[stonogo]

You're conflating two different topics. One is the overall thread topic, the study where people with strong accents -- NOT just southern ones -- receive lower wage offers. The other is media portrayal of the south in general, which is what I was responding to. I explicitly said it was bad that people associate possession of a Southern accent with subscription to the despicable politics that are at play in the South. I also said that the media portrayal of the South as full of extreme right-wing politics, racism, and xenophobia was largely accurate, because the powers that be in the south subscribe to them, and they're voted in by the populace. Does that mean they are unanimously supported? No, but that didn't stop you from making bad assumptions about my intent. The fact is that the parts of the country where these things prevail in politics is also the part of the country where Southern accents are common. There is no causative relationship between these two facts. I'm not "implying" anything; I'm saying that people should not be judged by their accents AND media portrayal of the south as politically backwards is accurate ... and these two things can both be true. It's part of the guidelines of this site to avoid going out of your way to make bad-faith interpretations of posts here, and this pointless exchange is why.

I assume the Reddit reference is some kind of an attempt at a burn that would make sense to extremely online people, but since I don't really read Reddit I'm not going to bother to figure out what the hell you're talking about there.