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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1512 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 17, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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In my time arguing on the internet, I've encountered a disturbing number of people who seem to think that having power over others is more desirable than any level of technological advancement. We have degrowth people IRL.

This is nothing exceptional, this is how baseline normie human works. If you see it as strange and unexpected, be grateful to gods/fates/fortune for beautiful bubble you live in.

I don't think the baseline normie would openly admit, even pseudonymonously, that they would trade vaccines, central air and the internet for the power to rape chambermaids.

Each time I've had that conversation, it's been a similar path.

A. Capitalism fuels technical advancements that help everyone.

B. Those advancements only help the rich. They hoard them.

A. The newest tech may be gatekept by cost, but prices always come down. Even poor people in America have a level of physical comfort completely unavailable to a medieval lord.

B. But the lord still had more power! He had servants to make his life easy, that he would abuse and be horrible to.

A. The freaking Sun King shivered while a servant chipped at his frozen breakfast fruit because Versailles was impossible to heat with fireplaces. The average person on welfare in America can have fresh fruit at room temperature in the dead of winter.

B. That doesn't matter compared to the power over others!

Even if many normies would likely be at least mildly abusive with power, it takes a special kind of ideologue to openly talk about the power over others being an end in and of itself.

it takes a special kind of ideologue to openly talk about the power over others being an end in and of itself.

Somehow when people imagine going back in time to middle ages, they always imagine themselves as a knight or noble, and never as a peasant who works 18 hours per day. Despite the latter being vast majority.

I don't think the baseline normie would openly admit, even pseudonymonously, that they would trade vaccines, central air and the internet for the power to rape chambermaids.

They quite literally did this, openly, in 2020-2021. As you recall, it was seen as acceptable to the baseline normie that the group that invented the vaccine be given it last because Muh Social Justice.

"Don't be hideously evil to your fellow citizen" only works in times of positive-sum growth. Once the reality of degrowth sets in (including that which is permitted to be imposed by said hideously evil fellow citizens since the rest are too busy making money to notice it) the knives come out and the spiral begins.

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