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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28916 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.

This is, incidentally, why Covid-era anti-vaccine activism was incomprehensible to a lot of boomers and the natural reaction was that stragglers were crazy and should probably be forcibly vaccinated. When the struggle had been getting enough vaccinations to cover even the poorer areas in various countries, hearing that scientists had cooked up an extra sciencey vaccine with a brand new mechanism was not a cause for concern but for joy and extra trust.

Same attitude applies to other topics - I once listened to an old local leftist lady recount how left-wingers of her generation couldn't quite always understand why the younger generation campaigned for more veggie food days for school meals, since her generation had campaigned for more days when meat was served in school meals, as one way to distribute the rising wealth.

It is not possible to understand what happened in 2020-2022 as a proportionate response to disease because it wasn't. COVID is not a disease that primarily affects children or leaves them with disabilities. COVID is not a disease where the number infected can be changed in the long-term by any existing intervention. The motive that best explains the turn to extreme pro-mandate activism (such as supporting assaulting people with needles, or throwing them in concentration camps) is it's status as a shibboleth - that vaccine mandates can be used as an excuse to carry out political purges of people you don't like, who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated.

Except that doesn't account for the Boomers as above. Who are more likely to be conservative themselves. The motive that best explains the turn is simple fear.

As I'll keep repeating every time this was brought up, the Tory British government did not want to mandate lockdowns and the like, the original response was not to do that. But so many MP's got inundated with letters and emails and phone calls from fearful constituents that they made a very public U-turn. Particularly from older voter's who are more likely to be on the right.

Conservative UK Boomers were not trying to purge their political enemies, they were simply scared. Now you can certainly make the argument that they were wrong to be so badly scared (though of course age did make them more susceptible than younger folk), and you can certainly make the argument that the media et al was part of why they were so scared, but they were not calling for tighter controls and lockdowns and vaccinations as an excuse to purge political enemies. It simply does not pass the smell taste. There was simply no reason for them to want to do so. Indeed, unlike in the US, Conservatives were more likely to be Covid vaccinated than Labour voters.

And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take also suggests that they weren't using it to purge political enemies, again because the government was a Conservative one, and didn't even want to do the things they ended up doing in the first place.

What group of people who are statistically more likely to be unvaccinated do you think the Conservative government driven by Conservative voters were trying to purge?

And given the government didn't want to actually take the steps they ended up being forced to take

Pretending to be forced is a pretty common way authorities do what they want while avoiding taking responsibility for it.

It is, But given my ex-position and contacts I can confirm that Boris et al, really did not want to. Not that Boris is principled, just that he thought it was going to make him look bad, due to the financial hit. We even have access to many of his messages as part of the various probes into parties at Number Ten at the like, if you don't (understandably!) want to take some internet strangers word for it.

I am not saying that Boris and the Conservatives had a particularly ideological commitment against lockdowns, and mandates, particularly, just that most of the reports commissioned showed very little gain for considerable cost.

It's worth noting that those reports were accurate, but also that in the US(where age is not the principle political divisor as it is in the UK), opposition to lockdowns on the right was specifically driven by younger conservatives. Older conservatives often held views more similar to their liberal counterparts, although many of them now regret it.

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