Comment by ChrisMarshallNY
15 days ago
Still different from birthright castes.
With a birthright caste, you're stuck. Even if you make a lot of money, you're still an untouchable.
In the US, if you make a lot of money, you can become upper class, even if you still have some "rough edges." I actually know a number of folks that have done exactly that.
I also know folks that have done the opposite. Started off on top of the heap, and ended up skint.
We definitely have strata. Hollywood stars represent an interesting one. They are sort of what folks aspire to be, but they are nowhere near the top of the heap.
In the UK, Elon Musk would never be a toff; no matter how much he has, but in the US, he's King of the Hill.
I guess that's where we part ways: just as the US is the world's richest 3rd* world country, I'd call ERM the richest upper-middle-class person in the US, but not exactly upper-class...
(just as a datum point: ERM is the opposite of an éminence grise, in just about any of its senses)
* in the economic sense. In the political sense, by definition the US is 1st world [after what happened to Yugoslavia (former leader of the non-aligned movement) I'm surprised Carney is brave enough to attempt to revive a "2nd World" ... surprised; but pleased!].
Quick delve: American class-based exceptionality gyrates around Norman Mailer's "philosophical psychopath"
Which Hollywood stars (mostly from the "middle-middle class" mentioned in my earlier link) are. Professional hipsters?
https://intellectualtakeout.org/2019/03/the-banality-of-the-...
>remember G.K. Chesterton’s lesson about how “two opposite passions may blaze beside each other
Wonderfully anachronistic essay on a wonderfully anachronistic opus, oh wow, I must have meant "timeless" somewhere
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/528839/summary
Compare: SV founders (including "broligarchs"(?)) will never say "cowboys" in vain, but East Coast financiers might :)
(How familiar are you with 1990s-2010s neo-hipsters?)
Edit: MPAA^W AMPAS will never think secret thoughts of "British upper middle class theatre" outside the occasional hire (for "diversity", these days). Is that why PG and Trevor moved to the UK ;)?
It's not reactionary centrism, but it's also not progressive centrism.. to always say never!
(Mostly just the jokes:
Q. How did the hipster wind up in the emergency room?
A. He fired his 3D-printed gun before it was cool. )
Not sure what you're getting at with cowboys, for me the intersection with SV is/was Gibson's console cowboy — "In the bars [Case had] frequented as a cowboy hotshot, the elite stance involved a certain relaxed contempt for the flesh. The body was meat. Case fell into the prison of his own flesh."
What is the opposite of relentless searching for the frontier? cottage-core?
Should we add Dolphus Raymond to the "white negro" pantheon? How about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezz_Mezzrow#Personal_life ?
EDIT: you might be interested in Wister, "The Virginian" (1902) as a Trope Codifier for the cowboy: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1298/pg1298.txt
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Who cares if the caste is birthright or not. If there is no class mobility, there is no practical difference between the two systems. Potato, potatoe.
There is class mobility: anyone can be a hipster-- in 2001
Theses days, it's about migrating to those basements of the "interwebs" where the gen alpha trolls hang out.. little red book?
https://archive.ph/2026.01.24-032347/https://aletteraday.sub...
hmmm: an arbitrary finite automaton can be decomposed into a collection of edges; can we decompose a reasonable philosophy into a collection of memes/greentexts/whatever the kids are doing these days?
(for that matter, I just assume the modal HN'er is ~13 now, but maybe that's an artifact of how the front page dynamic goldfishes the conversation?)
EDIT: little red book or little red pill? https://dakotavadams.substack.com/p/redpill-op
> I'd seen posters from the now fairly infamous 4chan /pol/, or Politics, board raiding other parts of the website in character as minorities or leftists before.
How about centres troll the extremes, as in https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GgTm194WIAEqak3?format=jpg&name=... ? (the Adams quote implies, whether the horseshoe be real or artificial, you'd largely be trolling the same people anyway?)
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How do people know your caste? Is it on your ID document?
In India maybe. In the US (or some other places) it might be easier to have someone analyze your tax docs. "So what do you do?" is not a popular conversation opener these days..