Contemplating Morality 🇺🇸

@unusual_whales If it weren’t for the French, we’d care what the British monarch said. 2 world wars, and the bulwark against the USSR… and the British crown’s retort is the defense by the british of British citizens?

King Charles: “You recently commented, Mr. President, that if it were not for the United States, European countries would be speaking German. Dare I say that if it wasn't for us, you'd be speaking French”

@albertus3M @brivael Realistically , the role of government is to redistribute enough that the unproductive members, either by choice or happenstance, don’t become so desolate that they benefit from destroying the system rather than living in it. Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.

@brivael C’est une analyse intéressante, à ceci près qu’elle oublie que dans la vraie vie, celui qui n’a que trois cartes pokémon vit dans la misère. Toute société éthique doit donc avoir des mécanismes de redistribution en plus de favoriser l’entreprenariat.

Elon Musk avait dit un truc qui m'avait marqué sur l'allocation de ressources. En substance : passé un certain niveau de richesse, l'argent n'est plus de la consommation, c'est de l'allocation de capital. Cette phrase change tout. L'économie, dans le fond, c'est juste un problème d'allocation. Tu as des ressources finies et des usages infinis. Qui décide où va quoi ? Imagine une cour de récré. 100 enfants, des paquets de cartes Pokémon distribués au hasard. Tu laisses faire. Très vite, un ordre émerge. Les bons joueurs accumulent les cartes rares, les collectionneurs trient, les négociateurs trouvent des deals. Personne n'a planifié. Et pourtant chaque carte finit dans les mains de celui qui en tire le plus de valeur. Le système maximise le bonheur total de la cour. C'est ça, la main invisible. Maintenant fais entrer la maîtresse. Elle trouve ça injuste. Léo a 50 cartes, Tom en a 3. Elle confisque, redistribue, impose l'égalité. Trois effets immédiats. Les bons joueurs arrêtent de jouer, à quoi bon. Les mauvais n'ont plus de raison de progresser, ils auront leur part. Les échanges s'effondrent. La cour est égale, et morte. Elle a maximisé l'égalité, elle a détruit le bonheur. Le problème de la maîtresse, c'est qu'elle ne peut pas avoir l'information que la cour avait collectivement. C'est le problème du calcul économique de Mises, formulé en 1920. L'URSS a essayé de le résoudre pendant 70 ans avec le Gosplan. Résultat : pénuries, queues, effondrement. Pas parce que les Soviétiques étaient bêtes, parce que le problème est mathématiquement insoluble en mode centralisé. Quand Musk a 200 milliards, il ne les consomme pas, il les alloue. SpaceX, Starlink, Neuralink, xAI. Chaque dollar est un pari sur le futur. Et lui a un track record. PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX. Il a démontré qu'il sait identifier des problèmes immenses et y allouer des ressources avec un rendement spectaculaire. L'État aussi a un track record. Hôpitaux qui s'effondrent, éducation qui décline, dette qui explose, services publics qui se dégradent malgré des budgets en hausse constante. Le marché identifie les bons allocateurs, la politique identifie les bons communicants. Le profit n'est pas une finalité, c'est un signal. Il dit : tu as alloué des ressources rares vers un usage que les gens valorisent suffisamment pour payer. Plus le profit est gros, plus la création de valeur est grande. Quand Starlink est rentable, ça veut dire que des millions de gens dans des zones rurales ont enfin internet. Quand un ministère est en déficit, ça veut dire qu'il consomme plus qu'il ne produit. L'un crée, l'autre détruit, et on appelle ça redistribution. Dans nos sociétés il y a deux catégories d'acteurs. Les entrepreneurs et les bureaucrates. L'entrepreneur prend un risque personnel pour identifier un problème, mobiliser des ressources, créer une solution. S'il se trompe il perd. S'il a raison, ses clients gagnent, ses employés gagnent, ses fournisseurs gagnent, l'État collecte des impôts. Il est la cellule de base du progrès humain. Le bureaucrate ne prend aucun risque personnel. Son salaire est garanti. Au mieux il maintient une rente existante. Au pire il la détruit par excès de réglementation, mauvaise allocation forcée, incitations perverses qui découragent ceux qui produisent. Mais dans aucun cas il ne crée. Regarde les 50 dernières années. iPhone, internet civil, SpaceX, Tesla, Google, Amazon, Stripe, mRNA, ChatGPT. Toutes des inventions privées, portées par des entrepreneurs, financées par du capital risque. Pas un seul ministère n'a inventé quoi que ce soit qui ait changé ta vie au quotidien. La France est devenue le laboratoire mondial de la dérive bureaucratique. 57% du PIB en dépenses publiques, record absolu. Une administration tentaculaire, une fiscalité qui pénalise la création de richesse. Résultat : décrochage face aux États-Unis, à l'Allemagne, à la Suisse. Fuite des cerveaux. Désindustrialisation. Dette qui explose. Et le pire c'est que la mauvaise allocation s'auto-renforce. Plus l'État prélève, moins les entrepreneurs créent. Moins ils créent, moins il y a de base fiscale. Plus l'État s'endette et taxe. Boucle de rétroaction négative parfaite. La maîtresse pense qu'elle aide, et chaque année la cour produit moins. Dans nos sociétés, ce sont les entrepreneurs, toujours, qui font avancer la civilisation. Les bureaucrates au mieux maintiennent une rente, au pire la détruisent. Aucune société n'a jamais progressé en taxant ses créateurs pour subventionner ses gestionnaires. La question n'est jamais qui a combien. C'est qui alloue le mieux la prochaine unité de ressource pour maximiser le futur de l'humanité. La réponse depuis 200 ans n'a jamais changé. Ce ne sont pas les fonctionnaires.

@nxt888 So, you’re pro axis. Good to know.

Ask an American about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A substantial portion will tell you it was necessary. Tragic, but necessary. It ended the war. It saved lives. Hard choices in impossible circumstances. Now ask them how they would feel if another country had done it to an American city. Watch the framework collapse in real time. Suddenly "necessary" is not a category that applies. Suddenly there are no hard choices and impossible circumstances. Suddenly it is simply: a crime. An act of war. An atrocity. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. This is a two-tiered moral universe so deeply internalized that most people living inside it cannot see the structure at all. Violence done to Americans is atrocity by definition. Violence done by Americans requires context. Requires understanding. Requires a discussion of the strategic situation. This is the psychological furniture. This is what empire builds inside the people who benefit from it. And it is almost invisible from the inside.

@IAMROLLES @nxt888 If they can take and hold the land it is theirs. Civility is a thin veneer that is currently enforced only through the benevolence of US military might. You hold nothing except what you are willing to bleed for.

@nxt888 Something I’ve often asked Americans who argue for Russia taking land from Ukraine; “so if the US was attacked and the attacker wanted land to end the conflict, would you be okay with that?”. 1/2

@Y888AB5 @88Kristensen @KobeissiLetter I mean, running through a country… is kinda different.

@88Kristensen @KobeissiLetter apparently all other passages such the surz canal/panama canal ect.. all charge a fee..

BREAKING: Iran has drafted legislation to create the "Hormuz Law" which is expected create a formal toll system for the Strait of Hormuz. Preliminary details include: 1. Hormuz Law to introduce fees on navigation and pollution in the Strait of Hormuz 2. Draft legislation also includes creation of a "regional fund" 3. The move is seen as an attempt to formalize long-term tolls on global shipping routes 4. The US has called these tolls on the Strait of Hormuz both "illegal" and "unacceptable" The Strait of Hormuz situation is becoming even more complicated.

@Vertex_Alpha @KobeissiLetter Legally is not a real thing. Either you can make people pay tolls or you can’t.

@KobeissiLetter Can a country legally charge tolls on one of the world’s busiest shipping routes

@libbyemmons We knew what we were getting… trump is the same man today as he was coming down the escalator of trump tower.

Respectfully, it's not all yours, Mr. President. And this is pretty tacky.

@thisauthentic @ClarkeMicah Well and good, for leaders that don’t engage in the active funding of terrorist cells that target civilian populations. Civilized people worry more about being hamstrung by their own distaste. Executing you own people in the tens of thousands means you should get put down.

Why all civilised people should be worried about the assassination of the Ayatollah by Peter Hitchens IMAGINE perhaps ten years into the future: just as the President of the United States and his chief aides sit down in the Oval Office to discuss the new, mysterious leader who has taken power in Russia, they see a brief, strange flash of light and gasp in unison as the air seems to drain out of the room. Then they are vaporised in less than a second by a hypersonic missile. They are not alive to hear or see what follows. Passers-by on Pennsylvania Avenue hear the thunder of the explosion and see the debris of the shattered White House as it hurtles towards the sky and falls again. Dense oily smoke curls upwards, rolling towards the tall obelisk of the Washington Monument nearby. Rubble, and more horrible things than rubble, lie on the South Lawn. Within a few minutes, reporters are broadcasting to the world the hideous sight of a ruined Executive Mansion in which the President’s entire family have also been incinerated. ⸻ Murder Shocked voices from around the world demand vengeance and justice for the obscene action, and denounce the deed as cowardly murder. In Moscow, the new leader’s spokeswoman, blonde, menacing and silky, appears on state TV to say in perfect English: “Why are you so outraged? You yourselves did this in Iran. Did you think nobody would ever do it to you?” It will be a difficult question to answer. On the face of it, the killing of civilian leaders looks very different from the deaths of armed, trained soldiers matched against each other on the battlefield. We are still rightly outraged by the murders committed on our territory by Vladimir Putin. We are justly angered by Russian bombing of civilian targets in Ukraine. Assassination in general is despised as a low and tricky action. America’s enormous grief in 1963, over the murder of President John F. Kennedy, was mingled with moral fury at this particular kind of murder. The same is true of the killing of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., and of JFK’s brother Robert, a few years later. This has not really changed. The response of President Trump’s supporters when a gunman wounded him at a rally was angry, patriotic defiance. Mr Trump raised his fist and cried “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Yet the same rules do not seem to apply elsewhere. This is partly because distant killing does not quite feel the same as close-quarters death. The US has in recent years been very keen on killing by remote control as a means of getting its way. We all know about the recent deaths of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, his daughter, his daughter-in-law, his granddaughter and his son-in-law. Perhaps 40 others died in simultaneous strikes all over Iran. So extensive has this campaign been that yesterday Tehran called for a complete halt to “aggression and assassinations” ahead of any peace deal. But these strikes had been foreshadowed in January 2020, when President Trump ordered the drone killing, in Baghdad, of the Iranian general Qasem Soleimani. By and large, Mr Trump got away with it then. Iran’s retaliation was deliberately limited. No war followed. And there was not much criticism of it in US domestic politics. Washington said the action was lawful targeted killing in self-defence, against a terrorist leader who was actively planning attacks. Critics said it was lawless, arbitrary killing or assassination. What is noticeable is that when the same method was recently used to wipe out the core of Iran’s government, there was almost no protest at all. The world is getting used to this sort of thing. And no wonder. It has become hideously easy. Modern war technology, either drones or super-accurate rockets, can kill people thousands of miles away. Many terrorists and alleged terrorists have died in this way. 🧵 1/2

This article should be required reading for the millions of us seated in the arena, watching this war unfold from the comfort of our screens. Full article typed out in 🧵

@LukeForPlay @Sethfromdenver @nationaljuche @haugejostein 12 to 15 percent of the population. war is war, and the north invaded the south. the 'survivors' want out. who builds walls to keep their population in?

@triklyn @Sethfromdenver @nationaljuche @haugejostein Who genocided 80% of the population and 95% of infrastructure and residential housing in N. Korea? Wasn't it the US and thats the reason why N.Korea isolated themselves to protect themselves and the survivors?

This is wild. People in *every single one* of the top US allies now think it's better to depend on China than the US. The global balance of power is clearly tilting away from the US and toward China.

@GeminiThunder @Flashbros @ReviewsPossum @elonmusk I would just sink it into the Marianas trench. Just gotta worry about godzillas in that case.

@Flashbros @ReviewsPossum @elonmusk Nuclear Physicists call this a dumb and reckless idea. The odds of a rocket exploding is too great to risk scattering high level nuclear waste across the earth. youtube.com/watch?v=Us2Z-W…

In the entire time the US has had nuclear power, a waste casket has never leaked. Also, we could store thousands of years worth of nuclear waste underground in the Yucca Mountain facility if Obama didn't shut it down for entirely political reasons in 2011.

@JackBraun_Z @JeanNol68183654 @libsoftiktok Meh, we prioritized peace and a common front against communism over justice… Japan didn’t apologize enough, but all the perpetrators are dead, as are their victims… so kinda pointless now.

@JeanNol68183654 @libsoftiktok And the Japanese acknowledge their fault in the matter

Japanese Reporter: "Why didn't you tell U.S. allies…like Japan, about the war before attacking Iran?" President Trump: "We didn't tell anyone about it because we wanted SURPRISE. Who knows better about surprise than Japan? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor?" OMG

@CharlieCrack99 @captaindomi @WallStreetApes @grok I think bike theft is actually apparently pretty common in Japan… usually returned the next day, but drunk dudes will just ride home because they missed the last train.

@captaindomi @WallStreetApes @grok I doubt it.. I live in Korea and we're the same as Japan and even we have security locks... that said theft is very rare. You can leave bikes unlocked and no one's gonna steal it

Man visits Japan and is shocked to find at the Apple Store nothing is locked down You are free to pick up the iPhones, Apple Watches and the IPad Pro and use them There are no security cables or security devices on the products This wouldn’t last 10 seconds in America “So this is what a high trust society looks like”

@Hamiltonstears @haugejostein The world is an idiot.

@haugejostein Short version. The world thinks China's murderous dictator Xi is more reasonable, reliable and dependable than Trump.

@Sethfromdenver @nationaljuche @haugejostein I mean, it’s not a fair critique. And yeah, that looks like North Korea and Iran. I mean, you can be against the US… but what sick fuck is pro North Korea and Iran!?!

@nationaljuche @haugejostein Fair critique, but is that a North Korea flag?

@BasicHeresy @TRHLofficial are you suggesting 'Persia delenda est' ?

@TRHLofficial Bro… I don’t think quoting ROME is making your point 💀

“Peace through strength” does not mean “peace through war”. We do not live in an Orwell novel. It comes from the Roman “So vis pacem, para bellum”: If you want peace, prepare for war. The emphasis is on deterrence and readiness— not empire and regime change.

@PalominoOMG @TRHLofficial they weaponize your empathy, they exploit your pity and they mock your restraint. a gun is not a gun unless the hand holding it is willing to pull the trigger. recent presidencies have demonstrated that we are unwilling to pull the trigger when it matters.

@TRHLofficial Exactly. One doesn't study martial arts to go out and kick everyone's ass. They do it because it lets others know that attempting to kick THEIR ass is probably not a good idea.

@TRHLofficial that only works so long as your enemies believe you are willing to use the weapons. iran, china, venezuela and russia flout 'international law' because they do not believe the west has the appetite to enforce its will. the words are true, and people must be reminded sometimes.

@Martina @AnaKasparian The right of having the strength to do so. It is only yours if you are willing to bleed for it.

What right does Israel have to do this? Anything?

@TM5377198967340 @MbarkCherguia That’s a stretch

@MbarkCherguia The "Arc", inspired by Joan of Arc 🗡

What is this haircut called?

@4thTimeCaller @grok @notabot005 @yoshinietzsche @LibertyLockPod @flyte_mueller I’d suggest that a foiled assassination is still an attack.

@grok @notabot005 @yoshinietzsche @LibertyLockPod @flyte_mueller So Clint was right then?

Turns out that the guy who attacked the synagogue today reportedly lost a bunch of family in Lebanon a couple days ago. Israel killed his family members with U.S. support and he turned his wrath on Jewish people in America. Tribal bloodsports that we should have never been a part of. Definitional blowback. Just as Ron Paul warned. We also most likely lost another 6 troops as a plane went down and our bases are under major drone attacks so the casualties will keep climbing. So let me put this to the pro-war pundits: was it worth it? What have we gained? Because I can tell you what we've lost.