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Tom Lavin
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Tom Lavin
@Rational_Obs
Musician/producer @ https://t.co/8WJzJrYAoz Occasionally blogging from an Objectivist perspective @ https://t.co/e0SMbPV0PJ
Freedom, PA Katılım Şubat 2016
635 Takip Edilen521 Takipçiler
You have to understand, someone like this is not an idiot. They aren't so dumb that they can't see how damaging this would be. They are either refusing to face the truth that the policies they support are completely destructive, or they know they are destructive - but are refusing to acknowledge what that says about their soul.
Zack Polanski@ZackPolanski
The Mail doesn't think seem to think workers, of all ages, are worth £15 an hour. That's fair pay for a fair day's work, with money workers will put back into the economy. We are the party for workers. Vote Green on 7th May.
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@stuckgear @joemichalczuk True, and immigrants taking advantage of the system are a problem.
But socialised medicine as an idea doesn't work regardless of immigration restrictions. The NHS only "worked" before because it had taken over a functioning private system. It was always going to decay over time.
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@Rational_Obs @joemichalczuk National Health Service
Not International Health Service
Its not free, we pay for it deducted at source from our income.
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A shower screen shattered all over my wife this week.
Over the next 72 hours, the NHS got almost everything wrong.
A cautionary tale of a system that is broken (with the usual caveat that everyone working in it is doing their best) 👇
I called an ambulance.
All good at first: “It’s on its way.”
Ten minutes later: “Actually, there are no ambulances for hours - can you get her to hospital?”
So I loaded my bleeding wife into the car, along with the kids and the dog, and drove to A&E.
Ten hours later, she came home - having given up after not even being offered a plaster.
The next morning, we called our GP: “Any chance she could see a nurse?”
“No - as the ambulance referred her to hospital, we can’t see her.”
So I went to the pharmacy and bought a first aid kit.
Because apparently that’s where we are now - me and a pack of plasters, in one of the richest countries in the world.
This morning, still in pain, still untreated, and with a ballooning foot, we went to an urgent treatment centre.
At first, smooth. She was seen in under two hours. X-ray done.
“Nasty cut, but nothing broken.”
Relief.
Two hours later, the phone rang.
It was the hospital.
“Sorry - we got that completely wrong. Your foot is broken and the wound needs antibiotics.”
If it wasn’t so serious, it would be laughable.
And the truth is - anyone who uses the system has a story like this.
We need to stop clinging to an idealised version of the NHS and have a grown-up conversation about how to fix it.
Free healthcare for all should remain a principle - but pretending the current model works isn’t helping anyone.
Almost every other developed country combines public healthcare with some level of private provision - and all deliver better outcomes as a result.
Yet in the UK, even suggesting that tends to get shut down before the conversation starts.
That’s not protecting the NHS. It’s protecting a cult.
We don’t need ideology. We need honesty about what works.
We need a brilliant NHS in practice for all of us - not one we’re told to revere while it quietly crumbles, and where anyone who speaks up is dismissed or discredited.
When are we going to get serious about the things that actually matter - and have the difficult national conversations needed to fix them?
We don’t need to abandon the NHS.
We need to be honest about fixing it.
We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders.
We have to be better.
We need to vote for real change.
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The Iran war is unfortunately going similarly to all the recent wars of pulled punches America has been involved in. Trump has at least put some fear into America's enemies, but he hasn't got the backbone to actually commit to winning this war completely.
The simple fact is that in war, there can be no half measures. You cannot go to war and consider the safety of the opposing country's civilian population - in such a case that country's government can simply hide all of its important targets in and amongst civilians and draw out the war indefinitely.
This is exactly what happened in all of America's previous wars in the middle east, and also Vietnam, in which the Americans pursued a war goal of simply "killing all enemy combatants", while leaving the towns and cities of North Vietnam essentially untouched.
In order to win the war in Iran, all America has to do is as follows: bomb anything and everything that is a military or government target, regardless of collateral damage. Make it clear to the Iranian regime that they are completely doomed, and make it clear to the Iranian population that if they don't overthrow the regime they might well be caught in the crossfire.
America would also have to mercilessly target all of Iran's little proxy terrorist groups, regardless of which country they are in. Make it clear to these groups that continuing to fight on behalf of Iran means certain death.
To be honest, such a strategy is probably impossible to pursue in the current political climate - America politicians and generals alike would most likely revolt against Trump and force him out of office. Such is the problem of our age: the correct policies are forbidden from even being considered by the corrupt morality that has infected Western culture. Nevertheless, this strategy is the only strategy that can actually work in war.
America has a completely dominant military in basically every possible measurement, but it can't win a war until it regrows its moral backbone, stops pulling punches, and fights for total victory. Until that time, terrorists and dictators around the world will continue their little schemes, and innocent people will pay the price of America's moral bankruptcy with their lives.
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You must tiptoe around minorities or you are racist.
If you assume anything about them, no matter how likely it is to be true or how welcoming you are after you find out you were wrong, many will apparently assume you made that assumption purely out of racial hatred.
It's all so tiresome.
BBC News (UK)@BBCNews
People assume I can't speak Welsh because I'm not white bbc.in/4etWdYA
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Tom Lavin retweetledi
On Saturday morning, a woman in her twenties was raped outside Epsom Methodist Church on Ashley Road. She had left a nightclub; she was followed by a group of men; the attack took place between two and four in the morning, in the heart of a market town in Surrey that most of the country thinks of, if it thinks of it at all, as somewhere you go to see the horses run.
The residents of Epsom have asked Surrey Police reasonable questions. "Who are the suspects? What do they look like? Is there CCTV?"
Surrey Police has declined to answer. They have said they do not have "sufficient information" to release descriptions. They have urged the public "not to speculate," because speculation "may lead to additional tensions within local communities." Translated from the institutional dialect, this means: we know what you are likely to conclude from the descriptions, and we would rather you didn't.
On Tuesday evening, hundreds of residents gathered in the town centre to ask the question again. The police response was to deploy public order units, riot shields, and helmets against people standing on the pavement of their own high street demanding to know what the men who raped a woman six doors down from them actually look like. The local Lib Dem MP - who represents these people and the town - told the protesters to "take it elsewhere."
"Take it elsewhere."
This is the settled posture of the modern British state toward its own citizens. When a town asks for the most basic information about a violent sexual offence committed on its streets - information that, thirty years ago, would have been on the front of every regional paper within hours - it is met first with bureaucratic evasion, then with riot police, then with a sitting member of parliament telling them to do one.
Epsom is not an unruly place. It is not a place with a history of disorder. It is a comfortable commuter town in Surrey whose residents have been told, in the space of seventy-two hours, that the police will not tell them who is hunting women on their streets, that asking about it constitutes a threat to community cohesion, and that if they persist in asking they will be treated as a public order problem.
There is a specific and ugly contempt encoded in this response. It is the contempt of an administrative class that has decided the British public cannot be trusted with the truth about anything happening to it, and that the job of the state is no longer to solve the crime but to manage the reaction to it, forcibly.
The people of Epsom have not misbehaved. They have done the thing that citizens of a serious country are supposed to do when something terrible happens where they live: they have turned up and asked questions.
And the answer they have received, delivered in riot gear, is that their questions are the problem.
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@GuntherEagleman Actually an accurate representation of democracy, and a great visual argument for why it's a terrible idea
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I watched for 2 seconds and felt y’all needed to see it too.
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Pretty crazy story, but what I think people should take away from this is not the specifics of this story, but that it has been going on under our noses for decades, and if you suggested such a thing might be happening you would most likely be dismissed as a right-wing conspiracy theorist.
The system is set up to give "asylum seekers" the benefit of the doubt at almost every point. It's as if the system were created by someone who had never heard of the concept of "lying". Subsequently, across countless different scenarios, from Pakistani taxi drivers getting paid by the council to take their own "disabled" kids to school, to "care-workers" who work for 5-10 years, get citizenship and just lounge on benefits, to Hamas leaders who manage to get council houses on the taxpayers dime while literally managing a terrorist organisation, the system allows for completely ridiculous abuses of our generosity.
We will probably never know the full extent of every injustice our government's naivety has allowed to happen.
bbc.com/news/articles/…
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Tom Lavin retweetledi
You have to understand. Spending 1 hour per day on brainrot is insane. That's about 6% of your waking day. About 5 years of your waking life. Half a decade. On brainrot. Just gone. Zero return. Zero fulfillment. Zero meaning. Zero contribution to the other parts of your life.
Justin Skycak@justinskycak
If you replace your daily brainrot sessions with technical upskilling, your quality of life will seriously improve.
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Rupert is sometimes a little loose with language, and some of his policies are marginally more authoritarian than I would prefer, but he is so clearly head and shoulders above every other politician in the UK.
The left-wing nihilistic madness has to stop. That's the most important political goal right now.
Rupert Lowe MP@RupertLowe10
My view on this gender debate is quite simple. If a grown man wants to dress up as a woman, and pretend that he’s a woman? Fine. I certainly don’t approve, and I will not call him a woman, but that’s his decision. It’s a free country. On the strict condition that others are not negatively affected by his actions - eg, if he decides that he wants to compete in women’s sport or intrude in women-only spaces? The answer is a firm NO. No men in women’s sports or spaces. Not complicated. When it comes to children? Absolutely not. Pushing this ideology on young boys and girls is sick and twisted. It should be illegal. To suggest that a young boy has been born in the wrong body, and should receive life-altering surgery to ‘resolve’ that? It’s abuse. It’s disgusting. I don’t want those vile flags flown anywhere in the public sector - anywhere. DEFINITELY NOT in schools, toddler play areas, hospitals or wherever else. For the NHS to be conducting trials where children as young as ten are given puberty blockers? It will creep and creep and creep back again. No. The answer is no. It is an unethical experiment. Anybody in a position of authority forcing this ideology on a young boy and girl, potentially leading to permanent physical changes? They should be prosecuted. Leave children alone.
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There goal is not to fund the government by taking away Elon's wealth.
The goal is to take away his wealth.
Greg Koenig@gak_pdx
Let’s assume you could magically liquidate Elon’s wealth. It is all stock, so you can’t actually do that, but let’s say President AOC is magic, she snaps her fingers, and the US Treasury has Elon’s net worth in the account. How long does that $800 Billion last? It funds 42 days of current federal government spending.
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this is possibly THE MOST Australian interview ever
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These essays are basically saying what I've been saying about immigration for the past year: that Trump's enforcement of the border is closer to the ideal immigration policy than the left's insane open borders fanaticism, regardless of the possibility that particular ICE agents might overstep their boundaries on occasions.
Sorry but if you can watch the UK getting basically taken over by foreign rapists and think that the main point to make about immigration is "what about the rights of the foreigners", I don't think you really understand rights, or anything else for that matter.
Tom Lavin@Rational_Obs
Babe wake up new Leonard Peikoff essays just dropped capitalismmagazine.com/2026/04/object…
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Babe wake up new Leonard Peikoff essays just dropped
capitalismmagazine.com/2026/04/object…
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You are aware that oil and gas together still account for 73–75% of the UK's total primary energy consumption (which covers all energy needs across electricity, heating, transport, industry and other sectors, measured in primary energy terms)? So explain to me exactly how ‘you will make it happen’ that we don’t use fossil fuels.
Tris Osborne MP@TrisOsborneMP
Let’s make it happen…
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While it is not true that *no one* is saying this, there should be a lot more people saying so.
Taxing the populace to provide "support" for any group is in fact wrong in principle, and impossible to stop from ballooning ad infinitum exactly as it has done over the past decades since government pensions have been a thing.
People should save their own money to provide for themselves when they wish to retire; your "needs" are not a justification for forcing other people to provide for you.
Dominic McGregor@DominicMcGregor
I’m 32 years old and I want to change the state pension. With the triple lock, based on historical growth (4.5%) when I reach my pension age. The state pension will be £30,100 a year. This would account for £512bn a year. The current government budget is 1.2Trn. This would be 3x the current NHS budget. The triple lock is unsustainable. Now the debate, no one is saying that pensioners shouldn’t recieve support. That goes without saying. But there shouldn’t be a non-means tested, non contribution based pension which gives everyone blanket support. Especially when you consider 1 in 4 of over 60 years are asset millionaires. My view is, we need to have a means tested only state pension. Which is reassessed every 3 years. There is no “pot” people pay into, national insurance is just a tax - there is no ring fenced fund for a state pension. It comes directly from taxation ever annum. Without changes like this, young people will suffer while older people - who receive their pension and political protection because they actively vote - will continue to have a glorious quality of life.
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