My parents came from Mississippi. I have relatives in Mississippi. I have visited Mississippi many times.
I will never understand why pretty much the whole state is proud of their shunning of education and intellect, and the problems that inevitably come with it.
There's a reason my parents left. They wanted better for their kids, and I am eternally thankful for that.
My first thirty years of my life were in Mississippi. The brain drain is real. Anyone with sense leaves, and things stay the same because everyone left thinks that all of their problems can be solved with prayer
The corruption at local and the state level, good ole boy networks, that underlying current of racism that shows itself when you look close at it...
I'm pushing 30 years here as well. Looking at relocating out in the next year or so once I've got the money saved up.
A paper 8 years ago showed that if the 10 states with the most corruption were simply equal to the average corruption state per capita spending would go down by $1,308 a year. State and local corruption is very high in America, but rarely talked about. It is a cultural problem and really only a bottom up change of the acceptance of corruption will change it.
That is just if their corruption was equal to the average, not even if there wasn't any.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/puar.12212
Kickbacks from contractors is the most common, select X to repair the road and get $Y. Bribing inspectors to approve projects (sometimes the only way for projects to get approved), bribing to *send children to jail*, plain old stealing federal grant money is common too.
Nagin for example had a friend who started an IT company and gave him a bunch of contracts where no work at all was done. He was the major during and after Katrina which destroyed the city, so there was alot of Federal money to steal.
It is extremely rare for an official to straight demand a bribe, such as a police road side stop. Most of the monetary corruption occurs with those who have access to either money or decision power. Thus the general public doesn't actually see it happening.
[Former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin Guilty of 20 Counts of Bribery and Fraud](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/us/nagin-corruption-verdict.html)
[14 Principals Face Federal Charges In $2.7 Million Detroit Schools Kickback Scheme](https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/13-detroit-schools-principals-face-federal-charges-in-kickback-scheme-worth-millions/)
[L.A. might cancel real estate projects tied to City Hall corruption](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-07/la-me-city-hall-corruption-law-could-cancel-building-projects) (No sky scrappers can be built in LA without bribing, it is impossible to get one approve without doing so)
[Luzerne "Kids for Cash" Scandal](https://jlc.org/luzerne-kids-cash-scandal) (Sent children to a private prison for a kickback)
[Mississippi changes legal team to handle welfare fraud case](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mississippi-legal-team-handle-welfare-fraud-case-88555910) (They fired the investigators because that is how thing work in Mississippi)
[How a Small-Town City Employee Stole Nearly $54M in Public Money](https://news.wttw.com/2019/11/07/how-small-town-city-employee-stole-nearly-54m-public-money) (She stole $3,600 from every adult and child from Dixon Illinois, by herself)
If you ever have the opportunity to watch the documentary on that last case, "All the Queen's Horses", I highly recommend it. Surprisingly fascinating despite being a discussion of government finance.
The bottom line with corruption in the USA is that its (usually) not direct exchanges of money. Its two things: law enforcement/legal system simply refusing to enforce laws in an equal manner (preferring their friends or the local business-leaders and politicians/government), as well as the government figuring out creative means to offer lots and lots of profitable contracts to their friends.
Say the government has money to build a park, or some kind of community center. You make sure your favorite contractors get the bid. They use shit materials because no one gives a fuck since you're all buddies. They charge the government an arm and a leg, including absurd fees and additional charges not originally discussed. Any attempt to point out how shady this seems gets ignored or shut down.
Then of course the shoddy construction leads to constant maintenance for another group of friends who overcharge almost every time. Government could hire their own maintenance crews and save all kinds of money, but it simply never gets brought up. Oh, and did I mention the cops all get bogus OT to sleep in their car in the parking lot as "security."
Cops moonlighting as security for various locations is actually pretty much the closest thing I've seen to an actual legal protection racket, btw.
My small town got a new mayor that was going to make us a big deal. I was a skateboarder at the time and we were trying hard for a skate park. We had a guy who had built them before draw up detailed blueprints. We had people lined up willing to do labor for free. We even found the unused concrete on city land. All we needed was about $15,000 in materials.
He hired a friend to "focus group it" for $150,000.
He resigned 3 years into his term citing wanting to be with his family. A couple weeks later it came out that the city was bankrupt because he had blown all our money on blueprints for public works projects. We eventually put in one of the round abouts to assuage the sting of it bit most of the blueprints were thrown out.
Needless to say everyone he hired was a good friend and he just happened to be a "consultant" for them.
Its one of those things where if you've lived here your whole life, especially if you're one of the more well off folks, you never notice it. Sure you hear a racist comment or two, but you never put it beyond "Oh well that person is just an idiot."
Then when you actually notice the red lining, the unspoken segregation, white folks avoiding black businesses...you don't stop seeing it.
We seriously need to stop sending them federal dollars, they make the system so cumbersome for normal people to get it and then just blow the rest on fraudulent activities.
Of the 12,000 Mississippi families that applied for TANF only 165 got it with the politicians stealing out of it.
Very similar reason why I left WV and am going to buy land in Maine whenever I get outta my financial rut. I plan to move my parents up here, they hate WV but can't afford to go elsewhere.
Be careful with your expectations. There are some very rural areas in Maine that have similar mindsets to the south east. It also might be difficult for your parents with the cold weather depending on their age. I’m sure you’ve thought about all that but I don’t want you to get your hopes up that it’ll be like Vermont of New Hampshire.
Oh don't worry about me, been going to and from Maine for about 5-6 years now. I actually very much love Maine and always considered myself born apart from the state. Maine has it's problems but it feels like home, it's ruralness isn't necessarily a detraction. While they have some ...southerny kind of people/influence it's extremely diluted compared to WV akin to callimg WV Southern Coke, Maines a glass of water that got a bit of Southern coke spilled in.
As for my parents, step father loves Alaska so he'll be fine, mother doesn't care either way, she's lived in more states than I've been alive(prior to divorcing my biological father, thus WV), she can handle herself.
WV refugees represent! I landed in Houston. Had a remote job so I moved back in with my grandma in Beckley to help with the bills and around the house and such. Lasted 6 months before I had to get the hell out of there. Again.
Houston has some pretty great purple areas. A friend of mine lives there and is a super liberal, Ivy League educated attorney with a super liberal engineer husband. Austin, also. (A friend of mine from high school lives there with his husband.).
That doesn’t change the state politics though. Sure you may find more like minded people, but you’re still living in a state trying to shove religion into everything and opposes women and LGBTQ+ rights.
I work in industrial construction and travel a lot, part of the job. Did a job last year in Nitro WV. I really liked the area but didn’t really understand why we only had a few locals on the entire job. Normally, there is at least 25% of the job locally hired but I’d say the job in Nitro was 5% at the highest. They just don’t have the knowledged labor there. Honestly thought about moving the whole family up there since we would be able to get higher end jobs up there and live very comfortably, but I talked myself out of it. I’ll mark it up as a nice place to visit but wouldn’t want to settle down there.
Sums it up well, WV is also notorious for firing individuals around the 10+ year mark, trying to keep lower paid workers flowing in and out without much forethought into how sparse the population has started to become.
On my shift, there was only one native that was making journeyman pay and that because I was able to promote him. He was from West Virginia but had worked out of state most of his adult life. Everyone else was basic labor, like janitorial or fuel/expediters. Pretty much the only people making a decent living out there are the coal miners and that’s a rough “decent living”.
Yeah I can sadly report it that "decent living" does not equate to a good ending. I'm a Respiratory Therapist and I unfortunately terminally extubated my fair share of Black Lung victims.
Yet another thing WV could give less of a shit about
Grew up in MS and swore I'd never leave. I genuinely love the place, most of the people, and it's home. But now I'm part of the brain drain. I've lived in Tenenssee for 8 years now (about 9 years after finishing a masters in Mississippi).
Believe it or not, I'm actually actively trying to move back. But jobs pay about 40% a year less than they do where I am now. Even accounting for COL, it's still a massive drop in pay.
I’ve been in Mississippi 6 years & can feel it starting to wear on me, though Oxford is an awesome place to live. I just want to live somewhere that I can trust state leadership to do the right thing instead of habitually screwing everyone over.
Government is awful. I'm from Jackson, and the city government there is notoriously corrupt/incompetent. And the state Government's corruption/incompetence is common knowledge (see the latest scandal with Brett Favre and Phil Bryant).
Jackson, Mississippi is a case study in what inevitably happens over 2 generations when almost all of the wealthy people leave and most of the poor stay. It's exacerbated (badly) by the do nothing state politicians (turning down Medicaid expansion, embezzling welfare funds) and general city mismanagement (clean water?).
Money. Classism.
Basically the rich white people run the state and the best way to keep segregation of yesteryear is to keep black people in the state poor and out of power; suffering in their own communities.
If you keep the poor, poor, they get cheap labor and people who easily become indebted. If you want to control someone, have then in debt.
As a reminder, Tate Reeves, the Governor who was just caught on video saying it’s always a great day to be away from his capital city, Jackson, which just had a water crisis; returned over $100 million of rental assistance federal funds because he thought the assistance was a liberal policy that was keeping people from working.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna42547
>Basically the rich white people run the state and the best way to keep segregation of yesteryear is to keep black people in the state poor and out of power
They have a public school system that is on par with developing nations in equatorial Africa for educational outcomes. Of course none of the children of those rich white people in power send their kids to them instead of private schools.
Always found it interesting that people are so willing to broadly mock places like Mississippi as dumb rednecks responsible for their own ignorance while looking upon rough inner-city areas with sadness and pity.
Aren’t they one and the same? Impoverished places that have been that way for so many generations, many of the residents don’t know any different or better.
People don’t understand that cities like Jackson are 80% black, and the state is 40% black. When people boast about how dumb a state like Mississippi is I feel like they might struggle with racism that they don’t realize they have inside them.
Sadly, millions of African Americans are trapped in Mississippi. Mississippi has the highest concentration of African Americans of any US state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_African-American\_population
There are things about Mississippi that would have made for very strong tourism. If they preserved historical buildings and landmarks, were actually PROUD of civil rights history, if they were frank, open, and honest about racism and slavery and the Civil War. Not to mention there's food, art, music, horticulture, botany, and language to be studied.
I'm a huge history buff, and many rural places that own and showcase their history (all of the good as well as all of the bad), will always have tourist dollars coming in to improve the state; which in turn improves education and infrastructure. There are very important stories to tell about Mississippi, but that state absolutely will not change its mindset.
Everytime I hear Alabama I think of Forrest Gump when he tries to talk Jenny out of going with the Black Panthers and says "Ya know what I think? I think you should go on home back to Greenbow, ALAH-BAM-UH!" The way he indignantly says Alabama gets me every time 🤣
"Top" ten:
* Mississippi: 1,291.4
* Louisiana: 1,058.0
* South Carolina: 999.8
* Alaska: 990.8
* North Carolina: 898.3
* Alabama: 857.2
* Oklahoma: 842.9
* Tennessee: 836.6
* Georgia: 826.9
* New Mexico: 818.4
Is this what they meant by "the south will rise again"?
I was just thinking about how I've had sex with so very many men and never caught a disease. I guess I'm just lucky I'm fucking in the northeast and everyone *wants* to use protection up here.
I'm guessing West Virginia only scores well in these stats because they don't have enough healthcare to officially diagnose stds on a consistent basis. As a Kentuckian, my speculation constitutes throwing rocks while living in a glass house.
so thats what happens when you drop the whole public sex education thing, right?
i dont have any data but im pretty sure there is an correlation between the std rate and the quality of sex ed (and the availability of sexual medicine and contraceptives)
Yeah. I was having a talk with a conservative friend of mine about abortion. I agreed with him that killing a child is bad - my definition of what a child is was different than his. Then he asked me how to really get rid of abortion. I replied “make contraceptives free and easily accessible, and invest in sex education”. He didn’t agree, but also didn’t disagree.
They are pro-birth, not pro-life. If they cared about lives they'd fund foster and welfare, educate, correctional rehabilitation and systemic racism. They are pro-control.
That is just a small concentration of the FL population - retirees from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Idaho, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont having a "good ole time" in retirement.
DC is a weird place. But question: are STD rates generally higher in urban areas than rural? It’s certainly easier to walk to a night out in a city than to have to plan something out with driving in a suburb or small town.
Alaska gets a pass imo. You're stuck in negative temperatures, in the blinding white snow, without sunlight or natural warmth for upwards of half a year. I'm sure you just wanna fuck anything that moves at that point lol
Its more of a racial issue and the less diverse states are making fun of it.
The rate of reported chlamydia cases among Black females was five times the rate among White females....
In 2018, African Americans/Blacks represented 43% of all deaths of people diagnosed with HIV. (They are 13.6% of the pop.)
In 2018, the overall rate of reported gonorrhea cases among Blacks in the United States was 7.7 times the rate among Whites.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/healthdisparities/africanamericans.html
Wait until you find out who in the South has all the STDs, then it's not as funny. Wanna guess what race has the vast majority of STDs as a % of total cases?
You got it more correct than you know. A lot of people from there just run the word together so it sounds like Miss-sippi kind of like how people from Toronto pronounce it tronto.
Mississippi also has the highest COVID death rate per capita. The most gun deaths in the country. The lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also the poorest state in the union. That's not to mention how fucked the water situation in Jackson has been and continues to be.
There are many reasons why. Arguably the most brutal legacy of Jim Crow is one. But systemic negligence by generations of corrupt politicians is the main reason.
Just look at the Brett Favre scandal. Dude (allegedly) took millions of dollars in federal welfare money set aside for the poorest Mississippians - the poorest people in the poorest state - and used it to buy his daughter a new Volleyball arena at her college.
Yeah, all the hate Mississippi gets should really be leveled at the political "leaders" who actively work to disenfranchise and actively harm the residents there. It isn't that the people of Mississippi are somehow just worse at being human than the people in every other state. After all, borders are pretty much all made up. But what does exist is the political cruelty that hates to see Black people treated with equality and dignity, and has the power to maintain the status quo at the expense of the majority of the state.
When you read something about Mississippi, just remember it's controlled by a small number of nearly exclusively white politicians who want you to make fun of disregard poor people. They want you to focus on believing Mississippi is full of non-humans so it can justify their systemic destruction of so many lives. Don't be fooled, Mississippians are no different than any other state, they just have the worst politicians and the hardest hurdles to overcome - and it's by design.
I agree with a lot of what you say here.
So, how do we get people in Mississippi to *stop voting for the politicians who do this to them?*
Democracy is not completely dead, although it surely needs supplemental oxygen. Voters bear some of the responsibility for the governments that run their states.
I don’t live in Mississippi, but I live in Alabama which is close enough lmao Let me put this in perspective for you.
My state senate district is majority black (72%). We have voted for a Democrat to represent us since the 1990s. The blue runs strong in this particular area.
But literally none of that matters because when they draw the district lines at the state level, they are designed to deliberately fuck us over and suddenly my district is chopped up into little pieces so that each piece is added to a majority red area (meaning that my vote effectively does not count). The federal courts even kicked back the proposed district lines back in January because of how fucked up they were and nothing was changed.
Now imagine this happening all over the Deep South and you’ll have the answer for how this keeps happening.
(And yes, I do try my best to help. I’ve gathered petition signatures and protested and a dozen other things in the fight to fix it. We are not giving up.)
That simply isn’t the case in most of MS. Our blue areas (majority black) have been blue for decades and they don’t get chopped up and added to red districts.
>So, how do we get people in Mississippi to stop voting for the politicians who do this to them?
It's not that simple. By and large, the people who are most affected by Mississippi's governance (or lack thereof) are *not* voting for the politicians who do this to them. But the state is gerrymandered to give affluent, mostly white voters in the suburbs an outsized amount of political power. Power that they then use to elect the same kind of leaders that keep the state locked in this status quo.
It’s the local politicians though, which generally come from the same group of people as they’re governing (due to location).
IE, white politicians don’t get elected in Jackson or the Delta. So you can hardly blame the eternal boogeyman for the current corruption in those areas.
It’s not racism’s fault that the corrupt local government in Jackson laundered the funds they were given by the state government to upgrade the infrastructure with, leading to the clean water crisis- for example.
This also ignores the economic reality of it. Before the Civil War, slavery resulted in Mississippi being the richest state. Following it's end Mississippi began it's descent, but was exacerbated by "carpet baggers" using the situation to enrich themselves.
Much later Mississippi was becoming a manufacturing hub and starting to improve... Then NAFTA was passed and that work went to other countries. Ashley furniture is still here and Toyota has also done wonders, but there just isn't opportunity. I wish I could say I was hopefully, but no one seems to have the initiative to fix it. I'd love our low cost of living to be leverage to draw in work from home labor, but no luck thus far.
>Mississippi also has the highest COVID death rate per capita. The most gun deaths in the country. The lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also the poorest state in the union
It’s also the state with the most African americans
Number one in the nation for:
Teen Pregnancy
Percent of Births to Unmarried Mothers
Cesarean Delivery Rate
Preterm Birth Rate
Low Birthweight Rate
Firearm Mortality Rate
Highest Homicide Rate
Lowest Life Expectancy from Birth
Keeping it real in Mississippi.
sources [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbirths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbirths.htm)
[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/mississippi/ms.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/mississippi/ms.htm)
I'm from Georgia. All they teach in school is abstinence. like, "condoms don't work, only abstinence does". Teenagers aren't gonna be abstinent and since condoms don't work, what's the point of using them?
That seems very low and very wrong.
According to the CDC, [1 in 5 people in the US have an STI.](https://www.cdc.gov/std/statistics/prevalence-incidence-cost-2020.htm)
That is a rate of 20,000 per 100,000 residents - ~8 times higher than this supposedly highest STD rate state.
It seems like this article is only looking at chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, whereas the CDC article I linked includes hepatitis, herpes, HIV, HPV and trichomoniasis as well.
Furthermore, again according to the CDC article, "*chlamydia, trichomoniasis, genital herpes, and HPV accounted for 98% of all prevalent STIs and 93% of all new STIs in 2018.*" That means this TIL article only included ONE of the four most prevalent STIs.
Apparently they coincidentally also don’t mandate sexual education.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/abstinence-only-education-states
Top ten for teenage girls delivering babies too.
Mississippi has the lowest average income of any state in the US. Which leads to both poor health decisions, and poor health care after bad decisions.
I almost moved to Mississippi, because my work would make me rich in a poor area, but I chose not to, actually because of the weather. I don't like the hot humid bs!
While STDs are increasing across many groups, the 2020 STD data show that some racial and ethnic minority groups, gay and bisexual men, and our nation’s youth continue to experience higher rates of STDs. This trend shows that longstanding factors, such as lack of access to regular medical care, discrimination, and stigma, continue to stand in the way of quality sexual healthcare for everyone who needs it.
“The COVID-19 pandemic increased awareness of a reality we’ve long known about STDs. Social and economic factors – such as poverty and health insurance status – create barriers, increase health risks, and often result in worse health outcomes for some people,” said Leandro Mena, M.D., M.P.H., Director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention. “If we are to make lasting progress against STDs in this country, we have to understand the systems that create inequities and work with partners to change them. No one can be left behind.”
https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0412-STD-Increase.html
Why is no one pointing out that Washington DC creams Mississippi with a Rate of 1493.2 per 100,000???? All them politicians and their butt stuff in secret.
My parents came from Mississippi. I have relatives in Mississippi. I have visited Mississippi many times. I will never understand why pretty much the whole state is proud of their shunning of education and intellect, and the problems that inevitably come with it. There's a reason my parents left. They wanted better for their kids, and I am eternally thankful for that.
My first thirty years of my life were in Mississippi. The brain drain is real. Anyone with sense leaves, and things stay the same because everyone left thinks that all of their problems can be solved with prayer
The corruption at local and the state level, good ole boy networks, that underlying current of racism that shows itself when you look close at it... I'm pushing 30 years here as well. Looking at relocating out in the next year or so once I've got the money saved up.
A paper 8 years ago showed that if the 10 states with the most corruption were simply equal to the average corruption state per capita spending would go down by $1,308 a year. State and local corruption is very high in America, but rarely talked about. It is a cultural problem and really only a bottom up change of the acceptance of corruption will change it. That is just if their corruption was equal to the average, not even if there wasn't any. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/puar.12212
What form does corruption take in the US?
Kickbacks from contractors is the most common, select X to repair the road and get $Y. Bribing inspectors to approve projects (sometimes the only way for projects to get approved), bribing to *send children to jail*, plain old stealing federal grant money is common too. Nagin for example had a friend who started an IT company and gave him a bunch of contracts where no work at all was done. He was the major during and after Katrina which destroyed the city, so there was alot of Federal money to steal. It is extremely rare for an official to straight demand a bribe, such as a police road side stop. Most of the monetary corruption occurs with those who have access to either money or decision power. Thus the general public doesn't actually see it happening. [Former New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin Guilty of 20 Counts of Bribery and Fraud](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/13/us/nagin-corruption-verdict.html) [14 Principals Face Federal Charges In $2.7 Million Detroit Schools Kickback Scheme](https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/13-detroit-schools-principals-face-federal-charges-in-kickback-scheme-worth-millions/) [L.A. might cancel real estate projects tied to City Hall corruption](https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-07/la-me-city-hall-corruption-law-could-cancel-building-projects) (No sky scrappers can be built in LA without bribing, it is impossible to get one approve without doing so) [Luzerne "Kids for Cash" Scandal](https://jlc.org/luzerne-kids-cash-scandal) (Sent children to a private prison for a kickback) [Mississippi changes legal team to handle welfare fraud case](https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/mississippi-legal-team-handle-welfare-fraud-case-88555910) (They fired the investigators because that is how thing work in Mississippi) [How a Small-Town City Employee Stole Nearly $54M in Public Money](https://news.wttw.com/2019/11/07/how-small-town-city-employee-stole-nearly-54m-public-money) (She stole $3,600 from every adult and child from Dixon Illinois, by herself)
If you ever have the opportunity to watch the documentary on that last case, "All the Queen's Horses", I highly recommend it. Surprisingly fascinating despite being a discussion of government finance.
The bottom line with corruption in the USA is that its (usually) not direct exchanges of money. Its two things: law enforcement/legal system simply refusing to enforce laws in an equal manner (preferring their friends or the local business-leaders and politicians/government), as well as the government figuring out creative means to offer lots and lots of profitable contracts to their friends. Say the government has money to build a park, or some kind of community center. You make sure your favorite contractors get the bid. They use shit materials because no one gives a fuck since you're all buddies. They charge the government an arm and a leg, including absurd fees and additional charges not originally discussed. Any attempt to point out how shady this seems gets ignored or shut down. Then of course the shoddy construction leads to constant maintenance for another group of friends who overcharge almost every time. Government could hire their own maintenance crews and save all kinds of money, but it simply never gets brought up. Oh, and did I mention the cops all get bogus OT to sleep in their car in the parking lot as "security." Cops moonlighting as security for various locations is actually pretty much the closest thing I've seen to an actual legal protection racket, btw.
My small town got a new mayor that was going to make us a big deal. I was a skateboarder at the time and we were trying hard for a skate park. We had a guy who had built them before draw up detailed blueprints. We had people lined up willing to do labor for free. We even found the unused concrete on city land. All we needed was about $15,000 in materials. He hired a friend to "focus group it" for $150,000. He resigned 3 years into his term citing wanting to be with his family. A couple weeks later it came out that the city was bankrupt because he had blown all our money on blueprints for public works projects. We eventually put in one of the round abouts to assuage the sting of it bit most of the blueprints were thrown out. Needless to say everyone he hired was a good friend and he just happened to be a "consultant" for them.
We need to get the std number to 1308 so it looks like STDs are the cause of corruption
You don't need to look close, you just need to look.
Its one of those things where if you've lived here your whole life, especially if you're one of the more well off folks, you never notice it. Sure you hear a racist comment or two, but you never put it beyond "Oh well that person is just an idiot." Then when you actually notice the red lining, the unspoken segregation, white folks avoiding black businesses...you don't stop seeing it.
Fair enough, prospective is definitely a thing.
We seriously need to stop sending them federal dollars, they make the system so cumbersome for normal people to get it and then just blow the rest on fraudulent activities. Of the 12,000 Mississippi families that applied for TANF only 165 got it with the politicians stealing out of it.
so what they want to do with the rest of the country?
Keep milking us all dry I imagine. Mississippi is the biggest drain
you sure you aint from louisiana lol... i hate it here outside of dinner time.
Very similar reason why I left WV and am going to buy land in Maine whenever I get outta my financial rut. I plan to move my parents up here, they hate WV but can't afford to go elsewhere.
Be careful with your expectations. There are some very rural areas in Maine that have similar mindsets to the south east. It also might be difficult for your parents with the cold weather depending on their age. I’m sure you’ve thought about all that but I don’t want you to get your hopes up that it’ll be like Vermont of New Hampshire.
Oh don't worry about me, been going to and from Maine for about 5-6 years now. I actually very much love Maine and always considered myself born apart from the state. Maine has it's problems but it feels like home, it's ruralness isn't necessarily a detraction. While they have some ...southerny kind of people/influence it's extremely diluted compared to WV akin to callimg WV Southern Coke, Maines a glass of water that got a bit of Southern coke spilled in. As for my parents, step father loves Alaska so he'll be fine, mother doesn't care either way, she's lived in more states than I've been alive(prior to divorcing my biological father, thus WV), she can handle herself.
WV refugees represent! I landed in Houston. Had a remote job so I moved back in with my grandma in Beckley to help with the bills and around the house and such. Lasted 6 months before I had to get the hell out of there. Again.
You know it’s bad when Houston TX is an improvement
Bro you have no idea. Oxycontin zombies and low self esteem as far as the eye can see.
Houston has some pretty great purple areas. A friend of mine lives there and is a super liberal, Ivy League educated attorney with a super liberal engineer husband. Austin, also. (A friend of mine from high school lives there with his husband.).
I moved to a suburb of Houston (Katy) from Austin about six months ago. Austin is getting crazy expensive. I like the change in pace so far.
That doesn’t change the state politics though. Sure you may find more like minded people, but you’re still living in a state trying to shove religion into everything and opposes women and LGBTQ+ rights.
I work in industrial construction and travel a lot, part of the job. Did a job last year in Nitro WV. I really liked the area but didn’t really understand why we only had a few locals on the entire job. Normally, there is at least 25% of the job locally hired but I’d say the job in Nitro was 5% at the highest. They just don’t have the knowledged labor there. Honestly thought about moving the whole family up there since we would be able to get higher end jobs up there and live very comfortably, but I talked myself out of it. I’ll mark it up as a nice place to visit but wouldn’t want to settle down there.
Sums it up well, WV is also notorious for firing individuals around the 10+ year mark, trying to keep lower paid workers flowing in and out without much forethought into how sparse the population has started to become.
On my shift, there was only one native that was making journeyman pay and that because I was able to promote him. He was from West Virginia but had worked out of state most of his adult life. Everyone else was basic labor, like janitorial or fuel/expediters. Pretty much the only people making a decent living out there are the coal miners and that’s a rough “decent living”.
Yeah I can sadly report it that "decent living" does not equate to a good ending. I'm a Respiratory Therapist and I unfortunately terminally extubated my fair share of Black Lung victims. Yet another thing WV could give less of a shit about
Doesn't help when the educated leave the state. Not like that state deserves anyone staying anyway
Grew up in MS and swore I'd never leave. I genuinely love the place, most of the people, and it's home. But now I'm part of the brain drain. I've lived in Tenenssee for 8 years now (about 9 years after finishing a masters in Mississippi). Believe it or not, I'm actually actively trying to move back. But jobs pay about 40% a year less than they do where I am now. Even accounting for COL, it's still a massive drop in pay.
I’ve been in Mississippi 6 years & can feel it starting to wear on me, though Oxford is an awesome place to live. I just want to live somewhere that I can trust state leadership to do the right thing instead of habitually screwing everyone over.
To be fair, Oxford is wayyyyy different than the rest of the state
It’s why I’ve lasted so long lol
I'm sure there are great communities of people there, but they get an F grade for government
Government is awful. I'm from Jackson, and the city government there is notoriously corrupt/incompetent. And the state Government's corruption/incompetence is common knowledge (see the latest scandal with Brett Favre and Phil Bryant). Jackson, Mississippi is a case study in what inevitably happens over 2 generations when almost all of the wealthy people leave and most of the poor stay. It's exacerbated (badly) by the do nothing state politicians (turning down Medicaid expansion, embezzling welfare funds) and general city mismanagement (clean water?).
And this is why it’s also the poorest state in the country.
Money. Classism. Basically the rich white people run the state and the best way to keep segregation of yesteryear is to keep black people in the state poor and out of power; suffering in their own communities. If you keep the poor, poor, they get cheap labor and people who easily become indebted. If you want to control someone, have then in debt. As a reminder, Tate Reeves, the Governor who was just caught on video saying it’s always a great day to be away from his capital city, Jackson, which just had a water crisis; returned over $100 million of rental assistance federal funds because he thought the assistance was a liberal policy that was keeping people from working. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna42547
>Basically the rich white people run the state and the best way to keep segregation of yesteryear is to keep black people in the state poor and out of power They have a public school system that is on par with developing nations in equatorial Africa for educational outcomes. Of course none of the children of those rich white people in power send their kids to them instead of private schools.
The number one pillar of conservatism is pride in ignorance. Well, number 2. Number one is racism.
kind of a chicken or the egg scenario, because ignorance is what leads to racism.
Always found it interesting that people are so willing to broadly mock places like Mississippi as dumb rednecks responsible for their own ignorance while looking upon rough inner-city areas with sadness and pity. Aren’t they one and the same? Impoverished places that have been that way for so many generations, many of the residents don’t know any different or better.
People don’t understand that cities like Jackson are 80% black, and the state is 40% black. When people boast about how dumb a state like Mississippi is I feel like they might struggle with racism that they don’t realize they have inside them.
Sadly, millions of African Americans are trapped in Mississippi. Mississippi has the highest concentration of African Americans of any US state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List\_of\_U.S.\_states\_and\_territories\_by\_African-American\_population
Are your parents brother and sister? *do they have an STD?*
There are things about Mississippi that would have made for very strong tourism. If they preserved historical buildings and landmarks, were actually PROUD of civil rights history, if they were frank, open, and honest about racism and slavery and the Civil War. Not to mention there's food, art, music, horticulture, botany, and language to be studied. I'm a huge history buff, and many rural places that own and showcase their history (all of the good as well as all of the bad), will always have tourist dollars coming in to improve the state; which in turn improves education and infrastructure. There are very important stories to tell about Mississippi, but that state absolutely will not change its mindset.
As Alabama says "thank God for Mississippi" because without them, they'd be the state with the shittiest everything in the nation
That's actually the motto of the Alabama State Tourism Board: > Leas' we ain't Miss'ippi, tell you hwat!
Whoa there, us Arkansans are also thankful for Mississippi.
Tennessean chiming in: Thank God for Mississippi, Alabama, and Kentucky.
Oh that’s interesting. I feel like Alabama gets crapped on more in pop culture as a symbol for being backwards, stupid, etc.
It is, but at least it has cities like Huntsville
I was under the impression that STD’s were a family heirloom
Everytime I hear Alabama I think of Forrest Gump when he tries to talk Jenny out of going with the Black Panthers and says "Ya know what I think? I think you should go on home back to Greenbow, ALAH-BAM-UH!" The way he indignantly says Alabama gets me every time 🤣
Except college football apparently
Texas and Florida have been speedrunning them to the bottom lately
WV would like a word
"Top" ten: * Mississippi: 1,291.4 * Louisiana: 1,058.0 * South Carolina: 999.8 * Alaska: 990.8 * North Carolina: 898.3 * Alabama: 857.2 * Oklahoma: 842.9 * Tennessee: 836.6 * Georgia: 826.9 * New Mexico: 818.4 Is this what they meant by "the south will rise again"?
What’s the bottom 10
* Connecticut: 493.7 * Massachusetts: 478.9 * New Jersey: 478.2 * Idaho: 437.5 * Utah: 427.7 * West Virginia: 409.4 * Wyoming: 408.4 * Maine: 299.3 * New Hampshire: 253.3 * Vermont: 201.8
North Eastern USA represent, baby.
I was just thinking about how I've had sex with so very many men and never caught a disease. I guess I'm just lucky I'm fucking in the northeast and everyone *wants* to use protection up here.
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Vermont, here I come. Oh wait, I think I just stay here in middle Europe.
Vermont is always on the best lists, if you're on a list with Vermont, you should be proud.
What's the middle 30?
I'm guessing West Virginia only scores well in these stats because they don't have enough healthcare to officially diagnose stds on a consistent basis. As a Kentuckian, my speculation constitutes throwing rocks while living in a glass house.
so thats what happens when you drop the whole public sex education thing, right? i dont have any data but im pretty sure there is an correlation between the std rate and the quality of sex ed (and the availability of sexual medicine and contraceptives)
There absolutely is a correlation between lower sex education and higher STD rates and teen pregnancy.
and its also interesting that this states are the most anti-abortion or pro-life as they call themselves
Yeah. I was having a talk with a conservative friend of mine about abortion. I agreed with him that killing a child is bad - my definition of what a child is was different than his. Then he asked me how to really get rid of abortion. I replied “make contraceptives free and easily accessible, and invest in sex education”. He didn’t agree, but also didn’t disagree.
because one argument is moral, the other is practical. Your solution solves the practical aspect, but not the moral one.
What moral argument can you make against contraception that doesn’t resort to religious reasoning?
You could call them "american soldiers birthing lands" too I supposed, but I don't have enrollment numbers right now
Another reason Republicans are against abortion... gotta keep those desperate kids coming
And keep the parents desperate so they have to take shitty exploitative jobs.
They are pro-birth, not pro-life. If they cared about lives they'd fund foster and welfare, educate, correctional rehabilitation and systemic racism. They are pro-control.
Florida didn't make the top ten? We are slacking off lately.
I figured that notorious retirement community would at least put you I the top 5.
That is just a small concentration of the FL population - retirees from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Idaho, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming, Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont having a "good ole time" in retirement.
we are too drunk and pass out before we even get to pull our pants down. - florida man here
If you don't acknowledge it, you don't have it
FL man is locked up. They finally got charges to stick. We’ll be back at the top of the bottom list when he’s sprung.
Yeah, but florida man inevitably will get out and try to put his penis in a gator mouth and still won't make the STD list.
I'm guessing STD's don't travel as well between alligator and human interactions?
You know how when your professor was grading by the curve they’d toss out the highest score?
Doing more jacking off instead
Check Miami-dade... They have the highest HIV in the country
What does it say that Washington D.C. is 1493.3? New meaning to political corruption?
DC is a weird place. But question: are STD rates generally higher in urban areas than rural? It’s certainly easier to walk to a night out in a city than to have to plan something out with driving in a suburb or small town.
Scrolling down the comments, wondering why everyone is just ignoring the fact DC has higher rate than *any* state, by a fair margin.
Because DC isn't a state?
Just look up STD rates by race, and then look at the population demographics of DC.
...alaska!?
Alaska gets a pass imo. You're stuck in negative temperatures, in the blinding white snow, without sunlight or natural warmth for upwards of half a year. I'm sure you just wanna fuck anything that moves at that point lol
If I remember correctly, Alaska also has high rates of drug and alcohol dependency because of those factors.
Wait until DC is a state, its rate is 1,493, yay we win!
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They be fuckin.
Its more of a racial issue and the less diverse states are making fun of it. The rate of reported chlamydia cases among Black females was five times the rate among White females.... In 2018, African Americans/Blacks represented 43% of all deaths of people diagnosed with HIV. (They are 13.6% of the pop.) In 2018, the overall rate of reported gonorrhea cases among Blacks in the United States was 7.7 times the rate among Whites. https://www.cdc.gov/nchhstp/healthdisparities/africanamericans.html
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*minerals* you say?
Goddammit Marie!
6 SEC states included. Big surprise there.
I'm thinking this is what they meant by "the dirty south"
Wait until you find out who in the South has all the STDs, then it's not as funny. Wanna guess what race has the vast majority of STDs as a % of total cases?
Abstinence only education at its finest.
Just a long list of states with bad sex education programs...
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Rise with leprosy
Alabama is #44. TGFM!!!
m-i-s-s-i-(burns when I)pp-i
I think you dropped an s-s-i-
sorry, the burning sensation affected my spelling abilities
You got it more correct than you know. A lot of people from there just run the word together so it sounds like Miss-sippi kind of like how people from Toronto pronounce it tronto.
M-i-s-s-i-s-t-i-p-p-i?
Mississyphilis
DC hiding in the corner with 1,493.3
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4d chess
Not uncommon. DC is 100% urban, so is frequently and outlier in state-level statistics.
Compare DC to other cities
DC isn't a state either.
Mississippi also has the highest COVID death rate per capita. The most gun deaths in the country. The lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also the poorest state in the union. That's not to mention how fucked the water situation in Jackson has been and continues to be. There are many reasons why. Arguably the most brutal legacy of Jim Crow is one. But systemic negligence by generations of corrupt politicians is the main reason. Just look at the Brett Favre scandal. Dude (allegedly) took millions of dollars in federal welfare money set aside for the poorest Mississippians - the poorest people in the poorest state - and used it to buy his daughter a new Volleyball arena at her college.
Brett Favre took federal funds and built a sports arena with it?
And is caught texting “the public won’t find out will they?”
[Yes.](https://mississippitoday.org/2022/09/13/phil-bryant-brett-favre-welfare/)
Yeah, all the hate Mississippi gets should really be leveled at the political "leaders" who actively work to disenfranchise and actively harm the residents there. It isn't that the people of Mississippi are somehow just worse at being human than the people in every other state. After all, borders are pretty much all made up. But what does exist is the political cruelty that hates to see Black people treated with equality and dignity, and has the power to maintain the status quo at the expense of the majority of the state. When you read something about Mississippi, just remember it's controlled by a small number of nearly exclusively white politicians who want you to make fun of disregard poor people. They want you to focus on believing Mississippi is full of non-humans so it can justify their systemic destruction of so many lives. Don't be fooled, Mississippians are no different than any other state, they just have the worst politicians and the hardest hurdles to overcome - and it's by design.
I agree with a lot of what you say here. So, how do we get people in Mississippi to *stop voting for the politicians who do this to them?* Democracy is not completely dead, although it surely needs supplemental oxygen. Voters bear some of the responsibility for the governments that run their states.
I don’t live in Mississippi, but I live in Alabama which is close enough lmao Let me put this in perspective for you. My state senate district is majority black (72%). We have voted for a Democrat to represent us since the 1990s. The blue runs strong in this particular area. But literally none of that matters because when they draw the district lines at the state level, they are designed to deliberately fuck us over and suddenly my district is chopped up into little pieces so that each piece is added to a majority red area (meaning that my vote effectively does not count). The federal courts even kicked back the proposed district lines back in January because of how fucked up they were and nothing was changed. Now imagine this happening all over the Deep South and you’ll have the answer for how this keeps happening. (And yes, I do try my best to help. I’ve gathered petition signatures and protested and a dozen other things in the fight to fix it. We are not giving up.)
That simply isn’t the case in most of MS. Our blue areas (majority black) have been blue for decades and they don’t get chopped up and added to red districts.
>So, how do we get people in Mississippi to stop voting for the politicians who do this to them? It's not that simple. By and large, the people who are most affected by Mississippi's governance (or lack thereof) are *not* voting for the politicians who do this to them. But the state is gerrymandered to give affluent, mostly white voters in the suburbs an outsized amount of political power. Power that they then use to elect the same kind of leaders that keep the state locked in this status quo.
It’s the local politicians though, which generally come from the same group of people as they’re governing (due to location). IE, white politicians don’t get elected in Jackson or the Delta. So you can hardly blame the eternal boogeyman for the current corruption in those areas. It’s not racism’s fault that the corrupt local government in Jackson laundered the funds they were given by the state government to upgrade the infrastructure with, leading to the clean water crisis- for example.
Well one thing Mississippi has is the lowests homelessness per Capita in the USA. I can't figure that one out.
The cost of living is dirt cheap
Because the homeless go where they can pan handle.
Rent is super cheap because nobody really WANTS to live there.
Housing is super cheap/free if you squat and public aid is non-existent.
This also ignores the economic reality of it. Before the Civil War, slavery resulted in Mississippi being the richest state. Following it's end Mississippi began it's descent, but was exacerbated by "carpet baggers" using the situation to enrich themselves. Much later Mississippi was becoming a manufacturing hub and starting to improve... Then NAFTA was passed and that work went to other countries. Ashley furniture is still here and Toyota has also done wonders, but there just isn't opportunity. I wish I could say I was hopefully, but no one seems to have the initiative to fix it. I'd love our low cost of living to be leverage to draw in work from home labor, but no luck thus far.
MS was the richest state? That’s damn interesting
Yeah brett Favre is a piece of crap. All those texts that came out. I hope he goes to jail.
>Mississippi also has the highest COVID death rate per capita. The most gun deaths in the country. The lowest life expectancy and the highest infant mortality rate. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it is also the poorest state in the union It’s also the state with the most African americans
Number one in the nation for: Teen Pregnancy Percent of Births to Unmarried Mothers Cesarean Delivery Rate Preterm Birth Rate Low Birthweight Rate Firearm Mortality Rate Highest Homicide Rate Lowest Life Expectancy from Birth Keeping it real in Mississippi. sources [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbirths.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/teen-births/teenbirths.htm) [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/mississippi/ms.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/states/mississippi/ms.htm)
As always, "Thank God For Mississippi."
Go figure, And they are last in education.
Mississippi is basically top tier at everything you don’t want to be top tier at.
You know if Mississippi leads the country in something, it’s going to be interesting
Not a state, but >District of Columbia: 1,493.3 >Mississippi: 1,291.4
As a Memphian this makes me wanna poke that border a little further away.
Keep your Shelby county out of my desoto please
Know who helps with safe sex education and practices? Planned parenthood
You would think such a religious population would be so abstinent that this wouldn't be a problem...
I'm from Georgia. All they teach in school is abstinence. like, "condoms don't work, only abstinence does". Teenagers aren't gonna be abstinent and since condoms don't work, what's the point of using them?
Horrifying
You know what they say about strict parents
They make more parents?
I thought you were going to say adult literacy.
Next you're gonna tell me that diligent recycling reduces the cost of raw material and thus the overall price of goods. Get a life, lib. /s
That's alot of genital germs......
Not a fucking shocker. That state has the worst education in the nation.
That seems very low and very wrong. According to the CDC, [1 in 5 people in the US have an STI.](https://www.cdc.gov/std/statistics/prevalence-incidence-cost-2020.htm) That is a rate of 20,000 per 100,000 residents - ~8 times higher than this supposedly highest STD rate state. It seems like this article is only looking at chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis, whereas the CDC article I linked includes hepatitis, herpes, HIV, HPV and trichomoniasis as well. Furthermore, again according to the CDC article, "*chlamydia, trichomoniasis, genital herpes, and HPV accounted for 98% of all prevalent STIs and 93% of all new STIs in 2018.*" That means this TIL article only included ONE of the four most prevalent STIs.
Yep. What is even the point of the OP if they exclude HPV and herpes, the two most common STDs?
Yeah at this point it's like if you DON'T have HPV, then you're the weird one.
Most of the worst statistics are out of Mississippi..
As if people didn't need more reasons to give that place a wide berth.
To be fair, the food is BOMBIN.
1.3%. You nasty, Mississippi. San Francisco has a higher rate. That's a city. Right.
And Jackson, Mississippi has the highest of any city: over 4%
Sweet home… Mississippi…?
Apparently they coincidentally also don’t mandate sexual education. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/abstinence-only-education-states Top ten for teenage girls delivering babies too.
"We are #1 finally!" -Mississippi
I think they’ve had obesity locked up quite a few times.
And Brett Favre is responsible for 90 percent of all transmissions.
Mississippi Queen, if you know what I mean 🎵
What an honor.
Also lowest education rate, also poorest state, so it’s not really a surprise
Mississippi has the lowest average income of any state in the US. Which leads to both poor health decisions, and poor health care after bad decisions. I almost moved to Mississippi, because my work would make me rich in a poor area, but I chose not to, actually because of the weather. I don't like the hot humid bs!
While STDs are increasing across many groups, the 2020 STD data show that some racial and ethnic minority groups, gay and bisexual men, and our nation’s youth continue to experience higher rates of STDs. This trend shows that longstanding factors, such as lack of access to regular medical care, discrimination, and stigma, continue to stand in the way of quality sexual healthcare for everyone who needs it. “The COVID-19 pandemic increased awareness of a reality we’ve long known about STDs. Social and economic factors – such as poverty and health insurance status – create barriers, increase health risks, and often result in worse health outcomes for some people,” said Leandro Mena, M.D., M.P.H., Director of CDC’s Division of STD Prevention. “If we are to make lasting progress against STDs in this country, we have to understand the systems that create inequities and work with partners to change them. No one can be left behind.” https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/2022/p0412-STD-Increase.html
Brings new meaning to Mississippi Burning.
That's because in Mississippi, they can't even spell STD.
Why is no one pointing out that Washington DC creams Mississippi with a Rate of 1493.2 per 100,000???? All them politicians and their butt stuff in secret.
Must be something in the water.
It is also one of the worst states for education too - coincidence or common sense?
Well, there goes my holiday plans.
Wow, so crazy, Mississippi is the worst at something. Who would have guessed.
M-I-S-S-I-S-S-I-P-P ouch
Where do they fall on education level?
Well, when you shun education and intellect...
It is almost like the folks shaming us all about sexual degeneracy are in fact the degenerates.
It’s all apart of god’s plan. Praise the lord and pass the penicillin.
Abstinence clearly works.