Specs Thunder

In the garden, I attempted to become my own god; the slithering fiend told me lies that held me in awe

[BlockHead @blockhead4000]

An interesting thing about the new crop of race communist retards is that they're truly a-historical in a Maoist sense. They've mentally imbibed 3rd world ism so completely that they cant abstract beyond "Keel de white mon", and dont understand the reason any of this stuff is still allowed to exist at all is to serve as a physical tether to WW2 and the Holocaust. A tether that can be used to keep those events topical and beat White people over the head with forever.

Hitler's not going anywhere though. He's the most famous man since Jesus of Nazareth and probably has more metaphysical power in people's minds in the current year. Even if the White Race lies down to slumber forever, Hitler is literally probably the only White man that will never be forgotten.

In Yemen the MG42 is the "Hitler Gun" and has special totemic power in battle. Warlords in Africa name their favorite gun or pet Lion Hitler. Both sides in the Russia Ukraine war utilize SS symbols and memorialize him in certain ways. He'll never dissappear even if they destroy every physical artifact of his life. He's taken on a new life as a War God of sorts, a pseudo-Mars you can pray to in battle to invoke his power.

[The Refined Populist @RefinedPopulist]

My favorite thing about wacky GOP antics from the Obama era is that every single thing your insane conservative uncle predicted at Thanksgiving 2011 came true.

- They ARE using your money for Abortions
- They ARE pushing the gay on Children
- The illegals/foreigners ARE stealing jobs
- New York City IS ruled by Islamo-Marxists
- The debt IS exclusively welfare fraud

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

If this is the state of your civilization, then there is absolutely no point in talking about crimes at all.

Because if you lack the moral courage even to correctly describe the typical perpetrator, then you certainly lack the moral courage to actually hold perpetrators responsible.

Society, ultimately, is implemented by humans. Every law ever written is just so much wasted paper if the humans charged with giving meaning to those laws refuse to do so.

And for the last 75 years, that is what has happened. We have developed a political class that refuses to follow the intent of the law, or even its literal text, because if democrats started imprisoning thieves and murderers, we might have to notice that they're all African, and if republicans started deporting visa fraudsters, we might have to notice that they are all Indian.

There is an unwelcome truth behind all of this. Almost no one is particularly happy about it, but it divides the world into two groups... those who are willing to confront it, and those with their fingers in their ears screaming lalalalalalalalaIcantHEARyou.

Classical liberalism alone did not create or sustain Western Civilization. We know this because we have plenty of it, and it's not.

Christianity alone did not create or sustain Western Civilization. We know this because we have plenty of it, and it's not.

Western Civilization was created and sustained by the balance of three philosophies, not two, and it is the third philosophy that is missing.

This third philosophy does not come with a name, and it was never given a name until someone wanted to eradicate it.

Why does it not have a name? Because, unlike the other two philosophies, it has no point of origin. It did not have to be invented.

It predates both classical liberalism and Christianity. It predates the human race. Bees practice it, wolves practice it, dolphins practice it and so do lions.

It is the default state of all life.

Without it, the liberal notion of human rights, and the Christian notions of the good Samaritan and the imago d.e.i. become nothing more than suicide pacts.

Both classical liberalism and Christianity are leftist, socialist, and universalist in nature, and they only ever worked as modifiers on the basic right wing philosophy of all life.

It can be best described by one word.

Empiricism.

That isn't the word you thought I'd use, is it? But it's the word that fits, because it's the word that means believing what you see right in front of you.

Regardless of whether it hurts anyone's feelings, or contradicts your abstract principles about Jesus or the rights of humans.

It is the philosophy of preferring the welfare of your family to the welfare of infinity shrimp. It is the philosophy of not ignoring the blindingly fucking obvious.

It is the philosophy of all of us admitting that women who look like Diane Yap do not need to be followed around by security inside the store.

They need to be followed around by the Highway Patrol once they leave.

[The Refined Populist @RefinedPopulist]

The American Revolution was fought over a simple principle: No Taxation Without Representation.

It’s time for the reciprocal principle: No Representation Without Taxation.

On welfare? No vote. Net negative taxpayer? No vote. Able-bodied and refusing to work? No vote.

The people who fund the Republic should not be politically subordinate to those who live off it. You shouldn’t get to vote yourself a paycheck from someone else’s wallet.

[Nelson Rodrigues @NelsonRedPill]

A Europa será destruída por mulheres que projetam naqueles animais a maternidade que cabia aos filhos que elas abortaram.

[Fortissax @FortySacks]

Because the Boomer Holy War, otherwise known as the Second World War, is the creation myth, the biblical Genesis, of the political world order we inhabit. History begins in 1945, Year Zero, when the Allied and Axis powers, the cosmic forces of absolute Good and Evil, clashed for dominion over the world.

What we call “Western Values” are the liberal American values of the postwar order: unregulated global capitalism, liberal democracy, individualism, civil rights, and equality. Three generations of men have been indoctrinated into this cult, which is ultimately a secularized heresy of Aristotelian humanist Christianity, repackaged as a universal moral doctrine.

Hitler has assumed the role of Satan, while some grotesque amalgamation of Winston Churchill and Martin Luther King Jr. occupies the throne of Jesus Christ. The Nazis are the defeated legions of Hell, and the Holocaust is the ultimate revelation of Evil against which all subsequent political and moral questions must be judged.

You’re not allowed to have nice things like community, traditional families, immigration restrictions, or any meaningful sense of national, ethnic, racial, or religious identity as a White person because any deviation from the sacred doctrines of the postwar consensus threatens to bring about Holocaust 2. To believe in any of these is to practice heresy. Racism is the ultimate heresy, and White guilt is origin sin, without a path to atonement.

The further removed each generation becomes from 1945, the weaker its attachment to this haphazard, pseudo religious worldview grows. In 13 years, an entire century will have passed since the outbreak of the Second World War.

The moralizing about the Holocaust, the obsessive fixation on stopping identity politics among native Westerners, the relentless insistence on feminism, diversity, and the ideological apparatus of the postwar order will resemble the exhausted dogmas of a dying secular religion whose founding revelation has lost its power over the living.

This is obvious as the materialistic promise of infinite growth and wealth has failed, and mass immigration, diversity and the third world are an existential threat to westerners who have no socioeconomic opportunities and a poor shot at family for formation.

[Richard “Beebo” Russell @proverbs_14_23]

I once sold a truck to a guy who called and agreed to pay full price as long as I brought it to the airport within the hour. It was incredibly sus, but my truck had been for sale for months, and I had grown desperate. So I went. It only got weirder.

The moment I arrive he hops in the drivers seat for a test drive, and a run to the bank to get the money to buy it. He’s a freakishly large porcine fellow, adorned head to toe in dirty work clothes. He looked like Hagrid if he were an alcoholic with a the world’s most unionized construction job.

We get to chatting on the drive. Work, life, conspiratorial ramblings, Donald Trump, Pakis. The usual, if you know this type of guy.

I come to learn he needed to buy my truck to get home. He had bought a one way plane ticket to come buy a different one, but had been ghosted by the seller when he landed. He was stranded at an airport on the other side of the country with no other plan.

So I thought, “well maybe I know the guy who ghosted him. Let me see if I can help.” I asked to see his phone to read his FB Marketplace message with the seller.

He had been talking to some guy with Broken English and a vaguely middle eastern sounding name for several days now. The guy was selling an incredibly desirable truck for 30% below market. A virtually impossible deal. The vehicular equivalent of a horny singles in your area add on a porn site.

He turned to me and said “y’know, his listing says the truck is about an hour from here, maybe I should go look for him.”

I said “bro I’m looking at his profile, he has this same truck listed in every city in North America. The plate in the photos isn’t even from our state. This truck is spammed hundreds of times across marketplace.”

To which he replied, “yeah I thought that was weird. I think it’s a glitch.”

“No it’s not a glitch… you didn’t send him money did you?” I asked, fearing the answer.

“Yeah I sent him a money, otherwise he was gonna sell it to another guy.”

I winced. “how much?”

“Five thousand bucks.”

“……okay.”

“Well let’s look him up, we have his name.” He replies confidently.

“Look him up where?” I ask.

“Facebook”

“I’m looking at his Facebook. It’s not real.”

Just then we arrive at the bank, he parks my 2500HD in the handicap spot at a 45 degree angle. I say maybe we should pick a different spot, he tells me he isn’t picky.

We set up the wire transfer, he makes a disparaging remark about brown people to the teller. She frowns, she is brown. The money luckily still gets sent. And he takes off in the truck.

Hours later he calls me from the middle of nowhere. He had decided to fuck with the aftermarket tuner while driving and bricked it. He was stranded.

I don’t think all you xitter users realize just how difficult the modern world already is for an 85IQ person to navigate.

With 53% of youtube shorts views now coming from AI content, these people are about to be thrust into a completely incomprehensible dream realm forever.

[Scorched Earth Policy @Scearpo]

While destroying your past with a woman is traumatizing, it beats being cuckholded. After all, what are you supposed to do?

"Work through the breakup?"
"Keep in touch?"
"Stay friends after?"

Yeah that sounds great, I'd love to "keep texting" and dance around this stupid little ambiguous zone we're both stuck in because neither of us had the will to just end it cleanly and move on. I would LOVE to taper off your presence in my life like some morphine addict suckling at the metal tube in my gay little hamster cage.

Maybe the wistful melancholy will be a nice consolation prize while I deal with the inevitability of you getting dined, fucked, and situationshipped by a rebound. It's okay though I'll just speedrun fucking a fat chick on Hinge and we'll be "even" as we say happy birthday and wish each other Merry Christmas for the next two years before we stop giving a shit.

No thank you. I believe in the Scorched Earth Policy. I believe in wiping out everything the moment it's over, it's the only thing that has the slightest semblance of dignity. What was there to begin with? A ring on the finger? A child, a family?

If so, good luck to you, you have bigger problems than what a tweet could solve for you. But if not, who fucking cares? Boo hoo you lost several years of your life, next time don't fuck up, you get at most 3 of these before it's over for you and you're just a glorified temporal prostitute playing roulette with your lineage.

Oh you share a home?
Kick em out or leave.

Buh buh buh but what about our kitty and our pupper?
Put em in the fucking pound.

Don Draper's problem wasn't that he was "running from his past" it was that he was a degenerate who couldn't stop himself from compulsively fucking strangers and he didn't dick his wife down hard enough to suppress her mental illnesses.

You can absolutely kill the past, in fact it's a necessary thing in the modern world. The trauma doesn't come from the act of killing it, the trauma is generated by the wrong lifestyle and cultural decisions that led to you developing the weakness in the first place.

The childhood is the first mistake. The childhood isn't real, it's a concept invented in the late 18th century, a product of excess and luxurious experimentation. The idea that children need to spend a decade of their waking memory having little to no responsibility, role or purpose beyond education and play has done irreparable damage to society. It trains human beings at their most mental pliable stages of life to expect that all of life should be one of provision, ease, and idle preoccupation. It conditions you to experience constant increasing disappointment with growing older.

The second mistake is "love." While love is real, true, and deeply important to the human condition, what you consider to be love is a series of delusions fostered by media and a sickened society to make you as sensitive and turbulent as possible. Of the factors that decide who you develop a relationship with, love is the least important. It's supposed to be a consequence of familiarity and proximity developed over time with trust and experience. Yet, the modern worldview would have you believe it's the metric by which all relationships should occur.

The third mistake is the self. This is not the most vividly harmful consequence but its pervasiveness is near universal. The idea of who "you" are is at odds with the reality. You realistically are not one single individual but rather a throbbing mass of consciousnesses competing within a consensus to steer your physical body.

You are the sandwich you ate, the sleep you got last night, the movie you just watched. You're a series of coin flips between how much cardio you get and when's the last time you orgasmed. You're shame, pride, accomplishment, and failure all clawing to try and mantle the forefront of mental preoccupation. You're the weather, you're the moon, you're the magnetic fields, you're the air pressure around you.

The "You" that you were in childhood no longer exists. Aging is the process of shedding your old skins as you gradually adopt new one. Your current form of consciousness and its amalgamated configuration is a conquer who built a home on the corpse of what it usurped.

We used to have rituals built into our tribes and societies to represent when the old you had to die and make way for the adult you. We do this because it's important to put away the childish things so that you may think as a man and not as a child.

Is it right or good to live this way? Maybe not. Children have a spark of divinity that adults have long lost. To play and think their way sometimes endeavors discoveries that change everything. Perhaps the consequencelessness and appetite for pure emotional indulgence is the leftover residue from the spirit world they entered our world from. A place where nothing really gets to die so all there is becomes indistinguishable from play and games. Demons that exist to make you cry, angels that work to make you smile, nothing more beyond that forever.

But we do not live in their world. They must live in the material world and the material world is one of permanently material consequences. We age, weather, and decay. We huddle for warmth and we scramble to survive. Everything we do as human beings is struggling against the violent apathetic chaos of the nature world as we steadily carve a path through the hostility. And we harm ourselves in the process, making thoughtful and thoughtless decisions as to which is the lesser evil.

Marriage and monogamy is not inherently natural to the primate existence. Were we to embrace what felt natural, we'd be hooting and hollering, dancing and beating each other, and likely a few would breed the many while betas hovered around the edges of the pack pilferraping what few squaws they could ensconce away for a moment.

We built a cage of suffering through the preciousness of our partners because we felt it's better to value the one and only person in your life you want to be with forever.

We did this because men feel better knowing the mother of their children has never known another.

We did this because people feel more strongly about caring for their own progeny than someone else's.

We did this because God made exactly two of us, one for the other, and the math always seems to keep that ratio constant.

In working around those desires, we created something made out of glass that cuts you when it's shattered. The one woman for her one man, and if anything should happen to her it's the worst feeling in the world. It's basically death but worsened by the ambivalence that a real death would crush and wipe away.

A constant reminder that your "one woman" is no longer yours and you have to wander around the world knowing she's gone forever and even if you took her back (which is always a mistake), that version of her is dead forever.

So the same solutions we created to lessen the trauma of a long gone childhood are the ones we apply to ourselves. We rip the mask and burn it. That version of them is dead, that version of us is dead. We mourn it, we move on.

If I don't live in the society that chooses my wife for me as a teenager and guarantees at gunpoint that she's a fitting mother for our future children, then being able to kill the past and start over callously is the only thing standing in between you and a reality where men do whatever it takes to make that world real.

To oecolamp's point, I think he's concluding something more reasonable about taking great care in entering a relationship and being completely dedicated to making it turn into a marriage, not some childish idea that nobody should ever break up.

This could and should be fostered by reducing the connotations of courtship from the inflation they've gone through in the past century. Here's how some of this should work:
- You are not allowed to "love" anyone but your wife. You "fancy" someone until you marry them.
- Women must be virgins before marriage.
- If a woman has had sex before marriage, she may either become a prostitute or a nun.
- Both sets of parents consent to a marriage and if either doesn't, the couple forgoes family support if they should choose to elope.
- The couple cannot live together until marriage (this one is huge btw)
- Courtship has a maximum time limit of a year, if a man isn't "ready" he shouldn't be courting anyone

Of course doing all this is impractical and larping your way through it with today's retinue of total used up whores is a humiliation ritual. You won't get any of this and you shouldn't get this until after a great cataclysm. It's just something to remember for whichever of you make it through the ashes to tell your grandchildren when choice finally returns to civilization.

For young men today, please understand this:

There is no reason for you to ever be talking to a woman you've been involved with after your relationship ends. If you're "texting" your ex you are a raped cuckhold who insists on humiliating yourself over false hopes and fancy dreams.

Everything you do during and after a breakup is a choice you make that essentially boils down to "is this worth exposing me to the woman I love being fucked by other men?"

Oh no you two split a lease and you wanna wait out the four months instead of breaking it?
Okay so living with this human emotional nuke is worth like 1-2 months of rent to you.

Uh oh, your loser ass friend group was friends with both of you and you think you can't win them over compared to her?
Okay so board game night and your shitty local bar is worth more to you than your pride and dignity.

Aw jeez you had a pet and you can't bring it to your new apartment and she can't bring it to hers?
Oh okay sorry I guess you need to be tangentially exposed to her getting rebounded by strangers because your retarded dog needs to eat concrete kibbles and takes leash walks to shit from you instead of any other faggot who lives in the city.

Every shitty movie, every mindful podcast, every t-shirt slogan, yum crunch yogurt bar commercial, feminized positivity message, and thoughtful little cartoon you encounter is begging you to be mindful, emotional, in touch, connected, thoughtful, loving, and human.

Have you ever spent a moment ever considering what it feels like to do the opposite?

Have you ever indulged in the rage? Have you ever let yourself feel callous?

Do you know how good it fucking feels to burn it all down to the ground and let the colossal weight of a person, a mass of people, all just go away?

Don't worry you're not going to "lose your humanity" indulging in it for just a little bit. If anything you'll find it. People who go through this long enough or often enough eventually find that truly being alone is the only time anything seems to have dignity or serenity.

Other people are a vacuous cacophony, polluting your existence with mundanity and discordance. Yet it's the hardest thing to maintain for long periods of time. Eventually the biology kicks in and you succumb to the world of other people, like parched lips licking up the morning dew from the tips of grass leaves.

But if you've never even reached this point, you are spiritually obese. You have never known the dignity of solitude because you've monkey branched every relationship in your life, collecting rolodexes of kept-in-touch exes. You fattened yourself with the comfort of persistent human contact and in exchange for that safety you robbed yourself of any dignity you had.

And no, you're not one of the lucky few who never experienced heartbreak, you don't get to claim that if you read this far. Those dudes are husking corn and talking about car engines, they've never even opened a tweet in their lives.

[Specs Thunder @Rizzophrenia]

@skibidiblazor @ChristianHeiens You were insta banned for posting Hunter Biden with a crack pipe on Twitter

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

I honestly do not understand how any American who is not already a literal Communist or a literal Jihadist could vote Democrat after hearing what Slotkin said below.

This is LITERALLY totalitarianism. It's not the fake "fascism" the Left likes to accuse the Right of, it is the REAL THING.

Undeniably.

Irrefutably.

This is a sitting member of Congress who was in the CIA saying that dissent from what she believes will result in imprisonment.

This is straight out of Solzhenitsyn. Straight out of Orwell. This is something an early Nazi would have said in 1932 under the Weimar Republic.

Please please PLEASE share her words with everyone you know. The Democrat/Media Complex will try to bury this. It is up to us on social media, on blogs and via texts and emails to get the word out.

The only way to stop these monsters is to make sure that voters who don't really keep up on politics understand the actual threat, see it with their own eyes and hear it with their own ears.

Please. Spread the word to anyone who will listen. And even those who won't listen.

[Cafa @tobillosdepapel]

Todo esto me hizo acordar cuando los de BLM quisieron saquear una panadería italiana en Ohio.
Qué maravilla la 2da enmienda

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

No, she does not realize anything.

No, she will not realize anything.

No, she will not change her belief system.

Because she has none.

Only high-testosterone, high-IQ heterosexual males speak and act as a result of their mental model of the system as a whole. Everyone else just says and does whatever they think will keep them safe, and maybe get them a pat on the head.

Her mental model is not "Diversity is good for France."

Her mental model is "if I say diversity is good for France, others will approve of me".

If you have enough voters who believe things simply because others believe them, democracy becomes irrelevant.

Actual opinion no longer matters, only the illusion of consensus. Because the people who are swayed by the illusion of consensus become the swing voters, and everyone who actually needs to be reasoned with becomes irrelevant.

That's what women's suffrage is really for. That's what immigration is really for. That's what government school systems are for. They are all for generating a critical mass of voters whose opinions are formed outside their heads.

That's why the entire Western political class appears to hate high-T hetero White men suddenly and all at once.

Western high-T hetero White men are the demographic that advances civilization at all, but they are also the greatest impediment to managerial rule. And guess which one the political class actually cares about.

So, no, women are not going to suddenly wake up and reverse course.

You are not going to seize power by changing women's minds.

You must change women's minds by seizing power.

[Vauban Books @VaubanBooks]

There is no war. There is no response. There are no french people fighting back. They are being brushed away. The point is all the meaning of being french is swept away. The symbolic world, all you are and love, is like a bit of string. Over there and meaningless. Who cares? Does anyone know the meaning of the word war? Sorry to say, but today Raspail is right! War?

"It’s war! Here is the map of the front.” “Obviously, it’s war,” said Machefer, “but who’s going to believe us? A war in which the unarmed enemy suffers casualties every day several thousand kilometers from here! We’ve been so successful in lulling the population to sleep that it simply lacks the strength to imagine any other kind of war than the one we stupidly commemorate every year. War? The Frenchman can clearly read this word in black and white spread over eight columns and it won’t make any difference to him at all, unless he has seen the enemy, heard the cannon, or received his ration book!"

They burn it for warmth and for fun and some for war but mostly because they can and want to. If we could call it war we wouldn't be in this situation. But we don't, we call it student protests.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Lina, you don't know the honest truth.

In the military, you got your POGs... Person Other than a Grunt. Guys who don't shoot anything. You need them, because you need all sorts of specialties, but you can't trust their big-picture judgement, because the overall mission of the military is shootin' people, and they don't do that.

In civilization, we have POMs.

Person Other than a Maker. Dudes what don't build things. You might need them. But you shouldn't take them too seriously, or listen to them too much, because on some fundamental level, they are never going to get it. They are never going to understand. The fundamental task of civilization is making things, and POMs don't do that.

"This is just a mash-up of existing technology" is the most POM-like typing you could ever hope to see. It's a tell that someone has never done a significant engineering project in a technical role.

Experienced engineers not only understand differently, we eat, sleep and breathe the basic reality that 99% of engineering challenges are "get mechanism to work with other mechanism". Without breaking, shaking itself apart or blowing up.

Every basic scientific principle behind the internal combustion automobile was understood by the ancient Greeks and Romans.

And yet they were not only unable to harness those principles to make a primitive steam-powered automobile, they were unable to conceive of the very idea, because their ability to implement and integrate wasn't advanced enough.

If you look at everything that Elon Musk has ever done, every company he has ever built, every technology he has ever brought to market, none of it was a purely new invention.

It was ALL taking stuff that already kinda worked, and making it do new things. And not just do them, but do them so well that they actually became practical.

SpaceX didn't invent the rocket. They made it reusable.

Tesla didn't invent the electric motor or the battery. They made them practical for ground transportation.

Neurallink didn't invent electrical nerve interfaces. They made them control a computer UI.

This shit is incredibly hard. If you try to use the known principle of a cold-gas thruster to make a car fly, you're going to crash and blow up a lot. You're going to have to make mistakes, and fix them, one by one, until you run out of mistakes and the thing flies.

Real engineers, real makers, know that this is what the word engineering means. POMs don't get it. Lina doesn't understand what she saw.

She thinks she saw a publicity stunt to impress yokels.

No. That was a publicity stunt to impress engineers.

It wasn't a demonstration of a flying car at all. It was a demonstration of the engineering capabilities of team.

It was a flex.

"Look," they said, "we can reify the Gernsback continuum. Give us your silliest, low-effort science fiction meme tech, and give us enough time, and we'll make it real."

The purpose of making a flying car isn't to let you do a jetpack leap over traffic. It's to learn all the little implementation details and balancing tradeoffs and gotchas that you have to master to make a car fly.

It's not the big scientific discoveries that build civilization. By themselves, they are nothing but curiosities.

What builds civilization is all the little discoveries that you make when you try to get the big ones to stop crashing and blowing up.

When someone does that on a unprecedented level, you either help them, or you stay out of the way and keep your ignorant POM opinions to yourself.

[Specs Thunder @Rizzophrenia]

@Devon_Eriksen_ RoyalRoad is a solid website where avoiding the ai slop isn’t too bad

[Specs Thunder @Rizzophrenia]

@marventhusiast @The_ANWTO @fredgiblet @MojaveArtClub I meant in games, my fault OG

[Specs Thunder @Rizzophrenia]

@patternoticerr @Smthingedgy I had a direct relationship to an individual who lived free in section 8 4,000 dollar a month house (California) while I worked my 40 to live in an apartment with roommates.

The family in question had all the fancy streaming services and took multiple Disney trips a year

[Specs Thunder @Rizzophrenia]

@The_ANWTO @marventhusiast @fredgiblet @MojaveArtClub There just aren’t many 20-30 year old men on the internet. Teenagers? Of course, infinity of those. But that’s not a good sample for society is it? Maybe there’s an argument to be had that teenagers play way too much video games but it’s not applicable to adults

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

I’m Polish. If France is your future, I come from the end of that road.

France shows you the slow version. We lived the full one – the version where the state doesn’t just take care of everything. It owns everything.

In Poland it arrived with Soviet bayonets. In America it would arrive by vote – slower, softer, with better slogans. But the destination is the same, and so is the mechanism.

It starts with prices. When the state decides what things should cost, prices stop telling the truth. A price is a message: this is scarce, this is wanted, make more of this. Abolish the message, and the whole economy goes deaf. So the shelves emptied – first of meat, then of almost everything.

Every Pole knew the joke. A man walks into a shop: "No meat?" The clerk: "No, sir. Here is no fish. No meat is across the street."

We queued for everything. People wrote their place in line on their palms and kept lists through the night. You waited years for a small car, and often more than a decade for an apartment. Not because Poles were lazy. Because nobody in the system had any reason to produce what we needed.

At work, we had another joke: we pretended to work, and they pretended to pay us.

And the promise of equality? It produced the most unequal system of all. The party elite had their own shops – Poles called them the shops behind the yellow curtains. Those with dollars shopped in special stores. Everyone else got the queue.

Then the system needed informers, because nobody believed in it anymore. Our neighbors were recruited to report on us. You never knew who was listening – the colleague, the friend, sometimes family. So we learned to live a double life: one language in public, another at home.

Those who spoke up got the wolf ticket: no job, no promotion, sometimes no university place for their children. Nobody needed to send them to prison. They just couldn’t live.

The newspapers reported record harvests while the shelves stood empty. Everyone knew. Nobody said it. That is what a society looks like when the lie becomes the system.

In 1950 we were about as rich as Spain. By 1989, Spain was twice as rich. That is what forty years of "fairness" cost us.

Today in America, the method is softer. Your neighbor won’t inform on you to the secret police. Someone will report your post, and you’ll be cancelled – no job, no account, no platform. Different tools, same machine.

We got out. Ten million of us joined Solidarity, and in 1989 a system that looked eternal collapsed. Since then, Poland has become one of the great success stories of Europe – because people were finally free to build.

But we still carry it. More than thirty years later, you can see it in the careful answers, the closed faces - the system leaves faster than the fear does. It takes generations to get out of it fully once you fall into that trap.

Nobody votes for the queue. Nobody votes for the informer. They come with the promise.

Trust me, you don’t want to go down that road.

[nic carter @nic_carter]

The WSJ starting to admit the obvious: Western democracy when combined with fiscally negative immigration and a generous welfare state, inexorably creates a solvency crisis. (they didn't mention the immigration part but it's an essential ingredient in the toxic mix)

their words are unusually stark:

> It’s also a litmus test of a pressing question facing the West: Is it possible for political leaders to rein in spending on ever expanding welfare states? So far, the answer seems to be no, increasing the chances that countries like Britain are inching toward a financial reckoning.

the welfare state + open borders model is a clear democracy failure mode and there's no obvious way out. no western European nation will reform pensions or entitlements. they are actually fundamentally incapable of doing what must be done. (the immigration aspect is virtual corollary to democracy because it creates incentives for the left to import reliable voters, so at least part of the time immigration is virtually unfettered.)

the UK, with maximum, unending immigration, an aging and shrinking workforce, a tiny and overexploited base of taxpayer paypigs, highly financialized service / financial industry, a legacy of welfare as political payoffs to disenfranchised groups, an inability to cut pensions, and a stagnant, is the poster child for this disease and the worst affected but by no means the only nation in this predicament.

the UK's grim fiscal state is the future of every western nation, unless something changes dramatically.

aging population + increasingly discouraged working-age adults + highly mobile capital & elites that simply leave under onerous tax regimes + mass and unending fiscally negative immigration + expensive decarbonization and deindustralization + a left wing that is totally committed to immigration, over all else + a total inability to cut entitlements = fiscal crisis and eventual default

in the end, the wealthy and the entrepreneur class that actually power growth will simply leave to escape the tightening tax noose. the government will become increasingly reliant on the middle/upper middle professional classes who lack the ability to leave, completely eliminating any motive to be entrepreneurial or take risks. the economy will become increasingly torpid as dynamism vanishes. the left will continue to gain power due to slow electoral build of immigration and will continue to honor their side of the deal, which is neverending handouts to fiscally useless electoral client groups.

case studies like south africa, venezuela and lebanon show us that life can get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse and worse. things getting extremely bad are not a guarantee that they won't continue to get worse. don't be fooled by anticipating a sudden realization among political elites that they have employed the wrong formula. things can just get steadily worse for decades and decades with no escaping the slide.

if I had to guess, I would venture that if no MAJOR (and I'm talking _major_) political reform occurs in western Europe, the continent will enter a sovereign debt crisis in the coming decade, standards of living will collapse, life expectancy will collapse, entitlements will be ravaged. I anticipate something akin to the effect that the collapse of the Soviet Union had on the local population, or worse. politics will be polarized between the ultraright and far left, each with their own radical solution to the problem (extirpating immigrants, versus actual socialism). I don't know which of the two will prevail. neither the right nor the left is willing to reform entitlements, which is the biggest problem, and so the market will do it for them. the US may escape their fate, but I am not particularly optimistic it will. our demographics and willingness to do hard things (on immigration, eg) are marginally better, but our spending and fraud-based entitlement economy is almost just as bad. no major party will even contemplate uttering that boomer luxury communism must end eventually. it's not even a topic in the midterms nor will it be in '28.

the productivity boost from AI might grant European nations a slight reprieve in the medium term, but it wont salvage their bleak fiscal situation in the end. this is because almost no European nation controls the industrial inputs to AI (beyond ASML), so their gain is limited to the productivity uplift from deployment of the technology, while they remain vassals to the nations which actually control the deeper stack. moreover, a GDP and tax revenue boost from AI can easily be outspent. these nations have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. they can always dream up utterly farcical new handout schemes, like the UK's "motability". additionally, while AI creates a legion of highly productive entrepreneurs, they will all tax optimize and the benefits of new firms will largely not be captured by their respective governments. capital and startups are more portable than they have ever been. AI simply accelerates the pareto-ization of the economy whereby a shrinking minority of founders produces more value whilst more and more are idle and depend on handouts from the productive few. however, capital and human capital mobility destroys this fragile arrangement and strips the idle many of their benefactors. AI buys Western Europe at most a few years of delay to the inevitable crisis.