I completely agree. I suppose we should be able to make the dense places denser (if people living there want that) without requiring density, or even worse, making wide-open spaces into people boxes.

The tourists can go fuck themselves, I want it pretty for me and mine.

> Allowing suburban sprawl in open areas will make Vermont look like NJ or Raleigh NC.

Makes sense that our legislators would want that, since most of them are from places like those. (yuk yuk)

> We need to stop living in the days gone by where Vermont can be majority single-family homes and wide open spaces

I agree about the single-family homes, but we absolutely must keep the wide-open spaces.

I know what woke people say it means. I have a white-collar job - it's impossible not to know.

That's why I know woko haram types have been calling for segregated "spaces" (to use their lingo) for a long time: school classes and clubs grouped by race, places at work or in public where certain races are excluded, etc. And yes, I've heard plenty of calls for segregated police forces, always proposed and defended on woke grounds.

We had a racially-biased covid vaccine program in this state FFS, despite no evidence that race made a difference to one's susceptibility to covid, and tons of evidence that class accounted for most of one's risk. Which should be obvious to sane people: a black software engineer (say) with a cushy WFH job was at much less risk than a Hispanic (for example) cashier who couldn't afford to stay home and had to go to work and get coughed on by obnoxious customers.

So yeah, I know. If proposing segregation sounds racist, it's because it is. An easy fix is to stop proposing segregation. The goal of woko haram ideology is to prevent working people of all races from coming together to fight for things that would benefit all of us: healthcare, livable wages, safe work, action on the climate catastrophe, etc etc etc.

> Chris Viens is running for another term on the Waterbury Selectboard, where he currently serves as vice chair — having resigned as chair in November 2020 after suggesting, at a public event, that maybe we should segregate the police so we could, you know, have Black cops police Black people and white cops watch over The Rest Of Us.

To be fair, favoring this sort of segregation is a fairly standard woke position.

> Sounds like he can actually get some shit done in this role.

Like what? I read the article and didn't get much of a sense of that.

Fundamentally, the Dems won't let Bernie have any power that he could use to do something for regular people, like any step toward universal health care.

Will Bernie be able to use this role to stop the Medicare privatization that began under Trump and that Biden accelerated? Don't bet on it.

> Ignores proof.

I did say TIL.

> Blames the gov’t.

Sorry-not-sorry: the government's decades-long history of infiltrating and instigating right-wing groups in order to create fear and advance the interests of the ruling (billionaire) class has made me skeptical of the real threat posed by two yokels with a plan to "destroy [a huge city]". From Operation Gladio in Europe, to all the Muslim teenagers entrapped via fake plots during the GWB and Obama years, to the January 6 rubes being thoroughly infiltrated by provocateurs (3 of 4 top Proud Boy leaders were FBI agents or informants, the lead guy they just convicted had been working with the FBI for ~10 years, etc etc), the pattern is clear.

Every major anti-globalization protest in the early 2000s had violence instigated by federal and state provocateurs. I was in Montreal when some of us actually caught some police provocateurs. (The cops later admitted it). Now they mostly just use identity politics to derail the left: "we want healthcare for all!" "what about purple lesbians in wheelchairs! Medicare for All is racist!"

Huh, that's really odd. The media doesn't usually miss a chance to present a story with an obvious red team/blue team angle, and this is teed right up for them. Anything but healthcare, I guess.

Huh, TIL. This whole thing feels like it glows, but time will tell.

> Which one?

Any of them, really. And yeah, I remember hearing about some in CA in the early 2010s.

The most I heard about the recent one down south (the Carolinas maybe?) was that someone tweeted something about not liking drag queen story hour around the same time as the substations were damaged. I just wondered if there was ever more of a connection than that. Shrug.

> Similar to the domestic terrorists who are shooting and trying to destroy our power grid.

Has there been any proof of who did that? I wouldn't put anything past rightoid yahoos, but I've only heard supposition so far. Maybe I missed something.

The schools have a strong incentive to CYA - who would want to be the one who ignored the one-in-a-million real threat? - and no incentive to not scare kids needlessly. This in turn creates a strong incentive for every anon or crank with a 3-line python script to spam out these robocalls. It's the same reason swattings happen: no matter how many innocent people the cops shoot, or how many babies they severely burn in their cribs with flashbangs, they have the same incentive to CYA and act on every implausible, anonymous TTY message.

> but we need to figure out a way to stamp this shit out

Right on. Stopping automated phone calls, or just not accepting them as a pretense for lockdowns and SWAT raids would go along way. Just having to actually call, expose your caller ID, and speak (with your actual voice!) would stop 99.999% of cranks cold.

Longer term, we should seek to change the material conditions which breed the sort of bleak nihilists that call in bomb threats (or worse). That's unlikely to happen, because asking why people's lives are so precarious, lonely, alienated and hopeless that they'd act out anti-socially inevitably leads back to our cruel economic system, and profits for the billionaire-pedo-island-class must be preserved at all costs. Expect lots of band-aid approaches and blaming identity groups (men/Muslims/xyz category) instead.

What would you say are the most racist parts of VT?

I mean, what /u/anusty said is at least plausible. People with skeletons in their closets are often quick to go on the attack, to direct scrutiny away from themselves. Like all the "male feminists" who turn out to be sex pests. And a 5-second glance at /r/ShitLibSafari shows there's plenty of racist attitudes among the woko haram/VPR-tote-bag crowd.

Imagining flatlander airbnb ski ghouls choking on carcinogenic smoke from a burning car feels pretty great.

The way to get there is to go for a total ban, or something even more extreme, and then "settle" for less.

This is why the message that uniting based on class is racist is pushed so hard. (And identity politics generally.) The wealthy people running the country and the state really, really, don't want regular working people of all stripes uniting to advance their common economic interests.

If there is ever a credible threat to AirBNBs in this state, expect countless articles and VPR "explainers" about how wanting affordable housing for regular people is actually racist. It's happened so many times before, like when Coca Cola paid the NAACP to say taxes on sugary drinks were racist.

I know, imagine all those poor flatlanders breathing the fumes! Just awful!

Any housing we build would be bought by the people and entities currently buying it: out-of-state gentrifiers, third home-owners, airbnb speculators, and private equity ghouls. It certainly wouldn't be bought by the people I know who are currently getting priced out of their rentals.

Building housing could be a good idea if we guaranteed, or at least incentivized, its use by regular Vermonters who need places to live. We could do that, but our leadership won't. They want poor Vermonters out.

Thanks so much for making this! Now I have an easy reference of where to avoid!

Someone make a minecraft mod where ISIS is given this map.

> Do you see more regulation of short-term as part of a solution?

Sure, but that's the most piddly compromise anyone should even think about accepting. That you're asking about "regulation" shows how near your horizon is; I suspect a small-L-liberal world is all you can conceive of. I want a country organized around ensuring regular people's needs first and foremost, instead of now, where the priority is maximum profits for a tiny group of oligarchs. I want vacation homes past the first, and non-owner-occupied AirBnbs expropriated by force - really make an example of people, put some fear into them. The recent bill to ban AirBnbs that weren't owner-occupied for 60-70% of the year was a tiny, hesitant step in the right direction, but even that got killed instantly. (Assuming there was ever any serious intent behind it; knowing the sponsor, Rep Kornheiser, I'm not so sure.)

> What other stories/reporting do you want represented in this episode?

Why are you asking me instead of whatever billionaire's "foundation" is funding public radio this week?

I can't wait for you to provide some "nuance" or "complexity" and explain to regular Vermonters getting priced out of their home state that parasitic rent-seekers have nothing to do with it. Or maybe, "it's not happening, but if it is, it's a good thing!"

I know a few working-class families living in cold houses right now because that's all they can afford. One family lives in an apartment with only one heat pump for heat that shuts off when it's 40F outside. Another recently had to move after getting carbon monoxide poisoning from an unvented furnace in the cellar that the landlord knew about and refused to fix. That's illegal! You might say. Maybe it is, but that doesn't matter if you don't have money enough for a lawyer, or if people who might be able to help (a tenant's union in this case!) don't care because you look poor.

I don't expect you to cover any issues like that. After all, the class of people listening to and funding VPR are (by and large) either rent-seekers themselves, or not harmed too much by the current housing crisis.

PS: Before anyone asks, no, just building more houses won't fix it. If we did, who would buy them? Certainly not the people who can't even afford a place with working heat. It would just be more of the same: wealthy third-home-owners, speculators, and private equity ghouls.

There's always an excuse. "Nothing will fundamentally change," indeed.

> It's not just Williston. You can thank Louis DeJoy, the orange man for appointing him, and the decades of Republicans in Congress trying to privatize the post office by saddling it with debt. This has been their goal for years and it's now really affecting on the ground deliveries.

The Dems definitely fixed all that when they got the legislature and the presidency after orange man, right?