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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29521 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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There is no hitting rock bottom. You can look at the worst places in the US, like Pine Bluff, Baltimore, or Detroit and they have only learned to turn left even harder. You can also look at countries like the UK and see that there's no bottom. Accelerationists need to zoom really fast if they want anything to happen, because there is no bottom.

Yes in most cases I agree.

For Chicago they need to prevent themselves from becoming Detroit. Which means preserving as much human capital as possible. Every year, thousands of high performers leave and are replaced (if at all) with low skill immigrants. The end of this path is Detroit. By precipitating a crisis, they can declare bankruptcy, and get out from under the crushing burden of pension obligations and debt. If it happens soon, there might be enough human capital left to save the city.

But of course this assumes that the new Chicago wouldn’t just make all the same mistakes as the old one. Which seems unlikely. I think they are doomed.

The best bet for the Chicago machine is to keep delaying the inevitable until they can manage to get a non-bankruptcy bailout (e.g. by the Harris administration). Then everyone else can pay for their malfeasance and they can continue as usual.

like Pine Bluff, Baltimore, or Detroit

Genuinely curious, can you say more about Pine Bluff? That town doesn't usually come up in lists of "most whatThefuck places in the USA" ... while Baltimore and Detroit absolutely do.

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

Can't speak to Pine Bluff but the most fucked town in the U.S. might be Cairo, Illinois.

Population in 1920 of 15,203. Today just 1,733.

The Wikipedia article is a decent read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo,_Illinois

Cities are the Curley Effect in action The productive move out and the people remaining are even further left. The problem is nobody ever learns from this (except Cubans), least of all the not-personally-useless leftists who move out and turn their destinations further left.

A country is different; it doesn't look like Baltimore but like the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s, which could not feed itself without subsidies from its great enemy. Except there will be no benevolent enemy to feed the United States.

Cheer up, China might throw a few scraps in return for subservience.

We gave the USSR food for physical sustenance; China gives us cheap backdoored trinkets and TikTok for spiritual sustenance. We have willingly made ourselves subservient.

If we are talking economic output, then rock bottom would be 'everyone is dead'. However, this is a really hard state to reach, even horrendous commie countries don't make it that far.

Of course, there is no bouncing back from that state.

In general, I am skeptical of the 'things have to get worse so they can then get better' meme. The real world is not full of either metaphorical or physical springboards.

Of course, I am also skeptical of the decline and fall narrative of the US. I don't think that every job will be that of a DEI officer eventually. Instead, it might eventually go the way of McCarthyism, where we got rich of most of the witch hunts (but obviously still screen job seekers in highly sensitive jobs like defense R&D for political leanings).

Yeah, accelerationism is fun to think about but I am skeptical that it actually makes sense. Places like Venezuela and North Korea show that you can get pretty close to the bottom and just linger there for years upon years, with no coming out the other side.

Some people have never lived in dead-end countries, and it shows.

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