All: diffs are what's interesting on HN, not generics. The diff with this article is the historical analysis, so please let's focus on that and avoid generic culturewar fodder, which leads hellward.
I understand the phenomena the article is talking about – being authoritarian about some things while hands-off about other (possibly much more major) things – but I'm sceptical that the proposed historical explanation is correct.
Here's my own take: the recent history of the West in general, and the US more particularly, has been a conflict between two competing worldviews – one relatively "traditional", the other calling itself "progressive". And go back to the 1960s, the competition between the two worldviews seemed relatively coherent – the "traditionalists" controlled most of the power structures in society, the "progressives" were (by and large) an anti-authoritarian rebellion against those structures. But, 50-60 years later, now the "progressives" (and their heirs) have come to dominate large sections of those same power structures, and they've swapped their prior (relatively consistent) anti-authoritarianism for an inconsistent mixture of authoritarianism about some things and anti-authoritarianism about others.
You can see the same thing in other Western countries – even if not to quite the same degree – who have rather different ethnic histories. That's part of why I'm sceptical that appeals to the history of different Anglo subethnicities really works as an explanation.
When I moved to California some years ago, I also found the default combination of political positions weird. The best half-serious description I could come up with was that California is a country of conservative libertarian social democratic hippies. Those words don't make sense together, but neither does California. At least to someone from the left/green end of the European political spectrum.
I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article, but at least it's an explanation for the weirdness.
"I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article"
Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo'd out of some Libertarian ideal (let alone a Scottish one). It's poo-poo'd because it's seen as an ineffective fix for addiction. This is largely true, but the activists forgot that a lack of drug enforcement can ruin city centers.
Reform should start in our incarceration system not in crime enforcement but I digress.
City centers are being ruined even with places with stricter drug enforcement. I’m not entirely convinced the two are linked. If anything cost of housing and wealth of an area are better predictors.
The article is fairly off and overindexes Anglo-Saxon influence in a state where the largest influences tended to be Hispanics, working class central/southern/eaatern European settlers, Okies during the Dust Bowl, Asians of all walks of life, and post-WW2 immigration globally.
California is just "California", and an "Anglo-Saxon" tradition or lens just doesn't track back west - be it California, Texas, Washington, etc.
Just think about it - Kearny Street is named after a racist Irish immigrant. Levi and Haas were the most prominent businessmen in that era and were German Jews. Gold was found in Sutter Fort - a hacienda owned by a Swiss German. Much of the settlement in Central California was farmers from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Asia, Armenia, etc. Chinatowns and Japantowns dotted much of California, and Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese fishermen were overrepresented.
Further to your point the Scots and Irish aren't even Anglo-Saxon. You could make the argument for calling them Anglo-Celtic now but not so much at the time of the settlement of the US.
> Further to your point the Scots and Irish aren't even Anglo-Saxon.
Both are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences.
In Scotland, the Celtic ancestry is stronger among Highlanders, the Anglo-Saxon stronger among Lowlanders – but neither are purely descended from one as opposed to the other.
The English conquered Ireland in the 12th century, which was followed by successive waves of Anglo immigration down the centuries. Many of the earlier waves of Anglo settlers ended up assimilating into a Celtic identity (summarised by the famous quip that they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves"), some of the more recent waves less so (which is one of the causes of the still only partially resolved conflict in Northern Ireland).
> You could make the argument for calling them Anglo-Celtic now but not so much at the time of the settlement of the US.
I find it interesting (as an Australian) that in Australia the term "Anglo-Celtic" is preferred much more than in the US. I think that's because, while both countries have been significantly influenced by Irish Catholics, proportionately the influence was more significant in Australia's case.
Applying Albion’s Seed to California misses out on Spanish missionary culture and the shipping merchants who came from New York City, which does not have the same puritan roots as New England.
American Nations is a more recent book that describes more of the United States, though with less depth.
The absence of Spanish culture is boggling - it's delibrately avoided ..
A third were born in California,
and about an equal number were born in states populated by what the writer Colin Woodard calls “Greater Appalachia”.
And so the ideology of California came to be shaped by two very different migrant cultures
Clearly there's a third missing (assuming numbers correct, etc).
In general I think as a majority-minority state, applying a primarily UK-focused take on California misses a lot. The largest group in CA is Hispanic-Latino (40% of the population), and that's a group with neither Puritanical nor Scots-Irish background ideology. And 15% of the state is Asian-American... A very small percentage of CA descends from either Puritans/WASPs or Scots-Irish!
My read of Albion’s Seed and American Nations is that they’re more about how a regional culture was germinated and founded, under the idea that the culture (including legal and economic systems) is even more durable than a specific group. So it’s not exactly connected to current demographics.
> The West Coast species is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent.
I doubt there is a place where politics are coherent. The author just got raised in some other variation of political insanity, and thinks it's normal.
The article feels like it's grasping at tenuous historical straws trying to explain a mental health crisis in SF that's only really gotten out of hand in the past 5-10 years.
The anti-puritan strain isn't necessarily Scots-Irish, either. It's common in anyone who's had to suffer under puritanism.
I respect the effort here, but it's a bit like a school paper trying very hard to support a tenuous thesis.
I don't really buy the notion that California's modern web of seemingly endless hypocrisy can be traced back to centuries-old ideologies.
Then again... what does account for it? In the USA, California's "liberalism" does appear to be unique in its scope and pervasiveness. After two and a half decades in California, I can call it out for its FAKE liberalism. There's a lot of grandstanding, pontificating, and self-congratulation... but in the end it's a bunch of corrupt politicians and anti-citizen handouts to special interests, just like anywhere else.
Even worse, these handouts are couched in an annual parade of "ballot initiatives" that CA voters are dumb enough to fall for over and over. BILLIONS of dollars to "combat homelessness," with essentially zero results. And that's just one egregious example. Everyday life is hampered by other idiotic, do-nothing laws.
One example: One of the cleanest-burning fuels you can buy anywhere is denatured alcohol. Welp, that's illegal in CA. So you have to burn dirtier isopropanol.
Online shopping for Californians is a pain in the ass, because after researching and comparing and then finally selecting an item, you see: "Can't be shipped to your area." I saw this recently with plastic gardening tubs. WTF.
Meanwhile, CA mandates the inclusion of cancer-causing MTBA in all of its gasoline. Which the oil companies use as an excuse to jack CA's gas prices yet higher than CA's obscene taxes already do.
"I can call it out for its FAKE liberalism. There's a lot of grandstanding, pontificating, and self-congratulation... but in the end it's a bunch of corrupt politicians and anti-citizen handouts to special interests, just like anywhere else"
But that is real liberalism. Not too many philosophies would accept jetting around the world to meet with other well to do people with the entire purpose to tell everyone they need to stop flying and walk to work. It's a rare instant where killing the massager would do good.
It wasn't what he was aiming for but the bits about Massachusetts are fairly spot on, he was a little too charitable in his characterization of the Puritans.
In order to truly understand this article, it helps to have read Albion's Seed.
It's true that Spanish influence isn't taken into account enough in this article, but the article is still pretty sound in the importance it puts on Puritan and Borderer (Scots-Irish) cultural influence, as these are the two foremost cultural forces at odds with one another to this day, not just in California, but across the United States. The Okies in this case would be Borderers.
And again, although we see other non-Anglo cultural forces, immigrants typically align and integrate more or less with either the Puritan or the Borderer ethos.
Also, Anglo (as in Anglo-Saxon) settlers aren't even that prominent demographically in California.
Irish (eg. Kearny), German (eg. Haas, Levi, Sutter), Southern Italians, Russian, and Chinese settlers were much more prominent than Anglos during the frontier era along with the obviously large Hispanic population in a region that has been under Spanish rule longer than it has been under American rule.
I haven’t read Albion’s seed, so maybe I’m missing something. But… I don’t see any evidence for anything in the piece. Just because you can make a narrative about the similarities between puritans and certain facets of California policy doesn’t mean that one caused the other. I could point out parallels between the puritans and Japanese culture too, or Venezuelan culture. This doesn’t seem like history to me so much as fiction writing.
Right, this article doesn't make a case tracing Puritan and Borderer settlement to modern day California, but the book Albion's Seed does, and it makes a very convincing case.
The book examines a variety of folkways, naming conventions, and lineages in the cultural regions throughout old England, discovers those same things present in regions throughout America, and then follows the continued expression of those folkways and lineages all the way up to the present day.
And although we can find similarities between Puritans or Borderers with other cultures around the world, we can't make a convincing case that, for example, the Japanese had a significant influence on American culture and politics, because again, the primary sources revealing the folkways examined in Albion's seed are quite distinct and can be accurately traced from old England, to American settlement, and again up to the present day. Puritan architecture, food, naming conventions, and ancestry is quite distinct and well-understood, and we see evidence of those things throughout the United states, whereas there's not much Japanese architecture, food, place-names, or influential dynasties here in America.
Anyway, Albion's Seed is a very good book that I highly recommend reading.
Okies were not uniformly Scotch Irish - it was a generic term for internal migrants from North Texas and Southern Oklahoma which was very ethnically diverse with German, Czech, Russian, and Southern settlers along with Native Americans and Hispanics.
Not really. Much of Texas and Oklahoma was/is a cultural mixture of southern settlers, Central Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, and Native Americans that turned into it's own culture.
There's a reason why bock bier (eg. Shiner Bock), dryland farming (a Russian German thing), frybread (from the Bureau of Indian Affairs era), Cowboy culture (a merger of older Hispanic Ranchero culture with southern settler culture), etc became a thing in Texas and Oklahoma
There is to this day a Californio-derived "vaquero culture" in CA which considers TX-style "buckaroo" cowboys (who dally their lariats, have cow savvy pintos, etc.) to be a cheap knock-off.
(and to your point about italians: I'm not sure but suspect the use of snubbing posts in round pens came via swamp italians. Also, don't forget the portuguese: not as prominent as on HI, but still pretty common, eg Devin Nunes)
A huge number of towns in the Bay Area and all over the Central Valley have Portuguese community centers, Sociedade do Espírito Santo (Holy Spirit Society) or something like that. Santa Clara, Hayward, San Leandro, Pescadero, Sausalito, Newark, San Jose, Tracy, etc. I am missing so many. Members carry on traditional Catholic festivals, have community music bands, etc. I crashed one such party, it was fun.
During my 20+ years in the Bay Area I listened to a lot of Portuguese/Azorean radio, so much that it corrupted my accent. I was born in the Texas of Brazil but I sound a bit like the British equivalent now.
There is a book called American Nations written about a decade ago that tried to explain the different cultures in America through the nationalities of their early settlers. This article seems like an application of that book to specific policy oddities in California.
It's an interesting idea, but in both the book and this article, the connections are spurious. For example, it's a good soundbite that one can draw a through line from the Scots-Irish individualism to the libertarianism of California, but little real evidence of this actually provided.
While I sympathize with cultural influence as explanatory to some degree, I find the Yankee/Scots explanation not only reductive and tidy, but superficial. I find big-L Liberalism a much more convincing explanation, and one that also accounts for why California and the coasts in general tend to be the vanguard of developments that later spread to the rest of the country and elsewhere.
Liberalism itself is not a coherent worldview, and the observed duality in this article seems unsurprising given the tensions that pull Liberalism in different direction. On the one hand, there is the Liberal notion of "freedom" or liberty as absence of external constraint (what the author would likely identify with the Scots-Irish) that pulls Liberalism toward ever greater "pushing of boundaries" and the transgression of limits, hyper-individualism, secularism, and skepticism. On the other, the tacit theology grounding Liberalism is a Protestant theism and a tradition that is, surprise surprise, communitarian (i.e., what the author identifies with Yankee or Puritans). So liberty vs. order.
Of course, Liberalism, like any worldview, doesn't just stand still. Its consequences are fleshed out over time. And here is where we see conflict. On the one hand, Liberalism celebrates neutrality. Its understanding of religious tolerance is rooted in this idea of neutrality. But on the other hand, Liberalism is justified by Protestant theological notions. Even its neutrality is itself extended only to doctrines that share its liberal egalitarian presuppositions.
Of course, just as Liberalism (Locke) is incomprehensible without Descartes and Protestantism (Luther), Protestantism (Luther) and Descartes cannot be appreciated without Ockham [0][1]. It's been a religious and philosophical war all along.
> The "culturewar fodder" in this article is so distractingly dumb and laughably factually wrong that I couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs. Whatever the author's point was supposed to be, they're going to have a tough time reaching any audience that hasn't already drunk the kool-aid.
Ok. In that case there are 29 other threads on HN's front page to look at, and perhaps have curious conversation about.
"Dumb", "laughably wrong", "couldn't make it past the first few", "whatever the point was supposed to be", "going to have a tough time reaching any", "drunk the koolaid", "I certainly wouldn't trust", and "completely indifferent to correctness" are all markers of the kind of conversation we're trying to avoid here.
Your comment made me go have a look. I must confess, the first few paragraphs seem fine to me. I’m with dang. It would be helpful if you explained what you find objectionable.
The author leads by claiming that San Francisco has made it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" (completely false) and condones people doing meth at playgrounds (also completely false, though it would be nice if SF police were more responsive and helpful), then he starts apologizing for rape and demanding that sex workers and anyone possessing a hypodermic needle be charged with crimes, because if they aren't it "verges on criminal negligence" (without any apparent consideration of why such failed laws were changed). After that preface he gets to his main point, a weird fantasy ramble of a cultural-ethnic-origin "explanation" of how this is supposed to have come about, something about Puritans representing state control and Scots-Irish representing individual freedom or something (while apparently ignoring the groups who actually settled in California). I gave up at that point.
The author is apparently living in a weird Newsmax/Infowars (?) media bubble combined with occasional off-topic nonfiction books and doesn't seem capable of critically evaluating information before mashing it together and hyperbolically passing it to readers.
> San Francisco forces people to compost their food scraps (completely false)
In place since 2009,
> The San Francisco Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance (No. 100-09) is a local municipal ordinance requiring all persons located in San Francisco to separate their recyclables, compostables and landfilled trash and to participate in recycling and composting programs.
This requires that residents have access to regularly collected trash, recycling, and compost bins, which they are encouraged to use by means of making larger sizes of compost/recycle bins cheaper than larger sizes of landfill trash bins. Grocery stores, restaurants, and events are also required to provide separate bins for patrons to use, and employers are required to provide sufficient ashtrays for cigarette butts. (The main opposition to this policy comes from owners of large multi-unit properties who were annoyed because they didn't want to make space for the bins or pay for collection.)
There is no enforcement of people using the bins fastidiously, and people constantly dump their food scraps and recycling into their ordinary trash bins. (Not to mention plenty of dumping of incorrect stuff into the other bins, which is also not ordinarily enforced against.) If a resident throws all of their food scraps into the trash bin, nobody is going to do anything about it. In theory if someone starts dumping car batteries in the compost or something the city can come fine them.
Characterizing this policy as making it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" is at best a gross exaggeration.
(As an aside: I would personally recommend people compost their food scraps, either on their own property or using a collected bin: dumping organic material in a landfill creates a lot of methane, landfill space is not unlimited, the resulting compost is a useful by-product, and separating most food scraps from general garbage is easy.)
> dang, if it weren't for your top-level comment I would have just moved on without comment here. It wouldn't be hard to go point by point through the parts of the first few paragraphs of this article that are laughable, but it's really not worth the trouble. Instead people should just skip the whole thing and move along to the next topic, optionally flagging the topic
Perhaps it's not worth your trouble to discuss the article substantively, and that's fine—but please don't post shallow dismissals, name-calling, or snark as an alternative. The site guidelines ask commenters to avoid all of those.
All: diffs are what's interesting on HN, not generics. The diff with this article is the historical analysis, so please let's focus on that and avoid generic culturewar fodder, which leads hellward.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Edit: you guys have done a fantastic job and this thread is so much better than it could have been. Thanks!
I understand the phenomena the article is talking about – being authoritarian about some things while hands-off about other (possibly much more major) things – but I'm sceptical that the proposed historical explanation is correct.
Here's my own take: the recent history of the West in general, and the US more particularly, has been a conflict between two competing worldviews – one relatively "traditional", the other calling itself "progressive". And go back to the 1960s, the competition between the two worldviews seemed relatively coherent – the "traditionalists" controlled most of the power structures in society, the "progressives" were (by and large) an anti-authoritarian rebellion against those structures. But, 50-60 years later, now the "progressives" (and their heirs) have come to dominate large sections of those same power structures, and they've swapped their prior (relatively consistent) anti-authoritarianism for an inconsistent mixture of authoritarianism about some things and anti-authoritarianism about others.
You can see the same thing in other Western countries – even if not to quite the same degree – who have rather different ethnic histories. That's part of why I'm sceptical that appeals to the history of different Anglo subethnicities really works as an explanation.
When I moved to California some years ago, I also found the default combination of political positions weird. The best half-serious description I could come up with was that California is a country of conservative libertarian social democratic hippies. Those words don't make sense together, but neither does California. At least to someone from the left/green end of the European political spectrum.
I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article, but at least it's an explanation for the weirdness.
"I don't know if I buy the explanation in the article"
Yea I don't know if the writer has ever talked to a progressive activist. Drug enforcement isn't poo-poo'd out of some Libertarian ideal (let alone a Scottish one). It's poo-poo'd because it's seen as an ineffective fix for addiction. This is largely true, but the activists forgot that a lack of drug enforcement can ruin city centers.
Reform should start in our incarceration system not in crime enforcement but I digress.
City centers are being ruined even with places with stricter drug enforcement. I’m not entirely convinced the two are linked. If anything cost of housing and wealth of an area are better predictors.
The article is fairly off and overindexes Anglo-Saxon influence in a state where the largest influences tended to be Hispanics, working class central/southern/eaatern European settlers, Okies during the Dust Bowl, Asians of all walks of life, and post-WW2 immigration globally.
California is just "California", and an "Anglo-Saxon" tradition or lens just doesn't track back west - be it California, Texas, Washington, etc.
Just think about it - Kearny Street is named after a racist Irish immigrant. Levi and Haas were the most prominent businessmen in that era and were German Jews. Gold was found in Sutter Fort - a hacienda owned by a Swiss German. Much of the settlement in Central California was farmers from Eastern Europe, Southern Europe, Asia, Armenia, etc. Chinatowns and Japantowns dotted much of California, and Filipino, Chinese, and Japanese fishermen were overrepresented.
Further to your point the Scots and Irish aren't even Anglo-Saxon. You could make the argument for calling them Anglo-Celtic now but not so much at the time of the settlement of the US.
> Further to your point the Scots and Irish aren't even Anglo-Saxon.
Both are a mixture of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic influences.
In Scotland, the Celtic ancestry is stronger among Highlanders, the Anglo-Saxon stronger among Lowlanders – but neither are purely descended from one as opposed to the other.
The English conquered Ireland in the 12th century, which was followed by successive waves of Anglo immigration down the centuries. Many of the earlier waves of Anglo settlers ended up assimilating into a Celtic identity (summarised by the famous quip that they became "more Irish than the Irish themselves"), some of the more recent waves less so (which is one of the causes of the still only partially resolved conflict in Northern Ireland).
> You could make the argument for calling them Anglo-Celtic now but not so much at the time of the settlement of the US.
I find it interesting (as an Australian) that in Australia the term "Anglo-Celtic" is preferred much more than in the US. I think that's because, while both countries have been significantly influenced by Irish Catholics, proportionately the influence was more significant in Australia's case.
Applying Albion’s Seed to California misses out on Spanish missionary culture and the shipping merchants who came from New York City, which does not have the same puritan roots as New England.
American Nations is a more recent book that describes more of the United States, though with less depth.
The absence of Spanish culture is boggling - it's delibrately avoided ..
Clearly there's a third missing (assuming numbers correct, etc).In general I think as a majority-minority state, applying a primarily UK-focused take on California misses a lot. The largest group in CA is Hispanic-Latino (40% of the population), and that's a group with neither Puritanical nor Scots-Irish background ideology. And 15% of the state is Asian-American... A very small percentage of CA descends from either Puritans/WASPs or Scots-Irish!
My read of Albion’s Seed and American Nations is that they’re more about how a regional culture was germinated and founded, under the idea that the culture (including legal and economic systems) is even more durable than a specific group. So it’s not exactly connected to current demographics.
> The West Coast species is the cowboy version: more rebellious, less civilised, and also completely incoherent.
I doubt there is a place where politics are coherent. The author just got raised in some other variation of political insanity, and thinks it's normal.
The article feels like it's grasping at tenuous historical straws trying to explain a mental health crisis in SF that's only really gotten out of hand in the past 5-10 years.
The anti-puritan strain isn't necessarily Scots-Irish, either. It's common in anyone who's had to suffer under puritanism.
I respect the effort here, but it's a bit like a school paper trying very hard to support a tenuous thesis.
I don't really buy the notion that California's modern web of seemingly endless hypocrisy can be traced back to centuries-old ideologies.
Then again... what does account for it? In the USA, California's "liberalism" does appear to be unique in its scope and pervasiveness. After two and a half decades in California, I can call it out for its FAKE liberalism. There's a lot of grandstanding, pontificating, and self-congratulation... but in the end it's a bunch of corrupt politicians and anti-citizen handouts to special interests, just like anywhere else.
Even worse, these handouts are couched in an annual parade of "ballot initiatives" that CA voters are dumb enough to fall for over and over. BILLIONS of dollars to "combat homelessness," with essentially zero results. And that's just one egregious example. Everyday life is hampered by other idiotic, do-nothing laws.
One example: One of the cleanest-burning fuels you can buy anywhere is denatured alcohol. Welp, that's illegal in CA. So you have to burn dirtier isopropanol.
Online shopping for Californians is a pain in the ass, because after researching and comparing and then finally selecting an item, you see: "Can't be shipped to your area." I saw this recently with plastic gardening tubs. WTF.
Meanwhile, CA mandates the inclusion of cancer-causing MTBA in all of its gasoline. Which the oil companies use as an excuse to jack CA's gas prices yet higher than CA's obscene taxes already do.
The hypocrisy is crushing.
"I can call it out for its FAKE liberalism. There's a lot of grandstanding, pontificating, and self-congratulation... but in the end it's a bunch of corrupt politicians and anti-citizen handouts to special interests, just like anywhere else"
But that is real liberalism. Not too many philosophies would accept jetting around the world to meet with other well to do people with the entire purpose to tell everyone they need to stop flying and walk to work. It's a rare instant where killing the massager would do good.
It wasn't what he was aiming for but the bits about Massachusetts are fairly spot on, he was a little too charitable in his characterization of the Puritans.
An article about California's political culture but only mentions Hispanics only once and doesn't mention Oakies or Asians at all.
Methinks it might not be the most representative of California's political history.
California is just California, and trying to apply an "Anglo" lens is dumb and ahistorical.
In order to truly understand this article, it helps to have read Albion's Seed.
It's true that Spanish influence isn't taken into account enough in this article, but the article is still pretty sound in the importance it puts on Puritan and Borderer (Scots-Irish) cultural influence, as these are the two foremost cultural forces at odds with one another to this day, not just in California, but across the United States. The Okies in this case would be Borderers.
And again, although we see other non-Anglo cultural forces, immigrants typically align and integrate more or less with either the Puritan or the Borderer ethos.
The immigrants, in this case, were all the anglos who showed up after the original hispanic settlement, and filibustered their way into Statehood.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Republic
Also, Anglo (as in Anglo-Saxon) settlers aren't even that prominent demographically in California.
Irish (eg. Kearny), German (eg. Haas, Levi, Sutter), Southern Italians, Russian, and Chinese settlers were much more prominent than Anglos during the frontier era along with the obviously large Hispanic population in a region that has been under Spanish rule longer than it has been under American rule.
I haven’t read Albion’s seed, so maybe I’m missing something. But… I don’t see any evidence for anything in the piece. Just because you can make a narrative about the similarities between puritans and certain facets of California policy doesn’t mean that one caused the other. I could point out parallels between the puritans and Japanese culture too, or Venezuelan culture. This doesn’t seem like history to me so much as fiction writing.
Right, this article doesn't make a case tracing Puritan and Borderer settlement to modern day California, but the book Albion's Seed does, and it makes a very convincing case.
The book examines a variety of folkways, naming conventions, and lineages in the cultural regions throughout old England, discovers those same things present in regions throughout America, and then follows the continued expression of those folkways and lineages all the way up to the present day.
And although we can find similarities between Puritans or Borderers with other cultures around the world, we can't make a convincing case that, for example, the Japanese had a significant influence on American culture and politics, because again, the primary sources revealing the folkways examined in Albion's seed are quite distinct and can be accurately traced from old England, to American settlement, and again up to the present day. Puritan architecture, food, naming conventions, and ancestry is quite distinct and well-understood, and we see evidence of those things throughout the United states, whereas there's not much Japanese architecture, food, place-names, or influential dynasties here in America.
Anyway, Albion's Seed is a very good book that I highly recommend reading.
> The Okies in this case would be Borderers.
Okies were not uniformly Scotch Irish - it was a generic term for internal migrants from North Texas and Southern Oklahoma which was very ethnically diverse with German, Czech, Russian, and Southern settlers along with Native Americans and Hispanics.
Agreed about the others but wouldn't the Okies be part of the Scots-Irish strain he covers?
Not really. Much of Texas and Oklahoma was/is a cultural mixture of southern settlers, Central Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics, and Native Americans that turned into it's own culture.
There's a reason why bock bier (eg. Shiner Bock), dryland farming (a Russian German thing), frybread (from the Bureau of Indian Affairs era), Cowboy culture (a merger of older Hispanic Ranchero culture with southern settler culture), etc became a thing in Texas and Oklahoma
There is to this day a Californio-derived "vaquero culture" in CA which considers TX-style "buckaroo" cowboys (who dally their lariats, have cow savvy pintos, etc.) to be a cheap knock-off.
(and to your point about italians: I'm not sure but suspect the use of snubbing posts in round pens came via swamp italians. Also, don't forget the portuguese: not as prominent as on HI, but still pretty common, eg Devin Nunes)
A huge number of towns in the Bay Area and all over the Central Valley have Portuguese community centers, Sociedade do Espírito Santo (Holy Spirit Society) or something like that. Santa Clara, Hayward, San Leandro, Pescadero, Sausalito, Newark, San Jose, Tracy, etc. I am missing so many. Members carry on traditional Catholic festivals, have community music bands, etc. I crashed one such party, it was fun.
During my 20+ years in the Bay Area I listened to a lot of Portuguese/Azorean radio, so much that it corrupted my accent. I was born in the Texas of Brazil but I sound a bit like the British equivalent now.
There is a book called American Nations written about a decade ago that tried to explain the different cultures in America through the nationalities of their early settlers. This article seems like an application of that book to specific policy oddities in California.
It's an interesting idea, but in both the book and this article, the connections are spurious. For example, it's a good soundbite that one can draw a through line from the Scots-Irish individualism to the libertarianism of California, but little real evidence of this actually provided.
While I sympathize with cultural influence as explanatory to some degree, I find the Yankee/Scots explanation not only reductive and tidy, but superficial. I find big-L Liberalism a much more convincing explanation, and one that also accounts for why California and the coasts in general tend to be the vanguard of developments that later spread to the rest of the country and elsewhere.
Liberalism itself is not a coherent worldview, and the observed duality in this article seems unsurprising given the tensions that pull Liberalism in different direction. On the one hand, there is the Liberal notion of "freedom" or liberty as absence of external constraint (what the author would likely identify with the Scots-Irish) that pulls Liberalism toward ever greater "pushing of boundaries" and the transgression of limits, hyper-individualism, secularism, and skepticism. On the other, the tacit theology grounding Liberalism is a Protestant theism and a tradition that is, surprise surprise, communitarian (i.e., what the author identifies with Yankee or Puritans). So liberty vs. order.
Of course, Liberalism, like any worldview, doesn't just stand still. Its consequences are fleshed out over time. And here is where we see conflict. On the one hand, Liberalism celebrates neutrality. Its understanding of religious tolerance is rooted in this idea of neutrality. But on the other hand, Liberalism is justified by Protestant theological notions. Even its neutrality is itself extended only to doctrines that share its liberal egalitarian presuppositions.
Of course, just as Liberalism (Locke) is incomprehensible without Descartes and Protestantism (Luther), Protestantism (Luther) and Descartes cannot be appreciated without Ockham [0][1]. It's been a religious and philosophical war all along.
[0] https://a.co/d/hLLKYlD
[1] https://a.co/d/gE2GhbL
The word is anarcho-tyranny. Anarchy for the regime-aligned underclass. Tyranny for for everyone else.
About to comment similarly. Penalties are higher and more intrusive for those that can pay for it. Anything goes if you can't.
Edit: Deleting this comment. After being removed from the moderator's post it was replying to, it serves no purpose.
> The "culturewar fodder" in this article is so distractingly dumb and laughably factually wrong that I couldn't make it past the first few paragraphs. Whatever the author's point was supposed to be, they're going to have a tough time reaching any audience that hasn't already drunk the kool-aid.
Ok. In that case there are 29 other threads on HN's front page to look at, and perhaps have curious conversation about.
"Dumb", "laughably wrong", "couldn't make it past the first few", "whatever the point was supposed to be", "going to have a tough time reaching any", "drunk the koolaid", "I certainly wouldn't trust", and "completely indifferent to correctness" are all markers of the kind of conversation we're trying to avoid here.
Your comment made me go have a look. I must confess, the first few paragraphs seem fine to me. I’m with dang. It would be helpful if you explained what you find objectionable.
The author leads by claiming that San Francisco has made it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" (completely false) and condones people doing meth at playgrounds (also completely false, though it would be nice if SF police were more responsive and helpful), then he starts apologizing for rape and demanding that sex workers and anyone possessing a hypodermic needle be charged with crimes, because if they aren't it "verges on criminal negligence" (without any apparent consideration of why such failed laws were changed). After that preface he gets to his main point, a weird fantasy ramble of a cultural-ethnic-origin "explanation" of how this is supposed to have come about, something about Puritans representing state control and Scots-Irish representing individual freedom or something (while apparently ignoring the groups who actually settled in California). I gave up at that point.
The author is apparently living in a weird Newsmax/Infowars (?) media bubble combined with occasional off-topic nonfiction books and doesn't seem capable of critically evaluating information before mashing it together and hyperbolically passing it to readers.
> San Francisco forces people to compost their food scraps (completely false)
In place since 2009,
> The San Francisco Mandatory Recycling and Composting Ordinance (No. 100-09) is a local municipal ordinance requiring all persons located in San Francisco to separate their recyclables, compostables and landfilled trash and to participate in recycling and composting programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Mandatory_Recycl...
This requires that residents have access to regularly collected trash, recycling, and compost bins, which they are encouraged to use by means of making larger sizes of compost/recycle bins cheaper than larger sizes of landfill trash bins. Grocery stores, restaurants, and events are also required to provide separate bins for patrons to use, and employers are required to provide sufficient ashtrays for cigarette butts. (The main opposition to this policy comes from owners of large multi-unit properties who were annoyed because they didn't want to make space for the bins or pay for collection.)
There is no enforcement of people using the bins fastidiously, and people constantly dump their food scraps and recycling into their ordinary trash bins. (Not to mention plenty of dumping of incorrect stuff into the other bins, which is also not ordinarily enforced against.) If a resident throws all of their food scraps into the trash bin, nobody is going to do anything about it. In theory if someone starts dumping car batteries in the compost or something the city can come fine them.
Characterizing this policy as making it "illegal not to compost your food scraps" is at best a gross exaggeration.
(As an aside: I would personally recommend people compost their food scraps, either on their own property or using a collected bin: dumping organic material in a landfill creates a lot of methane, landfill space is not unlimited, the resulting compost is a useful by-product, and separating most food scraps from general garbage is easy.)
Since this discussion is growing distracting, I've detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41958544.
> dang, if it weren't for your top-level comment I would have just moved on without comment here. It wouldn't be hard to go point by point through the parts of the first few paragraphs of this article that are laughable, but it's really not worth the trouble. Instead people should just skip the whole thing and move along to the next topic, optionally flagging the topic
Perhaps it's not worth your trouble to discuss the article substantively, and that's fine—but please don't post shallow dismissals, name-calling, or snark as an alternative. The site guidelines ask commenters to avoid all of those.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
California is (mostly) populated with the descendants of people that ran and ran and ran until they hit an ocean and couldn't run anymore.
Then they ran inland again, or into the metaverse, or space, or into their own minds.
That's far more true of the remote parts of the continental interior than it is about CA.
The gold rush, farming, ww2 industry, tech, CA is a catch basin for people who want to get rich quick.
Get rich quick by farming?
Get rich quick by buying land and investing in irrigation. The farmer doesn't get rich.
If you're a Californian who disagrees with me, tell me where your parents and grandparents lived.
All my grandparents lived in CA, nice try though