LA has no natural harbor, it started out as an inland nowheresville, founded as a feudal agricultural settlement by the seasonal Los Angeles River feeding the San Fernando Mission at the northern mouth of the valley. San Diego was the major city of the region.
Eventually it came time to build a southern transcontinental (“Southern Pacific”) railroad route, with San Diego as the obvious western terminus but San Francisco had issues.
San Francisco, swollen by the Gold Rush, terminus of the first transcontinental route, was the dominant power in California and didn’t want a rival, pulled enough strings to redirect to LA.
LA built an artificial breakwater and a port down by San Pedro several miles south of the city, before that they used absurdly long-ass piers off the western coast around Malibu and Santa Monica.
Then narratively unrelated to any of this there was oil discovered in the hills, which generated capital and drew Eastern money, Pasadena became the west coast WASP capital, or at least Palm Beach-equivalent. LA became self-sustaining.
Then the movie industry moved there for the weather and distance from Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons
Then during WWI the aircraft industry got big because there was infrastructure and a population of workers in coastal shipping range of the NorCal/Oregon lumber industry, but WITHOUT SF/Seattle-style labor radical tendencies
Then during WWII that got even bigger and the US realized it needed to build up its Pacific (Japan- and Russia-facing) coast, which was honestly still frontier at that point
The next day — after Hatzi had called the police and reported the theft — she found the car in her driveway along with a note and $30 for gas money. It read: “Hello, So sorry I stole your car. I sent my friend with my key to pick up my red subaru at 7802 SE Woodstock and she came back with your car. I did not see the car until this morning and I said, ‘that is not my car.’ There is some cash for gas and I more than apologize for the shock and upset this must have caused you.”
AFAICT, Macedonia the Former Yugoslav Republic is just a bunch of Slavs who sort of live in the area of what once was Macedonia the ancient kingdom and have no real connection to the area beyond that. Doing stuff like calling your airport the
“Alexander the Great” Airport
is legitimately cultural appropriation in the annoying sense and you can see why Greece, which is culturally much closer to Macedonia of old would be irritated.
That said, come on. Get over yourselves and live with it. It’s not worth an international incident. I’m sure there have been much worse naming expropriations in history.
The Macedonian naming dispute (along with all the other Macedonian disputes) is freaking hilarious.
To take a (large) step back, let’s start with two premises:
Ethnicities/nations, as we know them today, are not immutable facts of nature. They’re relatively recent entities, brought about through some combination of deliberate action (often coercive) and the network-effecty incentives that come with building a modern state and economy. If you drew a map of the languages or cultures of the ancient world, it would look like a Jackson Pollock painting. If you did that for Europe today, it would look at least something like the actual map.
Nobody has any respect for anything that is too obviously new or “artificial”. Having origins reaching back into the mists of time lends credibility. As Nietzsche said, “As men after all only respect the old-established and slowly developed, he who would survive after his death must not only provide for posterity but still more for the past.” So much the more for nations.
Some countries got lucky by going through everything earlier. France seems like an ok example of this. France has been recognizably France for long enough that everyone can just pretend it’s been around forever (even though half the country couldn’t speak French in 1860). At the other end of the spectrum, you have settler states (US, Canada, Brazil, etc.) who know they’re not going to fool anyone, and instead have built their identities around some sort of shared political/historical mythology (well… some people think they can fool everyone I guess). The most screwed are the countries that found themselves playing the nation-building game much later than their neighbors.
Which brings us to the Balkans. The Balkans got to live inside the pre-national stasis field of the Ottoman empire for a looonggg time. While the rest of Europe was busily engaged in the hard work of sorting themselves into ever-so-slightly more homogenous geo-ethno-religio-political configurations one bloody war at a time, everyone in the Balkans was hanging out just being “those guys who used to be Romans”. The millet system of the Ottoman empire just chucked all the Christians in the same bag, and for a long time, they didn’t object to that… but then it all started breaking down in the early 1800′s.
The Greeks drew the metaphorical golden ticket. Not that there was ever really a pre-Roman pan-Greek state that was analogous to modern Greece. There was the Macedonian-dominated League of Corinth, but all the city states hated Macedonia (and maybe also each other). There was Alexander’s kingdom… for like 5 seconds, before it became a bunch of warring satrapies. The Greeks were united for the longest time as Rome. And in fact, that’s what they called themselves (and what the Ottomans and everyone else called them). Romans. In the early stages of Greek nationalism, it was just Roman nationalism. “Oh hey, all of us Orthodox Christians, we should really found a new Rome, this will be great, because we’re all Roman.” The Slavs (who saw that a Greek-dominated post-Ottoman state might not be in their best interests) weren’t particularly inspired by this vision of a new Rome. So, yeah, Roman Greek nationalism worked out pretty well. It might have been a rebranding, but the Greeks had had a common high culture attached to a state (albeit not a Greek one per se) for a long time, and they were standing on top of the freakin mother lode of historical credibility. Oh hey, it’s time to play wheel-of-nation-bulding! You get… “School children across the world will be taught that your country (that was founded in 1830) invented democracy, geometry, and philosophy! Lord Byron will write poems about how kickass you are and inspire the Brits to support your independence!”.
Macedonia drew a flaming bag of shit. They were (and are) a bunch of Slavs who speak a dialect of Bulgarian but live all the way over in the region of Macedonia, which immediately borders Greece. Bulgaria and the Serbs were the actual political players in the region, and Macedonia (along with the rest of what was once Yugoslavia) got sucked into the Serbian orbit. Their language was standardized at an embarrassingly late date, and is, at least according to one linguist’s joke, is “a Bulgarian one, but written on a Serbian typewriter”. Macedonia became independent in 1991 (which makes it younger than Terminator 2), and has been fighting an upward battle to be taken seriously since then. I actually learned all of this crap indirectly from a Google autocomplete map on tumblr. It showed all the of the countries in Europe with “Why is {{country}} ____?”. For Macedonia, it said “called FYROM?”. The answer to that question is “because Greece refuses to recognize that Macedonia is actually called Macedonia and blocked it from joining the UN under a name that doesn’t literally cause everyone to google it and find out immediately that other countries think it is so bullshit it doesn’t even deserve its own name.” Or something like that. And if you click on the search box again, you get some helpful suggestions on other ways to learn about how Macedonia isn’t taken seriously by its neighbors–“is macedonia part of greece” (part of it) and “macedonia alexander the great” (computer says no). Other important disputes are “that time we were forced to change our flag because we were appropriating Greek imagery” and “we eventually came to a compromise with the Bulgarians about what our language is called where we got them to call it ‘the official language of the country (Republic of Macedonia)’”.
And that is why Macedonia is hilarious.
you don’t choose the Slav life, the Slav life chooses you.
Anonymous asked: Would San Diego be even bigger than San Francisco or even the real LA if it had been Southern railroad Terminus? LA became bigger than San Francisco in terms of population and it seems it benefited from some luck.
Maybe? It wouldn’t have the oil boom, and getting water from the Sierra Nevadas would be even tougher, but in that alternate history maybe instead the San Diego Aqueduct to the Colorado happens before the Hoover Dam, Las Vegas and the Central Arizona Project never happen and the Coachella Music Festival is held in Owens Valley instead? Also maybe in this history the US grabs part of Baja California during the Mexican Revolution?
The Eastern Corridor has the lowest suicide rate. The Corridor is densely populated – population density correlates negatively with suicide rate – and it has a strong economy. Utah is sparsely populated and it has a weak economy. Sparse population implies a high rate before 2007; a weak economy implies a rise in the rate after 2007. The Corridor wasn’t hit very hard by the 2008 crash. The entire economy of my part of the swamp revolves around the government. What are they going to do, fire people?
DC is denser than any state, and it has a lower suicide rate than any state. New Jersey is the densest state, and it has the lowest suicide rate of all the states. New York and Massachusetts are urban areas attached to vast expanses of rural land where nobody lives. Over 80% of the population of Massachusetts lives in Greater Boston, which is about 10% of the area of the state. Over 40% of the population of New York lives in NYC proper.
The outliers on the East Coast are West Virginia and Vermont. Vermont is New England’s West Virginia, so. (I knew a guy in Vermont when I was 15 or so. Last time I saw him, he gave me a roll of firecrackers and said his dad had heard they were illegal in Maryland and told him to give them to me. On the one hand, this is exactly my shit; on the other hand, the only difference between a hippie and a redneck is that hippies vote Democrat, but in cultural terms, that’s a hell of a difference.)
The states with the lowest population density are Alaska and Wyoming. The states with the highest suicide rate are Wyoming and Alaska. Utah is #5 for suicide rate and #11 for sparseness. There’s something else going on, but I don’t know what. Land settlement patterns? (@kontextmaschine?)
Real question is, around half of the population of Oregon lives in the Portland metro area, so why does Oregon have such a high suicide rate?
Oregon was the first state to approve of physician-assisted suicide, by plebiscite in 1994 (back during the Kevorkian wave of attention).
Also I remember an investigation into the numbers gun control groups were throwing out on firearm deaths that showed a lot of those deaths were suicides by terminally ill or terminally old men you’d fairly describe as “stubborn old coot”, we’ve got a bunch of those.
So, uh, “out on the frontier we’d rather go out with a bang than a hospital bill”, I guess.
The Eastern Corridor has the lowest suicide rate. The Corridor is densely populated – population density correlates negatively with suicide rate – and it has a strong economy. Utah is sparsely populated and it has a weak economy. Sparse population implies a high rate before 2007; a weak economy implies a rise in the rate after 2007. The Corridor wasn’t hit very hard by the 2008 crash. The entire economy of my part of the swamp revolves around the government. What are they going to do, fire people?
DC is denser than any state, and it has a lower suicide rate than any state. New Jersey is the densest state, and it has the lowest suicide rate of all the states. New York and Massachusetts are urban areas attached to vast expanses of rural land where nobody lives. Over 80% of the population of Massachusetts lives in Greater Boston, which is about 10% of the area of the state. Over 40% of the population of New York lives in NYC proper.
The outliers on the East Coast are West Virginia and Vermont. Vermont is New England’s West Virginia, so. (I knew a guy in Vermont when I was 15 or so. Last time I saw him, he gave me a roll of firecrackers and said his dad had heard they were illegal in Maryland and told him to give them to me. On the one hand, this is exactly my shit; on the other hand, the only difference between a hippie and a redneck is that hippies vote Democrat, but in cultural terms, that’s a hell of a difference.)
The states with the lowest population density are Alaska and Wyoming. The states with the highest suicide rate are Wyoming and Alaska. Utah is #5 for suicide rate and #11 for sparseness. There’s something else going on, but I don’t know what. Land settlement patterns? (@kontextmaschine?)
Real question is, around half of the population of Oregon lives in the Portland metro area, so why does Oregon have such a high suicide rate?
Oregon was the first state to approve of physician-assisted suicide, by plebiscite in 1994 (back during the Kevorkian wave of attention).
Also I remember an investigation into the numbers gun control groups were throwing out on firearm deaths that showed a lot of those deaths were suicides by terminally ill or terminally old men you’d fairly describe as “stubborn old coot”, we’ve got a bunch of those.
So, uh, “out on the frontier we’d rather go out with a bang than a hospital bill”, I guess.
Actually a lot of hardscrabble societies have traditions of the elderly knowingly choosing death, or of their children choosing it for them (often with a disclaimably fuzzy boundary there).
The Eskimo “out on an ice floe” thing is still idiomatic, but I’ve heard “walked into the snow ‘to go hunting’“, deny them fluids to dehydration, overhydrate them to water intoxication, all sorts of poisons
Of course most of the time you wouldn’t have to force it, one in every eight years would be cold enough and food would be scarce enough. You wouldn’t actually freeze or starve mostly, just weaken enough to fall to pneumonia, “the old man’s friend”.
That’s one of the funnier things about when Sarah Palin of Alaska was going on about “death panels” - it’s welfare state shit like Social Security and Medicare and (lesser known) winter heating assistance programs that are the reason that isn’t still a familiar thing
I randomly ran across someone tossing shade on baptismal shells and was like
“whatwhatsmil whats?”
apparently like, decorative scallop-shell imitations used to ceremonially anoint children into Christian humanity?
and I was like “ha ha how random” but then flashed back to how when I was a baby our family got a theoretically-but-not-really usable pewter/silvered baby-sized cup and hairbrush and dish that we kept on a visible shelf for low-key ceremonial veneration
Oregon votes exclusively by mail, I was just wondering if I put my ballot envelope (a thick and sturdy one with an optional privacy envelope within, with my signature on the back) in the box (with postage, I can also drop off at libraries and other public sites for free up to the deadline) and then I get hit by a bus before the election, is there anything to stop my vote from being counted?
friend tells me of a recent trip to Vegas where someone “accidentally” spilled a beer in her purse and while she tried to salvage her phone grabbed her wallet and ran and that’s CLEVER
