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.
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