The fact that outright billionaires are choosing to spend their time being irate online commentators and podcast hosts rather than, like, literally anything else productive, seems like a sign of one of the most important and unspoken sociological facts about modern America.
Billionaires are poor.
Having more money doesn't make you wealthier or more powerful.
Apparently in America the purpose of having billions of dollars is to have job security for being a full-time podcaster or online commentator about the woke left, which, it turns out, has gone bananas.
Billions of dollars to pursue my lifelong dream of being an inflooencer.
My advice to billionaires:
Use your money to generously and widely fund crazy people with unconventional ideas. Not just their startup ideas to get A RETURN. Fund them without strings attached. Write a serious book.
Do not start a podcast. Do not tweet. Do not smile in photos.
If you only fund business ideas, you are only ever going to get more useless money. This is a terminal dead end.
If you want to change the world, you have to be willing to lose money. The more you lose, the better.
The modern billionaire will inevitably be expropriated by his hated enemies and lawyers. It doesn't take a genius of political economy to see this coming.
The only solution is to pre-emptively self-expropriate by giving away your money to people you actually like and support.
More tens of billions of dollars expropriated just through *marriage or divorce* have been used to fund intellectual and cultural movement than perhaps all of the intentional funding of all other tech billionaires combined in history.
MacKenzie Bezos and Laurene Powell-Jobs.
The reason civilization is declining and we aren't getting Martian Technocracy is that you won't pay for your preferred ideological vision of the future, but environmentalist degrowth billionaires etc. *will* pay for theirs.
It would cost no more than a few billion dollars at the absolute max, from start to finish, to reform modern society into an expanding spacefaring civilization. Cheap!
Outside of occasionally winning scheduled elections, it turns out that unleashing freedom of speech and allowing the masses to vent their frustrations with bad governance at maximal intensity has no discernible effect on governance quality, and may even worsen it due to spite.
There is not enough analysis or even awareness of the feedback loops that inform the month-to-month decision-making by the Western governing classes in bureaucracies. They clearly seem to close ranks and deliberately intensify unpopular policies in response to populist pressure.
This is the exact reverse of the "vox populi, vox dei" theory that maybe populist rhetoric and pressure will at least nudge governance in the right direction. There are also bizarre outcomes like the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 totally deflating pandemic restrictions.
Frenzied, desperate Boomers passing laws to ban young people from free speech, home ownership, or stable employment, while also berating them uhh this is just like WWII, so we are reintroducing military conscription too.
We are just looking at the process of total institutional breakdown. Dysfunctional institutions keep escalating demands on your time and money; rationally disincentivizing competence or participation; fewer resources available; more escalating demands; rinse and repeat.
All the taxes and demands being placed on young people should instead be placed on the old. It is the old who should see falls in living standards at the expense of the young, not the other way around. The default situation is accurately perceived as illegitimate and vampiric.
It's hard to over-emphasize how utterly unprepared educated progressive Europeans are for even the mildest open debate that challenges their positions. They are basically dodos living in a completely closed intellectual hugbox represented by publicly-funded state TV.
These people have literally never, not once in their lives, encountered genuine intellectual opposition to any of their views, even second-hand. Every instance of "debate" in their lives, from university to TV, is just a carefully coordinated ritual with a predetermined outcome.
At least American progressives have had to contend with Fox News, the College Republicans, and President Donald Trump, which means they at least need to go through the motions of coming up with counter-arguments. *None* of this exists for Euro progs.
These sanctions were applied by OFAC, which is just part of the Executive Branch. I wonder if the Trump administration will enforce similar sanctions against officials in the UK, Germany, Ireland, and other U.S. allies violently suppressing the free speech of their citizens.
Every day I am surprised anew with just how much power the U.S. can and does exert over Europe! Now I find out the U.S. government can just debank and cancel any random person in Europe it wants!
The President cannot do anything about bad judges in America, who require 2/3rds of the U.S. Senate to vote to remove them, but paradoxically he can debank and cancel any judge, politician, bureaucrat, or activist in Europe that he pleases! Very interesting!
You have to admit that the way Boomer elites constantly counter every Millennial demand for benefits with an even bigger offer for loans (indebting them to Boomers), while loudly framing it as a favor the whole time, is just plain hilarious in this dark, Dostoyevskyan way.
There is this whole subtext of Boomers refusing to just pass down assets to their children or grandchildren but instead like malfunctioning robots constantly try to invent elaborate schemes where they have to work for them or go into debt to them to get their own inheritance.
"Please, I can't afford a house."
"What if instead of helping you pay for a house, I loan you the money for a house?"
"Great idea. Like a zero-interest loan, right? Right?"
A massive, gaping intellectual blind spot I have noticed is social-class politics and hostility *within* the Western world and Western populations. For example, it's obvious Western elites see the Western masses as a subhuman race, but I rarely see anyone dig deeper into this.
We just totally lack good sociology on class relations in Western populations. Even bringing up "class" sounds dated and Marxist, occasionally someone points out how complicated and extreme the British class system can be... but it pretty much stops there.
We have a vague idea that in, say, India, there is extreme assortative mating, cultural differences, etc. with regards to castes, and that "higher" castes have a hierarchical relationship with "lower" castes. Why wouldn't these phenomena exist in our societies too?