"The picture of the world’s richest man killing the world’s poorest children is not a pretty one."
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Bill Gates accuses Elon Musk of “killing” children with DOGE-led USAID cuts
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Thing is, it's still perfectly fine to dislike Gates due to the above. He very much wasn't a nice guy. Like you I loathed him back in the day. But those days are over two decades in the past, and to just make shit up about why they don't like him still ("he's not saving America", "He's just green-washing his history" etc etc) is just asinine.
You* don't have to like the guy to admit his money is doing a lot of good in the world. And, personally, good on him for that.
Leave the past in the past. "You never can go back, only forward, and if you don't bring all of yourself with you you'll never see the sun again." - Michael Marshall Smith, 'Only Forward'.
* The generic 'you', not you specifically.
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He had the audacity to ask for higher taxes on billionaires, and as such is a class traitor and must be burned.
Edit: He was the first, and a jew, so he gets the brunt of it, but you can see they are trying to do the same with Gates now, but with much less tracktion.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Because to almost every Trump voter the world is a very different place than the one we actually live in.
The sane and rational? We live in a world where making sweeping changes is complex and hard, and where well-intentioned swift action may cause by far more harm than is prevented.
The Trump voter? He lives in a very different world indeed;
The american right-winger lives in a world where every ill to befall them can be traced back to one or more convoluted theories where liberals, socialists, and ze jews conspire to undermine all that is good, godly and righteous in vast globe-spanning multi-stage plans because EVIL.
Most of them drowned by now in a morass of reality denial propped up by racism, bigotry, and the millennialist belief that eventually some divinely inspired strong man will show up and swiftly fix everything wrong, establishing a golden age where honest god-fearin' white folk will live blessed lives for a thousand years, right after all the dark forces have been vanquished.
To some this claptrap is sold by way of the Rapture belief, where the ostensibly benevolent sky wizard will pour fire and brimstone unto 99 out of a hundred people and gather a few chosen unto his heavenly realms to dwell forever with him in bliss.
Make no mistake. This is a cult. Or a series of cults with doctrine as deeply ingrained as it is self-evidently ridiculous.
And like every cult, it's only curable through formative trauma or deprogramming. Neither of which is a solution which scales. 70-90 million brainwashed yokels is not something which can be cured or meaningfully addressed this side of simply suppressing their insane ideals until they die out, hopefully without passing those ideals on.
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From your first link:
"Brooks laments, 'As the theologian Dallas Willard put it, there has been, over the past decades of neglect, a loss of moral knowledge. We came to a spot in 2024 in which 77 million Americans took a look at Trump’s moral character and didn’t have a problem with what they saw. But the consequences of those character failings are becoming evident in concrete ways.'”
This is what's so sadly disheartening to me--this "loss of moral knowledge." Yes, 77 million people saw Donald Trump "and didn’t have a problem with what they saw." It's a good thing that Jesus has held off on his second trip to earth: if he were here now, he'd be confronted with the abject failure of his first visit and commit suicide.
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It’s important to remember that “fixing” anything was never the plan. “Efficiency” was never a goal. The plan was, and has always been, to shutter the federal government. Norquist’s infamous “…reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”
The right has been methodically working toward this moment for over 40 years now. DOGE is a handy tool by which the legislative branch can be bypassed, clearing the path to the end goal. The right quite literally does not care what the fallout will be, so long as there is no longer a federal government. ”Eyes on the prize,” and all that.
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Yes indeed.
These kinds of attitudes are 1 of the reasons we are where we are.
Punishment, revenge, retribution. These are the things that gets the MAGA base to vote in numbers.
But even more, it's infected the left wing, too. (and why not, millions have good reasons to want retribution for the last 100+ days)
The left is happy to be righteous and jettison anyone with a 20 year old mistake with no timeline or allowance for anyone to improve themselves. Confessions and apologies are always called PR and bullshit, no one seems to believe anyone can actually change or be better.
Is that Bill? I don't really know. But I do know that in mid-30's, I was embarrassed at some of the things I did a decade ago, in my mid-40's I'm embarrassed by opinions I had in my 30's, and by the time I'm 70 I'm gonna be embarrassed at some shit I'll do next month.
We have a rich guy actively working to give away billions, with a history of actually giving away billions. It's literally what we want all the evil billionaires to do.
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Scary Devil Monastery
Ars Scholae Palatinae
Oh, yes. The pillar of his philosophy is that democracy is unviable and needs to be replaced with a constitutional king - CEO, basically - leading the nation on the behest of the wealthiest.
Essentially Yarvin is a longhaired shitheel who reinvented medieval feudalism and sold it to a bunch of people who now all see themselves as dukes in the monarchy of King Donald.
Tiresomely so.
At some point I hope we may actually learn from history.
Preferably before we fry in runaway global warming or the radiation of WW3.
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"reason" is libertarian BS.
I'm sure there is endless billions of waste in the US Military. So we should just shut down the Military right?
Hell, talk about balancing the budget!
Watchdog agency finds numerous examples of waste, fraud and abuse within Department of Defense in '24
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Trump gave him carte blanche and his advice was acted upon without needing to double check with Trump himself. Subject matter experts in the government were ignored and often times fired because they mattered less than a druggie who thinks fighting the 'Woke mind virus" is an existential fight for humanity.
Musk was determined to gut USAID, gutting USAID has killed people in the short time since he did it and will continue to kill people. Elon Musk and the kids he hired for DOGE think this is good times. Know why no President in 60 years got rid of it? Because it was both a force for good and projected American soft power in one go. But Donald Trump is too stupid to understand soft power and Elon Musk thinks keeping poor people from dying of disease is not a good thing. In fact Elon Musk actually joyfully posted about how he worked overtime instead of going to parties to kill an agency that distributes to people dying slowly and painfully of disease.
Elon Musk paid Trump a lot of money to get this power.
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My read is that he intends to spend it all within the next 20 years, both his and then the foundation's, and be done.
"The Gates Foundation will close its doors in 2045, decades earlier than previously envisaged."
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Yes, nearly a century ago we had a marginal income tax that high. That’s not a wealth tax and it’s not the 50s anymore.
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Yes, but he'll be giving it to the Foundation, and the Foundation will give it to wherever it's best needed. Or at least that's my take. It's not like he's going to go out and buy Ferrari
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I don't really think is the prevailing opinion on the left. If you examine this a bit closer, most Gates detractors are NOT on the left, they are on the right, and especially antivaxxers.
The right looks to tear down any progressive, doing philanthropy. Their biggest bogeyman is George Soros who has given away most of his money already, and a larger percentage than the rest of the Billionaires.
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If you are a real Christian, you would know that Jesus has a strong character and knew what would happen 2000 years ago. And what happens in the USA is just a local event of no deep importance.
You would also know that he is the son of god and therefore will not suffer any unfortunate accidents or arrests unless that helps his plans.
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Thanks for mentioning him, it now fits a few more pieces into place. I always understood Musk's greed, but I couldn't quite understand his glee in tearing apart US democracy and it's institutions. Now it makes sense, he's killing democracy to make way for the literal TechnoKings. Autocratic Rule by his billionaire class of Tech Bros.
The utter absurdity of Religious MAGA cheering on atheist Musk tearing down democracy and freedom, so they can be his serfs.
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There already is a one-time, capped exception for capital gains on a personal home on top of a perpetual, unlimited exception for gains on personal homes rolled into a more expensive home.
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There are plenty of detractors of Gates on both sides. I personally draw a distinction between his infractions that helped him accumulate the massive wealth he is now pledging to give away, and Andrew Carnegie, who hired mercenaries to murder his own workers, but that’s tangential to encouraging efforts to make amends.
The amends don’t change the actions, in either case. Neither forgiveness nor forgetfulness is required.
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You will have to find a more trustworthy source, before I waste my time. This is essentially the same people that want to dismantle government, providing the excuses for dismantling government.
And even if true it really isn't justification, unless you want to also dismantle the US military as I pointed out.
Of course the answer to the latter would be NO. They like Military power.
So ultimately this is nothing more than looking for excuses to get rid of things they are ideologically opposed to.
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There are plenty of detractors against everyone on Earth that has a public profile.
Gates detractors are mostly on the right, and antivaxxers (plenty of these are on the left as well).
Otherwise I do agree with the rest.
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ReadandShare
Ars Centurion
I can't help but compare/contrast that with Donald Trump after his meeting with CDC (and only after Covid 19 had spread like wildfire) - and the first thing out of his mouth was "the doctors were all amazed at how much I knew"!
The only people dumber than Trump are the people who voted for him!
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so you obviously agree that the literal nazi musk who is besties with dictators and destroying our democracy is the evil one, right?
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Quoting sources already ideologically opposed to the very existence of the thing they're talking about is not very persuasive. Doing so while simply ignoring the point being made to you — that if a government agency has problems, we inveistigate and fix the problems rather than wiping it out entirely at the first instance — does not do wonders for your own credibility.
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You must realise you're a piece of shit when Bill Gates seems like an angel in comparison and calling you out on your bullshit? No Elon? FFS.
Musk will just double down on being an even bigger asshole.
Musk will just double down on being an even bigger asshole.
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IQ and EQ tests mandatory to pass to vote. Pass mark... 110 minimum? 120 to be safe?
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Money is life. It is an abstraction of life siphoned from people and the planet (including the future).
One cannot steal and hoard, even for a “short” time — billions of dollars without killing people, stealing from the future (e.g. the opportunities people would have if they were to have access to those resources rather than having to try to scrape by with dead-end jobs), and contributing toward species extinction and ecological catastrophe.
I have an analogy I use to illustrate the opportunity loss bit: Einstein as a bricklayer.
Imagine that Einstein had been born to a waitress mother and truck driver father, one of whom was a pothead and the other who became an alcoholic. Imagine if he had been gay. Imagine if the father and the rest of the family didn't want to support little Albert beyond the absolute bare minimum (even hiding food from him) because of his sexuality and because of the limitations of their perspective due to their class status. Imagine if little Albert had grown up during the HIV-AIDS crisis, being told that gay males are sex-crazed animals who are hated by everyone, including the deity, and who will die horribly if they try to connect on an intimate level with one another (which they can't do anyway in many places for fear of vicious violence). Imagine if Albert's father had told him that school is a waste of time because getting a college degree won't enable him to obtain a unionized truck driver's salary. Imagine that Albert wouldn't have been able to become a truck driver anyway, even if he had wanted to (which he wouldn't have because he would have wanted to use his mind), because of epilepsy caused by a head injury from bullying schoolboys. Imagine if Albert had been systematically ridiculed and ostracized in school for his sexuality, second-hand clothes, acne, physical disfigurement, and the fact that he reeked of cigarettes and burnt wood. Imagine that he would have been placed into the vocational track despite having the best scores in his school on Iowa and then California tests, with one teacher even ripping up his essays, telling him to stare at the ceiling and read newspapers during class, and seating him in the back with the other working class students so that he wouldn't be able to read her tiny cursive handwriting and follow her quiet talk to the front rows. Etc. Etc. Albert works a serious of dead-end jobs, trying vainly to manage to be able to support himself following high school. Eventually, he befriends a mason and trains to become a bricklayer. The end.
Posh Americans: "It's a pity that he didn't choose to make better use of his fine ability."
Non-posh Americans: "At least he had the sense to learn a solid trade. Who needs academia anyway? The AI can weave baskets these days."
The character in that tale is someone I knew personally, so it is not exaggerated. In fact, it's quite an understated telling and many Americans have things much worse. Much of what held Albert back in that tale is the lack of opportunity that being in the "working class" entails. The problems begin even before birth, with womb teratogens from lead-laced housing and surrounding environments (building demolition), for instance. Albert might have been born with natural athleticism, into a home full of asbestos to go with the chain smokers and lead dust. More noise pollution. Reduced nutrition. More avoidable exposure to toxic chemicals because of lack of education and lowbrow passtimes. The simple lack of training by one's family in the expectations of being in positions of authority holds back people of the "lower classes." One compelling anecdote is a private school in which students use the bathroom when they need to versus public schools where teachers will tell the boys in the class that none of them are allowed to use the bathroom because some of them were misbehaving. A person's potential is systemically crushed.
Even someone like Albert in that story who didn't die because of the billionaires' parasitism is still robbed of the opportunity to not only greatly enrich humanity by meeting their potential but also is robbed of a better-quality life — so that people like Zuckerberg can build flaming moats. It does not have to bleed to lede and the life cost and cost to humanity of these parasites can never be undone via philanthropy. The irony is that when someone posts "What could anyone possibly do with so many billions" there are people reading who could very well spend that money effectively to enrich humanity (including by helping the planet's other species) but will never have the opportunity to contribute even the tiniest fraction of their goodwill and talent for lack of opportunity, opportunity stolen and hoarded.
One cannot steal and hoard, even for a “short” time — billions of dollars without killing people, stealing from the future (e.g. the opportunities people would have if they were to have access to those resources rather than having to try to scrape by with dead-end jobs), and contributing toward species extinction and ecological catastrophe.
I have an analogy I use to illustrate the opportunity loss bit: Einstein as a bricklayer.
Imagine that Einstein had been born to a waitress mother and truck driver father, one of whom was a pothead and the other who became an alcoholic. Imagine if he had been gay. Imagine if the father and the rest of the family didn't want to support little Albert beyond the absolute bare minimum (even hiding food from him) because of his sexuality and because of the limitations of their perspective due to their class status. Imagine if little Albert had grown up during the HIV-AIDS crisis, being told that gay males are sex-crazed animals who are hated by everyone, including the deity, and who will die horribly if they try to connect on an intimate level with one another (which they can't do anyway in many places for fear of vicious violence). Imagine if Albert's father had told him that school is a waste of time because getting a college degree won't enable him to obtain a unionized truck driver's salary. Imagine that Albert wouldn't have been able to become a truck driver anyway, even if he had wanted to (which he wouldn't have because he would have wanted to use his mind), because of epilepsy caused by a head injury from bullying schoolboys. Imagine if Albert had been systematically ridiculed and ostracized in school for his sexuality, second-hand clothes, acne, physical disfigurement, and the fact that he reeked of cigarettes and burnt wood. Imagine that he would have been placed into the vocational track despite having the best scores in his school on Iowa and then California tests, with one teacher even ripping up his essays, telling him to stare at the ceiling and read newspapers during class, and seating him in the back with the other working class students so that he wouldn't be able to read her tiny cursive handwriting and follow her quiet talk to the front rows. Etc. Etc. Albert works a serious of dead-end jobs, trying vainly to manage to be able to support himself following high school. Eventually, he befriends a mason and trains to become a bricklayer. The end.
Posh Americans: "It's a pity that he didn't choose to make better use of his fine ability."
Non-posh Americans: "At least he had the sense to learn a solid trade. Who needs academia anyway? The AI can weave baskets these days."
The character in that tale is someone I knew personally, so it is not exaggerated. In fact, it's quite an understated telling and many Americans have things much worse. Much of what held Albert back in that tale is the lack of opportunity that being in the "working class" entails. The problems begin even before birth, with womb teratogens from lead-laced housing and surrounding environments (building demolition), for instance. Albert might have been born with natural athleticism, into a home full of asbestos to go with the chain smokers and lead dust. More noise pollution. Reduced nutrition. More avoidable exposure to toxic chemicals because of lack of education and lowbrow passtimes. The simple lack of training by one's family in the expectations of being in positions of authority holds back people of the "lower classes." One compelling anecdote is a private school in which students use the bathroom when they need to versus public schools where teachers will tell the boys in the class that none of them are allowed to use the bathroom because some of them were misbehaving. A person's potential is systemically crushed.
Even someone like Albert in that story who didn't die because of the billionaires' parasitism is still robbed of the opportunity to not only greatly enrich humanity by meeting their potential but also is robbed of a better-quality life — so that people like Zuckerberg can build flaming moats. It does not have to bleed to lede and the life cost and cost to humanity of these parasites can never be undone via philanthropy. The irony is that when someone posts "What could anyone possibly do with so many billions" there are people reading who could very well spend that money effectively to enrich humanity (including by helping the planet's other species) but will never have the opportunity to contribute even the tiniest fraction of their goodwill and talent for lack of opportunity, opportunity stolen and hoarded.
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There is why every Republican president from Reagan on did massive deficits. They announced it at every CPAC from the 1980s, cheering at STARVE THE BEAST!!
and now that we have life in prison without trial and the entire government being illegally destroyed by the unelected, most people don’t want to hear it because they don’t care about “politics.”
I wish your post was the lead story in the New York Times, which still denies reality.
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You support Eugenics?
The logical consequence of an IQ-based system like that, in a culture that claims it will provide all of its citizens a fair shot, is to use genetic engineering to raise the minimum population IQ to your minimum threshold. It also entails equalizing the other factors, such as teratogen exposure and nutritional support. It terms of EQ, that would entail a massive change to schooling, including access to the insider knowledge enjoyed by wealthy families. It's therefore impossible to have a fair system based on IQ and EQ without converting the economy to true communism (as opposed to the imitation 'communisms' we have seen in places like Russia, North Korea, and China).
The other option would be to simply further penalize people for being born in the lower classes*. "Little Judy, it's your fault that you were born into a house filled with lead dust. You're too dumb to vote and perhaps we should talk about reproduction, too. We have robots now, after all."
*Class status does not directly determine one's IQ, of course — but it does confer massive advantages (teratogen avoidance, nutrition, violence avoidance, sleep quality, educational quality, higher-quality medical care, reduced exposure to ambient pollution in many cases, etc.).
Perhaps the most foundational problem with your post is that the current chaos is not happening because of stupid voters voting it in. It's there because the wealthy made it possible. A woman whose name escapes me said that if voting were to matter (ordinary) people wouldn't be allowed to do it. I think that that is more accurate than inaccurate. Even in ancient Athens the ballot boxes were stuffed by people who had the money to have the false ballots created. No one here likes me to bring it up but Liz Warren flatly stated that the 2016 primary was rigged. It's in an article from PBS if anyone cares to read it. Warren has a doctorate, comes from academia, and is a member of the Democratic Party. The Dems haven't had fair primaries nor primaries at all for how long now? There is, for instance, footage of a DNC leader bragging on daytime TV that no primary will happen, and that was for what would have been the primary prior to the one we could have had when Harris was selected to replace Biden.
Absolutely no one becomes a president (nor a senator) without having backing from enough elites to render the masses' opinions irrelevant. Even when the Dems had enough people to get a public option via reconciliation and 76% of the public wanted it they whipped against it.
Money likely has continued to gain power in our elections over time, a fact that demonstrates that ordinary people aren't the point. This is how Congress works, too — not just voting for presidential and senatorial elections, as was made clear by the famous Harvard-Northwestern study. That study showed that Congress ignores 90% of the public when it comes to legislative priorities/passage. When 80–90% of a population is considered "the bottom" that says what needs to be said about the value of the votes of the ordinary.
In short: Stupid voters are scapegoats. One needs to look deeper and more broadly. It's patently absurd to claim that the world is run by ordinary stupid people. It absolutely isn't. Ask the elites why things are as bad as they are. The USA is not a direct democracy; those who continue to flog the "stupid voters are to blame for this" — please stop pretending it is.
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Bill Gates has come a long way in some ways. If you would have told me in 1998 that in 2025 he was going to be a long-time philantropist who wasn't even in the top 10 richest people and an asshole 4x in magnitude and wealth was at the top, I probably wouldn't have believed it.
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Republicans care very much about the debt and the budget deficit when they're not in the White House. They care a lot less when they get power. But it does provide them nice cover for cutting services that help people while piling more money on defense contractors.
I've seen people, including Musk I believe, say the best way to fix government is to break it down and get rid of it. Even as an analogy it's stupid. You don't take your car to the crusher when the fuel pump gives out, you also don't hire a 19 year old CS major to look at it, you go to a subject matter expert on cars to get it fixed.
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The doctors were certainly amazed, that I can believe.
It is usually impossible to survive without a brain.
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While there are short steps from disenfranchisement to eugenics. that is not what iseptimus advocated nor implied.
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They were amazed, like Babbage was amazed when questioned "if I put the wrong values into the machine, will it still produce the correct answer?"
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Starving African babies is a certain winner in American elections. Well played.
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Prove it via explanation. An adequately detailed explanation is more useful than a PR statement.
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