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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   29662 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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What’s causing the divide is the utter failure of the current system of delivering anything the people want from their leaders.

It can’t deliver on economics, in fact the standard of living seems to be getting worse. People are cutting back on things that were once considered normal. The hoops necessary to get to a decent wage and lifestyle are higher every decade. In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids. That same lifestyle in 2024 requires a good college degree from a good university and quite often unpaid internships just to hope that if you and your wife work 40 hours a week, you can maybe have what your grandparents had with one less worker and less education.

It can’t stop crime. The number of anti-crime measures you take without thinking about them is crazy especially once you see how good it is in functioning societies. In Asia, it’s common for stores to leave their deliveries on the streets for hours. In some parts of Europe, people leave babies sleeping in strollers on the streets. In America, it’s common knowledge that you politely leave your car unlocked to prevent would be looters from having to smash windows to get at any valuables in the car. Porch piracy is a known problem. Personal safety often dictates when and where it’s advisable for the good people to go out. And police are basically told they aren’t allowed to stop a crime until it’s too late.

Education? About half of Americans don’t read above a 6th grade level. Many struggle with math more complicated than 10th grade algebra. All we can do with these kids is teach them The Narrative, encourage them to go into massive debt for the job training that K12 can’t give them and hope it turns out okay.

To me, it seems pretty clear that the problem is that what we have isn’t working, and everyone knows it, and so they’re grasping at the straws offered by radical and radically different ideologies to try and find a way to what people actually want — that the median American can live a modest but decent lifestyle in cities where crime is low enough that it doesn’t dictate how you live. They want their kids to have a good education and have the opportunity to be successful and happy. We have none of that, and the oligarchs in charge can’t give us that. So people are looking to other ideas: maybe socialism, maybe Christian theocracy, maybe some form of traditionalist society, maybe fascism, maybe some other idea.

The fact that we’re all so tuned into politics and it’s becoming so central to everything itself is a problem. If things were good, we would not care. People in all societies all over the globe got on very well in functioning societies without even trying to understand world affairs. They didn’t care that much even when given the vote. It was a small part of life, and probably came far behind other concerns like the health and welfare of their own family, sports, religion, and so on. Common people really only get super into politics when they are neither left alone nor helped. And this is where we are. Some 40% of the income earned by Americans goes to the government. And not only do we get what Moldbug calls “bad customer service” (meaning that the government doesn’t improve things for those taxpayers) but spends vast resources on harassing people about what they should think all the time (with their own money of course). Normies getting involved is a reaction, and polarization is the result. I contend that the only solution that will actually turn down the polarization is results.

In 1950, a kid could barely graduate high school and still get a pretty decent job at a factory or something similar. He could expect at least a small house, a car, and to be able to support his wife and kids.

Of course, a key part of this formula was the fifties having a far lower standard of living.

Perhaps, but it was a time when standards of living were rising and life was pretty good.

Yes, and in reality fifties houses were below the standard most working class Americans expect today, both in terms of being tiny square footage single floor houses and because they lacked air conditioning and were extremely flimsy even by the standards of modern US single family housing.

I mean, I live in a 50’s built house. It’s been refitted to accommodate central HVAC, dishwasher, laundry, etc. But a lot of that is pretty doable if often major repairs(hvac entailed redoing a bunch of drywall to get access to it, and cutting a hole in the floor to run the lines through the foundation, +sacrificing a closet).

Yes, and in reality fifties houses were below the standard most working class Americans expect today, both in terms of being tiny square footage single floor houses and because they lacked air conditioning and were extremely flimsy even by the standards of modern US single family housing.

In another reality, there's a ton of them in my neighborhood being occupied by working-class to upper-upper-middle class Americans. Many now have had air conditioning added, but flimsy? They're made of wood, not ticky-tacky.

I think there’s a real demand for sort of basic housing, I think the whole “standards have gone up” is a bit of a cope unless it’s specifically a complaint about building codes blocking new construction.

Myself and my medium sized family live in an 1000 square foot apartment. An 1100 square foot town home or duplex would be an obvious upgrade to work towards but stuff like that is simply not on offer in many places.

Eh, even in DFW these houses sit and sit until upgraded to modern standards with things like actual breaker panels. There may be demand for uber-basic rental units, but not as a house- and certainly, there's not a lot of demand to own them.

Some municipal zoning codes explicitly forbid any new house under a certain size. For example, the capital of New Jersey has a minimum of 1200 ft^2.

For single-family detached. For rowhouses it's 900 per unit, and for duplexes (included in "semi-detached") it's 1000 per unit, so nothing forbids building what @MaximumCuddles wants. The biggest problem would be it's in Trenton.

Yeah, if anything the average wood quality was better back then because we hadn't run out of old-growth forests yet. It's really obvious when you compare antique furniture to most modern stuff.

It's Douglas fir and other softwoods. You won't find timbers in post-WWII houses around here, and very little in the pre-WWII stuff.

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