Niels

General Manager | Investor | Contrarian | Philosopher

[Alastair Hilton @London_W4]

I am having a drink this evening with a friend in a Chiswick pub. Two policemen have just come into the pub and asked me to step outside. I have stepped outside and they have threatened me because I tweeted about a councillor banning seating outside pubs in Chiswick. They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. They came to threaten me. To warn me off tweeting about councillors and the council. This is modern Britain. This is the police state. Please, please, please watch this video. It does involve me using very bad language, but this has got to be seen. Police coming out to threaten someone who hasn’t committed a crime. I’m fuming.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

@Kristof_Poland And I love that I got to see that movie when in primary school at the age of ten - I still remember this movie to this day

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

@roaldcs @morepuzzled Heel goed, nog een goede denker op dit gebied is Frédéric Bastiat die in 1850 La Loi publiceerde waarin hij haarfijn uitlegt wat de enige taken van de overheid behoren te zijn:

https://t.co/G1Obulxppp

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

Series II, №2 — how an excess of empathy weakens a society and leaves it defenceless (with audio)

https://t.co/apSMPDJAtQ

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

@CarineKnapen @elonmusk Net als bij het einde van het Romeinse Rijk, waarbij de rijken zich terugtrokken op het platteland en zich met private milities verdedigden - een privatisering van bescherming die de kiem legde voor wat eeuwen later de feodale orde zou worden

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

@ajboekestijn Wetenschap is veel dogmatischer geworden, dan krijg je minder vertrouwen aangezien er in de wetenschap geen ruimte meer is voor debat. Dat debat wordt nu sterker buiten de wetenschap gevoerd - gelukkig.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

Search in Outlook and then you click a (proposed) few years old e-mail… Wasted.

[Andrew Fox @Mr_Andrew_Fox]

The Gaza war was fought with proportionality, outstanding protection of civilian life, and was started by Hamas.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

White Lotus 3 shows us how Freudian therapy is bollocks

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

For ten articles I tried to understand the progressive class the way a psychologist tries to understand a patient. It cannot be done. You cannot understand from inside what was built on values you do not share. Inferior is the word that lets you stop trying — not as an insult, but as a placeholder that parks the alien thing and opens the real question: not who are these people, but what produced them.

The answer is the age, and the state.

The age supplied the material. The most materially comfortable generation in history, raised after religion had quietly evacuated the West, come of age on the screen, taught to perform uniqueness while conforming completely. Spoiled, post-religious, lonely in a crowd, searching for purpose and finding only the algorithm.

The state supplied the demand. Frédéric Bastiat warned in 1850 that the moment law steps past its proper purpose — the defence of life, liberty, and property — it becomes legal plunder, and legal plunder cannot stay small. The state swells, the productive economy shrinks. A state confined to Bastiat’s purpose would never have produced the progressive class. It had no native soil there.

We are not heading toward socialism, we are inside it. When the state takes and re-spends more than half of what the country produces, the market exists at the margins of the state, not the other way around. And the movement defending this arrangement is, by any operational definition, fascistic: state and ideology fused, dissent disqualified, opponents declared beyond the reach of democratic conversation. This is not rhetoric, it is description.

Hannah Arendt closes the loop. Watching Eichmann in 1961 she found not a monster but a functionary who could not produce a single sentence of his own thought — the banality of evil as cold thoughtlessness. The progressive class, in the main, does not think. It speaks fluently in received formulae that cannot be examined, because examining them would cost the speaker her position in the room. That is exactly the kind of class an oversized state requires.

Douglas Murray has documented the symptoms across three books. I differ on the cause. Murray blames the people. I blame the phase — the age that produced the generation, and the state that put it to work.

Can we call them inferior? Yes, and politeness on this point has obscured the truth. By the standards of the inheritance the West itself developed — Aristotle, Aquinas, Locke, Kant, Mill, Popper — the class fails every test: truth, reason, due process, the refusal to treat people as raw material for political projects. Inferior is the operational description, not an insult.

What to do. Not a programme — a way of carrying oneself.

•Park the people. They are the product, not the cause. Bitterness is wasted attention.
•Study the state. That is where the cause lives.
•Hold the inheritance. The institutions no longer hold it for you, so the holding has to be done privately — in households, friendships, small circles of people who still read.
•Build what does not depend on the apparatus. Hard money, real skills, productive work, intact families, a body that works and a mind that reads.
•Think, in the Arendtian sense, against the pressure not to.
•Speak plainly in public what everyone says in private. The cost of doing so is going down. The cost of not doing so is going up.
•Read Bastiat. A short evening, and it gives you a vocabulary the people in charge would prefer you did not have.

The phase will turn — it always does. What survives the turning will be whatever each of us has been careful enough to carry through.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

The progressive class is not the reason — it is the result. The state grew them. Now they defend it.

https://t.co/G1Obulxppp

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Prices are critical information without an economy cannot function

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

Hoe @pvvfaber behandeld is, en nu @lidewij_devos behandeld wordt is minderwaardig. Het is een culturele klasse - de links progressieve klasse - die minderwaardig is geworden door ideologie boven normen & waarden te stellen.

@wierdduk @rkemp59 @ReneDercksen @RPlasterk @ALSpeyerbach @rblommestijn @Sywert @MeriTyping @RVeelo @RookmakerDorien @hansvantelling

https://t.co/LHp2Ore8QK

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

@lidewij_devos @MonaKeijzer @GidiMarkuszower @lientje1967 @geertwilderspvv @Eerdmans @Martinbosma_pvv

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

The progressive class is not the reason — it is the result. The state grew them. Now they defend it.

https://t.co/G1Obulxppp

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

The progressive class is not the reason — it is the result. The state grew them. Now they defend it.

https://t.co/G1Obulxppp

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

Market forces are natural order, the most fair and just outcome. It is objective, anything else adds subjectivity which de facto will lead to unequal outcomes and can never be rationally defended.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

Everything that is seen as unfair and unjust is a result of actions by the state: interventions from those with power in institutions that do not act following market forces. Anything that acts outside of the market will always create unbalances for only markets are able to correct and adjust. That is called capitalism, anything else is socialism. And anything socialism will ultimately lead to destruction.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

It is not the people, it is the phase we are in

[Under Secretary of State Sarah B. Rogers @UnderSecPD]

Policymakers worried about the rise of the so-called “far right” should avoid criminalizing accurate, data-driven political speech about mass migration — as this ruling appears to explicitly contemplate.

Doing so means that people willing to be convicted of “racism” get a monopoly on making arguments that strike large segments of the public as important and true.

[Niels @ncjvandoorn]

If governments get too big, it ís socialism - and that cannot be turned back easily