:shocked-pikachu:
I imagine that veggies and meat would be fresher. The air would be fresher? If you just buy a house 4Head the property taxes would be lower?
edit: @Frank @silent_water @THC oh my God red states are so fucked! On some "remember what you're fighting for" and it's McDonalds' Q3 profits. The grift is unreal.
nope, food distribution goes through the cities unless you literally live on a farm.
Doubt. I'm pretty sure Texas has one of the highest tax burdens in the country bc they can't have real taxes so they have property taxes. Red state regulators are even more corrupt than the rest of the country's. Texas is trying to pass a law that if you complain about pollution three times in a year and their Exxon owned regulatory bodies decide not to do anything about it you become a crime doer. Blue states are some of the most productive agricultural regions in the country, and as previously mentioned red states consider effective regulation for public safety an offense against god.
what the fuck is up with this "new netherland" "tide water" mayo larp shit?
Unless they're trying to get people used to the idea of balkanization (based)
It's based on how the US was settled and developed, when, by whom, and how different social aspects developed. The author is breaking down the nation into regions based on culture and history rather than simply geography.
You see, if there's gun violence in north Atlanta metro you need to understand it in the context of Greater Appalachia, as opposed to The Deep South which is where south Atlanta is.
Greater Appalachia is "Settlers overwhelmingly from war-ravaged Northern Ireland, Northern England and Scottish lowlands were deeply committed to personal sovereignty and intensely suspicious of external authority. "
and Deep South is "Established by English Barbadian slave lords who championed classical republicanism modeled on slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and subjugation and enslavement the natural lot of the many."
I will not explain any further.
I would go as far as to suggest that any social-science theory that attempts to draw hard borders is probably garbage, unless they're reinforced by existing political borders or major geographical obstacles, in which case it's probably trivial.
E.g. I certainly don't see any hard borders here. Some of the transition zones are hundreds of km wide. And they might even end up in radically different places if you broke the data down by race or household income.
and yet language/cultural groups persist somehow. Graeber attributes it to a kind of cultural reflection - people know how the group across the river behaves and so they intentionally differentiate themselves.
Pretty much this. There are many, many cultural shibboleths in the US. Minnesota has intense passive aggressiveness and a lot of shitty food that they enjoy. Texas has... problems. The south has southern hospitality and an incredibly complex system of social violence that is hard to even describe to people who haven't experienced it. The east coast has distinct regional accents and fifty different highly nuanced ways to say "fuck you" with meanings ranging from "i will shit on your corpse" to "i love you like a brother and would you like to come over for dinner with my family this weekend?"
Like i get shitting on America's corporatized culture and franchize bs and entertainment slop, but the persistent idea that america "has no culture" is rubbish based on a deep misunderstanding of what culture is, and presumably a lack of familiarity with the different cultural regions of the us.
Source - studied anthropology, have lived in many regions of the us and hate them all for different regionally distinct reasons.
I guess it's a question of scale. When you have group A differentiating itself from neighbouring group B (in ways which feel significant but which don't quite add up to a communications barrier), and group B is differentiating itself from group C, and group C is differentiating itself frrom group D, what you end up with when you zoom out is a continuum from A to D.
Bruh the French and the Germans think they're different cultures. The only culture in continental europe is the Berlin rave scene.
i believe this particular breakdown originates with a book that tries to argue for like 9 or so separate cultural regions in the US
The midlands seems particularly egregious with just giant lines outwards. I feel like that giant slice of Pennsylvania belongs more to Appalachia and "Tidewater." The Dutch in PA are just Germans because Americans didn't understood that Deutsch was German.
The Midlands does kinda seem like a "what's left of the country" region once it gets away from the coast a bit too far. Kinda makes sense though as that's pretty much nowheresville, having lived there.
Gun stuff aside, that was a neat intro to the different settler groups and their cultural legacies.
Whenever i see maps about the US, southern red states will usually rank the lowest for good things and the highest for bad things
You know how chuds constantly complain about NYC not being safe anymore because democrats "aren't tough enough on crime"? (looks at nypd budget larger than 85% of countries' military budgets)
Well in 2022, NYC had a homicide rate of 5.1 (annual murders per 100k people). But the US overall had a homicide rate of 6.5. Who would've guessed the most populated city in America has more scary sensational crime stories on the news??
Every year there's about 300-450 murders in NYC out of a population of 8.5 million. New Yorkers are safer than most of America and even a large part of rural America
