Thailand has a king, but as long as you don’t discuss political/royal matters, you can basically do whatever you want with your life, without endless government involvement.
Want to start a little farm? Just buy cows. Meanwhile, in Europe, endless licensing and permitting required. Can take years.
Financial transactions? Do whatever you want. Meanwhile, European banks enforce all sort of bureaucratic control to limit what you can do with your own money.
Thailand is not a democracy, but people live freer lives than most Europeans.
Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write.
This is the article: https://t.co/YkZrpqBWBQ
If you build a system that either explicitly or implicitly argues that all people are politically equal, all human rights are universal, and all political authority is derived only by the voluntary consent of the governed (a mythic impossibility that has never truly existed anywhere on Earth at any point in history), then it’s basically inevitable that you’re going to sooner or later get mass democracy.
And mass democracy ALWAYS leads to forced wealth redistribution and endlessly expanding bureaucracies, along with an infinite expansion of new made-up “rights” that actually attack things which were once considered universally necessary to the maintenance of civilization.
And to secure all of this, ever more coercive amounts of centralized power have to be wielded by the state, often to a degree that would make the absolute monarchs of the 17th century look like anarchists by comparison.
The power the Jacobins wielded over France in 1793 was infinitely more absolute and totalitarian than anything ever wielded by the guy who literally called himself the “sun king” and once declared “I am the state”.
Hello, this is Yanis Varoufakis with a piece of news that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so scary. This morning, two policemen appeared on my doorstep to serve a summons ordering me to the police headquarters to be interrogated by the Greek DEA, our drug busting police department. Not as a witness, expert or not, but as the accused. Accused of what?
Shortly after New Year’s, I appeared on a podcast organised by young people to answer their questions on everything that concerns Gen Z today: social media, the meaning of life, their job prospects, what I call technofeudalism etc. At some point, they asked me if I had ever used drugs. Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable “I didn’t inhale”?), I said I had. Apart from pot, I told them, I had one experience of taking ecstasy in Sydney 36 years ago. It was pleasant, I danced for 16 hours effortlessly but then, I added, it gave me a migraine for a week – and so I never used again. That was my introduction to making the point that, however pleasant drug taking may seem, there is a price to pay. And that the ultimate price is dependence, addiction – “the end of liberty”, I said emphatically.
Do you see where this is going? Yes, the Greek police have opened an investigation of me under the charge of... aiding and abetting the narco-mafia. [Do me a favour folks: Please don’t tell Trump, OK?]
Seriously now, at a time of war, genocide, stupendous exploitation and so on, my little trouble with the inane Greek police is neither here nor there. But it is important. Here, in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality and freedom. We don’t. Dark forces are at work, pushing us into a postmodern version of the Dark Ages.
So, beware, people! They are out to take away the last remnants of autonomy and freedom we have left. Resistance is, literally, existence.
A single dose of LSD is shown to ease anxiety for months in a new clinical trial.
Researchers tested LSD as a treatment for generalized anxiety disorder in nearly 200 people across the United States. Participants were given different doses of the psychedelic drug or a placebo and then tracked over 12 weeks.
The results showed that patients who received higher doses of LSD – 100 micrograms in particular – had the best outcomes. About 47 percent of those in the 100-microgram group were in remission three months later, compared to only 20 percent in the placebo group. Two-thirds of patients in this group saw their anxiety scores cut in half.
The drug also appeared to reduce depressive symptoms in many patients. However, side effects were common, especially hallucinations and changes in visual perception. Most were mild to moderate, but some participants dropped out of the trial.
More research will be needed to test safety, durability, and whether LSD could become part of mainstream treatment.
["Single Treatment With MM120 (Lysergide) in Generalized Anxiety Disorder: A Randomized Clinical Trial." JAMA, 2025]
“Trust me bro these people just have better aim and are more consistent than most Counter strike and Valorant pros”
Go look at any pro league for a FPS game you will not see shit like this, but apparently there are 5 people on twitter who are just that good
This is such an encouraging story of how you can homestead in one of the most remote areas on Earth and still maintain a wonderful balance with nature while doing it!