The “manifesto” is an excerpt from the CEO’s book, posted as a twitter thread, reposted below for anyone curious about the flavor palate of boots.

Because we get asked a lot.

The Technological Republic, in brief.

1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.

2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.

3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.

4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.

5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.

6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.

7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.

8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.

9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.

11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.

12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.

13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.

14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.

15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.

16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.

17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.

18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.

20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.

21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska

That’s just the back story.

The actual subject of the story is that some gross edgelord clout chaser drummed up support in the local ironic gooner community to throw an anniversary event in the spot where the guy killed himself.

In a word: wack.

A.R. Moxon recently recontextualized David Lynch’s quote “fix your hearts or die” as an invitation for lonely men to find peace through, ironically enough, feminism. It’s a great read. I hope all the men interviewed here find some degree of peace apart from this nihilism.

https://www.the-reframe.com/fix-your-hearts-or-die/

Probably reusing the stormy establishing shot asset. Continuity is for sober people.

ConnectPort at the plaza.

Tl;dr:

1. Fent and everything else going around today is way worse than heroin.

2. Portugal put tons of funding and political clout behind health care, support and restorative resources in addition to decriminalization. BC didn’t.

So yeah, no shit it didn’t work.

New comfort shows to try:

• Midnight Diner
• The Repair Shop
• All Saints Street
• The Invisible Man and His Soon to Be Wife
• How To with John Wilson
• Apocalypse Hotel
• Somebody Somewhere
• Hilda
• Over the Garden Wall (during autumn for maximum effectiveness)
• Mushi-shi

The article from Nielsen is free and super insightful and worth a look: https://www.nielsen.com/insights/2026/why-anime-fans-should-be-on-everyones-radar-april-2026/

It’s worth listening to the More Perfect podcast episode on wtf Clarance Thomas’s ideological deal is.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolabmoreperfect/episodes/clarence-x

Orville Peck!

Thank you!

Or perhaps other reasons…

@picandocodigo@lemmy.world - Can you update the post’s title to follow the formatting guidelines? “Godzilla Minus Zero (2026, dir Takashi Yamazaki)”

Happy to see this one breaching containment.

Bonus for Roman in the back seat being adorable while clutching his copy of Lee Iacocca’s biography.

Your lucky numbers are #ff0000

The plot sounds a bit more like Forgotten Island than KPop Demon Hunters, to be honest.

…and in the darkness, bind them

Dude didn’t wanna cuz school is more important.

In an April 3 interview with The Guardian, Kaczmarek said that the production wanted Sullivan to reprise Dewey, but he’s putting his master’s degree studies at Harvard first.

“He’s studying Dickens and is an incredible student – they offered him buckets of money to come back, and he just said: ‘No thank you,’” Kaczmarek told The Guardian.

When you know exactly how toxic your fan base is.

Repost of https://lem.lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/40649579 - removing

We’re three movies into this franchise. You can look at the first film as a ridiculously expensive pilot, testing out the characters and environment and seeing if the whole thing had legs. As it turns out, it did. There’s even a bunch of hyper-fans who are seeing the movie 100 times and fantasizing about living on Pandora. Neat-o. Cameron gets to make this a franchise.

But what’s it going to be about?

Michael Bay turned Transformers into incomprehensible VFX noise with zero interest in overarching themes, but I don’t expect much more from him or a series based on toy robots. Cameron is a solid filmmaker and idea guy, so he can definity do better than this.

It wasn’t until the success of the first film that he started planning the sequels. That’s when I presume he started settling into the main ideas of the project. Anyone who saw the director’s cut of the The Abyss should find this familiar: humanity bad, but can be saved with good guidance from not-humans.

That’s where I see the Avatar films heading. Humans are a pile of shit, but they can turn themselves around if they just STFU and listen to the Na’vi on how to not be shit. That works for me.

But WTF is going on with these new films? The hero’s journey of the first film was Jake realizing that humanity had life all twisted and that the Na’vi had things more figured out, so he was going to live within that culture. As the sequels kick off, Jake and Neytiri have built a family, but it’s entirely based on the dynamics of a US military family: stern dad doing drills, kids calling each other ‘bro’ constantly. There’s nothing non-human there; it’s terrible. I don’t understand how the Neytiri character put up with it. That relationship would NOT have worked out.

But getting into this last film, we get introduced to a traveling tribe of traders, so commerce via a trading economy is a thing now. And there’s raiding parties attacking the traders for no explained reason. To steal stuff? To just kill people? Never explained.

The Na’vi are being cooked up less like a utoptian society and more just-like-us-but-blue.

So what’s this all about? Spider.

Cameron and the producers saw those superfans who wanted to live on Pandora and created Spider as their self-insert surrogate. He’s the product of the worst of humanity, but he gets to live on the planet. He gets adopted into a native family.

The entire throughline of the franchise is about indulging Spider and, thereby, indulging the franchise’s superfans and their escapist fantasies.

And if that’s the case, we can forcast the suitability of the Avatar franchise by monitoring the activity of those superfans. Are they digging in or are they moving on?