Aleks.

I think it’s finally dawning on everyone that 100k is 30k. Took a very long time for people to realize this. 300k is more like 100k. Everyone keeps saying stuff like “oh but flights are cheaper” “oh but you don’t need to buy ink and pens!” Flights are not cheaper. This is completely made up. It’s $800 minimum to fly LA to NYC. Decent baseball tickets are $200. Slop bowl lunch is $26. It’s completely over. Stop the larp.

@FuzzyStonks @Cernovich I've seen boomers that never got it together and never got on the property ladder. They are truly fucked, can't even look forward to possibly making more money sometime in the future.

@Cernovich I think Gen Z forgets that boomers are so suffering the same inflation and economy as everyone else that’s alive right now. Yes, the ones who bought houses have great values but are subject to property tax increases and you can’t buy food off of property value.

Do Zoomers get drafted for a meat grinder like the Vietnam War? Pay 20% mortgage rates? Lose pensions? Have entire industries like factories close down? Wait in line for gas stations due to oil shortage? Every generation has something to complain about. Life is never easy.

I think that not being able to convince leftists was the least of libertarianisms failures. And all strains of conservativism were basically powerless in the face of the Great awokening. I too had those conversations with leftists but I recognized they were futile. Libertarianism is a dispositional ideology. It can therefore be easily subsumed in a larger more vital political movement. The real failure was lack of charismatic and effective leadership together with a failure of organization. Ron Paul was unfortunately inadequate. We needed a libertarian Trump or else a figure like Trump would take most of the libertarians with him, which in fact is what happened. Furthermore the libertarian party itself just fractured and disorganized the movement. What libertarian candidates need to do is abandon all open borders ideas. They are not even all that libertarian and will never fly with conservatives. And start running Republicans on a muscular deregulation program around the country. Co-opt certain populist positions. Libertarian populism

A lot of people are asking why the "Libertarian moment" failed to materialize. Here are my thoughts, as a former Libertarian myself. About ten years ago, there was an expectation, certainly within libertarian circles but across the Right at large, that the future of "Conservatism" in the US would be Libertarianism. There was this belief that the GOP would become a vehicle for libertarian philosophy and that the Right as a whole would be moving in a far more libertarian direction. The Tea Party movement, Ron Paul's presidential bids, the prospect of a future Rand Paul bid, and old Reagan quotes about how the essence of conservatism is libertarianism were all in vogue if you were involved in any sort of Right-wing politics in America. There really was this feeling that the old Reaganite fusion was exhausted and the Iraq era had discredited Neoconservatism. Meanwhile, the 2008 crash, coupled with the managerialism of the Obama presidency, had radicalized a bunch of young men into rejecting what they saw as the establishment narratives of both parties. For a 20-something-year-old guy, being able to proudly say that he hated both Bush and Obama felt incredibly liberating. Ron Paul's two presidential runs, and the prospect of a third and potentially more successful one from Rand, promised to herald in a new era for American politics. Libertarianism also seemed like a great diffuser of the insidious social Progressivism that was beginning to creep into all mainstream institutions. The Great Awokening was just in its beginning stages, and at the time there seemed to be absolutely no response to the Progressive agitprop that was gaining traction on the Left. We understood that these "social movements" were all pulling in the same direction, but no one had any idea how to address them because they were about as intense as they were insane. Libertarianism seemed to offer a great response. Do nothing. I'm serious. There was this expectation that we could completely sidestep the Great Awokening and nip the entire thing in its bud by adopting a "You do you" approach. By pretending like social or cultural issues didn't matter, or in some cases, that Progressives were actually in the right on them, Libertarianism offered an avenue for the Right to seemingly take off the table an entire revolutionary movement that we all thought was driving young millennials (who were still in their teens and early 20s) into identifying as Democrats or Socialists or even Communists. "I don't care about the culture war. I want gay married couples to be able to adopt and protect their marijuana operation that's going on in the basement of their private property with AR-15s, and I want to abolish the income taxes they make on it, too." But when this tactic was put into practice, it never seemed to work. I remember in my old libertarian days over a decade ago, having conversations with Leftists my age in high school and college, and it was always disappointing. It's like I kept trying to win them over and explain I was on their side and that they just needed to understand that wealth redistribution and socialism were bad policies, but that we were both "social liberals" who wanted the same thing. I just wanted them to be rich on top of it all. And for some reason, it just never worked. At the time, I didn't understand why. But I do now. Libertarianism offered the possibility of escaping politics itself while still being political. You could tell someone that you didn't care about their lifestyle, worldview, theology, or culture, and still plausibly make the case for why they should vote for you and implement your policies, because your policies were all about transcending conflict rather than confronting it. Libertarianism offered the illusion of a sophisticated ideology for adults who had outgrown the tribal passions of the past. But that's exactly why it failed. It was always operating like a parasite on an older order that it didn't create and couldn't defend, but few of us could see it at the time because of the nature of the world around us. But that world, like the Bushite one before it, died. Mass migration and open borders actually changed the visual landscape of America in a way that was far more abrupt than the gradual changes of decades earlier. The Great Awokening, which Libertarianism offered to neutralize with its "live and let live" attitude, ended up devouring everything around it until people could no longer ignore it. The economic situation, which Libertarianism had such elegant solutions for as the centerpiece of its entire worldview, actually ended up being far more complex than the activists ever expected. America's massive twin fiscal and trade deficits, endless QE, zero interest rate environment, and the hollowing out of the Rust Belt all coincided with the rise of managerial credentialism, the professional laptop class, and the adoption of Progressivism as the civic religion of every institution and profession that seemed to be benefiting from these very policies. "Social Justice Warrior" and "Rich Liberal" became synonymous with all the institutions that had betrayed America. This created a rebellion, as Libertarians expected, but the moment Trump arrived, he revealed that the overwhelming majority of those rebels were not interested in smaller government in the abstract. They were looking for a government that would fight for them. They had felt betrayed, humiliated, forgotten, and denigrated. They believed, correctly, that they were losing their country. They had a deep resentment of our oikophobic ruling class and their wacky social views that seemed to always pop up whenever core elements of their way of life were about to be torn away from them. And once those things came to the surface, the "Libertarian moment" was essentially dead because it had no satisfying answer to the actual question being asked, which wasn't "how to balance the budget?" or "what procedural railguards can we set up to protect Americans from warrantless wiretapping?" It was “Who rules, in whose interest, and can we do anything to stop our dispossession at the hands of people who openly hate us?” The Libertarian moment failed because it had no answer to this question, which has essentially been the foundation of all of American politics since Obama's second term. It's a political ideology that wants to escape politics itself, and the moment politics became more than just a complicated math problem and instead was about which vision of civilization would prevail, the entire premise disintegrated.

@Empty_America @OftCorrect It seems Travis kalinik formerly of Uber is working on exactly this

@OftCorrect X has spend the last several days discussing the fact that Ai and robotics aren't yet, in reality, providing a low cost Chipotle bowl.

So what is the SOLUTION to the Chipotle price crisis? Do we somehow increase labor supply and decrease food service wages? Do we allow deregulated street food peddlers and "plate sellers?" Do we want government subsidized cafeterias? Seems like no one ever discusses this!

I live in a place where every door can be unlocked. Every car is open with the keys inside. It's probably one of the greatest generally forgotten quality of life upgrades you can get. Whenever I visit somewhere where you can't leave a power tool outside your house it's such a jarring thing having to deal with this background anxiety about theft

I’ve put a lot of thought into trying to understand the Black Lives Matter moment and the “racial reckoning,” and I believe that the fact that black Americans endure a much higher level of routine crime victimization is a big part of it. The races of the people in this post are not disclosed, but I think they are probably black because the norms described here are foreign to white communities. White people call the cops when someone steals from us. I don’t believe there are any white people anywhere in America who would feel bad if a white neighbor kid who stole $2000 off our porch lost his college scholarship because we called the cops. That just isn’t how white people work. Nobody expects that whites will tolerate someone who is identifiable on video stealing an expensive package off their porch and not involve the police, and therefore, packages don’t get stolen off of porches in white neighborhoods. A tremendous amount of propaganda has been disseminated through elite media to convince black people that white people tolerate these kinds of transgressions from each other out of racial solidarity. This has always been a lie. White people do not practice racial solidarity. White people call the cops. People like the poster — nice, middle-class black folks who work hard and are doing well enough to order expensive stuff from Amazon — perceive that their lives are somewhat worse than they ought to be, which is true. Powerful political, media and NGO interests are telling them that the cause of this is racism, which is not true, and that the solution is solidarity with people like the neighbor kid who keeps stealing Amazon packages, which is completely counterproductive. What will actually make this poster’s life better is the rule of law being imposed on her neighborhood, which is something that America has failed to do for black communities for 200 years and is the fundamental source of persistent inequities. The reason you can’t order online packages and have them left on your porch is this neighbor kid who steals everything. The reason you have to put bars over your windows and you can’t park a car on the street in front of your house is the neighbor kid who steals everything. The reason there is no grocery store or pharmacy nearby is the neighbor kid who steals everything. The reason property values in the neighborhood are not appreciating the way they are elsewhere is the neighbor kid who steals everything. Your life will be better if he goes to prison. When there is a huge race inequity in who commits crimes, you can either have a huge race inequity in who is punished by the criminal justice system, or you can have a huge race inequity in who is victimized. Americans have chosen the latter, because that is the policy people in the most directly-affected communities vote for.

I am as anti Indian mass migration as anyone, however there is something distasteful about graffiti and harassing people where they live. Take it out on the politicians who let them in, find your balls and picket Trudeau's house, vandalize his mailbox. Harassing some elderly immigrant just seems cowardly. It's undignified, its even quite muslim. jizya-coded.

If this ever happens to you, call the police asap. Doesn't matter if you're not a citizen. If you're in the country lawfully, have a real job, and are paying taxes, you are entitled to live in peace. Just call the police.

This connects to the inflation/deflation question. Zoomers making $70k/yr now did not get a 30% raise over the last five years, nor do they expect to get a similar raise over the next five years (they expect to be unemployed thanks to AI^2 - Artificial Intelligence + Actually Indians). Ok so right now they can have a nice lunch for $28. In 5 years that same lunch will be $37. And it probably won't even be the same lunch: it will have smaller portions, worse ingredients, and be served by less attractive and personable staff, because not only does everything get more expensive in the vampiric scam economy, it gets steadily worse over time. The choice isn't between hedonic satisfaction now and a greater reward later, it's between immediate pleasure and future pain, with the future pain being guaranteed. This is what happens when the people administering the marshmallow test fail it, by rugpulling the kids who waited for the second marshmallow. Inflationary monetary systems destroy time preference, because the only reward for patience is getting screwed.

How else do you respond to the smarmy shit you posted. As if you don't have a massive propaganda machine that works in lockstep to demonize and spin lies about its enemies like Spencer Pratt. As if every individual who faces up to the flagrant corruption and humiliating incompetence of marionettes like Karen Bass is only doing it for Trump and vanity. As if wanting your city or state to be well run by competent people who enforce the rule of law and don't incinerate an entire town causing billions worth of damage is some kind of subversive right-wing fascism. Take the Prattpill, what has the past 15 years of the same people in power changed for the better in LA? Are you just waiting for your neighborhood to get torched by Karen bass?

@Alekspg3 @DisgracedProp You guys all use the same 3 insults, clever shit.

Seeing “mainstream media” Atlantic etc all close ranks on Spencer Pratt in same week, suddenly interested in LA politics like never before, reminds me that ordinary Americans are still up against an overwhelming evil that is willing to sacrifice the safety of their children, willing to prevent cities and humans from cleaning themselves up and from pulling themselves out of addiction and desolation, all so it can maintain its power.

The proportion of drug use among LA homeless is not "some".... It's an overwhelming majority with some figures at over 90 percent. I don't actually think we should try to give them treatment. The prison sentence is the treatment. We should be trying to use any illegal act they commit as an excuse to intern them for as long as possible. They may even come out sober afterwards. The goal is to delete them from public vagrancy, and I don't care about the cost.

@xrqptnpl @Alekspg3 @DisgracedProp Not all of them but sure yeah some of them are. The truth is many of them are beyond help and will die a homeless addict. You wanna try jailing them and giving them treatment to right ahead but itll cost you a bazillion bucks and won’t actually work.

@AshOnega @xrqptnpl @DisgracedProp Ok

@Alekspg3 @xrqptnpl @DisgracedProp The issue is the constitution and Martin v Boise. You wanna make it illegal to be homeless then you go to the courts an explain how civil rights deserve to be violated in the name of public safety.

There is one truly compelling reason the necessitates making money in this country. Healthcare. Being at the mercy of Medicare, stuck in a labyrinthine system of coverage and bargain basement doctors (when you eventually can get one), emergency rooms, impossible to see a specialist quickly, shitty dentists, and you'd better hope you don't have any subclinical chronic conditions or rare disorders difficult to diagnose. All of this much worse when you have children. You said before living close to Mexico to make this work but even then paying for private Mexican health care has its cost especially beyond the routine types of care

Many people ask me why I don't try to earn more money. I guess it's because I hate money. I hate it because it's the perfect antithesis of ROMANCE. Money isn't beautiful. Fretting over big bank accounts isn't beautiful. Jesus warned us about the hazards of wealth. I love Saint Francis, I love the elegant simplicity of having "just enough," I love eating stale baguettes and cold beans by candlelight when the power goes out... So I want to keep my operating costs low. I don't want a high-expense lifestyle. If I could get my monthly costs down to zero I would do it. Could I get rich? It does seem that I could if I wished. Years ago while hitchhiking in WY a Wall Street stock broker who picked me up said it this way: "You'd be good on Wall Street because you've lived at the bottom and aren't afraid of it. The other guys get nervous because they're scared to lose everything. You could laugh it off, and for that reason, you'd be a master-class trader if you put your mind to it." Others say that if I'm clever enough to go from flat-broke and homeless to owning multiple homes debt-free, I'm clever enough to earn big bucks. They're kind to say this, and they're probably right. But the "why" has never been apparent to me. We have enough. We actually have more than enough. I'm more interested in the delightful feeling of keeping things lean, elegantly simple, romantic. The idea of "grinding" to get the big house in the fancy location (and then presumably grinding indefinitely to pay those bigger taxes, bigger bills, etc etc) doesn't appeal. Give us a tiny old nonelectric shack on the side of a nice trail in the Berkshires, where the hikers stop by in the afternoons, and we walk to the village to go to Mass and buy fruit. Give us a houseboat on the bayou, a cozy tenement in Pittsburgh, a tired ramshackle farmhouse by the riverside. Something simple and beautiful, with monthly costs so low that "stress about bills" is never in our vocabulary -- and where the stress of managing oodles of cash and investments isn't a factor either. Many say: "ah, as you get older, you'll see the appeal of all that money," but I'm turning 32 next week. I'm a father and a husband now. I'm still not seeing the appeal and neither is my wife. If anything, I suspect the pursuit of wealth would actually cost me something, because as a writer, my medium is really romance -- which is a thing that money always seems to have a way of killing. And anyway, if I'm not chasing the money, that leaves more of it out there for others to get. Perhaps I am doing the "grindset" types a real courtesy by exiting that arena!

@Seth__Goldsmith @DisgracedProp I would kill myself if I wrote something this fake and gey

@Alekspg3 @DisgracedProp He’s a loudmouth Temu Trump loudly seeking attention and his supporters are whining when he gets attention.

Look, no established party wants to deal with this problem. not the unions not the jails not the hospitals not the local governments. This problem will only be solved in the face of tremendous opposition. But yes county jails, if there's no room MAKE THEM BIGGER. Our grandparents defeated the axis went to the fucking moon and dissolved the Soviet Union, I'm sure we can handle the seemingly impossible task of adding overflow capacity to a county jail complex and hiring some additional staff. If you're not up to The task then at least get out of the f****** way So that the competent can govern

@Alekspg3 @xrqptnpl @DisgracedProp So you’re going to put detoxing homeless bums in a county jail? All 600,000 of them? Where will the regular criminals go? Look, your reactionary politics don’t work and will never be enacted by LAPD. You can move to Russia or north Korea though! Enjoy it

@DisgracedProp @Seth__Goldsmith Perhaps it's possible some internal polling is showing Pratt to be doing much better than expected

@Seth__Goldsmith ok fine but why are they suddenly interested now? they didnt write shit about caruso

@AshOnega @xrqptnpl @DisgracedProp County jail

@xrqptnpl @DisgracedProp So where will they live while going through treatment?

@Empty_America This is the type of 3D printing that is actually liable to take on

Pulte homes has a machine now that can lay the walls of a concrete block house in a single day, they are using it to build row houses. We may see a return to load bearing masonry in this way, as stick framing is very dependent by nature on lots of human labor.

It's Silly to ignore possibilities because a victim might be offended. And in fact it can be all of the above. 1. Mahmoud knows about the attack because of his cousin, works at the bataclan. tells them about the character of security there. When it comes to the actual day he and his brother decide not to show up. 2. Ahmed Is there and makes sure a particular door is unguarded. Escapes as the action starts. Hard to prove involvement. 3. Muhammad knows about it from his friends, is otherwise uninvolved but in the confusion catches a stray bullet. 4. Ali is pressured to contribute but chickens out on the last day and doesn't show up. Believe it or not you can consider all of these possibilities and they are not mutually exclusive. Furthermore, why are you so certain all of the evidence is public? You really think the French police are going to release every salacious detail that may cause embarrassment or stoke ethnic tension?

One reason that this baseless conspiracy theory pisses me off is that, in reality, the terrorists actually killed security at the venue. Imagine being family of this murdered security guard and seeing incels on X claiming that the security was somehow part of the attack. And what exactly is the logic? Retards like you are claiming either 1) the terrorists had people disguised as security to allow easier entrance or 2) many security did not show up because they “knew something was coming.” Both cannot be true. Which is it? Neither is true. There is no evidence. The traumatized singer was looking for some greater explanation and made claims which he later retracted. publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/hsac/content/h…

Reminder that Jesse Hughes, the lead singer of the Eagles of Death Metal, was basically unpersoned for saying that something was up with the security at the Bataclan on the night of the massacre.

as i’ve said before, the right wing is the side of empathy when you show mercy to a violent criminal because you “empathize” with his “socioeconomic factors” thinking your kindness will heal his wounded heart in some sort of naruto talk no jutsu friendship heals all resolution that’s not empathy, that’s fucking retarded and reckless endangerment of the population empathy is when you put yourself in his shoes and realize that he wants to stomp you to death with them because he thinks the noises you make when he does it are funny. empathy is the skill of being able to read what is going on in his mind, able to hear how quiet it is, the ability to separate yourself from the naive notion that everyone is as thoughtful and introspective as you are it says a lot that right wingers can parody and satirize each other’s factions far better than leftists ever manage to parody any of them as a whole. right wingers analyze WHY people think certain ways, analyze WHERE others are coming from, and then judge them accordingly. to empathize is not to be “non-judgemental”, rather to judge at all requires effectively empathizing as a prerequisite this is where the confusion around women being the “empathetic” gender arises. they are not empathetic, they are sympathetic. they feel bad for others purely as a gut emotional reaction based off optics without any consideration for the actual dynamics driving them and their situation. they’ll demand softer punishments for heinous criminals because it would make them sad and they’re like, heckin oppressed babies. their sympathy is entirely based around how much agency they assume you have. the less agency, the more like a toddler you are in their eyes and they will seek to nurture you, even if that lack of agency makes you into a deranged crack addict or welfare leech or violent criminal right wingers are not unempathetic, they are unsympathetic. it is a masculine harsh judgement of others. the ability to see why they are how they are and if they turn out poorly despite having been given everything there is no sympathy for them. we don’t care about “victims” of “colonialism” whining to us decades later about how hard their lives are with the free infrastructure and education we gave them. we can empathize with them and feel their emotions, understand their thoughts, what we observe is entitlement, short-sightedness and selfishness. we do not feel bad for them you can not hug and kiss your way into changing people's nature, and if you do you are either doing it for your own ego or out of genuine naivety, but you are certainly not doing it out of empathy

You're the one living in a fantasy. You really think these guys woke up one morning and decided to commit mass murder without planning for a few contingencies? Perhaps they were on their way for croissants and decided to grab their guns? There is absolutely an advantage to having a guy on the inside, why Even argue such a quibbling point. Preventing doors being locked/getting easy access is one huge advantage. Communication to the inside, watchmen on the outside looking out for police.... There are any number of benefits to having a man on The inside maybe just for fun. And it would be so easy, we both know that concert venues will hire literally anyone. My question is why would you even argue this point so stridently

There was no conceivable advantage to having “a guy on the inside”. There is no evidence of it. This was a music nightclub, not Parliament. The security guards did not need to be disarmed. The terrorists could just fire at will. >“Went off without a hitch” Lol dude, the world is not a fucking action movie.

@sebastemp @RantsOnMute @Babygravy9 It's entirely possible to get hired as a security guard at a venue there is basically no standard Why are you so incredulous at these guys couldn't have gotten some of their friends hired at the venue to make sure the terror operation went off without a hitch?

@RantsOnMute @Babygravy9 In the world of concert venue security it is difficult to avoid hiring retards. Do you really think it is plausible that the terrorists infiltrated the security contractors? They didn’t need to do that