Reuben Edie

I'm an internet lurker. Just doing this to follow people and stay up to date.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

The Star Wars prequels are back in the public consciousness lately, so I wanted to talk about how much Palpatine’s rise to power is one of the greatest villain arcs of all time.

When it comes to the prequels, so many people naturally focus on Anakin’s journey towards the Dark Side, the flaws of the Jedi Order, or the general controversy of how different generations either love or hate the trilogy. But I really think a vastly overlooked topic is the plot surrounding the disintegration of the Galactic Republic and Palpatine’s eventual triumph at the end of Revenge of the Sith.

This is a man who manufactures crisis after crisis to first depose the previous Supreme Chancellor, wins a sympathy vote to succeed him, orchestrates a civil war where he’s secretly in control of both sides, and ultimately uses the conflict to wipe out his political rivals, overthrow the political order they had created thousands of years earlier, and convert the very Galactic Republic that the Jedi had once defended against the Sith into a Galactic Empire ruled by the Sith themselves.

It’s genius writing, overlooked by a combination of fandom controversies regarding the films themselves and the fact that Anakin, Obi Wan, and Padme usually overshadow Palpatine in the prequels.

The fact that the Jedi spent millennia fighting the Sith on the battlefield, only to allow them to secretly hijack their own Republic and then weaponize it against them when Order 66 comes down proves that the Sith are the true political realists of the galaxy, while the Jedi are the metaphysical liberals attempting to abolish politics itself.

But politics can’t ever be abolished.

The tragedy of the prequels is that the Jedi essentially promise a galaxy without conflict, and by the time conflict inevitably reappears after a postwar consensus that has lasted a thousand years, they’ve lost the ability to deal with it.

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Jesus lived 600 years earlier in a far more unrefined era, yet He never owned a single slave. What is most startling about Christ is how He entirely bypassed the cultural traps of antiquity. He easily could have engaged in the socially permissible norms of His day that age horribly now; like marrying a minor, or owning and sexually exploiting slaves. But He didn’t. He lived with absolute moral perfection in a time when the ethical bar was on the floor, and His standard remains flawless today. He is God.

[hamsters🌐🐹 @sigmahamster2]

The real class war is between the productive class and the welfare class.

[Dr Dick Gargantuan, DMD @MikeJazzpenis]

I haaaate this argument “Well, they WANTED to do it the right way but we told them no! What are they supposed to do!?”

Shit, man. They wanted something and didn’t get it? Wow, that’s never happened to me. I don’t know how I’d handle not getting my way on something. I guess they can just do whatever they want now. The rules don’t apply to them because they didn’t get their way.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Humans are a pack animal.

This may be hard to understand if you are evangelical and think the book of genesis is literal rather than allegorical, but humans are a pack animal.

What this means is that the human desire for the acceptance and support of a tribe is as fundamental as the desire for food, for air, for water, for sex, for sunlight, for love.

If you tell young men that they cannot have a tribe, they're not going to accept that.

Ever.

Especially if you tell that only to the young men of one tribe in particular. They're going to wonder why everybody gets to have a tribe and they don't.

And they're eventually going to decide that you are the enemy.

Because you are. Anyone who stands between young men and what they need for a healthy, fulfilled life is their enemy.

That includes you.

And if you manage to convince them that god doesn't want them to have a tribe, it will also include god.

The more you push back against their healthy and natural desire for a tribe, a homeland, and a birthright, the more they will hate you, and the more exclusive their definition of that tribe will become.

There is no way you can stop this. The only thing you can control is how far they have to go, how radical they have to become, in order to get it.

Because this can go all the way from enforcing immigration law, and shutting down corrupt visa programs right now, to gangs of young White men in balaclavas with Ar15s going door to door ten years from now.

We have to do something about the 14th amendment. I don't care if that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy. It's not a choice. The constitution exists to serve Americans, not the other way around. If that sentence confuses you, read the first paragraph of the constitution.

If we do not, young men of the future, the same little boys who are being radicalized right now by your malicious indifference, will treat a piece of paper that says they cannot have a homeland the way they would treat a piece of paper that says that can't eat food, or a piece of paper that says they can't own a home, or have a wife and children.

You may think that you offer them a tribe in the form of the universal kingdom of god, the community of all believers, but that's just a word game and you know it, which is why you are so defensive about the whole thing.

Where was the universal community of believers when these young men needed help? When they needed not just the surface appearance of a tribe, but someone to do the things that tribes actually do for younger generations they care about?

The pack serves a concrete set of functions in the life cycle of the human species, and you cannot perform those functions with a cardboard cutout.

Young men are sick of religion that offers them responsibilities with no rights, lectures with no help, demands with no love or empathy.

It's odd, in a way ironic, that, I, the man of zero faith, should have to be the one standing here telling self-styled religious leaders how they failed both their people and their god.

But having no faith does give me one advantage. It frees me from the delusion that Jesus is a puppet that I can pull out of my pocket, slip over my right hand, move his mouth and make him say what I want.

I used to wonder, as a child, what the phrase "taking the name of the lord in vain" actually meant.

But I no longer wonder, because when I became a man, I looked around me and saw all these people who talk to god and somehow get told exactly what they want to hear.

Then I understood that the key phrase here wasn't "in vain". It was "taking". Taking the name of god and using it as a tool for one's own goals.

Joel, here, is sad that his friend is getting sent home. This personally inconveniences both him and his friend, which effects Joel in a way that young men being denied their birthright does not.

So he finds an interpretation of scripture that says that god wants him, Joel Berry, to get his way, and that god wants all the young men who want a homeland and a birthright to go get fucked.

I'm not terribly impressed.

[vittorio @IterIntellectus]

a very simple solution to virtually every problem would be to stop allowing people who live off taxpayer money to vote

anyone whose entire livelihood depends on the government taking money from other people will always vote for a government that takes more money

we’ve built a system where people can literally vote to give themselves more of other people’s money

the conflict of interest is beyond ridiculous and if you remove the incentive you remove the problem

[Sall Grover @salltweets]

There seems to be some confusion amongst some people, so I will explain it as clearly as I can:

Australia’s sex discrimination act was created for women, on the basis of our sex. When it was enacted in 1984 (ominous year, in hindsight) employment was a big part of it.

There was a part of the act, section 7D, that allowed “special measures” where things exclusively for women weren’t even classed as discrimination, basically when it was being a woman is what actually mattered in the situation. Specific employment/opportunity provisions and… woman-only spaces fell/fall into this category.

In 2013, the Gillard amendments introduced “gender identity” while taking the definitions of woman & man out of the act. Sex was never defined, but in a normal world it didn’t have to be. It could only have meant one thing (a mistake, again in hindsight).

By the time the trans absurdity hit fever pitch, Australian institutions were captured. This included those meant to be the custodians of the SDA. Suddenly, all they cared about was “gender identity” aka transgender ideology.

When the Tickle v Giggle case came along, it started with an Australian Human Rights Commission complaint. To settle it, aka not have it advance to federal court, I was expected to just agree with transgender ideology. I don’t.

I wish I could say I completely understood the magnitude at the time, but it’s almost impossible to. You think you do, but you don’t really until it hits you like a bus.

But what I did know, instinctively, was that if I folded, I couldn’t live with it, nor would it help because all it signaled was that “we” would just accept it if threatened. I found myself in a position to challenge the absurdity, and I did, because I knew not doing it would have been worse no matter what.

Obviously, everyone knows now, the courts ruled against me in every way they could. From what a woman is, to 7D, to damages. I lost - and have lost - everything.

But what does it mean to everyone else in reality?

It means the sex discrimination commissioner told the court that the ordinary meaning of woman includes men who claim to be women, and the court accepted that. Men who claim to be women are women in Australia, via the only legislation they have to validate it.

It means that for every aspect of the SDA, per the SDC’s demand, woman includes men who claim to be women. From employment to women only spaces to pregnancy protections, because of section 7D.

Did we warn about this in our court submissions and arguments? Yes. That was actually our entire case. You can read it. It’s all publicly available.

The high court said that we would have no possibility of success. We were arguing that women is adult human female and this matters in, tada, section 7D. That was it. The high court said “hell no way”. The high court is captured too.

As it stands, due to legal precedent, a special measure for women based on sex does not provide a defense to gender identity discrimination. That means that all special measures for women fall to gender identity, which will only be used by men who claim to be women, and includes - tada - employment, and women only spaces.

It means that men who claim to be women have more rights than actual women, while simultaneously taking away our rights.

I don’t know how many more times I could say the “Tickle v Giggle” case is about more than “just” one app, I’ve been saying it for almost 5 years, but I will continue to do it until everyone understands. They wiped women’s rights off the map.

It’s a f—ing mess. It doesn’t work. It’s incoherent. It’s ideological. It writes women out of law. It’s corruption. It’s totalitarian. It’s bullsh-t.

It’s the test of any government: are you ok with legislating a lie?

[Yeerk.P 🦆 @PYeerk]

Male folk sociology of women is treated as a potential terrorist ideology, female folk sociology of men is taken as pop science, promoted by major institutions and accepted as a behavioural blueprint for socialisation

[Mike, Mike, Mike @Gulicio1]

This is the best explanation between left and right I have heard in a long time! #RepublicanValues #democraticvalues

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

I'm the kind of guy who tries to see value in all cultures, but if you're executing people for having sex then sorry, you're just barbaric. I am a better person than you, my values and culture are superior to yours, and I hope your culture perishes.

Also goes for blasphemy laws

[Lady Laughingloudley @blah_blablather]

Let’s be clear:
If I’m not going to sleep with you, I don’t need to know anything about your sexuality.
And children—who are not going to sleep with anyone—certainly don’t.
Your sexuality is not sacred. It’s not a personality, it’s not a protected class of performance art, and it’s not the center of anyone’s moral universe but your own. Unless we are in a relationship, I am not obligated to acknowledge, affirm, or be exposed to your private desires—especially not in public, and especially not in front of children.
This used to be understood. Now it’s called hate.
No, We Don’t Owe You an Audience
Sexuality belongs in the private realm. It is intimate by definition. If you feel compelled to wear your kink on your sleeve—or on a float, or in a first-grade classroom—you are not inviting understanding, you are demanding submission. You are violating others’ right not to participate.
Consent doesn’t vanish because your fetish is “progressive.” If anything, the burden is higher.
No one consents to being flashed on the subway. No one consents to a stranger’s arousal. No one consents to a stranger telling their child about masturbation, kink, gender identity, or pornographic categories under the guise of “inclusive sex ed.” Yet all of this is happening now—in public parks, in classrooms, in televised programming.
It is not tolerance. It is invasion.
Children Are Not Here to Validate You
Children are not queer. Children are not sexual. Children do not need to “see themselves represented” in a spectrum of adult desire. This idea—that identity is only valid if sexualized and mirrored—is narcissism, not pedagogy.
There is no legitimate reason to initiate a child into the language of sexual preference, gender identity, or alternative lifestyles. The only people who benefit from that dynamic are those looking to normalize boundary violations.
Let me state it plainly:
Children who are not going to have sex do not need to be exposed to sexuality.
Period.
Any adult who insists otherwise is not confused. They are grooming.
Public Fetishism Is Not Liberation
There is a vast difference between being gay and demanding the right to simulate sex acts in front of children. Between being transgender and insisting on teaching kindergartners about breast removal. Between being proud of who you are and insisting the whole world observe your kink play in the street.
This is not diversity. This is decay.
Men in dog masks being walked on leashes by their lovers are not brave—they are forcing strangers into their psychodrama. This is exhibitionism, and when children are present, it becomes criminal exhibitionism.
We used to know this. Peeping, flashing, voyeurism—these were considered red flags. Dangerous behaviors. Early signs of escalation. Now they’re filmed, hashtagged, and funded by public grants.
Stop Calling It Love—It’s Entitlement
This is not about who you love. It’s about how you demand to be seen. If you need the entire public to witness, applaud, and adapt to your sexuality, you’re not a pioneer—you’re an emotional colonizer.
Love does not demand a captive audience. It does not parade past toddlers. It does not demand that schools teach four-year-olds about “preferred pronouns.” Love protects children. Love guards modesty. Love waits.
And if you can’t wait—if you need to be seen, affirmed, and obeyed—you’re not talking about love. You’re talking about power.
Consent Applies to Culture, Too
We teach children that consent is sacred—so why are we failing to apply that lesson to public life?
No child consents to drag queen story hour.
No parent consents to leather harnesses on city floats.
No woman consents to being exposed to male sexuality in the ladies’ room, or in the school library, or anywhere she cannot opt out.
Consent is not just for sex. It’s for everything.
Attention. Language. Presence. Ideology. Imagery.
And we are done pretending we don’t notice when it’s violated.
The boundary is back.
And we are drawing it in bold.

[Peter🦍🍌 @PLDroneOperator]

I'm currently stressed out so I'm going to comfort scroll race war content on this application

[Natasha @Natasha_etc_]

I’m a middle-class woman in my thirties. I have a good career, a comfortable life and a degree of financial security that gives me choices many others don’t have. I’m well aware that I’m fortunate, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

Many of the issues raised in J.K. Rowling’s latest essay are less likely to affect me directly than they might other women.

But why on earth should that make them any less important to me?

If I need healthcare, I may be able to access alternatives. If I disagree with an institution’s decisions, I have the education, confidence and potentially the means to challenge them. Not everyone has that luxury. And circumstances can change quickly. Importantly, a comfortable life is hardly a permanent magical shield.

I don’t have to be a woman in prison to care about the rights of female prisoners, or a woman seeking refuge after sexual violence to believe single-sex services not only matter, but are vital in society. Nor do I have to find myself vulnerable on a hospital ward, or be a nurse required to change at work, to understand why privacy, dignity and safeguarding are important.

What troubles me is the expectation that women should accept the erosion or reinterpretation of their sex-based rights without question, and that objecting somehow makes them unreasonable, intolerant or hateful.

I believe biological sex matters. Women are entitled to privacy, dignity and safety, and single-sex provisions are and entirely reasonable necessity.

I also believe trans people deserve dignity, safety and protection from discrimination. That doesn’t require me to abandon biological reality or my support for safeguarding measures based on sex.

Then there’s the law.

The Supreme Court clarified the meaning of sex under the Equality Act in 2025. Yet disputes continue over how institutions apply that judgment. What happens to women who cannot afford those battles?

It shouldn’t require a legal team, financial security and the patience of a saint to exercise rights enshrined in law.

And this is where class matters. Those with the greatest influence over institutional policies aren’t necessarily the people who must live with their consequences. Those with the least choice are often expected to accommodate decisions they had little influence over. That is profoundly unfair.

I’m not an activist. I’m somewhat introverted, I don’t have a significant public following, nor would I particularly want one. I have no desire to make myself a public figure.

But I have opinions. Quite strong ones, as it happens. And I have a voice. One that my own conscience insists I use.

I don’t presume to speak for every woman. Women aren’t a monolith, and we’re perfectly capable of disagreeing. I don’t expect everyone to share my views, any more than I expect to share theirs.

But I do expect to be able to express mine. And I believe those of us who can speak have a moral obligation to do so, particularly when others cannot.

As for Rowling, I don’t agree with an argument simply because she makes it. I have profound respect for her, but she’s a woman, not a deity. I respect that she had no personal need, with her current circumstance, to enter this debate, yet chose to because of her convictions.

I don’t need to be personally disadvantaged to recognise something is wrong. I don’t need to know the women affected, or have anything to gain from defending their rights.

My current circumstances aren’t a reason to care less. If anything, they make me more conscious of why those rights matter.

I’d rather use my voice to defend something I believe in than stay conveniently silent simply because the consequences are less likely to land on my own doorstep.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

I wrote a new piece about women’s rights and whether or not I want trans people dead. (Spoiler: I don’t)👇
https://t.co/BfxVLo0AD1

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

I cannot stress enough what a El-Sayed victory would signal here. It would mean that discourse is dead in American politics.

I mean, what more is there to talk about if you can literally campaign with a guy who said America deserved 9/11 and still get elected to the US Senate?

It would mean that moral outrage does nothing to change the outcome of an election. We already saw this in 2025 with Jay Jones’ victory, and it makes sense if you think about it.

Why would moral outrage swing an election if we no longer share the same moral alignment?

[Æthelstan @TheHauskarl]

It's hard to put into words the bad vibes I get from these "security guards" - these urban scarecrows - that have gradually crept into every town centre and medium-sized shop across Britain. Faces covered, ID's hidden, barely literate.

Britain is turning into what feels like an interrogation chamber with a one-way mirror; you are expected to tolerate being tracked by all manner of AI and CCTV, meanwhile the people on the other side of the mirror and their henchmen are beyond reproach.

I don't feel safer with them around. I don't accept their authority over me. And I'm not going to spend money in the decaying shopping centres they're paid to lurk in.

I don't expect any explanation as to why this has happened to be forthcoming, and the only remaining avenue of protest is to withdraw your custom or vote for parties that will end this.

I'm not going to partake in the public lie, the communal act of pretending, that this is normal. The Britain I knew had no need of such strange men in the first place.

If you wish to live in a communal dream state of self-delusion and lies, go ahead, but you will do it alone and without me.

"The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the world."
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1974

[Aly Feels @AlyssaLogic]

One of the biggest surprises to me about adulting is seeing how bad people have to be at jobs before they get fired

[Hunter Ash @ArtemisConsort]

You cannot morally analyze acts totally divorced from their context. Throwing boiling water on random people for no reason would indeed be worse than stealing. Throwing boiling water on people burning down your city is a positive moral good.

[SirD 🇺🇸 @Sir_Dammed]

"I'm 13 and this is politics" to the fucking max.

These people unironically believe, thanks to the constant propaganda dumps poured into their brains from the moment they can spell "google" or "wikipedia," that this is how literally anything about the world works in 2026.

Meanwhile, if you dig into the real, unfiltered truth...

Bob voted republican because he wanted cheaper taxes and maybe because a cousin of a friend of a friend was raped by someone who probably wasn't here legally.

Bob generally speaking doesn't care about race or skin color. Bob's got a friend named Jamal who works with him at the construction site and they go out for beers on Thursdays. But he has seen a lot of rundown crime ridden shitholes aka predominantly black neighborhoods, and he's realistic/honest about the pattern of Black Americans and violent crime. His friend Jamal even agrees with him about it, but he doesn't like to talk about it because leftists will call him a coon.

Because Bob is honest about these things and because he votes republican, he's immediately labeled a white supremacist and a racist. Because leftists are retarded, they immediately assume this means he wants to put brown people in concentration camps. They will not provide any evidence or elaborate.

Meanwhile, Sally is your average left-wing democrat. She has had her brain absolutely *scorched* by the propaganda mill that is Google's proprietary AI, Wikipedia, CNN, MSNBC, NYT, CBS, BBC, etc. and she's been indoctrinated heavily since the day she stepped foot into university. Said propaganda plays directly on her emotions: convincing her that not supporting leftist politics would mean lacking "empathy" or "compassion." But Sally is a compassionate person.

Because of this, she misguidedly supports policies that invite hoards of military-aged foreign men into the country. These men are not "evil" per se, but they do not respect or share western values. Many of them (not all) see women as inferior beings who should not be allowed to dress how they like, drive cars, or have jobs. But Sally has been propagandized into the bigotry of low expectations. "Those poor browns don't know any better. They had it rough growing up," Sally thinks to herself as she votes for the guy who promises to import more of them.

Sally attends the average ICE protest. Sally is unknowingly impeding ICE while they're in the process of trying to arrest a known rapist and child sexual predator who sodomized a 4-year-old. She thinks she's doing something good and compassionate, when in reality she's behaving cruelly to the innocent. The 13-year-old girl who will be raped by an MS-13 member. The infant who was sodomized. The old lady who was beaten to death in her own home for some jewelry.

Bob knows Sally is like this, but he knows better than to try and talk about politics with her. Rather than hating her for it, he pities her and tries to help her however he can, because Bob's a good friend. If Sally knew Bob's politics, Bob would be immediately labeled an intolerant bigot by Sally, then subsequently ostracized from Sally's life and friend groups. Sally will not recognize the irony in these actions because she's too far gone, but Bob will be better off without her anyways.

[Christian Heiens 🏛 @ChristianHeiens]

You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.

When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.

These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.

When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.

We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.

We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.

Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.

They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.