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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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It’s unlikely that illiberality is genetic, because its modern instantiation is new (1960s onward), the ancestors of the liberals were all at one point monarchists, and it’s correlated to where you are born.

If you believe that aggression and selfishness are partially influenced by genetics, as I do, there are more humane ways to guide the breeding of humans. In Europe’s past, they executed criminals for murder and theft over a certain amount, and the “social reinforcement propaganda” led to kind/sharing people having many children. Any breeding program would have to solve the border crisis though, or develop insular endogamy practices.

You are muddying up the waters by using labels that have loose meanings. 'Liberal' or 'Monarchist' is a placeholder. Relying on a culture relative historical definition of monarchism to pontificate on what a 'monarchist' person was like in the past is nonsensical. Our historical definitions have no relevance to what people were actually like. They tell us nothing about what stimuli it was that made someone, in whatever sense you want to interpret it, a 'monarchist'.

Every single psychological trait is heritable. You are an expression of your genetic material in an environment. There is no partial cause. It's 100% total. Your response to stimuli is not accidental. I'm sure that, through some extreme environmental control, you could pacify someone by controlling their stimuli, but in a modern society, with the stimuli as they are, the people are as they are. If your reaction to the stimuli of modern society is anything other than acceptance you have in you some form of maladaptation to modern society that is incompatible with it.

This incompatibility is an existential threat to modern society as it creates bothersome things like the paradox of tolerance. If modern society wants to survive then people who are not compatible need to disappear from the face of the earth. It has no mechanism for that type of existence.

Why omit the possibility that the environment might change? It certainly does faster than genetics.

I don't understand what you mean.

I always disliked that essay. Society is not fixed, there are such things as revolutions and social changes. Where was 'society is fixed' when the US was introducing civil rights, abolishing slavery, mainstreaming homosexuals?

Drugs can be stamped out if you put in a lot of energy. China no longer has an opium problem, for example. If you send all the addicts to labor camps and shoot the drug dealers, the drug problem disappears. It's really not that hard to find a drug dealer and shoot them - if drug-addled losers and criminal gangs can manage it, so can billion-dollar armed bureaucracies if they deign to try.

For schools, we could simply reintroduce discipline and academic rigor.

Japan doesn't have an obesity problem. Why not copy their diet? Out with Coca Cola and McDonalds, in with sushi. Less corn and more fish.

The whole essay is like saying 'I can't get into this car, I've used 15 little plastic screwdrivers and can't see any way to unscrew the doors - I'll go find the owner and persuade them to let me in'. Well maybe you need a hammer to break the windows, maybe you need a rock, maybe you need a specialized pick for the lock, maybe you need a shaped charge...

Just because ineffective methods don't work, it does not follow that no methods work and you have to go around the inherent meaning of the task.