lovekoan

love is freedom. freedom is love.
sometimes you have to fight for both.

[lovekoan @lovekoan]

The deal is, you gotta own your shit

[lovekoan @lovekoan]

I think of that sparkly hot flame that happens when you first strike a match. Then I think about the long, slow burn of a wood stove that’s been going continuously for 24 hours. That’s the difference. When you have the right wood, the fire just keeps going. We set our lives up to protect it. Love that is aligned deep like that.

[Mark Dubowitz @mdubowitz]

I can write 100,000 words and give 1,000 interviews trying to explain this and then @TheBabylonBee nails it with 11 words.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I really wish now that I would have made a bigger fuss about this then than I did.

[DataRepublican (small r) @DataRepublican]

https://t.co/IO1s5PpMpw

[travis4nh @travis4nh]

Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount for a Chipotle burrito as someone making $184,500.

[Erik Voorhees @ErikVoorhees]

If the socialists had their way, Elon would have had his paypal profits taken and redistributed for the greater good.

The world would never have seen Tesla, nor SpaceX.

And the world wouldn't know it, because they were uncreated, and thus unseen.

Imagine the companies that don't exist, because Washington destroyed them before they were born.

[Tom Woods @ThomasEWoods]

John thinks Elon has a trillion one-dollar bills in his house, and if only he'd spend it on philanthropy, we'd solve lots of problems.

In fact, what Elon has is lots of capital, which is used to improve the general standard of living. Liquidating that capital so everyone can get a one-time check for $50 would be destructive and idiotic.

John has also managed to think, despite all the evidence everywhere he looks, that social problems are a matter of not enough money spent, that homelessness (for example) is a simple matter of people not having physical houses, and all we have to do is hand them some houses.

The more you like mankind, the more capital accumulation you should want, because that is the only way real incomes are increased for everyone, as opposed to the loot-and-redistribute model that eats the seed corn. ("Why do we have all this seed corn! I could feed so many people with it," poor John would be saying.)

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

Je vais partir du principe que tu es de bonne foi, parce que ton raisonnement est intuitif et que 90% des gens le partagent. Mais il repose sur trois erreurs factuelles, et ça vaut le coup de les regarder calmement.

Erreur 1 : la fortune d'Elon n'est pas un tas d'argent. C'est de la propriété d'usines, de fusées et de satellites. "Prendre la moitié de sa tune", concrètement, ça veut dire forcer la vente de la moitié de SpaceX et Tesla. L'argent ne sort pas d'un coffre, il sort des entreprises elles-mêmes, qui passent sous contrôle de fonds étrangers ou d'États. Tu ne redistribues pas du cash, tu démantèles un outil de production. C'est la différence entre récolter des pommes et découper le pommier.

Erreur 2 : "ça résout énormément de problèmes dans le monde". Cette expérience a déjà été tentée, en vrai. En 2021, le directeur du Programme Alimentaire Mondial de l'ONU a affirmé que 6 milliards de Musk pouvaient "résoudre la faim dans le monde". Réponse d'Elon : décrivez-moi exactement comment, comptabilité publique à l'appui, et je vends mes actions Tesla immédiatement. Le PAM a publié son plan. Verdict : ce n'était pas "résoudre la faim", c'était nourrir 42 millions de personnes pendant un an. Un an. Puis il faut re-payer, pour toujours. Le PAM avait d'ailleurs levé 8,4 milliards l'année précédente, et la faim était toujours là. Les ONG traitent les symptômes en boucle, jamais les causes, parce que leur financement dépend de l'existence du problème.

Erreur 3, la plus importante : tu cherches ce qui sort vraiment les gens de la pauvreté. Bonne nouvelle, on a la réponse, et elle est massive. En 1990, 36% de l'humanité vivait dans l'extrême pauvreté. Aujourd'hui, moins de 9%. Plus d'un milliard de personnes sorties de la misère en 30 ans. Par quoi ? Pas par la charité ni par l'aide internationale (plus de 1 000 milliards versés à l'Afrique en 60 ans pour un résultat à peu près nul). Par l'ouverture des marchés, l'industrialisation, le commerce. La Chine seule a sorti 800 millions de personnes de la pauvreté en abandonnant le collectivisme, pas en taxant ses entrepreneurs.

Donc fais le calcul complet. Option A : tu confisques 500 milliards, tu finances quelques années de programmes, l'argent est consommé, et tu as détruit la machine qui produisait les fusées, les voitures électriques et l'internet des zones rurales. Option B : tu laisses le meilleur allocateur de capital de sa génération réinvestir 100% de sa fortune dans des industries qui baissent les coûts pour tout le monde et emploient des centaines de milliers de personnes. L'option A soulage ta morale pendant 18 mois. L'option B sort des populations entières de la pauvreté pour toujours.

La pauvreté ne se redistribue pas. Elle se résout par la création. C'est contre-intuitif, c'est frustrant, mais c'est ce que disent 200 ans de données.

[MJ Murphy @hothingsgirlsay]

What you’re watching here is a classic reframing pattern.

Ilana starts with something almost everyone can agree with:

Most people have felt uncomfortable in their body.

Women are told they’re too fat, too thin, too curvy, not curvy enough.

Men are told they’re too weak, too soft, not muscular enough, not masculine enough.

That part is true.

But then comes the linguistic sleight of hand.

She takes ordinary body insecurity…

and slides it into the claim that the “trans experience” is just a more visible version of what everyone feels.

That is the frame.

Not: this is a specific belief system.

Not: this involves medicalization.

Not: this has consequences for women’s spaces, sports, prisons, or children.

Instead, the frame becomes:

“Everyone feels wrong in their body, and trans identity is just the brave, visible example of finding your true self.”

That sounds compassionate.

But it also erases the distinction between discomfort with your body and rejecting the reality of your sex.

Because almost everyone has felt insecure.

But that does not mean everyone is secretly experiencing some version of transness.

That is the NLP move.

Ilana creates agreement with a universal human experience…

then she attaches that agreement to a much more controversial claim.

And once you accept the frame, disagreement starts to sound cruel.

That is how the spell works.

[lovekoan @lovekoan]

@HeatherEHeying I also don’t like the way nail polish feels, on fingers and toes. I keep them short to type most efficiently. I agree 100% about long nails being a handicap. They are also unclean.

[lovekoan @lovekoan]

@Felagund07 @HeatherEHeying Yup. An ex of mine studied food sciences and they did an exercise - washed their hands, and cultured what was under their own fingernails. What grew there underscored the reason why, especially in food service and in medicine, nails should be trimmed as short as possible.

[Alex Armstrong @Alexarmstrong]

Read this open statement by Signal and your jaw will hit the floor.

Govts always use “protecting children” as their guise for more control and censorship.

I interviewed a prev Govt minister, who wrote the Online Safety Bill, and asked if they could tell me how a VPN worked. They couldn’t. These are the people writing these laws.

This new tool is another dangerous form of silent oppression that once again uses children’s safety as a guise to control the masses.

We can protect children online, but that starts at home, with parents, not in the Home Office, GCHQ, Apple, Google, Microsoft or Samsung.

[Hen Mazzig @HenMazzig]

"From my Māori perspective, a key point is that there was always a continuous Jewish presence in the land; they kept the fires burning, and that is what indigeneity looks like to us"

Dr. Sheree Trotter is an indigenous scholar and activist. She spoke at a first-of-its-kind conference called Building Indigenous‑Jewish Friendship, held in Toronto in conjunction with the annual Walk with Israel march.

She called Israel, "the most successful land‑back project, the greatest decolonization project."

“Increasingly, indigenous identity is being treated as a metaphor, a branding exercise, a political strategy. Indigeneity isn’t any of that; it is a lived reality rooted in specific people and place.” Karen Restoule, an Ojibwe from Dokis First Nation, who is director of Indigenous affairs at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, spoke at the conference, too.

Why do Western activists insist they know more about indigeneity than indigenous people themselves?

[MJ Murphy @hothingsgirlsay]

The Spiral of Silence

[Colin Wright @SwipeWright]

The left loves to mock right-wing religious doomsday preachers for confidently claiming to know the date of the Rapture, only to be proven wrong again and again, and those who take action based on these predictions.

I agree, it's funny.

But the secular left has built its own doomsday religion. Extinction Rebellion, climate catastrophism, and the "Climate Clock" are no less absurd. They all warn of a looming End Times, a short window for some kind of salvation, and even engage in public rituals of repentance while calling out heretics to be shamed and silenced.

Some of these True Believers are even behaviorally sterilizing themselves because they believe the future is so doomed that their children will only suffer.

This isn't some tiny isolated congregation following a quacky renegade preacher. This is a mainstream political movement.

[AP @Average_NY_Guy]

Here’s a question nobody likes asking about Nazi Germany:

How did countries like Austria, Poland, and France collapse so fast? These were established nations with armies, governments, borders, and millions of people. France alone was considered one of the strongest military powers in Europe.

Traditionally, we are taught that Hitler’s army was simply this unstoppable military machine that steamrolled Europe because it was overwhelmingly powerful. And yes, Germany was militarily strong. But that explanation alone has always felt incomplete, because historically even very strong armies usually do not conquer enormous amounts of territory that quickly unless something inside the targeted societies is already collapsing first.

Austria disappeared almost overnight. Poland fell within weeks. France collapsed in six weeks. History usually does not work that way unless large parts of the population no longer truly believe the fight is about their own survival.

The uncomfortable and dark reality is that many people did not initially think Hitler was coming for them.

Austria is probably the clearest example. The Anschluss was welcomed by huge parts of the population. German troops entered to cheering crowds, flowers, and celebrations. Many Austrians convinced themselves that joining Nazi Germany would mostly affect the Jews while improving life, or at least preserving it, for everyone else.

That mentality existed across Europe in different forms.

The illusion behind Hitler’s message was essentially: you can still be French, Polish, or Austrian. Live your life. Raise your children. The real problem is your Jewish neighbor.

And for millions of people, that was enough to weaken the will to resist.

A society only fights with total determination when people believe defeat means the destruction of their nation, identity, and future. But many Europeans convinced themselves the Jews were the primary target, so they accepted things they never would have accepted otherwise.

Some collaborated. Some stayed silent. Some rationalized. Some simply looked away.

The tragedy is that they were wrong anyway.

Austria lost its independence. France was humiliated and occupied. Poland was devastated. Cities were destroyed, sovereignty disappeared, millions died, and entire societies were dragged into catastrophe.

People often think evil can be managed as long as it is directed at somebody else first.

History shows otherwise.

This is why I’m done trying to convince Americans or Europeans about the dangers of extreme Islamism. In many mosques and Islamist circles, hatred toward America, Christianity, Western civilization, and Jews is preached openly and repeatedly. Yet many people in the West still process it the same way many Europeans processed antisemitism in the 1930s: “Yes, maybe they hate the Jews, but that doesn’t mean they are coming for us.”

That psychological separation is exactly the point.

As long as people believe somebody else is the primary target, they convince themselves they can safely ignore the ideology itself. They assume the hostility will remain contained to Jews, Israel, or some distant “other.”

But ideologies built around civilizational hatred do not stay neatly limited to one target forever.

And the end result, increasingly visible already across parts of Europe, is collapsing social trust, collapsing law and order, ethnic fragmentation, parallel societies, radicalization, and the steady erosion of the very national identities people assumed were untouchable.

At some point, societies make their own choices.
And eventually they live with the consequences of those choices.

You reap what you sow.

[David Bernstein @ProfDBernstein]

This is an American Jewish emergency. But I look at the Jewish news, and my generation isn't treating it like an emergency. The Jewish-oriented charitable foundations are still building new Holocaust museums, still donating money to universities that are incubating antisemitism, 2/

[Jeremy Boreing @JeremyDBoreing]

No. The story was not overlooked or buried.

Israel immediately informed us the attack happened. There were numerous investigations. The Captain of the USS Liberty was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Israel apologized and paid reparations.

The truth is, it's just not a big story. It's a tragic story, and no doubt. But it isn't a big story.

34 Americans died on the USS Liberty in 1967.

11,363 Americans died in the jungles of Vietnam in 1967.

Friendly Fire is horrific, but not uncommon. There is very little reason for a sixty-year old friendly fire incident to be widely known about, much less widely discussed.

For example, that same year, 1967, a US Marine Corp jet attacked a US Army position on Hill 875 in Vietnam, killing 42 American soldiers.

59 years later, not many remember Hill 875, not because it wasn't horrific -- it killed more Americans than the attack on the USS Liberty -- but because it isn't useful as a talking point to implicate the US/Israel relationship.

As to the second part of your question, we aren't discussing the USS Liberty today because of new information. We are discussing the USS Liberty today because of old -- even ancient -- grudges.

[lovekoan @lovekoan]

@newengland_npc @travis4nh The additional funding isn’t going towards improving academics. It is being used to bloat the administrator level, programs (including funding for paraprofessional aids for disability and behavior) that are not about learning but are basically social work.

[Mary Katharine Ham @mkhammer]

I’ve heard of this guy as a dark and imbalanced character for years. Women know that special kind of friend’s ex whose full-ass name you know long after they dated bc of the badness, and then he runs for Senate, and you’re like “wait, THAT GUY?!” And it’s hard to speak up about a guy like that, who has quite a bit of power and seeks more, but my friend Lyndsey’s accusations are specific and detailed about what happened and didn’t, backed by physical diaries and texts from long before he ran. They confirm that a man with a Nazi tattoo does indeed have a bunch of bad decisionmaking and impulse control problems and his behavior can be more than unsettling. If he’s healing, which last week’s story doesn’t indicate, he should do it somewhere other than the Senate.