It Began in Our Living Rooms: The Worship of Billionaires… The Soap Opera That Taught Greed Better Manners

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions

It Began in Our Living Rooms: The Worship of Billionaires…

Dallas did not just entertain us — it trained us. To admire the rich, excuse the damage, and confuse spectacle with legitimacy.

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Satire remains delightful right up to the moment it reaches our address… “I think the people who say “we need satire often mean, We need satire of them, not of us.’”

Quote Without Illusions
Satire remains delightful right up to the moment it reaches our address…
People love satire — until it recognises them.
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The Illusion of Choice | Alex Buday Get more from Alex Buday on Patreon

The Illusion of Choice
Freedom did not disappear. It just learned better manners. We still choose — only the corridor has already been arranged.
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The Tree on Which Reality Also Ripened… April 1, authority, spaghetti, and the modern industry of credulity

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
April 1’s spaghetti tree was not just a prank. It was an early masterclass in how authority, tone, and elegant packaging can make almost anything sound true. The props changed. The mechanism did not.
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The Intelligence That Often Smells Faintly of a Bank Account… “Nothing so gives the illusion of intelligence as personal association with large sums of money.”

Quote Without Illusions
Money does not only buy comfort. It often rents the appearance of intelligence.
A short reflection on wealth, polish, and the expensive costume of credibility.
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While We Leave the Verdict to Posterity… “Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility.”

Quote Without Illusions
While We Leave the Verdict to Posterity…
Historical responsibility sounds noble. Those living with the consequences usually prefer legal responsibility.
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Clean Deals, Then Service Fees… The price of Alaska, the age of service-fee empires, and Greenland’s polite refusal

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
Clean Deals, Then Service Fees…
Alaska had a price. Modern empire prefers service fees. Greenland, inconveniently, is not ordering the package.
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When silence begins to sound like agreement… “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.”

Quote Without Illusions

Silence rarely stays neutral for long. Public decay often begins not with noise, but with elegant hesitation and the habit of looking away.
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The Future Was Already Waiting Underground… The Logistics of Immortality for an Afterlife with Imperial Taste

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
The Future Was Already Waiting Underground…
Farmers dug for water and hit an emperor’s “forever.” Power wants eternity; history leaves a museum.
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When an unproductive afternoon begins to look like wisdom… “If you can spend a perfectly useless afternoon in a perfectly useless manner, you have learned how to live.”

Quote Without Illusions
When an unproductive afternoon begins to look like wisdom…
A useless afternoon may be the last respectable form of rebellion. Not every unproductive hour is a failure…
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The bidding goes on quietly… March 28, AD 193 — when power was not yet called a “campaign,” only an invoice

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions

Rome sold the throne openly. We just upgraded the auction into a campaign. March 28, AD 193 was vulgar enough to be honest — which is more than can be said for modern politics.
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Leisure, Already Booked in Advance… “Leisure is essential to civilization.”

Quote Without Illusions
Leisure, Already Booked in Advance…
Leisure is often just the hamster wheel in civilian clothes.
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The little blue courtesy that saved male vanity… — Viagra, angina, marketing, and one of the modern man’s most discreet panic attacks

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
On March 27, 1998, the FDA approved Viagra — and a small blue pill became a global symbol of masculinity, shame, ageing, and marketing. What medicine discovered, culture monetized.
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Attention as a rare luxury… “I like to listen.

Quote Without Illusions
Attention as a rare luxury…
Real listening is rare now. A 50+ man at a rainy bus stop watches a couple actually talk—just presence, no performance.
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Will This Ever End? March 26 and the Peace History Placed in Parentheses Too Soon…

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions

March 26, 1979 gave the world a peace treaty. History, as usual, kept its irony. Sometimes peace is not conscience at last, but war becoming too expensive to continue.
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In the Age of Overwritten Reality… “The duty of satire is to expose stupidity.”

Quote Without Illusions
In the Age of Overwritten Reality…
Satire used to hunt. Now it triages. The real problem is no longer a lack of stupidity, but an oversupply of it.
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The Walls of the Common House Were Still Only Lines on a Blueprint… - Rome, March 25, and a wistful note from a Central European believer in Europe

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
On this day in 1957, Europe’s common house was signed into being on paper. This piece looks back at that promise — and at the strange modern habit of mocking what has quietly made life freer.
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The Quiet Choreography of a Herded Market… “The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small.

Quote Without Illusions
The Quiet Choreography of a Herded Market…
Markets no longer wait for facts — half-sentences are enough.
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Illusions Not Included - Hostage of Stupidity: Dispatches from the Republic of Illusion Illusions Not Included - Hostage of Stupidity: Dispatches from the Republic of Illusion [Buday, Alex] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Illusions Not Included - Hostage of Stupidity: Dispatches from the Republic of Illusion

llusions Not Included – Hostage of Stupidity is no longer only an eBook. The essays and satires are now also out in a physical edition — for readers who still like their questions sharp, their irony intact, and their books in hand.
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Facts, With No Opinion Section — Robert Koch, tuberculosis, and humanity’s old habit of arguing with facts rather than facing them

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
Facts, With No Opinion Section
Facts don’t need an opinion section. Koch identified the TB bacterium in 1882—today a pathogen must survive politics, PR, and comment wars first. T
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When the scenery changes, but the appetite does not… “Anyone who studies present and ancient affairs will easily see how in all cities and all peoples there still exist, and have always existed, the same desires and passions.”

Quote Without Illusions
When the scenery changes, but the appetite does not…
Machiavelli still stings because the packaging changes faster than human nature.
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We Look Toward the Moon, and Away from Everything Else… Von Braun, selective memory, and progress as a convenience service

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
March 23: Wernher von Braun’s birthday — and another reminder that civilisation loves the future most when it can quietly reclassify the past.
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When virtue survives only as campaign vocabulary… “Virtue is the principle of democracy.” Montesquieu

Quote Without Illusions
When virtue survives only as campaign vocabulary…
Virtue is still quoted in politics. It is simply no longer expected to interfere with ambition.
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Lolita 2.0 | Alex Buday Get more from Alex Buday on Patreon

What if Lolita were no longer a scandal, but a format?
Lolita 2.0 looks at a world where realism masks calculation, intimacy becomes negotiation, and the public no longer judges — it scrolls.
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📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
The Moving Image That Never Learned to Stop…
March 22, 1895. The Lumière brothers set images in motion. A century later, we turned cinema into “content,” and attention into rubble.
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Wasted Time May Be the Most Intelligent Investment… “If I do not waste time, I am wasting my time.” James Richardson

Quote Without Illusions
Wasted Time May Be the Most Intelligent Investment…
Doing nothing is sometimes the most civilised form of resistance.
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Order, Freshly Pressed… March 21, 1804 — the Code civil is promulgated, and Napoleon is already trying on the imperial crown

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
Order, Freshly Pressed…
March 21, 1804: the Code civil is proclaimed. First the code, then the crown — a sequence power has always found irresistible.
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Seriousness as an Overpriced Life Strategy… “Do not take life too seriously — you will never get out of it alive.” Elbert Hubbard

Quote Without Illusions
Seriousness as an Overpriced Life Strategy…
Seriousness is often just panic in formalwear.
Full piece on Substack.
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When a Moment Still Wanted to Become a Memory | Alex Buday Get more from Alex Buday on Patreon

When a Moment Still Wanted to Become a Memory…
A new Illusions Not Included Podcast episode on photography, memory, and the age of performance. Also on Spotify and via RSS.
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Happiness, Scheduled for a Fixed Time… March 20 — Joy, by Appointment

📜 On This Day — Without Illusions
Happiness, Scheduled for a Fixed Time…
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