This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've been having some thoughts recently about the billionaires among us, some opinions, some takes even. My politics on this has evolved over time; at one point they were admirable titans of industry, then they were capitalist parasitic ticks, then they were a necessary part of the incentive structure that drives to economy, and now they are a bloated level of inefficiency preventing the market from functioning efficiently.
But over all this time, I've kinda synthesized a superstructure that I don't think is gonna change, that I think is not on the left right axis, but on another mysterious plane: I'm jealous of china. I think we're gonna have to steven universe meme one of these guys. I don't even really care who, and I don't care who does it. It could be Il Duce Trump, it could be General Secretary Mamdani, it could be some boring centrist whose name we don't know.
Anyone who imposes consequences on or limits the behaviors of the managing class would win my instant approval. This could just be because of my space autism getting triggered unimaginably by space-x getting fucking shackled to a corpse right before IPO/ Artemis being a big fucking waste of time and money* / Boeing doing boeing stuff, it could be the long 2008 hangover, it could be a thousand things.
I guess I'm just kinda over us deciding that once you reach a certain net worth, you are some sort of luminous being. You can go to pedo island and it's fine, you can do drugs that normies go to prison for an it's fine, you can fuck up critical national infrastructure and it's fine, you have infinite money when it's time to do what you want but somehow you have no money (or negative money!) when it's time to contribute to the public good.
I recall Luigi, and I recall the polling: people old enough to have been adults when a the post FDR wealth redistribution program was still around were very unfavorable; people who came into consciousness as the program was being fully unwound in the late 80s and 90s were split 50/50, and people who never experienced that social milieu were yelling "BASED BASED BASED!"
I really think that unless the uniparty plays it's cards right, the next realignment is not gonna be pretty for anyone. We need another FDR type to head that shit off like it's vanguardist communism in the 1930s, and at this point I don't think I care if they are left or right, they just need to be for the bottom and middle and even most of the top, and against the peak.
*Yes I know about pork. Pork can at least do something! highways can get build, parks are nice, and if we need to build bombs somewhere to it might as well be in bumfuck nowhere to give the nowhereians something to do other than meth.
I've updated my opinion of Elon considerably downward over the past few years. This isn't motivated reasoning or tribal updating, I think his early work genuinely represented some of the most impressive entrepreneurial achievement of the century, and I weighted that heavily for a long time. It's just that the account has been drawn down pretty substantially at this point.
SpaceX exists because Elon Musk willed it into existence through what can only be described as an unreasonable application of personal capital, obsession, and tolerance for failure. The prior probability of a private company successfully developing orbital rockets from scratch was, charitably, very low. He is not a steward of someone else's vision. He is the vision, or at least was its necessary precondition. You can believe the xAI merger is strategically stupid (I have no strong view either way) while still acknowledging that "guy makes questionable decisions about his own company" is a fairly weak indictment. The stronger criticism would need to be about the employees or shareholders who signed on under different assumptions, which is at least a real argument.
On billionaires more broadly, I find myself in the uncomfortable position of being genuinely more sympathetic to them than the median person in my reference class seems to be, to the point I'd have gone on that Pro-Billionaire March in SF if I was eligible and there, and I've spent some time trying to figure out whether this is motivated reasoning or just correct.
Here's the thing about capitalism that I think gets systematically underappreciated: it's one of the only wealth-generation mechanisms in human history that is even structurally capable of being positive-sum. The historical alternatives (conquest, extraction, inheritance, political rent-seeking) are zero or negative sum almost by definition. Someone taking your grain is not creating value; they are relocating it, while destroying some in the process.
Whereas Bezos building a logistics network that genuinely makes it cheaper and faster to get goods to people is, at minimum, attempting to create value, and by revealed preference it mostly succeeds. I'm simplifying, obviously. There are real extraction dynamics in modern capitalism. But the baseline isn't "billionaires take from the poor"; the baseline is "billionaires accumulate disproportionately while also expanding the total pie," which is a meaningfully different situation that calls for different policy responses.
The talent point is one people find uncomfortable to make explicitly, but I think it's basically right and the discomfort is doing a lot of work to obscure valid reasoning. The self-made billionaires specifically, the ones who started from, say, merely-upper-middle-class and compounded from there, represent a genuinely unusual combination of intelligence, risk tolerance, executive function, and social skill. You can find individual counterexamples, and luck is real and important, but as a population they seem to have a lot of the thing that makes economies grow. Artificially capping that seems like exactly the kind of policy that makes a satisfying fairness intuition and a mediocre growth outcome.
These people genuinely are *better" than you and me. Smarter, more driven, more ambitious, and more willing to take risks. All men are categorically not made equal.
("If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?" is not an entirely invalid argument)
I'll steelman the opposition: you could argue that beyond some threshold, wealth primarily compounds through rent-seeking rather than value creation, and that extreme concentration creates political capture that undermines the positive-sum game entirely. I think this is the correct version of the billionaire critique, and it's pretty different from "they are morally bad people who should be humbled."
The relationship between wealth and virtue is much weaker and in an opposite direction from what progressive discourse implies, and if you're selecting for "demonstrates poor impulse control, short time horizons, willingness to harm others for small personal gain," you will find that distribution pretty spread across income levels, possibly with some concerning concentrations nowhere near the top of the wealth distribution.
(If it's not obvious, this is not my stance on all billionaires. It doesn't extend to Russian oligarchs, tinpot dictators etc.)
I think it owes a big part to a whole generation of engineers that wanted to build spaceships, but previously had to settle for either pushing paperwork on mundane siloed details at BigGovCo contracting for NASA or the DOD, or settling for work outside of aerospace. I know some of them. The stream of smart college graduates willing to work long hours for peanuts just because the work was cool was there before, but not the money to pay for peanuts and materials. I'll give credit for the funding and risk-taking, but I have more mixed feelings on building an empire on burning out smart early-career engineers.
My understanding is that even a few years of experience at SpaceX is an easy ticket to a much more cushy/comfortable position elsewhere in aerospace, especially for a newly minted engineer. These guys aren't idiots, they weren't coerced into anything. They made the conscious choice of opting-in to work in the most exciting and fast paced company in their field, and most of them saw that as a golden opportunity. If they don't like it, they can quit, and many have. Elon isn't a slave-driver, he's just a hardass boss.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link