Thom Broersen

Ambtenaar | Econoom | penningmeester @NieuweDenktank

[Thom Broersen @TPWM_Broersen]

@Stanley_Kotokwa @Edenlife9 If I say you behave like a god but die like a mortal, does that make you god? No it doesn’t. Or do you think you are then? It’s fine if you don’t want to understand. And I’m not going to explain it again it any further, this should be enough.

[Thom Broersen @TPWM_Broersen]

@Stanley_Kotokwa @Edenlife9 No it’s about people In position of power. Judges, kings etc. Behaving like gods but will die like mere mortals.
So there is one god. But many people will behave like it, yet they are not.
To improve understanding I advice to read whole chapters/psalms. Via et veritas et vita!

[Thom Broersen @TPWM_Broersen]

@Stanley_Kotokwa @Edenlife9 This is absolutely ignorant.
Read the whole psalm. It’s about the people behaving like gods.
Your sentence is followed by:
7 But you will die like mere mortals; you will fall like every other ruler.”
8 Rise up, O God, judge the earth, for all the nations are your inheritance.

[Stichting Sociale Christendemocratie @Soc_Chr_Dem]

Welkom bij de Schaepmanrede op 22 juni te Utrecht. Thema: hoe bouwen we gemeenschappen in een verweesde samenleving?
@ajflach is de hoofdspreker. @Cultuurfilosoof plaats de vraag in filosofische context.
Zie de flyer voor praktische info.
Aanmelden: https://t.co/YfExqlMjuU

[The Culturist @the_culturist_]

Why did C.S. Lewis say that Hell is locked from the inside?

He explores this idea in his book The Great Divorce.

In it, souls of the damned are allowed to visit heaven on a bus ride, but they are not pleased with what they see — and they leave of their own accord.

The fact is, the damned cannot touch Heaven. They can't so much as disturb the dew drops on the grass. Nor can they even gaze upon the garden properly.

Why? Because they are blinded by their own sins:

– The philosopher would rather philosophize about God than meet him
– The painter would rather make beautiful art than gaze upon the source of all Beauty
– The clingy mother would rather fret over her son than give her full love to God

Lewis' point is that God cannot force man into salvation. Damnation is not God's rejection of man, but God tragically accepting man's rejection of him.

Hell itself is the ultimate monument to human freedom; for a human with true free will is even free to divorce himself with paradise.

What Lewis suggests is that you don't fully understand human nature until you understand that some humans really do not want paradise.

Conversely then, true freedom does not mean using your free will however you want. True freedom means surrendering your free will by forming your soul to the Good.

By sacrificing your free will in this manner, you gain glory, virtue, and happiness — for man was made to know and love virtue above all.

[Femke Marije @FemkeMarijeW]

Dus als je voor een linkse club 'milieudefensie' werkt kun je jarenlang je gang gaan. Maar zodra je voor een 'ongewenste' partij, te weten Tata Steel, aan de slag gaat word je wél volledig doorgelicht.

https://t.co/Or3A18Zvh9

[UN Watch @UNWatch]

🚨 BREAKING: New report by UN Watch reveals UN “experts” accepted millions of dollars from China, Russia, and Qatar before attacking the U.S., Israel, and the West.

🧵 See the report’s most striking findings:

[BILD @BILD]

Die TV-Doku „Unraveling UNRWA“ beschreibt die unheilige Allianz der UN-Hilfsorganisation mit Extremisten und Mördern der Palästinenser. Sie wurde u.a. für das ZDF produziert, ist dort aber nie zu sehen gewesen.

Sehen Sie die ganze Doku hier bei BILD: https://t.co/Un74CMeUH1

[Stichting Sociale Christendemocratie @Soc_Chr_Dem]

Voor in de agenda: maandag 22 juni Schaepmanrede
Locatie: Sociëteit de Vereeniging, Mariaplaats 14 te Utrecht.
Inloop: 19:00
De rede gaat over het actuele thema: Hoe bouwen we gemeenschappen in een verweesde samenleving?
Binnenkort maken we de sprekers bekend.

[Stichting Sociale Christendemocratie @Soc_Chr_Dem]

Save the date: 22 juni 2026 Schaepmanrede
Inloop vanaf 19:00 te Utrecht.
Houd deze tijdlijn in de gaten. De komende dagen maken we de sprekers bekend!

[Geerten Waling @GeertenWaling]

Dit is briljant. Het land met de meest geavanceerde wapentech zou de halve Ark van Noach nodig hebben om de Arabieren eronder te houden. Een bloedsprookje, maar dan wel de geestige variant.

[𝔼𝕝𝕝𝕚𝕠𝕥 𝕄𝕒𝕝𝕚𝕟 @ElliotMalin]

Alright, but it *isn't* genocide because the elements of the crime are clearly missing.

This is a blood libel that has caused Jews to be murdered. It must stop.

Not a single accusation has been able to establish that intent is present to the standard required. Not a single one has used the appropriate legal analysis to make the legal conclusion that they do.

Each accusation has systematically ignored the conduct of Hamas in relation to informing us about Israeli conduct and what is permissible. This violates the key provisions of the jurisprudence because it ignores the test that must be taken, known as the only reasonable inference test.

Here, from Bosnia v. Serbia (2007), para. 373: “The dolus specialis, the specific intent to destroy the group in whole or in part, has to be convincingly shown by reference to particular circumstances, unless a general plan to that end can be convincingly demonstrated to exist; and for a pattern of conduct to be accepted as evidence of its existence, it would have to be that it could only point to the existence of such intent.”

When each accusation ignores the conduct of Hamas, it fails to assess the reasonable alternative explanations. If there exists reasonable alternative explanations, such as human shielding (see: GCIV 28 & API 51(7)), weaponization of healthcare infrastructure (see: GCIV 19), diversion of aid (see: GCIV 23), it cannot possibly be genocide. We do know, with plenty of evidence, that each of these is relevant to the analysis because we know that Hamas has utilized human shielding (they admit to it and have done this for decades), have weaponized hospitals (Mohammad Sinwar was killed under the European hospital and we hear from Gazans about the presence of armed militants), and have diverted aid (Al Jazeera confirmed this just yesterday), then it cannot possibly be found that dolus specialis is present.

If dolus specialis is not present, it cannot be genocide.

Moreover, substantiality is very clearly missing.

From, Krstić: "It is well established that where a conviction for genocide relies on the intent to destroy a protected group “in part,” the part must be a substantial part of that group. The aim of the Genocide Convention is to prevent the intentional destruction of entire human groups, and the part targeted must be significant enough to have an impact on the group as a whole. Although the Appeals Chamber has not yet addressed this issue, two Trial Chambers of this Tribunal have examined it. In Jelisić, the first case to confront the question, the Trial Chamber noted that, “[g]iven the goal of the [Genocide] Convention to deal with mass crimes, it is widely acknowledged that the intention to destroy must target at least a substantial part of the group.” The same conclusion was reached by the Sikirica Trial Chamber: “This part of the definition calls for evidence of an intention to destroy a substantial number relative to the total population of the group.” As these Trial Chambers explained, the substantiality requirement both captures genocide’s defining character as a crime of massive proportions and reflects the Convention’s concern with the impact the destruction of the targeted part will have on the overall survival of the group."

In Sikirica the chamber stipulated that about 3% is not substantial enough to constitute genocide. In Gaza the death toll, including combatants and not accounting for live births (which outnumber measured death) is about 3.25%.

If we want to discuss live births, we would see population increase over the course of the war. Per Save the Children, the UN, and Palestinian Ministry of Health officials the births throughout the war ranged from about 4,000 - 5,500 per month.

4,000(30)=120,000
5,500(30)=165,000

120,000-72,500=+47,500
165,000-72,500=+92,500

So, we can demonstrate that the population has not decreased as measured in death vs. birth, but the opposite.

It is very clearly not genocide if you actually understand what genocide is and how it works. This is very clearly a blood libel that has caused the very harm you are saying you are speaking against, @shannonrwatts.

I think your heart is in the right place, Shannon. But I also think that you are helping cause the very problem you are speaking against here by helping perpetuate the blood libel that is very clearly erroneous and has caused real and demonstrable harm against Jews.

You cannot be an ally and spread the blood libel. And you must stop pushing it.

[Wrath Of Gnon @wrathofgnon]

As the annual wildfire season approaches remember that most PVC and uPVC windows are highly vulnerable in fires. Whereas timber windows will quickly char and from there remain structurally sound for at least an hour, PVC windows will typically begin to lose structural integrity in a few minutes at even relatively low temperatures. Regardless of whether the fire starts inside or outside you don't want windows to drop or allow embers and fire gasses through. If the fire is inside a window opening by melted PVC would likely mean a lot of air into the room, making the fire much worse. Moreover PVC emits toxic gasses when burning.

If you have a typical wildfire scenario with rapid but short-lived fire outside the windows you are usually far better off with solid timber windows.

There is a place and time for PVC windows of course, but think twice before installing them.

[Die Speyerbach ☄️ @ALSpeyerbach]

Something clicked watching this interview. The people in the clip inhabit what Thomas Hobbes calls the state of nature: a condition of no reliable rule enforcement, where force decides outcomes and nothing is fully secure. Life in the state of nature is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

Political order is the mechanism invented to prevent any return to that condition.

The social contract is the foundation of that order. Citizens accept obligations: taxes, obedience, compliance. The state provides protection and stability in return. Legitimacy rests on this reciprocal exchange within one bounded political community. The contract is the architecture of political trust.

The European Convention on Human Rights introduces a competing layer. Rights are now defined at the level of the abstract individual, prior to and independent of membership in any specific political community. It operates on a different logic: rights attach to the individual as such, prior to any reciprocal obligations.

The tension between these two frameworks was always structural. The social contract binds rights and duties together: you bear obligations because you receive protection, and you receive protection because you bear obligations. The human rights framework severs that link. Rights attach to the individual regardless of any duties owed to the community that enforces them.

Any situation in which the state is legally obliged to extend rights to individuals outside the original contracting community creates not merely a misalignment of burdens, but a contradiction at the level of first principles.

Mass migration makes that latent tension visible and measurable. Individuals enter from outside the original contracting community and immediately access universalized rights within the host legal order, without being structurally tied to the reciprocal obligations that finance the apparatus. The enforcement machinery built by citizens is simultaneously deployed to secure rights for the abstract individual. This is the system functioning as its human rights framework requires.

When newcomers arrive from societies that are themselves closer to the state of nature, a second pressure compounds the first. Behavioral patterns formed where force governs outcomes do not dissolve at the border. The Leviathan must now secure safety across a wider and less coherent field of behavior, with the same capacity it was built to deploy within a bounded community. This strikes at the contract's most basic promise: the guarantee of physical security for those who submitted to its obligations.

This produces a triangular institutional structure. The citizen carries obligations and finances the system. The state, as Leviathan, enforces and administers. The abstract universal individual holds rights-bearing status satisfied through the same apparatus, without equivalent obligations inside the community.

From a Hobbesian perspective, long-term stability requires coherence between obligation, enforcement, and protection within one unified political community. When protection is systematically extended beyond the group sustaining the obligations, that coherence erodes, and the entropy of the state of nature begins to re-emerge inside the political order itself.

The legitimacy of the system depends on citizens believing the contract still holds for them.

A system in which obligations remain concentrated on one group while rights are redistributed beyond that group develops structural contradictions. If we continue this uneasy tug-of-war between human rights on the one hand, and social contract political practice presupposing rights and corresponding duties to function on the other, the outcome may very likely be that human rights are the death of the social contract, and the societies that social contracts made possible.

[JA21 @JuisteAntwoord]

Woke begint met holle frasen zoals 'diversiteit', maar eindigt in uitsluiting: vacatures namelijk alleen voor progressieve niet-blanken. Dat is niet inclusief.

@DiederikBoomsma: "Die pigmentobsessie verzuurt de samenleving." 🔥

[Marieke Hoogwout @mariekehoogwout]

"In een D66-diversiteitsverhaal kun je niet wonen"
https://t.co/TShrAKUR2u

[Adam Mossoff @AdamMossoff]

The NY Times, Washington Post, CNN, BBC, CBS 60 Minutes, etc. all make it sound like the war against the Islamic regime of Iran is floundering, at best, or is a failure, at worst. This is so wrong that I'm gobsmacked that the media has misled so many people.

Here's the facts: As of this morning, U.S. and Israel have completely decapitated the Islamic regime (see image below). Its navy sits on the bottom of the sea with over a 100 ships sunk. It is no longer able to fire more than 1-2 ballistic missiles per day, and soon it will be zero. The Basijii thugs who slaughtered 1000s of innocent Iranians two months ago are themselves being wiped out and are running away at the faintest sound of a drone (these are hilarious videos). Islamic regime foreign diplomats are requesting asylum in mutiple countries. There are reports of regime troops refusing to show up for duty in Iran. The war is succeeding in the goals of its phases. It will ultimately remove the greatest source of global terrorism and an imminent nuclear threat to all Western countries, including the U.S. and Israel.

What comes next? Hopefully something better. The future is never 100% certain. But the Allies had no idea in WW2 what would come next after the surrender of the Nazis and Imperial Japan, and today these countries are some of the closest allies of the U.S. There are significant signs from the Shah and Iranians themselves that they could do the same. Let us hope, but whatever happens, the elimination of the 47-year holy war against the West is a good thing. And just about anything is better than a nuclear-armed religious regime that explicitly seeks an apocalypse with the U.S. and Israel.

[Handre @Handre]

Karl Marx gave humanity its most murderous idea: that human suffering stems not from scarcity and the human condition, but from private property itself. This bearded parasite—who never worked a day in his life and lived off Engels' textile fortune—convinced generations that voluntary exchange was exploitation while violent redistribution was justice.

The body count speaks for itself. Stalin's forced collectivization murdered 6 million Ukrainians through engineered famine. Mao's Great Leap Forward killed 45 million through sheer economic illiteracy. Pol Pot slaughtered a quarter of Cambodia's population. And every single time, the intellectuals proclaimed it "wasn't real socialism." The pattern is identical across continents and centuries: seize private property, centrally plan production, watch millions starve.

But the intellectual foundation was always rotten. Marx's labor theory of value—the notion that labor alone creates value—was already debunked by Austrian economists like Böhm-Bawerk before the ink was dry on Das Kapital. Value is subjective, determined by individual preferences in voluntary exchange. Marx simply couldn't grasp that the capitalist performs the crucial function of time preference—sacrificing present consumption for uncertain future returns.

Even "democratic socialism" in Western Europe required massive wealth transfers from productive individuals to bureaucratic parasites, creating permanent dependency classes and stagnating growth. Venezuela had the world's largest oil reserves and still managed to create toilet paper shortages. Cuba turned a Caribbean paradise into a floating prison where doctors flee on rafts.

Every socialist experiment ends the same way: empty shelves, secret police, and intellectuals explaining why the next attempt will be different.

[Cheeseburger @Kaasburgers]

Percentage sociale huurwoningen bezet door allochtonen

[Politieke Popcorncast 🍿🍿🍿 @polpopcorncast]

Lekker appen op de fiets