Prince Melethron Quínëopelë

Lose all this to rescue 1 pilot and call it your greatest military success of all time.

61 billion dead, 90 sterilized planets, 40 religions destroyed, and the subjugation of 10,000 worlds

On a completely unrelated topic, here is what's been going on in Dearborn mosques since the U.S. killed the Ayahollah.

The Massie cultists shouted "Epstein" as they took a picture at his campaign launch event last weekend. Extremely creepy and another example of how Massie doesn't actually care about trafficking victims.

I suspect that one of the reasons (not the only one, obviously) we have entered this extremely low-trust epistemic environment is the perceived collapse in credibility of the 'expert class' in 2020. A substantial part of that collapse was self-inflicted. Many public experts who had positioned themselves as neutral, evidence-driven authorities appeared, at key moments, to bend to partisan pressures or broader social hysteria (e.g., the sudden reframing of mass protests as acceptable during a pandemic after months of admonishing the public about masking and distancing). Add to that the early categorical dismissal of certain COVID origin hypotheses, the confident assertions about school closures, and so on. Scientific updating is normal, but when it is delivered with moral certainty and then revised, it looks less like refinement and more like politicization. The unfortunate consequence is that once the 'expert class' is seen as compromised, the authority gradient collapses. When that happens, it does not just elevate dissenting credentialed experts. It also elevates non-experts who position themselves as independent truth-tellers. The vacuum created by diminished institutional trust does not get filled selectively. It gets filled indiscriminately. There is now, unfortunately, positive social capital attached to conspiracism that gets rewarded. That is why various figures of at least some semi-prominence are drawn to it (though some part of this is also their innate stupidity).

For a country to survive, there has to be a common culture. Nobody dies to defend a “multicultural economic zone”! American culture, with its English-Scotts-Irish origin, is great and worth fighting for. Some may not realize it, but that’s why people come here. 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

Apocalypto (2006) ends with Jaguar Paw surviving the hunt… only for Spanish ships to appear on the horizon. Not a victory, not relief…just history arriving. One of the coldest final images in modern cinema.

Western civilization, according to liberals, effectively begins sometime between the late 1940s and the 1960s. What’s so funny (and honestly nefarious) about this take is that liberalism dissolved Western civilization into a bunch of abstractions, and then has the gall to declare itself to be the West itself, despite the fact that it’s nothing more than the pure negation of things that make Western civilization possible in the first place. Everything in this guy’s argument is a total inversion of the truth. There is no such thing as a “liberal civilization”. Liberalism is an acid. What it represents is nothing more than the erasure of a prior, much older Western civilization that modern liberals regard with open hostility and barely concealed contempt. What Slazac calls “values predominant everywhere else” were predominant in the West until less than a hundred years ago. That’s the first lie. The second is his suggestion that liberalism isn’t tribalistic. Notice how the entire suggestion here is that if you reject his secular liberal universalism then you aren’t Western? This guy is literally saying “Agree with my ideology or you don’t belong here” at the same time he builds his entire argument off of rejecting tribalism. The irony is that liberalism has become a tribe even as it pretends it isn’t one. You just want to cloak your ideology, your tribe, in the language of universal humanitarianism while lying through your teeth that this isn’t exactly what you’re doing.

My takeaway from the past view days is that many Trump supporters absolutely hate Europe. They regard it as a total enemy. They hate Europe for some of the same reasons that European leftists hate themselves, like the alleged anticolonial sins of Denmark against the Inuit Greenlanders. They also hate Europe for a lot of invented and fantastical reasons. They believe that the US empire is nothing but a charity operation, that European nations have no functioning economies, that Euros via various economic scams are constantly looting the United States, that Europe has become or is on the verge of becoming a collection of hostile Islamic states.

Should Europe expect the US to defend it if it isn't willing to help the US better position itself against Russia? Should Trump just let go of that Russian boulder?