"the scientist who uses his expertise to legitimize fundamentally anti-human policies while maintaining the fiction that he’s simply following the data."
If there's any policy that's fundamentally anti-human while its defenders claim they're "simply following the data", it's eugenics. Calling autism spectrum disorders "a dire threat to the American people and our way of life" brings to mind the comments of Hans Asperger on the victims he sent to be slaughtered at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, and how he defended his participation in that atrocity as looking out for the best interests of the people as a whole.
"Severe personality disorder (post–encephalic?): very severe motor retardation; erethic idiocy; epileptic seizures. The child is an unbearable burden at home for her mother, who has five healthy children to care for. A permanent placement in seems absolutely necessary." (Two months later, she died, with the official cause of death being pneumonia.)
"In the new Germany, we took on new responsibilities in addition to our old ones. To the task of helping the individual patient is added the great obligation to promote the health of the people [], which is more than the well–being of the individual. I need not add to the enormous amount of dedicated work done in terms of affirmative action and support. But we all know that we must also take restrictive measures. Just as the physician must often make painful incisions during the treatment of individuals, we must also make incisions in the national body [], out of a sense of responsibility: we must make sure that those patients who would pass on their diseases to distant generations, to the detriment of the individual and of the Volk, are prevented from passing on their diseased hereditary material."
What really disturbs me is that I've even seen some folks on the left, no doubt thinking themselves very high-minded and humanist, screeching about how they would advise anyone with an impairing hereditary medical condition (including themselves; I see this from people who themselves have hereditary medical conditions) not to have children so as not to inflict their condition on their progeny; it is not a very large step from that to implementing a formal government program of eugenics, because how can you object to a program designed to prevent people with impairing hereditary medical conditions from passing those on? (It's a pattern seen with, say, abortion, where pro-choice activists would say that they want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare", with the last generally intended to mean implementing measures that would ameliorate economic and social issues around childbirth and child-rearing, and then pro-life activists would push for heavy restrictions on abortion that would certainly make it rare and then feign surprise when the pro-choice activists would object to those restrictions because they made abortion so difficult to get that people wishing to terminate their pregnancy would turn to means that were unsafe and less than legal.)
Go back to the mid-20th century and male homosexuality was considered highly dysgenic. (Of all the groups the Nazis persecuted in the Holocaust, gay men were left to serve their sentences after the war's end and were not compensated for their suffering, because unlike being Jewish or Romani or even a communist, being a gay man was a criminal offence in most if not all of the Allied countries; not only that, but if you want a straight comparison to what we are seeing now, one of the earliest Nazi book burnings was at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin which was researching treatments for transgender people, most if not all of said research being lost in the conflagration, and the Nazis lumped transgender women in with gay men in the Holocaust, making them one of the earliest groups to suffer Nazi oppression despite Weimar Germany's thriving trans community.) It didn't matter that Alan Turing's work was vital to winning the war and developing modern computing as we know it; he was a gay man, and the UK government effectively murdered him for it by forcing him to accept chemical castration, which led him to commit suicide not long after. A dedicated program of eugenics would've mercilessly culled a key figure in the invention of modern computing without any regard to the contributions he could make.
(Even now I've seen defenders of eugenics claim that the Nazis' real mistake was including Jews in their program of extermination, since Jews are generally more intelligent on average and so obviously should be part of any "superior" human genetic mix, to which I can only drop my jaw in disbelief at the arrogance of thinking that surely this time we'd have it right about what mix of genes will produce "superior" humans.)
Thank you for watching and reporting on the "All-In Podcast" so I don't have to! Your in-depth analysis of these vile and revolting, so-called "elite" characters is spot on! It is hard to think of men engaged in something eviler than what these depraved men are doing. What they are doing and how they are doing it is absolutely, undeniably and unequivocally EVIL. And they must know it. I don't see how they could delude themselves to the extent that they do not see this. I think they are nihilists, who simply do not care. Perhaps some of them even take evil delight in harming and killing people to achieve their ends. It would not surprise me, because history is replete with sadists, from the Marquis de Sade to Joseph Mengele, to the "priests" of the Spanish Inquisition. And many of these same ideological adherents (Nazis, ultra-reactionary Catholics and fundamentalist evangelical Protestants and the corporate-investor backers of these villainous agents) are in evidence today. Sadly, we have added billionaires, created by ongoing massive economic inequality, to this deadly mix.
Their discussion of the Israel-Iran conflict where they "treat warfare not as human tragedy but as investment opportunity and entertainment content" mimics the Fox (not) News model. "They discuss “bunker buster bombs” and nuclear facilities with the same energy they brought to tequila marketing." I could not agree more with you that "This is war porn—the fetishization of violence by people who will never experience its consequences."
You really nailed it with this observation: "These are not good men making difficult choices in complex times. These are not serious thinkers grappling with genuine moral dilemmas. These are moral parasites who have discovered that there is considerable money in packaging sociopathy as insight, nihilism as wisdom, and the destruction of democratic civilization as entertainment content." QED. Jim Stewartson has also been writing cogently about many of these people and about this grotesque phenomenon for many years on his "Mind War" Substack in a brave attempt to wake people up to what is being done to us, before it is too late to save what is left of our fragile democracy and fractured rule of law.
I don't know how we extricate ourselves from this sociopathy they are promoting and selling to their ill-informed, intellectually and morally challenged audience. As you correctly point out, "This isn’t accidental. This is the deliberate cultivation of moral detachment as a marketable aesthetic. They’ve discovered that their audience doesn’t want serious analysis—they want the performance of seriousness by people wealthy enough to be above consequence. They want to feel sophisticated about supporting policies that will destroy other people’s lives, as long as those policies are discussed with enough ironic detachment and expensive props."
As long as it "owns the libs", apparently, anything goes with this crowd. This is truly a "Circus", but one that is chilling, appalling and very deadly. But as long as they can keep their cult 'entertained' while these "elite" sociopathic psychopaths sack our modern-day Rome, that is all that matters to them.
Andrzej Łobaczewski made a central and disturbing claim in Political Ponerology: when psychopaths rise to positions of political power, over time, the society they rule begins to psychologically adapt to them—often by unconsciously adopting their distorted moral reasoning, emotional numbness, and manipulative behavior.
Here’s a focused breakdown of what he said on this topic:
⸻
🔹 1. Society Adopts the Psychopathic Norm
Łobaczewski observed that in a pathocracy, normal moral standards are slowly redefined to reflect the pathological worldview of the ruling elite. Over time:
• Lie becomes truth, and truth becomes dangerous.
• Empathy, integrity, and independent thought are punished or ridiculed.
• The language of the ruling class (full of euphemism and doublethink) becomes internalized by the population.
• People begin to self-censor and mimic behaviors they privately abhor in order to survive or advance.
“In a pathocracy, the structure of the government, law, and even the social customs come to reflect the cognitive and emotional limitations of its psychopathic elite.”
⸻
🔹 2. “Reverse Selection” of Elites
• As the system becomes dominated by psychopaths and other pathological personalities, it starts to select for similar individuals in lower levels of government, media, education, and business.
• Normal, ethical individuals are seen as a threat and are gradually marginalized or purged.
• This creates a self-reinforcing loop, where the most ruthless and deceitful rise, and those with conscience are sidelined.
“The greatest danger arises not from the psychopaths at the top, but from those in the middle and lower ranks who begin to adopt their style and worldview in order to survive.”
⸻
🔹 3. Pathocracy’s Need for Social Conversion
Łobaczewski described how pathocracies require a critical mass of collaborators or corrupted individuals to function smoothly. This is often achieved through:
• Propaganda, education, and media manipulation.
• Economic or professional incentives to act against conscience.
• Fear and coercion to discourage dissent.
Eventually, a significant portion of the population—though not necessarily pathological themselves—begin to behave as if they were, due to indoctrination, adaptation, or survival strategy.
This is pure and utter detachment from reality. These fucking a-holes are the reason humanity is uncultured and devolving into some sort of frat-party-reality-show-bullshit. Absolutely ZERO class!
sacks & chamath have made a not insubstantial percentage of their net worth by making sure drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and rogue nuclear states have access to banking services.
As Gary of Gary’s Economics fame says as economies collapse , generally speaking people do crazy shit (not a direct quote BTW) I’m not excusing the behaviour of the dreadful people you’re describing but with their extremely limited world view and their literal brainwashing by unfettered capitalism how did you expect them to act?
Readers should listen to the same All-In podcast that Mike did because they will interpret it very differently, even if you end up equally critical of the hosts. This is not good vs. evil, which is the author's framing. This analytical lens is way too simplistic. The kind of rational calculations the author considers immoral / evil are exactly the kind of calculations that leaders have to make all the time. Take the example of bombing the nuclear facilities. Is that obviously immoral / evil? Might Israel have fought a much longer war - with more civilian casualties - if we hadn't bombed them as precisely? Is it not strange that US presidents pre-trump all argued that Iran must never have nuclear weapons, and yet they let Iran continue to inch toward nuclear weapons even though Iran pretty clearly had no intention to stick to the "civilian uses" only claim? Must they couch their analysis in the language of empathy and human rights to be moral or legit? I think they were genuinely shocked at how effective the bombing / ceasefire seems to have been, and were a little giddy. Weren't a lot of us a bit stunned, irrespective of our wealth or partisan affiliation? My point is not to defend the podcast gang. They certainly have their moral blind spots. And Sachs and Chamath don't seem to realize how much and cringe-ily they come across as shills for the administration. But these are very normal human beings (perhaps a bit smarter than average) trying to make sense of a very messy world given their very limited experiences. Is that good vs. evil or just human, all too human? I guess I'm just not sure what Mike accomplishes by abandoning persuasion for a trust-me, blanket denunciation.
"the scientist who uses his expertise to legitimize fundamentally anti-human policies while maintaining the fiction that he’s simply following the data."
This reminded me that the current government of the United States has decided to Make Eugenics Great Again: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/establishing-the-presidents-make-america-healthy-again-commission/
If there's any policy that's fundamentally anti-human while its defenders claim they're "simply following the data", it's eugenics. Calling autism spectrum disorders "a dire threat to the American people and our way of life" brings to mind the comments of Hans Asperger on the victims he sent to be slaughtered at the Am Spiegelgrund clinic in Vienna, and how he defended his participation in that atrocity as looking out for the best interests of the people as a whole.
"Severe personality disorder (post–encephalic?): very severe motor retardation; erethic idiocy; epileptic seizures. The child is an unbearable burden at home for her mother, who has five healthy children to care for. A permanent placement in seems absolutely necessary." (Two months later, she died, with the official cause of death being pneumonia.)
"In the new Germany, we took on new responsibilities in addition to our old ones. To the task of helping the individual patient is added the great obligation to promote the health of the people [], which is more than the well–being of the individual. I need not add to the enormous amount of dedicated work done in terms of affirmative action and support. But we all know that we must also take restrictive measures. Just as the physician must often make painful incisions during the treatment of individuals, we must also make incisions in the national body [], out of a sense of responsibility: we must make sure that those patients who would pass on their diseases to distant generations, to the detriment of the individual and of the Volk, are prevented from passing on their diseased hereditary material."
What really disturbs me is that I've even seen some folks on the left, no doubt thinking themselves very high-minded and humanist, screeching about how they would advise anyone with an impairing hereditary medical condition (including themselves; I see this from people who themselves have hereditary medical conditions) not to have children so as not to inflict their condition on their progeny; it is not a very large step from that to implementing a formal government program of eugenics, because how can you object to a program designed to prevent people with impairing hereditary medical conditions from passing those on? (It's a pattern seen with, say, abortion, where pro-choice activists would say that they want abortion to be "safe, legal and rare", with the last generally intended to mean implementing measures that would ameliorate economic and social issues around childbirth and child-rearing, and then pro-life activists would push for heavy restrictions on abortion that would certainly make it rare and then feign surprise when the pro-choice activists would object to those restrictions because they made abortion so difficult to get that people wishing to terminate their pregnancy would turn to means that were unsafe and less than legal.)
Go back to the mid-20th century and male homosexuality was considered highly dysgenic. (Of all the groups the Nazis persecuted in the Holocaust, gay men were left to serve their sentences after the war's end and were not compensated for their suffering, because unlike being Jewish or Romani or even a communist, being a gay man was a criminal offence in most if not all of the Allied countries; not only that, but if you want a straight comparison to what we are seeing now, one of the earliest Nazi book burnings was at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin which was researching treatments for transgender people, most if not all of said research being lost in the conflagration, and the Nazis lumped transgender women in with gay men in the Holocaust, making them one of the earliest groups to suffer Nazi oppression despite Weimar Germany's thriving trans community.) It didn't matter that Alan Turing's work was vital to winning the war and developing modern computing as we know it; he was a gay man, and the UK government effectively murdered him for it by forcing him to accept chemical castration, which led him to commit suicide not long after. A dedicated program of eugenics would've mercilessly culled a key figure in the invention of modern computing without any regard to the contributions he could make.
(Even now I've seen defenders of eugenics claim that the Nazis' real mistake was including Jews in their program of extermination, since Jews are generally more intelligent on average and so obviously should be part of any "superior" human genetic mix, to which I can only drop my jaw in disbelief at the arrogance of thinking that surely this time we'd have it right about what mix of genes will produce "superior" humans.)
Thank you for watching and reporting on the "All-In Podcast" so I don't have to! Your in-depth analysis of these vile and revolting, so-called "elite" characters is spot on! It is hard to think of men engaged in something eviler than what these depraved men are doing. What they are doing and how they are doing it is absolutely, undeniably and unequivocally EVIL. And they must know it. I don't see how they could delude themselves to the extent that they do not see this. I think they are nihilists, who simply do not care. Perhaps some of them even take evil delight in harming and killing people to achieve their ends. It would not surprise me, because history is replete with sadists, from the Marquis de Sade to Joseph Mengele, to the "priests" of the Spanish Inquisition. And many of these same ideological adherents (Nazis, ultra-reactionary Catholics and fundamentalist evangelical Protestants and the corporate-investor backers of these villainous agents) are in evidence today. Sadly, we have added billionaires, created by ongoing massive economic inequality, to this deadly mix.
Their discussion of the Israel-Iran conflict where they "treat warfare not as human tragedy but as investment opportunity and entertainment content" mimics the Fox (not) News model. "They discuss “bunker buster bombs” and nuclear facilities with the same energy they brought to tequila marketing." I could not agree more with you that "This is war porn—the fetishization of violence by people who will never experience its consequences."
You really nailed it with this observation: "These are not good men making difficult choices in complex times. These are not serious thinkers grappling with genuine moral dilemmas. These are moral parasites who have discovered that there is considerable money in packaging sociopathy as insight, nihilism as wisdom, and the destruction of democratic civilization as entertainment content." QED. Jim Stewartson has also been writing cogently about many of these people and about this grotesque phenomenon for many years on his "Mind War" Substack in a brave attempt to wake people up to what is being done to us, before it is too late to save what is left of our fragile democracy and fractured rule of law.
I don't know how we extricate ourselves from this sociopathy they are promoting and selling to their ill-informed, intellectually and morally challenged audience. As you correctly point out, "This isn’t accidental. This is the deliberate cultivation of moral detachment as a marketable aesthetic. They’ve discovered that their audience doesn’t want serious analysis—they want the performance of seriousness by people wealthy enough to be above consequence. They want to feel sophisticated about supporting policies that will destroy other people’s lives, as long as those policies are discussed with enough ironic detachment and expensive props."
As long as it "owns the libs", apparently, anything goes with this crowd. This is truly a "Circus", but one that is chilling, appalling and very deadly. But as long as they can keep their cult 'entertained' while these "elite" sociopathic psychopaths sack our modern-day Rome, that is all that matters to them.
Andrzej Łobaczewski made a central and disturbing claim in Political Ponerology: when psychopaths rise to positions of political power, over time, the society they rule begins to psychologically adapt to them—often by unconsciously adopting their distorted moral reasoning, emotional numbness, and manipulative behavior.
Here’s a focused breakdown of what he said on this topic:
⸻
🔹 1. Society Adopts the Psychopathic Norm
Łobaczewski observed that in a pathocracy, normal moral standards are slowly redefined to reflect the pathological worldview of the ruling elite. Over time:
• Lie becomes truth, and truth becomes dangerous.
• Empathy, integrity, and independent thought are punished or ridiculed.
• The language of the ruling class (full of euphemism and doublethink) becomes internalized by the population.
• People begin to self-censor and mimic behaviors they privately abhor in order to survive or advance.
“In a pathocracy, the structure of the government, law, and even the social customs come to reflect the cognitive and emotional limitations of its psychopathic elite.”
⸻
🔹 2. “Reverse Selection” of Elites
• As the system becomes dominated by psychopaths and other pathological personalities, it starts to select for similar individuals in lower levels of government, media, education, and business.
• Normal, ethical individuals are seen as a threat and are gradually marginalized or purged.
• This creates a self-reinforcing loop, where the most ruthless and deceitful rise, and those with conscience are sidelined.
“The greatest danger arises not from the psychopaths at the top, but from those in the middle and lower ranks who begin to adopt their style and worldview in order to survive.”
⸻
🔹 3. Pathocracy’s Need for Social Conversion
Łobaczewski described how pathocracies require a critical mass of collaborators or corrupted individuals to function smoothly. This is often achieved through:
• Propaganda, education, and media manipulation.
• Economic or professional incentives to act against conscience.
• Fear and coercion to discourage dissent.
Eventually, a significant portion of the population—though not necessarily pathological themselves—begin to behave as if they were, due to indoctrination, adaptation, or survival strategy.
End ChatGBT
This is pure and utter detachment from reality. These fucking a-holes are the reason humanity is uncultured and devolving into some sort of frat-party-reality-show-bullshit. Absolutely ZERO class!
Well said!
The "Circus" is beginning to be the Roman Circus keeping us entertained while the elite sack Rome.
Excellent. Time to start making those connections for people. Keep going.
sacks & chamath have made a not insubstantial percentage of their net worth by making sure drug traffickers, sanctions evaders, and rogue nuclear states have access to banking services.
https://cryptadamus.substack.com/p/of-tech-bros-and-trumpers
It's so frustrating these ass hats have an audience a topless Tiktocker would be proud of. Meanwhile we have 119 little hearts.
As Gary of Gary’s Economics fame says as economies collapse , generally speaking people do crazy shit (not a direct quote BTW) I’m not excusing the behaviour of the dreadful people you’re describing but with their extremely limited world view and their literal brainwashing by unfettered capitalism how did you expect them to act?
Thank you.
I'm believing them. Thanks for scouting for the rest of us. I'm thinking of you these days like I think about Merriwether Lewis in dystopia.
These guys sound like Guardians of Decay, as so brilliantly described by Mark McGrath on this platform
Readers should listen to the same All-In podcast that Mike did because they will interpret it very differently, even if you end up equally critical of the hosts. This is not good vs. evil, which is the author's framing. This analytical lens is way too simplistic. The kind of rational calculations the author considers immoral / evil are exactly the kind of calculations that leaders have to make all the time. Take the example of bombing the nuclear facilities. Is that obviously immoral / evil? Might Israel have fought a much longer war - with more civilian casualties - if we hadn't bombed them as precisely? Is it not strange that US presidents pre-trump all argued that Iran must never have nuclear weapons, and yet they let Iran continue to inch toward nuclear weapons even though Iran pretty clearly had no intention to stick to the "civilian uses" only claim? Must they couch their analysis in the language of empathy and human rights to be moral or legit? I think they were genuinely shocked at how effective the bombing / ceasefire seems to have been, and were a little giddy. Weren't a lot of us a bit stunned, irrespective of our wealth or partisan affiliation? My point is not to defend the podcast gang. They certainly have their moral blind spots. And Sachs and Chamath don't seem to realize how much and cringe-ily they come across as shills for the administration. But these are very normal human beings (perhaps a bit smarter than average) trying to make sense of a very messy world given their very limited experiences. Is that good vs. evil or just human, all too human? I guess I'm just not sure what Mike accomplishes by abandoning persuasion for a trust-me, blanket denunciation.
https://substack.com/@mikebrock/note/c-130300734?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=1xag6