New blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html

@cstross
It is the intersection of the degrees of selfishness & foresightedness. If your level of selfishness is "the good of all mankind" you want to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accomodation, etc; if "me and my family" you get traditional aristocratic behaviour; if "me & nobody else" you treat everyone else as objects, which can be disposed of at your whim- mass disposal of the poor on a par with a neat close-cropped lawn.

@HighlandLawyer @cstross

Nuke the Rich.
Eating them is bad for the collective colon

@MedeaVanamonde @HighlandLawyer @cstross

But if we ate one a week I think it would start deterring them

@darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde @cstross
Well let's be fair about this: a national lottery. One person a week is to be sacrificed, drawn by lot; but the number of entries in the lottery is the number of <£$¥€> one has, & that wealth will be returned to the national pot. It could be you, but statistically it's much more likely to be a billionaire.

@feorag @cstross France absolutely should lean in on making guillotines a world-recognized brand. Every teen should have a Monsieur Choppy labubu hanging off their backpack.

@javierg @cstross How is Gates responsible for millions of deaths during the pandemic?

@gjm @javierg @cstross iirc he lobbied for more money to the vaccine makers, and specifically not for more vaccines

@atax1a @javierg @cstross Noted. Is there some analysis somewhere of how that allegedly makes him responsible for millions of deaths?

(I can imagine how it might. I can also imagine how it might have been the actually-most-effective course of action but spinnable as responsible for millions of deaths by people who want to make him look bad. I can also imagine how it might be very impossible to determine whether what he did was actually good or bad either in expectation or in actual effects, which seems to me the most likely situation.)

[EDITED to add:] A bit of casual web-searching didn't turn up anything super-obvious but did produce e.g. this https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/gates-foundation-donates-70-million-to-covid/ which for all I know may have been a poorly-directed donation or one where donating more would have done a lot of good but, well, I know _I_ didn't donate any number of millions to anything related to COVID vaccines and it seems like if Gates wanted everyone to die he could just have, like, not done that.

@gjm this does not appear to be a question in good faith so we're outta here

@atax1a Obviously you're under no obligation to answer any questions, nor to believe anything I say, but for what it's worth it was absolutely a question in good faith. I don't know exactly what Gates did and didn't do, it sounds like you know more than me, I had a bit of a look and didn't find anything definitive, and I'd like to know more.

@HighlandLawyer @MedeaVanamonde @cstross

I think it might go faster if we just ate the richest one every week though

@cstross And the thing to understand about being "poor", is that that includes everything up to the very tippy top of upper middle class!!

@darwinwoodka @HighlandLawyer @cstross

Or Sacrifice them to Madame Pele on the Big Island.

@trademark @cstross And as Labour is so far to the right, why aren't there more parties to the left, besides the Greens maybe? Are voters more conservative than on the continent, despite apparent deprivation in large parts of the country?

@jsl @trademark @cstross I do not declare myself an expert on UK politics, but the first past the post voting system, and one candidate per election area, makes it very hard for new parties to get started since people rightfully worry about “wasting” their vote.

@darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde @cstross
Well let's be fair about this: a national lottery. One person a week is to be sacrificed, drawn by lot; but the number of entries in the lottery is the number of <£$¥€> one has, & that wealth will be returned to the national pot. It could be you, but statistically it's much more likely to be a billionaire.

@cstross @GinevraCat In the county in which I live, I’m theoretically “rich” because I’m in the upper quartile of income here, but people from places like the SF bay area scoff and describe anyone not making multiple millions per year as “poor.”

@HighlandLawyer @darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde That's going to reap an awful lot of middle-aged/middle-class skulls, though: 3000 middle-aged folks who own average homes (£0.3M each) = one billionaire-equivalent. Might be best to omit the family home from the notional wealth.

@darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde @cstross
Well let's be fair about this: a national lottery. One person a week is to be sacrificed, drawn by lot; but the number of entries in the lottery is the number of <£$¥€> one has, & that wealth will be returned to the national pot. It could be you, but statistically it's much more likely to be a billionaire.