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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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The class that is most precarious today are surplus elites. The low income high status people struggling to not fall into the working class. An electrician with a good salary and zero risk of unemployment benefits from low taxes. The sociology major or artist who makes less than an electrician is dependent on state handouts. The class represented by the modern left isn't the working class, it is the state handout class. This can either mean underclass living on welfare or art history major managing a project that is supposed to help the underclass (don't ask for statistical evidence of the efficacy of this project). Canceling student debt and more money for modern art benefits people with upper middle class parents who didn't make it to medical school yet are terrified of becoming a nurse. The modern left is in a conflict with the working class as the working class doesn't want to pay for LGBTQA+ certifications while the downwardly mobile middle class desperately needs it so they don't end up in the working class.

Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.

These social media campaigns work, they provide new jobs for chief diversity officers.

Especially women tend to end up with college degrees that are difficult to find employment for without left wing politics. There would be a lot fewer HR jobs if it wasn't for all the regulations that have been passed. Meanwhile the actual workers find most of the HR-stuff bizarre and alienating.

And this is a self re-enforcing cycle; the more it becomes a default that mentally healthy non-underclass women have degrees, the more women get degrees in communications and psychology(typically the two least rigorous majors) because women are susceptible to societal pressure and low-rigor degrees make it difficult to get a job, which means there’s outcry to make more jobs specifically for degree holders.

Feminism doesn’t help- the way to break the cycle would be to acknowledge that most but not all women should just be homemakers, yes often for men who make $65k/yr, but it isn’t the root of the problem. Pretending that everyone can be an elite is the root of the problem.

surplus elites.

The low income high status people

I think it'd be more accurate and simple to just call them intellectuals.

Elites who didn't develop some great new tech, trade their way to a career on wall street or become a surgeon.