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On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

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Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#291

Post by mturmon »

colechristensen wrote: post #217
maxerickson wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can be an interesting exercise to look at the census demographics for a county between 1900 and now. My home county had more black residents in 1920 than in 1990. It wasn't accidental in many smaller towns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundown_town I do expect that the Great Depression also contributed with small minority communities moving to cities.

Which I am sure is true for some places, but not all. The census count for "black" in my county in 1920 and 1900 was 5. Not 5%, 5. It was 99.97% white. It's a fact that people seem to have quite some trouble with. Much of the midwest is nearly entirely white (and at that a pretty narrow subset of northern europeans) because only a small set of people had any interest in settling there.

But, thought experiment: Suppose that 5 to 10 black families decided to relocate to Gedanken, Kan. (pop. 2000) in 1920?

I think the threat of race-based violence would have made this very difficult. One family, perhaps, but a little neighborhood? Not OK -- I'm thinking specifically about the Tulsa riots of 1921 and other racial violence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_civil_unr...).

(Grew up in suburban Kansas and spent plenty of time hanging around towns like the fictional Gedanken.)

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#292

Post by selectodude »

dionidium wrote: post #284
dionidium wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another thing that's often overlooked is that those cities are still quite large when defined by their MSAs. When the people "left" places like Detroit, they didn't all go to a different region; they went a few miles from "Detroit" to the Detroit suburbs, which we consider to be different cities mostly for irrelevant historical reasons. Detroit (14), St. Louis (20), Pittsburgh (26), and Cincinnati (28) are all still…

By the way, to your original point, I'm quite worried about the impacts of corporate consolidation on the legacy you describe. When Anheuser-Busch is purchased by a foreign conglomerate, it's not just the jobs of a few thousand St. Louisans that are at stake. It's the entire patronage infrastructure that such a large corporate citizen brings with it. Anheuser-Busch did great things for St. Louis, presumably, because…

>That's not an assumption we can make about Belgian ownership.

Nor should you, AB has all but moved their brass to New York City because the Belgians didn't feel like flying to St. Louis anymore.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#293

Post by selectodude »

tptacek wrote: post #198
mikestew wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One -27F January day, I looked at my wife and said, “this is America, and we don’t have to live like this.” So we moved to North Carolina, then eventually got a gig with Microsoft. Haven’t worked at Microsoft in twelve years, but Seattle area suits us so we never left. Also I can empathize why people are against Tesla, it's just the general mindset in the midwest when it comes to new technologies. More than just the…

Chicago politics are not conservative; it is one of the country's most stalwart Democratic bastions. (Politics here are problematic for other reasons).

Chicago politics are dominated by Democrats, but it's far more conservative than some of the crazy granola stuff on the West Coast. Rahm Emanuel would be considered a right wing demagogue in San Francisco.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#294

Post by tptacek »

selectodude wrote: post #293
tptacek wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chicago politics are not conservative; it is one of the country's most stalwart Democratic bastions. (Politics here are problematic for other reasons).

Chicago politics are dominated by Democrats, but it's far more conservative than some of the crazy granola stuff on the West Coast. Rahm Emanuel would be considered a right wing demagogue in San Francisco.

Rahm Emanuel is considered a right wing demagogue by a pretty sizable chunk of Chicagoans.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#295

Post by gilbetron »

humanrebar wrote: post #263
gilbetron wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I describe this as "exotic-ism", many midwesterners don't really like different things from them, except in a tourist sort of way. However, I think that even if someone in their town is the same as them except for skin color, they'll still treat that person a little different. It's a stretch to say they are colorblind except for cultural differences.

What you're describing generally fits under the umbrella of xenophobia. You can qualify it as "cultural xenophobia" if you want to distinguish from dislike of aliens in particular.

Very true! Phobia always seems a more intense emotion than what the people exhibit, but it is technically correct.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#296

Post by throwawayjava »

stcredzero wrote: post #262
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look you're free to use language (and downvotes) however you want, but I and others are merely pointing out that you are applying a very broad brush which basically amounts to "I can see similarities here, so I'll just call them the same thing" -- Marx may have had a 'subsume[d] sense of morality' in his analysis of capitalism but that doesn't mean anybody who has a similar sense of morality about another topic is no…

Look you're free to use language (and downvotes) however you want I've not downvoted you, at least in this thread. HN doesn't let you downvote in threads you participate in. "I can see similarities here, so I'll just call them the same thing" Isn't that how it works, especially with ideologies and models? Socrates is a man, all men are mortal, not all mortals are Socrates. Yes, but I'm talking about specific principl…

> Isn't that how it works, especially with ideologies and models?

No. Ideologies are labels that have meanings, sometimes very specific meanings. And even though there are overlaps between some ideologies and others, conflating terms is still disingenuous and unhelpful.

Marx believed in profit-motive, to be sure. That doesn't make Marx a Capitalist. Calling all "collectivists" Marxists is similarly silly.

> Yes, but...

Your parent was making a comment about the flawed logic in your argument justifying your misuse of the term "Marxism", not your overall opinion on identity politics.

Your response is totally irrelevant to that criticism.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllogism

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#297

Post by analog31 »

What I'd like to know is if any other place is substantially different. I lived in Texas for a while, and met relatively few people who behaved like stereotypical Texans.

I live in Wisconsin, and it is a divided state. There is heavy racial segregation, plus strong red/blue and city/rural divisions. That makes it pretty hard to identify a single unifying culture.

Perhaps all the Midwest lacks is branding.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#298

Post by selectodude »

ams6110 wrote: post #151
throwaway15814 wrote: post #10

Just moved out of the midwest.. I was originally from the East coast and moved back. I'll just say this, being a minority, I was shocked at how much contempt people had towards middle-easterners and black people. On numerous occasions people have said they've been "dirtying up the neighborhoods which is why they moved to another burb... they need to take better care of their lawns, etc". Out of all the companies that…

> There's a reason why Chicago was the only major city to drop in population the last couple of years. It's because it's a shithole. Expensive, but salaries are midwest-grade; weather sucks almost year-round; the government is as corrupt as a two headed snake; one of the most segregated cities in the world; and has a huge violent crime problem.

>and has a huge violent crime problem

I hope you're not comparing it to San Francisco where I'm 1.2x as likely to be jumped with a deadly weapon, 1.3x as likely to have my house broken into, 2.3x as likely to have my phone stolen and 2.2x as likely to have my car stolen.

And the best part is the worst neighborhoods in SFBA aren't even in San Francisco, and it's still scary as shit.

Let me know when they finish cleaning all the human shit out of the escalators on the train.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#299

Post by boomboomsubban »

Veelox wrote: post #80
maxerickson wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you make an interesting observation about how communities are structured here, but there is also plenty of overt (though quiet) racism.

What things are happening in the Midwest that you consider overt racism?

The Midwest still has residential schools, using a token weekly class to claim it's not perpetuating the cultural genocide. Sadly, it's often better than the alternative, living through a brutal winter with a wood stove and no running water.

Re: On Being Midwestern: The Burden of Normality

#300

Post by stcredzero »

throwawayjava wrote: post #264
stcredzero wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really cannot be separated from notions of class and capital and commodity-form without rendering the term "Marxist" nearly meaningless. The Intersectional claim is basically that inherent markers like race have become a functionally like a marker of class. Separating Marx from those things is like separating Jesus from Christianity. You just keep on asserting this without specifying why -- probably because you find…

> The Intersectional claim is basically that inherent markers like race have become a functionally like a marker of class. Hm. Unless closeparen edited their comment, I've very confused, because that's not at all the claim that closeparen made. In fact, the "all racism is really just a form of classism" is more common in conservative circles than leftist circles. > So you're saying there's something magically special…

Hm. Unless closeparen edited their comment, I've very confused

I wasn't specifically referring to closeparen's comment at that point. What are you trying to pull?

And it has a name. That name is Marxism.

Sounds like your intoning some kind of quasi-religious exceptionalism.

Marxism refers to, you know, Marx's system of thought.

Which historically results in one group of people violently seizing stuff from another group of people using some collectivist morality because individual rights means nothing to them. Nothing confusing about that.

calling everything that's "not you" a Marxist is pretty lazy.

I'm calling everything collectivist that has resulted in the above Marxist. Historically, most everything collectivist that has gained control of a society has resulted in the above and has called itself "Marxist."

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