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
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@GinevraCat @cstross And that includes "upper middle class" as defined in any reasonable sense of the phrase - having to work for a living, but able to absorb serious medical expenses or extended disability, or take vacations in more pleasant times - which includes, in the USA, anyone with an annual income under around $300K.
@callisto @GinevraCat Yep. The gap between a billionaire and a mere millionaire is vastly bigger than the gap between average-middle-class and a millionaire.
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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 Eat the rich before they eat us.
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@trademark @cstross In the 2025 Reith lecture, Rutger Bregman makes the point that if somebody agrees with you 70%, that person ought to be your ally. The left is demanding levels of purity far, far higher and that harms their position.
Look at Evangelical Fundamentalists and Tech Bros. They have about as much in common as (as you mentioned Hitler) the German Adel had with the Socialist part of the NSDAP. Their only common goal was to get rid of the democratic institutions. That's not even close to 70% agreement.
So, how can the Left get jointly behind the idea of saving the western democratic model instead of bickering with the people's front of Judea?@jsl @trademark @cstross What you're missing about "the left" in the USA is that (1) for the most part, they don't exist, still victim of the purges of the 1950s; and (2) the only reason we (a pronoun I use loosely) seem disunified is that the strategy of the Official Opposition
️ is to throw out test balloons of which vulnerable people to discard this week, then when opposition to *that* is led disproportionately by folks most directly impacted, then scream "you're tearing us apart." -
@cstross While I am in France, I still fall short of that. There again, there’s a joke in there about guillotines and falling short.
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@trademark Democracy does not run on victory to the most numerous these days, it runs on victory to the most indoctrinated. Which goes with the money.
@cstross Cheap excuse to deny the left's own agency. The left can't stop billionaries from spending their own money. What the left can do is to stop sabotaging themselves. If they can do that they will win. The left has been screwing themselves over for more than a 100 years though, this is not new.
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@SoftwareTheron No, our planet is beyond its *long term* carrying capacity. We've already passed peak birth rate and even without pandemics or billionaire-induced genocide there will be more than a billion fewer people on earth in 2126 than there are in 2026. It's a self-correcting problem within a period of a couple of centuries, and we can probably survive that long on our current tech base.
@cstross @SoftwareTheron That's assuming both no gain in efficiency and no change in underlying lifestyle (the part that has the most easy gains to make). -
@feorag I still think we should invest in guillotine futures!
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@jsl @trademark You're missing nuances not specific to the US (you mentioned a Reith lecture!). Here in the UK, the Labour party is de facto politically the Conservative party of 20 years ago: they're absolutely not remotely on the left any more, and they're pursuing dangerously authoritarian policies in many areas. I submit that it's not "purity" to oppose Tories in pink ties, it's realism.
@cstross @jsl ' I submit that it's not "purity" to oppose Tories in pink ties, it's realism.' If that turns out to be true this time, we'll have a case of "the boy who cried wolf", the rhetoric is always the same no matter what. This sort of behaviour was annoying enough when it only brought tory misrule, now it can very well bring in actual fascism, just like it did in 1932.
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@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.Enlightened Selfishness: I wish to live free of the fear of starving, freezing, or being shot at. Therefore I wish to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accommodation, etc.
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@cstross @jsl ' I submit that it's not "purity" to oppose Tories in pink ties, it's realism.' If that turns out to be true this time, we'll have a case of "the boy who cried wolf", the rhetoric is always the same no matter what. This sort of behaviour was annoying enough when it only brought tory misrule, now it can very well bring in actual fascism, just like it did in 1932.
@trademark @jsl Labour is pursuing a bunch of very unpleasant policies—institutionalizing transphobia, banning sex education for kids, banning immigration, social media surveillance, reclassifying free speech as "terrorism"—to say nothing of pandering to the far right and running a massive rearmament program (the latter might, alas, be necessary this time round). They're trying to recapture the Tory voters who have deserted for Reform. They're going to turn Labour fascist if they continue.
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Enlightened Selfishness: I wish to live free of the fear of starving, freezing, or being shot at. Therefore I wish to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accommodation, etc.
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@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.Nuke the Rich.
Eating them is bad for the collective colon -
Nuke the Rich.
Eating them is bad for the collective colon@MedeaVanamonde @cstross
I'd prefer to compost them, better for the environment. -
@MedeaVanamonde @cstross
I'd prefer to compost them, better for the environment.@HighlandLawyer @cstross
And poison the soil? -
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 I reached the conclusion over a decade ago that humans range ethically over the entire spectrum -- from basically* 100% good to basically* 100% evil.
Key point: evil people exist. I tend to get pushback when I use the word "evil" ("I don't believe in the supernatural!"), so maybe "completely selfish" is a better term in some contexts.
...and then one is rather forced to reach the conclusion that the global wealth/power system is or has evolved into (since at least Reagan/Thatcher) something which rewards "the worst of the worst" (once again, every accusation is a confession).
...and that the element which has most enabled this shift or intensification is the power that technology creates. (I could go on at length about this.)
Key point: humanity isn't inherently bad or self-destructive; we just haven't learned how to keep the problem-children away from the dangerous stuff -- because there didn't used to be so much of it, and it kind of happened rather suddenly, speaking in terms of cultural-evolutionary timeframes.
So the problem now is twofold: (1) how do we keep the bad people away from the dangerous things, and (2) how do we prise their greedy little fingers off those things in the first place?
These aren't easy problems to solve, but (final key point) I do think they're solvable. We just have to get enough people really understanding the problem in these terms (assuming I'm not wrong), and working together on solutions.
a noted foot
* allowing for error-margin and the fact that no real thing is ever perfectly in accordance with any ideal
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@cstross I wouldn't put anything past Epstein, but Gates has given enough evidence of somewhat-benevolent intentions that I'd at least _consider_ the possibility that he just picked a very bad way of saying "how do we get rid of _poverty_?".
I too would like a world in which there are no poor people, provided we can get there by making the currently-poor people not-poor and stopping new people becoming poor, rather than killing existing poor people and preventing anyone being born who might turn out poor.
(Of course there might be elements of both. It could be that Gates genuinely wants to eliminate poverty but some bit of his brain wants to do it because poor people are an untidy nuisance rather than to benefit those people, and sometimes that leaks out into his words, and all that could be true even if he wouldn't ever actually go for mass murder as the, er, final solution to the problem of poverty.)
Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
Gates is personally, actively evil on a scale seldom seen. He's responsible of millions of deaths during the pandemic, and the sequestering of lots of pharmaceutical advances that used to be freely discussed between research laboratories.
Willing to kill every poor person aligns perfectly with his history.
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@feorag I suspect that when it eventually comes to that, you'd be lucky to get 5% from the liquidation.
At least the $1bn ballroom could be used as a warehouse, but even then it's probably got terrible transport links.
An awful lot of the "money" is either in the form of objects which are expensive to make but of limited utility to non-billionaires, or largely illusory -- how much is Tesla actually worth as a company, if there's no billionaires to buy it? Probably not the current market cap.
@darkling @feorag The point is not to "fund government" since any country with a sovereign currency can never run out of money, so the conversion percentage really doesn't matter. The point is to remove power from a bunch of toxic psychopaths, so that the government can perform its basic function of stopping its citizens from dying unnecessarily
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@trademark @jsl Labour is pursuing a bunch of very unpleasant policies—institutionalizing transphobia, banning sex education for kids, banning immigration, social media surveillance, reclassifying free speech as "terrorism"—to say nothing of pandering to the far right and running a massive rearmament program (the latter might, alas, be necessary this time round). They're trying to recapture the Tory voters who have deserted for Reform. They're going to turn Labour fascist if they continue.
@cstross @jsl As I said, if it turns out to be true THIS TIME, it will be a case of "the boy who cried wolf". Assuming what you're saying is true, I would guess that Labour's leadership must have seen what happened to the most left-leaning US president ever and decided to overcompensate in the other direction. In the current situation I would recommend you spend 95% of effort on warning about reform and the remaining time on whatever labour is doing.
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@cstross @SoftwareTheron we could also do a lot of things a lot cheaper if we actually assigned the costs properly. Excess air travel would be self correcting if it had to cover the full costs for example.
@Colman This is the conclusion I have also reached. TLDR: all mineral extraction should be taxed at a rate sufficient to cover the costs (best estimate) of fixing the environmental damage caused by how it is processed and used.
(...and the revenue generated thereby should be used to, you know, fix said damage -- or reuse/recycle materials as much as possible to minimize it. e.g. pay people to repair and upgrade electronics, rather than grinding them up and sending the results to the poor side of town, locally or globally. Pay people to repair clothes and furniture. Pay for recycling plastics that aren't "cost-effective" to recycle. Pay for research into better ways to recycle things. Dump billions or trillions into mass transit, because it's so much more efficient than cars. ...and so on)
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@jsl @trademark @cstross What you're missing about "the left" in the USA is that (1) for the most part, they don't exist, still victim of the purges of the 1950s; and (2) the only reason we (a pronoun I use loosely) seem disunified is that the strategy of the Official Opposition
️ is to throw out test balloons of which vulnerable people to discard this week, then when opposition to *that* is led disproportionately by folks most directly impacted, then scream "you're tearing us apart."
