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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14261 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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There is a very simple solution - decrease the extra care elderly people receive. It seems unpalatable now, because who wants to let grandma develop bed sores and die? But the proportion of old people who do not have descendants will increase, and the people who are working and paying taxes will not have strong emotional ties to the childless old people.

These systems don't last because of pity. They last because the old are more numerous because of the baby boom and they can vote. How many do you need to die off before the young (who themselves are delusional about benefiting from these systems) can actually vote them down?

Especially in countries that don't have a large Millennial cohort (iirc America is better off here). They're fucked.

If you have the young enforcing the laws, the young paying the taxes, the young doing everything, what power do the old people have? The power of the state? But the state is powered by the young.

Eventually there wont be enough to go around. When that happens, force comes out and the young have a monopoly on force.

People always say this. The manosphere likes to point out that men are the enforcement arm of every government, so this whole feminism thing is parasitical. Women don't really have rights, the logic goes, since those rights depend on male tolerance and enforcement.

Maybe (in that sense fat Mottizens like men don't really have rights either) and yet it lasts for now. Because enough men are willing to fight for the system.

And technological advances mean the bar for "enough" can drop pretty fast. How many people do you really need to run an AI-powered surveillance state?

can actually vote them down?

At a certain point if the bottom 30-50% of young(er) people get pissed off and poor enough, the protests up to and including genuine physical violence to seize the reins of power could be in play.

Old people can outvote the young handily, and that won't change for ~100 years given current demographics. But they're power is only on paper, a revolution, where physical power rules, is much less favorable.

I'm not advocating for a butlerian jihad against Simon & Linda, but at the extremes it is a possibility

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