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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 12, 2026

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In my bubble (urban center-left progressive people with an academic background), the belief seems to be that the elites and the rich are somehow hoarding resources that, if unleashed and distributed equally, would make these concerns go away almost immediately.

Unfortunately, this isn't even true in the terms it's most frequently formulated in, i.e. finances, as explained by GP already, but it's even more inane when thinking about actual material things. The more intellectual fellow travelers of this protest movement have been complaining about worsening wealth inequality for years, but very few among them understand that this doesn't imply that people like Musk or Bezos actually personally consume vastly disproportionate amounts of apples, electricity or graphics cards that could, when redistributed, significantly lift up living standards among the masses.

It's strange that a movement with a titanic ideological progenitor writing volumes about materialism, labor, means of production, goods and services etc. has become so entangled with financialist thinking, something that was originally associated with their Capitalist enemies, that they have broadly come to believe that any problem can be solved by manipulating the dynamics of fancy green paper, that a problem as simple as "the average member of society is becoming an unproductive old person consuming lots of healthcare" doesn't strike them as a meaningful issue that no amount of playing around with the abstractions that we use to organize the economy will solve.

It's strange that a movement with a titanic ideological progenitor writing volumes about materialism, labor, means of production, goods and services etc. has become so entangled with financialist thinking, something that was originally associated with their Capitalist enemies, that they have broadly come to believe that any problem can be solved by manipulating the dynamics of fancy green paper, that a problem as simple as "the average member of society is becoming an unproductive old person consuming lots of healthcare" doesn't strike them as a meaningful issue that no amount of playing around with the abstractions that we use to organize the economy will solve.

These people would, rightly imo, respond that they don't just believe in the manipulation of numbers and that they do agree there's an underlying reality: immigration is offered as a curative for precisely this reason, and gibs for young people social welfare policies are often justified on the grounds that they'd improve fertility.

YMMV on these as empirical claims.