TCB

Just a good old boy trying to be a good old man — Patriot/1A2A/Bitcoin/Fitness/Golf/Guns

[TCB @Bidness71]

@shagbark_hick Limit voting rights to property owners with at least one child - prove me wrong

[TCB @Bidness71]

@thegarybrecka Corollary - the worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you

[TCB @Bidness71]

@Geiger_Capital @DrKrisEdward @Smirkley #56 Oglala Lakota spitting out babies but only voted 13% for Trump gotta be an Indian reservation 😂

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:

Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie

Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.

This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.

Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.

The Words We’re Missing

The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:

Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.

These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.

And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.

The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism

What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.

That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.

This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.

The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.

Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It

People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.

The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.

1/2

[TCB @Bidness71]

@FischerKing64 Team Electric Chair stand up #nomask 🔥⚡️💨

[Lisa Cusack @lisa_4_la]

In the short run, the Red States will see an economic and population boom as a result of Blue City radicalism.
But in the long(ish) run, this DSA takeover is extremely dangerous for everyone. If you wanted to conquer a country, taking over its two most powerful cities: NY and LA, is exactly how you would do it, and communist takeovers always begin in the cities.

I have long cautioned Republicans that you don’t win a war by ceding territory. We’re not sticking it to the Left by constantly retreating. Unless Red cities and states become active battle grounds against Democrat Socialism/Islamism, through purposeful education and political organization, Austin and Nashville will be next to fall, and so will go the country.

[TCB @Bidness71]

@NuffSaid1960 @Super70sSports

[TCB @Bidness71]

@41Adanac @Super70sSports

[Robby Starbuck @robbystarbuck]

The Mamdani Commies are coming.

Last night he got a handful elected to various high ranking positions. Soon he’ll have communist mini-me’s in every state. They fully control the Democrat activist base now.

They’ll soon be plastered all over your TV screen, they’ll be organizing at your kid’s school, knocking at your front door and clogging your social feeds. It’s happening. These people he’s hand picking are so extreme that they make AOC seem sensible in comparison.

Old school Democrats have no answer for this so they’re joining them but like every communist revolution, they’ll be among the first victims if the communists gain power.

The old guard GOP also doesn’t know how to fight this. They think it’s good news because these commies will say increasingly crazy things but what they don’t realize is the lengths these people will go to in order to seize power.

So it’s up to us, the political right and the sane independents + the politically homeless to stop them. It has only begun so charge up, We have a fight in front of us. Begin making alliances now to fight the beast that’s preparing to destroy our country. If we don’t win, the America we love will be gutted from inside.

We must fully awaken the spirit of our founders in our countrymen and women. It’s only that kind of revolutionary spirit that knows how to deal with and defeat communists.

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

The Bolsheviks were a tiny extremist group nobody took seriously. They could have been crushed at any time. Until one day, they couldn't. Soon they had control of all of Russia. They were insane. But that did not matter. They were organized and committed. They ruled for 74 years.

[TCB @Bidness71]

@BowTiedRanger All this is true and will be resolved in the primary

#1 qualification is ability to beat the Democrat nominee

If Vance wins Republican nomination and you vote “other” to protest his pajeet wife, you’re voting for Newsome, Harris, etc

We have a country to save

[Charles Murray @charlesmurray]

So many people don’t get it. If you’re really really good at something, you love to do it. It’s true of every person who’s been the one of the best at what they do, from Buffet to Michael Jordan. It’s true of the world’ best Rose gardener or sweater knitter. The money is irrelevant.

[TCB @Bidness71]

@charlesmurray Very true. Painters paint. Singers sing. Poets poet

Money is irrelevant

[TCB @Bidness71]

@johnkonrad @TennisonEddie Future Navy officers spend time on ships?

Pfft crazy talk

Next you’ll suggest every Marine shoot a rifle 🙄

[TCB @Bidness71]

Everywhere you go, there you are

[Garbage Human @GarbageHuman24]

This is very telling

[TCB @Bidness71]

“That’s your brain demanding certainty from a probabilistic signal” 🔥🔥🔥

Applies to everything - immigration, race, IQ, finance, you name it

[Alan Couzens @Alan_Couzens]

In our world, #HRV is a good example...

What John Q Consumer wants:

Certainty.

“My HRV is low, therefore I should take a day off.”

But that’s not how biology works.

How he should be looking at the problem:

“If my HRV is low, there may be a ~10% greater chance that I’ll have a shitty workout, and a ~20% greater chance that I won’t respond as well to the workout.”

Further...

"If I’m already having a shitty workout, and my gait, mechanics, motivation, or coordination are not what they should be, there's also x% additional injury risk"

But what happens instead?

“This stuff doesn’t work. 9/10 times when my HRV is low, I feel great. It’s garbage.”

No.

That’s not the data failing.

That’s your brain demanding certainty from a probabilistic signal.

The value of HRV is not that it tells you exactly what to do every day.

The value is that it gives you a little bit of additional information that you didn’t have before.

And in coaching, a little bit of additional information - used well - compounds.

The problem isn’t the data...

The problem is your statistically lazy brain!

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

[TCB @Bidness71]

@kevinnbass

[TCB @Bidness71]

👏👍

[John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad]

What’s killing this country isn’t a lack of compassion on the left. It’s a lack of empathy. Let me explain the difference, because it matters more than anything else in this debate.

Ro Khanna isn’t wrong: it wouldn’t be expensive to lower the Medicaid age to 50.

Mark Cuban isn’t wrong: you could run a profitable Medicaid hospital.

But neither understands the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, which holds that roughly 80% of consequences flow from 20% of causes.

It CAN work for 80% of the population. The trouble is the rest. About 5% are truly ill and genuinely expensive to treat, which might still be worth it.

But another 15% are fraudsters, hypochondriacs, and complainers who drain the system without justification.

I have a relative who runs a Medicaid program in a blue state. Eighty percent of her patients aren’t a problem at all.

That’s exactly why Cuban’s idea is dangerous. A pilot program naturally screens out the fraud and the worst cases, then posts numbers that look like a resounding success.

Then you scale it.

You can no longer cherry-pick patients, and the model collapses the moment it has to serve everyone.

This is the number one problem I see with Democrat normies. They can’t think outside their own bubble. And the irony is they’d call that a failure of empathy, when it’s the opposite.

Here’s the distinction they miss.

Empathy is opening your mind to the thoughts and attitudes of others. It’s not a “good” word or a “bad” word. It’s neutral.

What most liberals actually run on is sympathy: experiencing another person’s situation through the lens of your own values, your own thoughts, your own attitudes.

Take a guy who loves drinking and driving. One day he kills someone.

The sympathetic approach turns inward. You flash back to the night you had one too many and got away with it, and you assume he just made a mistake. The empathetic approach asks a harder question: why did that guy actually drive drunk?

Many liberals reflexively assume the best. “Maybe he has chronic pain.” “Maybe he was abused as a kid.” “Maybe he was sober 20 years and had an accidental relapse.”

Those are all real stories behind some drunk drivers. But none of them address the inconvenient truth: some people just really enjoy driving drunk.

And if you don’t believe that some people really enjoy driving drunk, you didn’t attend college in the last century.

Real empathy means understanding the negative cultural attitudes of others, not just the sympathetic ones. And some people, some entire subcultures, genuinely enjoy scamming Medicaid.

Until you understand that motivation honestly, you’ll never design a solution that holds.

Look at how we actually beat drunk driving. If we’d tried to solve it by curing alcoholism and PTSD alone, the guys who get drunk a few times a year to go tear around corners would still be killing people today. What worked was a penalty system blind to sympathy. A cop doesn’t care why you’re drunk behind the wheel.

Because Democrats lead with sympathy, they let patients who want more care simply ask for more care, and assume the request is always honest.

That’s how you end up with learning centers billing for autistic children who aren’t there. The overwhelming majority of Medicaid patients don’t need that service. A tiny fraction truly do.

Sympathy can’t tell the two apart. Empathy can.

And this is the real problem with what Mark proposes. You can absolutely run a single hospital on commie values.

One building, hand-picked patients, a closed system. It works beautifully right up until it has to scale. Without an empathetic filter, one that accounts for the good AND bad actors doesn’t survive contact with the full population.

Bleeding-heart idealists are sympathetic, not empathetic. That’s exactly why their model always looks perfect in the pilot and collapses in the real world

Communists don’t account for the empathetic, walk a mile in his shoes, fact Stalin enjoyed murdering dissidents

[TCB @Bidness71]

@johnkonrad Yes

Thought exercise - “How might bad actors exploit this”