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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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The second reason is to create a layer of cultural mulch around the pathways to success. The truth is that nobody actually gets success without an extremely strong drive to strive for it.

I don't think this is true, although i guess it depends on what your criteria for "extremely strong drive" and "success" is.

I know multiple people with only a moderate drive for success that have become dollar decamillionaires and two that are dollar centimillionaires.

The people with extremely strong drive for success are doing very well too of course but not necessarily as good or better. At some point it seems that drive and intelligence hits sharply diminishing returns and you end up with somewhat luck-based results. This goes for both career and startup success.

You need enough drive and intelligence to get a seat at the table but once there you get to roll largely the same dice as the rest of the guys there.

I think this is also why the media doesn’t like Tiger Mothers. Those women and their kids unironically believe that striving is good and that puts them in competition with their betters. The Asian kids who study more than you are trouble. And if white parents start doing this as well, it’s a problem.

Once again I disagree. I think people don't like Tiger moms is because they engage in zero sum crab bucket behaviour, which if generalised pretty much amounts to torture of the youth, without material or spiritual benefits on the group level. IE. their zero-sum behaviour becomes (very)negative-sum if generalised.

I’m not sure how deliberate it is, but I find it kinda weird just how often the values of the elite just so happen to be things that are absurdly destructive when practiced by lower class people. Not getting and staying married, not working hard and striving at every chance, not avoiding drugs and alcohol, behaving wildly in general, and so on — all of these things will make it much harder for a poor person to gain wealth.

I’m not sure how deliberate it is, but I find it kinda weird just how often the values of the elite just so happen to be things that are absurdly destructive when practiced by lower class people. Not getting and staying married, not working hard and striving at every chance, not avoiding drugs and alcohol, behaving wildly in general, and so on — all of these things will make it much harder for a poor person to gain wealth.

Its not weird at all. First off, money is a great insulator against the consequences of poor behaviour. Secondly, those aren't really the values of the elite. The higher your class the higher the likelihood that you stay married, people don't strive at every opportunity and people in over-consume drugs less.

Finally the things listed makes it harder for everyone to gain wealth (except striving), but the already wealthy do not need to, which is another reason why they can have a degenerate lifestyle without as disastrous consequences.

The elite value the freedom to do what they want and don't care about what happens to other people (or rationalise their preference as an improvement for everyone, damn observable reality), unfortunately if you're poor and without strong willpower you're more more vulnerable to the available vices than the elite. Which of course doesn't make things better, it's arguably even worse.

There's some truth to this, but it's overstated. The cathedral's message to poor women isn't "have your kids out of wedlock" it's "don't have kids, focus on your career and education". This is dumb because poor people are usually not good at school and have careers they are indifferent to at best, so they won't focus on those things. Likewise the message to the poor is, literally, don't do drugs- and this works about as well as the just say no campaign as a whole, but the media pushing back on that message is invented by poor people!

don't have kids, focus on your career and education

Isn't this the message to all women, and the poor are just poor responders?

The ladies that respond the best to this message and spend years in rigorous study are likely the women it would be best for our civilization to marry while young enough to maximize their fertility.

Kind of. Pop-country has the opposite message and it’s eleventy-bajillion times as Astro turfed and corporatized as anything else coming out of the entertainment industry- it’s just not aimed at the actual poor. Likewise public schools push birth control hardest in dirt poor urban districts.