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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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TBQH, red tribers don’t segregated themselves by IQ to nearly the same extent as blue tribers.

This sounds intuitively true to me, but I've never explicitly noticed this before. Do you know of a study/source measuring this, or is just obvious anecdotal trends? And why do think it is this way? Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth? Is it because of Blue Tribers congregating in universities and cities and that somehow drives this segregation, while Red Tribers are more likely to stay in their hometown and mingle with everyone else who lives there?

It’s anecdotal trends, but I think it’s driven by education level segregation in the blue tribe more than anything about IQ per se.

In large part red tribe hobbies are things that appeal to people from across the IQ/class/education spectrum(hunting, football, political conspiracy theories, motorcycles, barbecue, guns- these all seem to have fairly equal appeal to smart and dumb, rich and poor, illiterate and learned alike, whereas blue tribe hobbies usually don’t.) Additionally the economic niches red tribers fill tend to put them in touch with both white and blue collar workers while blue tribers are pretty siloed into white collar or service work. Finally red tribers are just more likely to not go to college even when they’re smart, so bubbles based on education are both less likely to form(conservative churches and bars are both probably less segregated by education status than liberal examples of either) and less segregating by IQ when they do form.

Is it just that the Blue Tribe places intelligence on a pedestal and so care about it more when selecting friends and relationships, while Red Tribers are more down to earth?

Online, it seems reversed, with red/grey people putting more value on IQ. Cernovich, for example , tweets a lot about IQ. Or Charles Murray.

Hold up, are you suggesting that Cernovich and Murray are "red tribe" in your book?

For the umpteenth time the blue/red distinction is cultural not political, and yes there is a difference.

If like a spectrum, closer to red than not. But I see what you mean.

When I was a kid, my school peers were all fellow AP-track kids with similar 1400-1600 SAT scores. Nowadays the majority of those kids all went to similar selective colleges, my peers from my selective colleges were mostly other kids who were AP-track kids at their own high schools. At work, my peers were at their own selective colleges with other AP-track kids from other high schools. And so on and so forth. I met my wife in college, her college friends and work peers all track similarly. A lot of our Blue Tribe hobbies "appropriate to our class" like Yoga and Rock Climbing and Art Galleries just expose us to other people who attended other selective colleges etc etc ditto ditto.

On the other hand, my friends from the Boy Scouts, from Church, and from local team sports ranged. Some were average (1200 SAT) kids from similar suburban houses. Some of my lifelong best friends from scouts lived in trailer parks. Some of my friends from church are good people, but basically not that bright, cardboard factory workers. Even today, guys at my gun club range (lol) in profession, from engineers to cops to trash collectors.

That's the basic argument: Blue Tribe life is all about professional attainment and as such focuses itself in work-home-status hobbies that stratify class (and thus largely IQ) lines. Red Tribe life centers itself around cultural institutions that cut across classes.

This is the basic argument of [Coming Apart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_Apart_(book); I would note that both my argument and his only apply to White Americans and not evenly to other races for complicated reasons.

A lot of our Blue Tribe hobbies "appropriate to our class" like Yoga

Okay, I have to link to this. Yes, he's shouty, but it's part of the performance image he's built up.

"This is food for sheep and people who do yoga" 😁

Thanks, I hate it.

More seriously though, what is this meant to convey? That asparagus is high class? This might be wildly pedantic but IME that's very much not the case - I live in a rural area with a lot of ditches not near cropland or irrigation systems. As a result there's a rather vibrant scene every summer for about two weeks where wild asparagus is freely available to anyone who feels like pulling over to the side of the road and walking down into the tall grass to snap off a pound or two (or twenty) of the stuff. It has a very similar vibe to people who go mushroom hunting after a good rain, something that could be considered "outdoorsy" or "being in tune with nature". In practice I've found that it's more people who are already farming/gardening/hunting/fishing, drive their F-150 three blocks to the town gas station for their Marb lights, started working when they were sixteen and held down a job somewhere doing something ever since.

No, I think it was just funny. Who on earth thinks of putting asparagus into a sweet cake? Some kind of savoury quiche or tart, sure - but a cake? It was an 80s recipe, but I have to agree with Hollis that it does have the vibe of "whole organic vegan all-natural gathered under the light of the full moon" types.

I've gone mushroom picking in the fields with my dad as a youngster years back, but we never thought of "okay, now coat them in chocolate and stick them on top of an apple tart" 😁

Hey, fair enough. To me that recipe just looks like a tweaked carrot cake with ferns instead of root vegetables, sounds kind of gross but I might give it a shot.