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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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YIMBY sentiment on this forum has (I think) been mostly focused on increasing the density of existing residential zones. However, it may be worth noting that there is an alternative: converting existing agricultural or unused land to low-density residential use (i. e., continuing to "sprawl"). In this article, a former employee of the libertarian Cato Institute accuses that organization of focusing exclusively on high-density housing, and of smearing as racist people who are not interested in long-term high-density living and clamor for more single-family houses. (In his view, upzoning imposed from the top down is not libertarian, because the existing owners have a sort of property right in the zoning of their neighborhood as a substitute for deed restrictions that could or should have been used instead of zoning codes.)

Wouldn't that just worsen social car dependency?

Wouldn't that improve me being able to avoid urban decay ruined public transportation?

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains

If you really want to avoid them, you should purchase a plane ticket to the civilized world. In Australia people standing at train stations are there to travel by train, not take drugs. We don't even have a single open-air drug market, against the best efforts of our local decriminalization operatives.

Before Morales boarded the train to smoke his drugs, he was outside the station plaza in a brisk breeze as people whizzed by. Women held their children’s hands. Others talked on phones. Then there were those with drawn faces who looked as though they hadn’t slept in days. Many were thin and some, like Morales, had bloody marks on their faces or limbs. He didn’t sleep the day before but seemed happy to talk.

I love this implication that thinness is associated with drug addiction in the US, as opposed to being normal. What a sad article.

I can't help it Australia is better on this for the same reason it was worse on covid lockdown. The natural rights libertarians that make up the US haven't quite made their mind up about reconcile things like this. But then they don't think much about city problems because they are just generally not city people.

I wondered why America is so uniquely bad at doing cities. It's vitally important to get away from our underclass in a way it's not in NZ or Australia. Because the distance between the underclass disposition and everyone else's is not so insanely large, I figure. Does it really boil down to America's essentially open and nature? We really did get all the poor miserable huddled masses. We got the worst people of Europe. The version of myself that remained in Ireland is less beset with personality defects.

I have a friend who lives in Australia. He says he misses the US, where he grew up, because Australia is boring. Plus he really really really hated lockdown. I guess the grass is always greener...

I'd say that, historically, for some, the dream of America was to have your own little kingdom of sorts, a small slice of bountiful heartland to call your own. This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it. That America had so much land for the taking made that dream possible.

This was the agrarian dream of people like Andrew Jackson (IIRC, or was it Thomas Jefferson), and it has a sort of charm to it.

Jefferson thought that farmers were more virtuous and more suited to democracy.

Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependance begets subserviance and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. This, the natural progress and consequence of the arts, has sometimes perhaps been retarded by accidental circumstances: but, generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer whereby to measure its degree of corruption. . . The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigour. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution. - Notes on the State of Virginia, 'Query XIX. Manufactures’.