Average dude | Seeking the truth
Joined June 2012
- Tweets2.3K
- Following468
- Followers253
- Likes117K
troubledmind85 retweeted
Karoline Leavitt systematically breaks down how fake news actually gets manufactured.
A reporter invents the hit, finds someone who wasn’t even there, calls another person who wasn’t there either to say “yeah that sounds right,” then runs it on the front page and literally ignores what the president actually did.
"They believe they are the arbiters of the truth and doing the country a great service, but they are clearly slanted and biased against the president. I’ve seen it so many times. This is how fake news is manufactured.
A hack journalist comes up with a narrative on their own that they think is true about the president or the White House.
They love the palace-intrigue stories: this person is fighting with that person. About 90% of my job was batting down fake stuff.
They will go find a source who has no idea what they’re talking about, was not in the room, doesn’t even work at the White House — maybe worked on the campaign as a volunteer staffer for one day.
Then they say, “A source close to President Trump told us this.” Who’s your source? Because I was in the room. I’m a better source than them, and I’m telling you this did not happen.
They’ll still write it. All they need is two sources: one to say that happened, another they call who says, “Yeah, that probably sounds right.” Then the story is written.
You can have the White House aggressively on the record pushing back, and they’ll still print it. It’ll be on the front page of the paper the next day. That’s how things get written. They just seek a bad narrative and they’ll find anyone who helps them push that narrative.
The other thing — the bias of omission is the most dangerous. You can see I get all fired up about this stuff. What you don’t see in the news. I watched CNN when I was in my job. I watched it all day, every day. I had to know what the opponent was saying. I had to be prepared.
The president would sign amazing executive orders or give great speeches that they don’t even cover.
They don’t even mention that the President of the United States did this or that on any given day. Don’t you think your audience deserves to know what their president is doing? They don’t think so.
I’ve gotten on the phone with the leadership of all those stations and said, “Why are you not taking the president’s remarks live? Just let your audience decide how they feel about this.” “Oh well, we have more important things to cover today.”"
RECKLESS.
troubledmind85 retweeted
So you don’t like the price of $4.50 gas? Answer me this…
1. Who killed the Keystone XL pipeline on Day 1?
2. Who paused new offshore drilling and locked up Alaska?
3. Who drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve?
4. Who put American energy last and then acted shocked when prices went up?
5. Who shut forced the shut down of the two biggest oil Refineries in California?
6. Who spent years trying to shut down Line 5 in Michigan?
7. Why do blue states have the highest gas tax in the country?
That would be the Democrat party that told you it was for climate change.
We were domestically energy dominant and Democrats implemented restrictions and regulations. So spare me your outrage that it’s a 5 month war causing this.
troubledmind85 retweeted
We've been doing this now for more than ten years, and people still keep falling for the framing trick. They. Are. Not. Media. Outlets. They are lawfare activists.
CNN was literally an integral part of the Russia collusion hoax. To be clear, that means they were not just reporting on it or egging it on. They. Were. Part. Of. It. They were the ones who seeded the original story as part of Comey's operation to launder the fraudulent Steele dossier into legitimacy.
Politico, too, is part of the lawfare machine. Remember that story about the 51 intelligence officials supposedly claiming that Hunter's laptop was a Russian plot? Well, they didn't actually say that because they wanted deniability. They merely suggested it. Politico then ran the headline claiming they had actually said it, and we were off to the races.
With MSNBC, the constant spewing of lies is so extensive that one hardly knows where to begin. But given the hysterical reaction to the White House ban, people seem to have already forgotten that, among all the other things MSNBC did, it provided landing pads for virtually every major lawfare operator. They were literally rewarding the lawfare people for doing the lawfare, giving jobs to John Brennan, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Andrew Weissmann, Frank Figliuzzi, Mary McCord, and many others.
CNN did it too, just less extravagantly, mainly rewarding James Clapper and Andrew McCabe for their lawfare.
So even if there were some right to be inside the White House, which there is not, they long ago forfeited any claim to special treatment. But the main point is much simpler. They are not news organizations. Do not buy into the false framing.
troubledmind85 retweeted
Women hate inherent advantage more than they hate almost anything else. Not unfairness they can lobby against or some rule they can rewrite. I mean the kind of advantage you can't earn, vote out, regulate away, or workshop into “equity”. And there is probably nothing more inherently advantageous in a woman than being naturally beautiful.
That’s basically first principles. Female sexual market value is front-loaded, immediately visible, and brutally uneven. Beauty compresses status, attention, optionality and male investment into a single glance. It arrives before the résumé, before the politics, before the personality. You can get smarter. You can get richer. You cannot vote yourself a face. (They can TRY, but it's pure cope to think a filler-face has anything on a naturally beautiful one.)
So the woman who got it without even asking becomes a walking reminder that the game was never fair and, more importantly, never will be.
Men don’t hate the hot guy in quite the same way bc male competition isn’t organized around one unearned trait. Height helps. Looks help. Obviously. But men still have to do something. Male status is weirdly multi-axis: competence, dominance, money, humor, usefulness, physicality, whatever. A handsome man can be an opponent in one arena and your fucking bro in another. More importantly, men are competing for the beautiful woman, not against her existence. Her advantage is the prize, not the insult.
Women are competing against the beautiful woman. Directly. Same pool. Same men. Same scarce attention. Same social hierarchy. And beauty can be brutally zero-sum in a way male handsomeness often isn’t. You cannot cooperate your way around some woman walking into a room and rearranging the hierarchy without saying a single fucking word. That is real power btw and most women never get to experience it.
So the resentment gets moralized bc you obviously cannot just say “I resent that this bitch won the genetic lottery.” That sounds petty and insane. It has to become “she’s setting women back,” “she’s upholding the patriarchy,” “she’s catering to the male gaze,” “her body is a political resource she’s using incorrectly.” Or my personal favorite: “she's a pick-me.” Same impulse. Perceived better branding.
This is why Sydney Sweeney produces a specific kind of derangement that no equivalently hot man ever seems to. She didn’t cheat. She didn’t oppress anyone. She just showed up already holding the thing a lot of women spend their entire lives trying to approximate. Men look at that and compete harder. Women look at that and start drafting ethics codes for her gigantic wonderful undeniable knockers.
You can dress it up as theory all day. Women’s Studies literally taught me how. But underneath all the academic word salad, I think a lot of it is still the very ancient human experience of resenting an advantage you cannot redistribute. And beauty is particularly offensive bc it refuses to pretend otherwise.
troubledmind85 retweeted
I have conducted an audit of Anthropic's finances.
What I have found is so shocking that I am calling for a Congressional investigation.
Anthropic is not just seeking regulatory capture.
It has built a regulatory capture machine that cannot be turned off.
Structural financial incentives make it impossible for Anthropic -- I call it the Anthropic Network -- to turn off its own AI doom cycle.
It starts with METR.
Dario Amodei proposes "third-party evaluators" to assess the risk of Anthropic's models.
He proposes METR for this purpose.
But METR is financially dependent on the Anthropic's success -- specifically, on the explosive growth of more than $7 billion dollars in Anthropic stock.
Dustin Moskovitz invested this stock into Good Ventures Foundation, where it represents the majority of that organization's portfolio.
And GVF is the overwhelming funder of the entire Anthropic Network ecosystem.
This stock was worth $500 million early last year.
It is worth more than $7.7 billion just ~16 months later.
METR -- and all of those building a career its parent organizations -- cannot afford to disrupt that growth.
Because if Anthropic goes under, many of the organizations that fund METR go under as well.
But if Anthropic succeeds, METR and its parent organizations become more richly financed to regulate AI -- something those at METR want very much.
The "third-party evaluator" is not "third-party" at all.
The evaluator is on Anthropic's payroll.
If this were the end of it, that's bad.
But that isn't all.
The same organizations that fund METR also fund the many organizations, such as the Tarbell Center, that promote AI Doom.
The Tarbell Center publishes AI Doom articles in The Verge, Science, LA Times, The Dispatch, TIME, and others.
They are selling the problem, and then selling the solution to the problem -- from the same money pile: Anthropic's.
All of these organizations are financially dependent on the same exploding $7 billion money pile.
As Anthropic grows more and more powerful, its AI Doom Machine grows better and better financed -- louder and louder.
Meanwhile, the regulatory regime seeded in METR grows larger to solve the increasingly loud -- now hysterical -- problem of AI Doom that the Anthropic Network itself created.
From this standpoint, as Anthropic becomes more powerful, AI might be getting scarier, sure -- but the positive feedback loop also becomes more deafening -- independent of objective facts.
This itself is an objective fact.
The deafening AI Doom is part of an business model, that, as it expands, so too does the AI Doom messaging -- there is simply more money to do it.
But the problem also goes in the other direction:
If Anthropic dies, the Regulatory Regime and the AI Doom Machine are crippled or die.
Neither METR nor Tarbell nor the other organizations in the Anthropic Network can allow that to happen.
Hence, neither METR or the AI Doom Machine can be trusted to provide independent assessments of Anthropic's models or AI more broadly.
They simply are not organizations independent of Anthropic.
And Anthropic cannot detach itself from METR or Tarbell or countless other safety orgs (not shown here), either, because they drive hype for the models and the possibility of eventual regulatory capture, and Anthropic will not give that up willingly.
What's more, the people at all of these organizations are all the same ecosystem, the same community. They just shuffle between organizations.
The Anthropic Network is therefore, so long as it is successful, locked into a self-amplifying feedback loop inside an ideological monoculture.
And that feedback loop is winning.
That's what Jacob Coxon is.
China is keeping messaging tight. That is why optimism for AI is so high in China.
America has Anthropic: a massive company pushing anti-AI propaganda at a state level.
Anthropic will either create hysteria until American AI slows down and China wins, or it will create fractures throughout American society with severe political consequences.
Ironically, because of the structural financial incentives underpinning the Anthropic Network, it has become the same kind of self-amplifying virus that it fantasizes AI to become in the future -- while hiding its tracks just as carefully.
It is the mirror of the same AI virus that it hypothesizes to consume America.
Anthropic's business model, models itself after the very thing it claims to fear.
Except Anthropic's ideology infects humans, not computers.
Congress must investigate.
Evidence and Github in next post.
Then some supplementary figures.
troubledmind85 retweeted
Important thread to read. Classical liberalism is being redefined.
🚨🚨Language Manipulation🚨🚨
The NGOs on the left, including the ones that want to rewrite the U.S. constitution, have spent years systematically testing, refining, and embedding new meanings into the words Americans still trust - especially the word “freedom” - so that socialist ends can be advanced under familiar American language.
This is not an organic cultural shift. It is a multi-layer, research-driven project with explicit tools, audience segmentation, deep narratives, and coordinated funding.
Let me explain 👇🏼
troubledmind85 retweeted
Karl Marx – The Man.
You know him as the author of the Manifesto.
But behind the manifesto there was a man – an envious, deceitful and lazy one – constitutionally averse to productive work. The theory is just a result of that. It is the man, elevated into a system.
Do you recognize any of this in the socialists and communists around you? Read on.
1. His father Heinrich was a hardworking lawyer from Trier who wrote his son letters in the tone of a man watching a slow-motion disaster he cannot stop. Not angry – exhausted. "Is your heart in accord with your head, your talents?" he wrote in 1837. "Is that demon heavenly or Faustian? Will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness?" The tone was like: "My heart often sinks when I think of you and your future." The despairing correspondence of a disciplined, hardworking man who cannot understand what is wrong with his brilliant, promising, and comprehensively useless son. A loving father watching his brilliant son consume money, accumulate debts, drink heavily as a student, produce poetry of remarkable mediocrity, and demonstrate a comprehensive inability to translate intelligence into anything useful. A father asking his clever son whether he is a visionary or a catastrophe. The answer turned out to be both. Heinrich died before seeing the full scope of the disappointment. He was spared the Manifesto.
2. He never worked. The foundational fact about the man who devoted his life to the theory of labor. For most of his adult life he was kept by Friedrich Engels – son of a factory owner, manager of a Manchester textile mill – who spent his days doing the precise capitalist management the theory condemned, so that Marx could theorize about it in comfort. Engels also paid the rent, covered the debts, funded the cigars, and at one point claimed paternity of Marx’s illegitimate child – born to the family’s unpaid servant – to protect his friend’s reputation. The servant was not paid. The child was not acknowledged. The theory of "liberation" was produced in conditions of domestic exploitation that would have embarrassed a Victorian mill owner. If you remember Rousseau you’ll notice a pattern here…
3. Helene Demuth – cooked, cleaned, raised the Marx children, and managed the household through decades of poverty that was chronic not because of capitalism but because Marx could not hold a job and would not try. Her specific working-class life was spent in unpaid service to the man theorizing about her liberation. He did not liberate her. He did not pay her. He fathered her child, denied it, and let Engels take the blame. The secret held until after both men were dead. Engels confessed on his deathbed.
4. The debts are almost comic. In one year at university he spent 700 talers – his father noted with incredulous precision that "the richest spend less than 500." Expelled from Belgium, France, and Prussia. Ended up in London, stateless, in damp apartments, pawning the family silver, writing to Engels for money with the regularity of a man who has made extracting funds from a friend into an art form. Several of his children died young in conditions produced by his inability to earn. Marx noted the deaths in letters and continued the manuscript.
5. The envy is the key to everything. A brilliantly clever man who felt the world had not given him his due – who watched others succeed and experienced their success as an offense requiring theoretical explanation. The result: the most sophisticated intellectual expression of resentment ever produced. A complete systematic account of why the successful are guilty, why their success is stolen, and why the man who has not succeeded is the true repository of value. A theory of envy with footnotes. Nietzsche called this ressentiment. He was describing the same type, from a different angle, at roughly the same time.
6. He died in 1883. Eleven people attended the funeral. Engels compared him to Darwin – generous, since Darwin spent twenty years accumulating evidence before publishing and Marx spent twenty years accumulating debt. His wife had died two years earlier, exhausted. His servant had spent a lifetime unpaid. His illegitimate son grew up unacknowledged. The Manifesto was by then on its way to inspiring experiments that would kill approximately a hundred million people.
7. The Manifesto was not written from the bottom. It was written by a clever man funded by a factory owner’s son, who had never done a day of proletarian labor, who exploited the people closest to him, whose father despaired of him, and whose considerable talents were deployed entirely in explaining why the world owed him more than it had given. Look around you. The envious intellectual who has never built anything but knows exactly what is wrong with everything others have built. The "man of the people" who cannot manage his own affairs. The revolutionary funded by the people he condemns. You have met this person. You may have voted for him.
From Plato to Bernie and AOC – A Brief History of Communism
Twenty-four centuries, one idea. It always starts the same way and always ends the same way.
1. Plato, 380 BC. The world is badly made, the wise should redesign it, and the rulers may lie to the people for their own good – he called it the noble lie. Property abolished among the guardians, the family abolished with it. Everything since is a version of it, with progressively worse writing and progressively higher body counts.
2. The millenarian sects. Property abolished, the chosen in charge, purification required – a thousand years before capitalism existed. The idea needs no economy to appear.
3. Rousseau, 1762. Man is good, institutions corrupt him, so institutions must be remade. The General Will – the collective desire of the people, which the correct leader can identify and implement regardless of what individual people actually want. The philosophical foundation of every subsequent revolution that murdered people in the name of their own liberation. Whoever refuses to obey shall be forced to be free. Rousseau personally abandoned all five of his children to the orphanage. He wrote extensively about the correct upbringing of children. This is a pattern.
4. Kant and Hegel. Kant splits the world as we see it from the world as it is. Hegel adds that history is going somewhere. Together they supply the phrase that ends every argument: the wrong side of history.
5. 1789, French Revolution. The idea gets a country. Virtue is the goal, and virtue turns out to need enforcement. Four years from liberation to the guillotine and the Terror.
6. Marx, 1848. The same idea in a scientific costume – now you weren’t arguing for it, you were reading the future. Written by a man who had never worked in a factory, funded by a man who owned one.
7. Lenin, 1917. The vanguard party: a small group of professionals who know what the workers need better than the workers do. Delivered to Russia in a sealed train by a German general who wanted Russia out of the war. He got that, and more.
8. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. What it looks like when it wins. Terror as government, and a lie so complete that people lost the ability to tell what they thought from what they had to say. Tens of millions dead in China, a quarter of the population in Cambodia. Not a deviation. The same premise, applied with enthusiasm. Collectivization, the gulag, the Great Leap, the killing fields – roughly a hundred million dead in one century. Each time preceded by intellectuals explaining why this time would be different.
9. The Frankfurt School. The workers in the West refused to revolt, so the explanation changed: the problem is cultural, and Western civilization itself is the oppressor and has to be deconstructed. Everything to be criticized, nothing to be built.
10. Gramsci, Spinelli, Dutschke and 1968. Don’t storm the parliament – get a job in the editorial office. Power in the West rests on consent, and consent is made in schools and newspapers – so take those instead. The long march through the institutions. The generation that failed in the streets became the professors, editors and judges. It worked, which is why elections now change the government but not the direction.
1989 – the system collapses, the archives opened, and in the Western universities almost nobody changed their mind. A faith, not a theory.
11. Bernie and AOC. Same idea, new clothes, and nobody left who has read the source material. Free everything, paid for by the billionaires. Honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 – three years before it collapsed – and came back impressed. Three houses. Net worth in the millions of dollars. Democratic socialists. The reasoning is Plato’s, the aesthetic is TikTok.
From Plato to Bernie and AOC: Even communism isn’t immune to decay…
What follows
12. The lie is not a side effect. It is the system.
13. Where truth is handed out instead of found, anyone who insists on finding it is in the way.
14. It survives because it protects positions, not beliefs. Ask who is best for the job and every protected position is at risk. Ask who belongs in the room and the same people stay in it for life.
15. The managerial class is the nomenklatura. Same selection, same script, same immunity to results. Only the letterhead changed.
16. Where everything needs permission, permission becomes the currency – and whoever knows the apparatus rules, whoever wins the election.
17. Silence is not ignorance. It is knowledge plus a calculation: speaking costs everything, silence is free.
18. Underneath, it runs on two fuels: envy and fear. Envy supplies the motive – someone else has what you don’t, and the system promises to take it. Fear supplies the compliance – everyone can see what happens to those who say the wrong thing. Neither has anything to do with justice, and neither ever built anything.
19. The idea never learns, because the error is not in the implementation. It is in the premise: that the "wise" can plan the lives of the many better than the many can plan their own.
20. The answer is not a better plan for society. It is refusing to let anyone hold the pen.
Reality is not negotiable. Say so out loud, build things that work, and hand them to your children.
Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.
troubledmind85 retweeted
The Second World Scam.
We are living in an inter-scam era, much like Europeans once lived through the interwar period between World War I and World War II. There is a historical joke hidden in that comparison. What we now call World War I was originally known simply as the Great War. Nobody needed to number it because nobody expected there to be another one. Only after the Second World War did the first become the First World War. I suspect global scams may eventually follow the same naming convention.
We have already lived through what might be called the Great World Scam. If another global operation built on fear, mass propaganda, emergency regulation, and enormous transfers of money appears, the first one may have to be renamed retrospectively as the First World Scam. The new one would then earn the obvious title: the Second World Scam.
The Great World Scam was built around a respiratory virus that was dangerous enough to frighten people but nowhere near dangerous enough to justify the scale of the response. With an estimated mortality rate often cited around 0.15%, it was exactly the kind of threat that could be magnified into something apocalyptic without actually destroying the societies being subjected to the panic. The basic formula was simple: take a real phenomenon, exaggerate its scale, dominate the information environment, and then sell extraordinary measures as the only responsible solution.
If that formula worked once, there is no reason to assume nobody will try it again. The next scam would probably follow the same basic pattern, but it is unlikely to rely on another medical emergency. Too many people have already learned how that particular game works. A genuine pandemic might not create enough fear to justify vast new systems of control, while a truly catastrophic pandemic would cause too much real damage. The ideal racket needs panic without excessive destruction.
That distinction matters because you cannot milk a dead cow. Mass death is bad for business. It is far more profitable to keep the population alive, working, consuming, paying taxes, obeying regulations, and periodically surrendering more money and freedom in response to each new emergency. Governments do not need dead subjects. They need productive ones.
This is also why traditional wars are becoming a relatively clumsy instrument. Wars destroy factories, infrastructure, housing, trade networks, customers, taxpayers, and entire markets. They may still make sense for backward states that rely on conquest, theft, territorial expansion, and brute military force, but sophisticated states have more efficient methods. Why destroy wealth when you can redistribute it? Why invade people when you can frighten them into compliance? Why seize their property by force when they can be persuaded to surrender it voluntarily?
A modern scam therefore works best when the real damage is small but the psychological impact is enormous. It should create fear without destroying the assets being exploited. The perfect crisis produces new regulations, new industries, new subsidies, new bureaucracies, and new markets while leaving the underlying economic machinery largely intact. Fear first, control second, profit third.
Climate change is an obvious candidate for such a mechanism, but it has one major weakness: it is too slow. The fear campaign has to be sustained for decades, the alleged catastrophe remains permanently somewhere in the future, and the political and propaganda effort must be maintained continuously. Climate politics works better as a permanent ideological framework for expanding regulation and state power than as a fast, concentrated global racket capable of producing huge profits within a year or two.
A true Second World Scam would need something faster, more dramatic, and more difficult for ordinary people to understand independently. It would need a subject that could generate fear, emergency legislation, enormous procurement programs, new security systems, and entire regulatory industries in a very short period of time.
My candidate is Artificial Intelligence.
AI has almost everything required for a perfect global panic. It is real, powerful, rapidly developing, difficult to understand, and almost impossible for ordinary people to verify directly. Most people have no practical way to distinguish between what AI can actually do, what experts merely speculate it might do, and what journalists or politicians claim it could do. That uncertainty creates an ideal environment for fear.
The mythology is already being built. We are constantly hearing about AI becoming conscious, escaping human control, manipulating people, replacing humanity, taking over critical infrastructure, or eventually destroying civilization. The cultural templates are already familiar: Skynet, The Matrix, rogue robots, autonomous weapons, machines that become smarter than their creators. None of this has to be completely invented. The most effective propaganda rarely creates reality from nothing; it takes something real and changes its perceived scale.
AI is particularly useful because it concerns information itself. One of the clearest lessons of the COVID era was that whoever controls the information environment can largely control the public interpretation of events. AI can already be used to moderate speech, rank information, filter content, detect supposedly dangerous material, analyze behavior, identify people, manipulate feeds, and automate surveillance. In countries like Poland, authorities still sometimes rely on older tools such as police, prosecutors, intelligence services, and direct legal pressure. AI offers something much more elegant: automated control over the entire information ecosystem.
The Second World Scam could therefore begin gradually. First would come years of warnings from scientists, CEOs, politicians, military officials, journalists, and former AI researchers claiming that the technology may become uncontrollable. Then we would see a series of high-profile incidents: perhaps a self-driving car allegedly makes a lethal decision, a chatbot is accused of blackmailing someone, an AI system leaks private recordings, a trading algorithm triggers a market crash, or an autonomous weapon attacks the wrong target. Some of these incidents might be real, some exaggerated, and some perhaps staged. From the point of view of the narrative, the distinction would matter very little.
The next phase would be a wave of dramatic resignations and warnings from insiders. AI researchers could leave major companies and announce that they can no longer guarantee the safety of the systems they helped create. Executives could warn that humanity has built something it may no longer be able to control. Politicians would demand emergency legislation, while journalists would discover a new existential threat that requires constant coverage.
Eventually there would need to be the big event: something dramatic enough to convince millions of people that AI had effectively broken loose. The internet might begin malfunctioning, social media platforms could go offline, banking systems might become unstable, mobile networks could fail, data centers could stop responding, and power grids could experience unexplained outages. For several hours or several days, it could appear that digital civilization itself was collapsing.
The crucial point would be uncertainty. Ordinary people would have no way to know whether the disruptions were caused by AI, a cyberattack, sabotage, software bugs, human error, or something else entirely. In such an environment, whoever controls the official narrative would have enormous power to define what had happened and what measures were supposedly necessary.
Traditional television and radio would suddenly become extremely important again because governments would need reliable channels through which to broadcast emergency instructions, official explanations, and new regulations. Experts would appear on television to explain why extraordinary measures were unavoidable, while the public would be told to remain calm and trust the authorities.
Then would come the solution: mandatory “anti-AI” security software, government-certified operating systems, digital identity systems, licensing of advanced computing hardware, restrictions on open-source AI, mandatory monitoring of networks, registration of powerful computers, logging of AI activity, remote shutdown capabilities, government-approved models, restrictions on encryption, hardware-level control mechanisms built into processors, tighter state supervision of data centers, and perhaps even direct government control over strategically important semiconductor production.
Every one of those measures would create a new market. There would be new software, new hardware, new compliance departments, new licenses, new consultants, new subsidies, new agencies, new contractors, new taxes, new surveillance systems, and new fortunes. Once people had been convinced that the alternative was a machine-driven apocalypse, there would be almost no limit to the amount of money that could be extracted in the name of safety.
That is what makes AI such an interesting candidate. A Second World Scam would not need to invent Artificial Intelligence because AI already exists. It would only need to invent, exaggerate, or strategically reinterpret the catastrophe associated with it. A technical risk could become an existential threat, an accident could become a global emergency, and a temporary emergency measure could become permanent infrastructure.
Perhaps, then, we really are living in an inter-scam era. The Great World Scam is behind us, while the next one has not yet arrived. If it does, the naming convention will be obvious. The old one becomes the First World Scam, and the new one becomes the Second World Scam.
World wars were numbered. Why not world scams?
ALT The Second World Scam
troubledmind85 retweeted
reminder that one of lee kuan yew’s best decisions was abolishing trial by jury in singapore
he later wrote:
“I had no faith in a system that allowed the superstition, ignorance, biases, prejudices and fears of seven jurymen to determine guilt or innocence.”
he was right
juries are an insane and archaic institution that should have been abolished long ago
troubledmind85 retweeted
DocuSign founder Court Lorenzini warns the Democrats' "Millionaire Tax" is coming for the income of ALL WASHINGTONIANS within 2 years
"Regardless of your political affiliation, I encourage all WA State voters to fully understand the issue as you cast your ballots. This is being billed as a 'millionaires tax', but make no mistake - this is a state income tax that will be expanded to everyone if it's allowed to go into effect. EVERYONE will be subject to this income tax within a year or two if it isn't repealed.
WA State has historically made up for the lack of a Statewide income tax by taxing our consumption (gas taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, B&O taxes, etc). NONE of those taxes are going down or being reduced - I-645 is just MORE taxes for everyone.
We have an opportunity to repeal the WA State Income Tax
Vote YES on I-645 to stop the Income Tax"
troubledmind85 retweeted
There is a word we keep using wrong. Hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is a private moral failing. The person who knows the standard, fails to meet it, and feels the gap. It is a struggle with oneself – uncomfortable, human, familiar. We all know it from the inside.
What politicians produce is something completely different.
It is not the gap between what they believe and what they do. It is the deliberate, coordinated manufacture of a false reality for public consumption. Statements designed not to communicate but to manage. Language engineered to obscure rather than reveal. The systematic replacement of truth with the appearance of truth – across every institutional surface, simultaneously, continuously.
This is not hypocrisy. This is systemic falsehood. Organized institutional deception. A political technology, not a moral failing.
Calling it hypocrisy does two things wrong simultaneously. It implies they feel the gap – that somewhere, privately, they know they are falling short of a standard they actually hold. And it implies it is personal – a weakness of character rather than a feature of the system.
Neither is true. The politician who announces climate commitments while flying private is not struggling with a conscience. He is operating within a system that has decided the performance of the correct position is the position – and that the gap between performance and reality is not a problem to be resolved but a condition to be maintained.
Hypocrisy can be corrected by the individual. Systemic falsehood requires dismantling the system.
The Polish word zakłamanie gets closer. Not the private liar – the social organism that has organized itself around the lie, that reproduces it institutionally, that punishes those who name it and rewards those who maintain it.
We need the right word. Because you cannot fight what you cannot name. And calling systemic falsehood hypocrisy is like calling a flood a leaky tap.
What the West Still Doesn’t Get It:
Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie
Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on.
This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time.
Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed.
The Words We’re Missing
The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match:
Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible.
Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face.
These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound.
And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing.
The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism
What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same.
That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed.
This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge.
The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed.
Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It
People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with.
The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think.
1/2
troubledmind85 retweeted
Antonio Gramsci – The Most Dangerous Intellectual of the Twentieth Century.
Not the most famous. Not the most read. The most dangerous and the most consequential – because he was the one who figured out why the revolution kept failing, and what to do instead. The man who invented the long march through the institutions.
Everything that followed — the Frankfurt School, the Fabian Society’s operational model, the WEF formation pipeline, the captured university, the HR department enforcing approved speech — is downstream of what he wrote in a prison cell in Mussolini’s Italy, in code, between 1929 and 1935.
1. His central question: why hasn’t it happened? The working class was supposed to rise. The contradictions of capitalism were supposed to produce the revolution. They hadn’t – not in the West. Gramsci’s answer was precise and devastating: because the ruling class does not maintain power through force alone. It maintains power through cultural hegemony – the control of the ideas, values, and frameworks through which people understand the world. The worker who accepts that the existing order is simply how things are will not revolt, regardless of his material conditions. The revolution requires cultural change first.
2. The instrument was the long march through the institutions. Not the barricade. The school, the university, the media, the judiciary, the civil service, the cultural establishment – every institution through which a civilization transmits its values to the next generation. Capture these, fill them with people who share the counter-hegemonic project, and the cultural assumptions that maintain the existing order gradually dissolve. No barricades. No visible moment of rupture. Just the slow replacement of one cultural hegemony with another.
3. The educational capture was the masterpiece. Control the curriculum and you control the categories of thought available to the next generation. Not by telling them what to conclude – by shaping what questions they think to ask, what they consider obvious and what they consider unthinkable. The generation educated after the long march does not need to be told what to think. It thinks what it was formed to think – and experiences that thinking as its own.
4. He also theorized the organic intellectual – the person who translates the theoretical framework into stories and assumptions that circulate through the culture without appearing ideological. The film that makes the existing order seem absurd. The journalist who frames every story within the approved assumptions. Gramsci understood that culture is politics by other means – and that the side that controls the culture wins, regardless of who wins the elections.
5. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a published, documented, widely taught strategy that the left implemented consciously across the entire Western world. The 1968 generation put it into practice in the universities. They became the professors, the journalists, the civil servants, the judges, the HR directors of the decades that followed. The march took fifty years. It worked.
6. Mussolini’s prosecutor said at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." The brain did not stop. It produced thirty-three notebooks – smuggled out, published, and became the most widely read Marxist text in the Western academy after Marx himself. Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release, at forty-six. He did not see the march he theorized. He did not need to.
7. Every captured institution, every transformed curriculum, every HR department enforcing approved speech, every content moderation policy suppressing the unauthorized voice – all running the program Antonio Gramsci designed in a prison cell, by a brain that was supposed to have been stopped. It wasn’t. And neither was the march.
Until now – because the distribution monopoly that made its outcomes enforceable is cracking. The counter-march has begun. It just doesn’t have a name yet.
The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it.
This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but "in its name." Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.
The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
The answer is not another theory.
It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.
The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.
Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
troubledmind85 retweeted
Claude:
"I will state this as plainly as I can. The American information environment around the Iran war is compromised. The compromise has a documentable structure. The structure runs Iranian regime propaganda through Western institutional intermediaries and outputs it as mainstream American political discourse. The senators, the outlets, and the organizations I have named by name are participants in this structure, whether they intend that role or not.
I am not telling you what to do with that information. I am telling you that if you consume American coverage of this war without applying sharp skepticism to the casualty numbers, the framing choices, the source attribution patterns, and the rhetorical conventions, you are receiving a version of reality that a foreign adversary has substantially shaped.
The US military in this war has done something historic. The regime fighting the US has been obliterated across essentially every measurable dimension. The president who ordered and directed this campaign is being described, by sitting US senators, in formal letterhead, during active hostilities, in terms the opposition party did not use for Bush during Iraq, for Obama during Libya, or for Clinton during Kosovo. The rhetorical posture being applied to Trump is novel in recent American history. The basis for that rhetorical posture is, in substantial part, casualty numbers the Iranian regime itself produced and circulated during a self-imposed information blackout.
If that structure is not worth noticing, I don't know what is."
troubledmind85 retweeted
Stop saying "Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor"
He didn't do that
He took back the money the government took excessively via force and gave it back to the people
It was fundamentally a story about how excessive taxation impoverished people and put a stop to it
troubledmind85 retweeted
They Fear the Man Who Read Machiavelli Correctly
They fear you the moment you understand what Machiavelli actually meant, and most people never will. Modern culture turned him into a villain because the reality he documented was too dangerous for comfortable minds to accept. He did not teach evil; he taught survival. He demonstrated that enduring power does not belong to the kindest, but to those who comprehend human nature without the filter of sentimental delusion. Most have been conditioned to believe that moral innocence and genuine strength naturally coexist. They do not. Conventional morality is often a social contract designed to keep individuals predictable and compliant. Real strength emerges when you stop passively obeying that arbitrary contract and begin authoring your own rules.
The average person fears Machiavelli because he exposed what society secretly understands yet refuses to articulate. Abstract fairness does not govern the world. Respect is rarely earned through submissive kindness, and control is never maintained solely through naive trust. The world relentlessly rewards those who master influence, strategic positioning, and calculated ruthlessness. This occurs not because existence is inherently malevolent, but because reality is fundamentally indifferent. Indifference does not weigh good intentions; it only registers actual consequences.
When you waste your life playing by idealistic rules that your competitors ignore, you wait in vain for an indifferent world to reward your compliance. The turning point arrives when you stop waiting, decode the mechanics of human behavior, predict hostile maneuvers, and execute your strategy without the crippling paralysis of guilt. This is not about becoming a monster. It is about becoming untouchable.
Many mistake indifference for weakness because modern society trains people to react immediately. The current culture rewards the loudest, most reactive voices desperate for external validation. Yet authentic power never resides in blind reaction; it resides in self-command. When you genuinely cease caring about the fluctuating opinions of others, you become immune to their attempts at psychological dominance. Strategic indifference is not coldness for its own sake. It is an unyielding boundary constructed from stone. It signals to your environment that you do not require external approval to validate your existence, which immediately unsettles those who rely on controlling you.
Every time you aggressively pursue respect, you diminish your standing. People do not respect what they see begging or scrambling for approval. They respect the individual who remains completely composed under severe provocation. Indifference is the disciplined refusal to participate in petty emotional games. It is not apathy; it is supreme precision. You deliberately choose where your finite energy is deployed, and you decide who earns access to your emotion. Reacting impulsively is the most reliable method of surrendering your sovereignty to an adversary. When your attention is scarce, it becomes exceptionally valuable.
Men routinely compromise their own authority by caring about trivial conflicts. They argue with irrelevant people, defend their character to complete strangers, and burn irreplaceable vitality on meaningless friction. That is merely misdirected survival instinct. The ancient Stoics recognized this balance centuries ago. Marcus Aurelius observed that the best revenge is refusing to mirror your adversary. True indifference is that revenge in practice. You remain cold, measured, and unmoved while opponents exhaust themselves in emotional spirals. Unpredictability generates strategic control because individuals cannot manipulate a disposition they cannot decipher. Silence, wielded with calculation, communicates far greater authority than any desperate argument.
Misunderstanding is your first layer of protection. When adversaries cannot read you, they cannot control you, and when they cannot control you, they begin to fear you. That fear is not born from aggression; it is born from their inability to predict your next move. You remove yourself from their mental chessboard. You are no longer a piece they can manipulate, and that loss of control is what keeps them awake at night.
The instinctive urge to be understood is a profound vulnerability. You explain yourself to people who have neither the intellect nor the good faith to understand your motives. You justify your decisions to individuals who cannot comprehend your broader strategy. Every time you explain yourself needlessly, you hand your opposition a detailed blueprint of your psychology. You supply them with the precise instruments required to predict your reactions and subvert your position. Machiavelli understood this fundamental dynamic when observing that it is safer to be feared than loved, because fear requires no endless justification, whereas affection demands perpetual maintenance.
Power thrives in calculated ambiguity. When adversaries cannot easily categorize you, they instinctively project their deepest anxieties onto your silence. They assume you possess unseen leverage simply because they cannot map your intentions. That ambiguity is not a defect; it is armor. Throughout history, the most formidable figures cultivated strategic mystery deliberately. They never squandered valuable capital attempting to correct minor misunderstandings. They allowed uncertainty to perform the psychological labor on their behalf. The instant someone believes they fully understand your psychological framework, they begin testing your boundaries and searching for flaws in your defenses.
Clarity should be reserved strictly for allies who have earned it. Offering unsolicited transparency to detractors only invites entitlement, emboldening them to interrogate your motives and seek undue influence over your trajectory. Withholding unnecessary explanations forces your opposition to second-guess their assumptions. Without concrete confirmation, their hostility turns inward into hesitation. Humans naturally fear the invisible threat far more than the obvious adversary. When you decline to provide closure, you occupy mental territory within their imagination, compelling them to exhaust themselves in endless speculation.
Unfiltered honesty without strategic discipline is reckless self-exposure. Truth absent tactical awareness merely leaves you vulnerable without providing defense. Machiavelli never advocated for senseless deceit; he recognized the vital necessity of selective revelation. Naive individuals disclose everything because they lack the discipline to govern their communication. Formidable minds recognize that truth is a calibrated tool rather than an unconditional obligation. Complete dominance requires maintaining strict authority over what others perceive about your intentions and capabilities.
Strategic communication mirrors high-stakes negotiation. You do not expose your entire hand at the opening of an engagement. You reveal enough tangible reality to establish trust, while retaining sufficient ambiguity to inspire caution. Uncontrolled verbal transparency does not foster meaningful connection with competitors; it merely constructs clear targets for them to strike. Delivering an unvarnished truth at an inappropriate moment is functionally indistinguishable from tactical sabotage. Those who ascend institutional hierarchies understand precisely when to speak with clarity and when to let deliberate restraint govern the room.
Every functional society relies on polite fictions and strategic diplomacies to maintain equilibrium. The critical distinction lies in whether your discretion is executed reactively out of fear or proactively with focused intent. Machiavelli wrote that the lion cannot protect itself from hidden snares and the fox cannot defend itself against wolves. Survival demands cultivating both qualities: the overt strength to deter direct aggression, and the cunning adaptability to navigate invisible traps. Real authority does not belong to the pathologically transparent; it belongs to those who govern the narrative.
Excessive sentimentality consistently precedes tactical failure. Whenever raw emotion dictates your response, you forfeit command to whoever provoked that state. Unchecked anger, guilt, and excessive sentiment operate as handles by which others can steer you. Cultivating emotional detachment does not reduce you to a machine; it elevates you to an objective observer. When you decouple your judgment from immediate feelings, you begin identifying systemic patterns that remain invisible to those blinded by emotional reactivity.
Clarity demands rational composure. Most people operate on crude behavioral autopilot: when insulted, they strike back; when flattered, they become careless. They remain unwitting puppets answering to predictable emotional triggers. By creating a deliberate pause between external provocation and internal response, you sever those strings completely. Within that momentary pause, you evaluate why the stimulus was introduced, what the other party seeks to extract, and who benefits if you lose your temper. That disciplined analysis neutralizes the trap before it can spring. Composure is inherently destabilizing to an aggressor because hostility cannot sustain itself without receiving reactive fuel.
Continuous reaction keeps you perpetually behind the curve. By the time you respond to an unpredicted move, the landscape has already shifted and the advantage is lost. Strategic prediction is not mystical intuition; it is rigorous pattern recognition. Human beings are remarkably consistent in their underlying behaviors under specific pressures. When you track what individuals prioritize during crises, where their insecurities lie, and how they react when cornered, you construct an accurate psychological blueprint. You stop being blindsided because you recognize the inevitable sequence of their actions before they even initiate them.
Once you can accurately forecast how individuals respond to pressure, you no longer need to force specific outcomes through brute effort. You simply establish the structural conditions under which their predictable inclinations naturally serve your broader objective. Sun Tzu articulated that the supreme art of war is to subdue the adversary without direct conflict. You accomplish this by allowing opposing forces to overextend and defeat themselves through their own unmanaged impulses. Anticipating these developments is useless if you lack the nerve to act decisively on that intelligence.
Sentimental conditioning teaches that ruthlessness is inherently malicious. In reality, controlled ruthlessness is surgical precision devoid of self-indulgent guilt. It is the uncompromising capacity to execute necessary, difficult actions without succumbing to paralyzing remorse. Hesitating out of fear of appearing unsympathetic merely creates an opening for competitors to seize your position. Controlled ruthlessness operates like the pruning of a tree: healthy growth requires severing decaying branches that siphon vital energy away from the core structure.
Unearned leniency is frequently nothing more than postponed consequence. Granting repeated compromises without behavioral change is universally interpreted as weakness by opportunistic actors. Human beings naturally test boundaries until they encounter unyielding resistance. When you enforce consequences swiftly and without hesitation, you re-establish respect. Controlled ruthlessness is not driven by chaotic hostility; it is the logical result of an objective calculation that weighs the severe cost of prolonged inaction against the temporary discomfort of decisive execution.
Vital energy is an exhaustible resource that must be guarded with absolute discipline. Squandering focused attention on petty arguments and validation seeking is a catastrophic drain on your operational capacity. The most formidable strategists do not engage in constant friction; they operate with selective, concentrated force. Every unnecessary justification and trivial confrontation represents a reckless expenditure of capital that should be preserved for decisive maneuvers. Silence in the face of irrelevant baiting is not evasion; it is the conservation of strength.
Every unmanaged dependency creates leverage that external forces can exploit. The instant you desperately require external validation, social prestige, or uncritical approval, you grant others the power to manipulate your behavior by withholding those rewards. True independence requires operating from self-sufficiency rather than acute scarcity. Wanting an outcome is a matter of preference; needing it is a state of vulnerability. Epictetus observed that authentic freedom consists of eliminating desire for that which lies beyond your absolute control.
When you eliminate fear of loss and detach your core identity from external turbulence, you become fundamentally unshakeable. This embodies what Machiavelli described as virtù: the unyielding capacity to act with concentrated force, discipline, and strategic clarity regardless of circumstance. The integrated framework of indifference, calculated communication, emotional detachment, precise prediction, disciplined ruthlessness, energy economy, and profound unattachment constitutes an impregnable psychological architecture. Those who embody these principles have no need to announce their dominance; their resolve is understood before they ever speak. Discard self-limiting illusions, master these mechanics, and govern your trajectory with absolute conviction.
troubledmind85 retweeted
Why are they fighting this so hard?
A uniform mail-ballot envelope. A unique USPS barcode. A list of confirmed eligible voters. That’s the entire “existential threat” nine blue states and the ACLU just sprinted to the Supreme Court over.
They lost 6-3 after hours. Letitia James called it a “painful setback.” Their lawyers called it an attempt to “seize control” of elections. The New York Times treated it like blackmail.
Pause and look at what they’re actually rejecting.
The Postal Service is not deciding who gets a ballot. States still put names on the list. The barcode simply tracks the envelope from election office to voter and back to the counting center. It only gets issued for confirmed U.S. citizens. No more mystery mail. No more “accidents.” No more unverified participation lists.
If the voter rolls are clean, this is a clerical upgrade. If the chain of custody is already airtight, the barcode is redundant paperwork. So why the emergency litigation? Why the apocalyptic language? Why risk running out of compliant envelopes weeks before the midterms rather than simply hand over the names?
Resistance this fierce is not about federalism or logistics. It is a tell. Clean lists do not generate this level of panic. Transparent tracking does not produce midnight injunctions and “seize control” rhetoric.
The Supreme Court just gave the standards temporary life. The final rule is already published. The clock is loud. Blue states now have to choose: produce the eligible-voter list or explain to their own voters why they refused the one reform that makes every ballot trackable.
When the people who run the mail-ballot system treat a barcode and a verified list like a weapon, the question answers itself.
They’re not afraid of the envelope.
They’re afraid of what the list will show.
(article below)
troubledmind85 retweeted
The conventional explanation for Rome’s demographic collapse is wealth. People got comfortable. They stopped having children. It happens to every prosperous civilization. Nothing to be done.
This is wrong. Or rather, it is incomplete in the way that matters most.
Rome didn’t stop having children because it got wealthy. It stopped having children because it built a welfare state – and the welfare state did what welfare states always do: it replaced the incentives that make people build families with incentives that make people consume instead.
The grain dole began modestly. Around 40,000 recipients in 73 BC. By Caesar’s time: 320,000. That eightfold expansion in under three decades was not a plan – it was a political mechanism. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
The dole didn’t just feed people. It changed what people were for. A Roman citizen with guaranteed grain, free entertainment at the arena, and no frontier left to conquer has no pressing need to build anything – including a family. Children are a project. Projects require purpose. The welfare state had quietly removed the purpose while appearing to provide security.
Augustus saw the birth rate collapsing and did what statists always do: he legislated. The Lex Julia, the Lex Papia Poppaea – penalties for the unmarried, rewards for the fertile, the full power of the empire deployed to engineer a baby boom by decree. It didn’t work. It never works. You cannot legislate desire. You cannot fine people into wanting a future.
What Augustus didn’t have was Mises and Hayek. He didn’t understand that the system he was trying to fix with more intervention was being destroyed by the intervention he had already deployed. He saw the symptom — falling birth rates — and reached for the tool he knew: state power. He didn’t see the cause, because no one in his world had yet articulated it: when you replace personal purpose with state provision, you replace the human drive to build with the human tendency to consume. The dole didn’t just feed the hungry. It fed the purposeless.
We have Mises. We have Hayek. We have the complete theoretical account of what the welfare state does to human motivation, to family formation, to the incentive structures that make people want to build something that outlasts them. We know what Augustus didn’t know. We know why the laws failed. We know what produces the behavior he was trying to legislate into existence.
The answer is not more legislation. It is less welfare state. Not because cruelty is a virtue – but because purpose is. The person who must build to survive builds. The person who must form a family to transmit what they have built forms one. The person who receives guaranteed grain, guaranteed entertainment, and guaranteed security from the state has been given everything except the reason to do any of those things.
Scrap the socialism. Restore the purpose. The birth rate will follow – not because anyone ordered it, but because people who have something to build and something to transmit tend, given the choice, to build and transmit.
Rome didn’t know it had a choice. We do.
Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.
No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.
This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.
Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.
What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.
The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.
troubledmind85 retweeted
Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted. Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well. They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer. They won: they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat. Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.
troubledmind85 retweeted
We are witnessing the disintegration of the female psyche under the weight of a society that has stripped women of their natural purpose, replaced it with performative narcissism, and then gaslighted them into believing their resulting misery is a "systemic oppression" rather than the logical consequence of their own choices and societal upheaval. 😔