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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25846 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.

ETA:

@ThomasdelVasto

I'd encourage you to question why so many post-rationalists, like myself, who were deeply involved in the SSC rationalist movement as you were, become Christian or at least religious.

Because they want to do a medieval LARP and don't care about the truth? It's not like they discovered some flaw in science and that's why they changed their minds.

@ChickenOverlord

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 shop at Walmart and eat at McDonald's.

  • -39

"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)?

Isn't that basically the trend of adopting children from Africa or Haiti? It's weirdly popular among white Christians, eg. Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti.

Uh, no?

Would you care to explain exactly how you think being Haitian is comparable to Down’s?

Obviously it wasn't intended as a 1:1 comparison, but Haiti has an average IQ of 82. A significant percentage of that difference is likely genetic, based on our current understanding of the heredity of intelligence. The mother's health and nutrition also plays a significant role, and that's outside the control of the adopting family. A young child adopted from Haiti is statistically going to be at a significant intellectual disadvantage compared to the biological children of that "wealthy white couple".

International adoptions in general come with a much higher risk of a child with physical or mental disabilities. Growing up I knew two families that did international adoptions, one from Russia and one from Asia. The Russian child had fairly significant behavioral issues and developmental delays, and the Asian child had a physical disability likely caused by prenatal or infant malnutrition.

The charitable interpretation is that these families do international adoptions out of a genuine desire to do good and provide a better home for a child, but from a utilitarian perspective it seems to provide pretty low impact compared to other forms of charity in terms of cost effectiveness. What is does provide is a very visible signal of social status and virtue, and the frequency seems to ebb and flow depending on whether it's trendy in a given community. For example, it was a trend in Hollywood in the early 2000s, with celebrities like Angelina Jolie and Madonna. At some point it fell out of fashion, and now international adoptions are practically verboten in left-wing circles, particularly if the parents are white and the child is not. The same dynamics seem to play out on a smaller scale in some Christian communities.

I could see a similar dynamic playing out with Down's Syndrome in the future, particularly for for parents wealthy enough to offload much of the care onto hired help. Let's be real, Angelina Jolie likely didn't change the diapers for all six of her kids while shooting movies every year or two.

The average IQ with Down’s is closer to 50. If IQ was perfectly genetic, nothing about nurture or epigenetics involved, the average Haitian would be almost twice as far from that as from the population average. The difference is more stark if the foster parents have more effect.

I would also say it’s fundamentally different to try for a child (who ends up with Down’s) than it is to knowingly adopt a child from a disadvantaged background.

The similarity lies in the fact that they are both visibly indicated in a way the parents can use for social signalling. Right now prenatal screening is still not ubiquitous, so having a child with Down Syndrome is not necessarily a choice. Ironically that reduces its utility as a signalling mechanism. But in 10-20 years? The only people having a child with Down Syndrome will be doing so because they refused the screening, or deliberately ignored the results.

I don't think this trend will take off in progressive circles though, given how it's uncomfortably similar to evangelical Christian practice. Evangelicals will have staked out a position on this first just by being generally anti-abortion.

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