Thomas J Weiss

Since it's graduation season, I thought I'd re-publish the speech I didn't give at Southern Cross University last year. Originally published in Sonder Magazine and reprinted here with permission. x.com/thomasjweiss/s…

“Fair” in that framework isn’t about what’s earned, agreed to, or produced. It’s about what can be taken without immediate collapse. If you can remove $135 million from someone and they’re still standing, it gets labeled “reasonable.” If you can redistribute it and make others feel helped, it gets labeled “just.” The standard isn’t rights. It’s tolerance for extraction. That flips the moral question entirely. Instead of asking, “Who created the value?” it asks, “How much can we take before it hurts too much?” Instead of voluntary exchange, it becomes calibrated coercion. And once that’s the premise, there’s no limiting principle. Because “you’re still rich” is infinitely elastic. There’s always more that “won’t kill you,” which means there’s always more that can be taken. So fairness stops meaning equality before the law and becomes a moving target based on envy, optics, and political leverage.

@RobbieBarwick Let’s assume it was a lie, and not just bad intel. Is Trump’s lie morally better or worse than the Iranian regime pursuing nuclear capabilities to bring about the end times?

@thomasjweiss What you have to say to avoid admitting that your president was either a liar last June or a liar this February. Either way, he's a liar and the war is a lie.

One of the most evil things I have ever seen. A literally Aryan Nuremberg Rally, where a traitor offers the wealth of the nation he claims to America so Trump keeps killing the people he wants to repress. Imagine if an Australian gave this speech in Japan during WWII?

@Andr3jH Elliot must not have gotten his cut.

@LJS527 We ignored what Iran did, directly, to kill American troops for decades.

The trump administration has a decision to make here. Either they continue to ignore what Russia is doing to aid in the killing of our troops, or they do something about it, like cutting off all negotiations with Putin and giving the green light for Ukraine to hit deeper into RU

No Kings.

@RobbieBarwick And the people who want to end the world and hasten the return of the 12th Imam didn’t stop. Color me shocked.

@thomasjweiss Trump stopped them making nuclear bombs last June. Remember?

Your argument is all over the place. Maybe compose your thoughts first before posting. The US didn’t deliberately target school kids, if they even hit them at all, which hasn’t been independently verified. If they *wanted* to kill ordinary Iranians a hell of a lot more of them would be dead. The US is targeting the repressive religious zealots at the top, and would stop targeting them if they agreed not to make nuclear bombs in order to hasten the coming of the Mahdi. Sounds pretty anti-Aryan to me, and I used to live in Nuremberg.

@thomasjweiss Not regular Iranians? Except 160 school girls. Except the families and neighbours of the leaders. Except the workers in the oil and gas plants and power stations struck by Israel with America's blessing, and will be ht by Trump if he follows through on his threat.

@RobbieBarwick Okay, but the US is killing regime leaders and military folks, not regular Iranians. And America was founded by traitors, so I’m not sure that’s the argument you think it is.

@thomasjweiss He wants to resume his father's repression of Iranians using the brutal Savak secret police, which is what provoked the 1979 revolution.

Well that ends the debate on deaths in Gaza. Hamas itself is admitting that 80% of casualties were combatants. There was never a genocide. You have been lied to and manipulated.

@megalodonzimmer @claydumas No. No, he’s not at all curious.

@claydumas Are you at all curious about whether or not this is true?

In the before times, I worked for the White House Deputy Chief of Staff responsible for issuing disaster declarations. That meant I was the person who got calls from the White House Military Office, who coordinated these requests, when they were ready for sign-off…

@InnocenceCapit1 What haven't they thought through?

I definitely would appreciate a secular Iran that does not have or isn’t making progress towards a nuclear weapon. But it seems like the Emperor Retardio and his gaggle of fuckwits really didn’t think things through. This is what you voted for.

@shadihamid @RenovatioOnline Why doesn’t Gaza vote to become part of Israel?

The best article I've read on whether states have a right to exist comes from the political theorist Andrew March in @RenovatioOnline. The piece is worth reading in full: renovatio.zaytuna.edu/article/nation…

Does Israel have a "right" to exist? No. But that doesn't mean it should be dissolved. I’m surprised pro-Israel advocates haven’t made this argument. But it requires conceding things most of them would rather not concede. My new essay for @wcrowdslive 🧵 wisdomofcrowds.live/p/does-israel-…

@paulcritchlow @halogen1048576 @mattforney Not transgender issues, to be clear, but the fact that they had skeptical views on progressive orthodoxy (even though they were all solid Ds).

@paulcritchlow @halogen1048576 @mattforney Rebecca herself told me on X some time ago that she fell out with her SGU podcast colleagues for precisely this reason.

Wrong. This woman killed New Atheism. If you're not familiar with Rebecca Watson, she's a tenth-tier atheist blogger who kicked up a stink back in 2011 when she went to an atheist conference in Dublin and some dude hit on her in the elevator. She ranted endlessly about how "creepy" he was and how "unsafe" being asked out on a date made her feel and the incident was dubbed "Elevatorgate." Richard Dawkins waded into the fracas and suggested that being hit on in an elevator wasn't the end of the world. He asked you out, Becky, you weren't interested, end of. This caused everyone to FREAK OUT at Dawkins' "misogyny" and about the supposed problem with "misogyny" in atheism in general, leading large numbers of prominent atheists such as PZ Myers and Jen McCreight to split off into Atheism Plus. Atheism Plus was atheism with a rape whistle, its adherents more focused on fighting da patriarchy then with stuff that...actually has to do with atheism. That's why atheism collapsed in on itself as a sociopolitical force. The left, per usual, ate themselves alive.

The Japan example came after a long amphibious campaign that shaped the war, and nukes are an existential threat that precision strikes - in isolation - haven’t been to date. But your point is still valid in that Japan faced an air threat it could not counter and capitulated. Steelmanning Pape’s argument, I’d say enemies have learned in the decades since that it’s better (for their survival) to resist than to capitulate, even if resisting makes their people much worse off. He does bring up Serbia as a counter example but says Clinton didn’t use a decapitation strategy to prosecute that war. But the Air Force leadership and the CJCS know all of this much more intimately that we, and Pape, do. And they also know a whole lot more about our capabilities.

@thomasjweiss @gummibear737 "His only real point is that no air campaign has ever toppled a regime." Even that's a ridiculous claim. Japan in 1945 and Serbia in 1999 are both examples of air power forcing surrender.

I listened to this very carefully, thought about it a lot Professor Pape is a serious person with well founded views But I'm wary of people who have spent a lifetime building overly deterministic models, he makes many assumptions I think lack nuance/context and he completely ignores the eschatological nature of the threat we face Ultimately what's a deal breaker for me is his contention that the best path forward is going back to Obama's JCPOA Everything about Obama's foreign policy towards Iran has been a disaster Still, I don't dismiss everything Pape says and he makes a number of good points that I need to factor into my thinking moving forward

@WatcherontheWeb @MorlockP It’s much harder to kill a religion. Especially one with a couple billion adherents.

"YoU cAn'T kIlL aN iDiOlOgY" *looks at history* *It's literally just a mountain of dead idiologies, most killed off via warfare in one way or another, stacked one on top of the other without end*

@KeenanPeachy The only way a few thousand marines are getting blown is if they keep them cooped up with sailors for too long.

If we’re going to “lose” (and anything short of total regime change is going to be perceived as a “loss”) let’s try to lose right away, before a few thousand Marines get blown to bits, an not after