John Wilkes Booth

nah i'm not starting a beef don't worry i'm just dwelling on the contrast a bit between you people and the people that i see in the real world.

you have to keep in mind i currently live in the south, and i'm not from here.

Neapolitan

...when you say "here" you mean the internet?

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John Wilkes Booth

no, i mean i'm not from the south. i mean i spent most of my life in south florida, but that place is so full of immigrants and new yorkers that it hardly even qualifies as the south. now i live in the stereotypical south and i'm more or less surrounded by crazy religious people.

The Batlord

I never knew the whole "Florida = crazy" thing until I came to this site. I guess it's mostly in the Panhandle, cause before now I always just associated Florida with old people, Disney World, and Miami.

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Neapolitan

I remember some elderly person talking about Florida. He started off saying he didn't like it cause him and his wife couldn't keep friends longer than a few months. He said that Florida was "very transient" and that "there's no one there between the ages of 23 and 63 [years old]." He explained that people go there for college and leave when they graduate, and that people go there to retire, some move back or pass on. Keep in mind I am not saying this applies to Florida as a whole, but just how this one person explained his experience when he living there.

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John Wilkes Booth

i mean that's the pop culture image that most people get, it has a lot of truth to it but its also missing quite a bit.

basically there's massive old people developments that don't interact much with the rest of the population. gated communities and such. they pay for the privilege of retiring in peace.

then there's orlando which is basically disney + all the other competitors he drew out into the middle of the swamplands. it's a party town somehow too despite existing in a muggy beach-less ****hole part of the state. honestly white people wouldn't even live in florida all that much prior to air conditioning. there's a good reason those 13 colonies stopped at georgia.

then there's basically only 3 metro areas to speak of. 1) south florida (wpb-miami) which is full of immigrants and retired new yorkers. lots of crime because of the crack epidemic + cramming 25 different south american cultures into one place. 2) tampa is a slightly milder version of this, in my experience. and then 3) jacksonville which is just yet another southern city. it's so close to the border it might as well be georgia.

but the whole florida = crazy thing is mostly a meme that gets repeated. it probably does create a lot of crazy stories cause it's one of the biggest states in the country population wise and damned near everybody who lives there isn't from there. you know that can't be a good combination.

The Batlord

That's actually probably mostly due to malaria. There's also a good reason why slavery stopped at the Mason-Dixon line, as that's around the latitude where the climate for malaria becomes unsuitable---malaria needs a year-round average temperate above a certain degree, and that doesn't occur above the Mason-Dixon line. White colonists in the South died like mother****ers from malaria back then, which is why they imported so many slaves, because they came from parts of the world where they had malaria---unlike Europe---and were therefore more resistant to it. The entire history of the US with slavery was actually very much dependent on one simple microbe.

Same reason why most of the European forts on the coast of Africa in the early days were manned by only a few whites at a time. Otherwise they'd just die.

Malaria and the Mason-Dixon – State of the Planet

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John Wilkes Booth

that's pretty interesting, i appreciate the return

though through skimming google posts it seems it probably had more to do with geopolitics and england/spain more than anything else.

The Batlord

Sure the conquest of America was driven by that rivalry, but the slave trade was very much a product of the "necessity" of bringing in labor that could deal with malaria and other tropical and sub-tropical diseases. It may not have been the original cause, but I doubt slavery would have reached the levels it did without that.

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John Wilkes Booth

i was talking about england forfeiting florida to spain, not slavery