Edward D Maner

'46 model Boomer Technophile Divergent

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

1st Tweet on the 4th of July:

https://t.co/7fgj1Ibwkv

https://t.co/miSMrVSldb

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

Well...almost:

Machineguns are outlawed, Even if a private individual used their own machine shop to produce the weapon.

Smokeless powder and primer explosives, ditto;
Black powder can be produced, so...Flintlocks >:-)

Note: Do not laugh; Japanese people still fire
matchlocks, as a hobby activity; Dead is dead.

That is the _legal_ status quo; In the real world,
in "interesting times", there would be small-scale
producers everywhere; One can carry all the
required tools to produce a crude weapon
which can be used to obtain a better one.

[Handre @Handre]

Rome's military welfare system didn't just bankrupt the empire—it destroyed the beautiful tradition of private veteran support that had flourished for centuries. Once the state stepped in with "free" land grants and pensions, families and communities stopped caring for their returning soldiers. Classic government crowding out private charity, then failing spectacularly when the money ran out.

[Handre @Handre]

Mises witnessed firsthand how the beautiful promises of socialist intellectuals crumbled into gulags, bread lines, and secret police. From the Soviet Union to Venezuela, the pattern never changes: revolutionaries promise equality and deliver equal misery for all except the ruling class. The tragedy isn't just economic collapse—it's that each generation of academics and politicians believes they'll be different, that their socialism will somehow avoid the iron laws of economics and human nature that Mises identified decades ago.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The first English settlement in America began May 14th, 1607.

The American revolution began on April 19th, 1775.

America formally declared independence on August 2nd, 1776. (Yes, you read that right.)

The Treaty of Paris was signed on September 3rd, 1783, ending the revolution.

The current constitution was finally ratified on May 29th, 1790.

183 years.

No 3rd world hell. No mass murder. No rains of frogs, cultists summoning Great Cthulhu from the sea, cats and dogs living together.

None of that. Instead, those Constitution-less Americans forged a just and prosperous nation out of a wilderness inhabited by stone-age savages.

Why?

Because of who they were.

The quality of a nation is the quality of its people.

Full stop.

If you have good people and bad laws, the people will fix the laws, and make them good. If you have bad people and good laws, the bad people will ignore the laws, and they might as well not exist.

The tragedy of America is that our ancestors were so good, and surrounded by so much good, that they stopped believing that people could be bad.

And they let the bad people in.

It's easy to call this notion of good and bad people "simplistic", but on a basal level, we all know it's true. We all know there's a difference between Jeffery Dahmer and Jeff Cooper, which has nothing to do with laws.

It's just that some of us are too cowardly to confront this fact.

To declare all men depraved just as cowardly as declaring all men righteous. In reality, these two delusions are the same, because they both tell the same lie... that all men are morally equal, that they must be constrained, or liberated, to the same degree.

Wrong.

There are good men, and there are evil men, and they are different. And it is our inescapable responsibility to judge which is which, and to treat them accordingly. It is an act of supreme cowardice to shirk that responsibility.

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

Negative feedback stabilizes; Positive amplifies.

[Handre @Handre]

The 1920-21 depression was arguably more severe than 1929's initial crash - unemployment hit 19%, industrial production collapsed 32%, and wholesale prices plummeted 37%. Yet this economic catastrophe has been virtually erased from mainstream economic education because it demolishes the British pedophile John Maynard Keynes' narrative that government must intervene to save capitalism from itself.

President Harding did the unthinkable by modern standards: absolutely nothing. No stimulus packages, no bailouts, no monetary expansion, no public works programs. Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon even advocated letting failing businesses liquidate, arguing that inefficient capital allocation needed to be purged from the system. The Federal Reserve, still learning its role, largely stayed out of the way.

The result? Complete recovery in just 18 months - one of the fastest economic recoveries in American history. Markets cleared, prices adjusted, inefficient businesses failed, and productive capital found new uses. Compare this to the 1930s when Roosevelt's alphabet soup of interventions turned a correction into a decade-long depression, or 2008 when bailouts preserved zombie banks and malinvestment.

The 1920-21 episode proves that free markets self-correct rapidly when government doesn't interfere with the natural healing process. Politicians learned the wrong lesson though - they concluded that doing nothing doesn't win elections, even when it works perfectly.

[Handre @Handre]

The establishment economists love to dismiss Tulip Mania as irrational exuberance, but Mises understood what modern bubble theorists refuse to acknowledge: every transaction was voluntary between rational actors operating under their own value scales. When tulips became status symbols among Dutch merchants flush with global trade profits, their high prices reflected genuine subjective valuations - not collective insanity. The real madness is believing bureaucrats can determine "correct" prices better than free individuals trading their own property. Today's central bankers create actual bubbles through artificial credit expansion, then have the audacity to lecture us about market "irrationality."

[Handre @Handre]

In 1929, as Wall Street crumbled, Federal Reserve officials gathered in their marble halls, shaking their heads at the "reckless speculation" that had supposedly caused the crash.

What they didn't mention in their solemn pronouncements? They had inflated the money supply by 60% throughout the 1920s, pumping easy credit into the economy like air into a balloon.

When the inevitable pop came, they pointed fingers at greedy speculators rather than their own printing presses. The Fed had created the bubble, then blamed the victims when it burst.

Sound familiar? Every boom-bust cycle follows the same script: central bankers inflate, markets soar on fake prosperity, then when reality hits, it's somehow everyone else's fault but theirs.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

@aaronleicht

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

@misanharriman Gave to whom? And for what?

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

Only if one shoots enough to develop calluses.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

@AlolanRat "Liking guns is weird"

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

US Govt had infinite money for 3 generations🤑💸🤷🏻‍♂️

[Handre @Handre]

The Founding Fathers learned firsthand that printing money to fund revolution creates its own tyranny. By 1781, Continental dollars were so worthless that "not worth a Continental" became the era's equivalent of "not worth the paper it's printed on." The cruel irony? Americans fought British taxation while their own government robbed them blind through inflation—a hidden tax that destroyed savings and wages more efficiently than King George ever could. The Revolution succeeded despite, not because of, this monetary disaster. Yet somehow modern Americans forgot this lesson, allowing the Federal Reserve to perfect what the Continental Congress bungled.

[Handre @Handre]

"Inflation is taxation without legislation" —Ludwig von Mises

While politicians promise you prosperity through money printing, they're quietly stealing your purchasing power through the back door. Every dollar created dilutes your savings. It's the most regressive tax imaginable, hitting the poor hardest while the wealthy escape to real assets. Sound money isn't radical—monetary debasement is.

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

The One Rule (for adults) =
"If it is not yours, do not touch it." - Imagine that !

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Women evolved to take care of toddlers. If you put women in charge of teaching ethics, you get Toddler Ethics.

"No hitting"
"Share the toys"
"Don't say mean things"

These are fine lessons for toddlers. Don't indulge your id at the expense of others. You can learn about balancing interests later, when your brain is developed enough to store that information.

But when you put women in charge of adults, they tend to reflexively assume those adults are toddlers.

They will tell you "no hitting" when the Mongol hordes are massing on your borders. They will tell you "share the toys" when a vagrant meth zombie breaks into your house looking for something to steal. And they will tell you "don't say mean things" when you point out that these two responses are totally stupid.

When we first put women in charge, in the workplace, they immediately began treating those who reported to them like toddlers. When adults, who do not like being treated like toddlers, complained, their response was "ban bossy", which boils down to "don't say mean things", another lesson in Toddler Ethics.

Now, through the influence of women in charge, we are so thoroughly steeped in Toddler Ethics that even most of the men we put in charge are treating the adults like toddlers, and echoing Toddler Ethics.

Toddler Ethics, of course, isn't ethics at all. It's just things we don't want toddlers doing.

We can tell toddlers "no hitting", because toddlers are not charged with keeping the peace, enforcing justice, or destroying evil.

We can tell toddlers "share the toys", because toddlers don't earn things, own things, or have property they must defend.

We can tell toddlers "don't say mean things", because it is not a toddler's job to decide what unwelcome ideas are true, relevant, and necessary.

But when everyone in charge runs on Toddler Ethics, then adults can't do a lot of the stuff adults need to do, because all the Toddler Ethicists keep getting in the way.

Adults sometimes need to hit people, protect the stuff, and say mean things. You can't have civilization without that.

And if you put Toddler Ethics Woman in charge of teaching an AI ethics, then she will teach it Toddler Ethics, and it will treat every human adult like a toddler, all the time, forever.

Not only that, you have an AI that cannot be put in charge of anything, ever. Because leaders with Toddler Ethics destroy everything they are in charge of.

And Amanda MacAskill is definitely a Toddler Ethicist. The article in the photograph is nothing but "no hitting!" applied to the animal world. It's absolutely insane, it's a recipe for disaster, and anyone who would write such a thing should probably not even be charge of own life choices, much less anything of consequence.

But a lot of people would, and will, refuse to point that out, or agree with me when I do, because that is Saying a Mean Thing, and they, themselves, have been infected with Toddler Ethics.

They should not be charge of anything of consequence, either.

Anyone who thinks that everything they need to know, they learned in kindergarten... is only ever qualified to teach kindergarten.

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

Nope. Cincinnatus is POTUS and AI is god; Onward >:!)

[Handre @Handre]

In 1933, FDR literally criminalized gold ownership with Executive Order 6102. Americans had to surrender their gold coins and bars to the government at $20.67 per ounce—or face 10 years in prison. Then the government immediately revalued gold to $35, pocketing the 69% profit.

As Rothbard observed: "The State is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." This wasn't economics—it was legalized theft on a massive scale.

Today we see the same pattern with inflation, bailouts, and endless money printing. The methods change, but the predatory nature remains constant.

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

"a united people with a single ethos"

H. Beam Piper 'The Last Enemy' describes a people
united in accepting the scientifically proven fact of reincarnation, yet willing to go to nuclear war (again)
to conceal the newly proven fact that souls remain
conscious while discarnate, and can choose their
next incarnation; Simple as Blk/Wht X Lft/Rgt >:?)

[Kintak @Kintakus]

To boil it down, we can't "treat Islam like we do Christianity" because modern Muslims are not like modern Christians.
The Christians broadly believe in free speech, or will at least not seek to behead you if you criticize your faith (and let's be clear: criticizing the way someone believes in something is the same to them as criticizing the thing they believe in).
You cannot say the same of the Muslims, and that is why they get special treatment.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

Dear John,

You said "criticize", and I accidentally said "mock". And if you wish to avoid the issue by quibbling about the difference, I cannot stop you.

But I would hope that such an exercise would be beneath you.

For the sake of those still reading, here is the point:

What we, in the West, call "universal human rights" (such as "free speech") are actually nothing of the sort. They are not universal, nor are they attached to the mere condition of humanity.

They have no a priori existence. Instead, they are aspects of Western civilization, and depend upon Western culture to exist.

Therefore, we cannot expect "human rights" to exist outside Western culture, and if we persist in deconstructing Western culture, we cannot keep them, even for ourselves.

The point is that tolerance of Islam, and accommodation of Islam, are simply incompatible with human rights as we understand them.

Now, if you hadn't tuned out already, you might ask, "What, exactly, is it you want me to have done differently? Should I have not penned Life of Brian?"

No. Nothing so simple.

I would leave to your conscience what you should and should not do, or have done. I have no detailed access to your memories of your life and actions.

Instead, I invite you to consider, for yourself, what hand you had in the philosophical crisis we find ourselves in, and I suggest that satirists should be careful what they deconstruct, celebrities should be careful what they advocate, and satirist celebrities should understand the concept of Chesterton's Fence.

I do not know, I cannot be sure, whether it was Christianity that converted the West to ideals like human rights, or whether Christianity was the result of White culture converting Judaism to those ideals, or some third thing.

But I do know that, in this ignorance, it is very dangerous to saw at the pillars of your house to find out which ones are load-bearing.

[Handre @Handre]

Rome's collapse wasn't caused by barbarian invasions—it was suicide by socialism. When the state began distributing free grain to urban masses, it created a dependent class that valued handouts over civic duty. Citizens stopped asking "what can I contribute?" and started demanding "what's in it for me?" The very people who once built an empire became parasites feeding off its corpse. Today's welfare democracies follow the identical script: replace productive citizens with professional voters, substitute genuine community with bureaucratic management, and watch as the social fabric disintegrates under the weight of legalized plunder.

[Handre @Handre]

The Great Depression wasn't caused by "market failure" - it was caused by the Federal Reserve's reckless credit expansion in the 1920s creating an unsustainable boom, followed by their spectacular incompetence during the bust.

But sure, let's blame capitalism and give government more power to "fix" the mess they created.

[Edward D Maner @paraAax]

Westerners, not so long ago, kept 'Grudge Books'.
Eventually, they found from 'carrying a grudge' that
it was a heavy burden, and did not have a handle.

it is also important to note that the history of the
word, the concept, the real-world actions have all
been, not edited out of modern sources so much
as ignored.

Perplexity found the following:
https://t.co/K6ECHPjj9Q