WorkingStiff 🇨🇦 @WorkingStiff10

Le progressisme est le pire cancer des 50 dernières années. Pas parce qu'il est "de gauche". Parce qu'il a volé un mot — progrès — pour vendre exactement son contraire. C'est la thèse de Thiel. Une fois que tu la vois, tu ne peux plus la dé-voir. Dans les années 60, l'Occident construisait. On allait sur la Lune. On bâtissait des centrales nucléaires, des avions supersoniques, on parlait sérieusement de coloniser Mars et de vaincre le cancer en dix ans. Le progrès, c'était des atomes : de l'énergie moins chère, des transports plus rapides, des vies plus longues. Puis quelque chose s'est cassé autour de 1971. L'innovation dans le monde physique s'est arrêtée net. Le Concorde a été retiré — on vole moins vite aujourd'hui qu'il y a 50 ans. Le nucléaire a été tué par la peur. Le salaire réel médian a stagné pendant un demi-siècle. "On nous avait promis des voitures volantes, on a eu 140 caractères." Mais l'humain a besoin de croire qu'il avance. Alors le progressisme a fait une chose géniale et terrifiante : il a déplacé le mot "progrès" du monde des atomes vers le monde des symboles. Puisqu'on ne savait plus agrandir le gâteau, on a décrété que le seul combat qui compte était de le redécouper. Plus de croissance à promettre ? On promet de la redistribution, de la repentance, des comités, des labels, des normes. La machine à créer a été remplacée par la machine à gérer le déclin — et on a appelé ça "le bon côté de l'Histoire". C'est là que Girard rejoint Thiel. Le progressisme n'est pas une politique, c'est une religion sécularisée. Il a gardé tous les rouages du christianisme — le péché, la culpabilité, la confession, le bouc émissaire à sacrifier — mais il a jeté la rédemption et la transcendance. Résultat : une religion qui ne sait que désigner des coupables. Jamais pardonner. Jamais construire. Et les coupables désignés, ce sont toujours les mêmes : ceux qui bâtissent. L'entrepreneur, l'ingénieur, le fondateur, celui qui prend des risques et crée quelque chose à partir de rien. Pendant ce temps on érige en héros le commentateur, le régulateur, le consultant — celui qui ne produit rien mais qui distribue les bons points moraux. Voilà pourquoi c'est un cancer, au sens propre. Une cellule cancéreuse n'est pas un envahisseur extérieur. C'est une cellule de ton propre corps qui oublie sa fonction, refuse de mourir, et se met à grossir sans rien produire d'utile — jusqu'à étouffer les organes qui font vivre l'ensemble. Le progressisme, c'est exactement ça : une partie de la société qui a cessé de créer de la valeur, qui se nourrit de celle des autres, et qui appelle ça de la vertu. La bonne nouvelle, c'est qu'un cancer, ça se soigne. Le remède n'est pas la nostalgie. C'est de rendre au mot "progrès" son sens originel : construire des choses réelles. De l'énergie abondante. Des frontières nouvelles. Des fondateurs qu'on célèbre au lieu de les juger. Le futur n'appartient pas à ceux qui redécoupent le gâteau. Il appartient à ceux qui en font un plus grand.

Here's one of Michael Crichton's very finest quotes, especially applicable to climate "science": "I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right ... In science, consensus is irrelevant." Best to everyone, w.

PoIiMath @politicalmath

a week ago

Michael Crichton is such a fascinating figure and it is a goddamn shame he died so young This guy got into Harvard Medical School and said "actually, I want to write stories" so he wrote one of the most harrowing long short stories, the Andromeda Strain. This guy was addicted

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The Liberal government often feels like a mashup of Animal Farm, 1984, and Brave New World. Animal Farm: Rule in the name of equality, then reward the insiders. 1984: Control language, police opinion, punish dissent, and call it protecting democracy. Brave New World: Keep people distracted, dependent, entertained, and morally smug while the country gets weaker. Different books. Same warning. One showed power through propaganda. One showed power through fear. One showed power through comfort. The Liberals use all three. They sell censorship as safety. They sell economic pain as virtue. They sell elite status-signalling as compassion. That’s where luxury beliefs come in. Luxury beliefs are ideas pushed by comfortable elites who never pay the real price for them. Open borders for other neighbourhoods. Energy costs for other households. Speech limits for other people. Cultural experiments for other families. Ordinary Canadians get the bill. The political class gets the applause. That’s the pattern Orwell and Huxley warned about. Not jackboots. Not prison camps. Something more polished. A government that speaks like a therapist, spends like a drunk, censors like a control freak, and calls it progress. Same cage. Better branding.

@Tablesalt13 As much of a leftist schill douche Brian is, in his defense, Montreal is gorgeous.

@wil_da_beast630 This is the exact same power play as redefining racism as only racial discrimination plus power

It saddens me greatly to think, that before the internet was invented, many people spent their whole life trapped in the wrong body without ever being aware of it.

It is not just racism. It is Communism expressed through racist framing. That's a very different thing. It almost seemed like people were ready and able to understand it back in 2021, but we've regressed. If you want to be serious about it, the targets are 1) The Communist (oppressor/oppressed) logic of group-based identification and struggle; 2) The disparate impact doctrine of civil rights law. If you whine and cry about it being "just racism" without addressing (2), you're just stepping into your pre-scripted role to advance (1), written by your enemies to use YOU to conquer you. The point of Communist oppressor/oppressed (Manichean conflict) logic is to create an increasingly self-conscious fight between two identity groups until a final calamitous rupture point. As Marx and Engels put it in the Communist Manifesto, it is to arrive at a point where the fight ends either in the revolutionary reconstitution of the society at large or in the common ruin of the contending classes. The ability for people like Wu (who is just doing a Maoism with race here) to get away with this ultimately boils down to an annoying cultural acceptance of disparate impact that's even more ultimately based on its de facto and even de jure codification in law. When the Civil Rights Act (CRA) was passed in 1964 on the bedrock of the 14th Amendment, there was no racial preferencing in the text of the law. In 1971, SCOTUS decided in Griggs v. Duke Power that de facto discrimination can be treated as though it is occurring even when there's no evidence of discriminatory intent if there is a disparate impact (inequity by group identity) in the outcome of some employment circumstance. Specifically, Duke Power Co. had an aptitude test for management roles and proportionally fewer black people than white people passed the test, creating a "disparate impact" (inequity) in outcomes thus access to management jobs. No evidence of discrimination or discriminatory intent by Duke Power Co. could be identified, but SCOTUS decided that the test operates in a de facto discriminatory way, for which Duke Power Co. could be held to account under CRA. This logic, which is ultimately a Soviet-Communist injection of "actual equality" (equity) logic into our discrimination law has expanded ever since and has gone on to be codified in the law itself since. Now, if there is a disparate impact where some group does worse on average than whites, who are held as the societal standard, that group can legally and socially claim discrimination and win. That is, the United States Congress passed a law that was meant to prevent racial discrimination, inter alia, and it was immediately turned into a Communist oppressor/oppressed weapon that we've never actually rejected. The entire DEI industry (Soviet-era korenizatsiya and raznoobraziya repackaged for American identity categories as sub-ethnicities) rests on this bogus foundation. To this day, we celebrate the law for what it was supposed to be and suffer under what Communists managed to turn it into against our own interests and society. Because whites are held up as the societal standard against which this program runs, and for other reasons, the manifestation of this program is the actual institutional racism and justification for individual and structural racisms against whites. In the Soviet language, whites in America (and Europe and the Commonwealth) have replaced the "Great Russians" in the parallel program in Soviet Union or the Han Chinese in Mao's adaptation of it to the Chinese circumstance. What we call "white supremacy culture" or even just "whiteness," they called "Great Russian chauvinism" in USSR and "Han chauvinism" in China. In typical "your enemies' reaction is your real action" fashion, this genuine multi-level anti-white racism in society generates a white victimhood mentality that Communist agitation will guide into an aggrieved white racial consciousness (because they are actually being made victims of an unjust system, and moreover because it's happening on a point in an issue where whites by and large rejected racial consciousness only to have that thrown back in their faces). But this means that the total quantity of aggrieved racial consciousnesses in direct conflict with one another goes up, and the Communist agenda item of creating mass self-aware group-based conflict where both sides have a pseudo-legitimate claim to victimhood succeeds. The issue (race) isn't the issue for the Communists behind this; the issue is the intractable conflict of group-versus-group, self-conscious of their identities as hard-done-by victim groups (gateway to the revolution). The way this knot gets untangled is not through culture warring or competitive victimhood, white against black against Asian against Hispanic. It gets untangled by filing strategic lawsuits that end up with SCOTUS overturning the disparate impact doctrine then appealing to the level playing field as the moral high ground of the land to marginalize this Woke oppressor/oppressed crap as manipulative, weak, and beneath our dignity as Americans and human beings. It cannot be won by sacrificing our dignity as Americans and human beings to play in the mud of aggrieved racial consciousness like the Communists want us to. This process, happily, has already begun. SCOTUS has already ruled correctly on the issue with college admissions, and while the colleges are now putting up a fight, they'll eventually lose it if we keep our eyes clear and keep going (more lawsuits, more cultural appeal to the real moral high ground here). Harmeet Dhillon in the Office of Civil Rights at the DOJ understands this issue and fight clearly and is delivering strong, strategic, consistent wins, as are some top-notch law firms that are really in the game now where they weren't a decade ago. Earlier, I said that white people are being victimized here by an unjust institutional and cultural system that has accepted Soviet ethnic logic against itself. The question is who white people are being victimized by. Is it "POC" or is it Communists? The answer is that it is Communists. To get this wrong and act as though it is "POC" is an invitation to racial warfare, tribalism, and destruction of the American way, just as the Communists want. To understand it correctly, and thus to fight it correctly, is to evade the Communist racialist conflict trap and to take strategic, decisive action that actually gets us out of this nightmare before it destroys us. Senator Lee is right about his second point, Americans reject this racialist framing, so the question is why so many are eagerly stepping into it when the winning path of leaving it behind is already open to us? Clicks? Content? Stupidity? Laziness? Complicity? Because victimhood feels good and cathartic even if the cost is civilization itself? I don't know, but it really pisses me off. We actually know what's going on here and can choose to do the right thing instead of the wrong things.

Mike Lee @BasedMikeLee

5 months ago

This is just racism Americans reject it

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This is how Lebanon went from being a prosperous Christian country to being ruled by Islamists. Pay close attention! “As Christians, we opened our doors to Muslims, and welcomed them into our country. We wanted to be inclusive and even made them part of the government. But due to having several wives and many children, Muslims became the majority. Once they were the majority, they thought they could do whatever they wanted, and began massacring the Christians who welcomed them.”

The harm reduction movement is built on fraud, misrepresentations, and bad science. It is one of the worst things to have happened to North American society in the past decade.

The Taxpayer Land Acknowledgment. Share it, recite it, customize it for your city. For the people, by the people!

It’s not just that white men have been disadvantaged, it’s that these industries destroyed themselves in the name of DEI. When they remade their workforces and shifted their priorities, they alienated their audiences. After the #OscarsSoWhite incident, the Academy dramatically changed its membership, purging older members and inviting lots of marginal nonwhite figures to join. They also required films to meet race-based criteria for cast, crew and subject matter to be award eligible. The Oscars telecast used to be the second biggest TV event of the year after the Super Bowl. Now, nobody watches the telecast, and nobody watches the movies that are being honored. The Oscars didn’t use its platform to center diverse stories in the culture, it made itself about diversity and therefore consigned itself to irrelevance. The National Book Awards followed a similar trajectory, becoming an irrelevant award celebrating irrelevant books about race that nobody wants to read. There has not been a novel that was a mainstream cultural event or even an award winner that could reasonably be described as “widely read” in more than a decade. Have you ever read or heard of Jesmyn Ward? According to the National Book Foundation, she is a literary titan whose ouvre defines our era. Women ignore literary publishing and read Frieda McFadden and Colleen Hoover and men stopped reading books entirely. Similarly, giant video game publishers destroyed themselves. The enormous conglomerate Ubisoft saw its stock plummet nearly 90% after it released a giant “Star Wars” game with a girlboss-of-color as a protagonist, followed by an Assassin’s Creed game set in feudal Japan where the player character was inexplicably a black man. Both games underperformed, and Ubisoft was forced to sell most of its assets to the Saudi monarchy.

William Hogeland @WilliamHogeland

7 months ago

Straight white dudes who have a hard time getting published or whatever: Boo fucking hoo. This is the way it's been. Dig deep, do your thing, see if you have anything. That's all there is.

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Reparations paid to people who were never enslaved, taken from people who never enslaved anyone, isn’t justice. It’s an attempt to use inherited guilt and emotional pressure to justify compelled transfer. Justice is individual. So is guilt. So is responsibility. Once you abandon that, every grievance becomes infinite and no one is ever innocent. By that standard, nearly every group on earth could demand reparations from someone else, forever. History is full of conquest, slavery, and abuse across every continent, by every race, against every race. There is no logical stopping point except perpetual conflict. Worse, this framework actively harms the people it claims to help. It teaches that progress comes from grievance, not achievement. That dignity comes from claims, not character. That your future is owned by your past. And it selectively edits history. Arabs enslaved more black people, for a longer period of time, across a wider geographic area, with practices that lasted into the modern era. No reparations are demanded there, because this isn’t about historical consistency. It’s about political leverage in the present. Real justice protects individual rights. Collective reparations destroy them. You don’t heal injustice by creating a new one.

kevin blue @kevinblue345

7 months ago

White people want us to forgive and forget. We still can not let go after we get reparations for how we were abused by the white man during slavery.

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“To avoid offending morons, let’s not talk about people & talk about apples” This is incredibly relevant & a must watch. Konstantin nails it.

‘Changing attitudes among boys and young men will be at the centre of the government's strategy to tackle violence against women and girls’ - the BBC. Let me be abundantly clear - schoolboys are not a threat to women and girls. Schoolboys are schoolboys. Stop plying them with guilt. The real threat to women and girls are the vast waves of immigration, legal and illegal, from cultures that quite frankly treat women like shit. THAT is the threat. THEY are the threat. Not schoolboys. I can imagine the literature now - entirely focused around young white lads being abusive to girls. Go out into the real world, and speak to women. See who they feel more threatened by. The gangs of foreign men that now loiter across our towns and cities, or schoolboys? I know the answer. Young men should be respectful, polite and decent - as the vast overwhelming majority are. So let’s stop forcing this awful guilt onto young men when they have done NOTHING wrong.

When Whites are a minority in a country they become targets and are systematically forced into a sub-class where they live in fear and lose everything (Rhodesia/South Africa) where the end goal is total White genocide. When non Whites are a minority they are granted millions upon millions in social programs and welfare and worshipped by liberal White people to the point they can do no wrong. There's a discernible difference in outcomes.

mitra @mitrajoy_

7 months ago

why are white people so afraid of becoming a minority? does the US treat minorities poorly or something?

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The Arabs, Turks, and Indians collectively enslaved three times as many people as Europeans, their slave trades lasted three times as long, and the only reason they ended was that Europeans - in particular the British - used military power to force them to stop. Yet we get the exclusive blame for slavery. Why? Simple. We're the only ones who felt bad about slavery. Even at the height of the slave trade it was morally controversial. It never sat right with us. We're genuinely ashamed of it. No one else feels bad about it. At all. And they know this. They know that the European soul is profoundly empathetic in a way that their own petty, clannish chauvinism is not. And in that universalizing empathic conscience they smell weakness, and in weakness, opportunity. They remind us endlessly of the role we played in continuing slavery, knowing full well that we will be either too courteous, or too distracted by guilt, to point to the much larger role that they played. By pressing on that sore nerve they sustain a moral assault on our conscience that they then exploit for financial benefits: welfare parasitism, preferment in admissions and hiring, open borders. The slave societies have found a way to take their revenge for the end slavery, enslaving us with our own conscience. And they don't feel the slightest twinge of guilt about that, either.

Brett Pike @ClassicLearner

7 months ago

The Ottoman slave trade, the trans Saharan slave trade, the trans Indian slave trade, lasted for thousands of years and enslaved millions of people… Yet school children are led to believe that slavery was a uniquely European activity. Now why do you think that is?

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People say “nothing that requires the labor of others is a human right” That’s because if something is a human right, you are entitled to it no matter what But if it requires the labor of others, then that person must perform labor in order to give it to you If another person doesn’t want to perform that labor for you, you would be entitled to use force (violence) to make them perform the labor This would in turn violate their rights to do what they want with their own property (their body) You cannot say something is a human right if it also violates human rights - it is self contradictory This is why the true test of something being a “right” is that it is a negative right - in other words, they can only describe your right to be left alone

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt on the impact of social media: “It’s the liberal girls who really rise first and fastest on depression…. Everyone is worse off, but being conservative seems to root you. You’re not as easily pushed into this crazy world. Being in a religious family seems to root you and [conservatism and religion] seem to be protective” He says: "Liberals girls spend a lot more time than conservative girls [on social media]. … The feeds of the liberal girls gets much more taken over by how terrible the world is." "Liberal girls are caught in a set of disempowering ideas. Here’s 3 terrible, terrible ideas, and if you believe them, you’re almost guaranteed to be a failure in life" The 3 terrible ideas are: 1. What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker 2. Always trust your feelings 3. And life is a battle between good people and evil people