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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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And those have their own negative consequences.

Negative for what?

Communism could work if we were all near-constantly on an MDMA trip type of immediate feelings of love

'Work' in what sense? I don't think that most if any of the problems with communism resolve to 'people don't care about each other enough'.

All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance.

Probably going to need to define 'meritocracy' here because this doesn't make sense to me. Under that rubric, surely an even greater source of 'un-meritocracy' is allowing parents to even raise their own children? We'd all be on a much more 'level playing field' if children were taken at birth -- or, better yet, cloned en masse under expert supervision (some moms drink after all) -- and raised in batches by the state.

What sort of 'merit' are you trying to select for?

Anyway, I think the children of the rich are in aggregate substantially genetically different from the children of the poor and the two serve different functions in the societal organism. It's good for more-capable people to receive more resources, as this allows them to more fully develop their potentials, which benefits us all. Why we would want to change that, I do not know. It could certainly be improved, but I think we're much more likely to break important things in the process of attempting that, and it's still not clear to me what it is you'd be trying to accomplish in the first place.

'Meritocracy' as I understand the concept means that the more-fit are more likely to end up in positions capable of making use of their virtues, not that everyone gets an equal chance, which is an incoherent idea to begin with. What would that even mean? And why would it be a good thing?