JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲

Si vis paceum para bellum
U.S. Navy EM1/SS (H. discharged)
BS Electrical Engineering
AS Engineering Technology
Novice guitarist, outdoor enthusiast.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@SteveVa20633780 @realMaalouf "Allah" == Satan.

Islam is Satan's response to the gospel of Jesus.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@KurtSchlichter I had an aggressively panhanding tweeker ask me "Are you OK?" when I told them to get the f*ck away from my wife.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@dogwoodblooms Add a $1.50 to those prices for the Peoples Soviet State of Washington.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@beyondreasdoubt "Military Intelligence" is considered an oxymoron by most active and former military personnel.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@cosmosarcive James Clerk Maxwell achieved this before flush toilets were widely adopted.

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

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.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@CynicalPublius @ShamashAran The "Bell Curve" goes all the way down ... to zero.

Statistically, half of the population is below 'average' (... the arithmetic mean).

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@GadSaad Watched "Gettysburg" recently. Americans did that to other Americans.

3rd world invaders? Modern tech? It could get downright medieval before it gets better.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@WEschenbach A.k.a. "Suicidal Empathy". Gad Saad recently released a book about it. @gadsaad.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@olyveyaa Skilled electricians can make > $100,000 a year. Working with electronic systems (AI data centers!) doesn't require a lot of physical strength and some work spaces are easier to access for smaller people.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@adamtaggart @RealRickRule Gold has been declining since January.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@WEschenbach Collectivists will say it was "bad luck", or the fault of capitalists.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@infantrydort Good Lord... My 1st computer was an Apple II+, with a wopping 48K of RAM. Cassette tape and then 5 1/4" floppy discs.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@mysteriouskat The goal of Socialism, always and everywhere, is to bring in Communism. Slowly perhaps, but the end result is always the same.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@WeatherProf In the U.S. Pacific NW, it's downright chilly. It's drizzling mist and temps in the 50's.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@cosmosarcive This is one of the things that convinced me that open ocean sailboat cruising is more risky than I want to accept. Rouge waves can, and have, taken out huge commercial vessels.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@_The_Prophet__ NATO states aren't rich. Decades of choices have left the EU industrially weak and energy starved. Hostile 3rd world invaders soak up vast resources and inflict chaos on the EU hoi polloi. Massive changes are necessary.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@NuScale_Power @grok Has NuScale Power initiated any commercial reactor installations? Has a complete prototype been built to the point of reactor criticality?

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@USN_Submariner That squat body crane (right side of image), used to be at PSNS.

[JamesB 684 💯 🇺🇲 @JamesB684]

@chamath I dabbled in COBOL briefly, many decades ago. Not much better than BASIC. A truly horrible computer language. I suppose it's better than Assembly language...