In 1968, while teenage Red Guards beat their professors to death with clubs in Beijing courtyards, Jean-Paul Sartre sat in Paris calling Mao's Cultural Revolution a model of revolutionary democracy. The most celebrated intellectual in France looked at a country burning its own libraries and saw liberation. He sold the Maoist newspaper La Cause du Peuple on French street corners himself, holding it aloft like a sacrament. Consider what he was endorsing. Between 1966 and 1976, the Cultural Revolution killed somewhere between 500,000 and two million people. Schools shut down across the entire country. Students dragged teachers onto stages, hung placards around their necks, forced them to kneel on broken glass, then murdered them. The historian Bian Zhongyun, vice-principal of a girls' school in Beijing, died on August 5, 1966, beaten by her own students with nail-studded clubs. Sartre called this the people governing themselves. You should understand why a man this intelligent got it this wrong. Sartre believed knowledge served power, that truth was whatever the revolution required, that the individual existed to be dissolved into the collective will. So when Mao abolished the distinction between teacher and student, between expert and mob, Sartre cheered. He had spent decades arguing that bourgeois reason was a class weapon. Here was a regime taking him at his word and clubbing the reasoners to death. This is what economic illiteracy buys you. A university, a price, a contract, and a peasant's grain stockpile all carry knowledge that no central planner can seize or replicate. Mises explained the calculation problem in 1920. Hayek explained dispersed knowledge in 1945. Sartre had access to both and chose the dunce cap of the collective instead, then handed out its propaganda on the Rue de Rennes. He died in 1980, mourned by 50,000 followers, never having retracted a word about Mao. The professors of Beijing got no such funeral. They got a ditch, and a philosopher in Paris explaining that their murder was freedom.

Britain now arrests more people for social media posts than China, Russia, and Turkey combined nearly matching the rest of the top 10 countries combined Britain really leads the world on these thought crimes Insane how the UK, which used to be a free country, turned out to be so totalitarian

BREAKING: President Trump publicly rebukes Israel over its war against Hezbollah. "Israel's fighting Hezbollah too long and too many people are being killed." Trump said he opposed strikes that destroy apartment buildings filled with civilians and revealed he urged Israel to let Syria take the lead against Hezbollah instead. "If Israel can't do the job without killing everyone else, he'll do the job. Syria will do the job."

I’m in Afghanistan right now and it’s unclear what your entire military career achieved

I get why it's done, and I don't have a better alternative, but I really hate patents-as-measure-of-invention.

The main question is how can we ruin this guys company for doxxing the man who didn’t want to work for him?

Sydney Sweeney will flirt with any man who talks to her I have never seen anything like this before

My opinion on the actual Iran deal (MEK infiltration of Congress aside): This may end up being an even bigger tar baby for the Trump administration than actually starting the Iranian war. This has nothing to do with capitulation accusations or JCPOA comparisons. It's that it's much more than a "what's wrong with wanting peace" thing. It all comes down to: the deal legitimizes the IRGC. That legitimacy is going to be the decisive factor for a lot of players, Israel most of all. The moment the US signs across the table from the IRGC, it's treating it as a normal government instead of what the Iranians in exile say, what Israel believed going in, what Trump himself said a few months ago. My read on why the US did it anyway: they got their interests served, wanted an official "war's over" to run on going into the midterms, and needed to buy time on the Strait of Hormuz. Fair enough on our own terms. Disaster in geopolitics. IMO, the better outcome was to refuse to legitimize any regime at all, even if that meant no deal and just holding the status quo until we figured out a real answer to Hormuz.

We’ve lost Venezuela. We might lose Cuba. The condition of Palestine is desperate. Global climate action is dead. Technofascists are running everything. The US “left” is Magafied populist trash in possession of zero brain power.

White House, June 2024 vs June 2026:

Ending the war as soon as possible is the best outcome left, but the truth is Trump accomplished none of his goals and lost the war to Iran. Iran's nuclear program is not eliminated, nor are its ballistic missiles. But Iran now knows it can crater the global economy at any time.