks instead of directly referencing what the author has written.
Three points:
One, your argument seems to be with the title and the tone of the author's book. I'm looking purely at the content of the article which seems reasonable to me.
Second, the response of Oklahoma's /governor/ to falling revenues is prayer: > “Our situation is dire,” Oklahoma finance director Preston Doerflinger said. “To use a pretty harsh word, our revenues are difficult at best. Maybe they fall into the category of somewhat pathetic.”
> Governor Mary Fallin had an answer: prayer. The governor issued an official proclamation making 13 October Oilfield Prayer Day.
Doesn't that seem mind boggling to you? That definitely seems /dumb/ to me.
Third, I don't think that epithet "dumb okie" necessarily applies to you. The author's argument -- without having read the book -- seems to apply to a subset of Oklahoma. For instance the author is clearly sympathetic to the victims of police brutality, the teachers of Oklahoma etc.
> The author explicitly links Oklahoma to Trump by describing it as having the third-largest margin of victory in the presidential election. Hence the red state comment.
That's fair. Sidepoint: how do you feel about Pruitt at EPA?
your own black box idea of "Reasonable" is basically the justification for everything you're saying. I can't really communicate with you when you are setting the criteria for every point on which you and I seem to disagree.
And, then I even give examples from the article describing how they seem reasonable.
Look you clearly disagree with my criteria -- so go ahread and back that disagreement up with an example from the article.
And you totally glossed over something from the article that I referenced, instead calling it an ad hominem attack against the author. He straight up linked Oklahoma to Trump as a glaringly high-margin-of-victory state. I'm not disputing the vote tally, but I'm simply saying that the mention of it in the article expressed an opinion on the relationship between red-state conservatism and allegedly bad government.
So your comments aren't actually connected to what the author is saying, and my larger criticism of his bias. I don't buy the idea that the funding and role of the speaker are irrelevant. You seem to be pushing that idea pretty hard. It just seems like you're selectively ignoring certain aspects of the discussion because they don't line up with what you want to believe.
Not only that, but if I say something is a "failing" government entity, then I am absolutely setting a critical tone, and perhaps a pejorative one. You can have efficient, good government among religious folks, or you can have ineffective government among religious folks. There isn't a causality demonstrated by the author, but he still implies that government administered by religious people is naturally ineffective.
You're going through the motions of discussing the article but you're arbitrarily ignoring the context of the article, the bias clearly represented by the author both in the text and in his other work, and the links the author draws between Oklahoma, Trump and religion as a way of disparaging the state.
If you can't see that the author is not cold and unbiased in his arguments, and would clearly prefer to live in a more secular and socialist (why else criticize his own mother for refusing government welfare money) place than Oklahoma, then I don't know how to say anything that is "reasonable" in your view.
I totally agree.
I do note that the conversation about prisons, and about mental healthcare, is larger than Oklahoma.
There have also been incidents in recent years of police officers in Oklahoma killing innocent people of nonwhite descent. That conversation about police brutality is also larger than Oklahoma.
I think the best argument in criticism of the Oklahoma state government is to say: Look at the wealth amassed by oil companies like Continental, Devon Energy, and Chesapeake. Devon Energy was building a massive skyscraper during the financial crisis, as the rest of America reeled. Now juxtapose that massive profitability in oil and gas with Oklahoman problems like drug abuse among young people, inadequate funding for schools, and significant amounts of high school pregnancy. Clearly there's a disparity between what the petroleum companies are earning, and what Oklahoma is receiving (as a state) for its part as an enabler of their profits. Further, it's easy to argue that these firms not only benefit from selling Oklahoma's resources and harvesting talent from petroleum engineering programs in the state's public universities, they also have caused geological anomalies with yet-unknown consequences.
And I suppose Oklahomans are complicit in this, because ultimately they elect the government and they remain tacit about many things that happen in the state. But if there were a discussion, it would have to start with, "is this how an oil-rich region should function?"
Edit: and btw, I would argue that even if DVN, CLR, and CHK are going through a turbulent market moment, the problems we are discussing preceded the selloff in crude oil by at least a decade.