bolido_sentimental
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User ID: 205
I live nearby and can say, in support of your first point: Springfield, Ohio was already totally fucked, and therefore it's a great place to put migrants. It is a quintessential Rust Belt city that was hollowed out by deindustrialization; it is a satellite of Dayton, which is even worse off.
This is happening much more widely even than what is reported on. Down the street from me, the village of Lockland was gutted by the closure of the original Stearns & Foster mattress factory in the early 2000s (along with many industrial closures for decades prior, and even the closure of the original Miami & Erie Canal in the 1910s... Lockland is a hard-luck place); it is now being resettled by Mauritanians, with the enthusiastic support of local NGOs.
I guess for the record, Mauritanians that I have met have been nice to me personally, and I am not aware of them making particular problems for everyone; but it is also true that they have concentrated in one neighborhood and turned it into Little Mauritania. I suppose it's better than the building sitting empty as they had done previously; but I wish that my own culture had simply stayed there and built new things after the factories closed, instead of decamping to distant commuter towns like Mason. Easy for me to say, I suppose.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
That is a remarkable historical fact. Going through this list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_emperors
As you say, damn near every single one had a reign ending in their death, with a definite majority of those being violent death.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
How do you cope with the idea that you or your loved ones might not go gently?
I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently. My fiancee basically lost her entire 20s having to be a stay-home caretaker for her grandmother, who had (and has) Alzheimer's. While she frames it as a choice that she was happy to make, from talking to her family, I really get the impression that she was basically the one who was sacrificed so that nobody else would have to address the situation. Honestly - I think it's an atrocity, and I can't listen to her talk about those years without boiling up with anger.
I love my parents, and when they get to that point, I want them to be safe and well cared-for; however, I'm not going to value their wellbeing above the wellbeing of the other members of my family. I grasp that there will be sacrifices to make, but the rest of us deserve a chance to live too. Furthermore, I don't see that any of the adults on either side of my family are making the appropriate preparations for their old age, and I intend to defend my nuclear family from potential consequences of this.
I am aware that my attitude about this is very hard and negative these days, and it may soften with time. I can't say I have a specific plan. I try to cultivate my material prosperity and physical strength all the time, because I think I will end up needing them.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
These are called filial responsibility laws, and they also exist in America. An interesting effortpost could be made by someone investigating the extent to which they are enforced here - something Wikipedia is kind of vague about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filial_responsibility_laws?wprov=sfla1
I think about the topic of bad drivers a lot - I think it is absolutely a systemic issue, in American society anyway. Cyclists are perhaps uniquely vulnerable to the things bad drivers do, but of course pedestrians and other drivers are affected as well.
I have the sense - entirely subjective, backed by no data admittedly - that the problem is less with driving ability and more with driving decision-making. That is to say: driving tests are testing for things like the ability to handle the car properly, and the ability to follow the rules of the road. However, the dangerous situations I see on the road are commonly not caused by people who can't drive the car safely, but people who don't do so for other reasons: they are impatient, they don't care about the safety of other drivers, they are drunk or high, or they are looking at their phone instead of the road. The guy that killed the Gaudreaus is a great example; he was drunk but I see this happen often. It's illegal to pass on the shoulder, and in instances like this there's no need to. You can always wait until you have room to pass legally, but dude decided that that didn't apply to him.
Just as a related thought, not tied exactly to your point, but I also subjectively feel like since the advent of smartphones, the quality of driving has dropped sharply; and I wonder if this is supported by evidence. I don't know if there's anyone tracking the frequency of, for example, someone failing to turn left when they get the left-turn arrow, because they're watching their phone instead of the light; and how many quality life-minutes that's costing society.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
Pine Bluff, AR is pretty rough, but probably not that much worse than Jackson, MS or other similar places in the South. I frankly thought immediately of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, which is definitely a bitterly poor place that I've heard of as being uniquely bad.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Ridge_Indian_Reservation#Social_issues_and_economy
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
This is a good point that I had not thought of.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
Do you intend to acquire more silver bullion? What proportion of your holdings is in this form?
This conversation is partially inspired by a relative of mine, who is holding several thousands of dollars in the form of wads of cash, stashed behind a bureau in his house. I told him that I thought this may be the very worst method possible of storing one's wealth, and advised him to at least go buy some gold that he could hide more securely.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I definitely did have that thought while researching this topic, hehe. I see that one can buy 1-gram gold bars that are worth roughly $100. I suppose silver coins would be much more straightforward to use in such a situation; a 1-gram bar of silver is worth like 3 dollars right now.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
Do any Motters buy gold or other precious metals, to store at your dwelling?
If so: why do you do this? How much of it do you have? (E.g., one month's salary worth, or some other relative figure that can just give a sense.)
This has come up frequently in conversation among my friends lately, for some reason. I am asking with an open mind.
bolido_sentimental
2mo ago
I don't disagree with your wider point, but there are some good Chinese novels out there if you dig. I particularly enjoyed Waiting by Ha Jin, The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei, and Ingratitude by Ying Chen.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Being "on one's phone" seems to be a fairly universal pastime these days.
Have you observed any cultural differences in what different types of people do on their phones? Like if you considered young vs. old, black vs. white vs. Asian vs. Hispanic, poor vs. middle-class vs. upper-class - who uses what apps? What activity are they actually spending their time on the phone doing?
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Last week, a lady at work asked me to read The Brothers Karamazov with her. Perhaps we could get some Motte book club action going.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Thank goodness, at least men still have power progression fantasies to read, lol.
I'm just joking around, please don't take offense - I enjoy a good isekai myself. But a generation or two ago, there were still men writing novels that grappled directly with the modern world. I feel like something important is lost if they entirely retreat from doing that.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Women are more narrative/relationship/character oriented, so fiction is going to militate towards female overrepresentation in a way media in general may not regardless of local attitudes.
Female overrepresentation in fiction is a recent development, though. Look, for example, at the list of bestselling novels in the U.S. in the 1970s. There are several years in which all of the top 10 were men. If this state of affairs could hold at one time, I would expect that at least 50/50 parity is possible.
And Uruguay speaks rioplatonese Spanish, which is not what I would associate with ‘less feminism’ anyways.
Uruguay was just an example of a physical place. I'm not explicitly interested in Uruguay.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
You've got me there, and that is certainly true. What I meant by "places" though was more like Latvia, or Uruguay or something.
I think what I'm really wondering about, is whether the extreme feminization of fiction and fiction publishing is a uniquely Anglospheric phenomenon, or a Western one, or a necessary consequence of the leftward shift of Western culture in general, or something else; and whether there are any holdouts anywhere.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
I have often read on The Motte (and believe it to be true, myself) that fiction publishing and reading have become heavily female-coded and -dominated in the Anglosphere.
Are there places where this is not true?
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Oh yeah, for sure. It's interesting for me because I honestly try to keep the Culture War out of my own life. I don't use X, I don't really read the news; as a result I never have anything to make top-level posts about in the CW thread. Nevertheless, this is where I come when I want to read real analysis of events and ideas; and sometimes I wish that there was more general-purpose discussion on The Motte, like DSL has.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Good luck man. I'm sure you know what to do. My weight loss platitude, which nevertheless did work for me in the past, was: don't keep junk food in the house. I have very low ability to resist it if it's there; but if it's not there I couldn't eat it.
Keep us posted on your progress, so that we can praise and commend you.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
I have often wondered if we will eventually reach a state where you can only navigate to destinations you can enter into your car's navigation computer; so that if you wanted to go off road or to somewhere you aren't authorized to go, you simply could not do it with the car.
I can confirm that when I was there in 2018, it certainly had not gotten any better. From 2000 to 2020, the population fell by half from around 3,600 to around 1,800. This from a peak of over 15,000 in 1920.
With the general decline of the river trade, Cairo is remarkably remote now. It's very hard for me to see how it could ever attract investment again. I imagine if you had commercial interests in the area, you'd base yourself in Cape Girardeau or Paducah.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
https://www.nashville.gov/departments/health/environmental-health/vehicle-inspection
Metro Nashville (TN) abolished emissions inspections in 2022.
I lived there and suffered through those for many years. There was MUCH rejoicing when it went away.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
Can you offer support for your assertion that white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore? It has never been my impression that the rates of violent crime or property crime are at all comparable between those places. To provide one example, poor, mountainous West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the nation from 1971 to 1998.
bolido_sentimental
3mo ago
You made me curious, and I did a search for: "What happened to black family stability?"
"The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population."
From the abstract of a 1995 book, The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans.
https://www.russellsage.org/publications/decline-marriage-among-african-americans-1
Is there a way to Make Black Men Economically Viable Again?
https://www.vicrc.org/
This is the one that provides the most support in the specific case of Lockland; the director, John Keuffer, is quoted fairly often in the local news here. And as another commenter notes downthread, Catholic Charities is heavily involved. I used to spend a lot of time with a girl who is now a fairly high-ranking leader in this region's Catholic Charities organization - we worked at the same previous job together, and she kept me posted during the application process for the job with CC.
The impression that I get is: there is a substantial amount of people for whom helping people who claim to be hungry and homeless is a Good Thing, full stop; and any downstream consequences of that are not important to them, are not actually even considered, compared to this higher priority. It's quite hard to argue against it, especially with highly empathetic people: the people who already live in Springfield or Lockland are not, currently, hungry or homeless to the same degree, so of course their needs are considered second.
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