Berkeley Instructor: "Rural Americans" Are "Bad People Who Have Made Bad Life Decisions"

https://www.blacklistednews.com/article/75401/berkeley-instructor-rural-americans-are-bad-people-who-have-made-bad-life.html

Published: November 14, 2019

Source: The Epoch Times

An instructor at the University of California-Berkeley stirred anger after he called Americans who live in rural areas “bad people” who deserve “uncomfortable lives” on Twitter.

Jackson Kernion, according to his website, has been teaching multiple philosophy courses as a graduate student instructor at UC-Berkeley since 2013.

In the now-deleted Twitter post published on Nov. 5, Kernion explained why he thought it is plausible to shame rural Americans.

“I unironically embrace the bashing of rural Americans. they, as a group, are bad people who have made bad life decisions,” Kernion wrote.

“Some, I assume, are good people. But this nostalgia for some imagined pastoral way of life is stupid, and we should shame people who aren’t pro-city.”

Before turning to critique the rural American lifestyle, Kernion wrote in another post about affordable healthcare for rural Americans.

He said he believed it would mean they have to be subsidized by “those who choose a more efficient way of life.”

“Rural healthcare should be expensive!” he wrote.

“And that expense should be borne by those who choose rural America!”

“It should be uncomfortable to live in rural America. It should be uncomfortable to not move,” he added.

America’s rural communities, which tend to be older and poorer than urban areas, usually face more challenges than their urban counterparts in accessing health care, internet, and other services.

A survey conducted by Harvard’s School of Public Health, NPR News, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reports this May that four in ten rural Americans have encountered problems affording medical bills, housing, or food in the past few years.

Kernion tried to back his points with economic arguments about not making rural life “artificially cheaper.” Still, it didn’t take long for that discussion to escalate into shaming the rural American population.

The next day, Kernion wrote on Twitter in what appears to be an apology that he “made a bad post” and would “reflect on it.”

“My tone is way crasser and meaner than I like to think I am,” he wrote. He eventually deactivated his Twitter account altogether.

UC-Berkeley has yet to make any response regarding the internet backslash.

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City life is exactly 180 degrees opposite of "efficient".

Your food has to be trucked in, making it more expensive and less healthy. How much more effort does it take when you are unhealthy?

Your waste has to be scooped up off the street, because you have so many homeless people, due to skewed "managerial" priorities, which have put people out of work and misallocated resources. Resources that should never have been available in the first place. The excessive taxation, fees, fines, permits, etc.. You know, those things that inefficiently burden the little guy, for the benefit of the fat assed "successful" idols you worship. So from what perspective is city life more efficient? Or for whom? Someone that wants to manage the population for their personal gain?

Treating symptoms instead of treating the causes is what ignorance does when it encounters a problem, or something unsightly.

Your water has to be poisoned to kill pathogens, because you have disconnected your local environment from the natural process of filtration, which doesn't usually require any effort, but poisoning it does. Not very efficient..

Your waste is either buried or expensively recycled, because you can't compost it. Not very efficient..

You are stacked on top of one another, in buildings, apartments, which are not designed to naturally heat and cool, and its also unhealthy, which requires you to take so many meds. People are not legos.

The average individual or family doesn't have a back yard, or a front yard, making it impossible to grow your own food, or raise your own livestock. Not very efficient or reliable.

If you cram people together in a small space, like LA, especially if its in a valley, the smog collects and doesn't leave, and you have more health problems.

Public transportation is a joke. You have buses that run mostly empty at certain times and overfilled at others, either way the fuel consumption and pollution still goes on. Individual people have individual bodies and individual desires that are not always simultaneously desiring the same thing at the same time. It is retarded to try and manage them as if that wasn't true.

People who are dependent on others to survive always praise the collective mindset, and poo poo the individual mindset, because they refuse to grow up. Or they are just a parasite.

I'm sure there are many other ways that city life is inefficient if you cared to really take a look and compare the two. But that would require the ability and willingness to learn..

By the way, there is no plateau of learning. There is always more to learn. You do not reach a point where you can stop and be lazy. But there are plateaus where you can take a break before you continue.

Rural people have kept your ass alive, because people in the city are mostly clueless about producing the food that you need to survive.