bolido_sentimental
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User ID: 205
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
I have often read on The Motte (and believe it to be true, myself) that fiction publishing and reading have become heavily female-coded and -dominated in the Anglosphere.
Are there places where this is not true?
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Oh yeah, for sure. It's interesting for me because I honestly try to keep the Culture War out of my own life. I don't use X, I don't really read the news; as a result I never have anything to make top-level posts about in the CW thread. Nevertheless, this is where I come when I want to read real analysis of events and ideas; and sometimes I wish that there was more general-purpose discussion on The Motte, like DSL has.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Good luck man. I'm sure you know what to do. My weight loss platitude, which nevertheless did work for me in the past, was: don't keep junk food in the house. I have very low ability to resist it if it's there; but if it's not there I couldn't eat it.
Keep us posted on your progress, so that we can praise and commend you.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
I have often wondered if we will eventually reach a state where you can only navigate to destinations you can enter into your car's navigation computer; so that if you wanted to go off road or to somewhere you aren't authorized to go, you simply could not do it with the car.
I can confirm that when I was there in 2018, it certainly had not gotten any better. From 2000 to 2020, the population fell by half from around 3,600 to around 1,800. This from a peak of over 15,000 in 1920.
With the general decline of the river trade, Cairo is remarkably remote now. It's very hard for me to see how it could ever attract investment again. I imagine if you had commercial interests in the area, you'd base yourself in Cape Girardeau or Paducah.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
https://www.nashville.gov/departments/health/environmental-health/vehicle-inspection
Metro Nashville (TN) abolished emissions inspections in 2022.
I lived there and suffered through those for many years. There was MUCH rejoicing when it went away.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Can you offer support for your assertion that white Appalachia mirrors Baltimore? It has never been my impression that the rates of violent crime or property crime are at all comparable between those places. To provide one example, poor, mountainous West Virginia had the lowest crime rate in the nation from 1971 to 1998.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
You made me curious, and I did a search for: "What happened to black family stability?"
"The original, often controversial, research presented in this book links marital decline to a pivotal drop in the pool of marriageable black males. Increased joblessness has robbed many black men of their economic viability, rendering them not only less desirable as mates, but also less inclined to take on the responsibility of marriage. Higher death rates resulting from disease, poor health care, and violent crime, as well as evergrowing incarceration rates, have further depleted the male population."
From the abstract of a 1995 book, The Decline in Marriage Among African Americans.
https://www.russellsage.org/publications/decline-marriage-among-african-americans-1
Is there a way to Make Black Men Economically Viable Again?
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
It's incredible to me, just how large a portion of the U.S. consists of areas like that. You can drive for hours through formerly-inhabited areas, in most of which you can fairly confidently say: "This will never be anything again." "That building will eventually cave in, no one's gonna save it." "This must have been beautiful in the '50s."
I wish we lived in a different world, where that didn't happen.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Right - that's a better way of phrasing it.
To me, this appears to be obviously true, and it certainly adds to my cynicism that addressing this situation does not seem to be part of anyone's political platform; I believe the going theory is that those affected are solid clients of the Democratic party, and actually trying to improve their lots (or the lots of the people stuck with them) does not change the political calculus at all, so there's no need to do it.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Well, I can't argue with that. I just wonder where they were happening, and over what. I admit I didn't go into the residential areas much.
I've visited Gary multiple times, just to look around and do photography. I would say that I honestly felt quite safe there; much like Cairo, Illinois, another place where I've been which has suffered a similar fate - anyone that would rob or shoot me migrated away 20 or more years ago. The place is simply empty of people to a degree that's hard to even explain. There's nobody there.
I wish I could share my pictures, but it would destroy my already crap opsec.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
It's largely been forgotten now, but Baltimore used to be a tremendous steel city, based around the Bethlehem Steel Sparrows Point facility. It was the largest steel plant in the world in the 1950s. There were many other large mills and shipyards there, making all kinds of things out of steel. Here's a good article about this:
Baltimore was hit extremely hard by deindustrialization, and decent jobs have not come in the same numbers to replace the ones that were lost. I suppose the interesting followup question is why the population remaining in Baltimore reacted in such destructive ways.
My impression is that the situation in Great Migration cities especially deteriorated after deindustrialization. If there were still good livings available for people with relatively low human capital or skills, I imagine the overall chaos would be a lot lower. I've never heard a good answer to the question of: "If we transition to a "knowledge economy," what are the people without useful knowledge supposed to do with themselves?"
Of course I don't dispute that the lever of "actually enforce all of the law, throughout the city" seems to have been abandoned.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Apropos of nothing: I have a copy of Make Room! Make Room!; but I have never yet seen the original Logan's Run (the book) in the wild at a bookstore, though I've been casually looking for it for years. I wonder if it had a limited print run or something.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
From your perspective, what would the local government need to do to improve life in Baltimore? And why do they not do it, whatever it is?
(I imagine nobody knows re: the pizza. It's not that hard to make a good pizza.)
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
I was thinking about this recently, in the context of the "population pyramid" getting worse and worse. What would be the effects in our modern society if all else were the same, but no one lived beyond the age of 75? Or if statins had never been invented?
I'm not advocating for, or evaluating the morality of doing this; it just makes me wonder. To what extent is the debt crisis, for example, caused by longer lifespans?
See also Logan's Run for a dramatically less serious examination of one solution to this issue, lol.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
I've sent letters and postcards to my friends for many years. People are usually delighted to receive mail from someone they actually know. It also makes a durable store of memory when you receive them.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Currently going through Will Durant's The Study of Philosophy, in which he explores and explains the ideas of great philosophers from Plato through to the 20th century. If I stick with it and read it all the way, I can gain exposure to the ideas of thinkers like Spinoza and Spencer, who never came up in philosophy intro classes in college. In general it's of course not as intensive as reading the primary sources, but I think it can give me an idea of which ones interest me the most to pursue later.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
A related topic that I often think about:
By a quirk of fate, I share the name, both first and last, of a famous professional athlete. I wonder how much opsec that gives me, if any. Imagine someone called "Thomas Brady" - I'm sure there are hundreds of them. But if you Googled "Thomas Brady, Atlanta, Georgia," would you just get all the times Tom Brady did something in Atlanta?
I can't think of how to phrase this, but: does anyone know of a good source or place where I can read about the black American lower class? In terms of their daily lives, aspirations for the future, hobbies, etc. I don't know where to find anything that's not a hagiography from the left, or Sailer-style noticing. It seems like, apart from social media, it is the least-represented, least-analyzed group online.
I know that for such topics as the fentanyl crisis, there was a big genre of think-pieces in which journalists went among the white lower class and asked them, "Why do you do what you do? How do you think this happened?" and so on. I'm not aware of anything similar where black people, who are not middle-class aspirants or celebrities etc., are asked, "What's going on? Why do you like this and not that? How do you feel about Policy X? What do you think AI is gonna do to the economy, or to your own job prospects?" and so on.
I get some exposure to this by talking to my next door neighbor, but he, specifically, always steers the conversation towards trying to buy my spare car; and I'm not ready to sell it yet, so I just go inside lol.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Oddly enough, I'm Facebook friends with the guy who operates that site. I think it's a great effort, but it's still less valuable, to me, than knowing the actual rates. It's like your likelihood of being murdered in Dallas vs. in Des Moines: if it's a difference from 1 in 45,000 to 1 in 55,000, how does that weigh against, say, the value you would've gotten from that extra cupholder?
These are imaginary numbers, but hopefully you see what I'm saying.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
I've been thinking recently about the stickiness of reputations among brands, and about whether it's something that companies really have the power to shift or not.
Here's the specific example in my mind. You know how, if you browse the Internet for many years, you'll see certain apparently-organic consensus points occur again and again? Reddit is especially known for this, but it happens elsewhere too. Well, in all my years online, the one I've seen the most often, in the most places, is:
A. Cars are mentioned. B. "Get a Toyota or Honda. Those are the best cars."
The corollary of this line of thinking is: "(Not-Toyota/Not-Honda) is junk." I've probably seen this statement about every manufacturer, but it's most commonly applied to the cars of the former Fiat-Chrysler group, including Fiat itself and Dodge. Ford, GM, and Nissan also get it a lot.
I've driven many Toyotas and Hondas. They are indeed very good cars. I have nothing to say against them. However - based on modern manufacturing technology, on any given metric, how much better are they likely to be than the equivalent car by Subaru? Or even Chevrolet or Dodge? What's the base rate of mechanical failure across these marques? Does anyone know? More to the point - is anyone looking? I would imagine they are not at all, based on typical shopper behavior. I think they mostly go by reputation.
What I find interesting is that in some cases, reputations created long ago stick around forever; and in some cases they don't. For example with Dodge, I'm specifically aware of a big problem they had with a 2.7 L V6 in the '90s which had big sludging problems and hence an elevated rate of engine failure. Prior to that, as I understand it, their main reputation was making fairly staid, uninteresting, but fine commuter cars like the Plymouth Sundance, Dodge Aries and so on. They also made a nice line of minivans. Anyway - at least since the 2.7 L V6 problem, I feel like, subjectively, people no longer trust them; and may never trust them again. Say that Consumer Reports announced that a hypothetical 2025 Dodge Journey was the best in its segment for reliability and features. Would you even consider looking at one?
Conversely, some companies like Audi (the sudden unintended acceleration debacle) and Subaru (head gasket failures) seem to have mostly shaken off their negative reputations; at least, I don't see them taking serious stick online over those things, and the products sell as well as anything else.
Is this just locked in now? Even if Toyota and Honda just made 50th-percentile-reliable cars from now on, would anyone ever notice? If the best car you could possibly get at a given price point was actually a Volkswagen or a Volvo, and remained that way for a decade, how long would it take for sales figures to change? How long would it take for me to stop seeing "get a Toyota or Honda" in every /r/personalfinance thread about cars?
N.B. I'm not car shopping right now. In the past, if I talk about this topic online, people will genuinely reply, "Just get a Toyota or Honda, man," as if that's what I were asking about. I'm not getting anything any time soon. My current car is fine.
bolido_sentimental
2yr ago
Can you tell me some of your favorite games from the last few years?
I usually enjoy indie games I have played, but I don't go to the online places where I would hear about them. Really, I've been hosed on discovering new games since Tips and Tricks magazine went out of business.
You've got me there, and that is certainly true. What I meant by "places" though was more like Latvia, or Uruguay or something.
I think what I'm really wondering about, is whether the extreme feminization of fiction and fiction publishing is a uniquely Anglospheric phenomenon, or a Western one, or a necessary consequence of the leftward shift of Western culture in general, or something else; and whether there are any holdouts anywhere.
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