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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 28, 2025

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this system of "psychopathy with a makeover" that makes sense to "paranoid" people "who don't understand the concept of sharing" keeps leading to stable societies with people leading prosperous lives, when instability and poverty has been the norm for most lives anywhere,

So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty? Or do you simply not consider people stuck in poverty to be people?

support a system that benefit more people in general

More than what? The USA benefits more people on average than which countries? Compared to which periods in history?

Trick questions, actually, because there's a fundamental flaw in your argument no matter how you'd answer them: better-than-worse does not substitute for as-good-as-better. Those are two mutually exclusive orientations. Yours is the former. No matter how much better than others an example might be, it says nothing about how good it realistically could be. When brought up as a barrier to improvement, better-than-worse is perverse. Confucius points this out in terms of intelligence: If you're always the smartest person in the room, you keep choosing the wrong room.

And that doesn't even touch on a much more important aspect which most people are functionally oblivious to. I'll pose it with a question: given all you know about this world, compared to what you'd really like the world to be, is this one the world you want?

Most people have become so tacitly cynical, it simply doesn't occur to them that what they want even matters anymore.

  • -11

So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty?

I probably implied it in that comment, and in this comment, I'm explicitly stating it, yes, that a minority of people in societies that have private property live in poverty.

More than what? The USA benefits more people on average than which countries? Compared to which periods in history?

For a current-time example, I'd say the USA compares favorably against North Korea, though perhaps South Korea vs North Korea would be a better example, as USA is only one specific and rather idiosyncratic example of a society that has private property rights, and South Korea is probably more similar to North Korea than USA is.

Trick questions, actually, because there's a fundamental flaw in your argument no matter how you'd answer them: better-than-worse does not substitute for as-good-as-better. Those are two mutually exclusive orientations. Yours is the former. No matter how much better than others an example might be, it says nothing about how good it realistically could be.

Well, the problem here is that you also say nothing about how good it realistically could be. So, how good could it realistically be? I'm all ears. As of yet, you've described the current system with words like "psychopathic" done by "paranoid" people, which I agree with you are completely morally neutral. As such, I have no desire to overthrow this non-immoral system which keeps giving us very good results, unless there's some other system in store for something even better to replace it. So what are those other ideas?

So you're implying that these stable societies (stable for whom, exactly -- the precariat? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precariat) aren't comprised of a majority of people who experience incessant instability and poverty?

Yes, that is clearly the case. I’m not sure how you could think otherwise, the vast majority of people on planet Earth are not living in poverty. That’s even more so the case for developed countries. Do you have evidence to the contrary?

Sure, "poverty". Let's talk living wage. Do you know how many adults in the US earn less than a living wage? Over 60%. But you're OK with that, if you even knew it. Only 40% of adults make more than bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive. That is a human poverty line, not the inhuman line of about half that much (which is actually the extreme poverty line.)

Anyone can be an Olympian if you lower the bar to 2", man. Get real.

  • -11

Only 40% of adults make more than bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive.

That is simply untrue. 11% of Americans live under the poverty line, and even making less than the poverty line is a far cry from “The minimum of what it takes to stay alive.” About 2,000 people died of malnutrition (not even starvation, just malnutrition) in the US in 2022. That’s .0006% of the population who may have lacked the bare minimum of what it takes to stay alive. A far cry from 60%. You know the median American makes $40,000 a year, right?

Iirc the vast majority of malnutrition deaths in the US occur among the elderly, and it's less that they are deprived of access to food, and more that they have physical difficulty with eating.