iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ukraine should raise money for more drone strikes on those Russian datacenters. Who doesn't hate those bots and the havoc they have caused all over the world with the intensity of thousand suns? If they do already, please post a link in the comments.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Why did Lula fail to rally Brazil? The far-right parties (be it Bolsonaros, AfD, Reform or Le Pen) are not ordinary political parties - they are politically organized crime networks. Meeting them with politics as usual does not work. Their networks and patrons have to be destroyed. Lula didn't.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

Saudi Arabia is the 8th biggest military spender on the planet. They invest in modern western gear, with barely any limits on what they can get their hands on. Their military is massive. And yet they are getting their asses kicked by Houthi tribesmen in flipflops. Why? Because it is a kleptocracy.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

Trump's increasingly unhinged trade war with Canada might be the product mix of idiocy, dementia and narcissism. But consider this: Canada is the biggest supplier of potash, uranium, aluminum, oil and gas to the US. Who else has these things in abundance? Russia. We know Putin has his ear.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 24/08/2026

I've seen it argued that one should not prosecute Trump and Trumpists if they step down, or else future authoritarians will not relinquish power. This is extremely naive. The only reason they keep doing the evil things they do is because they think they can get away with it.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

The rule of criminals for the benefit of criminals. It is truly insane that around a third of the people in the US still support this mafia regime. The right-wing media brainwashing machine is incredibly effective.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Elon Musk is promoting a movie that promotes Anders Behring Breivik style terror attacks. This is after he has been promoting race violence and riots in the UK. And doing nazi salutes. If this is not enough to kick off boycotts and divestments of his companies then what the hell is it going to take?

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 25/05/2026

New substack post about how fascism is not an ideology, it is and has always been a movement for looting: notesbyrandom.substack.com/p/fascism-is...

notesbyrandom.substack.com

Fascism is looting

It is not a movement. It was never an ideology.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

All governments exist between two extremes - the personalist despotism or the institutional rule of law. A personalist regime can last a long time, but it is not stable. It lacks the self-repair mechanisms that only independent institutions with balancing power can provide.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 03/01/2026

What comes to mind right now is that the best book I've read on Venezuela is called "Things are never so bad that they cannot get worse". A leader of a personalist regime always seeks to have no clear successor outside his immediate family. That means once he is removed, the danger is civil war.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Great article by Anne Applebaum on the USA's pivot towards Russia and against the EU. Quote: "This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law."

theatlantic.com

The Longest Suicide Note in American History

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 10/11/2025

I predict “Standing up to Donald Trump didn’t work" is going to go into the history books along with "Peace in our time", except Chamberlain was trying to buy British rearmament time, while Angus King and his cowards-in-arms is buying Trump time to complete his $170 billion personal militia.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 02/11/2025

The current discussion in the US about a third term for Trump just shows how important strict, unambiguous term limits for the highest offices of a country is. Kleptocrat movements are extremely personalist and weak when they must change leader. A one term limit would be much better than two.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 31/10/2025

For a while now I've been trying to understand modern kleptocracies as something other and different than classical fascism. The old fascist regimes seemed so different than the modern grifter networks, but there were also clear similarities. So I took some weeks off to dive into it. A thread.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 21/10/2025

Obviously, when Trump and his henchmen lose power, the new White House ballroom should become a museum of corruption. Just like they turned Yanukovych's obscene luxury mansion in Ukraine into one. What is happening now must be remembered.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

I wrote a longer blog post on how we should turn our migration policy on its head by pursuing win-win outcomes for ordinary people rather than chasing the far-right's talking points: open.substack.com/pub/notesbyr...

open.substack.com

Turning immigration policy on its head

How we got it all wrong

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 18/09/2025

A good article on how academics can be a key part of a restoration of democracy after an authoritarian takeover: donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-social.... A key message here is that it cannot simply be seen as a rollback to the old ways, it must be a dramatic improvement over it.

donmoynihan.substack.com

How social scientists could help to rebuild the federal government

Lessons from my time in the Biden administration

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 17/08/2025

Academics today are paid by the state to teach and to publish papers. I think this is outdated. They should be paid to review papers, organize information, teach, and publish, in that order of priority. For-profit journals need to die - they fragment and disorganize information. We need open access.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 06/08/2025

The current efforts to gerrymander even more in the US is another reminder that voting by districts is a fundamentally broken design. Politicians should not be able to pick their voters, and redistricting commissions are a weak half-way measure. Need proportional representation from all voters.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

There is one cheap trick to prevent an kleptocrats from taking over an established democracy: The one-term limit. They are all extremely personalized movements depending on the authority of their leader. Every time they have taken over an existing democracy, they have needed more than one term.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 26/07/2025

The Epstein backlash shows quite clearly how supporters of kleptocratic movements can be divided into grifters and suckers. The grifters understand that their leaders are lying - and accept this seeing it as a ladder for their own ambitions. The suckers actually believe the lies.

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capitolhunters @capitolhunters.bsky.social · 03/07/2025

Rep. Andy Ogles of TN, who just quietly caved on Trump's bill, is a reminder that dark dirty secrets in politics is a feature, not a bug. A candidate with a hidden crime or sexual shame is a plus - he'll be a compliant tool. 1/

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Anonymous @youranoncentral.bsky.social · 18/06/2025

This Israel - Iran war is really pitting the worst people you know against each other, we've got Israeli influence networks warring with Russian influence networks.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Good times create dreams of hard times. Hard times create dreams of good times. This is the cycle of fiction. Dark fiction in times of optimism is escapism and a flight of fancy. We love the contrast, the difference. But when reality turns dark, it quickly becomes apologism.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 06/06/2025

As I wrote before, the Musk and Trump relationship was always doomed. A kleptocracy only has one boss. The right move now is to supported the underdog, not because you want him to win, but to prolong the fight for as long as possible. Once the fight is over, the regime consolidates and solidifies.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

The big social media companies abandoned friend feeds in order to get people hooked on content from engagement algorithms. As a consequence, people got less engaged with their friends and consumed more disinformation. This is directly correlated with the rise of the alt right kleptocracy movement.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 21/05/2025

The US sanctions on the International Criminal Court is interesting on many levels. Firstly, it shows how dependent the rest of the world is on the US service economy, and now that they have found this weakness they will keep abusing it. They will not care that this will quickly ruin it.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

The last episode of Andor throws every established truth about pacing and story arc resolution out the window and somehow manages to make it awesome. Well done, really well done.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

The UK white paper on immigration is not all bad. The political introduction is an atrocity, adopting the language of the far right, and the rest is written in byzantine bureaucratese new-public-management language. But the actual politics are not that bad - it just won't fix the problem.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

Keir Starmer is right to talk about public trust on immigration, but by using the language of the far right on migration and completely accepting their framing of the problem, why would voters trust him over the people who pushed this view forward in the first place to much ridicule?

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 12/05/2025

So Trump is announcing that he will dictate the prices on pharmaceuticals by executive order, and this just after announcing last week massive tariffs on imported pharmaceuticals. So the speed re-run of the Venezuelan economic collapse is still ongoing. Nothing learned.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 01/05/2025

Harvard is discovering that the Trump administration is like a black hole - the more you feed it, the hungrier it gets. This is not just because Trump is a narcissist. That would be mistaking cause and effect. The appetite of a kleptocratic movement will always be insatiable.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 29/04/2025

Reddit has started automatic censorship of posts using AI. One of my own posts got removed by its AI for supposedly "threatening violence", which is a first for me. I can't even go back to check what I wrote to offend the AI gods because all trace of the post is gone, even from the warning letter.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

Fun fact: You have a 100% trade surplus with your employer if you just arbitrarily decide to only count goods and not services!

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

So why is Trump tanking the economy? Easy. It is just collateral damage. But there is no plan. It is a visceral, blind hatred toward the rule of law that Trump, like Putin, has developed over many decades fighting it. Anything and anyone connected to the rule of law and rules based order has to die.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

This is an extremely big deal. It basically knee-caps critical industries, and since it is a general export ban, it cannot be easily circumvented. China holds a near monopoly on many critical rare earth elements, and it takes almost two decades to go from new rare earth discovery to full production.

mining.com

China hits back at US tariffs with rare earth export controls

China placed export restrictions on key rare earth elements on Friday as part of its sweeping response to President Donald Trump's tariffs.

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Chris Murphy @chrismurphyct.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Those trying to understand the tariffs as economic policy are dangerously naive. No, the tariffs are a tool to collapse our democracy. A means to compel loyalty from every business that will need to petition Trump for relief. 1/ A 🧵 to explain his plan and how we fight back.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

An important part to being an opposition to an authoritarian regime is having a credible alternative, and a key part to that is having a plan on what to do when the regime falls. There will a temptation to forgive and forget, move on to try bring things back to normal. This would be a mistake.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

The arrest of Turkey's main opposition just underlines that "competitive autoritarianism" is just a facade driven by internal and external pressures, and not a new form of government. Once these pressures become too weak, the facade will drop. Because if they relinquish power they will face justice.

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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 13/03/2025

Hannah Arendt accurately identified loneliness as the fuel for Totalitarianism.

This image contains a passage of text with three highlighted sections. The first section, highlighted in yellow-green, discusses how loneliness, especially in certain social conditions like old age, has become a common experience, preparing people for totalitarian domination. The second section, highlighted in black, describes how totalitarianism organizes the masses in a way that seems like a suicidal escape from reality. The third section, highlighted in dark red, talks about the "ice-cold reasoning" and "mighty tentacle" of dialectics, which act as a final support in a world where nothing and no one is reliable. The text is formatted in a serif font, with highlights distinguishing key parts of the passage.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

The entire concept of "competitive authoritarianism" is quite weak. The original 2002 paper was interesting, but was almost as surface-level as as those it criticized, ignoring the social and economic structure of the regimes it looked at. It also contained a warning for the future. A thread.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 06/03/2025

Much as it pains me to say it, the US left-and-center really need to start thinking and acting like republicans when out of power. Less pointless decorum and more grandstanding. Less lamenting losses and more ruthless planning for what to do at the next opportunity in power.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 02/03/2025

I used to wonder how the alt-right politicians could lie so effortlessly without their brains exploding in cognitive dissonance. How conservatives could change to what appear to be pathological lying on a scale impossible to attribute to an underlying psychological cause.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

Everything that Trump, Musk and Putin do makes sense when you realize that they consider their own people the primary enemy, and they will try to destroy that which could inspire their own people to rise up. Independent Ukraine after Maidan could inspire Russians to revolt, so had to be destroyed.

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GeorgistSteve 🔰🏗️🌆🪩🗽 @georgiststeve.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

In retrospect, Kamala should've run on "Biden has been far too soft on crime; if elected I will have Trump tried for treason, denaturalize & deport Musk, and turn all of their assets into VA funding."

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

There are now three important questions to answer: If we still have a democracy - how do we stop it from falling to the new authoritarians? If we lost our democracy - how do we fight to get it back? And if we just regained our democracy - how to prevent our victory from being just a blip?

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 16/02/2025

I wrote that the US would economically and socially collapse fast under Trump because it would institute universal corruption which causes systematic and universal incompetence. I did not expect it to happen this fast and due to individual incompetence. What are we even seeing.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 06/02/2025

No evidence yet, but I suspect Trump is allowing Musk to run rampant because by committing so many crimes, he will be easier to reign in in the future once it becomes necessary. It is easy to overestimate the conspiring these dumb people are capable of but this is political organized crime 101.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

We really need a global anti-oligarch movement. Only by cooperating internationally can we successfully roll back this wave of klepto-fascists taking power everywhere. They are already global and help each other. If we try to defeat them alone and isolated, we will lose for sure.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 20/01/2025

The new Trump and Melania meme coins may seem like a dumb grift, but it is actually a clever way to receive bribes while avoiding what little remains of anti-bribery laws in the US. It just shows how important it is in the fight against politically organized crime that we ban cryptocurrencies.

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