crushedoranges
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User ID: 111
crushedoranges
14hr ago
I'm sorry, this is where I break with libertarians. What exactly do you think gives courts and contracts their teeth? Violence and kidnapping. Or sovereignty, as it is more commonly known. A monopoly on violence.
Suppose me and a few hundred thousand people came together and formed a corporation with salaried employees with the duties of ruling over contractual disputes, dealing with petty crime, and all issues related to security, and everyone involved agreed to defer to this body in binding arbitration and forgo their right to banditry and warlordism.
That corporation is a state. Congratulations, you've recreated statism with extra steps.
Libertarians aren't prophets in the wilderness screaming about the injustice of collective violence. Yes, it is worth killing people and imprisoning people over. People for thousands of years have valued law and order over the Hobbsian war of all against all and people are greatly relieved to have left the tribal experience of feuds and wergild.
crushedoranges
14hr ago
The current Supreme Ayatollah declared a fatwa against nuclear weapons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Khamenei%27s_fatwa_against_nuclear_weapons
Now, obviously, the degree of adherence to this is obviously not strict (why else have such facilities capable of it?) but the Islamic clerics may not know to what precise degree their nuclear program is progressing, or have the technical know-how to really understand it. So it's hard to say if Iran 'knows' anything, or to ascribe rational-actor motives to them, if only because the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. How much information is the IRGC relaying to the clerics that supposedly rule the country?
I suppose only the Mossad really knows what is actually happening.
crushedoranges
2d ago
The Buddhist would, of course, be horrified.
The Christian could reason that, acting in the same way as a mother cat would for her kittens, the man is simply doing what a cat would be inclined to do in nature, which is to hunt. And God made his creatures to do what they do, and lacking volition are inherently blameless in deed.
The aesthete would go: "Which is cuter and/or tastes better?"
I note that Bezos had a noted aversion to helicopter flight (perhaps a part a fear of flight, a part knowing the horrible safety record of personal helicopters) that he seems to have gotten over, just for this woman. To the point where he would go on longer helicopter rides just to hang out with her.
Placing your life in the hands of a woman is rare enough: placing it under IFR flight rules is singularly rare.
I don't know if you've ever been in a helicopter, but it's like putting your head next to a concert amp playing the sound of a chainsaw. No amount of plastic titties can overcome that. There are easier ways to get with a chick then that. I am inclined to believe that he is genuinely infatuated with her.
crushedoranges
7d ago
Life is absurd, so the base state of humanity is to be a clown.
crushedoranges
7d ago
We are three generations into the liberal experiment of the emancipation of women and the resulting sexual revolution and birth rates are already in the terminal phase. If you want an example of societies that are collapsing because of it, you just have to look out of the window.
Societies do not have to be healthy by liberal standards to be self replicating: see, all of history.
You think the Somali Muslims and Amish that will replace us will share our egalitarian ideals?
crushedoranges
7d ago
"Dad, I want to get married to a husband who takes marriage seriously and wants to start a family with me."
"Noooooo, my daughter, you need to ride the cock carousel from fifteen to thirty and waste your time with cads and fuckboys! How else are you going to become a bitter wine aunt? The world needs more girlbosses. Focus on your career and I'll pay for your IVF in your late forties with the finest Oxford sperm!"
crushedoranges
9d ago
Women laying with popular men is the feminine form of the 'nice guy' who orbits, hoping to transform a sexual relationship into an emotional one. Some of them do understand, eventually, that the sexual appeal is the stronger card they have to play (which is why they suddenly become frigid after a girlhood of being a slag) but a lifetime of using their strongest card has inflated their sense of self worth, and neglecting the other aspects of their personal lives hits home all at once.
crushedoranges
10d ago
I am constantly reminded day after day that although the right has a very good understanding of what the left wants and thinks, the opposite is not true.
Suppose I told you that Democrats want to make abortions of unrestricted term legal on the federal level. Then, you would say, that is not true: that only certain extreme activists would say so, that they are a minority within a minority: that democrats in general absolutely do not celebrate abortions or attempt to sacralize it as some sort of female right of passage.
But yet, knowing this, you apply the broad brush to Republicans without the nuances or the understanding. All of the logic and reason of the previous paragraph falls out of the back of your head, and you say: "Republicans want to ban abortion federally."
Be honest with yourself. Are you being generous with your political enemies, or are you close-minded and prejudiced?
(After writing this out, I realize you could be referring 'they' as evangelicals, but the basic observation still is the same. Which ones?)
crushedoranges
11d ago
You can't fight against a man who has the Mandate of Heaven: history bends to his whim, success manifests in his chamberpot. All that the hero king touches turns to gold before his manifest destiny.
crushedoranges
13d ago
the Ayatollah is hiding in some Persian bunker, wondering if the Americans or the Israelis will give him the martyrdom he's being hoping for.
Bibi is on Fox News, talking about his friend Trump.
I think Israel is winning.
crushedoranges
15d ago
I'd rewrite it to... 'that black hole of tastelessness, of which the very fabric of space-time screams in silent surrender to the singularity of vulgarity.'
They're stupid by the standard of Supreme Court justices. The late RGB, although I ideologically disagreed with her, could actually argue the case for a living, prescriptive constitution. Sotomayor and Ketanji are unashamed diversity-hires whose dissents are so embarrassing that I'd credit them to their clerks to save face.
crushedoranges
16d ago
The Antipopulist is literally the nerd emoji who goes around saying, 'if we replace all the MAY with SHALL, that TOTALLY restores the legitimacy of the system. This won't be worked around by motivated reasoning! The open-borders advocates will take their ball and go home and the government will enforce the laws as intended!'
I refuse to accept it, on this face, to believe that someone could be stupid enough to argue this. Or that he would believe us stupid enough to believe it. It is totally pedantic, almost surreal. This will not happen. It has never happened. No one has given up on a cause because of the wording of a law. And all of it is a moot point, because, and let me shout it loud so that the people in the back can hear...
IT DOESN'T MATTER HOW WELL A LAW IS WRITTEN IF THE PEOPLE IN CHARGE OF ENFORCING IT DECLINE TO DO SO.
OBVIOUSLY.
The hostility is deserved.
crushedoranges
17d ago
If we decided immigration policy based on what aesthetically looked good to liberals, we'd have open borders.
I'm reminded of the meme of 'Top Twelve Images That Will Make You Go Fuck Having Borders And Laws', roughly paraphrased, with a picture of a crying brown crudely drawn in fake news article. If you give into emotional blackmail, then every illegal will cry and sob as they're yanked to the border. No one ever goes 'it's a fair cop, guv' and gamely goes back to South America with a cheeky, roguish grin. We're not playing cops and robbers. This is real life.
What you are getting now is the compromise between open borders and putting up guards on the Berlin Wall and ordering them to shoot to kill.
crushedoranges
17d ago
The American economy is not dependent on imports from China, and neither does it rely on exports to it. All it needs to do to blockade China is block the straits of Malacca and Tiran.
crushedoranges
18d ago
Assume that you are a democrat and you have progressive inclinations, and you live in a community of similarly minded individuals.
What if I told you I was going to import a lot MAGA Republicans, and not the standard Republicans, but ones who compete amongst themselves to buy Trump-labeled kitsch. Who immediately demand that the public library be replaced with a church, and the lesbian cafes with titty bars. That the buses should be sold for scrap as they take too much space on the street for their hummers to pass. And not only are they so numerous as to immediately change the demography of the town, they also vote, so that your well-meaning local representative is replaced by a used car salesman who loots the public treasury at every opportunity.
This would approximate the reaction that many people have to having the city's least desirable renting underclass moved into their neighborhood.
crushedoranges
18d ago
Melkor and Sauron were already immortal spirits with immense power amongst the Valar and Maiar. So in this sense, they were already beyond Fang Yuan's desperation. But this was not enough, never enough. Melkor was arguably the most powerful amongst the ranks of the Valar, in his capacity to create dissonances, but he was not Eru Iluvatar: and he could never usurp or replace him. Similarly, Sauron was great amongst the Maiar, but aspired higher. Even in Lord of the Rings all he does is attempt to take the place of his absent master, rather than attempt to free him.
Our poor MC would have loved to been Sauron, to have an immortal span of life, but quickly the prize would seem poisoned, as there are immortals of higher station still, and inevitably he will scheme and plot until he runs into the face of God, for that is the only logical end, other than defeat and destruction.
crushedoranges
19d ago
I don't know how you could manage to turn political murder into something fake and gay but the Zizians managed to do so. It's not the principles that are important, it's actually being able to do shit. If I could radicalize the people inside of an Applebees at 7pm they'd be able to do much more damage and cause a nation-wide lockdown.
crushedoranges
22d ago
A younger version of me might say, 'tits or gtfo'. I know better now.
Oh, how I know.
The whole premise of that particular idiosyncratic statement is that once the woman shows her tits, it is a fundamental humiliation: that she acknowledges she has nothing to contribute to the conversation but the aesthetic value of her body. If she feels objectified, good. That is the point.
Once that Rubicon is crossed, there is no going back. There is only the diminishing value of rapidly vanishing youth. Once the tits are shown, they cannot be unshown. You will never be taken seriously again, because to do so would be unfair to the literally countless other women who must compete for men's intellect without the benefit of gratitious nudity.
Aella is a woman of loose morals, literally (and with the intent of accuracy) one of negotiable affection. Her intellect shall always have qualifications because there is no end to men desperate for a crumb of pussy to validate her every musing and whim.
You can't make a ho a housewife. She cashed in respectability to ride the cock carousel. If she really cared about the opinions of others, she wouldn't have fucked thousands of men to begin with. She feels shame because she should feel shame. She gave up something meaningful for nororiety, fleeting and ephemeral. And that's really the end of the story. Hos mad. Hos sad. Life goes on.
crushedoranges
28d ago
Because taking on sovereign debt is borrowing from your children and incurring a obligation upon generations yet unborn for your personal benefit.
If great men are those who plant trees who will shade those long after they are gone, then the weak man consumes those fruits, and leaves the future to the harsh light of the unforgiving sun.
Goya: Saturn Devours His Son
crushedoranges
1mo ago
I live in Canada.
There's no amount of propaganda that can make land or housing an unattractive investment. If people want to live somewhere badly enough, it increases the subjective value. It is fundamentally a doomed proposition unless you adapt a communist system where the government decides where and how you live. Land is such a powerful store of wealth that the primary goal of wars - not just in human societies, but in apes, and all sorts of creatures who fight over territory - is its acquisition.
Even if you say: 'all land is no longer an speculative investment vehicle' - it will not change the essence of the fact that people will start exchanging property rights with bullets instead of dollars. Because that was the status quo, before the market.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
Land is perhaps the ur-investment, the one thing guaranteed that God (and perhaps the Dutch) aren't making more of. Even in societies where the government owns all the land, like in China, and merely hands out leases you have crazy real estate bubbles.
There is fundamentally no way to uncouple housing from investment because houses are expensive and take a lot of time and effort to build. There will always be fewer houses then there are people willing to buy them.
crushedoranges
1mo ago
It's an objective truth that people have gotten fatter, not just women.
It's an subjective one that women's fashions have trended to the blue-haired and side-cutted. Androgynous, maybe. I would say 'less aesthetically feminine'.
Although on average, people are having less sex, the ones who are having it are having a lot more of it.
"I want to start a family with a woman I find attractive and young and who isn't the town bike" isn't the end of the world.
I was more objecting to the provocative terminology that libertarians use: that taxation is theft, that bans are imprisonment and murder, that many straightforward and inoffensive things are in fact statist violence to the individual. It is no more convincing to me than the vegan framing of an industrial concentration camp of imprisoned bovine lifeforms is, in fact, a cattle pen. It is a stupid way to argue and no one is actually convinced by that sort of rhetoric.
The sacral force of the law has always held the connotation of life or death consequence: since Roman times it was thus. Not everyone follows laws because of moral duty: justice carries both the scales and the sword! It is so obvious that only libertarians feel smug about stating the obvious. Yes, the state has the power to enforce its directives with force. That is a good thing. If it did not, then it would not have the power to make anyone heed it. And that threshold of necessary violence is decided by the people of the nation, not libertarians!
If you don't have that, you don't really have a society: only a collection of strangers in an economic zone.
Only a libertarian would believe that without a state, men would follow laws. Thousands of years of history have taught us this, that ambitious men who break weak states soon place themselves above it, to rule like tyrants. Similarly as you have encountered hundreds of critiques of libertarianism, I have read just as much apologia for it and have emerged thoroughly unconvinced of its merit and totally dumbfounded by its complete unseriousness.
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