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Billionaire Funds the Guardian to Tune of $116 Per Reader of Print Edition

In 2021 the Guardian ran a series of adverts claiming the newspaper was “not funded by billionaires”, and “our readers’ backing gives us the independence to hold the powerful to account”. Not perhaps all the powerful. The Guardian is backed by a number of billionaire philanthropic foundations, including the European Climate Fund and the Rockefeller Family Fund. According to the investigative journalist Ben Pile, an additional $12 million grant from the Gates Foundation is equivalent alone to $116 for every reader of the print version.

The entire system seems to be designed around maximization of the system’s ability to wield power, whilst diffusing responsibility such that identifying the actual source of power is nigh impossible, thereby shielding those wielding power on behalf of the system from any negative consequences of their decisions.

This obscurantist imperative shows up in the way the system’s functionaries use language. The technocratic prose deployed by the expert class is carefully scrubbed of any authorial voice. Identifying the person behind a given policy paper, scientific paper, white paper, or what have you, based on style alone, is essentially impossible. Third person passive predominates: they never say, “We have decided”, and certainly never say “I have decided”, but always “It has been decided,” as though policies are simply natural phenomena as inevitable as hurricanes, in which human agency plays no role. This reinforces the illusion that things are written, not by all-too-human scientists, but by Science; not by human journalists, but by Journalism; not by human agents, but by the Agency. It is the uninflected, lifeless, unified voice of the Borg.

Nor are these problems four-dimensional Machiavellian “chess” on the part of an actually competent shadowy “elite” that is in fact “profiting” from the disorder; there is no cynical manipulator of events… things really are that stupid, and there’s no one competent at the wheel of events. ...

And all wrecked by “economic populism” that results in crushing taxation, regulations in the name of social justice that destroy all enterprise, and ultimately really the enslavement of the good, intelligent, and talented part of the population in the service of providing goods to the dumb, dusky stupid many so that these many may vote for petty politicians invoking selfrighteous “union” language. It’s that simple. The left is right that libertarianism in Argentina would be “de facto white supremacy.” In fact they’re right about it in the United States too, except that the “dissident right” brain trust has convinced itself that the white “working class,” who are already highly taxed at the local level, would profit not from an elimination of racial legal handicaps against them and their children, as well as a lowering of their taxes—that would be Neoliberalism! Libertarianism!—but through “conservative populist socialism,” that is, taking more taxes from them and then funneling it back in the forms of “credits” or “services” after being filtered and laundered through the hands of various government employees. Who are these employees? Well, not “altright” or altlite Bannonite or “dissident conservative socialist” brain trust people as none have gone into the government bureaucracy, but Shaniquas and Chantelles. ...

Here is briefly, experience in Argentina, a few things I remember vividly: a Croatian Argentineborn businesswoman, owner of a cafe with unusually good coffee and Balkan pastries, who, prompted by warm conversation one morning, burst out crying to me over the prospects of her grandchildren in Argentina. All intelligent, highly educated, working in white collar professions, and all absolutely squeezed dry by a government that took most of their income while berating them for their “atomized” individualist identity and desires, and reminded them of their duty to give to the (helpfully beige, for moral reasons) Community and Society. All had material resources and a way of life that would be considered at best lower middle class in Europe and America, maybe not even that; all impoverished by a government that insists white collar workers are high-paid bloodsuckers who feed on the lifeblood of the Salt of the Earth working man. Every intelligent person who seeks or wants a half-good job complains about the same things in Argentina; crushing taxation, suffocating lack of opportunity, and an arrogant, partlyracially-mobilized “Working Class” that gets paid better than they do and is allowed to act with unending arrogance… bus drivers make double or three times what most white collar workers make there. The squeezing-dry of all money takes place for the sake of a “multiracial working class,” that is, a colored underclass. It is mostly the same in America and increasingly so in Europe ...

... in short, to be squeezed dry so that an obese Chantelle may gracelessly expire in a hospital after heroic efforts by inevitably low-paid medical professionals, and after a lifetime of her fattening up on corn chip. This is the cycle of the modern economy. In Argentina this Cycle has been made inescapable and all-encompassing. The high taxes provide no public services to speak of, no really common social or political life, no clean streets. ...

The insane female-protection laws of the country are another part of this story — and another benefit of decades-long “working man’s antiglobalist economic populist democracy.” To “denounce” a man is the absolute right of any woman, and without any due process a man will have his rights stripped and life destroyed by whatever denunciation, no matter how frivolous or without evidence. (To complain about such things in Dissident Right circles in America has also lately become declasse: you don’t want to be one of those boring Manosphere guys do you? What’s really important is Economic Populism and ending the rule of Global Capitalist Elites…) Thus Argentina may also be the first country where a significant percentage of the men have had to flee because of literal political persecution by militant feminism. ...

The likely future — and to a large extent already the present — of Argentina is interesting because the solution is and will be mass migration of its capable, its wealthy, and eventually soon in coming decades in general most of its beautiful, its talented, its non-dwarflike. But where will there be left to flee in the end?

"Wow, is that Chicago, Oakland, or Bradford UK?"

"Wow, almost 20 years old article. Any Israeli makes a mistake, it's remembered half a century later."