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Cake day: September 18th, 2025

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  • The incentive is that resources are lootable, that doesn’t change by swapping out one ideology for another. We can point to the post-WWII eastern bloc, Cuba, and Afghanistan as examples of USSR installing dictators. Ideologies tend to be too myopic in their understanding of reality, all systems have a tendency to form into dominance hierarchies, that’s the core issue. Fortunately, all systems decay over time and after collapse there is a period of time where a decentralized, democratic system can exist for a period of time.



  • This feels like a post hoc fallacy. Capitalism is not the cause of those things, societies that organize into dominance hierarchies, regardless of economic organization, cause those things. Slavery, wars, dictators, barbarism, deaths, corruption, and hypocritical systems were present before and in absence of capitalism. The Soviet Union formed into a dominance hierarchy (bureaucrat class instead of capitalist class), and inevitably displayed the same attributes.




  • It’s called the Dark Enlightenment, they essentially want to accelerate civilization collapse so their utopian vision is realized. The financial backers behind Trump adopted this philosophy, and have articulated their plan: dismantle democracy, Balkanize America and establish a patchwork of technomonarchy city-states. People really need to be talking with their community about localization of production of basic necessities, otherwise it will be chaos, famine and death when the system fails.







  • Policy has only aligned with the will of the people 55% of the time. That’s not so bad, assuming we just ignore the observed and prevalent phenomenons of elite capture of public opinion and manufacturing of consent.

    Of course, democracy exists when we discard the unsavory bits of reality, anything can be democracy when its meaning is an empty signifier.

    Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

    https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

    I’m not saying democracy can’t exist, it can and it should, but it’s only a fleeting notion in any society based on dominance hierarchy. Democracy does not exist without a well-informed public, a people plagued by ignorance do not have free will, and in consequence do not make their own decisions.

    There is nothing representative or democratic about US democracy, if we are being honest with ourselves.













  • I think what is happening is the reluctance of associating the term influencer with propagandist. The terms themselves are synonymous, influencer a little more specific, and without the added negative connotations propagandist has. If people realized “influencer” is just another term for propagandist, that may harm ad revenue. So we have “distinctions” being made, between influencers who do regular propaganda and influencers who do bad propaganda or “influencer propaganda” instead of just admitting they are all by definition propagandists.

    Propaganda is the expression of opinions or actions carried out deliberately by individuals or groups with a view to influencing the opinions or actions of other individuals or groups for predetermined ends and through psychological manipulations.

    Propaganda, Jacques Ellul


  • Civilization collapse will hit hardest on communities who haven’t localized their production of basic necessities like food. The financial backers behind Trump adhere to the Dark Enlightenment philosophy, with the goals of dismantling democracy, balkanizing America and establishing a patchwork of technomonarchy city-states from the ashes of destruction. The dismantlement phase is complete, now begins another phase of their philosophy, the scapegoating of Trump and replacing him with their Chosen One.

    Here is a quote from the dark enlightenment to get people an idea of what these people have planned:

    Civilization, as a process, is indistinguishable from diminishing time-preference (or declining concern for the present in comparison to the future). Democracy, which both in theory and evident historical fact accentuates time-preference to the point of convulsive feeding-frenzy, is thus as close to a precise negation of civilization as anything could be, short of instantaneous social collapse into murderous barbarism or zombie apocalypse (which it eventually leads to). As the democratic virus burns through society, painstakingly accumulated habits and attitudes of forward-thinking, prudential, human and industrial investment, are replaced by a sterile, orgiastic consumerism, financial incontinence, and a ‘reality television’ political circus. Tomorrow might belong to the other team, so it’s best to eat it all now.

    The Dark Enlightenment, Nick Land