Ah okay. Oh, there’s someone in the comments I know from meatspace recognizing me. I kinda wish I had not had the anxiety back for that.
Last time someone I’ve never encountered in my life made one of these out of something I’d written it was a “macro” when Something Awful got hold of like an Anthro paper I’d written about them in like 2002.
Like, I’ll totally agree that California NIMBYs are ridiculous and have committed the state to a poorly chosen path, but I don’t think you guys appreciate how very explicitly central “a civilization where everyone lives in a small-town environment with direct exposure to undeveloped nature” has been to the California Dream
Like before even the postwar Golden Age buildout under Gov. Brown the Elder that really instantiated this suburban paradise, the prewar boom of LA was very commonly framed – embraced by boosters to draw more residents – in terms of a job-rich city that uniquely didn’t have “slum” housing.
(You don’t even hear about “slum clearance” – the postwar practice of demolishing blocks at a time and giving the former residents intentions of something better that much anymore, but large areas of downtown-adjacent land in American cities was hyper-dense and low quality tenements or often formerly comfortable-class housing that had been subdivided all to hell)
California had an idiom for “life at high residential density” – the crowded, warrenlike Chinatowns of LA and especially SF since the Gold Rush, chaotically full of improvised enterprise, drug addiction, and murderous gang violence!
In the early 1980s, Long Beach – the industrialized working class shore to the south of LA, kind of its Queens, was like “ha-HA, we have filled this wonderful location at low bungalow density, time to upzone so as to keep this a functional area for working-class life!”
Of course the thing is the 1980s in Southern California went on to feature a massive illegal immigration wave (Cheech Marin’s 1987 Born in East L.A. is called that because it’s about an American-born bilingual Mexican Angelino experiencing this) which often landed in Long Beach AND the crack- and gang- heavy nadir of South LA-area Black communities.
Which is to say, in actual historical precedent that informs cultural sentiment, dense housing in California (let’s talk *Oakland*) consistently means “the white average-Joe neighborhood becomes overrun with inscrutable, addiction-riven, gang-murderous Others”
And the whole environmental stuff – there’s a clear line from John Muir and the Sierra Club through Paul Erlich and The Population Bomb to the Bay Area types who want to cap tech jobs or the people who worry about water (or road!) use coming from new development that the way to keep properly stewarding the land without exhausting finite resources was to limit population.
You can work racial or wevs angles too, a lot of the West Coast issues with natives and Chinese workers came from the way that the coast’s founding culture really came from a “Free Soil” philosophy, common among smallholders and “mechanics” in the (then-“West”), one of the two strains that went into the Republican anti-slavery stance along Boston moralism (New York, as the major port city of an international economy powered by cotton, was fairly pro-Confederate), that this was supposed to be a country to enable white men’s ability to establish self-sufficient petty dynasties of their own, and that indulging all this nonwhite work – creating a national economy oriented around slave-produced agricultural exports rather than white artisan industrial development, Pacific landowners recruiting natives or Chinese in a labor shortage rather than letting white wages rise so the workers could establish their pioneer fortunes – were, fundamentally, taking their jerbs.
And the pastoralism! This was the pleasant climate where the ranch house really blew up, integrating the outdoors and living area. Backyards – and home gardens – were key.
(In a LOT of ways Portland as I came to it at the dawn of the 2010s suddenly reminded me of things I had read about midcentury LA far closer than the one I saw in the 2000s)
Pete Seeger in 1963, “little boxes made of ticky tacky”, Joni Mitchell in 1970, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, these were laments for greenfield development coming before the activist-driven 1970s downzonings that saw that greenfield development was the ONLY way for California to add housing.
another one for the "1970s comin' back" file: a thread I saw on Twitter arguing at some length that the modern adult SFF fandom insistence on YA and Cosy is in fact a sign of fascist infiltration and that the only moral response is to Sex Everything Way The Fuck Up
Fucky Culture Prevents Fascism started decades before the 1970s, really.
It sounds as if the Wagner situation might have been defused? Anyhow, I liked this story because the modern world is very complicated and this was one of those timeless sorts of things that everyone understands, you could explain it to an ancient Chinese or Roman military advisor and they’d be like “oh yeah that happens a lot, you guys gotta be more careful”
Maybe it was growing up in a “favored quarter” suburb, but if you got into a little old lady’s house when I was a young kid at the turn of the ‘90s there was a shocking probability she had a multi-instrument synthesizer keyboard unit in there, somehow leveraging the organ as a precedent for instrumental emulation for church ladies
internet user pedestalizing young attractive women or interpreting their behavior much more charitably than they would for another demographic: being nicer to women is feminism, yes? I am fighting the incentives that make things weird and bad?
// incoherently getting this out before going for dinner
there’s a person on twitter who’s a friend of a friend through multiple links, shows up on my feed sometimes, generally makes funny and enjoyable posts. Once made a post that was like, “when men have messy apartments I’m like yeah okay, but when women have messy habitats I’m a little freaked out and I judge them more”
I was. amazed by this. My dude, this is literally sexism! You have wrapped around all the way and returned to normal sexism! How do you not recognize this! I almost pointed this out, but decided we didn’t have the rapport / character limit for this conversation to have P>0.8 of going well, and scrolled on.
almost everyone in my extended irl and internet sphere wants Equality in some vague way. they want the Dynamics to not Be Fucked, and they mill around doing things that are not “literally trying to treat people the same way regardless of gender”. And my axe to grind is that (1) this will tend to deposit you back into Literal Normal Sexism land, (2) even if you’re in some New Weird Sexism land, it’s still sexism and you should cut that out.
when I was younger I used to be a hardliner on “literally treat people the same way”. then I became more corrupt or less autistic or whatnot and now recognize this isn’t possible, but I still think genderblindness should be the starting point. And people seem so freaking interested in doing anything but this. They want to analyze the differences and digest them into different treatment. They themselves have personal or social incentives for wanting or giving certain kinds of treatment. And those incentives will win out over (my) (genderblind) ideology
I was hosting a party last week, and found out a potential woman attendee had (1) drunkenly gone around grabbing men’s asses at a prior event, (2) made public posts complaining about being shot down unnecessarily cruelly when one of them declined to cuddle with her. Said guy was telling me this in an uber back from buying alcohol and I was amazed, like, wait, you’re relaying this so casually – don’t you want her banned? I will if you want.
And he just – didn’t. He said that while he now disliked her, and felt slightly violated, he didn’t mind that much, and he didn’t want her banned just for fairness’s sake. Which was his prerogative. And it was one of many moments when I realized that very few people on any ideological branch are on board with this program that seems obvious to me, which is that we will not have equality until we are willing to treat people equally. The forces of unequal treatment are just that powerful.
(Not that I’ve, you know, gone around with a megaphone and said “HEY, DOES ANYONE ELSE THINK, NAIVELY, THAT WE SHOULD JUST – TRY THIS LITERAL EQUALITY THING –”)
sigh. I’ll soon shut up and hit post and go out for dinner, and probably during dinner I’ll start squirming about participating in culture war and delete this
but. come on! I know this isn’t 100% possible, but can we shoot for 90% or 80%? Can people not see that new double standards, of any kind, are not the way out?
Well there’s not consensus over what the form of equal treatment should be. In the 1980s-90s, the view that women should adopt the male practice of accepting petty unwanted sexual aggression with equanimity – which would ALSO represent gender-equalized norms – was very widely attested.
Russia has basically privatized all of its military operations in Africa over to Wagner in the last few years, so one big question is what now happens to the tens of thousands of Russian mercenaries spread out across like ~5-10 African nations
Wild card in the new Chinese/French/Saudi Scramble for Africa
Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.
Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.
Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge
if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality
the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts
try driving through the historic part of Boston and you’ll see that this is true
New England was heavily forested, its major utility on behalf of Britain was producing wood (incl. large old-growth trees for unspliced masts) and sap-derived tar for sealing ships (also ashes for lye production!) it was essentially a EUIV Naval Supplies province.
Like, we chalk “Mongols knew how to tap and drink the blood of horses to sustain themselves in desolate terrain” up to Mongols just being a very horse-centric culture, have you ever thought about what it means that New Englanders make maple syrup by tapping and drinking the blood of trees in snowbound winter?
ALT
