Matt S

John 8:32

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

We're used to hearing about extreme weather causing deaths in Africa.

There are now tens of thousands of heat-related deaths a year in Europe, which refuses to get air conditioning due to degrowthers and environmentalists.

This isn't about wealth. It's a deep moral sickness.

[Ole @DerCheapi]

My 2 cents to the balestinian issue:

After 1945 around 12-14 million germans were ousted from the eastern parts of Germany, around 500.000-600.000 died.

my great-grandfather was thrown out of a moving refugee train by a polish soldier, never to be seen again.

my grandmother was assaulted by russian and polish soldiers

my grandaunt died as a child after a russian soldier deliberately threw her milk bottle on the ground and made her starve

Near my hometown there was a mass suicide of 1000+ women and children because they knew what would happen when the russians would reach the city

The conditions for the refugees in the first few years were terrible, there simply wasn't enough space for all of them in the war-torn remains of Germany.

And still, they swallowed the pill. The things that happened happened. The next 20 years were the most successful in all of German history (at least in the west). In a matter of a few decades, the whole struggle of germans after 1945 turned from a major political issue into a distant historical memory that is told by elders, and it plays basically no role in the daily life of a German or in German politics. Whether or not that is a great thing is another question, but it shows what is possible when a society accepts their fate and works on progress instead of pointless political games.

Gaza could have been a Singapore of the middle east, the west sent billions in aid there. The palestinan refugees in Lebanon, Jordan and other countries could have integrated into society and built up great countries.

Instead, they chose the way of a satanist death cult and engaged in a pointless war that they already lost multiple times since 1948. Today, the average arab in Israel has more political participation than the average arab in Saudi-Arabia, Syria, Qatar, UAE and others.

[Echoes of War @EchoesofWarYT]

"FDR handled WW2 brilliantly" is the most unearned A grade in American history.

he signed Executive Order 9066 and locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans, two thirds of them US citizens, in camps. a federal commission later ruled there was not one documented case of espionage among them. the official verdict was "a grave injustice" driven by "race prejudice and war hysteria."

he turned away the SS St. Louis in 1939, sending 900 Jewish refugees back toward the Holocaust. his State Department sat on visa quotas while Europe burned. he didn't create the War Refugee Board until 1944, after years of pressure, and only after the bulk of the killing was already done.

when the War Refugee Board asked to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, the administration said no, too much "diversion of resources."

then at Yalta he sat across from Stalin, took his word on "free elections," and walked away having effectively signed off on Soviet control of Poland and half of Europe. those elections never happened. that's your Cold War, prepaid.

winning a war the size of the planet with the GDP of the planet isn't genius. it's arithmetic. "brilliant" is doing a lot of lifting for a guy who got the biggest calls of the century wrong

[Yehuda Teitelbaum @chalavyishmael]

The Yevsektsiya were Jews. They blamed Zionists and traditional Jews for alienating Soviet society. They believed that if Jews abandoned religion, nationalism, and every trait the regime found objectionable, Communism would reward them with acceptance.

They helped shut down synagogues, persecuted Hebrew teachers, and denounced fellow Jews as enemies of progress. When they were no longer useful, the Soviet state disbanded the Yevsektsiya. Many of its members were executed during Stalin's purges. Others disappeared into labor camps. Their loyalty bought them nothing.

The Antizionist League of Iraq was made up of Jews as well. Its members insisted that Zionism was the source of hostility toward Iraqi Jews. They argued that if Jews publicly rejected the idea of a Jewish state, suspicion and hatred would disappear. They were wrong. The League itself was dissolved and its leaders imprisoned. The Farhud left hundreds of Jews dead, Jewish homes and businesses were looted and destroyed, and over the following years an ancient community was driven into exile. Nobody stopped to ask whether their victims were Zionists before burning their homes or stabbing them in the streets.

A century ago, Baghdad had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Jews made up roughly a quarter of the city's population. Today there are fewer than ten Jews left in all of Iraq. Trying to prove that you are one of the "good Jews" has never altered the outcome.

German Jews were among the most assimilated Jews in the world. They were educated, patriotic, and deeply proud of being German. Many of them fought proudly in WWI. They often looked down on poorer Jews arriving from Eastern Europe. Some convinced themselves that antisemitism was directed only at those less refined than themselves. Even the Association of German National Jews sought accommodation with the Nazi movement and declared its opposition to Zionism. The Nazis outlawed the organization anyway. Its members were deported and murdered alongside the rest of European Jewry.

Today there are fewer Jews in all of Europe than there are Arab citizens of Israel. So much for Europe lecturing Israel about tolerance.

Once a society begins stigmatizing Jews, or even just one category of Jews, the writing is already on the wall. Assimilation has never provided lasting protection. Appeasement has never provided lasting protection. Explaining ourselves politely and hoping to be accepted as the "good ones" has never provided lasting protection.

We are living through a dangerous moment. The United States, and perhaps Argentina, remain among the few places where Jews are not broadly stigmatized. But even that cannot be taken for granted. A 2023 Harvard-Harris poll found that two thirds of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that "Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors." Those young people will shape the future of public opinion.

We have no choice but to speak plainly about antizionism.

Because if antizionism were merely opposition to Netanyahu, it would not predate Netanyahu. If it were merely opposition to Israeli policy, it would not predate Israel. Long before 1948, Jews were being massacred for refusing to accept their place as a tolerated minority.

The uncomfortable truth is that antizionism did not emerge in response to Jewish power. It emerged in response to the idea that Jews should possess power at all.

Kind explanations did not save the Jews of Baghdad. Compliance did not save the Jews of Germany. Revolutionary zeal did not save the Jews of the Soviet Union.

Clarity matters. Memory matters. And the refusal to lie about what we are facing matters most of all.

[Matt S @violinom8]

@SariArhoHavren Maybe it has something to do with the fact that more Europeans die annually from heat than Americans from shootings which lefty media is so concerned about?

[Zetetic Advocate @ZeteticAdvocate]

I think Americans don’t misunderstand why AC is less common in Europe.

A lot of Europeans live in a delusional mindset that imagines artificially cooling in a closed environment is some type of sin against the environment. However, because warming technologies have existed longer—but still require massive energy consumption—they are magically exempt from this mindset. So comfort is okay in the winter, and letting old people die in the summer is just fine.

[Tommy2 @t0xmmy2]

Something good is happening at this World Cup.

The Scots turned up. The English turned up. The Norwegians turned up. They sang their songs, got stuck in, and the Americans loved them for it. Glasgow and Boston are getting twinned off the back of it.

For 30 years we’ve been told to view the US as some sort of Great Satan — all imperialism and orange-man clichés. Not everyone buys it of course, but enough do.

And then Europeans actually go, and find a place that feels familiar. Makes sense to them. A bit richer, a bit further ahead, but recognisably ours. Settled by Europeans, still deeply European in its bones.

There’s a gathering-of-the-clans feeling to it. Old neighbours discovering they still like the same songs, the same drink, the same daft humour, and genuinely enjoying each other’s company.

None of it’s a surprise, really. It’s just been buried under so much politics that we forgot we were allowed to enjoy it.

Good to be reminded.

[Matt S @violinom8]

@foster_revkim @AustinFranco123 @nypost I did not say anything about your intelligence, only about your ignorance of the thing you talked about. You casually showed that you don’t understand the difference. The working for whites and Christians comments was earlier in the thread.

[Handre @Handre]

They told you Obamacare would discipline the insurance giants. Force them to compete. Drive down premiums through the magic of an online marketplace with a clean government website.

Then you watched the website crash in October 2013, and you watched UnitedHealth, Aetna, and Anthem post record profits while your deductible climbed past $6,000.

Here is what the exchanges actually built. The law forced you to buy a product under penalty of the individual mandate, then handed the insurers a fountain of taxpayer cash to make the product look affordable. Premium tax credits flowed straight to the carriers, not to you. In 2017 the federal government paid roughly $42 billion in subsidies, and that money landed in corporate accounts. The cost-sharing reduction payments did the same thing. The risk corridor program promised to backstop insurer losses outright, which is to say it socialized the downside while the executives kept the upside. Guaranteed customers. Guaranteed revenue. A captive market created by statute. Any cartel in history would have killed for terms like that.

Free market economists have a plain name for this arrangement: rent-seeking. When a firm earns its money by extracting subsidies through political channels instead of by serving customers who choose freely, it stops being a business and becomes a tax farmer. The insurers lobbied for the mandate because they understood the arithmetic better than the voters did. America's Health Insurance Plans spent millions backing the bill, then acted shocked when premiums on the individual market more than doubled between 2013 and 2017 in many states. They were not the victims of the law. They wrote the parts that mattered.

Strip away the subsidy and the whole structure collapses, because the prices were never real prices. A real price emerges when a buyer who can walk away meets a seller who can lose the sale. The exchange killed both conditions. You could not walk away without a penalty, and the seller could not lose because Washington covered the gap. This is not a market. The people who keep calling it one are counting on you not noticing who cashes the check.

[Russ Greene @GreenPlusAnE]

Total Boomer Luxury Communism is an existential threat to America. And this rhetoric below contributes to it.

Democrats want to take ~$25 trillion more in taxes on from younger workers, just because they think retired millionaire households deserve $100k plus a year. Note the language: "your social security."

Seniors, your social security doesn't exist anywhere. Your benefits are paid for by younger people's taxes, today. It's not "your social security" - it's "our payroll taxes."

Further, Dems want to jack up spending on Medicare and Medicaid, which means tens of trillions more in additional taxes on younger workers.

And we haven't talked about interest payments on the $39 trillion in national debt yet.

[Vladimir Suvorov @VladimirSuvor]

Megyn Kelly has also praised Tucker Carlson, who called Donald Trump "the anti-Christ" and a рdfile. And Kelly, alongside Tucker's alcoholic brother (who believes Jеws ritually kill and drink the blood of Christian babies), endorsed Graham Platner.

JD Vance is now a brazen traitor, acting no differently than the Obama-loving globalist he was as a Yale law student.

[The Redheaded libertarian @TRHLofficial]

The Scots are assimilating well to American culture.

[Matt S @violinom8]

@foster_revkim @AustinFranco123 @nypost As a matter of fact, Jews do work for whites, Christians and even muslims all the time (at least the muslims who don’t openly hate on or try to kill them). But how would you know that from under yr rock? U don’t even know how freedom of speech and religion operates under yr laws

[Aimen Dean @AimenDean]

With all due respect, Mr. Vice President, World War II is probably the worst example you could have chosen.

The whole reason World War II happened in the first place was because World War I ended with a deeply flawed post-war settlement. If anything, it is a warning about what happens when you fail to properly resolve the causes of a conflict.

And when World War II did happen, how did it end? Not through negotiations. It ended with a decisive military victory. In Germany, Allied forces were literally within meters of Hitler’s bunker. In Japan, it took two nuclear bombs before the Imperial leadership finally accepted reality and surrendered unconditionally.

I don’t even need to go digging through distant history or obscure corners of the world to find examples. Let’s stay in your own backyard. How did the American Civil War end? It ended with a decisive Union victory, the surrender of the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and accountability for those who had taken up arms against the Union. It did not end with everyone sitting around a table and agreeing to disagree.

The lesson from history isn’t that wars should end through vague compromises that leave the underlying issues unresolved. Quite often, the lesson is the exact opposite: unresolved conflicts tend to come back, usually bigger and bloodier than before.

[Matt S @violinom8]

@AustinFranco123 @nypost Your viewpoints? And are you aware that not all of your personal antipathies need to be shared in a professional environment? ‘I’m not interested in this position’ is literally all that needed to be said. And you’ll be working with much more vindictive people than these guys

[Matt S @violinom8]

@Hot_Car_Guy @nypost My exact thought. But again, some people are not that smart

[Mark Cuban @mcuban]

The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.

And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.

One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.

Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.

If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.

Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.

Alternatively

There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.

To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.

It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)

Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.

Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up

But

They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks

Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.

[Nikos Sotirakopoulos @Nikos_17]

Aesthetics can change the world.
They take an ideal from the realm of the abstract
and bring it down to earth,
for you to grasp and contemplate it.
Think of the impact Whiplash had on hustle culture.
See how David Goggins personifies, literally, an ideal.

Past movement understood this:
nationalism, communism & fascism
thrived on aesthetics.

This has made classical liberals allergic
to a higher aesthetic vision,
thinking it's only for unthinking hordes.
What a great mistake.

We need more stories…and we have so many.
Our ideas ended slavery,
took humanity from the gutter to skyscrapers,
and yet we are boring and uninspiring.

Or think of how much we could be doing
with the heroes Ayn Rand gave us.

We have the best ideas in the world,
and sell them with the excitement one would sell
fax machines.

The joke is on us.

[Randy Mott @randymot4]

The Heritage Foundation flips on Ukraine! Then they hooked up with Viktor Orban (the Kremlin sock puppet in Hungary) and flipped overnight as he helped fund them.
Orban gets voted out and Heritage flips again. Now they are pro-aid and noting that Russia cannot win the war.
Some of us never change our support or our prediction. Some of us saw how Russia seriously injuring its nation by a suicidal and unwinnable war would help reshape the global balance of power.
Will Heritage flip again on a major issue to lure in a big donor? Ronald Reagan rolled over in his grave.
https://t.co/vQCV5P8OAd #FoxNews

[Matt S @violinom8]

Agreed, except for the very last part on mass migration. With migration, quality matters more than quantity

[Richard Hanania @RichardHanania]

Europeans coming to America for the World Cup are shocked by our prosperity.

A German guy has his mind blown by Buc-ee’s. A Swedish woman is amazed by ranch dressing, says it's "like crack."

She claims that the internet on a plane flying over the Rockies is faster than what she has at home.

She declares “The U.S.A. has completely radicalized me within 48 hours.”

Americans can romanticize Europe all they want.

But it's good to have a higher standard of living.

And we do, thanks to freer markets and mass migration.

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