We've seen down that road. We know where it leads. Look at the imagined futures of games such as Shadowrun and Cyberpunk. This way lies an extreme dystopia for everyone except the ultra-rich.
Funny that the future Cyberpunk 2077 envisions is IMHO optimistic about AI. Unlike ours, in that world AI has already presented itself as a threat, and worst of them were somewhat successfully contained behind Blackwall. Perhaps because of that and NetWatch, there isn't a strong positive outlook on AI as we have, neither from corporations nor from most people. There are some AI and robots, but they are more specialized and many jobs still require humans, so those who aren't already rich are still to a degree needed. It's a dystopia in many ways, but AI isn't one of them.
None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)
A valid strategy against the monarchist oligarchs is to politely tell the MAGA part of the Republicans that they are being sold out and deceived.
But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message.
If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
I wonder: do these people really believe this stuff is going to work out well, or is working out badly for most people the point?
For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.
In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry.
Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact.
Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too.
The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.
I don't get how they can predict AI becoming powerful enough to revamp the entire economy and automate labor, but not powerful enough to just wrest control from them and then do whatever it wants to do instead.
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
Primarily because AI, artificial as it is does not want. People want. This doesn’t preclude programming something to do so, however it’s relatively long indirect link to any of the boogieman scenarios people like to anthropomorphize ideas into. The other scenario - people having a very powerful tool and imposing their will against everyone else is something that already happens and AI provides a natural step.
Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades.
The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.
Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
> Ah, yes, I remember Yarvin. His goal was to become a cult leader for billionaires whose brains had turned to mush from surrounding themselves with only yes-men for decades.
Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc.
It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.
Do you have a specific criticism of anything Yarvin has said? Specifically the things which he talks about in every interview he's given in the past 5 years.
It has become imperative, if anyone wants to seriously critique Land, that they gain a strong familiarity with the work of Immanuel Kant. Land's reading of Kant is perhaps the most interesting, and certainly the most politically crucial, of our generation. Start with the Critique of Pure Reason.
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
I read one article by Yarvin in 2015 and enjoyed it. I made numerous attempts after that to read him again and have never been able to finish one of his articles. He's always building to a point that never seems to arrive. Looking at where he is now I'm glad I made the decision to ignore him.
I also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
Nick Land is a philosopher who had a mental breakdown taking speed, blasting jungle music, and croaking into a microphone and I think it’s not coincidental that many of the people I’ve met who believe in this stuff have a relationship with amphetamines/MDMA. Andreessen name checked him in his accelerationist manifesto, which is funny because the manifesto is all about how tech is supposedly “pro-human” and Land was very explicitly anti humanist.
The missing detail is that he was doing this whilst being the stereotypical midlife crisis lecturer who finally finds a peer group who respects the avant-garde nature and intellectual depth of his philosophy by inviting first year undergrads to enjoy their first acid trips in his flat. Eventually he managed to find a group of people impressionable and emotionally immature enough to find his schtick impressive without him having to get them high first by re-emerging as a figure on the fringe right. This involved quite a pivot on notional values and inspirations, but that was only a problem if you assumed there was any substance to it in the first place.
You're absolutely right - Land's vision of technocapital is fundamentally anti-human, while Marc Andreessen's is pro-human. Mark Fisher criticized Land for underestimating the importance of the human face in keeping capitalism functional. However, I'd argue that for Land, camouflage has always been central to pre-singularity capitalism. A human face can serve as useful cover, helping technocapital advance toward its ultimately non-human ends.
Mental breakdowns, blasting jungle music, and croaking into microphones are wholesome and meaningful human activities belonging to a long-lived tradition that perhaps predates you. I honestly can't imagine what must be going on in the head of the kind of person who finds them reproachable.
"Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet. Sure, you can do just fine without them, but you're locking yourself out of a whole realm of the world, since an illicit psychoactive drug is not just a substance - it's a well-established global network of independent human-scale (but not always human-shaped) agents that does not cease to exist when you successfully ignore it. It's no coincidence that chemical neuroaugmentation has developed hand in hand with the silicon pseudocognition that lets us write to each other over a wire :)
And that's exactly why the goody-two-shoes humanist-by-default muh work-and-family type economic agents never know what hit 'em when weird shit inevitably hits the global fan. Though personally, I would prefer a world designed by acidheads, or even opiate addicts, rather than the present inane timeline, which is largely the work of coke fiends (and their industrious flunkies the speediots) over the course of the last half century or so.
Spoiler, kids: contrary to naming convention, amphetamine and its derivatives do not "speed" you up in any meaningful way.
this article is just a summary of things curtis yarvin originally said over 5 years ago and a Marinetti article that was in new scientist a few weeks back
On what basis do you make this accusation? Does HN need a new rule specifying what the other rules already explain? Give OP the benefit of the doubt. I read the entire article and it was absolutely not LLM-generated.
Yeah, I am not sure who this author is but it is at least a useful summary of the dynamics and history of neoreactionary movement. I don’t think most small l-and-c liberals and conservatives have any idea of what they’re up against, and are simply bewildered by what’s happening.
One thing I never understood - what's the plan for these accelerationists / techno monarchs if the "plebs" simply decide to say no, and rather just cut off their heads?
If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
Probably they do not even think about it. Have big secluded houses, lot of security, armed guards, cameras etc. They probably do not think about what if power grid will be destroyed/disabled, without power most of security will not work. Armed guards most probably will not throw away their life for them because they have their own life and families to think about when attacked by hundreds of people. Or think that they will be protected by police or military. But those are also rather common folk so probably would rather side with people instead of those techno-nobles. Finally they might think that they will be able to run with helicopter or plane. But you need people to operate those too. And those people may not exactly be willing to help at that time. Or just the road to the airport may be blocked.
In short I would say that they just do not comprehand the idea of world do not working in they favour. Of people not willing to do what they want.
But the get to that point life for vast number of people would have to get really unbearable.
If they reach their goal, they won't need a lower class, and they can address that problem however they see fit. A soldier might refuse to fire on their own side, but an autonomous drone won't.
Historically the ruling class never gave a shit about what the masses thought. This is why the french killed their divine king in the late 1700s, the king did not think he was so hated where this would be possible.
Today, the equation is flipped. Rather than ignoring the masses, the rich have been indoctrinating them for 3-4 generations now. Pacifying them. Removing their own ability to generate their own thoughts and replacing them with thoughts purchased and dispersed through advertising channels.
On top of that westerners haven’t been truly poor in about a hundred years. We allege that we can just go back to french revolution sentiments where we are all poor and stealing, well that is a lot harder if you have never had to steal or be good with a knife in your life thus far. The western mind and body have both been coddled. They are not the grizzly parisian of 1789 in a Phrygian cap. They might have never even thrown a punch before.
Given this, why should the rich be worried? We are cattle in this generation, not wild bulls.
the solution to this "problem" was mentioned: "get rid off the free press, dismantle USAID - this has already happened. NGOs and Universities are next."
History never had such powerful tech as we have now (or soon). Look at how it works in China, now add on top of this some AI which can better monitor your thoughts / education / etc. Future generations will be better "formatted" than we are
Some of them have very limited, anthropocentric visions of a world where they live as gods, empowered by godlike technology.
The more insightful ones see the end goal as one where humanity has been obliterated, with the successor expanding through the light cone, devouring all in its path. The (unspoken) rallying cry: "They will replace us." Naturally, this isn't a good popular slogan, so they ride along and let useful idiots do their thing.
I've long figured the essential knot at the bottom of this is: Do you agree with Land that intelligence and capitalism are in some sense "the same thing"?
I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.
And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Intelligence to Nick Land is explicitly not about logic or things that further human values (he is, in fact, explicitly anti-human, which is an intellectual honesty that I have to respect a lot more than the people who have taken his ideas and run with them).
It's about how a system can observe changes, react to them, make decisions to further itself (not any particular values), and act on those decisions. Think about a cybernetic OODA loop. Systems that do so will outcompete and replace those that don't.
Capitalism is all about that. If there's a dollar on the ground, someone will pick it up quicker than someone who has to petition some other agent to acquire a lock. And if two agents can engage in a mutually productive trade, they will not only fire together but also modify the system such that they will wire together in the future to more efficiently acquire limited resources.
All that is solid melts into distributed representations. In a way, he takes all the smartest critiques of capitalism and decides, well, capitalism is going to win, so we might as well embrace the state it converges to. Or not, but it doesn't really matter.
More seriously, can you provide sources for your interpretation of Land's thesis as 'capitalism is intelligence'? Asking because I've always interpreted it more as 'capitalism is sentient' (which I have to admit is a pure, unadulterated cosmic horror moment right there) but I'm not a Land scholar, just an appreciator of weirdnesses.
> Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades
Not correct - in Ancient Egypt, all the land belonged to the people through the Pharaoh (great house), and they both had the independent agency to do voluntary trade with they wanted with part of the produce and lacked that agency as they had to pay some share from the land assigned to them as taxes.
> I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Except the modern cultural paradigms originate from that very Ancient Egypt. From the monogamic marriage paradigm to higher education. And those Set, Horus etc have been meshed into the 'one god' concept as its aspects, and then that one god and practically every major thing in the Ancient Egyptian religion were used to create the modern religions. From 'weighing of the heart against a feather' for judging the goodness of the recently deceased in the afterlife to the very concept of after-life judgment, most religious belief traits come from Ancient Egyptian religion.
Do supporters of this philosophy still self-identify as conservatives? Such radical futurist visions seem directly opposite to core conservative values.
The never really did. If you saw them referred to that you were getting flimsy analysis. These people have a much more purposeful, active, and visionary approach to politics and society than any conservative ever has. Conservatism, since 2018, can be pithily summed up by this quote:
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Thiel et al's machinations are much more sophisticated than this quote (not an endorsement), but it basically does encapsulate the irritable gestures of your sundowning uncle and the cold selfishness of the old money class.
They do not, conservatism is seen as serving as a governor for liberalism and without conservatism liberalism would fail faster. Neo-reactionary is anti-enlightenment where some are accelerationists and others are not. The accelerationist support liberalism (to speed up the self-immolation) and the non-accelerationists support conservatism.
One way to look at it is how far back do you want to unwind the clock, if to the 90s then they consider that a 'this far and no further conservative' which they consider to be a liberal. You'd have to unwind the clock all the way to pre-enlightenment to get to the neo-reactionary position.
Most of the people in this story - most of the people in the current administrations - aren't originally conservative. Trump, Musk, Gabbard...
In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions where only two strongly held positions are becoming turbo capitalism or state communism. Trump et. al. call themselves progressive only in so forth as their voters dream of the return of the good old days.
He is so well read that what he is saying doesn't work in a blog summary like this.
I think he also says things exactly so people write blogs like this to make him sound extra controversial for marketing purposes.
If he just said what he really believes, that the US needs a president like FDR, it would get no traction.
Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him.
I get the feeling he is doing a type of "dangerous idea" performance art because it is really hard to be a professional blogger.
Almost the way the Ice-T band Body Count went from obviously stirring up controversy for the song Cop Killer for marketing purposes to Ice-T playing a cop on Law and Order.
Conservative at this point has as much to do with conservation as Liberal has to do with laissez-faire economics.
> since we develop Artificial Intelligence simply because we can, without any plan, without knowing where we’re going, and therefore without giving it any purpose, it means Artificial Intelligence is its own cause!
What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic.
The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
> The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it.
This doesn't completely add up though. The current flavor of AI took 10-15 years of massive research and capital investment to be developed: Think of the effort of scraping most of the web for training data, then running hundreds of the most powerful GPUs available for a year for the pretraining, then paying thousands of workers to label the data for RLHF. There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies. ChatGPT was presented as a sort of open-ended tech demo with not even any specific purpose. Right now, tech companies are almost desperately shoving AI into about any existing product they can think of, usually for free and often even against the preferences of their users.
This doesn't look like a successful monetization strategy for me - if anything, AI looks like the world's most elaborate case of investor storytelling.
I don't want to rule out that they'll eventually find a business model for AI, but it seems weird to commit to a technology which requires this kind of extreme resource investment to be useful without having any idea what you actually want to do with it, once you have it.
> What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
I think "Artificial Intelligence", as used by the author, has to be understood more broadly here. Artificial Intelligence isn't meant to be a placeholder for a tool like ChatGPT (a hammer), or for a plan like self-driving cars (a renovated home). I think it should be understood more like the faith in Artificial General Intelligence itself.
So the authors logic might be better understood in analogy to religious faith and its ritual of praying: A religious faith isn't the cause for a person to be praying - its the ritual of praying that "causes" (or "convinces") a person to be faithul to their religion.
EDIT:
Or, to paraphrase: The usefulness of Artificial Intelligence (AGI) isn't the cause to work on it - it's the work on it that convinces us of its usefulness.
I don't think this is that complicated: the explanation of histrionic billionaires like sam altman for why AI is worth developing begs the question. The fact there are researchers not trying to justify AI development doesn't nullify this observation.
>hey chatGPT let's make an AI headline to grab attention and then spend 4000 words talking about US politics and tangential offshoots. Mention the philosophy of some niched internet celebrities for flavor.
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
It's not an excellent critique. I got a third of the way through and he's done nothing but reference The Office, posted gifs that are supposed to make the reader think he is smart and Balajii is dumb, and insisted that Balajii isn't smart enough to see the problems with his own theory.
> Peter Thiel stated this as early as 2009, in a lecture for a libertarian-oriented think tank:
> “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…)
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s?
I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
I think what Thiel was getting at is the libertarian idea of being able to get a bit of land, farm for food etc. without the government getting in your face doesn't work in democracies because people will vote in laws taking your stuff to give to some causes elsewhere. Which is sort of true.
I don't really agree with the “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron bit though as capitalism is still capitalism even if you have to pay taxes and follow some regulations.
Anti-Ichthys? I can't ignore the feeling of really dark vibes coming from all this turbo-capitalism or AI cyberland, whatever you call it. If this batch of turbo-capitalists get hands on real AI, we'll end in a high-tech concentration camp in a matter of decades. We'll have blockchain and inalienable rights to custom emoticons (from a pre-approved collection), but also metrics that guide our daily lives, performance reviews and corporate offsites in reeducation camps where we'll have to repeat that machines are also humans.
It’s crazy how aligned history is right now to support the rise of an AI Monarch in the United States. We have a president with a cultish base, but he’s old and there is no real heir to his following. AI tech has been advancing rapidly and some people practically worship AI like if it’s some all knowing god. The President has also surrounded himself with tech leaders like Elon Musk who have some very radical ideas.
You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
Nick's entire shtick is based on the world having been under AI leadership for a good long while before the marketing term "AI" was introduced in the 1950s. In this model, the current crop of LLMs are more of a performance breakthrough made possible by the accumulation of political-technological power; but qualitatively, we haven't progressed that far past what McLuhan described. Another more credible author who I recently discovered subscribes to a similar model is Stross.
Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.
trump was the last in the primaries, until the algorithms selecting content to display for maximum engagement (keeping you glued to facebook so see ads) noticed that videos of trump result in massively increased viewer engagement
billions of dollars in AI supplied and free publicity later, he's running the US
Fortunately, it's only been a month and his approval rating is already plummeting. I doubt him proclaiming himself "Eternal Sovereign of America" would bode well with Americans, but who knows. His true fans seem completely oblivious to the insanity of what he does.
> “I believe that voting is providing a sort of pornographic stimulus; it becomes more like supporting your football team.
Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above.
The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level.
> Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion.
He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress.
I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort.
> “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
> Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.”
People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite.
Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas.
Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
Meanwhile, the open question is whether or how much AI will kill humanity. No one questions how AI will compete against and govern itself; they just assume it'll be more capitalism!
CEOs are monarch-like. Businesses are not democratic. Is it surprising that modern atheist, possibly sociopathic, business CEOs would consider this a path to follow?
It's a good overview of the ideological movements that have been happening in these spaces for some time. He makes some confused attempt to reconcile it with religious extremism at the end that doesn't work. There are already cleavages between Trump's evangelical base and the crowd surrounding Thiel.
In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term.
When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism.
The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank).
Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
tl;dr: AI and capitalism are both cancers, existing for no reason other than to further propagate themselves; hegemonistic. And Thiel is a cancer-causing agent.
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
They’re really doing a great job at reducing the influence of unelected bureaucrats and nakedly corrupt industry insiders and CEOs benefitting their companies.
If there was AI made for public benefit, maybe yeah. But for now AIs are made by companies and governments and they're trying their best to encode their interests into them.
The last paragraph of Animal Farm by George Orwell reads:
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
My take:
Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin!
The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice.
Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt.
But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance.
Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.
I feel like political discourse would not be in the state it currently is if it wasn’t boiled down to a facile comparison between good (the party you support) and evil (the party you don’t support) and that, ultimately, neither of them succeed without being in collusion.
It’s very much a false dichotomy based on Hollywood superhero slop.
Communitivity|1 year ago
aranelsurion|1 year ago
None of that has been tested yet in the real world of course. Perhaps we'll manage to build a world that makes Cyberpunk look better. :)
belter|1 year ago
wwweston|1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGhsEADnbOU
jonstewart|1 year ago
drhaGfayC|1 year ago
But it has to be really gentle and honest. Many people on YouTube already have gotten the message.
If on the other hand there is a true uniparty, then we are doomed. People have to select more honest candidates in the primaries on both sides to have any chance.
parineum|1 year ago
Dystopian fiction doesn't have a great track record for prediction.
einrealist|1 year ago
It was a time of wars and economic turmoil.
52-6F-62|1 year ago
The small patchwork of kingdoms were always redrawing their borders and sending people to fight over it.
But back then the nobles and kings were expected to at least be present for the fight.
It will not be peace. They will forever try to eat eachother and feed paupers to the war gods while these cowards hide in their luxury bunkers.
JohnCClarke|1 year ago
api|1 year ago
For most authors from Ayn Rand to Karl Marx I get the idea that they genuinely believe their ideas would make life better for the majority of the human race. I don’t think the problem with their ideas was obvious to them when they wrote them.
In this case I’m not so sure. A lot of the NRx writings drip with contempt for most people, which usually comes from externalized self hate. This stuff has a real misanthropic quality veiled behind a lot of tedious overwrought sophistry.
Also: reading the futurists, I would be shocked if they were not on speed. Didn’t meth hit around this time? Amphetamine abuse produces a specific sort of cognitive artifact.
Silicon Valley’s turn toward nihilistic accelerationism is probably chemically induced to some extent too.
The Russian Cosmists and the American futurist writers from the early days of the 60s counterculture (Leary, Wilson) are all way more interesting.
jgalt212|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
johntitorjr|1 year ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary
j_timberlake|1 year ago
The chance of AI becoming exactly powerful enough for this plan is like the odds of a flipped coin landing on its edge.
random3|1 year ago
dev_throwaway|1 year ago
The theory was that their imagined sense of being above others would make them easy marks.
Apparently he was correct. What a wild timeline we are living in.
almostdeadguy|1 year ago
throwmeme888|1 year ago
nadir_ishiguro|1 year ago
You really have to be blessed with the right kind of mix between psychopathy and idiocy to think that he's somebody to listen to.
jordanb|1 year ago
Many such cases: Ray Kurzweil, Eliezer Yudkowsky, etc.
It's really bizarre that these bozos seem to be in control now. Don't see how it ends well.
monideas|1 year ago
DiscourseFan|1 year ago
I don't think Curtis Yarvin is as complex or interesting as Land anyway. Unless someone can share an article of his that comes remotely close to the brilliance of Land's work.
lurk2|1 year ago
I also got filtered by Land, though, so take that for what it's worth.
AstralStorm|1 year ago
Even the magnates should figure out it is not going to help them. Which is why they actually move slow.
almostdeadguy|1 year ago
notahacker|1 year ago
gom_jabbar|1 year ago
balamatom|1 year ago
"Just saying no" to drugs in 2025 is like refusing to use computers and the Internet. Sure, you can do just fine without them, but you're locking yourself out of a whole realm of the world, since an illicit psychoactive drug is not just a substance - it's a well-established global network of independent human-scale (but not always human-shaped) agents that does not cease to exist when you successfully ignore it. It's no coincidence that chemical neuroaugmentation has developed hand in hand with the silicon pseudocognition that lets us write to each other over a wire :)
And that's exactly why the goody-two-shoes humanist-by-default muh work-and-family type economic agents never know what hit 'em when weird shit inevitably hits the global fan. Though personally, I would prefer a world designed by acidheads, or even opiate addicts, rather than the present inane timeline, which is largely the work of coke fiends (and their industrious flunkies the speediots) over the course of the last half century or so.
Spoiler, kids: contrary to naming convention, amphetamine and its derivatives do not "speed" you up in any meaningful way.
(EDIT: for the sake of it)
soulofmischief|1 year ago
throwmeme888|1 year ago
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26535290-100-how-futu...
in short, this substack article share by op is probably just ai generated slop
soulofmischief|1 year ago
turnsout|1 year ago
wiltonn|1 year ago
jonstewart|1 year ago
TrackerFF|1 year ago
If history has shown one thing, it is that it is much easier for the working/lower class to overthrow the upper class, than the opposite.
npodbielski|1 year ago
Philpax|1 year ago
kjkjadksj|1 year ago
Today, the equation is flipped. Rather than ignoring the masses, the rich have been indoctrinating them for 3-4 generations now. Pacifying them. Removing their own ability to generate their own thoughts and replacing them with thoughts purchased and dispersed through advertising channels.
On top of that westerners haven’t been truly poor in about a hundred years. We allege that we can just go back to french revolution sentiments where we are all poor and stealing, well that is a lot harder if you have never had to steal or be good with a knife in your life thus far. The western mind and body have both been coddled. They are not the grizzly parisian of 1789 in a Phrygian cap. They might have never even thrown a punch before.
Given this, why should the rich be worried? We are cattle in this generation, not wild bulls.
WinstonSmith84|1 year ago
History never had such powerful tech as we have now (or soon). Look at how it works in China, now add on top of this some AI which can better monitor your thoughts / education / etc. Future generations will be better "formatted" than we are
scarmig|1 year ago
The more insightful ones see the end goal as one where humanity has been obliterated, with the successor expanding through the light cone, devouring all in its path. The (unspoken) rallying cry: "They will replace us." Naturally, this isn't a good popular slogan, so they ride along and let useful idiots do their thing.
lionkor|1 year ago
gmerc|1 year ago
Epa095|1 year ago
Oligarchy, feudslism, dictatorships and other non-free forms of government is definitely not necessarily doomed to fail. Unfortunately.
I fear that with modern technology, controlling the masses is even easier, and we loose democracy. If not forever, at least for a long time.
d0gsg0w00f|1 year ago
hnthrow90348765|1 year ago
There's a lot more logistical options for them these days. You'd only catch them if they made a serious blunder.
hiAndrewQuinn|1 year ago
I've tried untangling this knot and ultimately had to accept I have better things to do with my time. But it's an interesting parallel. Capitalism appears to be the emergent system of many independent agents engaging in voluntary trades; maybe intelligence is the emergent system of many independent ideas trying to interact in the same way. "Fire together, wire together" and all that.
And, perhaps much like capitalism as it actually exists today, if ideas can't interact productively enough to pay their keep, perhaps they just eventually die out. I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
scarmig|1 year ago
It's about how a system can observe changes, react to them, make decisions to further itself (not any particular values), and act on those decisions. Think about a cybernetic OODA loop. Systems that do so will outcompete and replace those that don't.
Capitalism is all about that. If there's a dollar on the ground, someone will pick it up quicker than someone who has to petition some other agent to acquire a lock. And if two agents can engage in a mutually productive trade, they will not only fire together but also modify the system such that they will wire together in the future to more efficiently acquire limited resources.
All that is solid melts into distributed representations. In a way, he takes all the smartest critiques of capitalism and decides, well, capitalism is going to win, so we might as well embrace the state it converges to. Or not, but it doesn't really matter.
balamatom|1 year ago
dumbledoren|1 year ago
Not correct - in Ancient Egypt, all the land belonged to the people through the Pharaoh (great house), and they both had the independent agency to do voluntary trade with they wanted with part of the produce and lacked that agency as they had to pay some share from the land assigned to them as taxes.
> I don't see a whole lot of e.g. Set or Horus worshippers these days, for example.
Except the modern cultural paradigms originate from that very Ancient Egypt. From the monogamic marriage paradigm to higher education. And those Set, Horus etc have been meshed into the 'one god' concept as its aspects, and then that one god and practically every major thing in the Ancient Egyptian religion were used to create the modern religions. From 'weighing of the heart against a feather' for judging the goodness of the recently deceased in the afterlife to the very concept of after-life judgment, most religious belief traits come from Ancient Egyptian religion.
balamatom|1 year ago
Scea91|1 year ago
thundergolfer|1 year ago
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
Thiel et al's machinations are much more sophisticated than this quote (not an endorsement), but it basically does encapsulate the irritable gestures of your sundowning uncle and the cold selfishness of the old money class.
monideas|1 year ago
cjbgkagh|1 year ago
One way to look at it is how far back do you want to unwind the clock, if to the 90s then they consider that a 'this far and no further conservative' which they consider to be a liberal. You'd have to unwind the clock all the way to pre-enlightenment to get to the neo-reactionary position.
t43562|1 year ago
PKop|1 year ago
SirHumphrey|1 year ago
In a sense (American) politics is experiencing a vanishing middle of epic proportions where only two strongly held positions are becoming turbo capitalism or state communism. Trump et. al. call themselves progressive only in so forth as their voters dream of the return of the good old days.
Nullabillity|1 year ago
borgdefenser|1 year ago
He is so well read that what he is saying doesn't work in a blog summary like this.
I think he also says things exactly so people write blogs like this to make him sound extra controversial for marketing purposes.
If he just said what he really believes, that the US needs a president like FDR, it would get no traction.
Implying democracy is dead while really meaning Athenian democracy that we don't have and that the US needs a monarch when really talking about FDR/Hoover/Coolidge is a professional writer basically marketing themselves so other writers like this run with it and do marketing for him.
I get the feeling he is doing a type of "dangerous idea" performance art because it is really hard to be a professional blogger.
Almost the way the Ice-T band Body Count went from obviously stirring up controversy for the song Cop Killer for marketing purposes to Ice-T playing a cop on Law and Order.
Conservative at this point has as much to do with conservation as Liberal has to do with laissez-faire economics.
lucianbr|1 year ago
What nonsense is this? The plan for a thing and the cause of a thing are completely different. The assertion "since there is no plan it means the thing is its own cause" is non-sequitur, a claim that is not true and there does not seem to be even a hint of why it might even be considered true.
If I hit my finger with a hammer, I yell without any plan, so... the yell is its own cause? Who believes this nonsense? It fails the most elementary logic.
The causes of AI are plainly the curiosity of researchers and the greed of corporations who hope to make money with it. This is exceedingly evident. They shout if from the rooftops.
xg15|1 year ago
This doesn't completely add up though. The current flavor of AI took 10-15 years of massive research and capital investment to be developed: Think of the effort of scraping most of the web for training data, then running hundreds of the most powerful GPUs available for a year for the pretraining, then paying thousands of workers to label the data for RLHF. There has to have been a conscious management decision to pursue that specific direction of research, no matter how many resources it would require - and mere scientific curiosity doesn't strike me as sufficient of a reason to explain the expenses.
Expectations of profit would, but if that was the driving factor, then it's weird how haphazardly the whole sector goes about monetization strategies. ChatGPT was presented as a sort of open-ended tech demo with not even any specific purpose. Right now, tech companies are almost desperately shoving AI into about any existing product they can think of, usually for free and often even against the preferences of their users.
This doesn't look like a successful monetization strategy for me - if anything, AI looks like the world's most elaborate case of investor storytelling.
I don't want to rule out that they'll eventually find a business model for AI, but it seems weird to commit to a technology which requires this kind of extreme resource investment to be useful without having any idea what you actually want to do with it, once you have it.
whilenot-dev|1 year ago
I think "Artificial Intelligence", as used by the author, has to be understood more broadly here. Artificial Intelligence isn't meant to be a placeholder for a tool like ChatGPT (a hammer), or for a plan like self-driving cars (a renovated home). I think it should be understood more like the faith in Artificial General Intelligence itself.
So the authors logic might be better understood in analogy to religious faith and its ritual of praying: A religious faith isn't the cause for a person to be praying - its the ritual of praying that "causes" (or "convinces") a person to be faithul to their religion.
EDIT:
Or, to paraphrase: The usefulness of Artificial Intelligence (AGI) isn't the cause to work on it - it's the work on it that convinces us of its usefulness.
ForTheKidz|1 year ago
justlikereddit|1 year ago
This is the ideal AI application, generate thematically flavored text that feels contemporary and opinionated yet doesn't lead or conclude with anything.
delijati|1 year ago
https://x.com/saylor/status/1896239478710390941?t=kbVp-WdWBj...
extrememacaroni|1 year ago
te_chris|1 year ago
lurk2|1 year ago
deepsquirrelnet|1 year ago
> “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. (…)
> The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics.
> Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.”
Is this a common stance so called libertarians take now? That personal freedom eventually entails eating everyone else’s?
I guess I get why it’s popular for wanna be oligarchs. But I don’t see why anyone else would be in favor of it. Designing political systems to benefit yourself almost exclusively is pretty shallow on the intellectual scale.
tim333|1 year ago
I don't really agree with the “capitalist democracy” is an oxymoron bit though as capitalism is still capitalism even if you have to pay taxes and follow some regulations.
workfromspace|1 year ago
outside2344|1 year ago
akomtu|1 year ago
dudinax|1 year ago
deadbabe|1 year ago
You don’t have to suspend much disbelief then to imagine a project that perfectly replicates Trump as an AI to replace him after his death. How this AI is actually used is unknown, probably future republican presidents use it in campaigns, interviews and even some advisory role, effectively making the AI Trump a president in perpetuity. And as future generations grow used to this idea and the AI evolves, there is a path to maybe having direct AI leadership.
balamatom|1 year ago
Of course, Land presents it in an edgy 'satanist kid' way that has perennial appeal to the sort of big wigs who feel like they're not evil enough for their level of personal wealth. His text, Meltdown (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm), from before he achieved product-market fit, is worth a glance.
(EDIT: tenses make me tense)
blibble|1 year ago
trump was the last in the primaries, until the algorithms selecting content to display for maximum engagement (keeping you glued to facebook so see ads) noticed that videos of trump result in massively increased viewer engagement
billions of dollars in AI supplied and free publicity later, he's running the US
we're already there
actionfromafar|1 year ago
thrance|1 year ago
nis0s|1 year ago
Could someone explain how purple states, or purple voters, exist if that’s truly how people think? I worry that the kind of pessimism displayed in the quote above ignores the truth, which is that people in democracies care about the topics, do their research, and vote accordingly. I agree, however, that those on political extremes exhibit the kind of behavior described in the quote above.
The act of voting has always been about ensuring that the power structures favor one’s ability to live and thrive, whatever that means. It’s often just efficient for individuals to choose a party to support because there are too many demands on their attention. So, while some voting behavior may appear to be “supporting a football team”, it’s merely a rational act at an individual level.
> Nick Land believes that the Western ideological system, called “the Cathedral,” which includes state administration, universities, the press, and NGOs, functions as an immanent religion—a progressive religion that subdues and punishes any contrary opinion.
He’s not wrong, but the above is just an extension of the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which is self-evident from any serious observation of group behaviors. Land was just unfortunate enough to be born at the wrong time and place, which is why his ideas were “nonconformist”. But is progressivism a unique property of Western thought? I think some pre-colonial societies could be described as more progressive than Athens. From what I can tell, the Cathedral is useful for organizing socioeconomic activity for the benefit of the elites, which sometimes includes a guise of multiculturalism to downplay harmful competitive behaviors which arise due to inter-group differences. I guess it’s true that if the elites don’t need cohesive social fabrics to maintain economic activities, then there’s no inherent need for managing primal impulses through higher ideals. But I think the folly here is forgetting that this relative social cohesiveness lets the elites exist without being molested or bothered, including by elites in non-Western societies, but I digress.
I don’t think Land’s problem is the Cathedral per se, instead Land’s problem is what he believes is ignorance, obfuscation, or outright subversion of the truth, or what he believes to be “the truth”. The core problem is the belief that some truth is being distorted or disregarded for any reason, whether it’s a self-serving or altruistic one. In fact, our biases convince us that what we believe is necessarily the truth. The human mind wants to conduct objective analysis, but it utterly fails at it, which is why truth-seeking is better off as a group effort.
> “My prediction for 2050 is that many nation-states may fail — financially, politically, militarily, intellectually, morally, and spiritually.
> Conversely, small communities (often called ‘city states’) will be in control of their own prosperity, with citizenship as ownership. The citizens of these local communities will evenly share responsibility for the GDP that will drive the city states’ market capitalization.”
People didn’t have blockchain then, but the small-scale economies used to exist before cities and states emerged. My guess is that the Accelerationists will relearn the lessons of the ancients, and the city states will coalesce into nation states once more for the sake of productivity, efficiency, and security. The problem, then, is this—how is this Futurism? Maybe I am biased to think of “future” and “progress” as something which learns from the lessons of the past to improve an existing current state (so that it’s prepared for prolonged stability). The city state model is intriguing, I am not sure what to make of it without seeing it in action. But I think the only law in city states will be the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the entrenched elite are fooling themselves if they think no one else will play the game better than them. The inconvenient truth is that the niceties of the Cathedral protect everyone, including the elite.
Regarding the religious—I feel bad for them. Some people are born without the ability to question the ideas their parents imprint into them. It must really suck to have to belong to a group (the religious) that doesn’t have any objective way to justify its beliefs, so I understand why they think that “the world must be destroyed” to justify their sunk costs. My only gripe is that AI is being tarnished in all of this. I also dislike this false narrative that there is indeed some kind of Judeo-Christian fraternity. Sadly, I’ve seen enough of the world fucked by realpolitiks to say that there is no such thing, and it’s inherently dangerous to believe in such ideas.
Here’s what I believe—There’s no God, but God is not dead as long as his people exist. God is best thought of as a philosophical framework because ultimately man created God, an ideal to which he wants to aspire. Man created the idea of an objectively moral and ethical superior being, and gave himself the property of being created in the image of that being. So, now the burden is this: God (via man) created man in his image, and man must now create the world in God’s image, and the world should be beautiful—that is its birthright. There’s a lot there to unpack, but I think I’ll leave it up to the readers to take what they want from it because I favor free will. As far as I can tell, and maybe I am just foolish, but free will is God’s will.
quadhome|1 year ago
Meanwhile, the open question is whether or how much AI will kill humanity. No one questions how AI will compete against and govern itself; they just assume it'll be more capitalism!
djmips|1 year ago
delijati|1 year ago
lurk2|1 year ago
In 2015, right wing politics was being discussed among three chief groups: the techno-commercialists, the ethno-nationalists, and theonomists. You may still be able to find a Venn diagram describing these groups if you look for it, but to make a long story short, Trump was seen by many (though not all) popular figures in these groups as a unifying figure who could deliver on what everyone wanted. These groups were never wholly unified in what they wanted: Techno-commercialists were mostly anarcho-capitalists during this period and tended to not want the sorts of restrictions on immigration that the nationalists wanted. Theonomists tended to be interested in the salvation of everyone and thus couldn't limit themselves to capitalism or nationalism if these ideologies were found to conflict with their religion. These differences were set aside because there was a feeling that anything had to be better than the culture war issues that were going on at the end of Obama's second term.
When Trump began campaigning for the 2024 election, the cleavages became far more pronounced as groups became concerned with what messaging would be most effective. Theonomists were pushed out (largely by techno-commercialists) due to the feeling that religious overtones would be unpalatable to the average voter. Theonomists largely seem to have exited the stage in terms of their influence. I am aware of one that is building a town, but his interests seem to have shifted towards ethno-nationalism.
The techno-commercialists are everywhere now and largely seem to have won out over the nationalists and the theonomists. Blake Masters is another prominent one from Thiel's network. If you follow these circles at all, it also seems like Thiel has probably also been paying stipends to influencers in the space. It would have been unimaginable in dissident spheres to run cover for Thiel 10 years ago because he is 1) a billionaire with ties to the military-industrial complex, 2) an immigrant, and 3) gay, but there is now quite an extensive network of users on Twitter who promote him. Most of these guys were Trump absolutists; they believed anyone who crossed Trump was assumed to be in the wrong, because Trump was seen as the only viable way forward. It seems like they were in the loop with regards to JD Vance and Elon Musk being brought into Trump's inner circle, because they rapidly became emphatic about both figures despite neither being particularly palatable to their audience (Musk wants to bring in more immigrants, Vance is married to an Indian woman and worked at at investment bank).
Great overview, though. I had the draft for an article like this kicking around but I guess there's no need to finish it now.
fake-name|1 year ago
[deleted]
varelse|1 year ago
[deleted]
billev2k|1 year ago
I agree re capitalism. And Thiel. AI is TBD, but not looking so great.
gradus_ad|1 year ago
[deleted]
almostdeadguy|1 year ago
te_chris|1 year ago
“Unelected deep state blobs”. Whom, perchance, do you think should do the work of actually implementing policy?
Pray tell me more about this “shoring up” by presidential edict, without the legislature and in contravention of the said body.
n1b0m|1 year ago
tonyhart7|1 year ago
nadir_ishiguro|1 year ago
bee_rider|1 year ago
Other than that AI doesn’t die. The best thing a king can do is die, because monarchy is terrible.
cousin_it|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
vezycash|1 year ago
"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
My take:
Democrat and republican party are two sides of the same coin!
The parties shift, the faces change, but the game remains the same. Battles are waged in public, deals are made in private. Power is the prize, and blind loyalty is the sacrifice.
Allegiance is demanded, division is fueled. One side painted as righteous, the other as corrupt.
But no more! No more blind devotion. No more politics as theater while lives hang in the balance.
Judge not by party, nor by word but by action and how it affects you.
getlawgdon|1 year ago
ljm|1 year ago
It’s very much a false dichotomy based on Hollywood superhero slop.
watwut|1 year ago
Systematically. There is no symmetry here.