Someone's blog, I believe a Debian developer's, pointed me at ">this rant. My first thought is that I wonder if he has actually read Thomas Gold's The Deep Hot Bioshpere. For a short synopsis of how this book relates, see this page.
Beyond that though, he makes, I think, more good points than bad. Suburbia will be a BAD place to be if the availability of gasoline and diesel fuel were to be substantially reduced for a prolonged period of time, something he takes as a given. The cities would naturally also be a very bad place to be, but that is a given. I do disagree however with his opinion that the more liberal parts of the country, the northwest and northeast, will be the best off. He sees a conflict of arms in the "Bible belt." So do I in fact, but such a conflict would be short lived, versus the wide-spread death from cold, lack of food, lack of adequate shelter. Southern culture handled the widespread availability and use of arms before the industrialized era, it would do so again. For perhaps a generation, you would see violence as people band together to protect their own, but the very deep rooted southern culture that he sees as the spark of this violence would also be its control as the code of gentlemanly conduct re-asserts itself more strongly.
For all the flaws of such a life, flaws I touched on in my previous post, there are also some areas where it is subject to much less confusion. Gender roles are clear: while some women are stronger than some men, the reverse is far more generally the case, and this leads to a logical division of labor absent the equalizing mechanical aids. mmmm. I need to clarify here, as the Africans do not universally follow the European model here, and some other cultures might not either. The stereotypical hunter/gatherer society has women doing all the hard, backbreaking labor while men laze around and hunt some. There are reasons for this as well, some of which are good and some of which are bad, but it is not what we here, or the south specifically, would return to. Oh, you would see some cases of that, you did before, but no one who was well respected. You have surely heard the phrase "white trash"… well, men who fail to fulfill their responsibility is part of that. Pulling myself back on track here, we would revert to the farming culture of our earlier years, where the man farms with his wife, he primarily taking care of the fields and animals, and she the house and animals. Fully fair to neither, this yet had more to say for it than we do now, I think (limited to gender related topics) where we are lost in a confusion, where masculinity is universally denigrated, and our goal is an androgynous society. Ugh.