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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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I can't help it Australia is better on this for the same reason it was worse on covid lockdown. The natural rights libertarians that make up the US haven't quite made their mind up about reconcile things like this. But then they don't think much about city problems because they are just generally not city people.

I wondered why America is so uniquely bad at doing cities. It's vitally important to get away from our underclass in a way it's not in NZ or Australia. Because the distance between the underclass disposition and everyone else's is not so insanely large, I figure. Does it really boil down to America's essentially open and nature? We really did get all the poor miserable huddled masses. We got the worst people of Europe. The version of myself that remained in Ireland is less beset with personality defects.

I have a friend who lives in Australia. He says he misses the US, where he grew up, because Australia is boring. Plus he really really really hated lockdown. I guess the grass is always greener...

I'd say that, historically, for some, the dream of America was to have your own little kingdom of sorts, a small slice of bountiful heartland to call your own. This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it. That America had so much land for the taking made that dream possible.

This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it.

Jefferson thought that farmers were more virtuous and more suited to democracy.

Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subserviance and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. - Notes on the State of Virginia, 'Query XIX. Manufactures’.

Yeah, we have a small underclass that indulges in horrific bouts of violence and thuggishness. But they're out in the country, in remote towns in the Northern Territory or Queensland. Much less prominent than in the US.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-64389869

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