Four analogies for a country:
1. The nationalist right views it as a family or community. So applying the same bar to citizens as to outsiders is nonsensical, because the country is of, by, and for its citizens.
2. The tech right views it as a company: you should bring in only the people who will benefit it. But this view is ultimately empty, because it doesn’t tell you what the interests of a country actually are. Hence the tech right (who are usually positive-sum thinkers) keep falling back on zero-sum concepts like “being competitive” or “winning against China” to justify their preferred policies. (Yarvin makes the “country as corporation” analogy particularly explicit.)
3. The tech left views it as a charity. To them, wanting others not to receive what you’re been given is hypocritical. This view is also empty, because it doesn’t tell you where the windfall actually comes from—and once you start to talk about the benefits of culture, ethics, institutions, etc, it becomes clear that citizens (and their ancestors) *built* that windfall rather than just being given it.
4. The woke left views it as a cancer: something that is aggressive and parasitic by its very nature. Countries are inherently violent (in asserting their borders) and exclusionary (of non-citizens) and therefore shouldn’t exist (or at least shouldn’t be allowed to police their borders, which is effectively the same thing). A charitable read is that this is a trauma reaction to the holocaust and colonialism—but regardless, it has become so deeply anti-civilization that it seems descriptively accurate to call it evil and insane.
Paul’s tweet below most directly corresponds to the tech left bucket. Unfortunately people in that bucket are rarely willing to push back on the core tenets of the woke left, and so end up aiding and abetting them. As one example, he’s surely smart enough to recognize that his tweet makes no sense to people who view country as an extension of family. But acknowledging that is a slippery slope towards legitimizing ethnonationalism, so he pretends to not understand the pushback.
People demanding "proof" of election fraud are not understanding how crime works. I worked at Manhattan DA for over 2 years, one in Homicide. We never had video proof of the crime. We almost never had DNA. These are things that occur on CSI on TV, not in real life. And we still convicted people all the time.
What we had was testimony and circumstantial evidence. Travel times, bank records, cell phone data, gate access codes. Motive, capability, benefit, time and place. Never direct proof. Of course the defendant always denied the crime, but there was enough evidence to show that one had to have occurred nonetheless.
If what we have in the LA Mayoral election is a statistical anomaly that is beyond reasonable explanation with anything besides fraud, that is enough to prove a crime. This has been true since the beginning of Western Civlization.
78 years ago, 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Britain made it possible.
Today, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Britain made it possible.
78 years of the Nakba - and 78 years of British complicity in crimes against the Palestinian people.
Thomas Massie just sounded the alarm:
Congress is on the verge of handing Monsanto total immunity to mass poison Americans with glyphosate.
This is existential for MAHA.
“If farmers contract a form of cancer … from this chemical, if this makes it into the Farm Bill, you won’t be able to sue.”
Instead of pushing to repeal Big Pharma’s vaccine liability shield, Trump and his cronies are trying to expand immunity for even more poison.
It’s a complete betrayal of MAHA.
And it would cause vastly more harm than all of the benefits that MAHA has done combined.
@RepThomasMassie@MassieforKY
Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with the vagus nerve and its connection to self-healing and all sorts of things…
Now listen to what Jim Carrey says — many esoteric thinkers believe that the substance of enlightenment comes from the brain through the vagus nerve and needs to ascend back by not ‘squandering your sexual energy.’
Every liberal who screams about RFK Jr should watch this 60 Minutes segment. Truly unbelievable.
In 1958, Congress enacted a GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) exemption that allows food companies to independently verify the safety of their ingredients with NO government oversight.
In short, companies can put whatever the fuck they want in your food.
In Europe, there are 400 legal ingredients. In America, there are somewhere between 4,000-10,000!!!
We have literally been eating poison while our government looked the other way.