Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I find it somehow thrilling that somewhere in the American heartland there's an honor culture that's halfway between me and the Taliban.
I read an analysis a few years ago that did the political demographic split of the region I’m from and we’re almost ‘perfectly’ split between Republican and Democrat, something like 50.x% - 49.x%. But even so, red and blue mean different things in different places. In the Bay Area I’d be considered blood red if I openly expressed my views, even though I’m far from Republican. In the Midwest I’d be considered solid blue even though I’m far from them too. The kind of “right-wing” I am you’d find in a place like Russia or the People’s Action Party in Singapore. “Authoritarianism” and “collectivism” are not pejorative terms in my political vocabulary. It was core to the functioning culture we had growing up. You can have it in a both good ways and bad. But they exist all over the place.
There are pockets that develop their own unique subcultures all across the US. The bonds are no longer as strong as they used to be due to technology and at the time I was growing up, lots of changes were taking place as well, but I was definitely raised with the old guard mentality and so were my peers. The way it was once put to me was our locale was a group of cultured thugs. It made me smirk at the time but in retrospect it was accurate. Our community produced a lot of very intelligent young kids who had to grow up in an area that was tough to live in, especially with the changes that were happening at that time. They weren’t just street smart, I met a lot of IQ smart people there who had this… edge about them. The only thing I know how to liken it to is someone like Bane. Although he wasn’t represented entirely accurately in the later film based on the comics, Nolan nevertheless did a good job getting Tom Hardy to play the part. Bane was a gangster who was a genius. He wore lab coats, contributed to various scientific fields and moonlighted as a gangbanger. If you crossed a geek with a gangbanger, you’d get a lot of the kids we had. They could talk physics with you, how to fix a car, British history, etc., and they’d bang and play rap music with the people they grew up around. It was normal to us, but I can see how people in the Bay Area would find it strange.
But your characterization is actually very accurate.
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