@theobjectivist
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Champion of Reason, Individual Rights and Capitalism.
United States
Joined January 2025
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I agree suicidal empathy is an invalid concept. It's a package deal: it lumps a cognitive faculty, understanding how others think and feel, with a moral code of self-sacrifice, then blames the faculty for what the code produces. Understanding is valuable. She is also right that you can understand behavior without excusing it and care about suffering without owing its repair. There are no unchosen obligations.
But the problem isn't excess compassion or empathy. It's altruism, the code that holds self-sacrifice as virtue and need as a claim on the able. Boundaries don't fix it. A boundary is a compromise with a premise you've already accepted.
Compassion is proper toward innocent victims, not those who choose harm. Empathy that refuses to judge becomes a sanction of evil, paid for by the people who produced the values being sacrificed.
The issue isn't how much a person feels. It's what he believes he owes.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
AI critics mistakenly assume that data centers ALWAYS raise electricity prices.
It’s not true.
“We can definitely do AI in a way that keeps electricity prices the same or even lowers them,” explains @AlexEpstein.
Here’s how:
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Morning fellow comrades
Trick shots. A stunt takes practice, looks great on video, and ends with a piece of paper in a trash can. This childish demagogue can run on seizing the means of production, win the largest city in the country, and spend his afternoon filming trick shots.
Here what that paper symbolizes. A rent freeze on a million apartments that cannot fund their own repairs. An AI ban on 600,000 children in a school system where fewer than half of third graders read at grade level. A $34 million portal to publish files the city already owned. The result is children who still cannot read, less housing than the city had before, and less money in the pockets of the people who earned it. Every shot lands in the trash and nothing in the city works better than it did in January.
The fact that a socialist can win the mayor of the city that was once the beacon of capitalism, campaigning on this kind of childish propaganda, tells you how far the ground has already moved.
He is not an outlier though. He is the new acceptable extreme.
Both parties have made their peace with the welfare state and argue only in degrees. Republicans took an equity stake in Intel, a cut of Nvidia's China revenue and a golden share in US Steel, then called it industrial policy. That is government ownership in the means of production, the definition of socialism, gleefully by the party that used to name this the enemy.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Nothing he proposes makes resources affordable to American workers. You know what does? Capitalism. And he hates that. With every fiber of his being he hates prosperity… wealth and abundance. Nobody deserves to be subjected to his infantile conception of economics and ethics.
Bernie sitting on the Capitol steps alone after his amendment to reduce Medicare drug costs was defeated 99-1. All he's ever done is try his damned hardest to make survival for American workers easier and I wish we deserved him.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The attached photo of Sen. Sanders on the Capitol steps is from August 2022 during the Inflation Reduction Act vote-a-rama. A similar amendment on Medicare drug prices and benefits was defeated 99-1 then but 47-53 in a recent vote.
papermag.com/bernie-sanders…
truthout.org/articles/nearl…
congress.gov/amendment/119t…
denvergazette.com/2025/07/01/big…
Trick shots. A stunt takes practice, looks great on video, and ends with a piece of paper in a trash can. This childish demagogue can run on seizing the means of production, win the largest city in the country, and spend his afternoon filming trick shots.
Here what that paper symbolizes. A rent freeze on a million apartments that cannot fund their own repairs. An AI ban on 600,000 children in a school system where fewer than half of third graders read at grade level. A $34 million portal to publish files the city already owned. The result is children who still cannot read, less housing than the city had before, and less money in the pockets of the people who earned it. Every shot lands in the trash and nothing in the city works better than it did in January.
The fact that a socialist can win the mayor of the city that was once the beacon of capitalism, campaigning on this kind of childish propaganda, tells you how far the ground has already moved.
He is not an outlier though. He is the new acceptable extreme.
Both parties have made their peace with the welfare state and argue only in degrees. Republicans took an equity stake in Intel, a cut of Nvidia's China revenue and a golden share in US Steel, then called it industrial policy. That is government ownership in the means of production, the definition of socialism, gleefully by the party that used to name this the enemy.
Every time this man opens his mouth you want to shake your head. He is warning about authoritarianism while running the most authoritarian platform in the Senate.
Start with what is left of medicine. The choices Americans have now are the wreckage of eighty years of rules written by men like him, employer lock-in, mandates, price controls, coverage requirements. Medicare for All takes the last of it. Section 107 of his own bill makes it unlawful for an insurer to sell, or an employer to provide, coverage that duplicates the federal program.
Then the rest. His AI bill halts data center construction until Congress grants permission to build. A wealth tax charges you yearly for owning things, which means selling what you own to keep it. Mandatory employee ownership hands away parts of a company its founders built. His 32-hour bill overrides the hours two adults agreed to. Sectoral bargaining sets your industry's wages whether you signed anything or not.
Not one of those asks you.
This is what authoritarianism looks like.
38 days before the midterms, narcissist-in-chief Trump is illegally using $430,000 in taxpayer dollars to run a 30-second ad on Fox praising himself.
This is what you'd see in North Korea, not America.
Fox: Take this bogus ad down.
What is disgusting is that a man must spend his own money to stop power lusting looters like Bernie from taking the rest of it.
And what makes it possible is that these billionaires have no morality with which to answer him. They buy ads instead of making the moral argument, because they have never learned that the argument is theirs to make.
Watch what they say when cornered. They plead their charity, their Altruism. They cite the jobs they created and the taxes they paid. They apologize for their success and ask to be spared on grounds of service to others.
That concedes any argument. Once you accept that your wealth is justified by what it does for the public, the public's agent gets to decide how much is enough, and he will answer that question forever.
The defense they need is simpler and they are entitled to it. I produced this. It is mine because I made it. No man's need gives him a claim on my life, and no vote converts his want into a right.
Until they can say that sentence and mean it, they will keep paying to postpone the theft.
You made my own point for me. Weeks ago you posted that progressives are winning across the country despite being heavily outspent, because their ideas are popular. Now your posting that someone is trying to buy the midterms. Both of those posts can't be true. But of course @BernieSanders is not interested in what is true, he is only interested in power over you.
Money does not buy elections. Bloomberg spent roughly a billion dollars of his own money in 2020 and won American Samoa. Steyer spent over $340 million and won zero delegates. Amy McGrath raised close to $90 million and lost Kentucky by nearly 20 points. Jaime Harrison raised a record $130 million and lost South Carolina by 10. Voters are not for sale.
So look at what your bill does. It caps what a man may spend to be heard, and it taxes people to fund candidates they despise. That is not cleaning up elections. It is choosing who gets a microphone and charging those that did not choose to pay for it.
Speech costs money. Ads, staff, printing, airtime. Limit the money and you are limiting speech. That is the point, and everyone reading this knows it.
What we need to get Bernie out of politics.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
Since 2015, the UN has passed 188 resolutions condemning Israel.
That's more than twice as many as against the rest of the world combined—Russia, China, Iran, and Venezuela included.
Yet diplomats sat politely through a speech from Iran, a regime that has killed thousands of its own citizens and still persecutes them.
It's not about human rights. It's blatant anti-Israel bias.
Complete nonsense. Almost nobody in coffee shops are discussing P(doom). It is rationalist forum slang out of LessWrong that most people have never encountered. You are describing a handful of engineers in your own district and presenting it as the national conversation.
And the number is a guess with a decimal point on it. No dataset, no base rate, no agreed definition of doom, no time frame. LeCun says under 0.01 percent. Andreessen says zero. Hinton says 10 to 20. Yudkowsky says above 95. A survey of 2,700 researchers came back with a median of 5. Six orders of magnitude apart, which tells you nobody is measuring anything.
So some engineers feel uneasy about their own work, they convert the unease into a percentage, and you convert the percentage into a federal agency with licensing power over an industry.
An agency built on a feeling cannot be argued out of existence, because no evidence would ever satisfy it.
Bravo, Prime Minister. That is what moral certainty sounds like, and the West has forgotten the sound.
He did not apologize for winning. He named the eighth front of this war, the one fought in our classrooms. Qatar spent billions funding American universities and outlets like Al Jazeera to teach young minds to hate Israel and the West. It found willing partners in faculties that had been teaching the same thing for decades.
Then the line that ends the argument. Israel did not commit genocide. Israel prevented one. What genocidal regime sends a million polio vaccines to its enemy's children?
And he said the part our own leaders will not. Many in the free world are afraid to defend freedom. Western capitals see a civilization under attack and negotiate the terms of its surrender.
If only Washington spoke with this clarity instead of sending negotiators to men who chant death to America.
Exactly right. Delegations that sit through speeches from regimes that hang dissidents and stone women get up and leave when the leader of the only free nation in the region defends his citizens. That is not protest. It is the refusal to hear a case they cannot refute, and it tells you everything about an institution that seats dictatorships as the moral equals of free nations.
Credit to Baier for pressing the three broken commitments and the death toll. He held his feet to the fire there. But the harm was done before the first question. "Mr. President" and "thank you for the time" grant a terror state standing no propaganda ministry can buy, and the terrorism-victim lie went out unchallenged with Fox's credibility attached. You do not interview the spokesman for a murder regime, you indict him, and if you cannot do the second you have no business doing the first.
The dictator sees what Washington keeps refusing to see, that no agreement survives when one side cannot be trusted, and then our side keeps sending negotiators anyway.
Iran's president said it himself on Fox News: "If we are unable to trust one another within the framework of a dialogue, how can we hope that these issues will ever be resolved?"
Exactly. If only our own leaders had the sense and the principle to reach the same conclusion.
And his own interview proved the point. His foreign minister declared the Strait open in April and the Revolutionary Guard attacked ships the next day. He signed the Islamabad memorandum in June and weeks later the IRGC set a Qatari tanker on fire. In March his forces fired on neighboring countries and he apologized afterward. Three times his commitments were overridden, and asked who controls Iran, he could not say.
A deal requires a counterparty who can keep it. The man signing does not command the men with the guns, and he admitted it on camera.
The rest was lies. The Strait was not closed? It closed the day the war began. Iran is the victim of terrorism? Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terror, a designation it has held since 1984, its crowds still chant death to America, and it has attacked and killed Americans and our allies for 47 years, from the Marine barracks in Beirut to the three soldiers killed in Jordan this July.
The one true claim he made came from our own president, who announced arms shipments to Iranian protesters on camera and handed the regime its alibi. That the guns never reached the protesters does not matter to Tehran. It now cites our president to recast the slaughter of thousands of its own citizens, by its own admission, and tens of thousands by other counts, as self-defense against a foreign-armed coup.
A regime that rules by force keeps its word only when force requires it. No deal is possible with men like this, only terms imposed on them.
The dictator sees what Washington keeps refusing to see, that no agreement survives when one side cannot be trusted, and then our side keeps sending negotiators anyway.
Iran's president said it himself on Fox News: "If we are unable to trust one another within the framework of a dialogue, how can we hope that these issues will ever be resolved?"
Exactly. If only our own leaders had the sense and the principle to reach the same conclusion.
And his own interview proved the point. His foreign minister declared the Strait open in April and the Revolutionary Guard attacked ships the next day. He signed the Islamabad memorandum in June and weeks later the IRGC set a Qatari tanker on fire. In March his forces fired on neighboring countries and he apologized afterward. Three times his commitments were overridden, and asked who controls Iran, he could not say.
A deal requires a counterparty who can keep it. The man signing does not command the men with the guns, and he admitted it on camera.
The rest was lies. The Strait was not closed? It closed the day the war began. Iran is the victim of terrorism? Iran is the world's leading state sponsor of terror, a designation it has held since 1984, its crowds still chant death to America, and it has attacked and killed Americans and our allies for 47 years, from the Marine barracks in Beirut to the three soldiers killed in Jordan this July.
The one true claim he made came from our own president, who announced arms shipments to Iranian protesters on camera and handed the regime its alibi. That the guns never reached the protesters does not matter to Tehran. It now cites our president to recast the slaughter of thousands of its own citizens, by its own admission, and tens of thousands by other counts, as self-defense against a foreign-armed coup.
A regime that rules by force keeps its word only when force requires it. No deal is possible with men like this, only terms imposed on them.
SPECIAL REPORT EXCLUSIVE: Don’t miss the Iranian President TONIGHT 6pmET on @specialreport @foxnews #foxnews #specialreport #iran
You need to keep these intellectually and economically incompetent power lusters as far away from AI as possible. Let's look at what they have already built.
Nuclear power. Every reactor ordered after 1973 was canceled, more than 100 of them. No new plant was ordered from 1978 until 2012. Watts Bar 1 was ordered in 1970 and licensed in 1996, twenty six years. Vogtle 3 and 4 finished at $35 billion against a $14 billion estimate, seven years late, and the overruns drove Westinghouse into bankruptcy. That is the regulatory model you are holding up as a success.
Your health care. Congress projected Medicare would cost somewhere around $9 to $12 billion by 1990. Actual benefit payments that year came to $108.9 billion. Health spending has gone from 5 percent of the economy in 1960 to more than 17 percent, in the most heavily regulated market in the country.
The FDA. Ten to twelve years and over a billion dollars per approved drug by the lowest credible estimate. Every year of that delay is people dying while waiting for a treatment that already exists.
Now your bill.
Item one already exists. If a model breaks into a system or commits theft, criminal and tort law cover it today. You do not need a new agency to prosecute fraud.
Item two is the FDA for software. Nothing ships until a federal office grants permission. See above for how that goes.
Item three bans a category of research. Not an act that injures anyone, the work itself. That is prior restraint applied to mathematics.
And notice what set all this off. Altman and Amodei spoke openly about risks they see in their own work. You treat their candor as a warrant to take the work. The lesson every builder draws from this is to stop talking.
Rand identified the pattern. The men who produce are treated as suspects, and the men who produce nothing appoint themselves judges. You did not build a model and you could not build one. You propose to decide which ones are permitted to exist.
5 reasons you do not want these statists running the House:
1. Increase the minimum wage. A price floor on labor, which prices out the least skilled worker and calls it a raise.
2. Paid family leave. A benefit paid by employers under penalty of law, which shows up as lower wages and fewer hires.
3. End the war in Iran. The regime mined the Strait of Hormuz, attacked civilian shipping, and fired on Israeli towns. Leaving is not ending it.
4. A vote on Medicare for All. Abolish the private plans of 180 million people and put the whole thing under one federal budget.
5. Tax the billionaires. Every one of the four items above needs funding, so the men who produce most get billed first, and the bill grows with the promises.
Notice that four of the five require someone else's money and the fifth requires someone else's blood. Not one of them asks what an individual has the right to do with his own life and property.
Why does it matter which stocks a politician holds?
Because government holds the power to move those stocks. Drilling permits, export licenses, sanctions, reserve releases, refinery rules. When a signature in Washington can swing a company's value, access to that signature becomes the most valuable asset in the market. That is the engine of crony capitalism.
Her answer strips the officeholder of his portfolio and leaves the power untouched. The pull stays for sale, only the buyers change. It happens under every administration for that reason.
The fix is to take the power away. A government with no authority to bless or bankrupt an industry gives nobody a reason to buy influence in it.
That limit stands on moral grounds before anyone mentions corruption. A man's oil well is his property, and the right to drill it is not Washington's to hand out.
The Rational Animal 🤔 retweeted
There's something deeply unsafe about safetyism.
We wish people a safe flight—yet flying commercially is almost perfectly safe.
We don't wish people a safe drive—yet US roads are the equivalent of a 737 crashing every 48h, killing everyone aboard.
But we scare people when they get in an airplane but not when they get in a car.
The biggest opportunity we have to improve road safety is self-driving, yet there's lots of anti-self-driving safety talk, and self-driving is held to a *dramatically* superhuman safety bar.
The din about AI safety has reached extreme tenor—yet there have been zero material safety incidents. And the positive benefits of AI could improve and save many lives. But the safetyists say we must slow down.
We destroyed the nuclear power industry in this country nominally out of safety concerns, yet joule for joule nuclear power is *by far* the safest form of energy, even accounting for Chernobyl (a genuine disaster) and Three Mile Island (generally a non-event).
Building and fire codes are supposedly there to protect us from unsafe buildings. But actually the red tape makes development slow and sometimes impossible. So the safetyism protects us from jobs, innovation, and reindustrialization.
TSA was there nominally to protect us from terrorist threats—yet to the extent it pushes passengers at the margins from safe airplanes to dangerous roads, it actually kills not just time and money but actual humans.
Safetyism is deeply unsafe.
Soon to New York: “Crises as delivery costs go through the roof.”
Then
“Mamdani announces price ceilings on delivery costs.”
And finally
“Crises in New York as delivery comes to a standstill; thousands of workers out of jobs.”
Predictable and sad.
DoorDash has ripped off more than 260,000 NYC delivery workers. We’re making them pay $131.5 million — the largest worker settlement in City history.
This is New York, where hard work pays and greed will cost you.
