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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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The only true privilege of the poor is hating on the rich. Therefore, it is the moral responsibility of the rich to hateable...

...If I ever end up super rich, I'll be sure to fulfill my responsibility.

This seems like a terrible attitude to have. What do you think you gain by making the world around you worse?

Doing good things and being hated aren't mutually exclusive.

First part of being hated is about optics. If you own a Bugatti, then drive it with the entitlement of a Bugatti driver. If you purchased a Manet, took it off a Museum shelf and popped it in your living room.... then don't act 'terribly sorry for taking it off the shelves'. Own it. Be hate able for doing hate able things. This is especially annoying when rich people disguise themselves as poor people to avoid judgement. They sneakily avoid the challenges that inter-poor camaraderie authetic. You don't struggle to make rent, don't act like you empathize.

Second, it's about saying the wrong things. You're rich enough to not be fire able. Say the annoying things that gets normies cancelled. It makes you hate able, but is in line with your values. It may even result in good outcomes, but it doesn't make you likeable. You can be the person who gives hard truths to the young, because it doesn't affect your stature in society.

So yeah, it's about living authentically. Just doing that will make you hate able.

Say the annoying things that gets normies cancelled.

As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of people wealthy enough to both be visible and actually do this (Musk, Thiel, Rowling would be at the top). Being richer than the culture war is a very high bar.

As for me.... I try to drive my sports car like a sports car, but the local police will bust me for it the same as the poor slop in the clapped-out Toyota.

It’s not just being rich, it’s being rich and useful and disagreeable. What do Thiel, Rowling and Musk have in common? First, that they do not care particularly about being part of mainstream Anglo-American ‘high society’ socially, and therefore don’t sweat some missed invitations on the basis of their politics. But secondly - and much more importantly - they retain enough of a use to the former group that they can’t be fully put out in the cold. Musk is useful to the state department’s foreign policy aims, and to NASA (although they don’t have much of a say). Thiel is important to defense. Rowling can’t be truly cancelled in Hollywood because against the ongoing comic book movie collapse Harry Potter is Warner’s most valuable franchise and prints amusement park revenue for Universal, and she has an absolute veto over any use of the IP so they literally can’t afford to say anything that could annoy her in any way.