It's a bit disturbing to me how enthusiastically the SlaterStarCodex crowd latches onto this "fuck you, got mine" essay, gushing with praise and admiration about telling it like it is. The entire thing is a rationalization for the thinking illustrated in these quotes:
> I feel the need for a disclaimer of sorts. I am writing about class and some of the injustices of classism, but I do not particularly pretend to position myself as an enemy of classism: I'm pretty classist. And by "pretty classist", I don't mean in the sense of "Everybody's a Little Bit Racist" or "gee, internalized misogyny is hard to totally eradicate". No, I mean closer to Segregation and PUAs.
> My parents were born of blue collar families in blue collar communities and were of concerted agreement that their life goals were to flee that class and never have anything to do with it again. Elevating their – and their progeny's – social class was the family project. They enlisted my sister and I in this project, and were explicit, formal, and unapologetic about it.
> I empathize when social classes not mine find themselves on the short end of the stick, such as in the above account of smoking regulations, but that doesn't mean I'd do anything to change that outcome. Like, "Wow, it must suck to have your class' norms so disrespected by a change in the law like that. Welp, I'm off to buy a burger in this now refreshingly smoke-free burger joint, and discuss with my class-peers how else we can change public policy to make it more support my class' norms – even, if necessary, at your class' norms' expense."
The idea that "the Left" engages in "Orwellian double-think" with regards to class, is also pretty puzzling.
> A thing that has been very frustrating to me is that most books and other discussions I have been able to find that really address that social classes are cultures have come out of the Right. Again this pattern: the Right, at least, admits the phenomenon exists, mostly so they can hate on people (also see "culture of poverty"); the Left engages in Orwellian doublethink, insisting the problem doesn't exist and shouldn't be spoken of.
The Left promotes class-consciousness with the goal of abolishing unjust and arbitrary delineations, in its many dimensions (including the extremely well acknowledged ones such as vernacular). The idea that "the Left" has no notion that a poor Led Zeppelin fan can be higher class than the wife of a wealthy drug-dealer is insane.
edit: reply to gjm (because I got flagged too much)
The author
- belittles their opposition (ie: "It is a common confusion – or intellectual dodge – to conflate social class with economic class."),
- expresses veiled dismay that they can't "describe an ethnic, regional, or national culture with contempt, as broken or defective",
- is against legal prejudices today, but against any measures that attempt to correct the damage caused by those legal prejudices in the past ("I'm on-board with the idea that all people have equal rights before the law, and entitled to a baseline level of respect as fellow humans, but I'm not sure how much further than that I go." - ie: the arrangement looks like this today, deal with it as if it was fair regardless of how we got here)
- and concludes with "let's leave race out of it for the moment", echoing much of the talk by LessWrong-types "tired" of talk of sexism and racism.
This piece is not just a humble description of how they see the world, it's very prescriptive. The overall impression I get is a righteous defense of the "fuck you, got mine" mentality, very inspired by Ayn Rand.