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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@cstross I think there's an unusual degree of cognitive dissonance between the cultural (money = virtue), the propaganda (Gates spends on his image), and the "exceptionally terrible even considering" reality.
It would be nice to be able to believe these people with such vast and august power weren't ethically deficient by the standards of your common-or-garden city-burning slave-taking barbarian.
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@cstross I think there's an unusual degree of cognitive dissonance between the cultural (money = virtue), the propaganda (Gates spends on his image), and the "exceptionally terrible even considering" reality.
It would be nice to be able to believe these people with such vast and august power weren't ethically deficient by the standards of your common-or-garden city-burning slave-taking barbarian.
@graydon @cstross @pzmyers @javierg@mstdn.social @gjm
Turns out you can't make a billion dollars without also being an extremely bad person.
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@cstross I think most everybody thought Gates was terrible by the turn of the century, which is why he's spent 25 years and tens of billions of dollars convincing people he's actually a philanthropist.
And it was working out pretty well for him up until all the sex pest/Epstein buddy stuff caught up with him. @pzmyers @javierg
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@cstross @pzmyers @javierg @gjm I don't know if anyone else saw it, but there was a miniseries on Netflix (I think) a few years back about Bill Gates' various philanthropic efforts, each episode about a different one
It only took until about the second episode for me to realize it was obviously some kind of paid/funded propaganda, it was entirely uncritical. But the funniest part was in the last episode, they must have realised they had to ask at least SOMETHING critical or it would be too obvious it was a puff piece
So the interviewer asks Gates, "what do you say about the fact that none of these projects has actually been successful yet?" and Gates had no good answer to that question at all. I don't even remember what he did say as an answer, possibly because I was laughing too hard
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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 the problem is that those 70% allies stab you in the back sometimes. Happens a lot when anarchists cooperate with MLs
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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 @trademark @jsl they're running the standard control opposition Playbook by getting elected as a nominally left-wing party and then aliening their voter Base by doing a bunch of unpopular right when stuff, resulting in even farther right party winning the next election. Then they reset the goal posts so that the new center is between the two of them after they pushed it right
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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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@cstross @trademark @jsl they're running the standard control opposition Playbook by getting elected as a nominally left-wing party and then aliening their voter Base by doing a bunch of unpopular right when stuff, resulting in even farther right party winning the next election. Then they reset the goal posts so that the new center is between the two of them after they pushed it right
@fluffykittycat @cstross @jsl This supposed "playbook" would not work if leftists would actually cooperate with other leftists. It would also be superfluous since the left always fights with itself, there are too many examples in too many countries for a supposed right-wing conspiracy to be credible. This is entirely left-wing self-harm.
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