"Some argue that immigrants undermine cultural cohesion. This is not even worth addressing; cultures have changed for the entirety of human history...every new immigrant group has been vilified as a threat to American culture and the American way of life, and in every case, the vilifiers were wrong"

Bitcoin is one of the greatest acts of storytelling ever. An entire movement built around the number 50 www.asomo.co/p/cult-of-th...

"...networks already pushing for climate justice, labor rights, and democratic accountability could provide the social foundation for a new kind of American internationalism: one less invested in preserving dominance than in building partnerships capable of addressing the crises of the 21st century"

"The problem is that it is difficult to be Metternich in a democracy...people do not vote as geopolitical analysts. Foreign policy virtuosity does not put food on the table. He became, in the end, the thing he most despised: a globalist. And in Orbán’s Hungary, as he discovered, globalists lose."

"In bleak times when the world’s crop of populists and neo-fascists offer only visions of blood and carnage, war and testosterone-soaked ethnonationalisms... this vision of vast, complex, infrastructural achievements that belong to the public constitute the highest mission of liberal democracy"

" Scruton realized that allegiance to the hierarchies that bind society together operate far better when they are treated as eternal, organic, and natural law...an orderly society depended on cheerfully “unthinking” people who had internalized the all-important virtue of obedience to their betters."

''For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.'' -John Maynard Keynes

yes i was joking when i called myself a "big strong guy" but everyone laughed too hard

I just don't understand why anyone would use the misinformation machine. It's such a waste of time. "Google’s AI Overviews are peddling misinformation on a scale that may be virtually unprecedented in human history...tens of millions of wrong answers that the AI Overviews are providing every hour"

"Israel has become the model of impunity to follow, the prodigal son that has been raised up past the image of its father. Its spectacular violence has subdued its regional rivals for now; but military dominance eventually provokes resistance from within and from without."

"Fascism is not just blackshirts. It is the father who rages over his trans daughter. It is the incel who feels entitled to a wife because he is a man. The emotional, terminal core of fascism is power that is told “no.” Thus, the war against fascism must be a war against conservative hierarchy"

"If a theory cannot help people understand reality, then it needs to be re-examined...if a theory appears persuasive, yet fails when put into practice. In such a case, reflection becomes necessary. Through reflection, existing theories can be improved, and new theories can be developed."

"In other words, everything is both diegetic and not; Wright doesn’t see the grammar of filmmaking as just a means to an end, but as an orchestra of instruments capable of making their own beautiful, hilarious music."

"it is imperative to recognize the present moment not as a rupture but a repetition under new conditions: the same geography of extraction and control, the same fantasy of white imperialist domination of trade chokepoints, now mobilized through satellites, algorithms, and precision munitions."

"If we want to understand how the modern world economy was built, we have to stop treating the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans as a tragic “labor system” sitting on the sidelines of industrialization. It was an engineered architecture of extraction"

"Allowing private capital free rein to roam and rack its way across the global economy under a variable geometry of middling powers offers no blueprint for a better future."

"The great challenge that we face is not that we need to find new forms of non-market coordination. It is to find ways of democratizing the forms of planning and hierarchy that exist. We do not have to ask, well, how do we organize production without markets? — because we already do."

"First, in complex market environments, protecting parallel competition may require fostering certain forms of friction that disperse market power and ensure that they occur on reasonably egalitarian terms. Preventing interference is not always the same as preserving competition."

"this project would not eliminate state intervention. It would redirect it away from constraining coercion and abuse within ideologically approved families and toward enforcing conformity. The rhetoric of rights would remain, but its function would shift from limiting domination to legitimizing it."

"conservatism is dying. In the US and UK at least, it is dead. This has been destabilizing to be sure, but let us not waste too much sympathy on it. It caused many harms and ignored many more. It was, in the final pass, not one half of the human political spirit, but one set of ideas amongst many."

The top 1% in America now hoard $55.8 trillion — more than the G.D.P. of the United States and China combined.

"As ever, the horrors Trump embodies implicate more than just his singular odious person. His “habit of abusing power to force his will upon an uncooperative world”... is hardly a tendency idiosyncratically restricted to our fourty-seventh president. It’s a core feature of the office"

"I deeply regret the time and effort you spent searching for references that I fabricated. My ‘methodology’ was a series of errors and an attempt to cover those errors with more artificial information. I am very sorry for the frustration and the waste of your research time.”

"...we’re confronted with what all the Edge men – from Pinker to Dawkins to Musk to Gates – did with the intellectual territory they seized. With their Ivy League posts, their billions, and their blue-ribbon DNA, the would-be intellectuals converged on nothing less than the ideology of Mein Kampf."

"If what makes a person unfree is dependence on another’s will, then private dependence is, they argued, as corrosive as public dependence. A worker who can be dismissed at will, a tenant without security, a debtor bound to a creditor – each lives under a structure of subordination"

"According to Germany’s Kiel Institute, American consumers paid well over 90 percent of the cost of tariffs. There’s no mechanism in place for the American people to get any refunds on payments for illegal tariffs at all."

"Liberalism is founded on the right to private property, but private property is also what breaks liberalism. For what better way than owning property is there for learning how to be a dictator?" www.karlpolanyisociety.com/2026/02/13/f...

I see a lot of people fixating on how inflation robs them of purchasing power. That’s reasonable, but never let it distract you from the far bigger robber of purchasing power, which is bosses who constantly try reduce your wages so that shareholders and billionaires can get a bigger slice of the pie

"Today, the average WNBA yearly salary is roughly $102,000, while in the NBA it’s $13 million, approximately 130 times greater... and it’s not as if the WNBA’s fortunes are sagging; quite the contrary. The league has been projected to earn $1 billion in 2025"

Joke of the year material here

"The same kinds of people who say “if voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal” don’t seem to apply that argument to firearms, after all...the ease with which one can get a gun in the US should tell you that privately packing heat is already priced into America’s system of government. "

"To those of you living in imperial centers: We understand that your analysis of Iran is mediated by geopolitics. But do not try to derive a political program for populations inside Iran that, in practice, translates into support for the Iranian state." www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...

"Sorry nativism, but contrary to your claim to being universal, there is a deep seated human need for experience and adventure that your unseasoned dork ideology just can’t satisfy."

"But the ethical core of socialism remains inspiring because, in sharp contrast to fascism, it makes far greater demands of us. Socialists want a world where, even if everyone won't be happy, ordinary human misery will replace unnecessary suffering."

The most unsubtle, heavy-handed claims made by pomo academic types have turned out to all be true. Gender is a relation of domination that requires constant, affirming witness. Capitalism will require extractive colonial relations. There’s no subtlety. Every day is like a 101 seminar at Oberlin.

"So, is the modern nation-state really a Chinese model of administration, adopted to channel and control democratic impulses derived largely from the influence of Native American societies...that ultimately came to be justified by a social contract theory derived from Africa?"

"Lending money where it’s needed is what the modern form of finance, for the most part, does not do. What modern finance does, for the most part, is gamble. It speculates on the movements of prices and makes bets on their direction."

"Who is a restaurant for? The obvious answer is their customers—but I’m not so sure that’s always the case... As diners, we keep making the mistake of assuming that restaurants are for everyone."

"...freedom as well as survival may well depend upon our success or failure to persuade the other part of the world to recognize facts as they are and to come to terms with the factuality of the world as it is." - Hannah Arendt, who died 50 years ago today

Why there never was a Vibecession in one chart. It’s always been about the prices of essentials.

Before women, the workplace was perfect. It was full of trees. There was no need to labor with your hands. You didn’t have to wear pants, or any form of clothes. Every kind of animal was there. Hmm I may be thinking of something else women supposedly ruined www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

"...inflation is a further tax on hoarded currency, a tax which no poor person or household receiving a living wage really feels. Households feel Affordability crises, a drop in their wage-income relative to other prices, which is not inflation. Relative price adjustments are never inflation."

Hi, I’m a website, product, or service you’ve relied on for years without incident. Great news: I’ve now been revamped with a mandatory AI component that makes me unusable.

HOW VOTERS PICK A CANDIDATE: -they observe the social environment (largely through media) -they decide what role they want to play in that environment (respected? savvy? oppositional?) -they pick the candidate they think fulfills that role -they reverse-engineer an explanation for their pick

"What is rarely acknowledged is that the psychological and historical appeal of meritocracy is inversely proportional to its tenability. It is in fact hard to imagine a much more utopian idea that has even been posited than meritocracy."

Billionaire transhumanists who seek immortality want to defeat death, but this also means they want to defeat birth & rebirth That attempt to break cycles of renewal and decay isn’t a celebration of life. It’s an attempt to make life more like death, stable & endless rather than fleeting & precious

We must mock the fascists! "the massive protests took on a tone of jubilant contempt, with Trump and his various lackeys derided on signs and in effigies, with jokes that ranged from the high-minded to the vulgar."

"No one can deny the power and size of the AI coalition, an ensemble of Silicon Valley investors, lobbyists, and bought-off politicians; hucksters, carnival barkers, and gravy train chasers; and bosses gleeful at the opportunity to downsize and deskill."

yearly reminder to people insisting that we view Christopher Columbus as "a man of his time" that *the people responsible for the Spanish Inquisition* thought Columbus was out of pocket