@jwildeboer
1/3
I agree with your critique of the tech billionaires’ #adolescent mindset, but I see a contradiction: their so-called #antiState stance coexists with a desire for #domination. It’s not really about rejecting all control—just rejecting collective, democratic control.
Their “anti-state” rhetoric is not about freedom for all, but about removing limits on their own power. They seek domination, not true autonomy.
@mark @ErickaSimone @jonahgibberish
i see #anarchism as "stuck" (and #libertarianism as well, but that's been coopted by #plutocrat agendas now wholesale and is pretty much dead to me)
they are correct to condemn current structures
the idea is to build alternative better structures
but they are still busy tearing down what is wrong with the world in their minds
#anarchism suffers the same fate as #libertarianism:
there are well read true believer #libertarians and #anarchists
then it gets down to the level of the "bros"
they warp the meaning
it can be quite vile
then the true believers get offended after we encounter the bros and make prudent judgments
but here's the key:
the ideal and the real are different things
and the real, is real
so we keep our judgments
the true believers have no power (by design, btw)
#Palantir #Surveillance and #Technofascism
#libertarianism #peterthiel #tech #ai #socialsecurity #health
#Gaza #Palestine #Syria #iran #lebanon #Genocide #geopolitics
@palestine @lebanon @yemen @irannachrichten
#SettlerColonialism
#AntiImperialism #tiktok #cdnpoli
#antiPalestinianracism #canada #usa #yemen
@blackmastodon
#palestina #StopAIPAC #freePalestine #GazaGenocide #IsraelTerroristState #StopGenocide #IDFTerrorists #DismantleZionism
I probably haven't spent as much time as I should have, talking about the Washington Post and billionaire maggot owner Jeff Bezos' low-key capitulation or perhaps more accurately long-await embrace of the fascist American right; at least in part because a lot of the people at WaPo are still doing something resembling journalism and fact-based reporting has a well-known bias against the Emperor of Lies and the larger Trump regime. Bezos himself however, has repeatedly signaled to the Kelpto Kaiser that he, his empire, and his newspaper are open for business with the regime; with the two most prominent examples being Amazon's $1M donation to Trump's inauguration, and Jeff's reorganization of the WaPo editorial department to promote pro-capitalist libertarian propaganda in the service of a billionaire oligarch; namely himself.
So how is this re-imagining of the country's "liberal" paper of record going? Well if this short and to the point post by the fedi's own @davidgerard is any indication, the answer is "not great, Bob!"
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/04/washington-post-goes-ai-to-clean-up-amateur-right-wing-op-eds/
Washington Post goes AI to clean up amateur right-wing op-eds
"The first part of the AI-fueled platform plan is called Ripple. The Post wants to fill out the opinion section with “nonprofessional writers.” How will they quality check these? They’ll run them past an AI!
Why does the Post want to do this? Because they can’t find enough good writers to create the owner’s desired libertarian propaganda.
The Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos. In February this year, Bezos mandated that the Post’s opinion pages would support “personal liberties and free markets” and not print pieces that did not support these. Sounds nice, but those are specific jargon terms that rich libertarians use to mean “liberty for my money” and not any other sort of freedom or liberty for any other person."
Obviously, Dave's focus is the implementation of bunk "AI" programs to filter through trashfire winger substack author submissions, but our interest here is mostly the divide this exposes between the Bezos-loyal editorial board, and the actual news departments at the Washington Post. Please keep in mind that this is the same editorial board that just endorsed RFK Jr's transphobic, pro-conversation therapy "study" of trans care in America; the Post's upper management is desperate to realign the paper much further to the right to align with the billionaire boss's wishes, even if they're still failing in that endeavor for the most part. How desperate? Well I'm pretty sure begging substack libertarians to write editorial pieces in the paper of record for the most politically-connected city in America, under the guise of democratizing the opinions section, is a depth not even Bezos thought he'd ever have to sink to.
In the bigger picture the real lesson we might be learning here is that the pro-fascist, anti-humanist billionaire agenda being forced on Pig Empire society by the amoral oligarch maggots who own everything around us, including our governments, is simply not popular; and even force feeding it to us through every major organ of our discourse, isn't changing that reality anytime soon.
"There’s no denying the threat posed by the tech industry’s embrace of far-right politics. After decades of being praised as genius future-makers, they didn’t like when it was time to answer for the harms caused by their “move fast and break things” approach. But by the time the delayed accountability came, they’d accumulated enough power and wealth to make a serious effort to evade it. They propeled Trump back to the White House hoping he would save them — a bet that isn’t working out exactly as they planned.
Yet that doesn’t mean these politics aren’t still dangerous, whichever one ultimately comes out on top. Lonsdale and Srinivasan each imagine a more authoritarian world in their own way, where the powerful can do as they wish and everyone else has to suffer the consequences. One tries to realize a tech-infused version of an Ayn Randian fever dream, while the other intends to accelerate an escalating arms race to serve his sector’s bottom line — while cloaking it in the language of geopolitical rivalry and American superiority.
Drawing a distinction between the new military industry complex and the Network State movement isn’t to root for one over the other. They’re both efforts to try to push as far as possible toward a political reorientation that serves their interests. We could even see one as a hedge against the failure of the other: if the effort to capture the US government fails, then tech plutocrats could still decamp to their semi-autonomous zones where they rule with an iron fist and can do as they please. They must both be stopped, as they have horrible implications for our collective future."
https://www.disconnect.blog/p/the-ideological-rift-on-the-tech
How would you like to do a #buynothing day every week?
#resourcebasedeconomy #rbe #gifteconomy #freeworld #eattherich #tradelesssociety #moneylesssociety #selfsufficientcommunities #selfsufficiency #diylife #selfreliance #offgrid #ecovillages #ecovillage #anarchism #anarchocommunism #communism #socialism #libertarianism #leftism #intentionalcommunity
#climatechange #antiwork #volunteering #simpleliving #sustainableliving
#solarpunk #anticonsumerism
"With old J.R.R. in his grave since 1973, there’s no way to be certain, but it seems likely he would have been deeply disturbed to see the words “Anduril” or “Palantir” inscribed on a cruise missile or an AI targeting system.
In other letters, Tolkien wrote that “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning the abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to ‘unconstitutional’ Monarchy.” This is obviously contradictory and eccentric, and literature scholars have spent decades debating exactly what he meant by it. But we get a clue a few sentences later, when Tolkien writes that “The most improper job of any man, even saints (who at any rate were at least unwilling to take it on), is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity.” I take that to mean that Tolkien liked the idea of “unconstitutional monarchy” in theory, if a purely benevolent king like his fictional Aragorn could be found, but he didn’t trust any actually existing leader to fill the role, and so opted for anarchy and the “abolition of control” as a lesser evil. (Other readers will, doubtless, disagree.) At any rate, the bit about “those who seek the opportunity” to wield power being the least fit of all is another clear rebuke to people like Thiel, Vance, and Yarvin, whose entire lives seem devoted to becoming more wealthy and powerful. In fact, we could call that the moral core of Tolkien’s entire mythos.
It’s especially ironic, when you know the ins and outs of Middle-Earth, that Peter Thiel chose to name his surveillance company “Palantir.” In The Lord of the Rings, a palantir is not a good thing to have. Actually, almost everyone who lays a hand on one is cursed and driven to their destruction by the experience."
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/how-the-right-abuses-tolkien
there is a movement today amongst the #plutocracy class to make various nouveau company towns/ cities
this is greatly championed by #libertarians:
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/rich-private-city-inquality-public
what you don't seem to understand is that there is no freedom about any of this, in the sense of what you sell #libertarianism to mean. so my link repudiates your bs
of course, this is all very #libertarian, in the sense of what libertarianism really is: enthusiastic bootlicking of the rich
#Libertarianism (the #USA kind not historical varieties) is a "philosophy" that only works if you're a college sophomore blissfully naive about human nature
If you gut regulations the rich takeover
Plutocrats know this and fund various #libertarian causes. Because #libertarians are the perfect fools to play for political gain
"That's not fair!"
Exhibit A:
"#Musk’s #SpaceX town in #Texas warns residents they may lose right to ‘continue using’ their property"
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/29/elon-musk-spacex-starbase-texas.html
“End Times Fascism”: Naomi Klein on How Trump, Musk, Far Right “Don’t Believe in the Future”
https://www.democracynow.org/2025/5/5/naomi_klein_trump_silicon_valley
#Trump #Christofascism #antiLGBTQ #transgenocide
#billionaires #Trump #Musk #Koch #capitalism #libertarianism #fascism
#TransLivesMatter #TransRights
https://mastodon.social/@persagen/114186381298087870
LRT: The thing about political spectrums is that they are, by definition, finite. There is a limit to how right wing one can be (absolute monarchical totalitarianism/autocracy—absolute authority in the hands of a single person), and a limit to how left wing one can possibly be (power equally distributed to all living people, though this is merely theoretical, not actually possible).
The left wing limit is pure #libertarianism. Everyone is equally free.
@burgervege Pour conclure cet "aparté" sémantique, je dirais que Benjamin Constant, en rejoignant la vision spinoziste de la liberté - c'est à dire que la véritable liberté est celle qui passe par la compréhension des causes qui nous déterminent - nous rappelle la nécessité d'une conscience critique.
3/3
"Desperate for a new intellectual underpinning, neoliberals and libertarians sought refuge in the work of economist Friedrich Hayek, who famously argued in his 1944 polemic The Road to Serfdom that government intervention in markets is antithetical to individual freedom. But Murray, Rothbard, Hoppe, and others fatally twisted Hayek’s message, claims Slobodian, and took it so far as to argue that only Western countries are intellectually and culturally primed for capitalism.
The politics of this cohort, which he dubs the “new fusionists,” was rooted in “three hards,” argues Slobodian: “Hardwired human nature, hard borders, and hard money.” They forged sordid alliances with biologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethnonationalists, spouting pseudoscience about the link between race and IQ, a topic famously repopularized in the 1994 best-seller The Bell Curve, coauthored by Murray and psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein. They railed against lax immigration policies on the premise that they led to cultural decay. But perhaps most strangely, they ballyhooed the value of gold as a backstop against a looming economic cataclysm caused by incompetency in Washington. (Talk about apropos.)
In an interview with Vanity Fair, which has been edited for length and clarity, Slobodian analyzes Donald Trump’s radical agenda through this new prism of neoliberalism. He also unpacks the distressing parallels between goldbugs and crypto bros, and details why the tech set has suddenly taken up with the MAGA right. Silicon Valley’s “willingness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Donald Trump,” he says, is indicative “of the embrace of an ideology that pretty frankly ranks human capacity along the spectrum of intelligence and IQ.”"
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/donald-trump-silicon-valley-neoliberal-roots
The Trump Administration: Government by Billionaires, for Billionaires
https://cepr.net/publications/the-trump-administration-government-by-billionaires-for-billionaires/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wikiCenter_for_Economic_and_Policy_Research
#billionaires #capitalism #inequality #plutocracy #meritocracy #oligarchy
#Trump #fascism #authoritarianism #Musk #DOGE #libertarianism #privatization #Christofascism
التحررية و الحركة الرجعية الجديدة في البيت الأبيض
يقف #بيتر_ثيل صاحب الشخصية الغامضة، عند مفترق طرق التكنولوجيا والسياسة والفلسفة. وله تأثير كبير على عالم السياسة والتكنولوجيا اليوم. يُعرف بيتر ثيل بأيديولوجيته المعقدة والمتناقضة في بعض الأحيان والتي تمزج بين الليبرالية والمحافظة المتأثرة بحركة الرجعية الجديدة ورؤية مستقبلية للمجتمع.
#peter_thiel
#elonmusk
#libertarianism
https://newsfrontpage.wordpress.com/2025/03/27/%d9%85%d9%86-%d9%87%d9%88-%d8%a8%d9%8a%d8%aa%d8%b1-%d8%ab%d9%8a%d9%84-%d8%a7%d9%84%d9%85%d9%87%d9%86%d8%af%d8%b3-%d8%a7%d9%84%d8%ba%d8%a7%d9%85%d8%b6-%d9%84%d8%a3%d9%88%d9%84%d9%8a%d8%ba%d8%a7%d8%b1/
[#TwoWords : Elon Musk] Palantir suggests 'common operating system' for UK govt data
https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/25/palantir_covid_inquiry_comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43470010
#billionaires #oligarchy #libertarianism #meritocracy #plutocracy #capitalism #protofascism
#surveillance #Palantir #privacy
#TwoWords
Chris Hedges: Trump’s War on Education
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/03/14/chris-hedges-trumps-war-on-education/
The U.S. president’s cuts to education under the guise of fighting anti-Semitism are an effort to enforce totalitarianism in the minds of future generations. Questions are not to be asked, myths are to be enforced. By Chris Hedges ScheerPost The…
#Politics #Analysis #CivilRights #History #HumanRights #Racism #RightWing #TrumpAdministration #AntiSemitism #BookBans #ChrisHedges #Dei #DonaldTrump #Education #EllenSchrecker #HannahArendt #HowardZinn #JasonStanley #Libertarianism #Propaganda #Totalitarianism
Ayn Rand accused libertarians of plagiarizing ideas related to her own philosophy of Objectivism and yet viciously attacking other aspects of it.
#literature #libertarianism
"The majority of people in Argentina (53%) are now living in poverty. Their purchasing power and standard of living have been crushed by Milei’s brutal austerity.
Nearly three-quarters (72%) of Argentines said in June 2024, after half a year of Milei’s rule, that they were worse off economically.
While Argentina’s real economy is in crisis, the stock market has boomed, enriching local oligarchs and rich foreign investors.
Milei’s government has also promoted a notorious carry trade scheme known as the “bicicleta financiera” (financial bicycle) that has guaranteed massive returns for the few Argentines wealthy enough to invest.
Aside from finance, the few other sectors of the economy that are growing under Milei are agriculture and mining — extractive industries that rely on exports and benefit from a falling currency and weak domestic demand.
In short, Argentina is being turned into an impoverished, deindustrialized resource colony for foreign corporations and oligarchs."
https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2025/02/28/javier-milei-argentina-economy-resource-colony/
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