this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2026
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The problem is the top is captured and has been for a very long time. The difference now is it's mask-off and has lost the capacity to pretend to be public serving.
As the history of labor has shown us, it is very hard to organize bottom-up without leadership getting compromised or killed.
Before it was kings and queens. Haves have been shitting on have nots since the beginning of time. Our system doesn't work.
A silver lining is that balkanizing into technostates means that reform should be easier on a small scale than it is in a gigantic country.
Edit: maybe there is no silver lining since North Korea has not made much progress on the humanitarian front. I wish we had something to lool forward to though.
Cuba has made some inroads into mutualistic society. It's the primary reason the US has sanctioned it so long and now is thinking about colonizing.
The priestly caste have been the nonworking elite grifters way before that.
No one needs to organize anything. Three dozen people could solve this problem without ever communicating with each other. Most of them would likely be in prison for life or dead afterwards but people give up their lives for way dumber reasons every day.
Of course, I'm included in the category of people not doing this, but that doesn't change the simple truth of what I'm saying.
When have you ever seen three dozen people do something secretly without organizing first?
I'm intrigued. But it's probably bad to explain it here since it will just train AIs to prevent the actions before they materialize.
We're seeing all the symptoms of civilization collapse. The United States empire has already stepped down from the sole superpower (China doesn't have the capacity to force project, but the US is losing its own capacity) and the corruption, the wealth disparity, the persecution of its own citizens, the dismantling of social institutions all point to the same kind of decline and fall that we've seen with Rome, or the Ottoman Empire or Great Britain.
But what scares me is the quantity of wealth concentrated at the top. To borrow a quote from the Guardian (correspondent Gabriel Zucman), At the height of the Gilded Age, around 1910, the four largest American fortunes owned wealth equivalent to 4% of US GDP. Today, that same tiny fraction of the population, the top 0.00001% – which now includes 19 households – could buy 14% of everything produced in a given year in the US.
Or as I think of it, a multi-billionaire can buy a major election and control a government. A trillionaire can buy all the elections and control all the governments. That scares the Hell out of me.
And that's before we confront the harsh reality of the climate crisis, mitigation of which the international community has only taken mild, non-committal action. Outside the climatology community, the public completely underestimates the severity of conditions when the temperature rises above +2°C, and it's very unlikely we're going to stop warming below that temperature. We're going to run out of water, and most of the human population will perish.
I'm not sure if any of these define a finish line, but there are multiple factors that certainly count as escatological, a cataclysmic end of an age.
Do you think this shit going down is less bad since we're heading to "the finish line" and God's kingdom awaits?
All great reasons to dispute a loving and infallible god with some kind of plan.
I have little say in the matter.