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this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Samo Burja of Leverage Research and Palladium Magazine is trying to pivot to respectability https://samoburja.com/ He also has a Substack blog. People call him a sociologist and a political scirentist but he seems (echo me) entirely self-published except for a few opinion pieces and his highest educational credential is "studied at the University of Ljubljana." The Long Now Foundation gave him money which is disappointing.
The article at https://xenotransmissions.substack.com/p/evil-nerd-theory-part-iii-a-case mentions his neoreactionary history before Palladium:
The article also links to his More Right piece The Cult of Neoreaction which Nick Land discussed on his own blog, and there's another archive of his posts from a different date here and here is an announcement of a spin-off created by Samo and others called The Future Primaeval (that has various archives here but looking at an archived post list here from March 2015 to Jan 2017, looks like he didn't write any under his own name but that substack at the top of my comment says that one of the other people on the Palladium editorial board, Wolf Tivy, posted there a lot under pseudonyms Nyan Sandwich and Warg Franklin).
I remember him tweeting in February 2022 where immediately after the invasion he confidently predicted that Russia would gobble up all of Ukraine in a matter of weeks. Unlike all those legacy academics with their degrees he really see into the future of governance, you see.
That was the party line in the American foreign-policy crowd since winter 2021/2022. They thought that if the 'great power' Russia invaded, Ukraine would fall. So Burja's tweet was not even original, just the same thing any 23-year-old staffer in a new suit was writing.
Was it really the sensible position that the poorest country in Europe would go on to embarrass an ostensible superpower? Predicting a Russian victory in the short term in the early days doesn't seem too daring a hot take.
It was mostly the analysts who were predicting a three day walk in the park with the ukrainians cheering them on as liberators that turned out problematic all the way.
He runs an analytics company and was specifically touting how his models showed a quick Russian victory, even weeks into the invasion, which was more than just the usual Besserwisserism among western europeans towards eastern Europe. If the whole shtick is that the mainstream is lame but my patented crystal ball actually tells the future from first principles and you then tank even harder than the mainstream, you not only embarrass yourself but reveal your own preferences as well.
And the mainstream predictions in the West of Ukrainian resistance weren't as negative as what he advanced, which is precisely why many refused to believe the Kremlin would actually step on this rake of a war. That he wholeheartedly defended a quick Russian victory made him seem steeped more in the Kremlin's narratives than the West's, even as all imperial powers tend to be hubristic.
Sounds like he went for the low hanging fruit to showcase his business and ate shit, good to know.
His great founder theory certainly seems amenable to going all in on dictators.
westerners and their clever takes about eastern europe, eh.
The Leverage article kept referring to him as "the slovenian" and that's at least honorary eastern europe, but I've no idea if he actually grew up there.
That's a non-provably non-punchable face if I've ever seen one.
lolol
I looked at the table of contents of his manuscript and ... zero history. All blathering on about some theory he cooked up from first principles to fellate rich people. The fact that anyone takes this seriously is a stunning indictment on the state of humanities education.
If you look at literally page 1 you'll find the first footnote pointing at another chapter of the same goddamn book and now I'm going to go weep tears of impotent rage.
Ed: sorry, it's page 8, which is the first page after the self-congratulatory preface.
Hey, gotta pump up these self-citation numbers somehow
Hol up! It's kind of unfair to blame some poor soul with a PhD in Beowulf for failing the beat the fash out of a determined dickhead over the course of a single quarter. (half serious)
I mean, did Samo even complete a degree?
In a quick DuckDuckGo I can't find any site that claims Samo Burja has a degree.
His concept of live player is just another way of saying that most people are NPCs. The manuscript appears to call Elon Musk an engineer which is like calling Cheops an architect (alternatively, Musk must "fundamentally understand engineering").
The other hell site, LinkedIn, says University of Ljubljana but no major / degree listed. maybe he studied with zizek though.
... apparently he's a second connection. !?