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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15863 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens.

You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class. I have seen many such examples as my country transitioned from socialism to capitalism after 1989. Optically your family may have been lower class as your peers in school during socialism, but your father/grandpa was a former math professor or successful entrepreneur who's whole property was expropriated by commies, and who was forced to become janitor or stoker/boilerman (a popular punishment by the party for people with wrong pedigree for some reason). You still had access to better homeschooling style education, you probably read books since you were 4 or 5, and you were bored at school thanks to access to huge library, you probably know how to play an instrument or two, and you know how to speak multiple languages - and all that despite barely having enough to eat. Nevertheless, you are in fact genetically upper middle class, that is your potential.

I think that especially people in US have distorted view of what true class means with huge number of immigrants, who often flee political persecution completely broke, and who are such temporarily impoverished upper class people. It is different from permanently poor chav/white trash lower class of people who are there for centuries, often due to their genetic issues. And I mean it literally - some of the most fucked up populations suffer from centuries of first-cousin inbreeding with huge accumulated genetic load.

In Paul Fussell's nomenclature, the class of a math professor is definitely the 'upper-middle' class, not the upper class. Math is much too useful to appeal to the upper class (except perhaps as an eccentricity signal 'I am feeling so confident in my place in society that I can pick a subject used by people who need to think to earn a living, because nobody could possibly mistake me for them').

It is NOW, but back in G. H. Hardy's day...

former math professor

upper class? hahahahahahaha

You were probably member of temporarily impoverished upper class.

Makes me think of Hasan Piker, who appears to think that he grew up basically working class because his family was briefly of such diminished means that he was reduced to hiring the services of a second rate riding instructor.

It's additionally confused when the immigrant/native thing gets treated as the only marker of class and/or is seized upon by first/2nd gens as a tool of giving them greater privilege. The amount of times I've had interactions with people talking about bias and classism in the West when they're top 5% in their country of origin and have been the beneficiary and performer of 1000-fold the oppressive activity on their own Untermensch.

Can we create a name for this?

The Pedro?

As in Pedro Pascal.

Many such cases. You reminded me of the Claudine Gay - the recently axed first black woman Harvard president. Apparently her family were magnates from Haiti who owned a concrete plant in Haiti, with various shenanigans especially with regards to reconstruction after earthquake with Haitian politicians having shares in the company for some reason.

But yeah, she is marginalized person who needs affirmative action.

My law school class was full of black students who recieved explicit LSAT score adjustments in admissions and a frankly obscene amount of scholarship money/free resources by both the university and the law firms trying to pump up their diversity numbers. Not a single one came from an "underprivileged" background. They were the children of bankers and lawyers. One was a literal European aristocrat on their mother's side. It's a really radicalizing experience to be lectured to about oppression by someone who went to boarding school when you're the one two weeks behind because your student loan check hasn't come in yet and you can't buy books.

I think that a case could be made that what made SJ so appealing to the upper-middle (and middle) class was that by denying class, it made them free to be as classist. Before SJP, expressing contempt of the working class would have gone badly in mostly left-leaning academic circles.

Now, it is totally permissible, because being working class does not make you oppressed. After all, with blank-slatism, everyone who does not manage to earn a degree in grievance studies despite not belonging to an oppressed group is clearly just lazy.

So if you are a white woman whose daddy paid for your college so you could work in HR, you a free to feel vastly superior to the proletariat in a way which would have utterly embarrassed any upper-middle person in the 50s. Just take care to refer to them as "deplorables" or "MAGA base" who can not even bother to educate themselves about what is really the secret handshakes of your class membership (like the updates to the pride flag, pronouns, or knowing when you are supposed to do a land acknowledgement) but what you conveniently pretend is the basis of being a decent person.

what made SJ so appealing to the upper-middle (and middle) class was that by denying class, it made them free to be as classist

Which is why the same people also deny sex, which made them free to be as sexist; and deny race, which made them free to be as racist.

There's obviously no way to figure this out, but I truly wonder what race relations would be like if all racial agitating was treated like the N-word and limited to American descendants of slaves (and Injuns and railway workers)

It has to be infuriating to hear this shit from not just from ethnic groups that are richer than the white median, but from people like Ilhan Omar who ran cause they fucked up their countries.

>Some Brahmin whose family had literal slaves in India and was driven to private school in a Rolls lumping himself in with impoverished lead-poisoned African-Americans in Flint, MI as part of the BIPOC struggle.

>"You and I are the same because a teenager once told me my lunch smelled weird."

Or the whole Apu thing when I'd argue the Simpsons targeted the Scottish (Willie) and generic Germanic central European (Uter) more directly with lazy negative stereotyping

“BIPOC” explicitly excludes dot Indians.

Life can uh, find a way, though.

We weren't really rich (more middle class) and being black they probably blended in better, but apparently my sister's friends got a bit weird when they realized she was slumming it. Which...I kinda get. We found it frustrating too.

Was it a phase? How did she turn out?

Her run-ins with the law and rampant rebelliousness in high school appear to have been a phase. The damage that phase did to her life prospects (like missing out on college) seems to be more permanent.

Most people are lying scumbags who'll try to get away with precisely as much bullshit as people are likely to let them get away with.

We have gone farther than this. Being the lying scumbag would not have been a thing in the small town I grew up in.

Now you basically need to be a lying scumbag to just get average opportunity, so everyone does it.

It reminds me a lot of the steroid era and Barry Bonds. He was already a HOF, but everyone else was doing steroids because it had tacit permission from Bud Selig. So he started doing steroids to be on an equal footing.

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