The nurses’ resistance to recognizing these men was especially churlish and selfish, but that sordid episode is nowadays forgotten.

There were a surprisingly large number of people who despised the returning veterans, so the nurses’ resistance was part of a larger unsavory reaction to the war, blaming the vets for getting drafted and actually serving.

Zero to One, by Peter Thiel.

There are obvious parallels with the internet and AI.

Consider how the USA built railroads.

Self-serving crony capitalists got handouts of public land, then used that seed capital to build immense private wealth. These are not the people I point to when I want to indicate capitalism done properly.

Jim probably knows a lot more about capitalism than I do, and probably could teach me, but probably has better things to do with his time. If anyone wants to chime in with book recommendations, I’m all ears.

When Communism took over Russia and China, those were still very poor, semi-traditional societies. Plenty of semi-starved peasants around. So you could run a Leninist party just on class resentments. “Never forget class-struggle”, Mao liked to say. “Never forget you used to be a serf and you’re not one now thanks to me”, he meant.

In the West, though, by 1945, when peace and order was enforced by the United States, the economy had improved to the point where class-struggle just didn’t work as a generator of loyalty. Life was good, the proletariat could all afford a car and even vacations. Traditional society was dead, the old status-ladders based on family pedigree and land-based wealth were also dead. The West in 1960 was a wealthy, industrial meritocratic society, where status was based on one’s talent, productivity and natural ability to schmooze oneself into the ruling class.

[…]

The West started to build up a Leninist power structure. Not overtly, not as a conscious plan. It just worked that way because the incentives were out there for everyone to see, and so slowly we got it. Biological Leninism. That’s the nature of the Cathedral.

What did Lenin do? Exterminate the natural aristocracy of Russia, and build a ruling class with a bunch of low-status people. Workers, peasants, Jews, Latvians, Ukrainians. Lenin went out of his way to recruit everyone who had a grudge against Imperial Russian society. And it worked, brilliantly. The Bolsheviks, a small party who little popular support, won the civil war, and became the awesome Soviet Union. The early Soviet Union promoted minorities, women, sexual deviants, atheists, cultists and every kind of weirdo. Everybody but intelligent, conservative Russians of good families.

[…]

In Communist countries pedigree was very important. You couldn’t get far in the party if you had any little kulak, noble or landowner ancestry. Only peasants and workers were trusted. Why? Because only peasants and workers could be trusted to be loyal. Rich people, or people with the inborn traits which lead to being rich, will always have status in any natural society. They will always do alright. That’s why they can be trusted; the stakes are never high for them. If anything they’d rather have more freedom to realize their talents. People of peasant stock though, they came from the dredges of society. They know very well that all they have was given to them by the party. And so they will be loyal to the death, because they know it, if the Communist regime falls, their status will fall as fast as a hammer in a well. And the same goes for everyone else, especially those ethnic minorities.

As Lenin and the communists rallied the downtrodden to overthrow the bourgeoisie, so bioleninism rallies those with biological or identitarian disadvantages (perceived or inherent) to Leftist causes. In a system based on ability or traditional hierarchies such as a meritocracy or most Western civilizations, these groups would be at the bottom of the ladder – but when the state or culture gives them status, they become loyal warriors of the Left.

— Bioleninism by Spandrell

Wasn’t “kulak” itself a derogatory term under Stalin?