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'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

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Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#141

Post by briga »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #70
briga wrote: post #8

The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land. The people who arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from the crowded cities of the east into the vast and…

the vast and dangerous interior of the continent Sounds romantic but is it the truth? I understand that immigration was spearheaded by entrepreneurs who published guides to the new land and advertised in the homeland. You can see some of the spirit in foreign graduate students - they follow recommendations and usually have a very good idea what they are getting themselves into.

You better believe the interior was dangerous before railroads and highways and air conditioning, especially the mountains and deserts of the American southwest. It's only comparatively recently that many of these places have been able to support large populations

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#142

Post by sandworm101 »

briga wrote: post #137
sandworm101 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Alberta is still in its early stages of development WTF? Early stages? The highways have been paved. The electrical lines have been run. Modern military bases. Highspeed internet. Cellphone coverage. Universal healthcare. Universities. Alberta is well past the "early stages" of development.

Half the province is still uninhabited wilderness. The parts that are developed are rapidly expanding--certainly nowhere near what they will be 50 or 100 years from now. Compared to Europe or China there is still a lot of room for growth

>> "...is still uninhabited wilderness."

Again, lots of people don't see that sort of development as inevitable. There is even a movement in Alberta specifically to return land from a developed to a more natural wild state, particularly the tar sands. Alberta is is not "still uninhabited", rather other parts of the planet still have yet to protect their wild areas. "Development" and progress can mean reducing human impact on the land.

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#143

Post by Johnny555 »

phobosanomaly wrote: post #51

In many parts of the United States when you call 911, you're lucky if anyone shows up within an hour. It's a couple hours to get to a Wal-Mart or a store. It's difficult to get anyone to drive 40 minutes outside the nearest town and navigate unmarked dirt roads to do basic plumbing or home repairs. As a result, people have to learn to repair things, make things, use a gun, do first aid, lay shingles, hang drywall, po…

My nephew lives in a very isolated rural area on the east coast and I think you're overselling the "people in the community learn emergency medicine" part - he has no idea how to handle much more than stopping bleeding for a cut (his answer to any size cut is to slather it with antibiotic ointment, which the doctors then have to scrub out before they can suture) or maybe stabilizing a broken leg enough to move someone to the pickup truck.

Likewise, while he does repair things, I wouldn't say they are done well -- his electrical panel is a mess, I spent a couple weekends trying to help bring things up to code (and I'm not even an electrician), like replacing taped hand-twisted wire splices with junction boxes - the tape was melted on one of them from overheating.

He does own an impressive set of guns, but his car has a hole in it after accidentally shooting it while cleaning a loaded gun, so gun safety is not his strong suit.

He has a 4WD, but it's been a 2WD for the past couple years because he can't afford the parts needed to fix it, he cruises junkyards when he can to try to find what he needs.

His closest neighbor is a half mile away and lives in a glorified shed where the water comes in on a hose and electricity comes from a generator when he can afford to fuel it.

I can believe that there are well trained survival handymen out there who are well equipped to survive on their own, but I doubt that most isolated rural people are that well trained.

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#144

Post by admiral33 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #41
briga wrote: post #8

The early settlers of North American were in some sense selected by personality. It must have taken a certain sort of risk-taking personality to give up everything and climb aboard a crowded rickety passenger ship for a month-long journey to a vast and mostly uninhabited land. The people who arrived in America and decided to take it one step further by moving away from the crowded cities of the east into the vast and…

>> the crowded cities of the east into the vast and dangerous interior of the continent must have been a special breed. The cities were not what we would call safe. If you are living in total poverty inside a city without access to any real services, that empty field doesn't seem so bad. The "free land" thing was also a plus. Rather than risk-takers, they were more akin to desperate opportunists.

Well the coastal cities at least had a steady source of food for the poor as long as they were willing to dig for it [0].

[0]: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/oysters-new-york-city-...

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#145

Post by rbartelme »

aebtebeten wrote: post #34
supernova87a wrote: post #27

Well, to whatever extent this is true, I'd like to know -- 1) Whether this is something very special to the US, versus happens in every country, and is a fact of life in remote / non-city areas, and 2) Does this call for a certain approach to how to effectively govern or design public policy if there is a east/west or city/suburban vs. rural social divide? Attitudes in themselves are not a problem. Inability to have…

The actual article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0930-x Paywalled, so I haven't checked my question 3) Do people from the University of Cambridge underestimate self-segregation due to US population mobility? (FWIW, local politics in my country does anecdotally skew rural/right urban/left, but we fortunately have many other different divisions whose axes are uncorrelated with that particular one. I firml…

Code and Data on OSF: https://osf.io/y2mdw/

It's a bit funny that this is "open science framework"...when the code sets the wd with absolute paths, and the R packages are not explicitly versioned. I wish more scientists would start using Docker to make their work environments reproducible.

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#146

Post by briga »

sandworm101 wrote: post #117
phobosanomaly wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess you could look at it in a relative sense. Compared to Beijing, it could be argued that Los Angeles is in the early stages of development.

"Early" suggests a timeline, a progression from one state to another. Most people in alberta would probably take offense to the suggestion they are somehow 'behind' Beijing. They in many ways see their economic and societal development as far 'ahead' of Beijing.

The history of modern Alberta doesn't go back much further than about 150-200 years. When you compare it with all the civilizations that have been around for hundreds or thousands of years it is certainly still in its early stages.

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#147

Post by vb6sp6 »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #124
vb6sp6 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality traits are so embedded in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality as lesser or barbarous in some way. "rugged individualists" always seem to care a lot about how they are viewed by "coasta…

It's not just about caring how I am viewed for no reason, it's that I have to deal with the culutural differences daily both professionally and personally, but mostly professionally. I keep my politics etc to myself in the workplace, but the coastal elites seem to want to shove theirs down everyones throats, even in the workplace, which is very jarring. It's one of the same reasons I fled the bible belt and went to D…

Ok, but you aren't special in this regard.

I work in a red state, in a red county. My boss regularly praises Trump at work. Another claimed that his personal hero is George W Bush and said so in published interview in the biggest trade mag for our industry a few years ago.

There are still office debates about the existence of WMDs in Iraq.

Most try to shovel their conservative bullshit down my throat.

And we haven't even touched on the religious bullshit that gets thrown around.

But I don't give a fuck what these people think and i don't "allow" them to exert that type of influence over me. And if they fire me, I'll just go be a liberal atheist somewhere else (where I will also not give a fuck)

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#148

Post by zajio1am »

chmod600 wrote: post #5

This reads like the scientific version of a stereotype. Maybe kind of interesting, but extremely prone to misinterpetation, over-generalization, and potentially prejudice.

Stereotype Accuracy is One of the Largest and Most Replicable Effects in All of Social Psychology:

http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res...

Re: 'Wild West' mentality lingers in modern populations of US mountain regions

#150

Post by tylerjwilk00 »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #36

Can anecdotally confirm. Sometimes it quite annoys me that those personality traits are so embedded in myself though, because it seems to constantly be a headbutting of cultures that so many Americans on the coastal big cities just don't get or approve of, and love to condescendingly talk about that kind of personality as lesser or barbarous in some way. I love the mountains and freedom they offered me, the lessons t…

This is happening where I live. Previously huge tracks of mountain and forest are slowly being cut up. However, it's the rich newcomers that are selfish with their land. When we were children we had ATVs/dirtbikes and could put in hundred miles a day of riding. Now many trails have gates and no trespassing signs. Used to be a sense of shared commonwealth amongst connected properties. Now, it's the "privatization" of nature and it sucks. I miss the old days.

Also, totally get the condescension you speak of. "Oh. You do your own ! How quaint."

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