The News Thread

Aren't hicks just people who live rurally and tend to be less educated?

Nah, I wouldn't classify rural and less-educated as hicks necessarily. They tend to be rural, yeah, though more often than not they're actually suburban. Less educated, perhaps, but then I wouldn't expect that everybody go to college and study liberal arts (as much as I would like that). They tend to have blue-collar careers, though white-collar hicks exist (they're the worst).
 
I prefer blue-collar people. Spent enough time around white collar types who tend to be massive cunts, also I guess I'm biased because most aboriginals are blue collar and that's my comfort zone. Non-PC people who aren't yuppie filth.
 
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I think I get what he's saying, my dad raised myself and my brother the same way. Seems like he's differentiating hicks from himself because hicks don't aim upward and are fairly satisfied with less both in terms of knowledge and material gains? My dad was always poor white trash but slowly moved himself into the lower middle-class by the time he was in his 40's.
 
I prefer blue-collar people. Spent enough time around white collar types who tend to be massive cunts, also I guess I'm biased because most aboriginals are blue collar and that's my comfort zone. Non-PC people who aren't yuppie filth.

I'm fine with both, though of course I tend to only hang with white-collars nowadays because it's the social milieu I've found myself in. All my childhood friends are blue-collar though.

How do you differentiate though? I lump them all into one category tbh

White-trash tend to have a rather small view of the world, whereas hicks usually have enough education/money to know better, but still choose in any case to have a backwards ass view of the world--there's a certain pride for hickness. It's a deliberate identity imo. Not so much for white-trash.

edit: @CiG Hick's aim upward, they just don't aim for changing their perspective.
 
I guess I have no frame of reference for understanding what a hick is if that's the case. Bogans are kinda like that over here, poor whites who regardless of how well they do monetarily still hold firm to a kind of lower class pride. Not so bothered by it, I'd rather be around a bunch of happy-to-be-ignorant fucks than a gaggle of virtue-signaling fuckheads who language police everything you say and constantly push their shitty activism down your throat.

Here in Australia, in my experience, poor whites also don't push the religious activism much, if at all. I'm sure that's a problem with hicks over there, but here it's usually lower middle-class and above whites who fuck with you on a religious level.
 
I guess I have no frame of reference for understanding what a hick is if that's the case. Bogans are kinda like that over here, poor whites who regardless of how well they do monetarily still hold firm to a kind of lower class pride. Not so bothered by it, I'd rather be around a bunch of happy-to-be-ignorant fucks than a gaggle of virtue-signaling fuckheads who language police everything you say and constantly push their shitty activism down your throat.

Here in Australia, in my experience, poor whites also don't push the religious activism much, if at all. I'm sure that's a problem with hicks over there, but here it's usually lower middle-class and above whites who fuck with you on a religious level.

Well then fortunately for you, the virtue-signalling fuckheads aren't as numerous as they're made out to be.

Hicks don't push religion and don't really tend to be that religious although they support the right and the thread of evangelism that comes with it. I can't really speak much to the evangelicals. I've happily never had anything to do with them.
 
I've worked plenty of white collar jobs, I know to some degree they exist through experience. They exist enough that I prefer blue collar people by contrast.

Bunch of HR drones.

Office work sucks. I would rather have a blue collar job at this point because I would feel more accomplished at the end of the day
 
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Hick, redneck, and white trash are all distinct categories, and those who identify with them take them very seriously.

My immediate family are very well-to-do, but still consider themselves rednecks (despite living in suburban/rural Buffalo). They aren't white trash; but those who live in mobile homes and upstate do think of themselves as hicks.
 
I hope you realize that academia was limited to something like 5% of the population 100 years ago. A substantial amount of education came through work experience, with the educated being the ones who did the math and engineering to make sure that a bridge or whatever was architecturally sound. As engineering problems have gotten more difficult there are new areas of study that become relevant (like managing traffic flow as you've mentioned) and sure, formal education can help, but that's not academic discourse in the way you were implying earlier.

That is discourse in the way I was implying, actually. I meant communication between academic professionals who study complex patterns in traffic, urban infrastructure/architecture, etc.

When I say "academic discourse" I don't just mean in the humanities. I mean professionals in the sciences and technologies also doing research, and communicating with each other and with public officials.
 
That is discourse in the way I was implying, actually. I meant communication between academic professionals who study complex patterns in traffic, urban infrastructure/architecture, etc.

When I say "academic discourse" I don't just mean in the humanities. I mean professionals in the sciences and technologies also doing research, and communicating with each other and with public officials.

Is every B-student that got a bachelor's just to get an engineering job an academic in your view? Engineers don't communicate much with people that are actually employed by academia, unless there's public dollars involved (grants, etc) or if it's something with serious potential for public impact (e.g. a massive bridge, a freeway, etc). In the real world outside of academia, problems are dealt with as they come up. A professor may study and publish findings on road wear or whatever which may be read by private researchers, but they aren't directly involved in the process at all. An engineer builds the road, has plenty of experience and knowledge on said road wear from previous implementations, and chooses his materials around the demands of the person buying the road. Academics may promote laws which are enacted by politicians, but it isn't through conversation between engineer and academic that said laws are adhered to. That's up to dialogue between enforcement officers and private surveyors/QA people.

Outside of fundamental R&D/theory, academics are pretty useless in STEM (and the only reason that is an exception is because the government effectively killed all large private R&D labs during WW2).
 
A professor may study and publish findings on road wear or whatever which may be read by private researchers, but they aren't directly involved in the process at all. An engineer builds the road, has plenty of experience and knowledge on said road wear from previous implementations, and chooses his materials around the demands of the person buying the road. Academics may promote laws which are enacted by politicians, but it isn't through conversation between engineer and academic that said laws are adhered to. That's up to dialogue between enforcement officers and private surveyors/QA people.

This is all part of "discourse"! It's a complex of moving parts that all impact one another. It doesn't reduce to the spoken, physical conversation between an engineer and surveyor, or some such. It also involves the written, discursive conversation that transcends bodies and speech. A professor might publish something in a journal that's read by a public policy professional or private expert for an independent contractor, and that information gets absorbed into the conversations happening physically on the ground level.

I'm tired of this hierarchy of "real world" problems over academic, "not-real-world" problems. They all speak to the same social world and they all intersect as part of a highly complex social discourse. Urban planners may be publishing articles in academic journals, but those ideas aren't hermetically sealed-off from the engineers on the ground floor. They make their way into the social atmosphere--same with academic publishing in political science, health, medicine, etc.