[ltbarcly3]

As someone who lives in Mississippi, I'm beyond tired of the generally insulting and dismissive way this entire region is treated, usually by people who have never even been here.

The graph showing that Russia is neck and neck with Alabama for total US patents granted is absurd and stupid. It doesn't illustrate anything, it's purely there to get in a "Russia is as bad as Alabama!" graphic. They even include the following text which shows how intentional this was:

> Alabama has creditable research centers, of course—the Hunstville aerospace complex and the University of Alabama network among them. But Russia’s population was almost 30 times larger than Alabama’s in 2020.

Great, so Alabama has 30x the per capita patents in a patent system that is foreign to Russia? How many Russian patents does New York have each year? What is even the point of this graphic? Every other graphic is using the correct units (per capita, median, etc) except this one, it's just there to put Russia next to Alabama, because Alabama is "so terrible". The graphic is literally "how many foreign patents does arbitrary region A have compared to how many domestic patents these other arbitrary regions have, not normalizing for anything".

I would like to see how many rocket scientists there are per capita in in Alabama and Russia compared to other regions of the world, but that might not tell the story they want to tell.

Edit: I went to find the answer, and New Mexico and Alabama crush all statistics in terms of per-capita Aerospace Engineers. However, and this is just usual, when you go to https://cambridgedb.com/which-state-employs-the-most-people-... the answer to 'Where the most Aerospace Jobs are located" shows the wrong graphic to make California look good. The graphic was lifted from https://www.bls.gov/oes/2022/may/oes172011.htm, where the correct graphics are the first two on the page, which apparently they scrolled past to steal the one that doesn't address the question they are using it to illustrate the answer to.

[gibbitz]

I took this to be more about Alabama having 1/30th the population and a similar number of patents. The Soviet Union was 1/6th of the Earth and Alabama is less than 1/100th the size. If rural bias were to be involved in the choice here it would be to suggest that what those with the bias think of as underpopulated or backwater is more vibrant populus and intelligent than the largest part of the country formerly known as the country vilified as super scientists during the cold war.

To your point, Alabama was chosen to make that point because the numbers are contrary to that stereotype. The stereotype is not fair (they rarely are). But there's another way to look at this.

All of the American South was delt a hard blow in the Civil War and rebuilding afterwards as well as the subsequent industrialization and the fall of cotton, the dustbowl and then the fall of manufacturing has been hard on that region as well. Russia emerged from the end of the Cold War having faced a similar war of attrition but for them this started not long after the end of their own Civil War and a World War. In the same period of time those people met many more hardships but to come out into capitalism only to have oligarchs steal the country's wealth and resources puts them far behind even what Americans could see as an unfortunate part of our own country with similar hardships.

[watwut]

> All of the American South was delt a hard blow in the Civil War

I mean, that is one way to describe the end of slavery. Surely we can say rather large subset got better off despite repeated violent attempts to prevent improvement in their lives.

[ltbarcly3]

Of course it's better to be poor, uneducated, and free than it is to be poor, uneducated, and a slave. It's not even comparable. However, it's better still to have access to education and economic opportunity. Laughing at the south for being poor and uneducated is literally laughing at the descendants of slaves for being uneducated and poor.

Glib comments about 'the end of slavery' miss the point completely. The south isn't the great great grandchildren of plantation owners complaining about being poor and suffering the consequences of the Civil War. Those people are doing quite well, look at how good the schools are in the rich, almost entirely white suburbs of Jackson, Mississippi - a city where you can't drink the tap water.