Thomas Brookside

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@xwanyex "It's not oligarchy if every time you get millions of dollars in indirect payoffs to your dad, you blow it on hookers and blow!"

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@xenocryptsite To be even more charitable, it's because books and films want to present stories involving character, action and plot. And sitting on your phone 90% of the time eliminates all three of those. It's impossible to tell almost anything we'd recognize as a "story" about phone culture.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@JakeBequette91 The only reason non-profit institutions should be allowed to have sports in the first place is if athletics advance their educational mission. If the "money-making" sports are now eating all other sports, we should eliminate sports as an allowed educational activity entirely.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@OrthodoxOrigen Even if the welfare state only corrupts and ruins X% of the population involved in it, over multi-generational time scales that destroys your community. The way that the white family structure is now collapsing in the same way bears Sowell's point out ENTIRELY.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@jeffspross Yes, of course. The Congress would rather not solve the funding issue ahead of time, because it would impose political costs on current reps. "Let the FUTURE Congress members face those political costs! They'll have no choice!"

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@libobral I would be down with that if we eliminate all transfer payments to individuals as well. 100%. Enjoy your urban area that night, boss.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@LanceVader @memeticsisyphus It's also not "thousands" of years old. The Aztecs were relative newcomers when Cortes kicked their teeth in. And it was ACKNOWLEDGED by the Spanish colonial historians that Tenochtitlan was there, so the whole "Waahhhh Europeans don't acknowledge native cities!" part is false.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@johndrewmarkley I agree, and I thought it was well observed how the First Order officers in general were LARPing what they thought the Empire was, with Kylo being the worst, most cringe LARPer of all.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@xenocryptsite I think the concept is that a place can be so generic that it no longer seems real and becomes a dreamscape (or nightmarescape). Imagine a dream where you were trapped in an IKEA that was infinite and had no exit.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@michelle_byoung The reason that process didn't play out is because he fled.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@metroadlib It's 100% cause for a shopkeeper to seek to detain him. Period. What happens once the shopkeeper tries to detain someone can be chaotic and unpredictable; that's your incentive to a) not steal; and b) not flee.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@tylermilliken_ This team also seems to be jammed with guys who are soft and can't play in the cold. We had an unseasonably cold spring in New England. I'd be interested to see the data on OBP for batters and WHIP for pitchers on this team as a function of temperature.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@JackPosobiec Did you see that Polish girl made the French Open semis as a qualifier?

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@xwanyex Walking is great. HAVING to walk can be not so great.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@herereadthat @SeanMcCarthyCom This is silly. The collectivist sector in the US is CERTAINLY much larger now than it was in, say, 1885. Why didn't we see the same effect to an even greater degree in 1885? Or 1925?

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@SeanMcCarthyCom The post Civil Rights movement leftist pivot to "free stuff" as the be-all and end-all of community caused the death of patriotism. The left hates the nation because it hasn't given out enough free stuff. Leftists teach every young person to hate the nation for this "crime".

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@mavericul I've lived in much nicer buildings in "walkable" cities than this, and I've lived in suburbs, and I've lived in a rural small town. There's a narrow period of post-adolescence where this is better than a suburb (not by 100x, but better) ...and then you grow out of it.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@BretDevereaux One problem with this entire thread is that this is expressly NOT what midwit leftist Reddit tools do. They just say, "Livy was biased! Livy was writing to moralize!" and call it a day. It's laughable to claim that some kind of sophisticated textual criticism is going on here.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@xwanyex Your direct experience of a large number of male-oriented spaces is itself empirical data, though. Drawing conclusions from those observations *is* empiricism. "Anecdotes aren't data" can be a methodologically useful rule in some contexts, but it's fundamentally not true.

[Thomas Brookside @thomasbrookside]

@ETJY @theo_nash And then there's the fact that "Rome's ruling class used to be more cohesive than it is now, and that led it to act in a more public-spirited manner than the predators of our recent civil conflicts" is actually the only reasonable interpretation of the events in question anyway.