There is also an environmental/industrialisation angle (the ideal of ruralised life in Florida and the reality of ersatz parades and lawns).
This is way apart from your point and so I’m sorry, but Florida has a really interesting dynamic, where conservationists and ranchers have teamed up against urban/suburban development.
Florida has a huge influx of people (1000/day, they say), and is a very hot market for developers. Ranchers tend to preserve Florida as at least it was since the Spanish arrived 500 years ago and started herding cattle there. The open spaces can still hold a lot of biodiversity and provide some important ecosystem services (especially regarding water filtration and runoff) for the population. Thus, ranchers and environmentalists have teamed up.
This unlikely association (tending to fall on opposite sides of heated debates elsewhere) formed a coalition that effectively advocated for a long time for the Florida Wildlife Corridor to be signed into law, which it finally was last year.
As a blue tribe biologist whose forays across the United States often lead into red tribe lands, Florida conservation issues were the place where I saw most blue-red cooperation of anywhere I’ve been. Working alongside cowboys and wealthy city conservatives buying ranches to hold them against development to be part of the FWC, a very bold conservation proposal (biggest conservation corridor in the country) made by blue tribe conservationists, negotiated with red tribe ranchers, and signed into law by a conservative government, it was an interesting dynamic.
An article on this:
https://www.yesmagazine.org/environment/2020/09/11/florida-ranch-habitat-conservation
quotes were in $16-20k range
How is that possible?
It’s just an air conditioner?
(Although to be fair I’ve never bought an air conditioning system either and don’t know how much they cost).
Jesweez
2yr ago
I think the day is approaching where you won’t be able to tell if anyone you’re interacting with online is even real or not, and I hope when that happens I’ll just be fed up enough to put it all aside and just stop even coming online to see what people have to say anymore.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them.
It’s important to remember that the internet is a machine that takes the most hostile and unlikeable things that anybody in our outgroup has done and delivers them to our eyeballs on a daily basis.
So people on the left get a feed of angry Trumpers and religious wackos doing regrettable things in public, meanwhile you are being fed angry protesters and the most extreme things that people in your outgroup have done or said.
Jesweez
2yr ago
I think the drugs vs rape/pedo stuff makes sense.
People on those drug forums at least teach each other harm reduction techniques and are usually positive and supportive for those who say they want to quit.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Also it seems opposite of the thrive survive model that Scott posits. (Which I think better explains more of those unmentioned issues you bring up)
Jesweez
2yr ago
Wouldn’t you be worried about your ethnic group being subordinate to the one that wins the power contest?
Jesweez
2yr ago
America's credibility in foreign policy was never lower (in the 21st century) than the start of 2022.
I mean, the whole lying to our allies about WMDs was probably a much bigger credibility blow.
Even now Putin uses Iraq rhetorically as precedent for aggressive invasions.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Sure, but I think those traditional values are actually the remnants of an older monoculture that was steamrolling everything, and the left was so successful in usurping it that they stumbled into the position of becoming the new monoculture.
It’s always been an awkward position for the left, they’re temperamentally suited to fighting the power structure and so things got weird when they suddenly became it.
I don’t think these are great counterpoints as, LatAm is one of the most ethnically diverse places of the world, and it’s definitely true that people structure the cities there based on fleeing from crime.
But there may be something in what you mention about the idea of fleeing cities, in the US, city cores became the crime ridden parts, whereas in LatAm, the outskirts are typically more dangerous and the city center is more clean and well kept.
That’s probably part of it. But in my opinion, car culture is the biggest factor here. Here in the US we went all in on designing everything around the car, and it upended basic communal life in my opinion.
I don’t know about this.
I see far more families out on the street hanging out and just generally enjoying life in Latin America (where crime is much higher) than I do in the United States. It’s always the top thing I notice traveling between these two.
Latin American streets are full of life. Full of families, tons of children running around, events, gatherings, all manner of activity. US streets are quiet, dead, there’s nobody around, and even just walking around is shunned.
I also noticed that this affects my mental well-being a lot, and it’s the main reason my political persuasion is basically an urbanist in the way Noah describes.
Jesweez
2yr ago
And yet that freedom has eroded the very foundations of the community and turned society into an atomized and compartmentalized expanse of boring sameness.
Jesweez
2yr ago
The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging. There needs to be places for people to meet, small businesses and room for local culture
The traditional city in one of the cores of global power is also a multicultural hodgepodge. There’s nothing new under the sun.
I mean, it’s cultural diversity.
It’s previously been a conservative impulse to destroy indigenous cultures by integrating them into the ‘correct’ belief system (here: the church). This occurred across Europe and N and S America.
Isn’t it conservatives who want people in nations to have one culture and not several?
Jesweez
2yr ago
That’s just life in cities. Always has been like that. Come hang out in the city and you’ll find yourself shoulder to shoulder with 13 different ethnicities, and Socrates and his gang of kids will come bother you about why you follow the weird old traditions. At least if you’re in a city where people are pulled to want to come to, that’s how it goes.
I don’t really think there’s anything new here.
Jesweez
2yr ago
when a lot of opposition to Israel (especially on the left) is in fact motivated by antisemitism.
Wait, really?
I could see that opposition to Israel is motivated by anti semitism among Arabs or something like this. But since when is the left anti-Semitic, I’ve never seen that?
Jesweez
2yr ago
Just to try and solve the scenario in your post.
It could be that everyone gets a certain amount of credits monthly, which is enough to cover your needs and ask the AI terminal for a PS5 every now and then, but not enough for exorbitant purchase requests.
Next, you can engage in economic activity on top of this basic economy however you like, so if you want more you can work for it.
This is a good post, although I think you’re going to face pushback on that conformist name.
The conformists seem to be the ones who keep “not-conforming” to the structures of their day?
Then once they do create an alternative belief structure, historically those beliefs tend to splinter into a million little factions and flavors. E.g. Protestantism and socialism.
Jesweez
2yr ago
Also, the US is a society that took individualism and atomization to the extreme. We have the tradition that your children leave and go build a separate life on their own.
Under this model, when you’re old, your children usually don’t have the time or frankly desire to come spend tons of time with you and help you out. They’ve got their own life to worry about.
It’s not like Mediterranean countries where the multigenerational family lives together, the nuclear family is about parents and their kids and everything else is peripheral.
Thus, retirees in the US find a social support network elsewhere.
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