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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28722 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023

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But as you know, America is so rich that those possibilities on earth just aren’t attractive to the young American man anymore. He can go work in fracking in North Dakota, he can go work on an oil rig, he can get a qualification in some mining-related field and go work in Sierra Leone or the DRC, all these places have room for ambitious young western men if they’re willing to do what it takes. Parts of Southeast Asia are ‘booming’ if you’re in the right spaces in tech or finance.

None of these places are frontiers. They offer no respite from people telling you what to do and how to do it, and that's like 80% of the appeal.

The wilderness may have no people telling you what to do and how to do it, but it has Nature telling you so, and Nature can be far crueler and more demanding than any human tyrant. Although I suppose that depending on your personality and temperament it could still be more tolerable.

The nice part about Nature is that she follows the letter of the law rather than the spirit, and doesn't care if you outwit her. Find a way to exploit Nature's laws and you just win: find a way to exploit a human's laws, and those laws will change quite quickly.

True, and fair enough.

The actual frontier never had that either, there was always government in the Wild West. Unless you’re talking about the outlaw fantasy (organized crime is still pretty big today, so that’s certainly doable), the inhabitants of the old west lived under a system of government that was substantial, backed by military force and involved the weight of legal, social and cultural expectation in almost every aspect of life; it was, if anything, a more conformist society than the present.

There's government that's going to bother to look for you and make sure you're doing everything exactly the way they want it, and there's government that won't. No one would have arrested you for finding a free plot of land and starting a farm (though you might end up getting screwed once "civilization" expands, and your land becomes interesting, I suppose.)

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