Meme - Bruce Orrell: "This street sign tells a vindictive story. Evelyn Buck was a former Reeve, Councillor and Mayor of Aurora. Her service to the community was honoured with a street named after her. In his first term as Mayor, Tom Mrakas installed the rainbow crosswalk on Yonge at Wellington. Ms Buck - entrenched in her beleifs voiced her opinion. While not a popular opinion in today's world, it is still a personal opinion. To punish this former Mayor, Mayor Mrakas decreed that the street signs with her name should be emblazoned with a rainbow. Punishment for having a differing opinion."
"Evelyn Buck Lane"
It's no surprise that left wingers love censorship and dismissing criticism as harassment
From Great Depression to Great Credit Crisis: similarities, differences and lessons - "The Great Depression of the 1930s and the Great Credit Crisis of the 2000s had similar causes but elicited strikingly different policy responses. While it remains too early to assess the effectiveness of current policy, it is possible to analyse monetary and fiscal responses in the 1930s as a natural experiment or counterfactual capable of shedding light on the impact of current policies. We employ vector autoregressions, instrumental variables, and qualitative evidence for 27 countries in the period 1925–39. The results suggest that monetary and fiscal stimulus was effective -- that where it did not make a difference it was not tried. They shed light on the debate over fiscal multipliers in episodes of financial crisis. They are consistent with multipliers at the higher end of those estimated in the recent literature, and with the argument that the impact of fiscal stimulus will be greater when banking systems are dysfunctional and monetary policy is constrained by the zero bound."
We keep being told that Keynesianism is rubbish, and that fiscal stimulus / Keynesian stimulus is useless and doesn't work
TIL that during the 1970 World Cup qualifiers, members of the Australia national team consulted a witch doctor preceding their game against Rhodesia. Australia won but didn't pay the witch doctor, so he cursed their team instead. After that, Australia failed to qualify for the World Cup for 32 years : r/todayilearned - "In 2004, a new witch doctor was hired to reverse the curse and Australia have qualified for every World Cup ever since"
Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 on X - "Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease.
1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is rational. Where Rousseau weeps over the noble savage, Voltaire mocks. He is the master of devastating wit, precise irony, surgical ridicule. Candide dismantles every naive optimism in ninety pages with the efficiency of a guillotine – which is fitting, since the guillotine is partly what his work made possible.
2. His great weapon is mockery. Écrasez l’infâme – crush the infamous, meaning the Church, tradition, inherited authority. He crushed it. With wit, elegance, and devastating precision. He was right that the Church was corrupt, that the aristocracy was parasitic, that the old order was indefensible in many of its particulars. Being right about what to demolish is not the same as knowing what to build.
3. Voltaire is the demolition crew without an architecture firm. He tears down, magnificently. He offers no replacement – only rubble, and the advice to cultivate your garden. Private. Disengaged. The conclusion of Candide: after every horror, every injustice, every system failure – grow vegetables. This is not wisdom. This is elegant surrender dressed as philosophy.
4. His irony is a solvent. It dissolves corruption, yes – but it dissolves everything, including the things worth keeping. A civilization marinated in Voltairean irony learns to mock every claim to authority, every appeal to tradition, every invocation of duty. This feels like freedom. It is actually vulnerability – a society that has learned to be ironic about everything is defenseless against the person who believes something earnestly enough to act on it. Robespierre was not ironic. He was a true believer. He won.
5. Rousseau gave the revolutionary the emotional fuel: the pure victim, the corrupt oppressor, the righteous rage of nature against civilization. Voltaire provided the intellectual solvent: he dissolved the legitimacy of every institution that might have contained that rage. Together they cleared the ground completely. Robespierre arrived and found no Church, no tradition, no inherited authority with enough credibility to resist him. He simply moved into the vacuum and filled it with the General Will and the guillotine.
6. And when he wasn’t playing "champion of liberty", he was on the payroll of kings, literally. He spent years at Frederick the Great’s court and corresponded adoringly with Catherine the Great, flattering both in print as enlightened monarchs of the age. While he was writing these letters, Frederick and Catherine were carving up Poland – dismembering a European nation, erasing it from the map and subjugating an entire people in one of the great crimes of the eighteenth century. Voltaire knew. He didn’t care. Écrasez l’infâme — crush the infamous — unless the infamous is paying well and lives in a palace in Berlin or St. Petersburg.
7. The contemporary Voltaire is everywhere: the late night host who dismantles everything with devastating wit and proposes nothing. The enlightened cynic who sees through every institution, trusts nothing, builds nothing, and considers this sophistication – while cashing checks from the very system he mocks. The fake antidote doesn’t kill you. It leaves you without defenses when the real disease arrives. Rousseau is the fire. Voltaire is the man who dismantled your fireplace and called it progress – and then went to warm himself at the tsar’s. Together they produced the French Revolution, with the Terror, and the template for every ideological catastrophe that followed. The most dangerous intellectual partnership in Western history wasn’t a conspiracy. It was two men who despised each other and destroyed the same thing from opposite ends, leaving the ground perfectly prepared for those who came after them with a plan"
Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 on X - "The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire
The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history.
1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough.
2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available.
3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre.
4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings.
5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it.
6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself.
7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now."
This is why left wingers hate the Anglo Enlightenment so much
Thread by @PalmerLuckey on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "We need a bit more shame. People used to avoid certain self-interested behaviors to avoid shame, private and public. Law and customs assumed this. Now, 38% of Stanford students claim to be disabled. 40% of young women (under 35) claim mental illness, and SSI disability payments have gone up 400% in a single generation. It isn't good for anyone, least of all people who are actually disabled, when everyone looks the other way as friends and family and peers con the system with a level of shamelessness no architect of our safety net ever imagined could be possible in America. When everyone is disabled, nobody is. I have talked about this before, but this particular rant is brought to you by a situation where a bunch of exclusive merch at a local anime convention was sold out because a bunch of scalpers registered for ADA compliant disability badges (they don't have to prove anything in California) and walked in ahead of the people who had been camping out since 4 AM. No shame."
Maga Conservative Dr Ken Dabb on X - "Tyler’s mom: “Tyler did it.”
Tyler’s dad: “Tyler did it.”
Tyler’s boyfriend: “Tyler did it.”
Law enforcement: “Tyler did it.”
The evidence: “Tyler did it.”
Tyler: “I did it.”
Candace Owens: “it wasn’t Tyler, everyone else is lying. Something just feels off to me”"
Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 on X - "Aristotle wrote the operating system Western civilization ran on for two thousand years – and quietly abandoned in the twentieth century, around the same time all the catastrophes we have been describing began.
1. His central question is not “what are your rights?” It is “what are you for?” Eudaimonia — flourishing, not happiness — is the answer: the full realization of what a human being can become. The moment a civilization stops asking this question and starts asking only about rights, equality, and safety, it has already chosen administration over life.
2. Virtue is not a rule you follow. It is a habit you form – through practice, through the right environment, through a community that models and rewards excellence. This is why negative selection is so catastrophic in Aristotelian terms: it doesn’t just promote the wrong people. It corrupts the very mechanism by which virtue is transmitted across generations.
3. Man is a political animal – not in the sense that man should be governed, but that man is constituted by his community. You cannot flourish alone. But the corollary is equally precise: the polis exists for man’s flourishing, not the other way around. The moment the state becomes the end and the citizen becomes the means, you have not just bad government – you have the inversion of the natural order.
4. Aristotle catalogued the corruptions of every form of government: monarchy becomes tyranny, aristocracy becomes oligarchy, polity becomes mob rule. The pattern in every case is identical – the rulers stop ruling for the common good and start ruling for themselves. This is not a modern insight. It is the oldest political observation in the Western tradition. Every system contains the seed of its own corruption. The question is always: who is it for?
5. Phronesis — practical wisdom — the ability to judge particular situations correctly, without a rulebook. The bureaucratic state destroys phronesis systematically, replacing judgment with procedure, wisdom with compliance, the experienced man with the certified one. This is Aristotle’s explanation for why the credentialed class produces so many wrong decisions with such complete confidence.
6. He identified the middle class as the foundation of the stable republic – the ballast that prevents the ship from capsizing toward oligarchy above or mob rule below. Not as a sociological observation. As a structural necessity. Destroy the middle class and you have not just inequality – you have the preconditions for every tyranny he ever described.
7. The West replaced Aristotle with procedure, utility, and rights. It gained a framework for managing conflict but lost the vocabulary for saying what a good life is. The system can optimize for GDP, equality of outcome, measured safety – but it cannot tell you what you are for. Aristotle could. Every civilization that forgot that question discovered, eventually, that someone else was happy to answer it for them."
Glenn Beck on X - "Trump just took America one step further towards REAL freedom. For years, the EPA has decided, "for your own good," that it must reduce emissions on diesel trucks, even if their method of doing so will limit your truck to going only FIVE mph when it gets too cold. And if you try to remove that limit, they'll ARREST you in an armed raid. Trump just pardoned a group of mechanics who committed that crime of daring to think THEY owned the trucks they purchased. Imagine you're on a dark northern road. It's 30 below and your EPA-mandated DEF system fails due to the cold. Your truck then drops to 5 mph. The engine is fine, but a federal climate sensor failed, so you're no longer permitted to drive your own vehicle at a speed that would keep you alive. When local mechanics stepped up to keep rigs running safely in subzero blizzards in Alaska four years ago, 30 ARMED EPA agents ran a tactical raid on the veteran-owned shop over engine modifications. This forces a basic question: When you hand over your hard-earned money, who actually owns that property? Because if they can lock your hood and strand you in a blizzard, you don't own that truck. You're just making the payments while they keep the keys. Thank you, President Trump, for righting this grave injustice and once again reducing the power of the weaponized bureaucracy."
Meme - ">"history is written by the victors"
>sea-peoples arrive
>causes the collapse of a the bronze age
>refuses to write anything
>leaves"
Meme - "*Venus fly trap* WHY WOULD A FLY EVER LAND ON THIS?
*mouse trap* MICE SHOULD BE ASHAMED TO GET CAUGHT IN THAT...
*Bear trap* COME ON, BEARS! IT'S SO OBVIOUS!
Wow the Horse Archers are retreating!"
Man 'driven mad by mother' jailed for stabbing pregnant partner - "A man who repeatedly stabbed his pregnant partner after pressure from his disapproving mother “tipped him over the edge” has been jailed for 18 years. Babur Raja, 41, admitted attempted murder, attempted child destruction, possession of a knife in public and the wounding and assault of two passersby after the attack in Sutton Coldfield town centre on 4 March. At his sentencing hearing at Birmingham crown court, his barrister said Raja’s conservative Muslim mother “literally drove him mad” in the run-up to the attack by forcing him to choose between her and his partner, Natalie Queiroz. Jane Humphryes QC said the family turmoil led to a temporary mental illness, or adjustment disorder, leaving him with little memory of what he had done. She said: “His mother had not been happy he was in a relationship with a white woman, and told him he must leave her or she would not be in contact. “This man of impeccable character is driven literally to distraction, forced by his own mother to choose between her and his chosen partner and their unborn baby.” The court heard that Queiroz’s breast implants probably saved her life during the frenzied assault. Benjamin Aina QC, prosecuting, said that if Raja had plunged his knife 2mm further into Queiroz’s abdomen, her unborn baby would have died."
Damn racist white people who disapprove of miscegenation!
More Americans Are Aging Alone. One Woman Told Us What It’s Like. - WSJ - "Amy Kant initially thought she should name a power of attorney about 10 years ago after caring for a dying friend. She still hasn’t appointed someone to do it. The 65-year-old is single with no children, and bound up in that choice over who should make financial decisions on her behalf are other big questions that are often intensified when aging alone. How to handle eldercare? Estate planning? Where will she live in her later years? “It all falls on me,” she said. Kant had long cherished the freedom that came with being single. She prided herself on doing headstands in yoga and walking 5 miles a day. But lately being single has felt like a struggle, and not just because of the weighty financial decisions hanging over her head. Back surgery and a heart valve replacement in the past few years have turned her condominium outside Boston into a recovery ward. She spends most of her time at home these days recovering from heart surgery complications, with friends stopping by. She finds solace painting in a spare bedroom she turned into a studio, but knows she will eventually have to move to a smaller place that’s easier to get around in.Kant is among the millions of Americans learning to navigate aging alone. Roughly 10% of the more than 125 million adults ages 50 and older in the U.S.—or at least 12.5 million people—are solo agers who live alone and have neither a spouse nor a child, according to an AARP analysis of census data. It’s a growing demographic hitting both genders, driven in part by climbing divorce rates among older Americans and a rising number of adult children becoming alienated from their parents. Kant didn’t set out with a master plan. In her 20s and 30s, she chose lower-paying nonprofit jobs to give priority to her art. She remembers how friends envied her freedom; while they were tied down with dinner duty, their kids’ homework, and college savings, Kant spent her evenings painting and didn’t think twice about going out on weeknights. She eventually earned her M.B.A. By her 40s, she was working as a fundraiser, maxing out traditional retirement account contributions to ensure her financial stability in later years. When she transitioned to independent consulting for organizational development in her 50s and 60s, she used a solo 401(k), a retirement-savings vehicle for self-employed people. In her 40s she considered adoption but ultimately decided against it. Then in her 50s, after her own mother died, she went through a period of regret that she had decided against single motherhood... A longtime college friend serves as her healthcare proxy, and Kant maintains a spreadsheet of friends to coordinate visits when she’s ill. Still, she understands the boundaries of a chosen family. Her friends have their own households to manage; some have already died."
Was the Russian Revolution Jewish? | The Jerusalem Post - "A hundred years after the Bolsheviks swept to power, historians and contemporaries still struggle to understand the prominent role played by Jews."
I'm told that this can't be true because later Communists persecuted Jews (by this kind of logic, the Bolsheviks couldn't have been Communist because they persecuted the Mensheviks) and that pointing out that many early Bolsheviks were Jews is promoting a Nazi conspiracy theory. Time to shut the Jerusalem Post down
Israel's top court says non-Orthodox Jews can claim citizenship - "The Law of Return grants citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent, while religious law requires one to have a Jewish mother"
I'm told that Marx wasn't Jewish. Looks like Israel is wrong in how they define Jews
Jack Seiden on X - "People talk about billionaires controlling politics, but it seems to really be the high-school squabbling among the staffer/campaign world that’s tearing apart our politics."
Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "Glad to see people finally waking up to the power and importance of the staffer class. They're young, they're extremely online, they're radicalized, they're unaccountable, they're invisible, and they're incredibly powerful."
Evan Barker on X - "The entire Democratic Party is being held hostage by the staffer class, on every extreme, out of touch issue. Often consultants/donors are one in the same This is literally what my book (coming out in 2.5 weeks) is about and I expose it all:"
Basic Optimism | Facebook - "Nobody announces decline. It doesn't come with a headline. It comes as a series of things you quietly stop expecting. You stop expecting the ER to be fast, the wait is 14 hours now, and it always is. You stop expecting the metro to be safe after dark, so you and every woman you know just stopped taking it. You stop expecting streets to look "first-world," until a shopping cart grill on the pavement doesn't even register as strange anymore. You stop expecting the bridge to get fixed, it's been closed for three years and nobody's coming. You stop expecting your tax bill to buy you more than it bought your parents. You just adjust. Don't take your phone out. Don't wear jewelry. Don't walk alone. You do it automatically now, the same instructions they'd give you in a warzone. Your kids play around the tents, because that's just where the playground is now. None of this arrives as a collapse. It arrives as a thousand small "that's just how it is now" moments, until one day the thing that used to work simply doesn't, and no one can say exactly when it stopped. The West is turning into the third world. You might not see it yet. But once you do, you can't unsee it."
facts about on X - "The Erdoğan story starts with a sandwich. Before his election, during Ramadan, Erdoğan appeared at a press conference and made a point of eating a sandwich in public. To outsiders, it looked meaningless. In Atatürk’s Turkey, it meant everything. Atatürk built the modern Turkish republic after the Ottoman collapse as a deliberate shield from the caliphate and clerical rule. He abolished the caliphate, secularized the courts and education system, and tried to keep political Islam out of state power. So a hardline Islamist could not simply walk into national politics and say: I am here to bring political Islam back. He had to look moderate. Secular enough. Democratic enough. Safe enough. That is why the sandwich matters. In Islamic tradition, "Taqiyya" means lying or concealing one’s beliefs under pressure. The concept is often used more broadly: hide the final objective, Lie or say what the system needs to hear, gain power, then change the system from within. One can break any rule of Islam for the goal of spreading Islam. The sandwich was Taqiyya. And Erdoğan’s later record shows the direction of travel. He did not destroy Atatürk’s republic overnight. He hollowed it out gradually - weakening secular institutions, tightening control over the press, jailing critics, intimidating opposition figures, and turning elections into a tool for consolidating power. Abroad, the pattern is just as clear. Turkey still occupies Northern Cyprus. It repeatedly bombs Kurdish forces in Syria and Iraq, including Kurdish-led fighters who helped defeat ISIS, while allowing its border to function as a corridor for jihadists entering Syria. Then there is Hamas. Erdoğan has hosted Hamas leaders, defended Hamas as a “liberation” movement, and positioned Turkey as one of its safest political homes outside Gaza. And this is still a NATO country. A NATO country that bought Russia’s S-400 system. A NATO country removed from the F-35 program because of that risk. A NATO country that hosts Hamas, bombs America’s Kurdish partners, cracks down on journalists, occupies part of Cyprus, and presents itself as a patron of Muslim Brotherhood-style political Islam. Yet NATO has no clean mechanism to expel a member that stays inside the alliance while drifting toward the other camp. That is why selling Turkey F-35s - or anything close to that level of Western military technology - would be insane. You do not hand the crown jewels of Western airpower to a leader who treats NATO like a shield, not a shared civilization. And Keeping American nuclear bombs on Turkish soil under this political trajectory is even more insane. Atatürk built a republic to keep political Islam from capturing the state. Erdoğan learned how to pass through its front door holding a sandwich, and now he plans to do the same with NATO."
