A78NF1522_DX

Member of La Raza Humana since 1973, legally-speaking. (Or since 1972, biomedically-speaking…)

[Students For Liberty @sfliberty]

Almost every major revolution in modern history followed the same script: overthrow one power, install another.

France swapped the King for Robespierre, then for Napoleon.

Russia swapped the Czar for Lenin, then for Stalin.

Cuba swapped Batista for Castro.

Only one revolution broke the script. The American one, in 1776. 🧵

[A78NF1522_DX @Edgewise47]

@Sassafrass_84 There’s nothing to “understand”; they’re NOT “stupid” and they actually _KNOW_ what they’re doing.

[John Wright @johncwright2001]

Of course liberals know the difference between legal & illegal immigrants, just as they know men in drag are not women. But the sole point of Liberalism is to accuse Christians of hypocrisy. The accusation need not make sense; it need only be loud, vulgar, and easy to repeat.

[Mike Jones 🦘🤿🐊😱 @MikemanCommeth]

@FurkanGozukara That's complete bullshit. He "closed" the deficit by stealing money from the city pension fund. There hasn't been a dime of new tax collected yet. You people are fucking morons in that you believe this snake oil salesman.

[Skscartoon @skscartoon]

How Is New York City Doing Under Comrade Mamdani?

[Kevin Bass @kevinnbass]

I was a lifelong Democrat. I thought most conservatives were ignorant or evil or lying. I believed almost everything written in the New York Times, The New Republic, and the Atlantic. I was horrified when conservatives criticized the authorities. Every criticism I saw: I thought all of it was motivated by animus, resentment, self-interest, or ignorance.

Whatever truth there might have been in the criticism, I saw as a mere "half-truth": an exploitation of this or that cherrypicked fact being weaponized. Why did I see it in terms of weaponization? Because I was biased: I saw liberal establishment institutions and figures as fundamentally good, so all criticism of them was automatically interpreted as being in bad faith.

Didn't the critics know that these institutions or figures were fundamentally good? If they didn't, they were ignorant. If they did, they were evil. It was that simple. This meant that any legitimate criticisms would just be dismissed, as if bouncing off of an impenetrable bulletproof shield.

This all changed once I started writing about the pandemic. Soon people started talking about me the way I once thought about conservatives. This led to a complete identity collapse as I came to understand that my old worldview was hateful and ignorant, that I hadn't understood what I had been judging.

I cannot forget the hearing that led to my dismissal from medical school a year after I started writing. During the hearing, people talked about me as if I wasn't human. My behavior was interpreted in the worst possible light. Complete fabrications were created. Nobody was concerned with the truth, only horrified at my apparent "unprofessional behavior", which was really a mirror of their unprofessional behavior directed at me. They structured the hearing to make it virtually impossible for me to speak and explain that what was being said was a lie. And nobody seemed to have any problem with this. Why? Because I was bad. If I am bad, then every mistreatment and every violation of the school's own policies became justified. A person who is bad does not deserve any rights. They only deserve punishment.

But the thing I remember most was the allusions to my social media activity. They said, "Kevin is driven by resentment from his childhood." I wasn't. I was on good terms with my parents. They alleged that I needed psychotherapy to deal with this trauma. It was a completely fake story that they had constructed about me, to demean me, to marginalize me, to try to explain the views I had expressed: that something terribly wrong had happened during the pandemic. They couldn't imagine that I might have legitimate points. So they reduced me to the same kinds of psychological caricatures that I once reduced conservatives to in my own mind.

When I was dismissed, I was broken. But I had help from friends who helped me understand what happened. And I came to realize that a hysteria had overtaken the left. I spent a lot of time reading about show trials, about witch trials, and so on. I also connected with people who had experienced similar things and came to realize that something similar had happened to hundreds of physicians around the country. My story wasn't unique. It was all the same story over and over again.

I cannot believe the person I once was. I cannot believe that I could exist like that. I still don't understand how I could be like that, or how millions of people in this country could continue being like that. It disturbs me greatly.

One thing I know is that whatever this thing is that is driving people crazy needs to be destroyed. It is hostile to civilization and to our humanity. It causes us to dehumanize each other and try to destroy each other. It is the very same monstrous thing that I once attributed to conservatives. But it had been inside me, and I could now see it inside others. This is something I still grapple with.

[Handre @Handre]

On January 1, 1990, Poland flipped the switch. No phased rollout, no five-year transition committee, no gentle weaning of the patient off central planning. Leszek Balcerowicz lifted price controls, slashed subsidies, made the złoty convertible, and opened the borders to trade, all at once. The planners in the West clutched their pearls. Surely you cannot just do this overnight. Surely the people will starve.

They did not starve. Within weeks the empty shelves that defined every communist economy filled up. Street vendors appeared in Warsaw selling everything from sausages to imported electronics. The shortages that the central planners spent forty years failing to fix vanished once prices were free to do their job: tell producers what people actually wanted. A price is information. Strangle it and you blind the entire economy, which is exactly why the comrades kept guessing wrong about how many shoes to make.

Now look at the gradualists. The economists who insisted on "sequencing" and "managed transitions" pointed at the contraction in 1990 and 1991 as proof Balcerowicz went too far. Yes, output dropped and unemployment rose. That was the rot of central planning becoming visible, the liquidation of factories that produced goods nobody wanted at costs nobody could justify. You cannot keep a steel mill open just because it employed ten thousand people making steel that sold below the cost of the coal that fed it. Pretending otherwise is how Ukraine and Belarus stayed poor for another decade.

The numbers settled the argument. Poland returned to growth by 1992 and never stopped. By 2019 its real GDP was roughly two and a half times its 1990 level, the strongest performance in the entire former Eastern Bloc. Russia, which dithered, half-reformed, and handed state assets to insiders through rigged auctions, produced oligarchs instead of a market. Ukraine kept its old factories breathing on subsidies and stayed broke.

The lesson sits there for anyone willing to read it. The transition hurts least when you stop managing it and let people trade.

[A78NF1522_DX @Edgewise47]

@Woodcutcc @Handre 🙄 “It will be different _THIS_ time!…” 😒

[John Wright @johncwright2001]

The Lefty Deathcult never ceases fantasizing about human extinction, underpopulation and glorifying divorce, sterility, homosexuality, abortion, contraception.

[KeepCalmAndDrawl ☦️ @FormerlyFormer]

@RobertAJGagnon1 @EveKeneinan I always find it hilarious when people assume that the OT patriarchs are just held up as wholly shining examples.

Like, have you read any of the prophets at all? God is constantly telling them they’re stiff-necked, rebellious, and crap examples of what He wants them to be.

[Eve Keneinan 𝛗☦️ن @EveKeneinan]

It's a heresy because it's built from pieces of the truth, viz.

Animal creation is in its way very beautiful, and if often horrific, at least amoral.

Whereas man is uniquely burdened by sin.

These people misunderstand the Fall in two ways.

First, they do not grasp that, while animals do not sin, that sin has infected all creation, not just man. For sin is death, and death is not a problem for man alone. This leads them to think that a world without man would be paradise, when in fact it would only be an endless parade of misery and death.

Second, they see man as uniquely evil, but not understanding sin or the Fall, they think this is simply a property of human beings, rather than a wound that requires healing.

So, placing man too low and a nature too high, they fail when they weight these things, thinking a world of nature without man would be a better world.

Most Leftists, after all, want to wipe out some race or another, for being oppressors. It's not surprising, is it, that some of them hit on the human race itself as "oppressors."

The deepest driver of Leftism is an attempt to get revenge on God for the crime of being, after all, and like the demons before them, Leftists work out that while God is untouchable, you can really mess up man. Since God wants us to be fruitful and multiply, you can do your damnedest to fuck that up.

[Handre @Handre]

Darth Vader chokes his officers from across the room. The Empire builds a planet-killing weapon to force compliance. Every storyteller in history understood the same thing: the villain is the one who points the gun. You root for the rebel, the smuggler, the man who refuses the king's tax. You always have.

So explain why the modern left loves coercion.

The same people who cried during Braveheart, who cheered when Katniss raised three fingers against the Capitol, who hung posters of the lone man facing tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989, now demand that the state seize half your paycheck, dictate which words you may say, and lock you in your home for eighteen months because a bureaucrat in a press conference said so. They saw coercion on the screen and hated it. They live coercion in policy and love it.

I think the trick lies in the costume. Coercion never announces itself with a black helmet and ominous breathing. It arrives wearing the language of compassion. "Universal healthcare" means men with badges extract your earnings to fund a system you cannot opt out of. "Wealth tax" means the government claims a portion of property you already paid taxes to acquire. "Forgiving student debt" means a plumber in Ohio who never set foot in a lecture hall pays for a sociology degree in Brooklyn. Strip the adjectives and you find the same thing every time: someone with a weapon making you comply.

Ludwig von Mises spelled it out in 1944. Government is the negation of liberty. It is, at root, the apparatus of compulsion and coercion. Every program, every mandate, every subsidy rests on that single fact. Keep your own money and watch what happens if you refuse to pay. The fines come first, then the court summons, then the men who carry guns for a living. There is no gentle version.

The left has not abandoned its hatred of villains, it has simply learned to write itself into the hero's role while doing exactly what the villain does. You were taught to spot the man pointing the gun, they are telling you to thank him.

[The Drunk Republican @DrunkRepub]

Laughs in Mandarin

[A78NF1522_DX @Edgewise47]

@SaltyCracker9 @ApexSeeker_ (🤷‍♂️Well, guess we can’t argue with what’s proven to work, can we?…)

[A78NF1522_DX @Edgewise47]

@CRTisaCult @wokal_distance Some (“many”?) people do—they just don’t care.

[FischerKing @FischerKing64]

People don’t take Watergate seriously at this point because they have no respect for the media. Watergate was a media myth about themselves as fearless guardians of ‘our democracy.’ Robert Redford played Bob Woodward ffs.

Really it was a sordid palace coup, and ‘deep throat’ was just an angry FBI agent who got passed over for promotion. You can’t prop up a myth like that when we can all see that journalists, working with dishonest federal employees, are more prone to lies and setting up fake conspiracies than just about anyone else.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

Ro Khanna, Yale Law, eyeing the presidency, tells you a House resolution "binds" the President to end a war. He knows it does not. That is the point.

The power to declare war belongs to Congress. But what he waves is no declaration. It is a concurrent resolution: one chamber, never presented to the President, never signed. It is not law. It cannot be. Chadha confirmed in 1983 that Congress may not alter legal rights by a vote that evades presentment. He clerked on a federal court. He knows.

Then why say it? Because he does not want the law. He wants its prestige without its labor, the posture of principle with none of its substance. This is evasion: the refusal to look at a fact one already sees.

A man who will not name reality while running to govern it tells you what his rule would be. Truth is not a tactic to him. It is an obstacle.

Want the war power back from the executive? Pass the bill. Override the veto. Own the vote. Everything less is theater, and theater is not law.

[The Rational Animal 🤔 @theobjectivist]

I want to address this accusation. Rand openly acknowledged her position, and there's no hypocrisy in it.

First, the "fake name" is a myth. She used Ann O'Connor, a version of her real married name. Her husband was Frank O'Connor. There was no alias and nothing hidden. The records were public, recovered through a routine FOIA request.

Now the principle, which she stated plainly. A man forced to pay into a system has every right to reclaim what was taken from him. In fact, only the opponent of the welfare state has a clean moral right to it, because he never sanctioned the theft, while its supporters endorse the very crime.

It is not contradictory to oppose a system and still take back your own money. I oppose Social Security. I will still cash the check, because it is my money, seized from me by force, and I will never recover what I paid in.

Refusing it frees no one. It only lets the looters keep what they stole. Reclaiming what is yours is not accepting the system. It is refusing to be its victim twice.

[A78NF1522_DX @Edgewise47]

@LizardKing0x92 @FloppingAces Battered-Voter’s Syndrome

[Flopping Aces @FloppingAces]

America’s ruling class has performed another miracle.

They took the most basic truths in human civilization ... crime needs punishment, borders need enforcement, schools should teach, welfare should be temporary, families matter, merit matters, and taxpayers should not be looted by professional parasites ... and somehow rebranded all of that as “extremism.”

Incredible work, really.

Apparently, a “compassionate” society is one where the violent repeat offender gets another chance, the victim gets a candlelight vigil, the taxpayer gets the bill, the schoolkid gets passed along illiterate, the fraudster gets a grant, the NGO gets another contract, the illegal alien gets services, and the working American gets told to shut up and be more inclusive.

What a beautiful system.

Soft justice did not stay in the courtroom. It metastasized. It became soft borders, soft schools, soft parenting, soft welfare, soft standards, soft men, and soft bureaucrats explaining why every obvious solution is “too harsh.”

Lock up predators? Cruel.
Deport illegals? Hateful.
End generational welfare? Lacking empathy.
Punish fraud? Complicated.
Restore merit? Problematic.
Teach kids to read? Probably colonialism by Tuesday.

A serious country protects the innocent from the guilty. A decaying country protects the guilty from consequences and makes the innocent finance the experiment.

That’s America’s real crisis.

Not poverty. Not “root causes.” Not another fake expert panel.

Consequences.

We stopped imposing them on the people destroying the country, so now the country imposes them on everyone else.
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