This was just a top notch meme. Informative and a very clever arrested developement reference.

I guess i don’t really see the point. Is there a strong use case out there, or is this a marge’s potato? (“I just think they’re neat”)

I was careful to say perminant heirarchies for that reason. Bao Jingyan said that power originates in the contrast between the weak and the strong, and the cunning and the naive. I’m inclined to agree.

But we can have social institutions that break up and flush out these natural channels of inequality, rather than institutions that metastize them into heirarchies.

Aristotle discussed a then-current idea to redistribute all personal wealth above 5x the poorest citizen. We could tax all inheritance above say 500k at 100%. Eliminate all personal debt every 7 years.

There’s a lot we can do to make heirarchies more temporary.

There are lots of ways to organize people that aren’t heirarchical, or that dilute or limit power rather than concentrating it.

Directly voting for laws, appointing officials by sortition - like being picked for jury duty, pushing decisions down to neighbourhood councils, consensus decision making, a culture that always permits insulting the successful and plenty else has been suggested.

It all comes with drawbacks of it’s own, of course. And having grown up in a heirarchical society, it can be very hard to imagine anything else, until you read about all the times and places where people have organized themselves differently.

There’s a lot of neuroscience showing that social power suppresses empathy in the brain. Status, privilege, wealth, etc. make almost everyone less able to consider the pain of others.

Most of us can be reasonable with people we know. But the socially powerful are making most of the important higher-scale decisions, and they are neurologically the least capable of making good decisions on behalf of others.

Or that’s how i see the problem.

While i too yearn for the downfall of capitalism, pre-capitalist societies were still responsible for environmental distruction, slavery and genocide.

As long as individuals or a small elite have enough power to enforce their needs over the needs of everyone else, we’ll always have capital-b Badnesses.

We have to usher in the collapse of perminant heirarchies, whatever form they take.

The fact this is can even be a sentence someone thought to utter is such a triumph of wealth over reality.

When you have a product that you know can and will be used harmfully, you can’t just say “but if you use it harmfully, we’re not responsible”.

OpenAI is undeniably responsible for deaths they facilitated, like this one.

It’s the washington post in 2025, what do you expect?

Well I’m insured

He financed a spoiler candidate for OR governor last election. That spoiler candidate was too obviously right wing to siphon enough votes, despite what she was being paid to say.

Phil knight is strongly opposed to democracy.

Tiny states use pointless votes like this as a chance to curry favour. Sure, china or the us, we’ll vote however you want on this purely symbolic question that will have zero real world impact. Now about that loan…

Hey remember that time christians sacked christian byzantium and finally ended the roman empire in the name of fighting islam, the great enemy of the christians and the roman empire?

Or all those decades where the omnipresent threat of instant nuclear annhilation was considered the main infrastructure of peace?

Things have been stupid before, and they’ll be stupid again.

Thats getting away with raping children money.

Or the people who had to work, or couldn’t wait for 3h at their neighborhood polling place, or have disengaged from politics for any number of reasons, or were educated here and earnestly didnt know how important this last election was.

Low voter turnout is an inevitable symptom of a corrupt system.

Given how incredibly well the harris campaign was doing at first and the outpouring of bi-partisan support for shooting CEOs dead in the street immediately after the election, and the barnstorming success of mamdani, i think it’s safe the say harris lost because they took pelosi’s advice and tacked hard to the right, instead of solidifying their early victories by continuing to lean left.

I think it’s pretty clear the country was willing to vote for harris, dems just fucked it up.

everyone voted for a

~30% of the adult population voted for said rapist

If humans are more likely to take photos of racoons they find cute, we’d expect those racoons to have cuter features than the average racoon. It might not be actual change going on, is the point being made.

We don’t conciously notice the snout length, just the ones we think are cute are probably slightly more likely to have a shorter snout.

As a child we had a play tunnel that devermiculated for easy storage.

While we’re discussing things sideshow bob was wrong about, actually plenty of ancient cultures could well have considered chief hydrological engineer a calling.

Elaborate gardens or fountains and the complex hydro-engineering they required have been a symbol of power from ancient assyria to las vegas.

Water and it’s storage and control seems to have had religious dimensions in both the mayan world and angkor.

Water control, flood control and canals were major imperial projects in china.

It’s super believable to me that any of those groups might’ve considered a dangerous, difficult, educated job with religious or elite association to be a calling.

Also, i dont think anyone would use the c-word to describe cappadocia.

The campaign came out of the gate punching and dominated the news cycle. Then they took pelosi’s advice and tacked right and immediately began to flounder.

Im not convinved the technofascists wouldve allowed a democrat win, but i don’t think it’s because kamala only had 3 months. Thats how long election campaigns are in civilised countries.