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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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See, I strongly disagree that most of the "elite" are misanthropes who would consign us all to death if it was costless to do so, at least when simply giving us most of the things we do want is, in absolute terms, hardly any more expensive.

I don't think Soros wants us to endure privation for the sake of it, most people who espouse such claims (and many non-elite do! There are plenty of middle class people who demand austerity and "sustainable living" just as loudly), do so because they think expecting sustained economic growth will be catastrophic.

That is an incredibly stupid notion, but to the extent that it's a distinction worth making, that makes them misguided and not evil. Sure, there's quite a bit of aesthetic fetishism involved, such as Greens hating on nuclear power which is greener in both a literal and metaphorical sense than they ever could be, but it's not the overwhelming motivation.

As I've said in the past, one of the reason the wealthy dislike the poor is because the latter have enough power to be a nuisance or intrude on their sensibilities. They're uncouth, they demand a say in public affairs, they threaten your wellbeing if you don't surrender gibs and so on.

On the other hand, how many people hate monkeys in zoos? If you think that hobo on the subway was an incoherent shit-slinger, you've seen nothing yet. However, since they're modestly interesting, don't do any harm, and are utterly powerless, it's not a big deal at all to cough up the pocket change to keep them in conditions that, in the better class of zoo, constitute an improvement over their state in nature! Zoo lions might not roam the Serengeti, but they don't starve to death nor worry about outsiders killing them, then their cubs, so as to make their wives fertile and ripe for the raping.

Just about nobody advocates for both keeping lions and monkeys around and keeping them in conditions barely better than non-existence. The power differential and burden of care between us and godlike Masters of the Universe will be OOMs higher in the former and lower in the latter.

With that out of the way, back to the thought experiment where we are alive. Monkeys and lions aren’t in the same status hierarchy. You don’t improve your standing by whipping and starving your pet dog. You, however, do by whipping and starving the other members of the same species.

The way I see it, in an unevenly distributed post-Singularity world, the gulf between the people who dominate and the rest of us will easily be as large, if not larger, than that between us and monkeys today. At that point, assuming that status hierarchies exist, and that these entities care about them, I don't expect to see the people in charge weight their status therein on dominating us, not when they can measure relativistic kill penises with the Matrioshka Brain next door.

I expect that they'll be thinking along the lines of "damn, Bezos Prime Alpha 1.2 managed to get dibs on that pair of binary neutron stars I was eyeing" rather than obsessing over the 0.000001% of increased output they could gain by getting rid of us quaint throwbacks.

FWIW I don't believe Klaus Schwab wants the proles to eat the bugs for the sake of humiliation. More like he's of the kind of people who are completely detached from a) what the average person finds humiliating and b) the idea of personally acting on one's ecological beliefs. He hears that people are starving and his response is "let them eat cake bugs".

This attitude seems to extend to most genuinely high-up elites. Humiliation of proles is what the grunts of the system get a kick out of. The actual rulers are so far up there they don't notice the prole, if they do want to humiliate anyone it's their lowers within their class.

The fact that it's you endorsing that speaks against it.

edit: I will expand on this comment because, while it is in line with your expressed worldview, petty snips are not in vogue here. Here's why I think your idea is stupid. I assume you don't act like a hyper-paranoid schizo in daily life (if you do, disregard the rest of the paragraph and my condolences). I assume you have numerous concessions and allowances for your "friends" and "family" and "law-abiding fellow citizens" whose "brain chemicals" "rob them of the ability" to kill you.

Given that, your categories don't cut reality at the seams and are thus useless, amateur nihilist-esque mental masturbation.

Aren't Friend and Family something like the biggest class of people that abuse children? (the Brave summarizer "According to the National Children's Alliance, in substantiated child abuse cases, 77% of children were victimized by a parent.")

As another point, in the third world, if you aren't acting like a "hyper-paranoid schizo" in relation to traffic when you are a pedestrian, you become another cross in the sidewalk. But in general there is nothing more blackpilling that being politically aware in a thirdworld country.

Aren't Friend and Family something like the biggest class of people that abuse children?

When adjusted for the total amount of time the child spends in their company (I won't count the inherent trust of the relationship since trust is what we're debating in the first place)? Doubt it would be significant. 77% divided by ~10 years, compared to however many% are relative strangers divided by however much time they spend in the company of a given relative stranger.

Also, if I understand correctly that website counts neglect as abuse. Surely "withdrawal of care" is the optimistic baseline in the dog-eat-dog world framework, when we compare it to active abuse, let alone killing?

Re: traffic in the third world, in the literal example of traffic it's still neglect, not the desire to murder everyone around you. Even most criminals and organized gangsters have end-goals that aren't "kill everyone I see".

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