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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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Have you noticed this too?

A little bit, but not undertaken (or even intended, I think) very seriously. There are some families living on a couple of acres, with a goat and a little garden, and the mom staying and homeschooling the kids. But they are not serious about the garden or the goat, they're just kind of a nice hobby to have if you're going to be a housewife in an era full of appliances, and less expensive than other hobbies. They tend to be the same people who go to church a lot, and are part of a small (but sometimes physically distant) church with a reasonable tight community, who kind of want to belong to a more physically close village sort of unit, but not enough to actually make it happen.

I don't know if that kind of thing is more common than when I was a kid. I was homeschooled, and there were a lot of families who liked homesteading aesthetics, raising one livestock animal, once, and reading Little House on the Prairie, and a few families who took that unexpectedly far.

What you've described is unlike my experience of the internet in Current Year. I spend a lot of time here and on DSL, which are highly selected discussion spaces. My Instagram feed is the one clothing brand I chose, three people I know in real life, and art and craft videos for eternity, which I also chose. My Facebook feed is mostly local plants and day trip sort of places, and a little bit people I know. Occasionally a person I know says something political, and then if they do it a few times I unfollow them. My experience of the internet feels very narrow, like I would like to expand it a bit, but am not sure how.

This seems basically unrelated to whether or not I would rather live in a city vs rural area. In rural areas, I'm more likely to interact with people who are unlike me, because they're the only people I can find to interact with. It's interesting, to an extent, I like having an excuse to get to know people unlike myself. There'll be some old person talking about their (literal) dream or somebody's wedding or funeral to go to I don't know that well. In a city, I mostly find people at least as selected for similar interests as I do online, which can be comfortable, but also gets a bit cramped. Whenever I've had an opportunity to interact in a friendly and non-political way with people unlike myself, it has generally been interesting, and I've enjoyed it, at least in retrospect.