Charlie StrossNew blog entry: More in Sadness than in Anger: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2026/02/more-in-sadness-than-in-anger.html
Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.
Michael Newton@[email protected] I don't actually know the context of the emails, but from the quote it does seem that the exact wording is both second hand and ambiguous; is it the poorness that is suppose to go away, or the people?
Not that I'm feeling generous enough to the people involved to assume the nicer option, but I'd feel dirty to not at least acknowledge both exist.
Charlie Stross (@[email protected])
48.7K Posts, 1.64K Following, 28.2K Followers · Scottish resident SF/F author (he/him/they/them). Three times Hugo Award winner, 30+ novels in print. Does not play well with Nazis. Abolish the monarchy! Born in a world with 320ppm atmospheric CO2, 3.3 billion people. @cstross.bsky.social on Bluesky blog at: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/ FOLLOW REQUESTS: don't expect a reciprocal follow. And I will reject requests from folks with no profile and/or no tooting history.
gjm@cstross I wouldn't put anything past Epstein, but Gates has given enough evidence of somewhat-benevolent intentions that I'd at least _consider_ the possibility that he just picked a very bad way of saying "how do we get rid of _poverty_?".
I too would like a world in which there are no poor people, provided we can get there by making the currently-poor people not-poor and stopping new people becoming poor, rather than killing existing poor people and preventing anyone being born who might turn out poor.
(Of course there might be elements of both. It could be that Gates genuinely wants to eliminate poverty but some bit of his brain wants to do it because poor people are an untidy nuisance rather than to benefit those people, and sometimes that leaks out into his words, and all that could be true even if he wouldn't ever actually go for mass murder as the, er, final solution to the problem of poverty.)
Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE
That Mitchell and Webb Look - Kill All The Poor
JavierGates is personally, actively evil on a scale seldom seen. He's responsible of millions of deaths during the pandemic, and the sequestering of lots of pharmaceutical advances that used to be freely discussed between research laboratories.
Willing to kill every poor person aligns perfectly with his history.
mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)@atax1a @javierg @cstross Noted. Is there some analysis somewhere of how that allegedly makes him responsible for millions of deaths?
(I can imagine how it might. I can also imagine how it might have been the actually-most-effective course of action but spinnable as responsible for millions of deaths by people who want to make him look bad. I can also imagine how it might be very impossible to determine whether what he did was actually good or bad either in expectation or in actual effects, which seems to me the most likely situation.)
[EDITED to add:] A bit of casual web-searching didn't turn up anything super-obvious but did produce e.g. this https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/gates-foundation-donates-70-million-to-covid/ which for all I know may have been a poorly-directed donation or one where donating more would have done a lot of good but, well, I know _I_ didn't donate any number of millions to anything related to COVID vaccines and it seems like if Gates wanted everyone to die he could just have, like, not done that.
@gjm this does not appear to be a question in good faith so we're outta here
@atax1a Obviously you're under no obligation to answer any questions, nor to believe anything I say, but for what it's worth it was absolutely a question in good faith. I don't know exactly what Gates did and didn't do, it sounds like you know more than me, I had a bit of a look and didn't find anything definitive, and I'd like to know more.
@gjm and we have better things to do with our morning
more recent ref: "In the 2000s, the Gates Foundation blocked South Africa from procuring the anti-retroviral AIDS drugs it was entitled to under the WTO's TRIPS agreement. The Gates Foundation blocked the Access to Medicines WIPO treaty, which would have vastly expanded the Global South's ability to manufacture life-saving drugs."
pzmyers 🕷
Graydon@cstross I think there's an unusual degree of cognitive dissonance between the cultural (money = virtue), the propaganda (Gates spends on his image), and the "exceptionally terrible even considering" reality.
It would be nice to be able to believe these people with such vast and august power weren't ethically deficient by the standards of your common-or-garden city-burning slave-taking barbarian.
John
Thad@cstross I think most everybody thought Gates was terrible by the turn of the century, which is why he's spent 25 years and tens of billions of dollars convincing people he's actually a philanthropist.
And it was working out pretty well for him up until all the sex pest/Epstein buddy stuff caught up with him. @pzmyers @javierg
fraggle@cstross @pzmyers @javierg @gjm I don't know if anyone else saw it, but there was a miniseries on Netflix (I think) a few years back about Bill Gates' various philanthropic efforts, each episode about a different one
It only took until about the second episode for me to realize it was obviously some kind of paid/funded propaganda, it was entirely uncritical. But the funniest part was in the last episode, they must have realised they had to ask at least SOMETHING critical or it would be too obvious it was a puff piece
So the interviewer asks Gates, "what do you say about the fact that none of these projects has actually been successful yet?" and Gates had no good answer to that question at all. I don't even remember what he did say as an answer, possibly because I was laughing too hard
ケレムさん 🏴☠️ イラスト 
The Manchurian Idiot
Eric J
Walter van Holst@cstross So, Mitchell & Webb were prescient? https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE
That Mitchell and Webb Look - Kill All The Poor
Svavar the NeurospicyThe fact that Gates wanted to give his wife STD medication without her knowledge tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's and the tech industry's approach to consent.
skua
Martin Vermeer FCD
MJ Ray@svavar @BrianSmith950 @cstross is that a fact? We've only Epstein's word for it, in drafts not sent to anyone else, haven't we?
Milcom MiasmaAlso explains the uncontested divorce. 😆
Some of us had an idea of what he was back when he ripped off DR DOS.
Source: https://culturacolectiva.com/en/technology/bill-gates-plagiarism-inventions/
Tinkerbellum
GinevraCat@cstross And the thing to understand about being "poor", is that that includes everything up to the very tippy top of upper middle class!!
Callisto@GinevraCat @cstross And that includes "upper middle class" as defined in any reasonable sense of the phrase - having to work for a living, but able to absorb serious medical expenses or extended disability, or take vacations in more pleasant times - which includes, in the USA, anyone with an annual income under around $300K.
@callisto @GinevraCat Yep. The gap between a billionaire and a mere millionaire is vastly bigger than the gap between average-middle-class and a millionaire.
Kayla Allen 🏳️⚧️ 💉x8@cstross @GinevraCat In the county in which I live, I’m theoretically “rich” because I’m in the upper quartile of income here, but people from places like the SF bay area scoff and describe anyone not making multiple millions per year as “poor.”
@cstross @GinevraCat And by “in the upper quartile,” I mean “just barely in it.” So I’m probably around the 75-80%, not the 99%, in a mostly rural county primarily depending upon being a commuter country for Reno.
@KaylaAllen @cstross I wish more people realised how far away they are from billionaires and pushed for better tax on them!
I wish more people realized that if you have to work for a salary—if you can't just decide to retire tomorrow and still have an income in the top 1%—then you are not "rich".
"Rich" is like being Steve Jobs keeping a Gulfstream jet fueled up on the ramp, with crew ready and waiting 24x7 *for nine months*, in case a histocompatible liver came up for transplant at short notice in a neighboring state (they only last a few hours out of the donor body).
HighlandLawyer@cstross
It is the intersection of the degrees of selfishness & foresightedness. If your level of selfishness is "the good of all mankind" you want to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accomodation, etc; if "me and my family" you get traditional aristocratic behaviour; if "me & nobody else" you treat everyone else as objects, which can be disposed of at your whim- mass disposal of the poor on a par with a neat close-cropped lawn.
It is the intersection of the degrees of selfishness & foresightedness. If your level of selfishness is "the good of all mankind" you want to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accomodation, etc; if "me and my family" you get traditional aristocratic behaviour; if "me & nobody else" you treat everyone else as objects, which can be disposed of at your whim- mass disposal of the poor on a par with a neat close-cropped lawn.
lemgandiEnlightened Selfishness: I wish to live free of the fear of starving, freezing, or being shot at. Therefore I wish to eliminate poverty by giving everyone enough food, accommodation, etc.
Medea Vanamonde 🏳️⚧️Nuke the Rich.
Eating them is bad for the collective colon
@MedeaVanamonde @cstross
It's their ideas which are toxic, not their flesh. But if you really want, put them all in a rocket & fire them into a lunar impact with enough velocity to create a crater visible by eye from the Earth, as a warning to future generations.
It's their ideas which are toxic, not their flesh. But if you really want, put them all in a rocket & fire them into a lunar impact with enough velocity to create a crater visible by eye from the Earth, as a warning to future generations.
Dr David Mills@MedeaVanamonde @cstross @HighlandLawyer too many toxins getting into the food supply.
Dissolve them in piranha solution, and use the liquor as chemical feedstock.
Dissolve them in piranha solution, and use the liquor as chemical feedstock.
Darwin Woodka@MedeaVanamonde @HighlandLawyer @cstross
But if we ate one a week I think it would start deterring them
@darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde @cstross
Well let's be fair about this: a national lottery. One person a week is to be sacrificed, drawn by lot; but the number of entries in the lottery is the number of <£$¥€> one has, & that wealth will be returned to the national pot. It could be you, but statistically it's much more likely to be a billionaire.
Well let's be fair about this: a national lottery. One person a week is to be sacrificed, drawn by lot; but the number of entries in the lottery is the number of <£$¥€> one has, & that wealth will be returned to the national pot. It could be you, but statistically it's much more likely to be a billionaire.
@HighlandLawyer @MedeaVanamonde @cstross
I think it might go faster if we just ate the richest one every week though
@darwinwoodka @HighlandLawyer @cstross
Or Sacrifice them to Madame Pele on the Big Island.
@HighlandLawyer @darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde That's going to reap an awful lot of middle-aged/middle-class skulls, though: 3000 middle-aged folks who own average homes (£0.3M each) = one billionaire-equivalent. Might be best to omit the family home from the notional wealth.
@cstross @darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde
Counterpoint- great method to reduce prices in the housing market.
Counterpoint- great method to reduce prices in the housing market.
BashStKid@HighlandLawyer @darwinwoodka @MedeaVanamonde @cstross Well, that’s a better basis for Omelas than the original …
and treating people as objects is sin per Pratchett
Brendan Halpin@cstross Reminiscent of discourse of the London intelligensia at the time of the Irish Famine (Nassau Senior, Economist magazine): the projected population decline was spoken of as highly desirable but likely too small.
Wayward Sun (yak shaver extraordinaire)@cstross I see we're done with light and breezy?
Feòrag
Koochulainn