one of the core things going on

Is it ever. I completely stopped engaging with Republicans as it became increasingly clear that essentially none of them were arguing in good faith ever (and I'm referencing voters more than politicians here). "I don't care" and "fuck you" are the alpha and omega of modern conservatism, and they've pretty much cut out everything in between.

It really makes you wonder what a Northeast+Great Lakes country with Southern Ontario, Southern Quebec, the Maritimes, New England, NY, NJ, PA, and the Great Lakes adjacent parts of the Midwest would be like. In many ways it's a lot more sensible than the borders we ended up with.

Richard Nisbett was all over this. White southerners (particularly rural white southerners) are far more violent than northerners. Mark Twain noted the same thing a century earlier (though he spins it differently):

"Do I know you? I know you clear through was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people - whereas you're just AS brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark - and it's just what they WOULD do.
"So they always acquit; and then a MAN goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought PART of a man - Buck Harkness, there - and if you hadn't had him to start you, you'd a taken it out in blowing.

Another observation of Nisbett: the descendants of the Irish retained a propensity towards alcoholism. It is interesting that the stereotypical facial morphology of the 18th century Irish is the facial morphology of fetal alcohol syndrome.

Let's all disclose our SAT scores and feelings about eugenics!

South Florida being where people go to retire, it's to be expected that the average age of death there is really high...

The point about having your political beliefs become part of who you are is a good one, but I am doubtful that it's a new thing with Trump. Surely there were strongly identifying Republicans and Democrats before!
And in fact this https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2017/05/17/partisan-identification-is-sticky-but-about-10-switched-parties-over-the-past-year/
seems to suggest that young Republicans were the most likely to switch parties around the time that Trump got elected.

It would be kind of hilarious if we blamed America's problems on the Irish.

If you look at the right-wing power structure,
the thought does cross one's mind. And I say this as a woman with cousins named not only Erin, but Colleen -- the very worst of the 2d gen Irish-American tendency.

Surely there were strongly identifying Republicans and Democrats before!

There were, but there was also a 40 year reassortment going on where Southern Democrats had to stare deep in their souls and realize that Republicans hated black people more than Democrats. So "party" didn't align with identity quite as well.

As a side note, I always think that articles about political polarization are incredibly dumb if they fail to note that Southern Democrats were muddling things up in the 60s-80s.

My mom's name is Colleen, and she was merely named by self-hating Jews.

And boy did she outdo them on the naming of her own kids.

The only Colleen I know is Jewish too.

I know lots of Colleens that are Irish.

The red areas in the upper Midwest are mostly Native. The blue is the Republican white people. They aren't hurting themselves the way they are in the south.

@4, 6, 7

My point was that culture has a persistence that should not be underestimated. As culture is slow to evolve and is transmitted across generations through example. For example, retirement-age-with-two-grown-children-and-a-mortgage adults getting absolutely, unable-to-talk wasted at a house party while elementary school school run riot around them would be completely outside the experience of a descendant of prim Massachusetts Unitarians. Hypothetically.

13.last: Not yet? I'm wondering if eventually the southernification of the rural midwest is going to start showing up on these maps. You already see it in Northern Michigan and parts of IN/OH/IL (obviously the parts that were always kinda southern, but not entirely e.g. the red bits east of Indy or smack in the middle of IL). I'm not sure whether those red bits are a recent phenomenon though.

Of course it's not just about being Republican, the plains states have always been Republican and healthy, it's about Southern culture moving in. The stark difference between OK and NE is notable here (with KS mostly but not entirely like NE), you can just see where the line is between places settled by Southerners and not.

Kieran Healy has a blog post noting that a whole lot of maps of distribution of one thing or another in the US come down to either a map of population density or a map of tbr percentage of African American population: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2015/06/12/americas-ur-choropleths/ . And so it's usually worth thinking about how one or the other of those things affects what you're thinking about.

But in this map the almost entirely White Upland South is bright red. Obviously you have the poor core Appalachia area of western WV, eastern Ky, and northeastern TN, which always pops up on all maps. But it's not just that! Most of OK, all of AR (and not just the part along the river that's majority Black), all of AL (not just the Black belt in the middle), all of TN except metro Nashville (and not just the greater Memphis area), most of western NC, etc.

The whole south pops up on this map, and not just the parts with a high percentage of Black people, and that's really notable because as you say most maps don't have that feature.

I thought I had read recently that this map holds up even if you factor for race. Am I going to look for that reference? Probably not.

Basically this map has the whole south red except for a few islands of blue in the key "new south" cities (Nashville, Atlanta, Research Triangle), and lighter blue in some smaller metros with similar "new south" characteristics (Fayetteville AR, Lexington KY).

19: You don't need to really look it up, you just need to look at whether the map has a stripe across Alabama. If the main factor is percentage Black you always get a dramatic stripe through the middle of Alabama. (In other southern states the geography is more complicated so you need to pay closer attention, but in Alabama it's particularly easy to see.)

The maps in 17 are very cool, but really the second one should be "percentage Black or Native" or "percentage Black, Native, or Appalachian" (depending on whether it has partisan valence or not, since Appalachia recently switched parties).

Interesting!

Huh, I've looked at those maps many times before, but today is the first time I noticed the higher percentage Black in the UP. I wonder what's going on there? Retirees from metro Detroit?

I should add a caveat to 22, it's possible that this map doesn't have enough shades and so is missing an even brighter stripe through the Black belt in Alabama. But nonetheless this map doesn't just look like the typical Black, Native, Appalachian map.

Come to my TED talk about why colleges should have affirmative action for BIA people, Black, Indigenous, and Appalachian.

17. Isn't he Irish?

27: No. He's from Ireland. Only Irish people born in the US count as truly Irish.

There's really two different things going on in this map: lower life expectancy throughout the rural (but not the urban) South, regardless of local demographics, and much lower life expectancy in heavily Native areas of the rural West. There are some other more minor phenomena that are interesting but those are the big ones.

19: This isn't precisely responsive, but it's at least suggestive: Life expectancy by state and race.

Excerpts:

**Maryland -- White males 75.57 / black males 68.69 / white females 80.08 / black females 75.94
**Massachusetts -- White males 75.68 / black males 69.29 / white females 80.57 / black females 75.68
**Michigan -- White males 74.91 / black males 66.32 / white females 79.71 / black females 73.50
**Minnesota -- White males 76.86 / black males 70.13 / white females 81.61 / black females 75.08
**Mississippi -- White males 72.72 / black males 66.71 / white females 78.94 / black females 73.87

So just eyeballing it, the differences seem stark enough to move the averages in different states.

You also get this interesting thing, where states with lower black populations have healthier black populations:

**Maine -- White males 75.21 / black males 78.47 / white females 80.00 / black females 85.14
**Wyoming -- White males 76.09 / black males 82.44 / white females 80.34 / black females 84.50
**Vermont -- White males 76.72 / black males 84.11 / white females 81.19 / black females 84.71
**South Dakota -- White males 76.32 / black males 83.37 / white females 81.82 / black females 80.06
**North Dakota -- White males 76.98 / black males 89.97 / white females 82.42 / black females 78.44
**New Hampshire -- White males 76.97 / black males 85.56 / white females 81.19 / black females 88.02

From those numbers you can see that both Black life expectancy is especially low in most places, but also White life expectancy is also lower in the South. And I expect that the White life expectancy in the South drops further once you look just at the rural South.

On the second thing in 30, an interesting fact is that Wyoming is the only state with higher average Black incomes than White (and they're much higher!), and it's because it's mostly because of rich Black people from California moving there. I expect it's a similar phenomenon that you're seeing there. Black people in NH are probably mostly rich people from Boston or like Dartmouth professors.

31: Where are you getting that stat? I tried to replicate it and couldn't. But check out the confidence intervals below: it might have been a statistical artifact related to how few Black people there are in Wyoming to sample at all.

Median household income, 2016-2021 ACS 5-year estimates, 2021 dollars, Wyoming:
White householder: $67,124 ± $3,185
Black householder: $45,376 ± $30,436
White non-Hispanic householder: $68,091 ± $2,797

A few random additional items to include in this thread. I've been reading a number of the articles about US life expectancy in the last couple of weeks and few things worth emphasizing are:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/04/america-mortality-rate-guns-health/673799/

Imagine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

According to data collected by Burn-Murdoch, a typical American baby is about 1.8 times more likely to die in her first year than the average infant from a group of similarly rich countries: Australia, Austria, Switzerland, Germany, France, the U.K., Japan, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Let's think of this 1.8 figure as "the U.S. death ratio" the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations. In direct country-to-country comparisons, the ratio is even higher. The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia. Only in our late 80s and 90s are Americans statistically on par, or even slightly better off, than residents of other rich nations.

This has interesting data on life expectancy and health access by racial categories: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/report/key-data-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/

Black people fared worse than White people across the across the majority of 30 examined measures of health, and AIAN [American Indian / Alaskan Native] people fared worse on half of the health measures for which they had data available (Figure 13). In contrast, Asian people fared better than White people for most examined health measures. Measures for Hispanic people were more mixed relative to White people. Data limitations for NHOPI [Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander] people existed for half of the examined measures, limiting the ability to understand their experiences.

Comparison to peer countries: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.04.05.22273393v4.full.pdf

For example, here is how life expectancy has changed in Canada over the pandemic:

Canada
Total --
2019: 82.37
2020: 81.39
2021: 81.65
Women --
2019: 84.43
2020: 83.67
2021: 84.04
Men --
2019: 80.28
2020: 79.12
2021: 79.26

Or by median family income:
White householder: $87,694 ± $1,366
Black householder: $65,059 ± $48,176

Yeah, ACS data is very unreliable at small sample sizes. The MOEs totally swamp the results.

This seems relevant:

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/04/23/surprising-geography-of-gun-violence-00092413?utm

32: https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/t8ef3y/map_of_income_inequality_between_black_and_white/

I must admit I didn't check up on their sources.

37: Thanks. I was able to replicate that number precisely - it's the 2018 one-year ACS estimates, which are an even smaller sample size.

In 2018 1-year, white householder median household income was $62,226 ± $1,747; for Black householders, $88,951 ± $66,837. The % difference is the 42.86% on that map.

But if they had used 5-year 2018, they would have gotten Black householder median household incomes 29% less than white, much like the other years I had above.

$88,951 ± $66,837

That's quite the range!

The 5-year estimates said Wyoming that year had 215,840 white-headed households vs. 2,007 Black-headed. When I tried to get the 1-year equivalent for those numbers, the Census site refused to display anything on the Black side, suggesting even the total number was statistically unreliable.

I was wondering why rural Texas shows so much variation and suspected there were some Spiders Georg of Lifespan things going on, so I looked up TX counties by population and omgwhy does Texas need 93 counties with fewer than ten thousand people in them?!

The Atlantic article in 33 is pretty funny. Here are all these stats describing the problem, and here are some very plausible explanations, but actually it's overregulation, according to Alex Tabarrok!

41: The 254 counties of Texas makes it massively hard for social services to function effectively, even before having paltry budgets and malicious state leaders. It's a big problem. In contrast, California has 58 counties.

42: Quoting that paragraph:

The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America's problem isn't freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation. In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments. This has created what the economist Alex Tabarrok calls an "invisible graveyard" of people killed by regulators preventing access to therapies that would have saved their life. Consider, in the same vein, the problem of diet and exercise. Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It's possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.

I don't find "too much regulation" the best way to approach the (varied) problems of the US Health Care system, but I think it's correct to say that the sedentary suburban American lifestyle isn't a symptom of "too much freedom" (in the same way that gun deaths are).

Alex Tabarrok is a predictable libertarian hack who hates education and voting, truly not worth reading anything he writes. ChatGPT trained on any 5000 words of his is more thoughtful. May he have only competing witch doctors and Dr Oz when he gets sick, that's what he wants for everyone else.

Yes, the FDA introduces a braking mechanism to adding new treatments that's pretty bureaucratic and expensive. Inefficient as it is, it blocked Thalidomide, and having some agency in that role rather than none means that people faced with serious disease don't need to listen to greedy quacks who offer nutritional supplements or faith healing.

Is there an alternative general interest somewhat literate monthly to the Atlantic? I dropped it a while back, aside from staff hacks like Flanagan they ran somthing by David Brooks.

The last sentence of the quote in 44 is known to be false, the Soda industry peddles the line that not enough walking is a demographically relevant health threat to distract from the completely crystal clear evidence that flooding groceries with subsidized fructose and sugar has predictable consequences. Both in dollars and lives, diabetes and related complications are much more serious than cardiovascular problems, Anyone intending to write about this in an even slightly informed way would include none of this in a half-assed first draft, but it's the Antlantic so why check.

43: I actually was just coincidentally looking up some data on small counties. In California, 35 mostly small-and-rural counties club together to pay a single entity to manage indigent health services. I'd be surprised if the tiny counties of Texas didn't have similar arrangements - or maybe the state does it in their stead or something.

whoops diabetes tied with cardiovascular when everything gets aggregated, see table 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5551483/

But cardiovascular is not just due to too many parking lots.

I've been meaning to cancel my Atlantic subscription. I'm sorry Ed Yong! I'm sorry Adam Serwer!

47: My friend helps coordinate counties for early childhood development resources. I think there's collaboration, but it's a mess. At the state level, there's something like 2 employees, total.

Well, at least they make it easy.

Jerusalem Demsas is great, but not enough to get me to subscribe.

40: It's probably a privacy issue. At a certain point, they're giving out statistics with such small numbers, they're just describing a couple of people.

Yeah, there's a threshold beneath which the Census doesn't release information that might be personally identifying.

53: Yes, the top-level around 2,000 would have been fine, but I could only find it in a race-specific table that would have then subdivided it further.

Both in dollars and lives, diabetes and related complications are much more serious than cardiovascular problems

I haven't tried to make that comparison, but it's interesting to look up information. For example, this is interesting.

After adjusting for age- and sex-related differences, depression had an associated 8.2 years of QALY loss; diabetes, 5.6 years; hypertension, 2.5 years; heart disease, 5.4 years; stroke, 6.4 years; emphysema, 8.0 years; asthma, 4.8 years; arthritis, 0.3 years; and cancer, 2.5 years.

From what google tells me, about 11-12% of the US population has diabetes. According to the American Heart Association, half of the US population has some form of heart disease (including hypertension). If, back of the envelope, 40% of the US population was losing 2.5 years of life to hypertension and 10% was losing 5.4 years to heart disease, that would be more diabetes.

Wilford Brimley tried to warn us.

This is also interesting.

Dr. Saint-Maurice and colleagues found that if U.S. adults age 40-85+ increased moderate-to-vigorous physical activity by 10 minutes per day, approximately 6.9% of annual deaths could be averted--111,174 preventable deaths per year. Greater benefits were associated with larger increases in physical activity. Similar benefits were observed for men, women, Mexican Americans, non-Hispanic Black Americans, and non-Hispanic White Americans. This analysis illustrates the potential impact of public health efforts to increase average physical activity levels.

For scale there are approximately 700K deaths/year to heart disease and 90K deaths to diabetes (but that overstates the difference in years of life lost because diabetes is relatively more likely to affect younger people).

||

Does anyone remember a piece from years ago called something like "I don't care what they did on the veldt" that was on a commenter's blog (I'm thinking maybe Megan)? I'm wondering if it still exists anywhere.

|>

To give a better picture of deaths due to diabetes:

Diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in the United States in 2019 based on the 87,647 death certificates in which diabetes was listed as the underlying cause of death. In 2019, diabetes was mentioned as a cause of death in a total of 282,801 certificates.

On the veldt, people who couldn't remember where to find articles were eaten by leopards.

59: Probably not this https://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2003/07/just_not_so_sto.html

59: Or this https://crookedtimber.org/2012/01/17/dear-guys-who-would-like-to-make-stuff-up-about-sexual-relations-a-priori-on-the-basis-of-like-spiders-or-something/

62 & 63: No, I believe it was more evo-psych focused.

63: Ooooh, Belle Waring. I'll click-thru and read just as soon as I don my blood-spatter-proof tyvek bunny suit!

It seems overcorrecting to imply that because the sugar-products industry wants to downplay their role in general poor health, sedentary lifestyles must not be a real problem.

66. It's a huge topic and hard to devise dispositive studies. But a steep increase over time in diabetes is happening elsewhere as well,
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2017/04/05/522038318/how-diabetes-got-to-be-the-no-1-killer-in-mexico
and it's definitely true that the soda industry is taking active steps to shift blame.
https://www.cnbc.com/2015/08/10/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets.html

If zoning is the "more likely explanation" (from a thought leader willing to cite Tabarrok), why introduce a soda tax or cut ag subsidies that subsidize soda? I haven't read the Atlantic article and am shooting from the hip on all of this today. I live in a walkable neighborhood, like exercising, vote for yimbys, but my last pass at assessing effects of changes in diet vs exercise in the literature definitely pointed to diet nudges as more beneficial, at least for my personal not-great but not-terrible levels for both. More exercise, even a little bit, for very sedentary people helps a bunch of health outcomes is my memory of the literature. Not clear that it helps much with obesity absent dietary changes though. I would push the connection between suicide rate and population density as a health benefit personally if I wanted a health argument.

56,58, I can't do reference hunting today, and as I say, dispositive studies are hard to come by. There are definitely studies driven by changes in outcome for people who are either very sedentary or very obese. very sedentary counterintuively includes people with office jobs who have intermittent vigorous exercise if I remember correctly, at least for strokes. Alcohol and smoking are huge confounders for epidemiologicall attempts to untangle these.

67: It seems more likely to me they each have a multiplicative effect on the other. Consistent with diet still being the bigger of the two.

I've never seen a study saying my marshmallow diet isn't safe.

Indeed, the faster you eat them the better: "Optimization of Peep Oral-Insertion Techniques for 'Chubby Bunny'"

OT: So many drunk Millennials.

They've gotten to Mr. Brightside.

59: Could it be the post where Ogged riffs on the value of civilization and good company?

Ah, here we go:

http://www.unfogged.com/archives/week_2006_10_15.html#005622

So many names in the rummaging!

Jackmormon, Emerson, A White Bear, bitchphd...

It happens at the state level too. In the Back Bay, an upper middle class to upper class neighborhood in Boston, the life expectancy is 92. In Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood which is getting more expensive but has been historically poor, less than a mile away, it's closer to 59. Everybody here is a Democrat.

75 to 17-19.

Diabetes leads to vascular damage which leads to cardiovascular disease. That's why statin therapy is a major part of diabetes care. You could die of a heart attack, but you might never have had that MI without having had diabetes.

75: I was curious, so I tried to find the source of those numbers. Seems to be this report (pages 21-22), which is based on data from 2003 to 2007. Also, it's not talking about all of Roxbury, it's talking about one very specific corner surrounding Melnea Cass Boulevard. It also shows the part of the South End immediately south of where I live as very low life expectancy. I think this would look pretty substantially different if you used recent data.

Here's some more recent visualization of life expectancy by census tract, for several cities including Boston, with data from 2010 to 2015. Roughly the same census tract in Roxbury the other one showed as being 59, this one shows as 78. The riverfront parts of the Back Bay show up as 82 instead of 92. These numbers generally look much more reasonable to me.

The latest mass shooting is just so bizarre that it's not passing my attention with barely a ripple. Shooting people who asked you politely to stop shooting (at 11pm), including children, is evil at a level that seems new.

78 and 79: I believe that. I bet that the life expectancy on Marlborough Street or Louisburg square (Beacon Hill) is in the 90's though.

73: No, but it led me to the right one, so thanks!

It wasn't quite what I was remembering, but still a fine rant on ev psych.

Homegrown evolutionary psychology is bullshit, and professional ev psych is highly suspect. In the first place, the idea that our nature is revealed by what animals would have done in a brutish struggle for survival IS NOT RELEVANT. What proto-humans would have done is purest speculation, and irrelevant as well. Our standard is NOT ANIMAL BEHAVIOR IN A STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL. We can do better than that these days. We have frontal cortexes now! This has been a very exciting development and it allows us to CHOOSE OUR BEHAVIOR! This is great! It means that we can act a hell of a lot better than animals in a brutish struggle for survival. So I DON'T FUCKING CARE what animals would have done on the veldt.

We should organize society arroyos sound zookeeping praxis.

Around.

We have frontal cortexes now!

There's no requirement that we have to use them.

...yet. The nanny state moves slowly, but determinedly.

For sound sociological reasons, I was watching what people were drinking last night. A couple were drinking Bud Light, but more were drinking Michelob Ultra. Which I've never tried that I can recall. But the baffling thing was to be drinking either when my cousin was paying for a full open bar including all the liquor and many wines.

||
A reference in a 1904 UK newspaper to someone's place of birth as "Starie Rus', a village about forty miles south of St. Petersburg, in County Novgorod." How is life in County Novgorod, tell me?
|>

45.1 Oh my bad, I confused Tabarrok with Bryan Caplan for no good reason, Tabarrok is a libertarian but not the complete idiot.

88: presumably the village is in Novgorodsky Oblast, and oblast is Russian for "county" in the sense of a national division one level down from the country itself. The average 1904 reader wouldnt know what an oblast was, though. And you couldn't just say "a village in Novgorod" because Novgorod is a city. So County Novgorod, like County Durham, County Cork, County Kerry and so on.

PRINCIPALITY

Who is this Nevsky person?

The link in 82 took me to a sensitive content warning, which seems like an overreaction.

OH MY EFFING GOD AJAY I was inviting people to RIFF on the folksy English version of Novgorod Oblast, via 19th C literary mashup or whatever. Nothing is fun anymore.

A little kid was selling pictures for a $1, so I bought one. I turned out to be a violation of Disney's intellectual property, so I threw it away after I was far enough away that he couldn't see me.

It was just a photocopy.

LIFE IN THE COUNTIES WAS NEVER FUN

19TH CENTURY LITERATURE WASN'T EITHER

The Holy Roman Empire was none of those things.

I think it should have been rendered as Novgorodshire since there isn't a Count of Novgorod. In fact all foreign countries should get this treatment. Instead of the exoticising "province" or "state" let's normalise Novgorodshire, Heilongjiangshire (pronounced Hingshire) and Coloradoshire.

||

"I think what characterizes him is that he has infinite tranquility,"

101; I figured this had to be about Trump or Musk, but no.... I admit I haven't been keeping a close eye on the situation in Paraguay.

And why would you? It is so very tranquil.

100 and in the grand old tradition of tautological toponyms I give you Novgorodshire Oblast, etc.

100: It's like my whole life is a lie. Did anybody in all of US history ever ask how we can have counties if we reject counts? Not in any of the history textbooks I was assigned.

I STILL WANT TAKES BARRY!!!! DON'T YOU THINK I FORGOT!!!

New Hampshireshire?

I never realized that counties were the cute form of Counts, either.

I want to make some sort of joke about clownties, but haven't gotten it yet.

Denmark had a marquee, or tent, over the country.

Worse yet, peep, your counties come with sheriffs.

And weed control officers.

106 were you looking for Israel/Palestine takes?
They're fucked.

http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_18304.html#2163177
You promised!
http://www.unfogged.com/archives/comments_18304.html#2163265
Pout.

112: Ten years ago I used to troll my liberal friends who wanted to believe that Palestinian apartheid was ultimately self-defeating for Israel -- a country that, after all, relies heavily on the goodwill of the US and other countries.

I used to say, no, given Israel's actual goals, this is how you win.

That formerly hot take has evolved into something approaching conventional wisdom. The open question now is: Given Israel's goals, is it counter-productive to deny democracy to Jewish Israelis? I'm still on the fence on that one.

Setting aside the question of whether under conditions of apartheid Israel can be considered a democracy, it's now run by a fascist government which stands a good chance of committing another nakba. I don't see any way out for them although the recent massive protests were heartening to see. I just don't think this ends well.

I think this was all embedded in the original Zionist project, although nothing predestined it to come to full fruition. Becoming an ethnostate meant throwing away the universalism that Jews had previously helped the rest of the world aspire to, and that made being Jewish any more distinctive than being Serbian.

My ancestors were anti-Zionist Jews I think partly because they were doing pretty well for themselves in the US, and had ambitions of further assimilation, but I like to think this was also part of what they grasped.

The people supporting Israel in hopes of starting the Apocalypse are looking to finish in the money.

116 True, that was the contradiction at the heart of the project, though not predestined as you say. One wonders how things might have turned out differently and so much better had Rabin not been assassinated and a two-state solution with a viable Palestinian state arrived at. And of course the person, other than the trigger man most responsible for Rabin's assassination is none other than Netanyahu himself.

Yeah, the terrorists really did win by killing Rabin, that was the one chance. Though it's still not clear to me whether Rabin would have been willing to make the concessions needed for a genuinely viable Palestinian state (the most obvious and straightforward example is completely ceding Hebron, which Barak never came close to considering, and is absolutely necessary for a viable two state solution).

I think this was all embedded in the original Zionist project, although nothing predestined it to come to full fruition. Becoming an ethnostate meant throwing away the universalism that Jews had previously helped the rest of the world aspire to, and that made being Jewish any more distinctive than being Serbian.

Yeah, I agree with this take as well.

110: If it has a sheriff, it's a shire! That's what the word means! Shire-reeve!

Counties in the UK do not have counts either, of course, since we call our counts earls (though their wives are still countesses rather than earlwives).

But more recently a lot of counties gained sheriffs of their own, even in England, right? How did that happen? (I do see that by the 20th century the city/borough-level sheriff positions had disappeared and all that remained were county-level ceremonial ones which were renamed 'high sheriffs'.)

I remember 10 or so years ago in a class I taught between high & low areas --like Marin County v. Certain reservations the gap was huge...like 30 years.

Basically only some people in the US live in a developed nation.

123: counties in England (which are generally but not always *also* shires, and similarly shires are generally but not always also counties) have had sheriffs since before 1066, and Scotland (where shires are also generally counties though we prefer not to think of it that way) for almost as long - they were originally the chief law enforcement officer of the area, but over the years their responsibilities changed and they became a sort of master of ceremonies (in England) or a lower court judge (in Scotland) with the office either heritable (in mediaeval Scotland), appointed in rotation (in brackets) and vice versa.

also, counties whether shires or not may be county councils but also may not, in which case they're just ceremonial counties, unless they are metropolitan councils or unitary authorities. hope this helps!

125: Thanks. I learned in research since 123 that when the Anglo-Saxons set up shires they called them comitati in Latin!

126: I know enough about UK local government not to be intimidated. It's worlds more rationally devised than most of the US, in fact, though all the old ceremonial stuff coexists confusingly.

A logical and rational substructure with a load of confusing ceremonial stuck on top is pretty much my ideal form of government, now I think about it.

I feel like the US is the other way up which is terrible.