David Hartmann @DavidHartmann

The Battle of Kursk (pure sound of combat)

As a former major fund-raiser for Amnesty - I produced the first five 'Secret Policeman's Balls' - I renounce the mob who have taken over Amnesty Amnesty used to be about trying to do something about TORTURE

Rebecca McCurdy @_RebeccaMcCurdy

2 days ago

Beira's Place, the women's sexual assault support centre founded by JK Rowling, has been labelled an "anti-rights group" by Amnesty International UK, alongside For Women Scotland. Story @heraldscotland 👇 heraldscotland.com/news/26268863.…

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2012 Dilbert Classics Week

This system does not just produce liars – it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit. This environment also produces a kind of cognitive adaptation often described as doublethink – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and to accept both as true when required. It is not merely lying to others, but a learned internal tolerance toward contradiction itself, where inconsistencies are tolerated because survival depends on it. Literally twisting the minds. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others who lived through this recognize the pattern immediately when they see it in Western institutions today. The show trials of Twitter mobs. The compelled speech. The ideological litmus tests for employment. The memory-holing of inconvenient facts. The ritualistic confessions of privilege. To a post-communist eye, it is unmistakable. To eyes that have only known freedom, it looks like a passionate, if misguided, social movement. That gap in perception – between those who have vocabulary for zakłamanie and those who do not – may be one of the most consequential fault lines in the Western world today. Because you cannot fight a disease you cannot name. And you cannot name what your language was never built to describe. The first task, then, is translation – not just of words, but of the lived understanding those words carry. The lie is not a bug in this system. It is the system. Until that is understood, the West will keep arriving, perpetually surprised, to find that the institutions it trusted have been quietly hollowed out from within. 2/2

What the West Still Doesn’t Get It: Communism’s True Core: The Systemic Lie Most people in the West think they understand communism. They picture bread lines, gulags, failed five-year plans, and the collapsed Soviet Union. They treat it as a discredited economic theory – an experiment that proved that abolishing private property doesn’t work. Case closed, history moved on. This misunderstanding may be the most dangerous intellectual failure of our time. Communism was never primarily an economic system. Economics was the surface. Beneath it lay something far more insidious: a total, systemic, institutionalized commitment to lying. Not occasional dishonesty. Not spin or propaganda in the ordinary sense. Something deeper – a civilizational war against truth itself, waged through every institution, every classroom, every newspaper, every conversation, until reality itself became negotiable and the lie became the air people breathed. The Words We’re Missing The Polish language, forged by decades of living under this system, produced words for this phenomenon that English simply cannot match: Zakłamanie [zah-kwah-MAH-nyeh] – a state of total, pervasive, socially embedded falsehood, a condition in which an entire society is saturated with lies so thoroughly that truth becomes almost inaccessible. Obłuda [ob-woo-dah] – a deep, performative hypocrisy, the gap between what is proclaimed and what is actually practiced, the mask worn so long it begins to feel like a face. These are not words for individual liars. They describe a system – a mode of social organization built on organized mendacity, where the lie is not the exception but the foundation. English has no single word for either concept, and that linguistic gap is not a coincidence. It reflects a gap in experience. Cultures that did not live under communism lack the vocabulary because they lack the wound. And because they lack the vocabulary, they struggle to recognize the thing when it reappears in new clothing. The Continuity: Communism, Leftism, Wokeism What we call wokeism today, or the broader radical left, is not a new phenomenon. It is the same operating system running on updated hardware. The specifics have changed – instead of the proletariat, we have marginalized identity groups; instead of bourgeois class enemies, we have racists and transphobes; instead of socialist realism, we have DEI statements. But the deep structure is the same. That deep structure is this: truth is not discovered, it is assigned. Reality is not something to be understood honestly but something to be narrated strategically. Language is not a tool for communication but a weapon of power. And anyone who resists the approved narrative is not simply wrong – they are dangerous, and must be silenced, shamed, or destroyed. This is zakłamanie in its modern form. This is obłuda wearing a human rights badge. The same movement that insists men can become women will insist, with equal fervor, that questioning this is an act of violence. The same institutions that claim to champion free inquiry systematically suppress dissent. The same people who invoke tolerance as their highest value are among the most intolerant forces in public life. The contradiction is not accidental – it is structural. It is the system working as designed. Why the West Still Doesn’t Get It People who grew up in freedom tend to assume, at some level, that bad actors know they are lying. That somewhere behind the ideological performance, there is a cynical operator who privately acknowledges reality. This assumption is wrong, and it is why Westerners consistently underestimate what they are dealing with. The totalitarian lie, at its mature stage, is not cynical. It is believed. Or rather, it creates a condition in which the distinction between belief and performance collapses entirely. People learn to say things they do not believe so fluently, and for so long, that they lose access to what they actually think. 1/2

The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment – the real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire The French Enlightenment and the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment happened simultaneously, in the same century, reading the same books, arguing about the same questions. They reached completely opposite conclusions. One produced the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution. The other produced the guillotine. This is the most important civilizational fork in modern history. 1. The French Enlightenment begins with the assumption that human beings can be improved by reason – that if you strip away the corrupting institutions of Church, tradition, and inherited authority, the natural goodness underneath will organize itself into a just society. This sounds like progress. It is a fantasy with a body count. Every attempt to implement it has required, at some point, a Committee of Public Safety to handle the people who turned out not to be naturally good enough. 2. The Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment begins with the opposite assumption: human beings are what they are, not what they could be if properly enlightened. Hume grounds morality in human nature as it actually operates – sympathy, habit, sentiment, the slow accumulation of social trust. Smith shows that self-interest, properly channeled, produces collective benefit without a planner. Neither man is building a utopia. Both are building with the actual material available. 3. Burke is the direct refutation, written in real time. He published Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 – before the Terror, predicting it precisely – because he understood that institutions are not obstacles to human flourishing, they are its precondition. They contain accumulated wisdom — the knowledge of the dead — that cannot be recovered once destroyed. Pull society apart to improve it and you don’t get the General Will. You get Robespierre. 4. The American founders read Burke, Hume, Smith, and Montesquieu – the Frenchman who looked at England and understood what France was missing. They built a system that takes human nature as given — self-interested, power-hungry, tribal — and constructs institutions to contain those tendencies rather than assume they disappear once the right people are in charge. Checks and balances are not a design flaw. They are what you build when you don’t believe in philosopher-kings. 5. 1776 versus 1789. Same Enlightenment, same century, same vocabulary of liberty and reason. One produces a constitutional republic that has survived two and a half centuries of stress, civil war, and upheaval. The other produces, in sequence: the Terror, Napoleon, 1848, the Commune, and eventually — via Marx, who was a Frenchman in spirit if not in birth — the entire catastrophe of the twentieth century. The difference was not intelligence or intention. It was the starting assumption about human nature. Get that wrong and everything that follows is wrong with it. 6. The guillotine is not the Revolution’s failure. It is its logical conclusion. If man is naturally good and the system is corrupt, then whoever seizes the system in the name of natural goodness is licensed to do anything. The General Will cannot be wrong. Those who resist it are not opponents – they are enemies of nature itself. 7. The real antidote to Rousseau and Voltaire was never a better French philosopher. It was a different civilizational tradition – one that builds with human beings as they are; that treats inherited institutions as repositories of wisdom rather than obstacles to progress; that distributes power rather than concentrating it in whoever currently claims to know the General Will. That tradition was built in Edinburgh, London, and Philadelphia. It is currently under sustained assault — from exactly the same ideas, in exactly the same form, with exactly the same confidence — that Burke watched demolish France in 1789. He was right then. He is right now.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

2 days ago

Voltaire – the fake antidote to Rousseau He is the most entertaining man of the eighteenth century and the most seductive trap in Western intellectual history. He seems like the cure for Rousseau. He is the other half of the disease. 1. Where Rousseau is emotional, Voltaire is

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World War II timeline [🎞️ stoferr]

Younger people don’t have a distinctive handwriting style like previous generations. They don’t learn cursive - because why when you type everything? So they have this childish block print, and it says nothing about them. In the past you developed a style, cultivated it - and it reflected who you were. You had ‘experts’ who might tell you what your letter formation said about you. You had handwriting experts who might testify for or against you at trial to prove this or that. It’s weird. I don’t physically write as much as I used to. And I when I make a journal entry or something - my hand gets tired quicker. There is an entire culture passing away before our eyes. Maybe it’s unimportant, but it’s real.

Should a country that kills athletes be allowed to participate in international athletic competitions? My vote is no.

Marco: "Just weeks ago, a convicted sex offender and a foreign national was shielded from deportation by the governor of Minnesota. Tim Walz issued him a pardon. This week, I revoked his legal status and as of today, he has been removed from the US."

July 10, 1943. Two hours before dawn, the biggest fleet the world had ever assembled starts putting men on the beaches of Sicily, and the war finally comes home to Axis soil. The night before, the airborne drop had scattered paratroopers all over the island in a windblown mess. This was the main event. More than 3,000 ships out of the darkness, over 150,000 men going ashore in the first rush, more than 4,000 aircraft overhead. Numbers bigger than what would hit Normandy eleven months later. Nobody had ever tried anything on this scale. The Allies came in at three points along the southern coast, Licata, Gela, and Scoglitti on the American side, and the beaches near Syracuse on the British. Two of the biggest personalities of the war were running the show and could not stand each other. George Patton had the US Seventh Army. Bernard Montgomery had the British Eighth. From the first hour it was as much a race between the two of them as it was a fight against the enemy. The first troops came ashore against almost nothing. Some Italian coastal units gave up without much of a fight. For a moment it looked easy. Then the panzers came. At Gela the Germans slammed a counterattack straight into Patton's thin beachhead, tanks rolling down toward the water while the Americans were still landing supplies. It got close. Tanks got within a couple thousand yards of the sea. What saved the beach was the navy, big guns out in the bay firing over the heads of their own men and blowing the German armor apart on the open ground. The line held. Within six weeks Sicily was Allied, Mussolini was under arrest, and Italy, Hitler's oldest partner, was falling out of the war. The soft underbelly was open.

Now that Europe has become post-heroic , with its scarce youth declaring its unwillingness to defend their own countries, the fact that Israeli youth do fight to defend their homes and country is not viewed as admirable, patriotism is ridiculed and bravery despised.

The Atlantic’s new cover story about the end of reading is absolutely frightening. Here are 5 concerning facts from it: 1) 51% of adults read 0 books a year: According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. 2) Reading for fun has gone from a mainstream hobby to a niche one: Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. 3) Everyone is reading less: The decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most—retirees, women, and college graduates—have seen a collapse. 4) Books are getting simpler and shorter: New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. 5) Kids are struggling to read and doing less of it: Fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have slid for the past decade. From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely or never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent. "Every year older a child gets, the less they like to read." For most of history, the biggest reading problem was illiteracy. People didn't know how to read books. But today the biggest problem is post-literacy. People know how to read books, but don't. A society that doesn't read loses more than just books. People lose the ability to think critically, focus deeply, and see life through multiple perspectives. The world needs you. Please consider picking up a book today. theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/…

An American soldier, Iraq 2005. "Those Brits are a strange old race. They show affection by abusing each other, will think nothing of casually stopping in the middle of a firefight for a 'brewup' and eat food that I wouldn't give to a dying dog. But fuck me, I would rather have one British squaddie on side than an entire battalion of Spetznaz! Why? Because the British are the only people in this world who when the chips are down and it seems like there is no hope left, instead of getting sentimental or hysterical, will strap on their pack, charge their rifle, light up a smoke, and calmly and wryly grin, 'Well, are we going then you wanker?" 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧

‼️‼️🇺🇦🇷🇺 In a devastating maritime blitz that marks one of the most extensive asymmetric assaults on naval logistics in modern history, Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have completely paralyzed Russian commercial and military shipping across the Sea of Azov. The catastrophic operational fallout has forced Russian border authorities to abruptly suspend all vessel movement through the critical Don-Donbas-Azov shipping canal and completely freeze transit applications for the strategic Kerch Strait. According to an official briefing by the Commander of Ukraine's Unmanned Systems Forces, Robert "Madyar" Brovdi, elite strike units operating under the SBS Birds command executed an industrial-scale drone operation overnight. Over the course of a single night, Ukrainian drone swarms successfully hunted and battered 28 vessels belonging to Russia's illicit "shadow fleet" in the Sea of Azov. This single-night victory caps off a relentless 6-day maritime blockade. In total, Ukrainian drone operators have achieved 73 confirmed precision hits across 76 hostile vessels, systematically dismantling the Kremlin's maritime supply chain. The official damage log confirmed by the SBS Birds command includes: 21 shadow-fleet oil tankers aggressively neutralized to choke off fuel supplies. 4 maritime tugboats and 2 dry cargo vessels heavily damaged. 1 specialized engineering vessel (dredger) critical for port infrastructure knocked out. Simultaneously, the large-scale operation projected immense kinetic power deep into the enemy's operational rear. Across occupied Crimea and the southern frontline sectors, Ukrainian forces successfully obliterated 53 legitimate military targets—obliterating crucial air defense coordinates, radar stations, and energy infrastructure. By turning the Sea of Azov into a burning trap, Ukraine has effectively shattered Russia’s southern military logistics while severing the vital economic channels Moscow uses to fund its war machine. See the latest updates with us: @visionergeo

The Free Speech Union is deeply shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Ann Widdecombe — a formidable woman and a staunch defender of free speech. Rest in peace, Ann.

Alex Phillips @ThatAlexWoman

2 days ago

No doubt about it, they only ever made one Ann Widdecombe The scariest, sassiest, most diminutive of women. Witty, tough, loyal to principles, steadfast, reliable, utterly unique Good luck to everyone upstairs. Widdy is coming to lick things into shape. Honoured to have

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Activist: "Farmers are millionaires sitting on land worth a fortune. They can afford the inheritance tax." Farmer: "How much did I earn last year?" Activist: "I don't know. A lot, surely." Farmer: "Twenty-two thousand. Before the tractor broke." Activist: "But the land's worth millions." Farmer: "On paper. I can't eat the field or spend it. The only way to turn it into money is to sell it, and then I'm not a farmer, I'm a bloke who used to have a farm." Activist: "So sell a corner of it." Farmer: "A corner doesn't work as a farm. You can't run a suckler herd on the bit that's left after the taxman's had his slice. You sell one field, then the next bill comes, then another field. It ends one way." Activist: "The land only costs that much because you won't sell it." Farmer: "It costs that much because a hedge fund three counties over wants it for carbon credits and a footballer wants it for the view. Neither of them has ever calved a cow at three in the morning. They set the price. I get the bill." Activist: "It's still an asset." Farmer: "It's a workplace that happens to be expensive. You've decided the value of the shop is the same as the wage of the shopkeeper. Come back in February and watch me not be a millionaire in the rain."