iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Ukraine had a huge oligarch problem - and instituted many laws against them following their Revolution of Dignity. Business and media must be separated by law. Those with a lot of power and wealth must be held to a higher standard and more scrutiny than ordinary citizens. Today it is the opposite.

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A specialized force to scrutinize such network would be needed, along with radical transparency and anti-corruption laws. The wealthy patrons are often part of rent-seeking capital and depend on government contracts and favourable regulation. They must get neither. Anti-oligarch laws are needed.

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So what could be done? The weakness of the criminal network is that they are unable to stop doing crimes. The problem is that if they weren't stopped before they became a problem, it won't be any easier after. So more of the same as before will not cut it at all.

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Individualizing responsibility for the problems of the world means that there is nobody to hold responsible, nobody to blame. That means the establishment politicians get all the blame. Oligarchs who have concentrated an unhealthy amount of wealth pay grifters to redirect the blame away from them.

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They feel slighted and cheated, and want retribution - but are aimless and lost until told where to direct their anger. Fascists direct that anger at anyone different enough. Concessions merely validate that direction. Liberals are unable to redirect it - for them responsibility is a mirror.

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Their leaders are motivated by a lust for power and attention-seeking, while their supporters by anger and grievance. What they want is not rational, it cannot be sated by neither concessions nor mere material gains. Those who vote for them are the left-behind and ignored worst-off in society.

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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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Except that what replaces the Saudi kingdom could be even worse. They have used religious fundamentalism as a tool of propaganda and control. But if its homegrown fundamentalists get their hands on the Saudi military arsenal, the region could be thrown into a war that would make ISIS look tame.

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The Saudi regime has massive monetary reserves. But once a kleptocracy appears as weak on the outside as it is on the inside, its days will be numbered. Fidel Castro conquered Cuba with an army that was a tiny fraction of the Batista regime. Saudi Araba could fall the same way.

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The closure of the Strait of Hormuz and today's destruction of the east-west pipeline is an existential threat to the Saudi regime. Once exports stop, storage tanks fill up and oil wells must stop pumping. Restarting oil wells is time-consuming, risky and costly.

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Kleptocracies look strong on the outside, but they are hollow on the inside. Everything inside has rotted away by corruption and nepotism. The Saudi military is disorganized by design because the Saudi rulers are more afraid of a coup from the inside than threats from the outside.

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

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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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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This may seem unfair, but it is important to rub it in that - as it was clear immediately after Jan 6th - the oligarchs only care only their own skin and nothing for their minions. The more they believe that they will not be punished - the more they will steal, cheat, and brutalize their opponents.

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This danger remains especially if the plundered funds, taken-over media, rigged laws and stuffed institutions are allowed to remain. Amnesties should only be given to the top echelon in exchange for stepping down in a negotiation - and then everyone below them should be ruthlessly punished.

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And they will keep trying for as long as they maintain this idea. They cannot imagine that someone would show such mercy - because they would not. Even if, contrary to all indications, Trump does step down in 2028, there is no reason why an even worse autocrat would not replace him four years later.

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

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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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

The movie Directory, Uwe Bull, is the perfect late-joiner to the fascist cause: The world's most failed movie maker who has been desperate for attention his entire life, an outsider contrarian troll with no ideology, just the usual general nihilism. In other words, just another grifter.

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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 · 25/04/2026

Alt som fører til at folk må gi opp anonymitet på nett nå som fascister kontrollerer store deler av verden og så og si alt av sosiale medier er objektivt en dum ide. Hadde vi hatt noe a la bankid for sosiale medier for 10 år siden, over hele verden, hadde mye vært bedre. Men ikke gjør dette nå.

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Per @peranoia.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

I am also testing and comparing different services at the moment, and Mistral with vibe is shockingly fast. But really bad at accuracy. And it quickly gets into loops. The vibe client is also not great, even things like copy-paste is not working well. Hopefully it will get better soon!

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Petro (token) - Wikipedia

Not for lack of trying: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_(... But like everything else Maduro did, it was a failure.

en.wikipedia.org

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They never had this. Such regimes only have individuals holding crackpot ideas that they suddenly have the power to implement with little feedback mechanisms or checks and balances to hold them back from creating disaster. This ruined Venezuela, and will soon ruin the United States too.

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Too many people on the left still think of Chavez as something more than a tinpot dictator and kleptocrat because he cloaked himself and his regime in the drapings of socialism. But this was a lie. Kleptocrat regimes have no ideology, as this implies a movement doing theoretical development.

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The rot can be hidden for a long time, often showing itself only when the despot is replaced with another despot, casting the blame on the new despot, rather than the former and type of regime he led. Case in point: Maduro replacing Chavez. While Maduro lacked Chavez's charisma, they are the same.

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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 · 19/12/2025

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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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

Trump is also using every possible opportunity to show them that he will pardon them for any crime they commit for him or for themselves while serving him. Time is not on the side of the Democrats here. The regime must not be allowed to solidify and consolidate, it must be disrupted to the maximum.

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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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I think this is an essential analysis in other to defeat the new fascists. The cultural and ideological parts of fascism are harmful but that is neither their strength nor their weakness - and to focus on it is a mistake. We must attack the money. I hope to have a longer substack article on it soon.

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Richard Jevans: "one of the major and too often neglected factors holding the top ranks of the Nazi Party together was corruption: the receipt of massive gifts, huge increases in income, property and so on, that cemented the patronage relationship they had with Hitler in a relationship of clientage”

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Paul Corner on Mussolini: "‘In a regime that rested heavily on a whole network of personal contacts ... corruption represented a kind of glue, keeping the network together… this discretionary nature of decision-making that rendered people so vulnerable to what was, in effect, blackmail…’

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Götz Aly: "The Nazi leadership did not transform the majority of Germans into ideological fanatics ... Instead it succeeded in making them well-fed parasites. Vast numbers of Germans fell prey to the euphoria of a gold rush, certain that the future would be a time of unbridled prosperity."

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My conclusion is that it is a modern version of something that has been around for as long as have historical record: Pillage and plunder. The nazis and the fascists both immediately maxed all ways to rack up national debt, plundered their own people, then looted other countries. Some quotes:

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Fascism should not be understood as an ideology. Any particular instance of fascism is just an arbitrary confabulation of its leaders, some crackpot theory they have decided to latch onto, that is not necessarily shared with any other instance. Fascism, I realized, is above all an economic movement.

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Reading Götz Aly and Adam Tooze on the economics of Nazi Germany in the evening while hearing about the kleptocratic smash and grab of 12% of an entire country's GDP in the morning finally made me connect the dots. These are not different movements, they are the same thing.

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I usually read the most while traveling. For me, sitting in an airport terminal, in a hotel lobby, or on a train is perfect for concentration. The journey took me as usual from country to country in rapid succession. Eventually I came to Moldova, where I was told of the great bank robbery of 2014.

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