13 Comments

Nicely scrubbed and polished. Speaking of ratchet effect -- see your footnote 3. In neutral economic/finance-speak this is referred to as the benefit of compounding interest.

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Recent article that screams 'neofeudalism' to me. Not highbrow but...

https://alt-market.us/rothschild-wants-merger-between-corporations-governments-and-ai-to-save-capitalism/

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Look forward to your posts.

When teaching my kids to ride a bike I would tell them to 'look where they want to go! If you look at what you want to avoid you will crash into it'.

The current need is for a model that we can visualize, a beacon, so that it can direct our actions.

Transvaluation of values is pretty vague, (I am aware that you have answered this to me in the past, but I raise it because the vision needs to exist to be used to navigate to).

That the soul exists is self evident. Call it self awareness if you like. You cannot assume the opposite without a contradiction. The question is, does it persist after death. I suspect we the living will never know, but does that matter?

Egalitarianism is not the same as evil. There are limits at both ends, too much and too little. This suggests to me that there might be another framework, though I an not sure what. I will point out that concerns for sustainability are egalitarian. (Preserve the world for future generations of...)

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I have a question for you. You call your blog "neoliberal feudalism", so are you for or against feudalism?

On the one hand you seem to oppose attempts by the "neoliberal" WEF-types to impose a neo-feudal order, on the other had you dislike modernity generally and want to go back to a (presumably feudal) pre-modern system.

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Hi Eugine, the neoliberal feudalism framework is descriptive; I am against it. But I try to understand the motivations and forces involved as clear eyed as I can. Remember Aristotle: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it”.

I am against neoliberal feudalism because it is going to result in enormous misery and death for mankind on the back-end of a world with upcoming 10 billion people and massively declining natural resources, instead of fixing these issues on the front end to stay consciously below Malthusian limits. I am against the forced blending of the world into an open borders gray soup. I am against the commodification of mankind down to secular materialist consumption, a widget, and the general decline of mankind to the lowest common denominator. I am offended at being fed constant lies, and living in a so-called "democracy" with zero representation and zero accountability.

With respect to disliking modernity, I do dislike it, but I do not think we can go back to a pre-modern era. I am not a luddite and I criticized Kaczynski's starry-eyed optimism about a return to a glorious past in a previous post. Rather, I am a philosophical pessimist, which I will discuss in a future post.

I hope this is helpful.

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> I am against neoliberal feudalism because it is going to result in enormous misery and death for mankind on the back-end of a world with upcoming 10 billion people and massively declining natural resources, instead of fixing these issues on the front end to stay consciously below Malthusian limits.

Funny, that's the exact same justification the WEF-types give for their actions. Also funny how the shortages the Malthusians predict never actually happen, so now the WEF are trying to artificially limit production in order to create artificial shortages.

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Hi Eugine, the maximum production capacities for a wide number of critical resources is just about now, which I delved into in this post: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental-d97

For example, half the world’s population relies on synthetic nitrogen fertilizer booster agricultural output in order to survive. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in turn relies on natural gas inputs, which are peaking now. All easily mined oil, gas, and coal is already gone, and only utilizing advanced techniques -- deep-sea oil drilling, fracking, etc -- can we continue to extract.

Also, this isn't something you can casually get wrong and then work out on the back-end without massive human misery and death. The evidence is on peak production deniers like yourself to prove your case, given the catastrophic consequences if you are wrong (a "precautionary principle"). Even if humanity manages to extract more using new, clever methods, this will just extend the date of reckoning, not end it.

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> Hi Eugine, the maximum production capacities for a wide number of critical resources is just about now, which I delved into in this post:

And I pointed out the problems with that article in it's comments.

> Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer in turn relies on natural gas inputs, which are peaking now.

Fossil fuels have been "peaking now" for the past half century.

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"Fossils fuels have been "peaking now" for the past half century."

New energy sources piggyback on increasing supply of current, reliable sources in the context of access to credit, innovations in technology, adequate demand, favorable EROI, energy of the correct types to run modern society, taxability, portability, efficiency, transmission and storage.. yada yada.

Debt as payment now for future energy. Interesting explanation of the "everything bubble" and how this relates to "peak affordability" as opposed to "peak fossil fuels" in an era of increasing energy cost of energy, debt-based economics and complex societies.

Dr. Tim Morgan, former head of global research at Tullett Prebon

surplusenergyeconomics.wordpress.com

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Energy isn't part of a bubble as shown by the fact that real energy is in fact being produced.

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October 19, 2023
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October 19, 2023
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Hi Arnim, yes, this a good point. I present the framework descriptively and then I attack it, so I can see some rephrasing could be in order there as well.

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