[…] the world I’m living in, which increasingly resembles the backstory from a dystopian 1970s SF novel in which two-fisted billionaires colonize space in order to get away from the degenerate second-hander rabble downstairs who want to survive their John W. Campbell-allocated banquet of natural disasters. Notwithstanding the world being on fire, an ongoing global pandemic vascular disease that is being systematically ignored by governments, Nazis popping out of the woodwork everywhere, actual no-shit fractional trillionaires trying to colonize space in order to secede from the rest of the human species, an ongoing European war that keeps threatening to drag NATO into conflict with the rotting zombie core of the former USSR, and an impending bubble collapse that’s going to make 2000 and 2008 look like storms in a teacup… I’m calling this the pivotal year of our times, just as 1968 was the pivotal year of the post-1945 system, for a number of reasons.
— Charles Stross (Oct. 17, 2025) https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2025/10/the-pivot-1.html
Category: Current Affairs
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The world right now is like a dystopian 1970s SF novel
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U.S. Threatens to Invade Greenland
How will we be talking about this in a week? In a month? In a year? Nothing seems predictable anymore, as Anthony says in this clip. The U.S. isn’t playing by the rules anymore, so why should anyone else? Who will stop them? (Via Silent Middle Child on YouTube.)
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The final, chaotic days of a political era
The second Trump administration has exposed the lie of Reaganomics, as well as the rot at the heart of an administration dedicated to the idea that some people are better than others. It has also shown the ridiculous cultlike behavior of those who adhere to that idea.
— Heather Cox Richardson, https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-19-2025
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Aaand Stay Out!
When a strategy elevates one man’s ego over institutional continuity, decisions become less about national goals and more about personal narratives. That’s dangerous.
Why almost no one talked about this…
Because that’s how this administration works: loud chaos on the surface, quiet architecture underneath.
The daily noise—the insults, the theatrics, the manufactured conflicts—keeps the country chasing outrage while the structural shifts slide through unnoticed.
This NSS is one of those shifts. It’s the operating system everything else will run on:
- migration crackdowns
- hemispheric militarization
- weakened alliances
- far-right transatlantic alignment
- sidelining climate
- expanded executive authority
This is the operating system beneath the spectacle.
— Olivia of Troye, I’ve Sat in the Rooms Where These Are Written. This One Stunned Me.
“Statue of Perfidy” illustration by David Rowe, 2025
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Evict Ken Sim
We didn’t exactly evict him, but our right-wing bitcoin-obsessed mayor lost big time at the recent by-election in Vancouver. I created this animation for Sean Orr (a leftist Socialist!) and he won! By a landslide!
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This is What a Digital Coup Looks Like
“We are watching the collapse of the international order in real time, and this is just the start,” says investigative journalist Carole Cadwalladr. In a searing talk, she details a fast-moving technological coup and the rise of the “broligarchy”: an unprecedentedly powerful class of tech executives (like Elon Musk) who are complicit in dismantling democracy and enabling authoritarian control across the world. She shares a guide on how to digitally disobey in this age of runaway corporate power, data harvesting and mass surveillance — and reminds you that you have more power than you think.
(Recorded at TED2025 on April 8, 2025)
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How to Survive The Broligarchy
Here’s where we are right now in history. Great stuff from Carole Cadwalladr, the journalist who broke the story about Cambridge Analytica years ago (sucks she’s on Substack though). The best line is this: “The United States is Your Enemy” and it couldn’t be more true right now.
