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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28892 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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I've never heard of this guy before so I can't say much. but I'm laughing my head off at his description of the Midwest:

To be sure, the Midwest met my expectations of being safer, more affordable, and less degenerate than the coastal Sun Belt. But it turns out this was a bad thing for my temperament!

It turns out safety is mostly achieved by cultivating a boring and risk-averse culture optimized to meet the needs of smallminded and gossipy people who get don’t get excited about much other than college sports and weddings. If you’re a contrarian novelty-seeker you will quickly get ostracized in an environment like this because people like you are a genuine threat to the social order. You can make friends with 95th percentile openness people who see you as a curiosity, but when push comes to shove they will never choose you over the Shire.

As someone who grew up in the Midwest, moved away, but occasionally still visits.. yes. yes to all of this. The main risk to your safety in the Midwest is suicidal levels of boredom. It's amazingly hard to get people to open up about any conversation that isn't college sports or local gossip.

It's amazingly hard to get people to open up about any conversation that isn't college sports or local gossip.

That's small town society everywhere, in Ireland it was lambasted as The Valley of the Squinting Windows. People don't talk to you about their interior lives because that's the one thing they can keep private, and besides the neighbours probably have a good guess about it anyway. When you're living in such a place, as the saying goes, they know you "seed, breed and generation" and "all belonging to you". Scandals and family history are known, even if not talked about - I remember years and years back, my mother talking about a visit with the 'old people' (elderly family members) and among those discussions of local gossip, coming to know that a certain man was not the grandson of who he thought he was, and he didn't know because his father didn't know this man was not his real father. The local squire got a tenant girl pregnant*, married her off with a share of land as her dowry, and the guy who married her raised the subsequent baby the same as his own children, so there was never any suspicion on the man's part that he wasn't the son of his reputed father.

But certain of the neighbours knew, anyway. That's why people don't open up and spill their guts; if you're local, you know all there is to know anyway, and if you don't know, it's the one scrap of privacy they can have. Very especially if you're a blow-in or incomer, you'll be a stranger pretty much all your life and they may like you, but they won't trust you with the same level of "everyone is connected" knowledge.

*Apparently he had a habit of doing this, which was one reason the estate dwindled away.

I was thinking the opposite. I don't expect them to dish up all their dirty little secrets, but they seem happy to talk about how their cousin or whatever is getting married. They just don't want to talk about anything that happens outside of town.

That's the downside, of course. Their focus is on their own little world, so what happens five miles outside the radius isn't something they pay attention to. There is a point to it; why do I care about what happens in San Francisco, when it has nothing to do with me and affects my life not at all? But at the same time, you can't just bury your head in the sand.

When you're living in such a place, as the saying goes, they know you "seed, breed and generation" and "all belonging to you"

Paddy’s Seed and Breed (formerly Seamus’s)

Hey @ZorbaTHut @cjet79, I've got an idea -- instead of banning Hylnka, why don't you make him a mod again? (see parent)

I don't get the joke, what letters are you supposed to replace and where to make it funny?

Sneed's Feed and Seed (Formerly Chuck's)

Yes, I know that, but how does that apply to Paddy's Seed and Breed, what does it make? Seamus's Seamus and Breamus?

It isn't a proper snowclone of the original, though I guess there's an alternate interpretation where the local squire's name was Seamus and the pregnant tenant girl went on to marry a Paddy

I grew up elsewhere, moved to the Midwest, and this "boring" nature is pretty much exactly why I like it here. It turns out that I am not a thrill-seeking adventurist that delights in the revolution or tolerates being surrounded by vagrants, I just want my nice city with nice parks and nice people to have a nice beer with while watching a nice Big Ten game. I can get about as much novelty as I want during travel, keeping my home the opposite of novel is my preference.

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