There can be no liberty without civilization. And civilization is a secure group. Liberty is not the default state of the universe. In an absolute state of nature (what Thomas Hobbes famously described as the war of "every man against every man") there is total, unrestrained freedom, but zero meaningful liberty. You are free to act however you wish, but anyone stronger is equally free to stop you. True liberty isn't just the absence of physical constraints. It requires the enforcement of boundaries that protect individual agency. Those boundaries are merely theoretical without a mechanism to back them up. That mechanism is the secure group. Civilization establishes order and a monopoly on force to guarantee that individual rights actually mean something in practice. This creates the ultimate tension: the very mechanism required to guarantee liberty is simultaneously its greatest potential threat. The civilization must be powerful enough to protect the individual, but restrained enough not to crush them. If a civilization pursues security as its absolute highest virtue, then a totalitarian regime becomes the ultimate expression of civilization, and liberty is entirely extinguished. This trade-off is the engine of almost all historical political conflict. For liberty to survive within the secure group, the group cannot just protect its members from external threats or internal chaos; it must also design mechanisms to protect the individual from the group itself. If liberty is impossible outside of civilization, then the romanticized idea of "natural liberty" is functionally useless. All meaningful liberty is, by definition, civil liberty. When you strip away the theoretical rhetoric, you are left with a fundamental exchange: you trade the chaotic freedom of the wild for the protected freedom of the group.

Even if they were, ethnicities and religions aren't historical agents. Concrete people are. You are engaging in the mistake of even conceding it could be a valid point. If the bolsheviks were jews and this was ground to accuse all jews, then some jews not being bolsheviks would also be ground to not condemn all jews. Treating "the Jews" (or "the Russians," "the Whites," etc) as a single actor with collective intent is a category error - classic collectivist thinking.

You’ve seen the pattern a hundred times. A group of highly intelligent, well-intentioned experts sits down and designs the perfect detailed plan for education, housing, healthcare, or the entire economy. They have data. They have models. They have authority. Then reality refuses to cooperate. The reason is simple but devastating: The knowledge needed to coordinate a complex modern society is not concentrated in any room or committee. It exists as millions of small, local, and often unspoken pieces of information held by ordinary people (knowledge of specific circumstances, changing conditions, and personal trade-offs that no central authority can ever fully collect or process). This is where centralized planning runs into its hard limit. That said, not all centralization is the same. In domains with clear, singular objectives and where rapid unified action is essential s(uch as national defense) a strong central authority can be highly effective. The state can set the overall mission, incentives, structure, and rules of engagement. The military itself is a classic example of successful centralized command paired with decentralized execution on the ground. The knowledge problem bites hardest when the state tries to do the same thing in areas where goals are diverse, knowledge is widely dispersed, and constant adaptation is required (precisely the domains of economic production, innovation, and everyday resource allocation). In those areas, the state is usually far better at setting the broad rules and incentives than at trying to direct outcomes from the center. The fatal mistake is assuming that because central direction works in some domains, it can be scaled to run society itself.

Laura Loomer is just a grifter. She goes with the wind

JD Vance is an idiot. Exhibit A)

It's very difficult (if not impossible) for humans to fully separate emotions from rationality. This is an abstract exercise where you take apart elements of something that appears as a whole in the person. Emotions are essential for effective decision-making in most real-world scenarios, whether you're a man or a woman. It's just that, on average, women tend to be more emotional. It's a matter of degree.

A great example of how X amplifies obvious lies

The fact that this is legal says a lot about the level of degradation of Western Culture. It needs reform.

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What a circus, my God

Just as parts of the left crossed over to support Trump in the last US election, parts of the right will cross over to support the left in the next one.

The irony. AI zealots are like Climate zealots.

Remember

You’ve probably done this before: You’re in a group conversation and you disagree… but you stay quiet. Not because you don’t have a point. But because you sense that “everyone else” thinks differently. That’s the Spiral of Silence. The theory is simple but brutal: People tend to stay silent when they believe their opinion is in the minority - not out of weakness, but out of fear of social isolation. The result? The majority opinion gets louder and louder (because people feel safe repeating it), while the minority opinion slowly disappears from the conversation. Over time, what started as “just one opinion” starts feeling like the only acceptable one. And social media has supercharged this effect.

Robert D. Putnam’s 2007 paper "E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century" investigated the effects of multiculturalism in society. His finding: More ethnic diversity = less social trust. People "hunker down". Trust drops even within your own group. In homogeneous US communities: 70-80% trust neighbors "a lot". In diverse cities like LA/SF: ~30%. Short-term effect of multiculturalism in practice.

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NEW: UK Defence Secretary John Healey has resigned, saying PM Keir Starmer and the Treasury failed to commit the resources needed for defence amid rising threats. In a resignation letter, Healey said the proposed Defence Investment Plan “falls well short,” warning it could reduce UK forces’ readiness and make the country “less safe.”

The stupidest idea ever. Only in UK

This

Remigration or civil war. Which way, Westerner?