J. W. Botsford (Sci-fi Author)

@MisterIneffable @SummonDarkness_ @billmaher Ontological shock is extremely antimemetic.

@BrivaelFr It's rebranded Gnostic theology. Gnostic theology works like this: 1. This world is a prison. 2. We have something better, no specifics, just better. 3. Join us, become an initiate, learn secrets. 4. We will overthrow the existing regime and bring paradise led only by us.

J'ai croisé beaucoup de gens très intelligents, très bons en business, qui tournent sur un logiciel marxiste. Ça me fascine. Voici ma tentative d'explication. 🧵 Le marxisme n'est pas une théorie économique qui survit par ses mérites intellectuels. Böhm-Bawerk l'a réfuté en 1896. Aucun département d'économie sérieux ne l'enseigne comme valide. C'est réglé depuis 130 ans. Alors pourquoi des gens brillants y croient encore ? Parce que le marxisme n'est pas une théorie. C'est une religion séculière. Et elle survit par des mécanismes psychologiques, pas rationnels. Premier mécanisme : le ressentiment déguisé en analyse. Girard explique que le désir mimétique peut se retourner. Au lieu de vouloir être comme celui qui réussit, tu veux le détruire. Le marxisme transforme cette envie en vocabulaire académique. Tu ne jalouses plus. Tu "déconstruis les rapports de domination". Même émotion. Emballage différent. Deuxième mécanisme : la culpabilité du succès. C'est le plus fascinant. L'entrepreneur marxiste a réussi et il se sent coupable d'avoir réussi. Le marxisme lui offre une indulgence. "Oui je suis capitaliste, mais au moins je sais que le système est injuste." C'est l'équivalent moderne d'acheter son pardon à l'Église. Tu expies ton succès en professant la bonne idéologie. Troisième mécanisme : le signaling social. Dans les milieux éduqués, tech, startups, être "critique du capitalisme" est un signal de statut. Ça dit "je ne suis pas un capitaliste vulgaire". C'est du Bourdieu appliqué à lui-même : tu achètes du capital culturel en critiquant le système qui te permet d'en avoir. L'ironie est magnifique. Quatrième mécanisme : la meilleure histoire jamais écrite. Le marxisme a un héros (le prolétaire), un méchant (le capitaliste), un diagnostic (l'exploitation), une promesse (la révolution), et un paradis (la société sans classes). C'est Star Wars en version politique. L'école autrichienne en comparaison ? Pas de héros. Pas de méchant. Des individus qui interagissent dans un système complexe avec des résultats émergents. C'est vrai. Mais c'est pas sexy. Personne ne fait la révolution pour "l'ordre spontané de Hayek". Cinquième mécanisme : le piège de l'intelligence. Et c'est le plus contre-intuitif. Les gens très intelligents sont PLUS susceptibles d'être marxistes, pas moins. Pourquoi ? Parce que le marxisme est un système intellectuel sophistiqué avec sa propre logique interne. Plus tu es intelligent, plus tu es capable de construire un édifice cohérent à l'intérieur du système. Et plus l'édifice est beau à l'intérieur, moins tu as envie de regarder si les fondations tiennent. Le château de cartes est impeccablement construit sur du sable. Il faut être intelligent pour construire un château de cartes impeccable. Les gens médiocres n'y arrivent pas, leur château s'effondre tout seul et ils passent à autre chose. Les gens brillants construisent un château tellement beau qu'ils refusent de regarder le sable en dessous. Sixième mécanisme : Nietzsche et la morale inversée. Nietzsche a décrit comment les faibles retournent la morale pour transformer leur faiblesse en vertu. Le marxisme fait ça à l'échelle collective. Et l'entrepreneur marxiste fait l'inverse : "je suis riche mais moralement supérieur aux riches parce que je reconnais l'injustice". Du ressentiment de luxe. La version premium de la mauvaise foi. Le résumé en une phrase. Le marxisme survit pas parce qu'il a raison. Il survit parce qu'il remplit des fonctions psychologiques que la vérité ne remplit pas : un coupable (bouc émissaire), une vertu (ressentiment transformé), une rédemption (culpabilité expiée), un statut (signaling social), et une belle histoire (monomythe). L'école autrichienne a les bonnes réponses. Le marxisme a les bonnes émotions. Et les émotions battent les réponses. Presque toujours. Presque.

@pmarca Elites decide others have no value and annoyingly use up their precious precious tokens.

Frontier models become more expensive to serve. Token demand explodes at exponential rates. Solve for the equilibrium.

@pmarca The next decades will be about the struggle by all nations to feed the AI/Robotics genie and the choices they make to do this will not be pretty.

It’s an unfortunate time for the industry to run out of every single important component in the supply chain.

@elonmusk @farzyness @pmarca The next decades will be shaped by the need to feed the AI/Robotics genie.

@pmarca A friend of mine showed me his OpenClaw setup. He runs open source models locally on his home computers for easier stuff, but spends ~$200/day on frontier models.

Magical OpenClaw experiences that use frontier models cost $300-1,000/day today, heading to $10,000/day and more. The future shape of the entire technology industry will be how to drive that to $20/month.

@GaltsToad @AutismCapital The Iranian Gov. will shoot them anyway and blame it on the Americans.

@AutismCapital Small precision bombs, or even non explosive weights, at crucial points, generators, boilers, transformers, could disable the plants while leaving the buildings still standing. A chain of people around the building or in the parking lot would be unlikely to be harmed.

If this is true it's a very interesting move to call Trump's bluff. Iran is trying to make the cost of his decision so morally high that it becomes a line that if he crosses there's no coming back from. i.e. "Are you prepared to directly kill all the youth?" It's diabolical.

@GENIC0N Give everyone klotho gene therapy.

what's the laziest --dangerously-skip-permissions way we could raise global IQ 10 points in 10 years?

@TroonPlanet Leftists have no stable principles except accumulating power. That's why they like Islamists. They help them break down national identity and consolidate power on a supranational scale. The LGBTQ serves the same function to some extent by undermining traditional culture.

It took me a long time to accept the reality of the Islamization of Europe and what this entails. Today in a fac/ebook group for people looking for apartments & sublets in Denmark, a gay couple posted that they were looking for a sublet. Many in the group were shocked 1/4

@bryan_johnson Go watch "A Scanner Darkly." If you see yourself acting like the people in that movie, it's just run of the mill leaky dopamine vesicles. Nothing to be too worried about.

Something happened in the past six months post psilocybin and 5-MeO-DMT that I can't fully explain. The brain data helps but doesn't complete the picture. Feels like a home I didn't know I was looking for. I'm trying to figure out what to do with that now.

@earlkralik @reddit_lies The leftists optimize every decision around accumulating power. That's their only stable principle.

@reddit_lies Why indeed. The answer is: leftist don't actually care about LGBTQ, they only care about its usefulness in furthering the revolution. That's also why they defend Islam - it's a useful revolutionary tool. They otherwise have no stable value system.

This post in /r/askbrits, asking why Christians must accept LGBTQ but there's no expectation for Islam to, is currently one of the most controversial threads on Reddit for the entire week.

@Mysisila @ChristinaD9752 @RealCalvin1 Mao's Red Guard all got sent to the rural areas to do hard labor as their reward for being useful idiots. Stalin sent all his useful idiots who helped him win the Russian civil war to die in Siberian Gulags.

@undeservingfut @ChristinaD9752 @RealCalvin1 they will just send them into the grinder forever making it easy to kill a fuck ton of them, the left are more cautious with their useful idiots, because there are less of them.

Why did so many countries, world leaders, and local leaders surrender to Islam with no resistance at all? No war, not a single shot fired people just caved.

"I have moved my timelines for the permanent underclass arrival to 6 months from now"

@ChristinaD9752 @RealCalvin1 Both Islamists and Communists think a small group of elite should rule and deal with anyone who opposes them with insults and threats. When they overcome their enemies, Islamists always win because they're not afraid of death.

@RealCalvin1 It's an unholy alliance between the Marxists and Muslims based on their shared goal of causing the total collapse of Western civilization so they can fight over who gets to rule over the ruins. I wish this was hyperbole.

@BillAckman @ClassicLibera12 @X Civil litigation judges have seen plenty of grifters. You just got to get the right judge and once they find out who's the jerk, they'll throw out the case. You just have to get one who isn't an extremist political activist, or win on appeal.

I am reaching out to the @X community for advice with the likely risk of sharing TMI. I have been sufficiently upset about the whole matter that I have lost sleep thinking about it and I am hoping that this post will enable me to get this matter off my chest. By way of background, I started a family office called TABLE about 15 years ago and hired a friend who had previously managed a family office, and years earlier, had been my personal accountant. She is someone that I trusted implicitly and consider to be a good person. The office started small, but over the last decade, the number of personnel and the cost of the office grew massively. The growth was entirely on the operational side as the investment team has remained tiny. While my investment portfolio grew substantially, the investments I had made were almost entirely passive and TABLE simply needed to account for them and meet capital calls as they came in. While TABLE purchased additional software and other systems that were supposed to improve productivity, the team kept increasing in size at a rapid rate, and the expenses continued to grow even faster. While I would periodically question the growing expenses and high staff turnover, I stayed uninvolved with the office other than a once-a-year meeting when I briefly reviewed the operations and the financials and determined bonus compensation for the President and the CFO. I spent no time with any of the other employees or the operations. The whole idea behind TABLE was that it would handle everything other than my day job so that I would have more time for my job and my family. Over the last six years, expenses ballooned even further, employee turnover accelerated, and I became concerned that all was not well at TABLE. It was time for me to take a look at what was going on. Nearly four years ago, I recruited my nephew who had recently graduated from Harvard and put him to work at Bremont, a British watchmaker, one of my only active personal investments to figure out the issues at the company and ultimately assist in executing a turnaround. He did a superb job. When he returned from the UK late last year after a few years at Bremont, I asked him to help me figure out what was going on with TABLE. When I explained to TABLE’s president what he would be doing, she became incredibly defensive, which naturally made me more concerned. My nephew went to work by first meeting with each employee to understand their roles at the company and to learn from them what ideas they had on how things could be improved. He got an earful. Our first step in helping to turn around TABLE was a reduction in force including the president and about a third of the team, retaining excellent talent that had been desperate for new leadership. Now here is where I need your advice. All but one of the employees who were terminated acted professionally and were gracious on the way out (excluding the president who had a notice period in her contract, is currently still being paid, and with whom I have not yet had a discussion). The highest compensated terminated employee other than the president, an in-house lawyer (let’s call her Ronda), told us that three months of severance was not enough and demanded two years’ severance despite having worked at the company for only two and one half years. When I learned of Ronda's request for severance, I offered to speak with her to understand what she was thinking, but she refused to do so. A few days ago, we received a threatening letter from a Silicon Valley law firm. In the letter, Ronda’s counsel suggests that her termination is part of longstanding issues of ‘harassment and gender discrimination’ – an interesting claim in light of the fact that Ronda was in charge of workplace compliance – and that her termination was due to: “unlawful, retaliatory, and harmful conduct directed towards her. Both [Ronda] and I [Ronda’s lawyer] have spoken with you about [Ronda’s] view of what a reasonable resolution would include given the circumstances. Thus far, TABLE has refused to provide any substantive response. This letter provides the last opportunity to reach a satisfactory agreement. If we cannot do so, [Ronda] will seek all appropriate relief in a court of competent jurisdiction.” The letter goes on to explain the basis for the “unsafe work environment” claim at TABLE: “In early 2026, Pershing Square’s founder Bill Ackman installed his nephew in an unidentified role at TABLE, Ackman’s family office. [His nephew]—whose only work experience had been for TABLE where he was seconded abroad for the last four years to a UK watch company held by Ackman—began appearing at TABLE’s offices and conducting interviews of employees without a clear explanation of his role or the purposes of these interviews. During this period, he made a series of inappropriate and genderbased [sic] comments to multiple employees that created an unsafe work environment. Among other things, [his nephew] made remarks about female employees’ ages (“Tell me you are nowhere near 40”), physical appearance (“Your body does not look like you have kids”), as well as intrusive questions about family planning and sexual orientation (“Who carried your son? Who will carry your next child?”). These incidents were reported to senior leadership at TABLE and Pershing Square. Rather than being addressed appropriately, the response from senior management reflected, at best, willful blindness to the inappropriateness of [his nephew]’s remarks and, at worst, tacit endorsement.” The above allegations about my nephew had previously been brought to my attention by TABLE’s president when they occurred. When I learned of them, I told the president that I would speak to him directly and encouraged her to arrange for him to get workplace sensitivity training. The president assured me that she would do so. When I spoke to my nephew, he explained what he actually had said and how his actual remarks had been received, not at all as alleged in the legal letter from Ronda’s counsel. I have also spoken to others at the lunch table who confirmed his description of the facts. In any case, he meant no harm, was simply trying to build rapport with other employees, and no one, as far as I understand, was offended. Ironically, Ronda claims in her legal letter that TABLE didn’t take HR compliance seriously, yet Ronda was in charge of HR compliance at TABLE and the person who gave my nephew his workplace sensitivity training after the alleged incidents. In any case, Ronda, as head of compliance, should have kept a record or raised an alarm if indeed there was pervasive harassment or other such problems at the company, and there is no evidence whatsoever that this is true. So why does Ronda believe she can get me to pay her nearly $2 million, i.e., two years of severance, nearly one year of severance for each of her years at the company? Well, here is where some more background would be helpful. Over the last two months, I have been consumed with a major family medical issue – one of my older daughters had a massive brain hemorrhage on February 5th and has since been making progress on her recovery – and I am in the midst of a major transaction for my company which I am executing from a hospital room office next to her . While the latter business matter is publicly known, the details of my daughter’s situation are only known to Ronda because of her role at our family office. Now, let’s get back to the subject at hand. Unfortunately, while New York and many other states have employment-at-will, there has emerged an industry of lawyers who make a living from bringing fake gender, race, LGBTQ and other discrimination employment claims in order to extract larger severance payments for terminated employees, and it needs to stop. The fake claim system succeeds because it costs little to have a lawyer send a threatening letter and nearly all of the lawyers in this field work on contingency so there is no or minimal cash cost to bring a claim. And inevitably, nearly 100% of these claims are settled because the public relations and legal costs of defending them exceed the dollar cost of the settlement. The claims are nearly always settled with a confidentiality agreement where the employee who asserts the fake claims remains anonymous and as a result, there is no reputational cost to bringing false claims. The consequences of this sleazy system (let’s call it ‘the System’) are the increased costs of doing business which is a tax on the economy and society. There are other more serious problems due to the System. Unfortunately, the existence of an industry of plaintiff firms and terminated employees willing to make these claims makes it riskier for companies to hire employees from a protected class, i.e., LGBTQ, seniors, women, people of color etc. because it is that much more reputationally damaging and expensive to be accused of racism, sexism, and/or intolerance for sexual diversity than for firing a white male as juries generally have less sympathy for white males. The System therefore increases the risk of discrimination rather than reducing it, and the people bringing these fake claims are thereby causing enormous harm to the other members of these protected classes. So what happened here? Ronda was vastly overpaid and overqualified for the job that she did at TABLE. She was paid $1.05 million plus benefits last year for her work which was largely comprised of filling out subscription agreements and overseeing an outside law firm on closing passive investments in funds and in private and venture stage companies, some compliance work, and managing the office move from one office to another. She had a very good gig as she was highly paid, only had to go into the office three days a week, and could work from anywhere during the summer. Once my nephew showed up and started to investigate what was going on, she likely concluded that there was a reasonable possibility she would be terminated, as her job was in the too-easy-and-to-good-to-be-true category. The problem was that she was not in a protected class due to her race, age or sexual identity so she had to construct the basis for a claim. While she is female and could in theory bring a gender-based discrimination claim, she reported to the president who is female and to whom she is very close, which makes it difficult for her to bring a harassment claim against her former boss. When my nephew complimented a TABLE employee at lunch about how young she looked – in response to saying she was going to her 40-year-old sister’s birthday party, he said ‘she must be your older sister’ – Ronda immediately reported it to our external HR lawyer. She thereby began building her case. The other problem for Ronda bringing a claim is that she was terminated alongside 30% of other TABLE employees as part of a restructuring so it is very difficult for her to say that she was targeted in her termination or was retaliated against. TABLE is now hiring an external fractional general counsel as that is all the company needs to process the relatively limited amount of legal work we do internally. In short, Ronda was eminently qualified and capable and did her job. She was just too much horsepower for what is largely an administrative legal role so she had to come up with something else to bring a claim. Now Ronda knew I was a good target and it was a good time to bring a claim against me. She also knew that I was under a lot of pressure because on March 4th when Ronda was terminated, my daughter had not yet emerged from consciousness, she was not yet breathing on her own, and my daughter and we were fighting for her life. I was and remain deeply engaged in her recovery while at the same time I was working on finishing the closing for the private placement round for my upcoming IPO. Ronda also knew that publicity about supposed gender discrimination and a “hostile and unsafe work environment” are not things that a CEO of a company about to go public wants to have released into the media. And she may have thought that the nearly $2 million she was asking for would be considered small in the context of the reputational damage a lawsuit could cause, regardless of the fact that two years of severance was an absurd amount for an employee who had only worked at TABLE for 30 months. She also likely considered that I wouldn’t want to embarrass my nephew by dragging him into the klieg lights when her claims emerged publicly. So, in summary, game theory would say that I would certainly settle this case, for why would I risk negative publicity at a time when I was preparing our company to go public and also risk embarrassing my nephew. Notably, she hired a Silicon Valley law firm, rather than a typical NY employment firm. This struck me as interesting as her husband works for one of the most prominent Silicon Valley venture firms whose CEO, I am sure, has no tolerance for these kinds of fake claims that sadly many venture-backed companies also have to deal with. I mention this as I suspect her husband likely has been working with her on the strategy for squeezing me as, in addition to being a computer scientist, he is a game theorist. My only advice for him is to understand more about your opponent before you launch your first move. All of the above said, gender, race, LGBTQ and other such discrimination is a real thing. Many people have been harmed and deserve compensation for this discrimination, and these companies and individuals should be punished for engaging in such behavior. Which brings me to the advice I am seeking from the X community. I am not planning to follow the typical path and settle this ‘claim.’ Rather, I am going to fight this nonsense to the end of the earth in the hope that it inspires other CEOs to do the same so we shut down this despicable behavior that is a large tax on society, employment, and the economy and contributes to workplace discrimination rather than reducing it. Do you agree or disagree that this is the right approach?

@Polymarket Wow, the globalists got betrayed by China and now they get betrayed by America. Who do they have left? A whole bunch of weak countries run by anti-nationalist.

JUST IN: French President Macron calls on medium-sized powers to “join forces and stand up” to the U.S. & China.

@theobjectivist Reading the biography of Howard Hughes. He was extraordinarily wealthy but he got syphilis back before antibiotics and it slowly drove him insane. Today we can live the life of Howard and not have to worry about that stuff. Even AIDS is preventable with the latest drugs.

The average American today lives better than John D. Rockefeller did in 1926. That is not an exaggeration. It is a fact. Rockefeller could not fly across the country in five hours. You can for $200. He could not video call his family from another continent. You do it for free. He had no antibiotics, no MRI, no air conditioning in July. He could not carry every book ever written in his pocket. You are reading this on a device that does all of that and more. Americans throw away 30-40% of their food. Not because they are wasteful, but because food is so abundant that waste is affordable. Your car has climate control, navigation, and safety systems that did not exist at any price a century ago. Your home has heating, cooling, refrigeration, and entertainment that emperors could not have imagined. None of this was voted into existence. None of it was redistributed from the rich. It was created by free minds operating in what remains of a free market. Every comfort you enjoy today is the product of a man who thought, invented, produced, and traded voluntarily. This is what the remnants of capitalism still deliver, even while it is being dismantled. Imagine what a fully free society could build.

@Ken_LoveTW Nobody remembers the Second Chechen war? Or Gaza?

The Iran Guerrilla War Myth Everyone Keeps Repeating I keep hearing this argument that Iran could trap the U.S. in a Vietnam-style guerrilla war, and honestly, it collapses the moment you think it through. Guerrilla warfare is not just about mountains or terrain. It’s about people. In Vietnam, the government armed civilians and turned the entire population into a support network. Fish survive because of water, and in war, the people are that water. Now look at Iran. This is a regime that has repeatedly used live ammunition against its own citizens during protests. Reports over the past few years suggest thousands have been killed or detained in crackdowns, and millions have taken to the streets despite the risks. You expect that same government to suddenly hand out weapons to the public and trust them in a national crisis? That’s like handing matches to a room full of people you’ve been locking inside for years. The reality is simple. A government that fears its own people will never arm them. Iran’s leadership understands that the bigger threat isn’t foreign invasion, it’s internal collapse. If weapons were widely distributed, many wouldn’t be pointed outward. They would be pointed inward at the regime itself. So when people talk about Iran fighting a prolonged guerrilla war, they are focusing on geography and missiles while ignoring the most important variable in any conflict. Loyalty. Without it, even the best terrain in the world is just empty land.

@Ken_LoveTW Nobody remembers the Second Chechen war? That was basically flatten Chechnya with bombs and then install your favorite puppet and leave. People have the memory of goldfishes. theguardian.com/world/1999/nov…

the Iran war could represent an unprecedented form of warfare in human history. For decades, victory meant one thing: occupy the capital, control the country, plant your flag. That was the logic from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. But those wars also proved something else. Occupation is expensive, slow, and politically unsustainable. Now the playbook is changing. President Trump is signaling a new model: destroy the threat, then leave. No occupation. No nation-building. Just precise, overwhelming strikes on what actually keeps a modern state functioning—power grids, energy systems, communications, and transport. In today’s world, electricity is everything. Take that away, and a country doesn’t just weaken, it stops working. Cities grind to a halt. Hospitals fail. Supply chains collapse. Internal unrest becomes inevitable. This is a fundamental shift. War is no longer about controlling land. It’s about disabling systems. Minimal troops. Maximum impact. If this model works, it won’t just reshape one conflict. It will redefine how wars are fought going forward.

@AngryBritbong @zriboua Putin smashed Chechnya to smithereens and killed 10s of thousands of civilians and they stayed conquered even with old Russian tech. People have the memory of goldfishes. theguardian.com/world/1999/nov…

@undeservingfut @zriboua Except the US has increased the likelihood of them getting a nuke. They've achieved the sqaure root of fuck all with this inane "war".

My assessment: 1- IRGC made a bet. And the bet was that they would keep the pressure on the Strait of Hormuz, and set the market on fire, as it would be the easiest way to make Trump think twice, withdraw, TACO, or have Gulf countries turn against Trump. But it didn’t work. It won’t work militarily or just in general. UAE is joining the war in a more proactive manner, Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi are also more eager now than ever. Qataris have completely switched against the IRGC. But also, Trump himself said "I don’t care about the strait" obviously meaning that others should join the fight, but he denied to IRGC its strategic value. Which absolutely sucks for them given how they are pissing off their own partners, China mainly. The goal of every single military operation is to either enhance posture or change the calculus of your enemy in a way that favors you, blocking the strait isn’t achieving that for them. 2- IRGC thought that Trump given that he kept on saying that "it’s going fast" that dragging and delaying discussions or surrender to Trump’s demands, they would buy time. But they don’t understand that it’s a war, you can’t buy time when you’re being hit at the core of your command and control and your units aren’t being replenished. I’m not sure if they are delusional or if they are in a state of denial and my understanding is that it’s the latter because they constantly underestimate US resolve just like they underestimated Israel last year. 3- Trump, if you haven’t noticed, is ready to escalate, it’s a problem for IRGC because they are so used to being the ones who set the tempo of escalations, (see Iran-Israel April 2025) U.S. options have widened so much compared to just a weak ago. In other words, doesn’t look good for them. They made too many enemies and too fast.

@ChristianHeiens Leftists optimize everything toward the accumulation of unlimited power. They always dispose of all the useful idiots once they gain power.

The strength of Leftism is how it’s able to silo off each of its various subcauses when necessary. These people simultaneously argue that America is an illegitimate white settler-colonial state built on stolen land and that anyone in the world can enter this country illegally, have a kid, and that child automatically has a “birthright” to it. How do you have a birthright to something that was originally stolen? You don’t. But this internal contradiction is not a problem for the Left because the movements are both in service of the eternal progressive omnicause. So the ACLU lawyers in the Supreme Court chamber arguing that foreign agents of a nation at war with America can claim birthright citizenship for their children if they illegally enter the country never find themselves having to do battle with woke protestors in the streets calling for the decolonization of America itself because both groups recognize each other as friends, not enemies.