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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   25607 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

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

So, to start with, almost everyone in the red tribe has higher purchasing power parity than their blue tribe equivalents. This is sometimes from lower costs but it's also often from preferring different goods- and not necessarily inferior goods from an objective perspective. McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc. The red tribe is not tormented about the higher status of goods that they see(often, from an objective perspective, correctly) as inferior- they are often bemused by it instead. There are red tribe elites and they have far less of the church crowd/country music crowd/genuinely rural division which is very important in understanding middle class red tribers. These people think their lakehouses are better than selfies on a European beach- partly because they can go every weekend. These people are who the broader red tribe would imitate if they had more money. And by and large pilots and oil executives and contractors and union guys don't want to live in NYC. They're perfectly happy with their kids going to public college. Status just works differently.

Is there resentment about cultural tastemakers pushing bad values? Yes. But this is couched as immorality, the same reason the underclass is poor(actual red tribers would not refer to them as underclass, of course- it'd be '-something- trash').

McMansions are better housing than NYC apartments. Literally- they're bigger, they have more amenities, it's harder for neighbors to affect you, they're less likely to be infested by rats, etc.

This is purely your opinion and given the price people are willing to pay per sqft, one that millions of people do not share with you.

NYC apartments have something McMansions can never have: location, location, location. This is the ultimate amenity.

You may not value it, which is fine, but that doesn't mean it isn't valuable.

That would get into the weeds of what exactly PPP means. You could also say that a big mac in NYC is worth more because you can eat it while being in NYC. But PPP would disagree with you there.

That's an interesting and fair point, obviously a big mac in NYC is not substantially better than a big mac in Boise, but at the same time there is probably some amount of value for what you said about "big mac in NYC is worth more because you can eat it while being in NYC" because that is convenient.

I'll have to think on this more, would you mind expanding on the "But PPP would disagree with you there." part?

Also in general, PPP aside, I just think it's ridiculous to make sweeping judgements about the subjective value of things to people, it's not just clearly wrong, it adds very little value to a conversation to be like "I like X more than Y, thus X is better in all cases".

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