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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024

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Sounds like you need a long-term eugenic environment to cost-efficiently correct this. The social matrix that enables this behavior is itself founded on genetics. To fix a country you must fix its people.

I don't believe this. Go to any parking lot no matter how crowded and there will be handicapped parking spots open. You don't need to purge the genepool to fix parking violations. You just need to make the problem legible to the authorities.

A panopticon society might fix the problem everywhere, but if you're talking about just a single implementation of the legibility fix then you're only resolving the surface aspect of the problem. If you simply wish for parking spaces to not get stolen, sure, it would work. If you're viewing the problem as 'bad actors use intimidation and bullying to create unfair, anti-utilitarian outcomes', then implementing the fix in one place will simply squeeze the problem out elsewhere.

Problem here is you can't blame genes as such, not if you mean "low level criminality means poor people who are poor because their genes are bad". The guy with the car is living in the same apartment complex and owns a car, so presumably he's getting the same kind of income in the same general level of job the woman has. He's not an underclass thug, he's someone who has no sense of community or the unwritten rules of society because of - well, what? I think we can take it that the traditional methods of discipline and social ostracization have gone by the board. 'Question authority' means that teachers, pastors, cops, you name it, including now parents, are no longer unquestioningly accepted.

Now it's "if the parking space is open, I take it, I don't care someone else is paying for it, this is me being smart and taking advantage of the rule-following fools. If someone touches my property, I am offended and retaliate, but I have no problem taking other people's things, including their parking spaces".

I honestly don't know the solution, it does seem to me that there's a huge gap between the assumptions under which I (early Gen X) was raised, and the way Millennials/Zoomers were raised. There's a ton of "of course this thing is bad and should not be done" assumptions that are just not in common anymore. Things like "well you don't take someone else's parking space even if it's free" is one such example.

I'd say the eugenics would be more about promoting pro-sociality. I don't think East Asia has as much trouble as the West, let alone other parts of the world, with these kinds of perennial bad actors. The OP specified two approaches that only East Asian countries have so far achieved, Japan's acceptance of insularity and its attendant low immigration and economic stagnation, and China's social credit authoritarian system. Both are quintessentially East Asian systems. You need an East Asian-style populace to even get to the point where such approaches are plausible, as otherwise you are dealing with whacky Westerners and their preferences.

In America there's plenty of underclass thugs who own cars, and he might be sharing that apartment with eg a more functional girlfriend or something. There's also plenty of normal working class people living in shittier apartments than they could technically afford.

The guy with the car is living in the same apartment complex and owns a car, so presumably he's getting the same kind of income in the same general level of job the woman has. He's not an underclass thug, he's someone who has no sense of community or the unwritten rules of society because of - well, what?

It’s not uncommon for the PMC-adjacent, or the PMC to-be, to live alongside the working class (or even the underclass), especially temporarily when they’re young. For example, graduate students with little income or net-worth, or those who work low-paying PMC jobs such as at a non-profit (more common among women than men).

As has been discussed quite a bit here, many working class men can out-earn members of the middle-class or even the lower rungs of the PMC—plumbers, policemen, electricians can very well match or out-earn teachers, librarians, back-office workers in corporations. It’s also not uncommon for working class men to have… spirited… modes of self-expression, albeit at lesser rates and severity than the underclass.

The guy, whether under or working class could also be living with a girlfriend/wife, which might mean greater household income and reduced per capita housing costs relative to the presumably solo-living Reddit woman in her 20s or 30s. He could also be living paycheck to paycheck, while she's able to save money net of living expenses.