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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   30877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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Not sure if you're being serious but if you are, it's kind of funny to see a Jewish person like you advocate in favor of just the sort of anti-meritocratic policies that would have locked many of your European ancestors out of social advancement 200 years ago.

To be fair, I think that "I got mine, now it's time to pull the ladder up" is a perfectly sensible strategy from the individual point of view, and I'm not criticizing you for it if you do have such a strategy. It's just not a strategy that extends well to a global imperative for all society, for obvious reasons.

She's not that religious and there was always the baptism loophole.

Jews have been bankers for far longer than modern meritocracy has existed. In any case, given the probably twenty or thirty fold increase in the number of white collar jobs created since the Industrial Revolution (on a per capita basis, let alone overall), some degree of meritocratic advancement was always inevitable. Even in 1400 someone very smart of humble birth wasn’t necessarily tied by fate to that origin - social advancement is a feature of all human society. As the total number of certain jobs increases, of course there’s space for people to move up the ladder.

But the rigorous nature of our meritocracy, combined with slower economic growth and elite overproduction, has created more perverse incentives. The only way out - the only way to protect children - is either a lottery system (structurally bad in so many ways) or some kind of hereditary structure, even if only in part.

It’s always been weird, because rafa would lose enormous amounts of status in such a system. Right now the PMC, doctors bankers lawyers are at the top of the status pyramid because it’s their bourgeois regime. Replace it with rigid generational classes, and rafa’s title and status would be downgraded to ‘banking clerk‘. Just like it was in the good old days. And rafa works like 60 hours a week or something, which is huge, but most people do not feel this pressure, and they don't need to be "liberated" from it/re-enslaved in a guild by the revolution.

What's a "rafa"?

@2rafa

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