His latest conspiracy theory: the Left is infiltrating farming with lesbians. I know, that’s ridiculous, and I must be getting this from one of those fake news sites, or the Onion, or something. So I had to triple and quadruple and septuple check that this wasn’t some made-up story. But I knew it had to be true when that unimpeachable source, World Net Daily, confirmed it. Here’s a bit from his radio program.
You sit in there and laugh. Okay, go ahead and laugh at it, but I’m telling you what they’re doing. They are trying to bust up one of the last geographically conservative regions in the country; that’s rural America. Rural America happens to be largely conservative. Rural America is made up of self-reliant, rugged individualist types. They happen to be big believers in the Second Amendment. So here comes the Obama Regime with a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer and they’ll set you up. I’m like you; I never before in my life knew that lesbians wanted to be farmers. I never knew that lesbians wanted to get behind the horse and the plow and start burrowing.
Horse and plow
? Burrowing
? The lesbian farmers are all looking at you funny for just that, Rush.
I have some information for Rush: Lesbians are people. Some of them might want to farm. Some of them live in rural America. Some of them might want to be scientists, or zookeepers, or bankers, or mothers.
Also, it’s not nice to assume that everyone in rural America is as bigoted as you are, Rush.
Yeah. You can tell how self-reliant they are by looking at the massive disparity between the federal taxes paid in the state and the amount of federal money spent there. For some odd reason, these self-reliant red states need lots of federal monies.
And you can tell how individualist they are by looking at how they vote. They vote as their pastor, their preacher, their AM radio talking-head, tells them to vote rather than actually, y’know, looking at the economics, the tax implications, or the other shit that will affect their economic well-being. Voting in lock-step is NOT being an individualist.
Maybe he meant “furrowing”.
That get a lot of federal subsidies.
My relative’s rural county in the upper midwest is doing OK economically. I’d estimate that half their cash flow is state and federal money.
1. Rural America is almost a myth. The US is one of the most highly urbanized countries on the planet at 84% metro.
2. And not all rural Americans are christofascists. PZ might qualify as…a rural American. It’s not like Morris, MN is near much of anything.
Sounds like someone’s been hitting the opiates a bit hard.
BTW, for anyone interested in the ‘kernel of truth in the middle of the bullshit’: https://www.ascr.usda.gov/lgbt-rural-summit-series-and-ruralpride-campaign
No free money for lesbian farmers, unless they are also poor farmers, in which case the get the same programs ever other poor farmer is eligible for.
Two lesbians in rural Norway responded to the shootings at Utöya by taking their boat out near the island and rescuing kids that were swimming away.
But Limbaugh probably thinks* that was bad, his sypathies being with anyone toting a gun.
*yes, I know, sometimes his verbal ejaculations do not dignify being associated with this Word.
I used to laugh at Rush Limbaugh, for about a week when I was a kid and home sick with chicken pox, but then I realized he wasn’t a parody, and actually believed the crap he was spouting. Now I just cringe.
“burrowing”…maybe he is thinking of burrows as in that neolithic stuff. He should move into the bronze age any time now.
If it was true some rural area is a strong bastion for Limbaugh-style conservatism, it would mae a great start for a bantustan-type system… Of course, they get to take their share of the US national debt
Who uses a horse and plow? Nowadays, tractors drive themselves and take soil samples along the way so you can later compare them to drone-captured crop density data overlaid on a topographical map and determine optimal fertilizer placement. A rep from one of the companies that makes them presented at a bioinformatics symposium I went to. It sounded pretty cool.
By “it”, Rush meant his face or his whole self, right?
michaelvieths, the Multiple Rocket Launch System for cluster munition fertilizer distribution should work hand-in-hand with that analysis.
“… a bunch of federal money and they’re waving it around, and all you gotta do to get it is be a lesbian and want to be a farmer….”
Actually for many years now we’ve been giving huge amounts of money to farmers, simply for buying some land, and then not farming it.
Dear Rush Limbaugh,
The Dead Milkman’s song, ‘Stuart’ is not an accurate news source. Also farmers don’t burrow; burrowing owls burrow. Why do you think they call them ‘burrowing owls’.
Holytape
michaelvieths @10:
Elton John, when he’s not hunting horny back toads.
How’s comin along?
“Why is
thishe still a thing?” –John OliverAgriculture jobs is a need area. Expanding the type of person who considers working in agriculture from a white cis-gendered male to folks of types and backgrounds is not just good for the previously marginalized folks, but also for farming, and for the country. Unless one grew up on a farm (which not many folks do anymore), it may be difficult to even understand how to get into farming as an occupation.
Brother Ogvorbis @ #1
While that is prob true for a great many rural people who might be farmers, I do feel the need to say that that stereotype does not apply to all. My sister and her husband, both in their 60s, are farmers in a very rural area of northern New England. She has a HS education, he went to 8th grade and was illiterate until she taught him to read. Most of the people in their area probably fit your description, but the two of them are progressive atheists who vote for diversity, reproductive choice, and equal rights for all people. They vote, and they deplore Trump and all the dreck associated with him.
I know… one anecdatum cannot refute broad stereotypes. But I wanted to stick up for my red-neck sister and her red-neck husband. They have red necks because they work outside all day, not because of their political or cultural beliefs. :-)
I’m volunteering out in your neck of the woods, PZ, in Iowa’s blood-red 4th, on behalf of the lovely Kim Weaver, running against the second stupidest man in Washington, and the face of White Supremacy in Congress, the loathsome Steve King. Look for the Twitter hashtag #SendKimATubman, and do so, if you object to King’s overt racism (in this instance, attaching an amendment to the latest appropriations bill forbidding Congress from spending a single penny on adding Tubman’s face to the $20, nor any other African American to U.S. currency. Y’all recall what he also said at the RNC about non-Christians and non-whites never having contributed to civilization, and his resolution denying slaves were involved in building the White House. Then there’s his rabid defense of Todd Akin. The list goes on and on.
Anyway, as someone who has spent their adult life in Boston, New York, New Haven, Tokyo, Paris, and Queretaro, I was very pleasantly surprised to see the diversity of this rural district. There are several LGBTQs on statewide ballots, the Progressive Caucus was easily one quarter LGBTQ, This district has women top to bottom on the ballot: Hillary for Prez, Patty Judge against Chuck Grassley for Senate, Kim Weaver against Steve King for House, Susan Bangart for Iowa Senate, and Nancy Huisinga for Iowa House. You can’t name too many other districts in the country where this is so.
I have to say there are not a great many African Americans in thee district, but plenty of Latinos, working the lousiest jobs (poultry barns and hog CAPOs), and all of the Democrats I’ve met have an incredible dedication and drive and passion for preventing Iowa from turning into their neighbors, Wisconsin and Kansas. These aren’t your grandparents’ hicks and rubes!
Meanwhile, I’ve already gained five pounds in sauerbraten and corndogs.
Apparently, Rush cannot ascertain the difference between women wanting to take up farming and the Amish.
The former would use a tractor, with all of the modern trimmings, soil analysis equipment on the tractor and more, whereas the latter furrow their fields using a horse drawn plow.
As someone speculated above, it sounds like Rush is hitting the opioids again. As I’m taking opioids for my back, I can see how one could make such an error when abusing those drugs.
That said, hanged if I can see how someone could abuse opioids, the number one side effect beyond therapeutic dosage is nausea and vomiting.
But, they do stop the spasms in my calves, which previously felt like my ankle was going to be twisted off from my leg.
@chigau #2:
These days, in most countries in the developed world, getting into agriculture requires a terrifying amount of up-front borrowing.
Iowa was early to recognize marriage equality. I have some friends from the USAF who moved there!
anbheal@19 mentions “the second stupidest man in Washington, and the face of White Supremacy in Congress, the loathsome Steve King.” From the Encyclopedia of American Loons (May-2011):
Anybody who is a “big believer in the Second Amendment” is not an individualist.
Who uses a horse to plow? I pretty sure the gold standard in plow animals was mules and oxen.
I had a job once where I was required to ride around the city with a “supervisor” and we would apply temporary fixes to the street and sidewalk. he like to listen to Rush Limbaugh I had never heard of him before and hated every minute he was on but I did learn a very important lesson.
What his primary focus was on was resentment everything was rooted in resentment the subject was resentment and who was delivering the news of who to resent.
if he could get resentment going he was winning. I do not know if he actually believes any of it little is actually true in any case but it makes no difference as long as he is continuing to stimulate that feeling of resentment he is still selling orange juice and in control.
uncle frogy
whywhywhy@17: while city folk might not understand how to even get in to farming, the farming folk that I know have resolved to stay the fuck away from farming.
There’s advantages to the lifestyle, but many disadvantages as well, and the economics completely suck: you’re a multimillionaire on paper but barely scraping by in practice.
numerobis @ #27
Years ago I worked in a remote, agrarian area of Tennessee. There were a number of VISTA workers doing public health research in the area, and their observation was that these farmers had a lot of stress, higher incidence of heart disease, a fair amount of alcohol abuse, and shorter lives than people living in urban/suburban environments. Those farmers were no where near millionaires. I’ve not met a lot of millionaire farmers. They may not be dirt poor, but certainly not rich even on paper. I suspect “millionaire farmer” is something of a myth.
My step father’s brother was a farmer. Fifty years ago, a farmer could get by on a hundred acres. In order to make ends meet, mostly due to the higher cost of equipment, the step father’s brother gradually increased his acreage to over 1000 acres before he retired, circa 2000, and lived of the rent of the acreage. The “small family farm” has died, except as a hobby to somebody who works full time at another job.
Current farm practices depend heavily on complicated machinery, which is purchased through bank loans. Farmers are in debt up to their eyeballs, and most are encouraged to invest more and more in larger operations.
Some few farmers are going with small-scale, such one or two cows, milked by hand, and selling boutique products. It pays about the same, day-to-day, and is ideal for a couple to work together.
Proof opioids don’t always give you a Coleridge or a Wells or a Dickens. Sometimes you get Aleister Crowley.
Not really.
1. Modern farms are large and highly mechanized with a bad case of Giant Machinitis. In the midwest you might farm 1,000 acres and own a few hundred thousand in machines. Good land can easily run $2,000 an acre.
Do the math. Your assets are worth over a million USD.
2. More math. Your net on cash flow is going to be low. In a bad crop year you might lose money. In a good year, make a fair amount.
So you are asset rich and cash poor.
3. It’s hard work, chancy, and complicated. A lot of my relatives are from a very rural farming area in the upper midwest. None of the ones below 70 years live there any longer.
Seriously. Limbaugh always struck me as more of a “goat man.”
Your concept of individualism might be bullshit if you’re going around complaining about people who don’t fit the mold.
wzrd1@#20:
People react to different painkillers differently, it seems. It also seems that if you’re in pain, they just chop down the pain. If you’re feeling fine, then they can be quite entertaining. It’s very much “your mileage may vary.”
When my jaw was broken and wired shut, they sent me home with a liter of liquid roxicet. The pain wasn’t too bad but I tippled away at it, anyhow. What I discovered was that the roxicet made “glee” funny. As taraskan said @#31, you don’t always get great results.
PS – that was what motivated my comment about Limbaugh maybe being back on the poppy. When I came down from my month of blissful pain I went back through some of my comments here and some emails I sent, and – wow – was my sense of humor (which is normally off-kilter) a mess.
If I understand this correctly, if lesbians (or gays or trans whatevers) take up farming they get the same subsidies the straight cis hetero folks do and Limbaugh considers this to be some sort of special treatment? I can not think of a more obvious case of someone objecting to equality. Thinking that this equal treatment is some plot to lesbianize the agriculture sector is well into Alex Jones territory. In fact perhaps an Infowars syle show is his new business model, since rush’s current endeavor is apparently not doing well financially.
Marcus Ranum #36
Do you recall the source of
raven — Yeah, I know about big farms, and even bigger farm corporations. I also understand that if you have a 1000+ acre farm, you have a lot of equity…as you said, asset rich, cash poor. Of course, you probably “own” that land with the bank, so what is a millionaire then? Even with that, there are still a lot of farmers with modest holdings. They may not be poor, but calling them millionaires seems like taking liberties with that idea.
And one of the most common long-term side effects of opiates is constipation (which in some cases is a permanent narrowing of the large intestine similar to Crohn’s disease).
Just food for thought. I mean, look at that face.
chigau@#8:
Uh, nooo… Was it something I said when I was on the roxi?
Marcus Ranum #41
It’s from here
https://www.amazon.ca/Childs-Garden-Grass-Official-Marijuana/dp/0843103469
When you’re high and have an incredible insight and write it down,
that is what you read the next day.
.
I thought it was hilarious at the time.
.
I might have been high.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/08/mass-lesbian-farm-infiltration-is-obamas-best-scheme-yet.html