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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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I get the impression that I'm something of an odd man out here in that I did not go to college after high-shool

I failed/dropped out of community college and switched to a trade, does that count? Granted lots of that was due to idiotic decisions advisors pushed me towards(who thinks taking calculus with no precal was a good idea) and some of it was personal issues. I probably would have gone to college on a wordcel liberal arts degree otherwise.

It seems to me that we are at a point where the sort of culture/worldview that produces a guy like Greg Abbott or the median Trump voter is as alien to the typyical liberal as that of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon and I can't help but expect this to end badly.

I think it’s not just that liberals don’t stop and consider that people are inherently bad and someone has to impose order. I think a lot of them don’t consider that someone has to do that in meatspace, in real life, go and physically take and action which has a real world effect according to the laws of Newton.

I get this all the time talking to motteizeans about automation. But chatgpt will do it! Ok, how’s chatgpt supposed to mop floors and pick peaches and build fences? America is a high-labor cost economy, and so is Germany and Canada and all the rest. A machine which can acceptably replace a human worker is already back ordered and guess what, we still need blue collar workers doing things other than fixing robots.

And with the current border situation that’s the disconnect; Greg Abbott knows the mandarins in Washington can say whatever they want, but privates and captains(and sergeants etc) on the border have to listen to them for it to take any effect. My bafflement was less ‘what does he think he’s doing and how does he think he’ll get away with it’ and more ‘why now, when he’ll gain control of the house in November and the post-election shenanigans give him a lot of political cover’.