Thursday, March 9, 2017

Into Arcadia

Or as David Brooks puts it (along with a bunch of false analogies):
I can’t figure out why so many Republicans prefer a dying white America to a place like, say, Houston.
One reason is rural people, cultures, and environments. Though attachments to people and place diminished for decades, many remain. It's thousands of shared stories that become parts of ethical narratives, a strange concept to some, whose idea of a narrative consists of anti-white fictions. It's thousands of regional recipes such as grandma's homemade bread, the best you ever tasted. A good recipe off the internet is just something that tastes good, not a part of you.

It's rituals. It's doing specific activities during certain calendar dates each year.

A tree in a contemporary city park is a random tree, often a semi-dwarf cut to look the same as its neighbors. A tree in the woods behind your home becomes the special place where you had your first kiss with your spouse. These sacred attachments cannot be adequately conveyed by the mediums of film and television, which often reduce rural life to satire or mawkishness.

Big cities can be decent or excellent places, as long as they are racially homogeneous. They can be places deserving of great attachment. But not now.

Even those who believe nurture assumptions, have an inkling that moving to a contemporary big city results in handing children over to ghetto and Hollywood cultures, leaving parents with teenagers who seem like hostile strangers in the nest.

Rural areas are not immune to these destructive cultures, but they are better.

Many whites do move, including high IQ whites, causing brain drain in rural areas. Attend rural advanced placement classes and you will hear big city and big college dreams. It's quite unfair for city dwellers to mock country folks for low intelligence when big cities poached millions of bright, rural graduates. Farm boys make especially good engineers.

When poorer, lower IQ individuals move to big cites, they often end up exchanging one low paying job for another in a higher cost of living area, including the costs of being surrounded by hostile individuals. Fifty years ago, working class individuals could walk off farms and into decent paying factory jobs, even when they were unskilled. Now, it's often better to make $7.50 per hour in a rural area than $10.50 per hour in the big city.

The often unmentioned big attraction of contemporary cities is massive opportunities for semi-anonymous philandering, avoiding walks of shame. It's much easier to be abusive toward someone you probably will never see again anywhere. But philandering is usually reserved for high status men and is always accompanied by lies to self and others--and I do mean always. In a few cases, it involves the raping and trafficking of runaways. In places like Rotherham, the drugging, raping, and trafficking happens to non-runaways, not far from home. If you are predisposed toward guilt and other ethical traits, such philandering holds little appeal.

The "respectable" mass media seldom talk about philandering and its consequences.

Instead, the mass media emphasize their cultural activities, often claiming there is little to do in rural areas. But if you have a low paying job, many big city cultural activities are off limits anyway. Most big city cultural activities are overrated hedonistic behaviors, propped up by pedantry and advertising. Someone once called Los Angeles, with some exaggeration, the world's biggest city with nothing to do. Paintings can be viewed in books and on the internet less expensively. And much contemporary art should be ignored.

For most people, outdoor activities are more ethically and personally rewarding than didactic cultural activities, which often involve destructive status competitions.

One purpose of agitprop is to make us alienated from sources of purpose, except cultural Marxism, making us willing to psychologically flee and fill voids with cultural Marxism's lies and "activism."

Small towns are often sources of petty and malicious gossip, but often the individual complaining about the gossip earned the gossip through their own actions.

Big city work places have their own social treachery. You have to keep your mouth shut while your coworkers spout their political narratives, lest you get fired by coworkers who have never honestly studied and weighed issues. And nothing is quite like the horrors of multicultural, big city schools for whites.

Even if co-workers cared about finding more of the whole truth, well-reasoned arguments seldom turn up on the first few pages of Google results.

Some urbanites create more purpose with gentrification, community gardens, and other activities, but the result is hollow and ephemeral, often childfree and philosophically sterile. Gentrified children end up in expensive private schools, which have problems with spoiled children. And gentrification makes neighborhood nonwhites livid when they see their property taxes rocketing upward.

Economists, of course, will rightly lecture rural areas about wasteful farm subsidies, but they usually avoid the non-tax entitlement ways governments redistribute far more to big cities, especially the free riding financial industry. The economic vibrancy of some big cities is not driven by nonwhite immigrants, It's driven by crooked redistributions. Working migrants move to big cities to provide services to the free riding individuals. Other non-working migrants join in the free riding.

The better economies in certain coastal and sunbelt cities aren't due to neutral policies. They're due to deliberate corruption favoring rent seeking industries in those cities.

Rural individuals often underestimate the costs of driving.
The risk of injury death — which counts both violent crime and accidents — is more than 20% higher in the countryside than it is in large urban areas.
Long distance driving also causes cardiovascular disease and large negative externalities. But many whites seem to loath cities so much that they work in cities but drive over 100 miles per day to make a home in the country.

Rural areas have drug problems but those addicted would probably be addicted in cities as well. Alone in a city is not where you want to be if you have self-control problems. Selection effects are a bigger problem than people realize. High functioning, eugenically bred individuals know better ways of responding to boredom than drugs.

Most of all, rural areas provide better protection from nuclear wars and other human inflicted catastrophes, the sorts of disasters the establishments and defense industries are right now prodding us into.

David Brooks, the self-anointed social science expert, will never ever move to Houston's vibrant neighborhoods. Instead, he noted this about his $120,000 cosmopolitan vacation:
But sometimes money allows you to see too many things, too quickly. Sometimes if you seize all the opportunities your money affords, you may end up skimming over life and nothing is deep enough to leave a mark.

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