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@fazalmajid Well, that, probably, but also "power broker".
The Epstein files function to identify the de facto real power structure. (As he saw it, but considering how long he kept what running, he can't have been too far off.)
(It also identifies the help and the wannabes.)
@dr2chase Reducing white women to the status of chattel is important to the project; they can't do that without reversing the demographic transition as it applies to white people, too. And that unconcerned "kid died of measles" couple may well be representative.
They've deeply internalized "women, cattle, and slaves" and a Late Romantic "survival of the fittest" which ignores the actual environment and supposes some ideal person. Facts are not much involved anywhere.
@petealexharris Taking it personally is a barrier to understanding, and understanding is necessary to (reliable) victory.
In a just or kind world, one should not be required to deal with such people, and yet the world we have is one subject to selection.
@petealexharris It is, alas, nowhere near 99%.
The distinction may have operational utility in opposing their policies; for example, the "all these babies will die! look at the tombstones in old graveyards!" response to anti-vax policies functions to confirm the objectives and purposes of the anti-vax movement. It's about killing babies; that's what it wants. Telling its members that babies will die is not an effective means of dissuasion.
@petealexharris A death cult is about everybody dying, usually because $DIETY has become disgusted with mankind and will slaughter everybody and the goal of the cult is to bring about that end of the world.
The Right contains some death cultists (Premillennial dispensationalism is extremely death cult) but most of what we're seeing is eliminationist; they want to extirpate everyone else and dwell alone in the earth. They themselves don't want to die or the world to end.
@cstross Not precisely; they're not about generalized dying, they're willing to kill a lot of kids to maintain their status.
Can't enjoy that status if they're dead.
(Real death cults tend to be powerless people who want everyone to die as a means of escaping their circumstances. There's certainly some death cult members getting sucked into the grift but even those are mostly built on histrionics about a lack of white supremacy rather than material misery as such.)
@cstross If you want to reverse the demographic transition, you have to kill a lot of infants.
If you don't reverse the demographic transition, patriarchy goes away.
("The environment produces the organism" is always the case; other things are the case, too, but what you can have is constrained by the environment which exists, not which could exist. And for humans, cites are an environment and culture is an environment.)
Anti-vax is a "kill babies, keep patriarchy" movement.
@johnzajac @EricLawton @bonaventuresoft What I'm saying might reduce to "don't call that efficiency, we need another word". ("Effectiveness")
Because efficiency-the-word is pretty strictly the cost-efficiency zero-margin meaning and fighting with the mammonites for it is a lot more work than I think we have to do.
Jane Jacob's guardian and trader syndromes ("what can I get for this?" versus "what's the most I can turn this into?") come to mind here.
@johnzajac @EricLawton @bonaventuresoft Which reduces neatly to "nice things or rich people, pick one".
It's not so much that you get what you reward as you get whatever manages to make the most of itself. (Sometimes by copying, sometimes by growing.) And our current system replicates greed.
@johnzajac "because we want to be billionaires" is exactly the problem, yeah. Which can only really be addressed by making being a billionaire impossible.
The problem with keeping "efficiency is good sometimes" around is that it's precisely the wedge that got used (from the formal process of enclosure forward, and which I could wish more people were aware of, because what is being called enshitification is digital enclosure) to get us here.
@johnzajac Cost efficiency is a bad thing.
Cost efficiency is why we're in this mess, on the whole and by and large.
('cost efficiency' = I want the largest possible pile of accounting tokens because that maximizes my relative advantage)
Gotta watch out for efficiency of outcomes, too; lots of people's preferred outcomes really do include consigning their neighbors to perdition.
Better to specify outcomes and reward effectiveness overtly, not implicitly.
@DGI If it was feudalism, the great and good would have obligations to the lowly in fact as well as law.
What they're trying for can be described the mammonite flavour of a god-king autocracy. (It is supremely unhelpful that being a CEO makes you a god-king inside your corporate entity. That'd be a major design flaw to fix if there were any sense in keeping the limited liability corporation around.)
In effect, you owe the autocrat your life, and they get your entire labour in recompense.
@fazalmajid It takes about 10% of the population to have a revolution.
It's a system under selection. (Life is involved, so…) Incumbents (a man granted patriarchal status is an incumbent) cannot accept change because incumbency means "meaningful change" is the same thing as loss of status.
But there's no changing local maxima without going downslope some, and thus we get politics. (This is the problem of armies in an evolved hat. That _is_ progress.)
@cstross @mekkaokereke @sophieschmieg Sure, but just like the quid pro quo for the quality is "restore de jure chattel slavery everywhere", the quid pro quo for the folks in the MAGA hats is "force women to marry".
Which in turn means "women can't get jobs, bank accounts, loans, or higher education" (at a minimum); all that is in living memory and the bottom two fifths of the male population, should we rank them by social desirability, want it back real bad.
@cstross Thing is, if we want to decarbonise (and thus live) we are going to have to take all their property away.
To get to a condition of general prosperity, same; you can have your lifetime's economic output, not anybody else's.
Most people are fine with that and recognize that improving your lot is collective; the more specialization and communities of practice, the more nice things from one life of effort.
Greedheads, well, they're kinda broken. Shouldn't let them break everything.
People post pointers to massively comprehensive studies finding no connection between vaccines and autism. This is not so much missing the point as a failure of comprehension.
What the right wants is social approval—incessant, slathering approval—for torturing their children into normalcy. (Or, failing normalcy, for murdering them.) The objection to autism is not an objection to the brain chemistry; it's an objection to the idea that you don't have to make people normal by any and all means.
@cstross there's this pattern across history in agriculture; you can get a reliable food supply from latifunda (large areas of land worked by slaves) or by prosperous freehold farmers.
The systems do not mix and latifunda drive out freeholds because they've got more ability to absorb surprise. (the Yard Sale Model in real life!)
Americans will do the non-slavery jobs involved in the freehold version. To get that involves destroying the latifunda. (And the monopsonist food processors.)