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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   29448 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 2, 2026

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My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry

You're gilding the past a bit. JP Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie and the like are remembered with a sort of fond awe because they left a lot of money to charitable endeavors and endowments, but the term "robber baron" came about for a reason. They weren't "luminous beings," they were far less constrained than rich people are today (Elon Musk could probably have you whacked if he really wanted to but not without risk; robber barons were nearly as powerful as medieval aristocracy) and the ratio of those who felt some sense of social responsibility versus amoral sociopaths was probably no different than now. Do you think there were no 19th century "pedo island" equivalents? Tales of nobles engaged in depravities with the local peasantry go back centuries.

You're gilding the past a bit

I think you're misunderstanding OP. In the context of the paragraph, it seems clear to me that "at one point they were admirable titans of industry" means "at one point current billionaires seemed like admirable titans of industry to me", not "I currently think that billionaires actually used to be admirable titans of industry back in the day".

You're gilding the past

I see what you did there.

There are a lot fewer stories of the Gilded Age billionaires being personally depraved than there would be for an equivalently-sized group of medieval aristocrats whose escapades were equivalently well-documented. "Robber baron" refers to business practices that were and are considered evil by leftists, but in many cases are still SOP today.

They really were better people than most elites through history. I suspect they were better people than most modern-day billionaires, although it is hard to tell because modern-day celebrities are so well-documented that you hear about every minor extramarital affair, which would not have been the case back in the Gilded Age.

I don’t think this is true. We have glimpses into the behind-the-scenes depravity of the Gilded Age; the Maiden Whores of Babylon; the infamous Stanford White scandal, several others besides. And this was when the press was even more corrupt and in many ways deferential than today.

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