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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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If true, we would observe that home schooled children who completely missed the whole uplifting experience of American education, would be the bitterest and most vengeful woke warriors.

You'd also want to control for religious conservativism.

Anecdotally, the most relentless and insufferable woke warrior I know was homeschooled in a left-wing religious family, but I suspect that it is hard to find statistically significant samples of such people because they're so rare.

Explaining great and influential social movements as "mere" revenge for schoolday grudges is not new idea.

Robert Nozick, one of leading theoreticians of libertarianism, tried to answer mystery why intellectuals oppose capitalism, when capitalism is the greatest thing ever.

Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?

TL;DR of Nozick's argument: smart intellectuals get the best grades from teachers in schools, but not the best rewards from bosses in capitalist marketplace.

Therefore, they are justifiably angry and burn the whole shit down.

And when they still do not get what they deserve, they do it again.

Big if true. Is school is not mere waste of time, but factory producing unstoppable killer robots, the only way out is to shut the whole thing down.

But then, why do smart intellectuals like Nozick support capitalism?

I suspect that the Big Five model can be used to generate a more fine-grained explanation (most modern intellectuals are high in openness, neuroticism, and agreeableness, which inclines them towards libertarian democratic socialism; Nozick seemed to be lower in neuroticism, so ended up as a bleeding heart but free-market libertarian) but I don't have the time or expertise to do it.

Certainly, but e.g. Nozick didn't do those lucrative things. He was sincere to a fault.

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