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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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Utterly evilness is thinking that "Human Global Welfare" is something we should strive for, instead of giving to your people. In my morality system, community and ethnos is everything, and as we consider a Father who does not prefer his Son to other people an evil person, I cannot tolerate people who believe in global constructs of human welfare.

Why should you give to your community when you could give even more to your son? Perhaps it is utterly evil and repulsive to help your community when your son could use a second xbox?

How much should a father favor his son? What if his son’s needs are met?

Choosing to feed the local homeless instead of buying the son a nicer car is altruism. Choosing to feed the non-local homeless, or to protect them from malaria, is still altruism. Even when you (rightly, IMO) value these distant people less, there exists a point where you can do more for them than you could do for your son.

The effective altruists claim that this tipping point occurs very close to home, and that commissioning art or donating to a university is a luxury: more style than substance. Some of them surely think that feeding the homeless is such an extravagance, too. Those people are probably wrong—SV is a different kind of luxury signaling environment breeding its own styles of excess. I don’t think that makes the basic claim evil.