The Marxist revolutionaries are at the door
The first installment of the Republican convention seems to have been exciting. (I didn’t watch it. I don’t watch conventions. I’d rather watch paint dry.) Kimberly Tinfoil gave a psychotic all-caps fascist shouting rant, and the gun-pointing St Louis couple gave a slightly quieter fascist rant.
During their speech Monday, Mark McCloskey described Cori Bush, the activist leading protesters in St. Louis, as a “Marxist revolutionary.”
…
“That Marxist revolutionary is now going to be the congresswoman from the 1st District of Missouri,” Mark McCloskey said on Monday. “These radicals are not content with marching in the streets. They want to walk the hall of Congress, they want to take over, they want power. This is Joe Biden’s party. These are the people who will be in charge of your future and the future of your children.”
Joe Biden is about as “Marxist” as Ivanka Trump.
Patricia McCloskey spoke after her husband, claiming that Democrats “are not satisfied with spreading the chaos and violence into our communities” and want to “abolish the suburbs all together.”
She added that Democratic leadership would bring “crime, lawlessness, and low quality apartments into now thriving neighborhoods. These are the policies that are coming in to a neighborhood near you. So make no mistake, no matter where you live, your family will not be safe in the radical Democrats’ America.”
In other words – everybody who isn’t rich enough to buy a huge house in an expensive neighborhood is a murderous criminal, and also [whispers] not white. Be afraid!
I find their protests amusing, not least because on this side of the pond ‘suburban’ is something of a term of contempt, and anyone who lives in suburbia is somewhat pitied for their lack of imagination. The attitude seems to be “Either live in the city, where it is all happening, or make a proper commitment to living in the countryside”. Suburbanites are deemed to be boring, staid and small-c conservative, pottering in their gardens and going to church at the weekends, and commuting to work during the week, coming home to watch the Beeb in the evening and write peevish letters to the editor of their local newspaper.
Tigger, that’s actually sort of the case here, too. Suburbia was mocked by The Monkees in their song “Pleasant Valley Sunday”., and it has been a subject of mockery for a long time. But so many Americans have imbibed the dream of a large house with yard, a two (or more) car garage, and distance from their neighbors that this mockery seems to resonate only in liberal and academic circles now…and only in a relatively small group of liberals and academia, especially those of us who realize that 300 million plus people all having a large house with yard and garage is environmentally unsustainable, just like the radical environmental activists’ dreams of everyone living on their own acreage, producing all their own food, and living off the grid. There just isn’t enough land for that, even if we destroyed all the remaining habitat fragments.
More than sort of – The Suburbs have been infra dig here since forever. Little Boxes. The Graduate. Crabgrass Frontier. A thousand novels and movies and sociological/journalistic reports and sitcoms.
But Trump is a real estate hustler. That’s his mental world, to the extent that he has one.
I do love arithmetic. Thank you for the opportunity to play with some numbers.
The overall population density of the UK is approximately 262 people/sq km. It is the 51st most densely populated country on Earth and feels very crowded whenever I visit, despite having lots of areas of uninhabited wild land. By comparison, my country, Ireland, is number 112 at 70 people/sq km and feels almost deserted, because most people live in the cities*.
The US has 32.5 people/sq km. It is the 180th most densely populated country on Earth.
Apparently, at the absolute minimum, it takes 0.07 hectares of arable land to support each and every human being, assuming a largely vegetable-based diet. If we assume ten people per hectare (because the other 0.03 hectares would be needed for shelter) and since 1 sq km is 100 hectares, each sq km of arable land could support a thousand people (who weren’t greedy).
So far, so good.
But only about 10% of the world’s land is arable.
This means that any country** with a population density exceeding 100 people/sq km is going to have to import at least some of its food. Our current population growth is unsustainable, unless we find a new way to eat – and very soon.
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* If we remove the capital city, Dublin, from the picture, with its 1.4 million people crammed into 318 sq km, it can be seen that the remainder of the country, with a population of 3.5 million people spread over 70k sq km, has a density of just 50 people/sq km, most of them in towns; which is why it feels less crowded than would be expected from the figures.
**Assuming all countries have a fair share of arable land, which is actually far from being the case.
The big thing about the US is that a MASSIVE chunk of it is useless for agriculture because there’s not enough water. That’s why the west is so sparsely populated until you get to the coast. You can see it from any space station photo at night, or from being in a plane flying over it at night (and during the day for that matter). East of the Mississippi lights basically everywhere. West, dark with a few spots.
Not to mention the mountains. The Grand Canyon. The need to cut down forests to put that many people into their own plot of land. The need to fill in wetlands to put that many people on their own plot of land. By sheer numbers, yes, it seems almost doable, but not if you look at the actual distribution of water (as Ophelia mentioned) coupled with the unliveability of other areas, and my point is that the only way to do that is to destroy the small remnants of land we have left for every other freaking species in the country. We already have driven so many species to extinction, it’s not funny.
My fellow Nebraskans think it is a mark of our wonderfulness that we don’t have a lot of species on the endangered species list, but the reality is, by the time the list was compiled, we had already destroyed most of what was here to turn it to corn and cows.
Apropos of population density, there is a metric gaining currency that weights population density by population to give a better feel for the density actually experienced by the people who live in an area. If, for example, a country is largely sparsely inhabited, and most of the people live in a few massive cities, most residents experience a high density, something that is not captured by simply dividing total area by total population.
This paper discusses the technique and includes a world map with shading indicating population-weighted population density. The US and Canada are relatively low on that scale; South America, the western half of Africa, and south Asia are relatively high. (I would have guessed the US was more heavily weighted toward cities; I’m surprised.)
This article discusses population-weighted population density applied to US cities, which is the application that first brought the technique to my attention. By this metric, the NYC metro area is by far the most densely populated region in the US. See the chart in the article.