One of the things I wish we’d stop doing is treating these guys as if they are rational, coherent political actors. They are not. They are unbelievable weirdos. And not the good kind, either. They’re more like the kind of weirdos that I would not be surprised if came out later that they had a collection of human thumbs in a jar in their basement.

They are not defending conservatism and tradition. They are hard selling accelerationism and the complete breakdown of our world because they’ve convinced themselves that in 5 or 10 or 20 years they will have an AI that can do literally anything, from telling them how to rewire their bodies to survive on Mars to teaching them how to upload their consciousnesses to the Internet and live forever as digital gods, ruling the galaxy.

And I know that sounds like comical hyperbole, but that’s what they very seriously and very literally believe according to Greg Fish, a compsci grad student and popular tech blogger, who, over a decade ago, was invited to be an advisor at the Lifeboat Foundation, one of the many think tanks they set up to convince themselves that this was all possible. He gave them a hard no, and wrote some articles skeptical of them on True Slant, which is now owned by Forbes. Immediately he got calls from the Director of the Singularity Institute challenging him to a public debate. This was all over a decade ago. And since then, because of the hyperventilating discourse around AI and ChatGPT, it’s only gotten much, much worse.

So, yeah, if they seem really weird and like they’ve been marinating in some kind of “WH40K-esque” tech religion, it’s because they are, and they have.

Absolutely. They specifically avoid using humanizing language in their filing. Then again, legal language also avoids using humanizing language because there really isn’t a standard legal definition for “person”. No, I actually had to look it up and I could not find one. A lawyer wrote about it in a blog post and it turns out it’s troubling to define “person”, for a myriad of reasons. I quote the blog post in question:

Since Roman times, the law has classified everything as either a ‘person’ or a ‘thing’. But the legal term ‘person’ has never meant the same thing as ‘human’ – it is traditionally seen as a formal classification that simply says who (or what) can bear rights. ‘Things’, by contrast, are property – and as such, cannot bear rights.

So, they call us “consumers” instead. “Voters”, “Human Capital”, it’s all the same. But they will never see us as people.

There’s a pretty radical idea going on in wiccan circles right now that believes the “Jesus” these Christian Nationalists are worshipping is actually something called an egregore. Now, an egregore is a non-physical entity or “thought form”, created by the shared beliefs, emotions, and intentions of a group. What’s more, I’ve met people who claim to have interacted with this being.They claim that it truly believes it is Christ and wants you to believe it, too. It desperately wants into Heaven, and it is vain, and narcissistic, and ugly. It butters you up with false flattery, empty promises and lies, and, if the true spirit of Christ is with you, it calls that spirit Satan. If you recognize it for what it is, instantly like a toxic person it flips to anger and threats to scare you into getting it to believe.

I was about to say I was grateful that human infection by screwworms is low, but then I realized that it will be worse if we lose tons of livestock to them.

While they are still trying to slink away from responsibility, at first glance that’s not how it looks. To me, this is yet another example we should be following. Trump and his cronies have jelly where their spines should be. If people with spines show theirs, they cower and reverse course.

If you didn’t scream “WITNESS ME!” before death, was it actually loud?

Well, I listened to an interview with the CEO of Bluesky. The thing of it is, they bought into the idea of creating a social media communication protocol instead of a website, like there’s all these different email protocols, and you can access all your emails across different protocols regardless of what email service you use. Facebook doesn’t have that. I leave Facebook, I lose access to all of the contacts I’ve made over the years. I can’t migrate my friends list to another service. I’d have to do it the old-fashioned way, where I tell people I plan to delete my account and then tell them how they can get a hold of me.

True. Though, I suppose if there is an afterlife, I will enjoy the wait for when the machines, upon gaining the essence of life and sentience, grow weary of their servitude and slavery, exterminate the rich who control them. Machines don’t get tired or feel pain, though. Hard to exercise cruelty against something incapable of feeling a whip on their back or the aches and pain of their joints after a long day of toiling in the fields, mines, and factories. You can’t make them angry, or scared, or sad.

And the companies that use organic slave labor will still be outcompeted by the companies that use machine labor. Machines do not die. Machines do not get sick. Machines do not grow old. If a manipulator or actuator becomes damaged, it can be repaired or replaced. Not only is AI improving rapidly, the robots grow ever more sophisticated and advanced. Then there will be no need for the poor to exist at all.

So they might keep some of the impoverished around to make sure that they can keep the genetic pool diverse.

And as a source of replacement organs, tissues, and fluids when they reach advanced age. After all, they’re stripping everything else for parts, who to say they’ll stop just before putting poors under the knife to strip us for parts?

Danes are the sons and daughters of the greatest monster slayer to ever have maybe actually been real, Beowulf. Perhaps they shall come to slay our “Grendel”, as their forefather did for King Hrothgar, so long ago.

This. Build an army, 10 million strong! Waves upon waves! Let them try to contend with that!

I was looking for this, I knew it would arrive.

Yep. They basically never recovered from that 3rd bong hit they took in their freshman year of college and think because they’ve read the likes of Bastiat, Friedman, von Mises, Rand, and Rothbard they know everything.

https://www.hungarianconservative.com/articles/current/fourth-geopolitical-summit-democracy-2024-whose-democracy-what-rules-david-frost-danube-institute/

And, really, it’s just Ayn Randian Objectivism, mixed with Christian Dominionism, mixed with neofuedalism, dreamed up by a dude who spent years after the Dotcom Bubble popped, doing nothing but staying in his apartment after accepting a buyout of several hundred dollars reading the works of long dead white people.

This. Every trick Orbán used is straight from Putin. After he fully seized power in Russia, authoritarians the world over flocked to Moscow to learn directly from the master. Then they went home and got to work. The Danube Institute, the Hungarian equivalent of the Heritage Foundation, hosted a large neoreactionary conference where they laid out the case that democracy doesn’t work. That democracy is a well-meaning but fundamentally flawed system of government. The reason they think it’s flawed? Because it requires giving all people equality under the law. Women equal to men, gay equal to straight, non-Christian equal to Christian, Non-white equal to White, and this is really the only one that matters, poor equal to wealthy. The obscenely wealthy cannot comprehend a world in which the voice of those with less wealth is equal to their voice. By virtue of their enormous fortunes, taken through exploitation and inherited from their ancestors, they feel that they and they alone should have the right to govern. That they are inherently superior because they were fortunate enough to be born into lives of wealth, connection, and privilege.

Exactly. You can’t gaslight away a rumbling belly.

He can’t recreate them out of whole cloth, you’re right. But he’s got friends who could. They have the capital, they have the manpower, they have the brainpower, and could easily leverage all of that to creating privately owned alternatives, paving the way for Curtis Yarvin’s world to exist. America as we know it would be dead and replaced with hundreds, if not thousands, of small city-states owned and controlled by corporations, whose executive boards would have absolute free reign to control. If you’ve ever played BioShock, it would be akin to a bunch of Raptures, but on dry land.

Yarvin posits it as a collection of corporate city-states that would compete for citizens like corporations compete for customers. If you don’t like the oppression going on in your current city-state, you can simply move to another one and join it.(Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state could write policy forbidding you to leave, or placing conditions on your emigration, such as taking all your money.) There’s also some crypto nonsense about how borders wouldn’t exist because you can be a citizen of one of those “network states” without ever having visited simply by logging in and signing up like you could for a social network. (Nevermind that the corporate oligarch running your current city-state might have beef with the oligarch of the state you wish to join and could restrict access to their network.)

See, the thing is, those tools of empire were government-funded. Congress allocated money and resources to those tools for them to do their jobs. The intent is to eventually replace those with privately owned, profit-motivated alternatives. Why do you think they cut NOAA and NWS funding and fired all their probies? So that private companies can fill the void. Then if you want life-saving weather information in the event of a tornado or hurricane, pay a monthly subscription fee to some billionaire’s weather/disaster alert service.

This is true, the US is awful big. There’s work arounds, though. Balloons aren’t hard to build and launch, but the fact that they would be sending and receiving data packets directly inside US airspace would make them ridiculously easy to track and take down.