there is a specific, very modern strain of mostly anglosphere protestant christian religion that can hinder intellectual progress. When I say "very modern" I mean within the last 2-300 years. Most of intellectual history in post-Roman Europe is linked to religious institutions. countless philosophers, mathematicians and scientists were clergy or members of religious orders.

The conflict thesis is, at best, a reaction to this modernist milieu and at worst an ahistorical narrative cooked up by 19th century edgelords.

(inb4 "MUH GALLEY LEGO TRIAL!")

I can't help but think that there is a deliberate effort to remove the US from it's position in the global geopolitical arena. And not merely as a by-product of policy decisions but specifically to damage the American reputation.

There is. You can read it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics

Dumpty's loyalty is with whoever will give him the most money and power as a person. Always has been.

Maybe money but clearly not power. The American voting population gave him more power than pretty much anyone in many senses of the word “power,” yet he’s clearly not loyal to the American voting population.

So I think money or wealth is the bigger weight here.

The American voting population was manipulated to give him power. The ones which helped with manipulation are effectively in control.

Or do you think all the wedge issues organically crystallized in voters' minds?..

Also accurate. There is an election coming up. First Tuesday in November. Has been since 1845. After a certain number of votes, it's difficult to deny otherwise. It doesn't have to be for or against anyone. Just needs to be a vote for a better United States of America.

Or he's just... ya'know... stupid.

Accurate observation.

> The book emphasizes that Russia must spread geopolitical anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."

I can’t tell if the world how it is right now in 2026 is the way because this book’s plan went so well, or just dumb luck.

Of course they are, because they are not primarily concerned with the reporting of noteworthy events. They are most worried about profit with the secondary goal of reporting but only insofar as it serves the first goal. This is a wider trend across many industries.

Obviously, a business needs to have an income but it's becoming more common for businesses to function first and foremast as revenue generators and the thing that enables that is only seen as a means to an end. When the quality of the product/service and it's function as a revenue generator diverge, the product/service will always take 2nd chair.

Maybe we could argue that the primary product is the revenue, especially when there are investors involved who are looking for big returns.

More than even that, there is more news being generated than there are 3 inch chimp brains available to digest it all (even with AI busy summerizing everything) or act on it.

There is no media theory of information of what happens when info explodes beyond capacity of the system to consume it. (UN report on Attention Economy says less than 1% is actually consumed by humans)

So media orgs, instead of coming up with one, they just keep mindlessly doing what they know how to do - generate more info. Platforms and corps subsidize this activity for their own interests.

So media orgs have no signal/warped signals of how useless what they are doing is.

Among the countless local and global newspapers etc, either present or recent decades, are there any that you believe were or are primarily concerned with reporting noteworthy news?

When it comes to the companies named here, I would argue that they have shown that reporting isn't even a secondary goal or a goal at all. Journalists don't even make that much money, but they've still gutted newsrooms very thoroughly. I assume that they already have people working on setting up an LLM connected to feeds of press releases, government announcements, public police crime reports, prominent social media accounts, etc. to create a repository of slop they can use (which will bear a vague resesmblance to 'news') without having even one reporter employed. And then they'll try to sell access to that slop feed back to the AI vendor (which hopefully won't buy it).

>Why look at a website when it's all in AI?

well, at least in the case of google, I'm pretty sure that's the point. Or at least, they are doing things that would seem to be moving towards being an oracle with all the answers and not the signpost that points you in the right direction. The destination rather than the gateway.

remember AMP?

Holy cow, I never even thought about that in relation to AMP. It's not a new thing, then.

I suggest a look at the recent economic development of Bangladesh, if you want something less abstract to illustrate the point that the reduction in poverty is very noticeable.

You would think that a great reduction in extreme poverty would give people pause, but it is almost always barely acknowledged. The strange conclusion is that people who tell you they care the most about poverty do not actually care about it in the slightest. It is just a vehicle for their resentment.

Bangladesh's Human Development Index (HDI) has shown a consistent upward trend, reaching 0.685 in the 2023/2024 report, ranking 130th out of 193 countries. It remains in the "Medium Human Development" category, marking a 72.5% increase in HDI value since 1990 due to significant improvements in life expectancy, education, and GNI per capita.

https://data.undp.org/countries-and-territories/BGD

What does that have to do with exploitation?

Wow, in 36 years of scientific and technological progress, life expectancy went up and so did raw economic output?

Again, what does that have to do with exploitation?

This would be more of an indictment if we were closer to the 19th century rather than 5 popes deep into public denouncements of American militarism.

I have a friend who received ibogaine as a treatment, in mexico, for opiate addiction and it is not at all like your average hallucinogenic drug.

for starters, she had to go through cardiac tests before they would even administer the stuff because it can cause serious cardiac symptoms, up to and including death. Somebody in her group was kicked out because they had been using meth the week of the trip (no pun intended). They were telling them that even too much caffeine could increase their risk of cardiac symptoms.

Then the trip itself was like 48 hours and it wasn't a fun trip like acid or mushrooms. The few things she would tell me about were awful, and she still won't talk about most of it almost a decade after the fact.

Some drugs don't need to be caught up in federal approval but ibogaine is absolutely a drug that needs the red tape and all the pomp and circumstance of FDA approval.

But did it work?

as far as I know. She also had to do serious therapy and addiction recovery stuff, so it wasn't like she was magically cured of being addict simply by using ibogaine, in, case that is how my story came off.

There are simply too many candidates and not enough roles to fill and certainly not enough money for research. This is great for the universities but it's awful for grad students and assorted post-grads/docs/whatever. Now you have a bunch of assistant professorships and adjunct spots where you get paid like shit and you have no chance of tenure.

There is nothing an employer likes more than a pool of candidates willing to debase themselves for every morsel and crumb.

There can't be enough roles unless we either grow academia indefinitely or reduce grad school spots to like 1 per tenured faculty

There are too many grad students, is my point. Like, obviously, not all grad students go into academia, but that is the main career track for a graduate degree in a lot of fields.

What I'm saying is that it can't be qualitatively different.

You can't guarantee every IC they will become a manager (which a professor essentially is) in any area and academia is no different. Larger number of students is what allows both the scientific progress and better filtering of potential professors.

this sounds like donning a TNT vest to diffuse a bomb

boy, if we treat it like junk food, things are only going to get worse for some places in the world. The food over here in the states is pretty awful if you aren't paying attention. Sugar in everything, high calorie/low nutrition etc.