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MadMonzer

Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

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joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC 

				
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MadMonzer


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 06 23:45:01 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The staffers who wrote the rules and the bureaucrats who implemented them would have been Silents. I think the Greatest Generation leaders who decided in principle to do it genuinely had no idea how much trouble it could cause.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I have some thoughts on why this system disappeared, but that's a bit beyond the scope of your question.




[FWIW, the system is the same in all large professional services firms]


It still (mostly) exists in the UK - my father's firm had performance shares, but the dispersion between high and average-performing partners was about a factor of 1.5. Conventional wisdom is that it failed in the US because over-performing partners would quit to found boutiques. No idea why the US and UK are different.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
At least in the UK's uniformly fucked housing market, the average homeowning Boomer is worth more dead than alive because they are under-occupying a valuable family-sized house. Press coverage tells me that the situation in the US is similar but less extreme.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
"Going out on the ice floe" is the exception. In a world where food is scarce and malnutrition is a major cause of death (which is almost everywhere until the 20th century) the old "kill themselves for the sake of their descendants" by letting the prime working/child-bearing age family members eat first. And they do, in almost all times and places we look at.


Families where the core workers eat first get through the hard times a few members shorter.


Families where the elderly eat first don't get through the hard times at all.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In the Anglosphere, mostly continuing to live in the houses they raised children in while making it impossible to build new family-sized homes for the next generation.


In Continental Europe, mostly retiring too early.


In all cases, not having enough kids to keep the Ponzi scheme going. The Silent Generation (and to a lesser extend the Greatest Generation) got a very good deal in retirement because there were a lot of Boomers in their peak-earning years to pay for it. The Boomers think that they deserve the same deal despite having fewer kids.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
A high rate on a lower balance means that you needed a much lower deposit (and had the benefit of those high interest rates while saving for it). In addition, inflation was higher (with, as always, wages and prices roughly keeping pace) so the monthly payment didn't stay excruciating for as long.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
We would have been bred out as autistic. I'm not even sure that they would have been making a mistake doing it.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Standard Cambridge Natsci workload per week according to the faculty, and roughly correct in my experience (admittedly only during the 8-week term)
Lectures: 12 hours (Sitting in lecture listening and taking notes - the quality of lecturing was high enough that people went to the lectures)
Supervisions: 4 hours (2-1 interaction with a tutor)
Practicals: Up to 12 hours in lab depending on what options you were doing (biologists have more labs than physical scientists). Possibly 2-4 hours a week writing up lab reports outside the lab, depending on what labs you were doing that week.
Self-study and review of lecture notes: 6 hours
Preparatory work to discuss at supervisions: 16 hours.
Seeking additional academic support: 2-4 hours a week if you needed it.


So 50+ hours academic work a week, and the gunners had at least one and often two demanding extra-curriculars on top.  Preclinical medics had it slightly worse.


This is not usual for either UK or US undergraduates.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


In my view, 1/20 is more than enough to form the basis for class resentment.




To trigger class resentment, the elderly would need to be a privileged class. There are two institutions that allow this in the modern west: pensions, and mass homeownership. America doesn't really have pensions until the New Deal, and the only non-rich Americans who own their own homes in that period are farmers. The (middle-class and below - class resentment of the rich elderly is obviously real, but is about class and not age) urban elderly were seen as pitiable before these institutions came into their own.


I can't speak for 160-acre family farms in the early 20th century US, but in the (very long) era of subsistence family farms in the west, gramps is generally perceived as a net positive (but is still allowed to starve before the prime-age family members when food gets short).  So I don't think there would be widescale resentment of the elderly among the smallholding class either.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In the strong sense of maximal, I agree with you - the maximum human lifespan has been 100-105 since time immemorial. But decreasing mortality at older ages means that any given high percentile (95th, 99th, even 99.9th) has been visibly increasing in my lifetime.


The apparent maximum lifespan has dropped because there are fewer places where you can credibly claim to be 110+ based on dodgy records.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I've gotten the impression that the situation is somewhat better in Europe than in US




I think "manufacturing is in a better state in Continental Europe than in the Anglosphere" has been both conventional wisdom and true since the 1980s, if not earlier.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Beyond freedom etc.




Freedom etc. doesn't get you limited liability for negligence. (A business in a world without companies could get limited liability for ordinary business debts by negotiating it into every commercial contract they signed, but thinking about the practicalities of that tells you why a standard-form deal of limited liability in exchange for transparency is something a government would want to create). "I absolutely cannot under any circumstances lose more on my passive investments than the amount I invested even if my business partner is evil" is a socially valuable deal to have available that you can't contract for at common law.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Lawsuits against non-profit and up-and coming models for breaching the copyrights of the big LLM's.




This is a very, very high risk strategy for the big LLMs given that they have breached the copyrights of absolutely everyone in the process of training their models on a corpus of copyrighted text. "You can't train an AI model on publicly-available but IP'ed data" is not a net win for Anthropic or OpenAI.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I think this is a product of a long-running psy-op to convince people that National Socialism was not a fundamentally left wing movement.




If National Socialism was ever a "fundamentally left-wing movement" then nobody told Hitler's contemporaries. The right found him sympathetic and the non-communist left didn't.




There were a lot of left wing journalists and academics in the immediate post World War II period who suddenly found the need to "memory-hole" which horse they'd been backing prior to the allied victory in Europe.




Only because of the Nazi-Soviet pact. A number of Communists went from being loud and proud anti-fascists to pacifists when Soviet policy changed, and straight back to being anti-fascist after Barbarossa.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It means, to me, that there are two sides: pro migration and anti migration. All other issues are secondary to the real issue, and therefore all parties will align on the topic of greatest importance.




That would you be considering the parties to the left of Le Pen interchangeable. not the parties considering themselves interchangeable (which was your original claim). I agree that, as a single-issue anti-immigration voter, you are correct to do so.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The British aristocracy were over-represented among the dead in WW1 and WW2 (and, as far as I am aware, in most of the 19th century wars). That is, of course, to be expected for a group that justifies its privileges by claiming to be a warrior elite. As far as I am aware, the same was true for the Germans. (The Prussian aristocracy was uncomplicatedly a real warrior elite in WW1. In WW2 the Waffen SS did more dangerous stuff than the Reichswehr, and Nazi elites' sons were more likely to be in it).


That the planter class in the Confederacy widely dodged the draft would be surprising to me, if true. They tended (as do their descendants in the red tribe elite) to see themselves as a warrior elite.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think "even though the bad guy is known to be bad, I am going to try to distinguish the bad things he did do from the bad things he didn't do" is a fundamentally autistic way of thinking. Once normies know someone is a bad guy, they just put him in the "bad" bucket and believe everything bad about him and disbelieve everything good.


The term "Clinton Derangement Syndrome" wasn't used at the time, but there was a similar phenomenon where conservatives, even otherwise sensible ones, who had (correctly) worked out that he was a bad man started believing every negative rumour about him (and his wife) including the obviously silly ones, and a similar pro-Clinton litany of obnoxious efforts to psychoanalyse them. Something similar happened among small groups of anti-Obama and anti-GW Bush political obsessives, but on a much smaller scale because normies didn't see Obama or GW Bush as bad people.


People as venal, chronically dishonest, sexually incontinent, and reckless as Clinton and Trump normally get jailed or at least driven out of public life in disgrace.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Medicare fraud is different.


I'm not joking here - Republicans see Medicare as a program which helps good people, so a little bit of fraud is inevitable and acceptable. Whereas Medicaid is a program which helps the undeserving poor, so any fraud at all is grounds for throwing the baby out with the bathwater.


This also explains why the government is so bad at anti-fraud efforts. The voters who are outraged by fraud believe (wrongly) and the politicians who pander to them pretend to believe that fraud is mostly a problem caused by politically unsympathetic groups of program beneficiaries claiming more than they are entitled to. People with experience of private sector anti-fraud work start with the assumption that most fraud involves organised, professional fraud operations such as the one Rick Scott ran.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do not think the Matthew Yglesias wing of the Democrats see Hasan Piker as the future of the party.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Les Republicains, i.e. the remnant of the traditional French centre-right, did not consider everyone to the left of Le Pen interchangeable. They refused to withdraw from three-cornered left-LR-RN second rounds where they were in third place, did not endorse either side in two-way left-RN runoffs, and allowed individual LR politicians to endorse FN candidates in such cases.  That is how you behave if you think the left (not just the communist left, but a broad left alliance including communists) is as obnoxious as Le Pen.


Even Macron's liberal Ensemble did not withdraw from three-cornered left-ENS-RN contests where the left candidate was a communist.


I don't think that the communist left, the non-communist left, and the liberals forming a popular front against "fascists" means that they consider themselves interchangeable - it just means that they think Le Pen counts as a fascist. If Le Pen really was a fascist, then forming a popular front against her would be the right thing to do according to all three groups' stated values.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You are entitled to accuse me of motivated reasoning here, but the point I am making is symmetric. I have not claimed that MAGA are bad people because they have right-populist political views, I claimed they were bad people because they repealed the character floor for political leadership, arguably in 2016 and uncomplicatedly in 2024. My continued presence on the Motte should be a signal of good faith - if I believed that right-populists were per se bad people, why would I still be here?


You can't do politics without meeting good people sincerely pursuing political goals you do not share, or good people with different political views to you because they don't understand the issues, or (very occasionally if you are smart enough to be a Motteposter) good people with different political views to you because you don't understand the issues. My social circle contains Brexit supporters in both the first two groups, for example. I have less experience meeting MAGA normies, but I have spent enough time in red states to know that most Republicans, and even most Trump voters, are not evil.


But "Men as dishonest as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" used to be one of the things 90% of citizens agreed on. (So was "Men as uncouth as Donald Trump should not hold high political office" but I care about that a lot less). It isn't obvious why the standard bearer for "Deport the illegals and reshore manufacturing" needs to be a reckless sociopath. Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot weren't. Nigel Farage isn't. (Admittedly Boris Johnson is one.) I know Richard Hanania has a theory for why populism always leads to kakistocracy, but I think it proves too much.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
In particular, the highest-fertility subpopulations in the west right now are the Amish and Haredim, neither of whom are able to sustain technological civilisation. The post-2010 social media driven fertility drop has pushed Mormons below replacement level, leaving Modern Orthodox Jews the only ethnic group with both above-replacement fertility and calculus.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's worth noting that the UK did draft women for war work in WW2 - including heavy manual work that was close to the limit of what women were physically capable of. My grandmother was drafted into the Women's Land Army at 17, and did a farm job that would have been done by a man in peacetime, and that essentially no woman would have done voluntarily.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If the crypto and SPACs were just about ripping off Trump's own supporters, I would agree with your point re. 1. But with all of 1, 3 and 4 the problem is not that Trump is getting paid, it is that some of the people paying Trump are smart enough to know what they are doing, and we can assume that they are getting something in return. But we don't know what is being sold, and in some cases (especially the crypto) we don't even know who it is being sold to.


One example where we do know is that Trump changed his views on the Tiktok ban around the time Tiktok investor Jeff Yass invested in the Truth Social SPAC. That moves the SPAC from scamming his own supporters to accepting bribes from a proxy for a Communist dictatorship.


Nobody thinks the Saudis deal with Jared Kushner is purely commercial. The question is whether this is a tip for his work on something which benefits both Saudi and US interests (presumably the Abraham accords), or whether it is a bribe for some piece of as-yet secret work which benefits Saudi interests and hurts US interests. Even if it is a tip, the dollar amount is so much larger than the customary and reasonable gift given in that kind of situation that it would be improper under conventional business or political ethics. When Eric Trump announces the groundbreaking on Trump Hotel Durkadurkastan, we don't know if it is a purely commercial transaction, a tip, or a bribe. (But we do know that the Durkadurkastanis see this as a distinction without a difference).


In addition, all five of your points involve dollar amounts which were 1-2 orders of magnitude higher under Trump than under previous corrupt presidents. For me, this is absolutely critical, although I agree that the average swing voter is innumerate and doesn't care. I don't think the Saudis paid Jared Kushner a few hundred million dollars* for a small favour, whereas people were willing to pay Hunter Biden a few hundred thousand dollars just to set up some meetings.


* My estimate of the NPV of the management fees on the $2 billion investment over the life of the fund, assuming the standard 2-and-20 fee.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
He is already in visible decline. Even if he is alive at age 90 in 2036, he won't be functioning at the level needed to keep the show going, let alone actually wield power.