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PaperclipPerfector  18d ago (text post)   27026 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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So a bit of a time ago there was a discussion here about the gender war, demographic implosion and political male-female divide in South Korea. @rokmonster stated that "Seoul is the only city worth living in [there]" as self-evident fact, apparently.

As someone who knows little about Korea, I find this puzzling. Aren't there other large cities there? I'm sure there are. Are they really that bad? And if yes, what is "that"?

I can't speak for Korea, but one-major-city countries are pretty common. England is famously lopsided: London is 7/8x the size of the next largest city, and contains almost all of the seriously high-paying jobs. With a few principled holdouts, if someone lives in a city that isn't London it's usually because they can't afford it there.

Singapore is basically a city state. I'm sure there are others.

This feels though similar to Americans do not travel to other countries but everyone in Europe does therefore everyone in America are uneducated proles.

The one big city countries all seem to be NOT continent size countries. All of Europe seems to have outsized capital countries, but the countries are probably more comparable to regions of the U.S.

The only of the big Euro countries that might be less capital dominant is maybe Italy? Rome is still dominant for tourists because of history but Milan is only half the size and perhaps more economically important and Naples list a higher population.

Italy and Germany contain multiple roughly equivalent population centers due to their relatively late unification, with each of those cities once having been the capital of an independent nation. This is also true of Spain, which has Barcelona to counterbalance Madrid.

I wonder how much of the relative smallness of Berlin is due to late German unification, and hoe much is due to being damaged in WW2, followed by being split in two during the cold war and dragged down by being located in communist East Germany.

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