Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
It's the entire attitude of the ultra rich class that they did this all by themselves with so little effort and obviously nobody else is worth a damn and why can't they be smart and rich like us?
They don't even realize they're simply grifting off the rest of us.
@cstross Wow what?! This is the first time I've seen that quote.
I mean the charitable read is "how do we end poverty" but even then that is a HELL of a way to phrase that if so?! And it's hard to give these people the benefit of the doubt rn
@cstross
But.
You cannot give up on self interest without consequences, no matter how much you dislike self interest looking like helping other people...
In fact, I'd argue it's *very quickly* unsustainable if you're left to your own devices.
I just hope it's quick enough.
@cstross Eat the rich before they eat us.
@cstross
IIRC per your journal you've previously come to the conclusion that the planet is about 100% beyond its maximum carrying capacity (given our current tech base).
It appears that they may agree.
@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 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.
@cstross The problem is not the billionaires, in a democracy it's the most numerous who win, not the richest. The reason the left almost always loses is purely self-harm and splittism for instance: https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3mfcdb62pp22r the left has been doing this to itself since the 1917 March revolution. Fix the left instead of going "booho billionaires rule both parties". Hitler himself won in large part because of "nach Hitler kommt wir" ideas of the communists.
@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 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.
@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.
@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.
@cstross
I dream of new Nuremburg style trials and 'detention' for the Super Rich.
Take their stuff, their names and their freedom. Redistribute.
@cstross Glad that more and more people realize that the oligarchy wants to kill us. I thought I was going crazy. But billion of deaths is consistent with their vision of a livable planet destabilized by an out-of-control climate.
@cstross It seems the solution to the question the billionaires ask is to take their ill-gotten gains and redistribute the money so everyone has a decent standard of living.
Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
@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
@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.
@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.
@cstross And the thing to understand about being "poor", is that that includes everything up to the very tippy top of upper middle class!!
@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.
The fact that Gates wanted to give his wife STD medication without her knowledge tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's and the tech industry's approach to consent.
@cstross So, Mitchell & Webb were prescient? https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE
@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
@[email protected] I don't actually know the context of the emails, but from the quote it does seem that the exact wording is both second hand and ambiguous; is it the poorness that is suppose to go away, or the people?
Not that I'm feeling generous enough to the people involved to assume the nicer option, but I'd feel dirty to not at least acknowledge both exist.
