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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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See, I strongly disagree that most of the "elite" are misanthropes who would consign us all to death if it was costless to do so, at least when simply giving us most of the things we do want is, in absolute terms, hardly any more expensive.

I don't think Soros wants us to endure privation for the sake of it, most people who espouse such claims (and many non-elite do! There are plenty of middle class people who demand austerity and "sustainable living" just as loudly), do so because they think expecting sustained economic growth will be catastrophic.

That is an incredibly stupid notion, but to the extent that it's a distinction worth making, that makes them misguided and not evil. Sure, there's quite a bit of aesthetic fetishism involved, such as Greens hating on nuclear power which is greener in both a literal and metaphorical sense than they ever could be, but it's not the overwhelming motivation.

As I've said in the past, one of the reason the wealthy dislike the poor is because the latter have enough power to be a nuisance or intrude on their sensibilities. They're uncouth, they demand a say in public affairs, they threaten your wellbeing if you don't surrender gibs and so on.

On the other hand, how many people hate monkeys in zoos? If you think that hobo on the subway was an incoherent shit-slinger, you've seen nothing yet. However, since they're modestly interesting, don't do any harm, and are utterly powerless, it's not a big deal at all to cough up the pocket change to keep them in conditions that, in the better class of zoo, constitute an improvement over their state in nature! Zoo lions might not roam the Serengeti, but they don't starve to death nor worry about outsiders killing them, then their cubs, so as to make their wives fertile and ripe for the raping.

Just about nobody advocates for both keeping lions and monkeys around and keeping them in conditions barely better than non-existence. The power differential and burden of care between us and godlike Masters of the Universe will be OOMs higher in the former and lower in the latter.