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Feb 10 4 tweets 1 min read
Western liberals imagine the ‘autocrat’ as ‘an absolutely corrupt congressman’ because they’re incapable of imagining a different system. But a genuine autocrat would have too much power for corruption to make sense; he faces directly the existential question of what a nation is.
A stably corrupt state requires a special set of conditions. It must have a ruling class of absentee owners who care only about their position in the game of finance. This is the basis for a perfectly corrupt system, not autocracy. The US is such a state.
There are 3rd world kleptocrats but the possibility of looting a nation-state only exists because Anglo-American financial institutions make it possible. You can loot a whole nation because you can put the money in an off-shore account and spend it in the ‘free world’.
In the stably corrupt state, the people who benefit from the corruption want to keep the game going in perpetuity and they never ask the existential question (what’s the purpose of the state?). That’s the absentee owner. He forms a parasitical, insular community of elites.

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More from @mr_scientism

Feb 10
The liberal picture of society is essentially a gas with atoms exerting forces on one another. An 'autocracy' is a gas with one super-powerful atom that exerts force on all the other atoms, which have no power of their own. The 'solution' is to distribute power among the atoms.
The other possibility is to note that there's only one autocrat atom but many regular atoms, so the mass of atoms, if it'd just coalesce in a thermodynamically improbably way, could exert force against the autocrat atom. Distributed power, it's thought, makes this more likely.
The problem is that this picture isn't true (it doesn't even make sense) and the 'solutions' proposed on the back of it have to be translated into real world terms and whenever you translate them into real world terms they become proposals for corruption.
Read 5 tweets
Feb 10
Looking through this 2013 Pentagon study on 'Chinese racism' and how the US can supposedly use it to its advantage. Highlights so far: Includes a dynastic chronology; chapter 1 is on the evo psych origins of racism; no primary sources in the bibliography. esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Doc…
"The Chinese commonly believe that they are cleverer than others, and so may shape events in an oblique manner or through shi [势], the strategic manipulation of events. This conceit among the Chinese that they can manipulate others is supremely dangerous for Asian stability."
I skipped to the part on the Communist era and he says the Communist Party doesn't have explicitly racist views but when they talk about class they secretly mean race. His only source for this is Frank Dikötter.
Read 6 tweets
Jan 26
'Wokeness' and 'identity politics' are just the latest in the long line of methods the plutocracy's philanthropic networks have used to gain and maintain power. In this case, they fund and staff organizations that purport to represent minority groups.
An earlier iteration of this strategy was to build political power through 'experts' who were trained and funded by the philanthropic networks. This was followed by the promotion of 'civil society', which was just organizations funded by the same philanthropic networks.
These strategies are embodied in academic movements and these movements tend to criticize one another, masking the fact that they're funded by and do the bidding of the same organizations. Thus, the current movement criticizes the 'technocratic' nature of the older movement.
Read 4 tweets
Dec 6, 2021
'Airforce 2025' forecast (from 1999): "the study speculates on the rise of a 'Sino-colossus' incorporating China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan. ... the US turns inward because of severe economic problems 'the American Century has given way to the Asian Millennium.'"
"Crossroads 2015 ... arrives ten years before the other scenarios. Here, the US faces economic hard times, and the pace of technological progress has slowed. Russia, its power on the rise, attempts to seize and incorporate independent Ukraine."
Another scenario: "the US is pinned down by a host of microcrises around the world ... The US is 'overwhelmed and preoccupied with worldwide commitments, such as counterterrorism and counterproliferation efforts, humanitarian assistance, and peacekeeping operations'"
Read 5 tweets
Dec 4, 2021
When it comes to ‘money in politics’, there’s a lot of research activity around campaign finance but little around the sprawling network of foundations, think tanks, NGOs, activist orgs, etc, that make up the more permanent structures of plutocratic control of government.
This is because the plutocracy itself is interested in certain ways in which money can enter politics, or rather they’re interested in the ways in which NEW money can enter politics and displace their incumbent political networks. Campaign finance is one such entry point.
Setting up an alternative network of think tanks, NGOs, etc, would be extremely difficult, and the process of gaining influence would tend to lead it to endorsing the status quo anyway. Backing ’anti-establishment’ politicians is a more likely avenue of attack for new money.
Read 4 tweets
Oct 5, 2021
People love to say 'science is the new religion', 'scientists are the new priests', etc, but this betrays the fact that, according to our culture, science is NOT supposed to be like religion and scientists are not supposed to be priests. But why not?
What could have been more mundane than that the new cosmology would have simply been incorporated into our culture, replacing Medieval cosmology? Why, instead, did we concoct the idea of a 'scientific method' that opposes itself to 'religious dogma' and applies to all things?
The 'scientific method' and the supposed opposition between science and religion are a political invention that subordinates the scientific revolution and incorporates it into the dominant ideology of the modern world: liberalism.
Read 12 tweets

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