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The topic of casual, vitriolic, comically uninformed bigotry about southerners in other parts of the country is actually a really fascinating topic in its own right, and something I might wade into here some day when I'm less strapped for time, because it actually touches on some really interesting and fascinating challenges America will face soon, as the South continues to grow in economic and population strength relative to the North East and the West Coast.
If you wrote it I'd read it. I just read an article from Bloomberg that said the southeastern corridor (or something like that) just surpassed the northeast in terms of contribution to GDP, those from the northeast continue to leave for the south, as do businesses, and as a result the south's representation in congress is growing. I wasn't aware of the prejudice, which is sometimes just outright hostility, against southerners prior to moving up north recently, so I can't be sure if it's just a frustrated response to their diminishing importance or has always been there. But I do find it fascinating and odd to see a group slowly losing its prominence to another group it views itself as superior to, despite the deeply engrained nature of that superiority. Like the roots of that superiority are starting to decay but the flower doesn't realize it yet.
I think you'd get a lot out of the following article - https://www.ecosophia.net/hate-new-sex/
That's a blog written by a prominent astrologer. Even if I agree with what they're saying I just can't view it with credibility.
I mean check out this line from his wiki "He is currently blogging at Ecosophia, where he has written about the intersection of magic and politics."
"He criticises the openness of liberal occultists, arguing that magical practices benefit from more obscurity and secrecy" I mean fucking christ
If you don't like occultism or things influenced by it, what are you doing on the rationalist side of the internet? Did you somehow miss all the references to the kabbalah in Scott's work? He even directly mentions in one of his articles on Slatestarcodex that he has a lot of friends who are practicing occultists. If you're going to judge people based on an interest in the occult, you're going to have to throw Scott Alexander out with the bathwater too. For the record I think that if you actually listen to Greer speak on those topics he's eminently reasonable, but I'm not going to try to convince you.
Either way, I don't understand why you think that an author has to be judged by the entirety of their work as summarised by wikipedia. There are plenty of people who I trust in some domains but not in others, and I often find that even people I disagree with strongly on important issues can produce compelling works of writing. I don't agree with everything Friedrich Nietzsche said and I definitely think that Plato got some things wrong too, but that doesn't mean I can't recognise the quality of their work and get something out of it.
We have to draw the line somewhere and if that line is not at believing in astrology and practicing magic, I don't know where it is.
I don't think that's a particularly good metric. You're tossing out almost the entirety of human culture - you're throwing away Plato, Isaac Newton... hell, you're tossing just about the entirety of pre-Renaissance cultural output into the bin. Moreover, I view a lot of modern beliefs as having substantially less truth-value in them than astrology or magic - say what you will about astrology, but it produces less incorrect information than modern social justice theories, antiracist activism and a decent chunk of both libertarian and communist ideology. The fact that a lot of insightful and compelling writers believe in nonsense like tabula rasa doesn't mean that they can't produce great work in other areas.
i wouldn't consider that standard to apply to people like Plato, Newton etc. They were just around at a different time, which just didn't have the same level of understanding of the world, so a lot of ideas and thoughts about the world were given room to be elevated. I'm not going to fault someone for not knowing space is a vacuum when they lived thousands of years before we went to space, for instance. Just like I'm not going to fault someone for believing something wrong about the spread of disease prior to the invention of germ theory.
I would agree with what you're saying about things like social justice, antiracism etc. But those are really low quality modes of thought. Exceeding that standard, which I'm not sure astrology does but it's certainly not substantially below that standard, does not lend credibility. That's not good company to be in.
Also disagree that a writer should be regarded as being capable of producing great work in one area and nonsense in another. If those areas are substantially different, that's one thing. And there are always exceptions to the rule. But in analyzing the world, if they indulge in nonsense that's a good indicator that their critical thinking abilities and abilities to discern the true nature of things are probably fairly weak.
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It really is a great case study in prejudice in action.
When I was in my early 20's two decades ago and moved to the upper Midwest from Atlanta, I got no shortage of comments about how racist, specifically, the South was, and (because of the way socialization works) I actually accepted those claims at face value. Everyone high status in my new world knew the South was super racist, and so I just kind of accepted the sense of what they were saying. It took me a surprisingly long time to figure out that, in fact, Atlanta is in most ways of course a million times better for black people than where I had moved to, race relations (though complicated of course) in the New South were productively evolving in ways that absolutely were not happening in the calcified old Midwest, black southerners and white southerners have way more shared culture and values than the weird balkanization you find up north, and all the smart high status people I was around had absolutely no idea what they were talking about, were extremely invested in some pretty deranged stories about race relations in America, and (worst of all) had most of their own sense of how public morality worked and their own moral worth tangled up in it all. The South certainly has its own problems, of course, but the role of black people in the moral imagination of lots of well-credentialed and wealthy northerners is just... creepy, harmful, and weirdly fanciful.
My hunch is that the reason for the prejudice is actually the consequence of something like privilege: when you're on top and overwhelmingly dominant for a while, you reach a point where you write off other places or groups and then don't bother updating your priors because, at least for a time, you don't need to. I would compare it to something like the old reputation that existed in America in the 50's and 60's that "Made in Japan" means cheap, flimsy, low quality junk. That stereotype was probably based in reality for a few decades, and if you were American, you could adopt that stance and then treat it as though it were true for quite a while without playing close attention... and that would be fine until Japan's capacity for quality and innovation grew better much faster than you might've expected, and eventually your musty old views would become a serious liability if you were an American working in business and your old prejudice against Japan's products eventually made you less competitive. The actual reality is that, especially after the Civil War, the South really was very poor and excluded from industrialization and urbanization for a very, very long time (IIRC, there were 22 major Northern metros in 1950 with populations > 1 million, and only 1 in the South at that time), and most of the rest of the country could ignore it and treat it as an unimportant backwater until really rather recently.
Those are all good points. but what i get stuck on is someone will claim to be a vehement opponent of prejudice and will be woke as fuck, but then they will be just flagrantly prejudiced against the south and southerners to a degree that would make a klan member blush. and they genuinely just don't see the hypocrisy or problem when i bring it up. like someone will have lived in new york their entire lives, has never been to the south, but they are just so confident that not only do they understand it really well but are confident it's just absolute hell.
a thought i had is that this is an excellent and perhaps somewhat unique feature of how decentralized the American system is. if each state were not allowed to have the degree of latitude they have, there would be less variation between them, so different parts of the us would no longer be able to evolve and adapt to different problems and ways of thinking. the us as a whole would probably just decline, but instead a business or person can just relocate to a part of the us whose policies are more optimized for the task at hand.
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