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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28917 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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Various threads lately have had me thinking about how incredibly wealthy we are as a country, and how it definitely was not always so. For example, I made this comment a couple days ago about how everyone was just flat super poor back in 1900, and we're literally at least 10x richer now. I had likewise told the following story in the old place, in context of wealth to afford vast quantities of food (and how that may interplay with societal obesity):

Even coming from Canada, my wife was shocked by how cheap food is here in America. Historically, it just was not this way. We are one generation removed from stories like, "In the fall, dad made his semi-annual trip to the market in the city and brought back some quantity of 50lb bags of flour and 5lb chunks of lard, having a huge smile on his face, saying, 'We're gonna eat reaaaal good this winter!'" (I don't actually remember the exact quantity he said, but it was a low number, and we can easily scale by a small multiplier.) Like, this was a level of abundance in preparation for the winter that they were not used to (obviously, this was not their entire supply of food for the whole winter; they had some other food stored, but it is indicative that it was, cost-wise, an absolute treat). I checked a nearby grocery store's website; 50/5lbs would cost me $26.85. Like, pocket change. (Even if the multiplier was 5x, that's like nothing.) I probably have that much in random cash sitting around in my car. If I lost it or it was stolen, I'd be sad about a violation of my property, but literally wouldn't give a shit about the monetary value. This was a wonderful blessing of food abundance to some people in first-world countries not very long ago.

I didn't completely spell it out, but that was my wife's father's story when he was a child in Canada. (I also hedged on the number; my best memory was that it was precisely one 50lb bag and one 5lb chunk). That was not that long ago.

Yesterday, I read an obituary for a 95 year old who was born in a homestead dugout in New Mexico. Literally born in a hole in the ground.

Perspective on how utterly ridiculously quickly we went from basically universal poverty to nearly universal wealth is often lacking in many conversations where it could be quite beneficial. Sure, some in the capitalism/communism debates (or more generally the sources/causes of wealth and how it interacts with society's choices/governance), but also in obesity conversations (as mentioned) and even fertility conversations. Born in a homestead dugout. And you don't want to have a kid because of a car seat?!

I still don't properly know how exactly to craft an argument that comes to a clean conclusion, but I really feel like this historical perspective is seriously lacking in a country where the median age is under 40 and many folks no longer have communal contexts where they get exposed to at least a slice of history from their elders.

My parents grew up south Europe, born during WW2, and I couldn't believe the level of poverty they endured. I visited the 7,500 person town they grew up in and even today in 2024 it still doesn't have consistent running water and each house has maybe 20 amp electrical service max. You could eat a chicken once a month on special occasions. Dinner involved some starch and beans, every night, usually the same thing. Family members having spent time either in prison for being reported by neighbors with a gripe, or serving as conscripts, or both.

Violence too? Each parent had a sibling killed under circumstances they never quite explain to me. Another sibling (my uncle) becomes mentally retarded from some disease they couldn't even put a name on, because access to health care didn't exist. "He just had a fever when he was young and was never the same when the fever went away". This is almost certainly from a preventable childhood disease that no longer exists in the modern world.

How fucking frightening a world was the relatively recent past. And yet my parents hardly complain about anything. I cannot fucking deal with listening to them stoically describe their upbringing and early life in the US (as illegal immigrants, another fun adventure) and then contrast with the median gen-Zer complaining about their absolute life of amazing luxury today.

I'm sure the horror damaged my parents in ways that aren't legible and that they would not have chosen it if they could do life again, but I'm also not sure this life of absolutely pure luxury we have today (by contrast) actually is the stuff that a good world springs from. Maybe the problem is bad morals, but I struggle to articulate it. It sure would be a shame if you needed the hard times to create the strong men.

For most of recorded history hard times created stunted dumb peasants that were 5 feet tall and had an IQ of 95 max. You want good times with a challenge, you don't want HARD TIMES™.

You don't need a high IQ to be a peasant though.

I recently enjoyed this article about goiter in Switzerland posted on the SSC board https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n23/jonah-goodman/a-national-evil

What a great article! Thanks for the read. Amazing that reactionaries always show up to shit on the new and working interventions! Those poor kids kept dumb and disabled till the 50's because of that one doctor! Reminds me of the hand washing guy that said maybe you should wash your hands in between delivering babies and was drummed out of medicine. I think the HARD TIMES™ folks on here have no idea what they are advocating for, and the horror of it.

Worse yet, it was washing your hands between performing autopsies and delivering babies.

Finally, he made a startling realization. A fellow doctor died of what appeared to be a case of childbed fever after cutting himself with a scalpel that had been used during an autopsy of one of the women.

The physicians, Semmelweis realized, had been dissecting infected cadavers with their bare hands. Then, with those same contaminated hands, they were delivering babies.

“They were inoculating their patients with bacteria,” Perlow said. “They were basically immersed in pus for hours.”

Yep. An American, a North Korean and a South Korean.

Enormous enough adversity degrades and permanently weakens people. A child of starvation and parasite infestations doesn't make for large tough adults.

I seem to recall reading that US and South Korean border guards are selected to be particularly tall specifically for, er, diplomatic reasons. But I don't have a citation on-hand.

It's obviously propaganda. I don't know how you look at the guy on the left or right and think "yep, that's what an average typical American/South Korean looks like."

Surely the North Koreans are doing the same.

It was an interesting twist of WWI that for many citizens of the UK getting drafted into the army was a substantial increase in their quality of life. If you were a common prole you were likely medically or physically unfit for the high danger roles, and now you were getting 3 square meals a day and proper medical care for the first time in your life.

Isn't this kind of true of military service in the US? Isn't the army actually not a bad deal if you live in a poor enough area?

The army is a fantastic way to access upwards mobility that wouldn't be otherwise available, yes, but by US standards you'd have to come from a really poor neighborhood to get a quality of life improvement from it in the short term.

If you're poor in the US the military is a fantastic option for upward mobility. But the US also hasn't fought a war like WWI for 80 years, so the potential downside is significantly lower than the prospect of someone signing up for the Great War.

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