Zwag

[Zwag @ZSepv2]

Conversely we witnessed this same phenomenon among the American left and the global left in general during the cold war, as the starry eyed activists and peaceful revolutionaries gave way to 5th columnists and depraved dictators. Resentment feeds on itself.

[corsaren @corsaren]

There is a common pejorative attack on rwers, hinted at here, which boils down to “they’re just bitter that their liberal friends think they’re scum.”

And sure, there is something very funny and self-defeating about “owning the libs to get them to like you”. Moreover, the typical response pattern is often full of vice-signaling, commons-plundering, and all manner of “I don’t care if this hurts me, just so long as it hurts you more” behavior that simply validates those same negative labels to which they so strongly object.

It’s childish. It’s grotesque. It’s counterproductive and negative-sum. It is ignobility at its most ignoble. And perhaps most of all, it’s just plain embarrassing.

HOWEVER. I think that the widespread appeal of this reactionary behavior ought to serve as a damning indictment of the overall “theory of change” that the 2010s woke movement represented. The theory that, if you leverage cultural power to shun, shame, and banish wrongthink from the domain of acceptable discourse, that this will somehow engender a form of lasting moral and ideological victory—that by making certain viewpoints unacceptable, you would make them unthinkable.

This theory of change, misguided as it was to begin with, culminated in a mass cultural backlash, the first and second term of Donald Trump, and a reactionary movement so hellbent on revenge that they have willingly destroyed an immense amount of valuable institutional capital just for the chance to inflict a similar degree of anguish upon what they see as their oppressors. By any reasonable metric, this must be considered an abject failure.

This failure should have been foreseeable. In a political system in which everyone’s vote is equal and private, and a new media landscape that eschews top-down enforcement of norms, instead rewarding self-radicalizing echo chambers and simclusters, this strategy is predictably disastrous. Ideologies which are not allowed to participate the light of open debate will merely fester in the dark.

Ancient societies that committed wholesale massacre of the defeated, brutal as they were, at least understood this simple principle: if you want lasting victory, your enemies must either be captured, convinced (i.e., integrated), or killed. Silence is not an option. They will not go quietly into that good night. Slaves without shackles will always revolt once they locate the power to do so, and in doing so they will rarely take care to maintain the prudent constructs of their former masters. They will simply burn it all to the ground.

My current theory of politics is that the #1 problem with our system today is the hollowing out of the conservative movement. In a way, the memetic power of wokeness did succeed in vanquishing traditional conservative ideas from the domain of elite discourse. But if conservative ideas are universally treated as vile, stupid, and evil, then the only men who will remain to champion them will be those who embrace such labels. And in the absence of a Reagan or Friedman or Romney to root for, the shunned masses will search for salvation in men like Trump. If they cannot see themselves in Captain America, they will simply embrace Homelander.

[James Heale @JAHeale]

Inside Reform v Restore:

📣Meet the team behind Rupert Lowe
💻 Twitch streamers boosting him
🚔 Police called to Makerfield office
📈2024 REF voters aware of Restore
👨‍⚖️ Challenge of keeping EHRC happy
😤 Reform outriders taking on Lowe

[🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿guineboud🇺🇦🇩🇰🇱🇹🇱🇻🇪🇪🇫🇮🇪🇸 @vanhanenist]

I wonder what happened, Nassreddin.

[Gothic Comics. @PenseesofPascal]

"Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her" - G.K Chesterton.

[The Conservative Alternative @OldeWorldOrder]

"I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country."

—The final words of Nathan Hale, 1776
American Soldier & Spy

[The Ways of A Gentleman @Gentleman_Ways]

Unpopular opinion: Hip-hop culture has done enormous damage to society.

It glorifies crime, promiscuity, materialism, and disrespect towards others, while convincing young men that these behaviors are admirable.

Society eventually becomes what it celebrates.

[Kompot Mk 2 Mod 0 🇺🇲 @cerautomas]

You shouted over the three minutes of silence for a murder victim, you worthless sack of shit.

[SuperTrucker 🚛💨→💻 @supertrucker]

A European visits a Home Depot in 2026.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

246 years ago today, a 13 year old boy named Andrew Jackson watched his neighbors get hacked to death in a Carolina meeting house, and the future of American politics was decided in a single afternoon.

Colonel Abraham Buford had spent the morning marching his 350 Virginians north through the Waxhaws, a Scots-Irish settlement straddling the Carolina border. He thought he had a day's head start on the British. He was wrong by about an hour.

At 3 p.m. Tarleton's dragoons came out of the pine woods at a dead gallop. Buford formed a single line in an open field, ordered his men to hold fire until the cavalry was 10 yards away, and waited. It was the worst possible tactic against horsemen. The first volley emptied a few saddles. The second never came.

The British line crashed through. Buford ran up a white flag. A British officer rode forward to accept the surrender. Then a musket cracked from somewhere in the American ranks. The shot killed Tarleton's horse, pinning him beneath it.

His men thought their colonel was dead.

What followed is what the Continental Congress later called, with careful understatement, "an event without parallel in this war." For 15 minutes the British Legion went down the American line with sabers and bayonets, killing wounded men where they lay. An American surgeon counted an average of 16 saber wounds per body. Some men were stabbed so many times the wounds ran together.

113 dead. 150 too badly cut up to move. 53 prisoners. British losses: 5 killed.

The survivors were dragged to the Waxhaw Presbyterian Church, where the local women turned the pews into hospital beds. One of the nurses was Elizabeth Jackson. Her 13 year old son helped her wash the wounds.

Andrew Jackson never forgot it. Forty years later, as President, he was still settling scores with the British Empire.

"Tarleton's Quarter" became the most effective recruiting poster in American history. Four months later, those same Scots-Irish farmers would corner a Loyalist army on top of Kings Mountain and shoot them to pieces. They yelled "Remember Buford" the whole way up the slope.

One afternoon in a hayfield lost Britain the South.

[Sci-Fi Archives @SciFiArchives]

Gorgeous Blade Runner (1982) artwork by Gokaiju

[Tyto Alba 🪶🪶 @kriiger_tyto]

Ok if it wasn't clear, the meta now is to steal memes from iFunny and add "Nietzschean" to it... at kalos, at serf, another one trillion dollar to our kind coalers

[Washingtons ghost @washghost1]

We went very wrong somewhere along the line

[Blair Dulder CPA™ 🧃 @runaway_vol]

lets not forget that germany turned the hangar for their failed cargo blimp project into a tropical spa the size of central park

[Principled Hardcore Capitalist, BTRBT 🐇🔴📦🥪 @BTRBT_]

I used to wonder whether Stalinist propaganda would work in our Internet and smartphone age.

Could people really be convinced that the Soviet Union was some kind of paradise, when evidence to the contrary could be readily accessed?

China makes me think it would still work.

[UltraNosk @UltraNosk]

You don’t even enjoy the stuff you watch or play. You just like “owning” your political rival and that shows how pathetic you’re

[MA5K CEO @Nobbie_OCs]

"The Heretics are That Way"

By Eddy González Dávila -- https://t.co/YGszow8ZiQ

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

Around 1,950 years ago in Pompeii, a weaver named Successus fell in love with a barmaid named Iris.

She did not love him back.

We know this because his rival, a man named Severus, decided to humiliate him publicly. He grabbed something sharp and carved this into a wall for the whole city to read:

"Successus the weaver loves the innkeeper's slave girl named Iris. She does not care about him at all. But he begs her to have pity on him. His rival wrote this. Goodbye."

Imagine walking to work and seeing that with your name on it.

Successus found it. And instead of letting it go, he carved his reply directly underneath:

"Envious one, why do you get in the way? Yield to a man who is better looking and being treated very unfairly."

Severus came back one more time to end it:

"I have spoken. I have written. You love Iris, but she does not love you."

Then, in 79 AD, Vesuvius erupted and buried the wall, the tavern, and the entire argument under 20 feet of ash. The thread was frozen mid-beef for almost two millennia until archaeologists dug it up and translated it.

We will never know who got the girl. We do not even know if any of the three survived.

Pompeii has over 11,000 of these inscriptions. Bar reviews. Bragging. Bad poetry. A bakery wall that says "Welcome, hungry people." Two guys fighting over a girl in the comments.

The technology changes. We do not.

[Video Nasties🇵🇲 @53gaDr3amca5t]

Romans would have been cripplingly addicted to the internet. The most potentially terminally online civilization in history.

[Adin - عدین - עדין @AdinHaykin1]

I'm a retard who never read anything beyond a headline and this is my meme:

[Zwag @ZSepv2]

Nuance without clarity and decisiveness is stupidity.