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So so much.

I have been reading Gil's book. It is very good. I highly recommend!

See their interview with Naomi Klein where they can't seem to get past the title of her book so they don't have to deal with the subject matter of her book

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we got here.

🔥

Cal Newport's op-ed on the related topic of the "rationalists" and the craziness of Silicon Valley culture (emphasis on the first syllable) was good, but with the NYT it's always one step forward, nine steps back.

The NYT absolutely buys the Growth vs. Real Human Suffering/Freedom/Dignity calculation. They hold it in their soft hands on the way to work and tuck it into their deluxe little briefcases.

NYT is still waiting for vindication of its MLK bashing, Pinochet snogging and Apartheid apologetics

Put very well.

I don't think it's possible to become a billionaire and no be highly pathological. The solution isn't better billionaires. It's zero billionaires.

Or see themselves as in the class benefiting from the dictator's actions and choices.

That’s the real brilliance of your book. You bring ALL the receipts! It’s all out in the open. They’re telling us what their plans are. They’re shouting it from the rooftops! It’s important to listen to them, not because they’re so smart, but because they’ve got us in their crosshairs

This book gave me a literal nightmare but I would still recommend. I read parts of it out loud to my husband, feeling like a crazy person.

Won't that depend on how many open windows are available?

KIRK: Well, they were hardly supermen. They were aggressive, arrogant. They began to battle among themselves.

It's their evil-dumb (fear) chasing pointless profit on a dying planet. Anxiety isn't about "make more money!" Anxiety is about "grieve your past harms to wake up!" They're resisting taking emotional accountability and it makes them MORE dumb, more panicked, more useless

@nytimes.com needs to be renamed to the New Glazing Times.

love hearing about efficiency from a guy who made his money on crypto, of all fucking things, whose entire premise rests on INefficiency

Where are these benevolent dictators??? What an asshole!

Interesting factoid about the word authoritarianism! I’m gonna read up on that

i'll add that it's a bit on the nose about it being cold war propaganda coming from the authoritarians in our country at a time we were VERY authoritarian, and are so still.. and what the "law and order" morons are all about in actions and words.. there is no law but "because i said so" with them..🤮

there's no such thing as human nature. human nature follows material reality, not the other way around. asserting otherwise is rank idealism.

:) ;)

When paperclips go bad....

It is very billionaire-brain coded to think that efficiency matters more than self-determination and the humanity of our species, as a whole and as individuals. IDGAF about efficiency. I care about anti-corruption, and outright waste, but not "extreme efficiency" at all.

So you can build a nation over centuries and get maybe even several benevolent dictators in a row, leading the nation to success. And then you get one Trump who destroys everything because he's a fucking moron, and you, the poor fucking citizen, have no way to stop it.

@chknutsen.bsky.social @inalkristiansen.bsky.social - another flippant reference to the existence (and greatness) of benevolent dictatorship 🫣

Not efficient tho.

Hitler turned Germany's cities to rubble more efficiently than any democratic regime would have.

If only we could do a major opinion poll of dictators to ask if they considered their motives to be malevolent or benevolent

Sure. Efficiently corrupting. Efficiently one sided. Efficiently restrictive. Pretty sure efficiency was never the selling point of democracy. Democracy was the point of democracy. 🤔

a little too on the nose that CEOs' favorite form of "government is the benevolent dictator

The fetish of efficiency and the ledger-like moralism of ultilitarianism are both products of The Enlightenment. This is what happens when the tools of the Age of Reason become not the means to human flourishing but the ends themselves. Even Voltaire understood where this led absent common sense.

First they came for the billionaires. And I said, "Sure - I'll show you where they're hiding. Give me a sec to fetch my phone, so I can film this. Do you have enough zip ties?" Because they would never speak for me.

Trump is a wannabe dictator and we can see how that works. Incompetent sychophants in charge of everything. None of them can say the Emperor who is all knowing and all seeing and has the biggest brain has no clothes. That's how they all work.

They’re never benevolent, just occasionally useful for the connected few. At least for a little while, til they lose favor or become disloyal. Only a fucking idiot or complete bootlicker would have this kind of world view. Fuck this asshole.

I'm so glad that efficiency isn't the only metric.

Sounds like the kinda shit an evil, scheming vizir would say.

Dictatorships are actually extremely inefficient because the government is run by incompetent loyalists, corruption is rampant, and policies turn on the whims of the dictator. The Nazis did not make the trains run on time, that was just propaganda.

"Hmm, where have I heard this before?" In the @nytimes.com. They promulgate this sort of fascism every day.

Until someone suggested to him that the benevolent dictator is named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez…

The efficiency is entirely deceptive (temporary). The inefficiencies are far greater and manifest themselves in botched transitions.

"benevolent dictator" 😂 Must be comedy hour

Extremely efficient *at crime.

This is sometimes attributed to Voltaire-- "The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination." But I'm not sure he really said it.

youtu.be/rStL7niR7gs?...

There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator... Figured this would be obvious at this point in human history.

What is a benevolent dictator? History has shown us that they are far and few.

And it’s not even accurate. The only thing dictators are efficient at is funneling money to themselves. Because of their corruption and the impossibility of speaking truth to power, it’s much harder to identify and fix problems bsky.app/profile/gild...

German concentration camps and death camps were very efficient.

A truly benevolent dictator would throw this guy back in prison.

If a dictator was truly benevolent, the first thing he/she would do is to take away all the money of the billionaires.

Has there ever been a "benevolent dictator"?

The wealth of the Forbes 400 is 20% of the amount of the national debt. We need a billionaires tax to prevent the wealthy from using their wealth to destroy our democracy, but also to fund programs that they say we can’t afford because of the national debt.

Democracy is not intended to deliver efficiency, it is intended to deliver _accountability_.

praising CCP I see

Things would be perfect if everyone just listened to me is 11 year old thinking

Funny how fascism protects the oligarchs from accountability so efficiently. bsky.app/profile/gild...

“…jailed in the United States and pardoned by President Trump…” I wonder how he arrived at that opinion.

Xi Xinping? He's pretty much said the same thing in his promotion of Xi's authoritarian brand of communism in China.

All well and good, until you get a dictator who isn't benevolent and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Examples abound.

Is the answer Plato? Because unfortunately I think the answer is Plato.

Gil Duran talks about the countries they want to create. Just google "Network States" with his name and he explains it all pretty well about what the techbros want to inflict on humanity politically.

Malevolent dictators are even more "efficient", if you believe that's the measure of a society.

Why not use these technologies to help make democracy more efficient? Given crypto's obsession with treating social problems as technical problems, it's pretty glaring when they take the pass.

And they want to ELIMINATE education, because...

It's efficient for the billionaire. These fucking men: "I made lots of money with software. I should run the world unimpeded."

"If you get a benevolent dictator" That's a big if, and that's the entire problem with the whole thesis.

Man, if there was ever a time for the pitchforks to come out.

These people think this guy was the hero www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqfJ...

Nothing.

The single most important tenet of democracy is respect for the Rule of Law, applied to everyone regardless of their status or wealth. The peaceful transition of power is a ritual of observance of the Rule of Law. This follows even if there are different levels of enfranchisement and voting systems.

No true Aragorn.

Spoiler : they are alive

Was it Alexander or Genghis Khan who, after killing everyone who got in the way, would basically say, "Okay you're on your own again, do whatever, I don't care. See you at tax time."?

The irony is that every filthy rich elite is anti-merited and highly anti-productive

DEPRAVED BILLIONAIRES MUST BE TAXED OUT OF EXISTENCE! Dems win if they run on this. It's more clear than ever that we have a sociopathic billionaire class who have entirely too much power, $$$ and zero respect for human dignity. THE TIME IS NOW! THE PEOPLE ARE FED UP AND READY! RISE UP!

One of the faculty members at the college I work at asked me to buy your new book for the library so he could read it. I did, and he absolutely loved the book and learned a lot from it. So good work!

Good, good. So we've gone from "Why has no one seen Terminator?!" to "Why has no one seen Star Wars!?"

Yep, someone with the authority and will to violate people's rights can accomplish objectives more efficiently. We have known this since before the founding.

“As long as I’m the decider…”

Sorry, I did a quick search and saw he was from China and lives in Canada

UEA ist pretty authorian.

Do I get to decide what makes a billionaire “benevolent “ or do you?

Make me dictator I will be benevolent in so many creative ways cryptofascists never imagine when they lie awake worrying about Bernie Sanders

Philosopher Kings are a novel concept to these people.

Something so right about him making his billions while lying in bed, in debilitating pain.

And what about the vast majority of the time when you get an incompetent or malevolent one?

Benevolent Dictator is an oxymoron.

He is not entirely wrong. Capitalism often prospers under a autocracy. Take China and most of the Asian tigers.

Benevolent dictators are a fantasy. Theres a reason dictatorships are synonymous with oppression, abuse and death of citizens. Democracy has its problems but those inefficiencies actually can protect as much as they can harm

I will accept this burden gracefully and with dignity First official act, execute all crypto bros

Thank you 🙏 for the gift.

Rich Guy Says we need Fascism

Just sayin’

All these billionaires have never truly experienced consequences for their actions and think of themselves as above punishment, excpt in very rare cases where the rule of law has been applied to them, mostly as a fine or a light social rebuke. The downsides of autocracy are invisible to them.

There is no such thing as a benevolent dictator. Every single one will crush or oppress his opponents. And this bastard knows it.

“Let’s believe he’s a good man. But his second-in-command–is he a good man too? You’d better hope so. Because he’s the supreme ruler too, in the name of the king. And the rest of the court…they’ve got to be good men. Because if just one of them’s a bad man the result is bribery and patronage.”

I mean, I have a cutoff on wealth, we don't need Billionaires, 999 million is more than enough monetary compensation for whatever you might have contributed to society. If you "need" more than that I suggest therapy, because you will never be satisfied by more income, you have a deeper need.

"Freedom of Money" - meaning your degree of freedom should be tied to the amount of money you have.

I thought about replying with Otto von Bismarck and a speech bubble, but no one knows what that guy looks like.

And guy which autocracy is the model for them? Rhymes with Who-bye.

Mayhap Mr Zhao goes and fucks off to not America where he can circle jerk with other crypto fuckbois.

Sounds like a child of Yarvin 🙃

"Benevolent" according to whom? Who gets to decide what "benevolent" is? The wealthiest and most powerful