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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25816 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 4, 2025

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Good deep dive! But the point is that the effect of price controls - do they deliver the goods by keeping things affordable and available or not? - isn't determined by ethnicity or tribe.

"Is strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit badly by..." is implicitly based on an understanding of the above, in fact.

It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?

And I’m answering: familial loyalties, suspicions of whether their tribe will benefit, aesthetic preferences, etc.

Who is having their goods delivered? Whose fault is it that what is happening is happening? Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.

I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.

Then Brexit happened and there was a big alignment but it’s amazing how you can predict people’s carefully worked out opinions on the results of certain policies once you know their class, gender, age and job.

I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.

Sure, you could, but it's not causal. But do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks? It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?

I am come from an upper-class family, I went to the appropriate schools in the UK, I read the Soectator, etc. You could pretty easily predict my views on the merits of taxation and on the usefulness of the Laffer curve, my voting affiliation, my views on fox-hunting, on globalisation, all from those pieces of information.

Sure, you could, but it's not causal

I am suggesting that it is largely causal. It's not a coincidence that most people's opinions are pretty close to their family's and the social group's - they are hugely influenced by them, and also by casual factors that they share in common with those groups.

It's all just situated selves determining so-called truth? Or are the effects real independent of you coming from an upper-class background?

As I said:

Macroeconomics and the like are so nebulous, unreadable and unproven that you will find people’s opinions on the effect of price controls is strongly determined by their loyalties, and not the reverse.

The effects of any given change are obviously objective, at least per any given situation, but they are vague and complex and delayed, and this produces obvious disagreements about them when observed and analysed subjectively by subjective humans.

do you believe the veracity of what you think about the effects of taxation is really no more accurate than what a poor person thinks

Certainly I thought so, or I would have changed my opinion to that of the poor person. But I observe that the poor person is equally certain of his opinions' superiority to mine. These days I'm not entirely sure what I believe about macroeconomics.

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