@cstross Cheap excuse to deny the left's own agency. The left can't stop billionaries from spending their own money. What the left can do is to stop sabotaging themselves. If they can do that they will win. The left has been screwing themselves over for more than a 100 years though, this is not new.

@cstross @SoftwareTheron That's assuming both no gain in efficiency and no change in underlying lifestyle (the part that has the most easy gains to make).

@cstross @feorag Gonna make a killing when the revolution comes

@cstross @jsl ' I submit that it's not "purity" to oppose Tories in pink ties, it's realism.' If that turns out to be true this time, we'll have a case of "the boy who cried wolf", the rhetoric is always the same no matter what. This sort of behaviour was annoying enough when it only brought tory misrule, now it can very well bring in actual fascism, just like it did in 1932.

@HighlandLawyer @cstross

Enlightened Selfishness: I wish to live free of the fear of starving, freezing, or being shot at. Therefore I wish to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accommodation, etc.

@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.

@lemgandi @cstross
That's the high foresightedness version of high selfishness. Includes considering that one might want companionship, services, etc without personal risk from the flock.

@HighlandLawyer @cstross

Nuke the Rich.
Eating them is bad for the collective colon

@MedeaVanamonde @cstross
I'd prefer to compost them, better for the environment.

@HighlandLawyer @cstross
And poison the soil?

@cstross I reached the conclusion over a decade ago that humans range ethically over the entire spectrum -- from basically* 100% good to basically* 100% evil.

Key point: evil people exist. I tend to get pushback when I use the word "evil" ("I don't believe in the supernatural!"), so maybe "completely selfish" is a better term in some contexts.

...and then one is rather forced to reach the conclusion that the global wealth/power system is or has evolved into (since at least Reagan/Thatcher) something which rewards "the worst of the worst" (once again, every accusation is a confession).

...and that the element which has most enabled this shift or intensification is the power that technology creates. (I could go on at length about this.)

Key point: humanity isn't inherently bad or self-destructive; we just haven't learned how to keep the problem-children away from the dangerous stuff -- because there didn't used to be so much of it, and it kind of happened rather suddenly, speaking in terms of cultural-evolutionary timeframes.

So the problem now is twofold: (1) how do we keep the bad people away from the dangerous things, and (2) how do we prise their greedy little fingers off those things in the first place?

These aren't easy problems to solve, but (final key point) I do think they're solvable. We just have to get enough people really understanding the problem in these terms (assuming I'm not wrong), and working together on solutions.

a noted foot

* allowing for error-margin and the fact that no real thing is ever perfectly in accordance with any ideal

@gjm @cstross

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.

@darkling @feorag The point is not to "fund government" since any country with a sovereign currency can never run out of money, so the conversion percentage really doesn't matter. The point is to remove power from a bunch of toxic psychopaths, so that the government can perform its basic function of stopping its citizens from dying unnecessarily

@cstross @jsl As I said, if it turns out to be true THIS TIME, it will be a case of "the boy who cried wolf". Assuming what you're saying is true, I would guess that Labour's leadership must have seen what happened to the most left-leaning US president ever and decided to overcompensate in the other direction. In the current situation I would recommend you spend 95% of effort on warning about reform and the remaining time on whatever labour is doing.

@Colman This is the conclusion I have also reached. TLDR: all mineral extraction should be taxed at a rate sufficient to cover the costs (best estimate) of fixing the environmental damage caused by how it is processed and used.

(...and the revenue generated thereby should be used to, you know, fix said damage -- or reuse/recycle materials as much as possible to minimize it. e.g. pay people to repair and upgrade electronics, rather than grinding them up and sending the results to the poor side of town, locally or globally. Pay people to repair clothes and furniture. Pay for recycling plastics that aren't "cost-effective" to recycle. Pay for research into better ways to recycle things. Dump billions or trillions into mass transit, because it's so much more efficient than cars. ...and so on)

@cstross @SoftwareTheron

@callisto @jsl @cstross No, the left was always going hard after Biden, the more left somebody are the more they are criticized by the left. Even when he forgave the student debt, they claimed it was his fault the courts struck it down and gave him no credit for even trying.

@trademark @cstross Yes, sorry, I'm not familiar with either US or UK nuances. Just surprised and unable to reconcile the ideas of the eponymous Labour movement with what is coming out of Westminster.

@MedeaVanamonde @cstross
It's their ideas which are toxic, not their flesh. But if you really want, put them all in a rocket & fire them into a lunar impact with enough velocity to create a crater visible by eye from the Earth, as a warning to future generations.

RE: https://wandering.shop/@cstross/116108349700425602

@cstross

> The class war has turned hot. And we're all on the losing side.

@cstross
But.

You cannot give up on self interest without consequences, no matter how much you dislike self interest looking like helping other people...

In fact, I'd argue it's *very quickly* unsustainable if you're left to your own devices.

I just hope it's quick enough.