"He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man"
My thoughts after 3 months in the US/Texasđșđž:
- Americans are way more extroverted than Europeans
- Talking to strangers is normal here
- My first H-E-B trip felt like Boris Yeltsin seeing an American grocery store
- Some food is more artificial, but the amount of choices is insane
- You can still eat healthy. You just have to choose it
- High risk, high reward is real
- Way more people are entrepreneurial
- People dream bigger than in Europe, and they actually execute
- Obv not everyone is smarter, but the smart people are world-class
- Successful people here are way more down-to-earth. In Europe, successful people care about status and can be arrogant
- Cars. Enough said
- Americans have perfected artificial sweets
- Thereâs still more freedom here than in Europe
- One thing I didnât expect: some Americans talk down on America
- As an outsider, thatâs weird, because imo itâs still the greatest country on Earthđșđžđșđž
el nacionalismo de por sĂ es berreta pero el nacionalismo tercermundista, muy comĂșn en argentina, es muy berreta. victimismo, resentimiento, creer que la tradiciĂłn obliga al mundo a ser tan mediocre como vos. es el resentimiento del gordo al que elegĂan Ășltimo en gimnasia
El mundo tiene que estar agradecido que a EEUU le chupa un huevo el fĂștbol porque si no arrasarĂan con todo como en los Juegos OlĂmpicos o en cada cosa que se proponen.
François Truffaut on John Ford and Howard Hawks:
Interviewer: "Like many American critics, I'm surprised by your admiration for Howard Hawks and John Ford. Would you explain why you like them?"
Truffaut: "Originally, I didn't like Fordâbecause of his material: for example, the comic secondary characters, the brutality, the male-female relationships typified by the man's slapping the woman on the backside. But eventually I came to understand that he had achieved an absolute uniformity of technical expertise. And his technique is the more admirable for being unobtrusive: His camera is invisible; his staging is perfect; he maintains a smoothness of surface in which no one scene is allowed to become more important than any other. Such mastery is possible only after one has made an enormous number of films. Questions of quality aside, John Ford is the Simenon of directors. Hawks, on the other hand, is the greatest cinematic intelligence among American directors. He isn't a cinema addict, nor is he anguished or obsessed. Rather, he loves life in all its manifestations, and because of this harmony with life in general, he was able to make the two or three greatest examples of every genre of film (except perhaps comedy, in which you have Lubitsch etc.). To be specific: Hawks made the three best Westerns (Red River, The Big Sky, and Rio Bravo), the two best aviation films (Only Angels Have Wings and Air Force), and the three best thrillers (The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Scarface)."
Interviewer: "M. Truffaut, Hawks' very versatility might be called an indication that he lacks a single vision of life or of cinema. Yet it is precisely that lack which you condemn in your French predecessors."
Truffaut: "Hawks does have a vision of life and cinema! For example, he is the first American director to show women as equal to men (think of his handling of Lauren Bacall vis-à -vis Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep). He always knows what he is doing. When he decided to make Scarface, realizing the danger of a film about sordid mobsters, he instructed his scriptwriter, Ben Hecht, to join him in constantly thinking about the history of the Borgias so as to give the film some tragic stature. It is to this that we owe the nearly incestuous love between George Raft and his sister in the film."
â François Truffaut, interviewed by Charles Thomas Samuels (September 1970)
âŹïž François Truffaut â John Ford â Howard Hawks.
asĂ como acĂĄ en argentina el juez federal del juzgado nro 148867 de indio troIo, la rioja te anula la decisiĂłn de bajar aranceles de 500% a 499%, en estados unidos pasa lo contrario y te anulan todo movimiento peronista. por eso ellos son lo que son y nosotros somos lo que somos
Peter Thiel on DEI, woke culture, and political correctness in 1996:
âThe multicultural educator at Stanford used say, âI started looking for racism everywhere, and I started finding racism everywhere.ââ
âAnd indeed he didâif you look for anything everywhere, you will start finding it everywhere.â
âIf youâre a feminist and believe everything that is longer than it is wide is a symbol of male oppression l, then you will start finding sexism everywhere.â
âWhen you start looking for racism everywhere, and start finding it everywhere, itâs only a small step to finding racists everywhere. Thereâs nothing wrong with that if the racists are really out there, but Iâm going to suggest to you, they really arenât. The problems of racism, sexism, other forms of oppression, have been vastly exaggerated, and as a result, people get unjustly accused.â
âA culture of complaint leads to a culture of blame.â
đšđł Xi Jinping said he was an avid reader of American literature.
"In my younger years, I read the Federalist Papers and Thomas Paine's Common Sense. I was interested in the life story of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and other American statesmen."
"I also read David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Jack London."
Follow: @RTSG_News
âTo be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world is the finest medicine a man can give himself.â
â Henry Miller
Nolan is a huge pussy âŠif he wanted it would be legitimate to reimagine the Odyssey entirely eg in west Africa of 1400 ad or even in Congo of 2000âŠbut by his choices he shows extreme slavishness to dull convention and that heâs mentally trapped in opinions of his time
Elon Musk just defended America better than every politician in Washington combined.
Musk: âAfter World War 2, the US could have basically taken over the world and any country. Like we got nukes, nobody else got nukes. We donât even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want?â
One nation on earth held a weapon nobody else had.
Total dominance. Zero competition. No risk of retaliation.
Every empire in history that held that kind of advantage used it.
Rome. The Mongols. The British. The Ottomans.
They conquered until they collapsed.
America had a bigger advantage than all of them combined.
And it rebuilt the countries it just defeated.
Musk: âThe United States actually helped rebuild countries. So it helped rebuild Europe, it helped rebuild Japan. This is very unusual behavior, almost unprecedented.â
Almost unprecedented?
It had never happened before. Not once in 5,000 years of recorded history.
The Marshall Plan wasnât foreign aid.
It was the most radical act of restraint any superpower ever committed.
America turned its enemies into allies. Turned rubble into economies. Turned surrender into partnership.
Germany went from ashes to the economic engine of Europe in a generation.
Japan went from unconditional surrender to the third largest economy on earth.
Three years after the war, America was flying food into Berlin.
A city in the heart of the nation that just tried to destroy it.
Thatâs not policy.
Thatâs a civilization deciding what it is at the exact moment it has the power to be anything.
Youâre being told a story right now.
That America is the villain of history.
You hear it everywhere. Media. Universities. Social platforms.
Musk: âThereâs always like, well Americaâs done bad things. Well of course Americaâs done bad things, but one needs to look at the whole track record.â
Every nation on earth has dark chapters. Every single one.
The difference is what a country does when nobody can stop it.
And when nobody could stop America, it fed its enemies and rebuilt their cities.
Musk: âThe history of China suggests that China is not acquisitive. Meaning theyâre not going to go out and invade a whole bunch of countries.â
Probably right.
China has historically built walls, not fleets.
But the real question isnât about borders anymore.
Weâre approaching a moment that mirrors 1945 in ways nobody has fully processed yet.
AI is going to give a handful of people a power advantage that makes nuclear monopoly look quaint.
If someone is going to hold that kind of power, who do you want it to be?
The country that conquered when it could? Or the one that rebuilt when it didnât have to?
Every alliance. Every trade route. Every economy.
Billions lifted out of poverty.
All of it traces back to one act of restraint that had never been done before.
And carries no guarantee of being repeated.
The most powerful thing America ever did wasnât building the bomb.
It was what it didnât do after.
Que cosa increible Nueva York es como caba pero con dinero y capitalismo. La gente anda contenta, hay ruido, pasan âcosasâ. Nada que ver con el embole que es casi toda Europa entre la miseria y el frio que se vive alla.
Most guys totally miss the lesson of this book.
The takeaway is that our moral framework is completely incapable of stopping this.
You canât switch to âbourgeois democracy but racistâ and survive
Overcoming this will require a complete ethical/spiritual transformation
Kanye West said this in 2022 on @lexfridman:
Lex: "What do you hope your legacy is?"
Ye: "To be forgotten. There's ego in memory. Who designed the sidewalk? Who designed the water fountain? Who designed the stop sign? Who designed the stop light? These things are so ubiquitous that the person that designed them is forgotten. If it's a good idea, it's a God idea."