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PaperclipPerfector  8hr ago (text post)   942 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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In the last roundup about embryo selection, guy with Greek letters in his flair ThomasdelVasto said the following (emphasis added):

Now I personally have religious reasons to oppose this sort of intervention, but even if you don't, it's not hard to imagine the insane societal consequences of allowing free for all designer babies. As one hyperbolic comment on the slate star subreddit says:

Yet another reason for people to not have kids. This shit is so socially erosive. "Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby" Nuke it from orbit.

While this comment is pretty over the top, I still think there's a strong point here! Gattaca was a cautionary tale, not a user's manual. Then again, I suppose the general zeitgeist considers the prole class to be so whipped, and coddled with bread and circuses, that our materialistic transhumanist tech overlords can simply do whatever they want, even if it will end up condemning "natural-born" people to permanent servitude.

Much of right-wing thought is just people looking for "right-wing" language to express low-class envy and grievance. AOC-ism with extra steps. There's long been an element of that in the American Right, and there's nothing wrong with it provided it's based on actual complaints. (Working-class people were entirely justified in their anger at those judges who ordered their kids bussed into the ghetto while sending their own kids to private schools.) But ever since the first Trump campaign, prole resentment has become arguably the defining characteristic of the Right in America. It's the glue that binds together the vulgar, secular, working-class Trumpian Right and the traditional Religious Right. The tattoo-covered WWE fan doesn't want to listen to a sermon from the Southern preacher but recognizes him as a fellow member of the broad ingroup of low-class Americans who share a common inferiority complex toward urbanites with lots of education and money. While not every Right-winger shares this attitude, there's a near-universal refusal to acknowledge or condemn it. Elon Musk is almost a caricature of the "materialistic transhumanist tech overlord," but you won't see him defending himself against such attacks. (You might say this is because he's unaware of them, which might be true of some Silicon Valley Tech Rightists, but isn't true of Musk, considering how much time he spends on Twitter.)

P.S. To preempt the accusation that I ignored ThomasdelVasto's point, I reject the whole theory that poor, low-IQ people are harmed by competition with rich, high-IQ people. People are willing to risk dying in the desert to move from low-IQ to high-IQ countries because high-IQ has massive positive externalities.

P.P.S. I know I might get banned for this post. I was drawn to the forum because I'm a long-time Scott Alexander fan, from back when "right-wing SSCer" meant "secular guy who talks about embryo selection and national IQ," not "guy who thinks we need to go back to 1710 ideas about religion and government and that eugenics is evil." For me, unlike many of you, the former wasn't just a gateway drug to the latter, so I'm "left-wing" now. You can follow me on Substack and Twitter.

P.P.P.S. The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.

"Want a baby? Do you want a prole baby, made the old fashioned way? You don't know what you're going to get! It's like a loot box, could be pure crap. You should PAY US to make a cool designer baby, with a 34% increased chance of the ultra-rare and coveted phenotype High Functioning Autist. If you have a loot box baby, they're going to get crushed by Ultra-Rare HFA Baby"

Prediction: we will see a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple use gene editing to give their baby Down’s Syndrome.

You know it’s gonna happen. Imagine the social media storm.

Have we even seen the milder version of a wealthy, virtue-signalling white couple finding out in genetic testing that the fetus has Down's and deciding to keep it (and publicly advertising their decision)?

30 seconds of googling later:

She found out Jaxon might have Down's syndrome after being persuaded to have an extra screening and a blood test due to her age.

...

Lorraine and her husband Mark declined all further testing. They wanted to keep their baby, no matter what.

...

Jaxon was diagnosed at birth and Lorraine says the family has never looked back. She says her other children adore him and will fight over who gets to look after him when they are older.

"Low class people could be here" he thought, "I've never been in this neighborhood before. There could be low class people anywhere." The cool wind felt good against his bare chest. "I HATE LOW CLASS PEOPLE" he thought.

The latest episode of Hanania's podcast reverberated his entire car, making it pulsate even as the $100 champagne circulated through his powerful thick veins and washed away his (merited) fear of proles exercising political power. "With a car, you can go anywhere you want" he said to himself, out loud.

I would be shocked if ThomasdelVasto is a fan of Elon Musk.

The mottezien is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a cuck, nazi, bigot, fascist, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a resentful prole and you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back, calls you egregiously obnoxious, and then bans you from the forum.

Er, but... you're the one using 'resentful prole' as an insult.

You're banned, so you can't answer this, unfortunately, but it's unclear to me why being a member of the proletariat would be at all bad, and if you do in fact believe that wealthy urban leftists are bad (contemptible, leading America down a bad path, etc.), resenting them seems like a reasonable response. So shouldn't the answer here just be the chad "Yes"?

(Well, it may not be accurate in my case depending on what you mean by those terms. I work for a wage, so I suppose in the Marxist sense I'm a proletarian, but generally when I hear 'prole' I think 'industrial working class' or something, which I am not. Nor do I think I'm particularly resentful, since I did in fact go to a fancy big city university. But that's just quibbling facts. I would certainly be much more offended if you called me a Nazi or fascist.)

You know what's funny that just occurred to me? In the background of nearly every optimistic old school sci-fi property is just the assumption that gene editing will be deployed for the good of all humanity. You're enjoying your giant stompy robot Battletech novel, and it just has throwaway lines about how humans live longer and with less disease thanks to the Star League 300 years ago. It was viewed as such an obvious gimme that sci-fi didn't even dwell on it. It was boring, like the precise mechanics of a faster than light drive, or how the Enterprise's computer worked. Give it a few throw away lines and move on with the story. There was a humanity wide genetic uplift program that was 100% successful, now moving on...

I do wonder how much of this was an artifact of the high trust society America used to be, where public works could actually be completed to the good of all with state capacity to spare. Now it's impossible to envision a future where all our children have their disease genes filtered out, have enhanced cognitive functions, and might reasonably be expected to live in relative health until 140. In our low trust hellscape of highly dysfunctional state capacity, corruption exceeding any ability to accomplish anything, massive corporations enshittifying their golden geese with 3rd world scams, and a high time preference work force that can't do even the most simple jobs with trust and correctness, we can only envision the technology heightening the war of all against all.

Add to that the people who (rightly) won't trust the technology, given the institutional own goal "the science" has inflicted on itself the last 10 years. Even if it were possible for everyone to benefit from a genetic uplift program, a portion, possibly a large portion, would choose to be left behind.

Oh the future we could have had. Alas.

nearly every optimistic sci-fi property

Pretty sure it’s the optimism that’s doing the work!

Dune may have been pretty confused about genetics, but like everything else in its setting, the fruits were definitely reaped by the aristocracy. Maybe this is just because the camera follows aristocrats, and there are Mentat-grade weaponmasters hanging out in every village? It takes a millennia-long suicide plot to spread one genetic advantage to the human race as a whole.

Yeah, it's probably fair to say the optimism was doing most of the work. But on the flip side, it's funny to say that Battletech is optimistic. Although I suppose by the standards of "Every human institution is going through a shredder of being flooded with high time preference scammers/thieves that loot it down to the bedrock", it does seem optimistic. Then again it's hard to write a novel in the future where every human society has collapsed and the surface is dominated by feral humans. Though there are a few. I guess The Time Machine could be their ur-text.

I've said this before, but Dune is such a special case. Taken in as a whole work, the overriding theme seems to be that to survive among the stars, humanity will be tortured without end because the human condition is fundamentally incompatible with galactic habitation.

I wish you had posted this yesterday. It would have gone well with my wine - I had a South African Cape Coast sav blanc, from an east-facing vineyard at the foot of a coastal valley, where the sea air and rocky soil produce a really crisp, refreshing white with an almost salty minerality. Paired that with a very mild, milky cheddar and some raspberries. In the evening, when it wasn't so hot, I cracked a Salamino di Santa Croce lambrusco. Again, that's a bit tarter and more acidic than your typical fruity lambrusco, but I paired it with a rich mushroom bruschetta. I don't actually know that much about Italian wine (the family place in Italy is on the coast, quite some way from the real wine country), but I know what I like.

P.S. I know you're supposed to capitalize "Sauvignon", "Lambrusco", etc., but that's always struck me as a little pretentious.

Now I want an effortpost on wines... I personally am only really familiar with the Niagara region, but would like to become more worldly.

Saving this post to talk more about internal dynamics in the red tribe.

Turok, you really don't learn. You don't deserve the courtesy of a long and detailed explanation of why you're being banned. In fact, you seem to be expecting it, and are relishing the opportunity to be a martyr. So be it:

Permabanned.

Well that didn't take as long as I thought it would. Not as satisfying without more buildup but today is still a good day.

I think that the main benefit of explaining a ban is not to the user (especially in the case of a permaban), but to the wider community.

So I think that it is helpful to link to the last warning (afaik).

I think another factor might be that the correct place to criticize a top level post from three days ago is as a reply to that very post. Starting a pristine comment thread on Monday in medias res with a reply to another comment seems like a really bad style. By definition, a continuation of a last weeks debate is not about current events, so my personal expectation would be that the comment would strive to be an excellent top level comment in all other regards, charitably paraphrasing a broader debate so far and then adding some useful new commentary. Instead, what he served us was re-heated leftovers from three days ago moisturized with the ketchup of his own opinion.

While most of his comment reads to me as not particularly coherent (but that might be a problem on my end), and also does little engagement with the quoted comment except to sneer and in the "P.S.", I think it is the "P.P.P.S." especially where he goes of the rails completely.

I do not think that we have many regulars who are central examples of "prole", posting long texts on a discussion site seems to select for somewhat educated people, mostly. It is not that he was correct that this was an insult which hurt especially badly, and it was just that he was banned for blatant name-calling.

--

While "you do not represent the true spirit of the left, I do" has been done to the death for a hundred years, I would nevertheless register an objection to him describing himself as ""left-wing"". While his sneering dismissal of the working class is certainly reminiscent of similar dismissals by the woke left in the past decade (e.g. Clinton's "despicables"), I think that it is stupid to give up on the working class. Wokism completely failed to engage with these people ("in my rich neighborhood, I get along fabulously with Blacks and immigrants. If you in your poor neighborhood fail to get along with them just as well, that is because you are a dirty old racist!") and then they decided to vote MAGA instead. But Trump's tariffs have the potential to be a very educational lesson for low-income voters, it is just up to the Democrats to offer these people a stomach-able alternative to populism.

I am being performatively lazy here. Turok genuinely isn't worth my time, and I'm confident that almost all of our regulars are well aware of his bad behavior. That being said, I appreciate you sharing the link to previous warnings.

For what it's worth, I don't see anything wrong in continuing a thread in a new CWR. Most users would prefer more engagement or at least eyeballs on their posts, and once the thread becomes obsolete, it's very unlikely that a significant number of people will even read anything you have to say.

So, to be clear, you made this post not because you want to share something that you think is an interesting observation that you made about the US Right, but (per your P.P.P.S.) because you think that your claim is an insult (seeing as how you gloss it yourself as "calling [the reader] a resentful prole" and group it with a bunch of other standard slurs) and applies to the abstract representation of a member of this forum ("the mottizen")? At face value, I figure your claim is at least wrong because this [ought to/would] be seen as "egregiously obnoxious" and earn a ban no matter the particular choice of insult.

Contrary to what you seem to think, this also doesn't particularly imply that your insult is spot on or hits a nerve; to think otherwise is the same sort of delusion as that of the hobo who screams at passersby that they are all cucked by the lizardman conspiracy, gets himself arrested for public disturbance and hauled away screaming about how this proves the lizardmen are afraid of his message.

Have you ever had a conversation with a tattoo covered WWE fan, or a southern preacher?

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