PaperbackWriter

Never forget that Donald Trump is the Music Man. youtube.com/watch?v=LI_Oe-…

@DastDn I can't believe they didn't go with "Draculand"

Total American Cultural Hegemony. Dracula Land. Amazing.

@ConceptualJames Ops Officer, set a course for the Op System.

Ops be oppin at op speed.

The backstory here is that the Squamish people of what is now Vancouver were illegally dispossessed of this land a century ago. They sued, got their land back, and used their sovereignty to ignore local zoning rules and build 6,000 new homes over the objections of nearby NIMBYs.

@BradRTorgersen Care to name names or cite specific examples? I'd like to know who in libertarian spaces is guilty of this.

Okay, I've had almost a full week staring into the heart of Jew-hating darkness that is LOLbertarian NO MOAR WARZ anti-Trumpness. Where nobody uses their picture nor their name, except for amoral big ticket 'fluencers trying to use current events purely for engagement.

@justinamash So, about what we spend on Social Security in 51 days. Let's make commensurate cuts to Social Security spending to pay for the war and when the war is over: the "temporary" cuts become permanent.

The $200 billion Trump wants for his war in Iran exceeds what the U.S. spent on Afghanistan over his entire first term.

@AndrewBrunelle @AncapAir @FoxNews If we're gonna talk about "in general" then explain to me why Iran's government murdering protesters is not something I should care about when it actually happens, but the US govt. conscripting people is something I should care about even when it doesn't happen.

@PaperhackWriter @AncapAir @FoxNews I wasn't talking about this country, just in general.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! Barron Trump, the son of President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump, turns 20 today.

@AndrewBrunelle @AncapAir @FoxNews You say it happens "all the time" but conscription hasn't happened in the US for more than 50 years. Something which has not happened in 50 years and does not appear likely to happen again any time soon is not, in fact, something that "happens all the time."

How dare you assume what Ancap Air loves or doesn't love? He's just saying that under current laws and Trump has talked about a draft, hasn't he? Of course nobody should have to fight a war against their will, but in this fucked up world it happens ALL THE TIME. And these "volunteers" are usually tricked into the military by high school recruiters.

The biggest obstacle to problem solving is "giving things the wrong names". If your city has a feral human problem, and you call it a "homeless problem", you aren't going to understand the correct solution. So you're going to end up buying a lot of homes for feral drug zombies to turn into rat infested drug dens. Conversely, if your city has a homeless cat problem, and you call it a "feral cat problem", you're going to end up killing a lot of innocent animals, and being troubled by a lot of unnecessary rats. If you take a noise mitigating technology, put it on a car and call it a "muffler", then pretty soon you're required by law to have one, because no one wants to listen to 2500 explosions per second right outside his house. But if you it on a rifle, and apply for a patent calling it a "silencer", then pretty soon you're required by law to not have one, because some Hollywood filmmaker thought it was a magic device that would let you have invisible gunfights in the middle of a crowded subway. Now let's suppose you want to develop radar camouflage. To do this, you need eleventy billion trillion squillion dollars from congress, which they will print with their money printer, thereby reducing the value of some carpenter's life savings in Peoria, Illinois to just enough to buy a large pizza. But since congress has the collective IQ of a goldfish, and less attention span, you can't call it what it is, which is radar camouflage, because then they will think you just need to paint some tan and green blobs on planes, and they will only give you two billion trillion squillion dollars. They'll still print the rest, of course, but they'll spend it on tiny houses for feral drug zombies (built on contract for two million dollars each by a contractor who just happens to be a senator's cousin), and on murdering homeless cats. You want that extra nine billion trillion squillion dollars. Partially because you need it, but also because congress just inflated your life savings to the price of one large pizza. So you call the whole thing a "stealth fighter" which will be "invisible to radar". And you get eleventy billion trillion squillion dollars. Yay! But now everyone who isn't an engineer is confused. They now literally think you have an invisible airplane, like Wonder Woman scooting across the sky on her butt in an 80s cartoon. If you had called it "camouflage", you wouldn't have that problem. Because everybody knows that camouflage doesn't make you invisible. Camouflage just makes it take longer to spot you. Which gives you more time to do stuff before angry people start shooting at you. No one would ever call camouflage a "failure" because a soldier wearing a tan and green jacket got shot. Because it's named correctly, so people understand it correctly. So @Microinteracti1 is dead wrong. But it's not his fault. He just believed the lie that was intended for congress, because he's not an engineer. It's not even the fault of the people who lied. Yes, they wanted money. But they also wanted less dead pilots. So whose fault is it? Congress, of course. You have to lie to them to get anything done, because they are a bunch of 50+ year old theater kids, with no understanding of the world they live in, and no skills except winning rigged popularity contests and being sex pests to any woman or child who strays too close. When the system becomes so entrenched and ossified that it spends more time and money dealing with social expectations than physical realities, of course the impingement of universal laws on your bubble is going to come as a bit a of rude shock. In reality, radar works like light. It bounces off stuff, and then you detect it, and notice that it bounced off something. Only difference is, light comes from the sun, but you have to shine the radar yourself. There's a little piece of tech that cyclists use so you won't run them over when they ignore stoplights at night, or cut you off in traffic, entrusting their lives to you while assuming you're heartless because of your Trump 2024 bumper sticker. This piece of tech is called retroreflective clothing. It's designed to bounce light straight back at whatever angle it came in at, based on the assumption that your eyes are in roughly the same direction as your headlights. This way, you see them, and you only fantasize about killing them on purpose, instead of doing it for real by accident. Radar camouflage is the opposite. It's designed to absorb as much radar energy as possible, and to throw the rest off at a different angle. This increases the time it takes to realize you're there at all, and the time it takes to figure out where you are, which means that you have more time to drop JDAMs on people before someone starts shooting at you. Which is nice. But there are countermeasures. First of all, you're still a solid physical object that reflects light, and that includes radar. You can't suppress it all. Secondly, if you're throwing off reflected radar in a different direction, the enemy can put radar emitters, and radar detectors, in multiple places. And have them talk to each other. A camouflaged guy can hide from one person, but it's harder to hide from ten people standing in a big circle around your hiding spot. So you use all your tricks, try not to get notice, and you devote special effort to throwing long range munitions at all the stuff people put there to see you with. But you know the risk, and you take it seriously, because no one told the PILOTS they were invisible. That's just what they sold to congress. For eleventy billion trillion squillion dollars of your kids' college money.

Few people know this, but Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 because of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu himself approved it (before he was replaced by AI). I have the dreams to prove it.

@Knorssman Dilan called my views on economics "silly" and then blocked me for daring to ask him what evidence he had to support his beliefs.

Milton Friedman discusses five enduring myths: 1) The Robber Baron myth 2) The Great Depression myth 3) The Big Government myth 4) The Free Lunch myth 5) The Robin Hood myth

@hasanthehun How or what can I donate to make sure Hasan stays in Cuba forever?

on our way to cuba 🇨🇺 delivering humanitarian aid, food, medicine and solar panels! cuba has always been there for others, now it’s our time to be there for cuba!

There is a narrative going around that the entire US government is run by a bunch of Satanic cannibal pedophiles blackmailed by Israel to do its bidding, all based on essentially no evidence. Just saying, if I were the CCP, that’s a narrative I’d be very happy with…

@GBNT1952 Just what a Jewish Nazi would say! /s

I’m confused guys… am I a Nazi or a Jew? It just seems impractical to be both…

@robsmithonline Is it in the interests of American safety, security, and prosperity that Iran's theocratic regime possess both nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles with which to deliver them?

As someone who actually wore the uniform and has wartime service, I believe a strong part of supporting the troops is keeping them out of wars that don’t explicitly serve the interests of American safety, security, or prosperity. But that’s just me.

Who makes me craziest over the Iran war? The people who say: Yes, Iran possessing nukes would be unacceptable. Yes, the regime is viciously inhumane and repressive and murderous. Yes, Iran is the world's largest sponsor of Islamic terror. Yes, Iran is building a massive conventional missile capability. Yes, Iran has enough fissile material and the capacity enrich it in about two weeks to begin deploying a weapon (unclear how long it takes to get to the first weapon, certainly doable within a year). Yes, Iran is building ICBMs with the intention of targeting the U.S. Yes, Iran has turned Yemen, Lebanon and Iraq into militant, divides messes. Yes, the Iranian Twelver Mullahs do have an apocalyptic vision for the world. Yes, Iran does see itself as the new Caliphate, seeking to overturn all infidel nations. But no, we can't go to war to eliminate this threat.

In the year 1800, something like 75% of all Americans worked on a farm. In 1900, it was already down to 35%. By the 1960s, it was less than 10% and today hovers around 1.5-2%. What's the argument for the union improving conditions as opposed to market forces? Farming jobs have always sucked, why didn't medieval peasants just form a union to make it not suck?

@PaperhackWriter In the case of the UFW, that's wrong and is basically libertarian claptrap.

To move this up into its own thread, we are starting to see the reflexive anti-unionism of some conservatives, and I will just tell you, LEARN something about the appalling conditions farmworkers were facing in the 1960's. This wasn't a Milton Friedman economics seminar.

@MarkChangizi You had me there for a moment. I thought "obviously, this is satire.....no, wait....he's serious.....or is he?"

I was against the war. And now that we’re in it, let me be crystal clear: I was against the war. That’s my contribution. No updated analysis. No recalibration to the fact that we’re already here. No attempt to be useful in the new reality. Just the steady, metronomic reminder: I said we shouldn’t go. We went to war. I was against it. We are at war. Still against it. The entire utility calculus flipped for the rest of the world — but not mine. Mine is elegantly simple: maximize the number of times I can remind you I was right beforehand. And so I will continue — heroically, tirelessly — to extract every last drop of status from the single stake I placed: that I was against the war.

There's a certain kind of self-described libertarian who is disinclined to believe anything the US, Israeli, or Ukrainian government says, but inclined to believe anything Iran or Russia says. These people are not actually libertarians, they just hate the US government and by extension its allies.