Dvorstone

@dvorstone 's limiting principle of stewardship: Do not mortgage, migrate, or sell what your grandchildren cannot reclaim.

Very important to understand: politics isn't about being right. It's not about "theory." People join your team because they think it's morally better and stronger (more likely to win), and the latter outweighs the former. Ultimately, people want to side with the winning side.

Well, there are lots of taxes on vices, such as on booze and cigarettes. We use tax policy to drive social policy all the the time so... reduce taxes on jobs like his and increase them on jobs like "influencer." Thus, any job that is "entertainment" or similar, just tax them more.

You saved them from needless suffering but only by inflicting it onto others. That's what is always ignored. Sure, you saved a Somali from suffering but transferred it to a suburban Montanan mom. In what way is that just or good? Why should the people of France suffer so that the suffering of Syrians can be lessened? The people of Britain must suffer so the people of Bangladesh can suffer less? Underneath the noble rhetoric about lessening suffering is a wicked truth: their goal is, far more often, a desire to impose the suffering onto who they really hate. They don't love the Somalian so much as they hate the suburban Montanan mom.

There are no shortcuts.

I will help the naive: whenever someone gets an edge, they keep it secret until the edge breaks down. Anyone selling you an edge only does so when it's already expired.

This kind of sentiment is very modern but is actually ahistorical and bizarre, especially from within a Christian framework. Of course women aren't "inherently good." No one is. Not women or men or babies. "Inherent goodness" isn't a thing for mortals. This is a modern illusion, largely derived from Rousseau, but there is an older strain of it that suggests that it is women alone who possess innate virtue, and that men must be civilized to it. This is, of course, nonsense, but it is a popular nonsense. This is partly why the "red pill" guys are so despised (but they earn contempt from time to time); they tend to look at women without rose colored glasses. Many women have long taken advantage of this double-standard, pretending themselves incapable of genuine malice (see Lindsay Clancy supporters). The truth is that men and women are equally sinful, even if how the manifestation of that sinfulness largely varies by gender. What's troublesome about the modern age is that this myth of women's virtue is so embedded that a fair observation of women's nature often appears misogynistic. I used to ask the question "what are the worst behaviors/attributes about men?" and people usually have no problem answering, and the answers are fairly consistent. Ask the same about women and it's often crickets. When answers are given, they're varied enough to seem arbitrary. Actually acknowledging that women are human and not divine is, to modern people, a faux pas of sorts.

Mayonnaise is the devil's condiment.

Gossip about lesbians breaking up is objectively the least interesting news possible.

I regard women who do this as truly villainous because the implication is that they enabled evil behavior so long as hey could benefit from it at the time OR that they'll slander their own dead husbands if they think it'll benefit them now. There's no good look here.

I will reiterate my position: significantly increase the cost of national parks, and ban all non-citizens. And then, make it a felony to litter in a national park.

The question is "why isn't this a compliment?" There are a few reasons: 1. She is confessing to being promiscuous, which lowers her relative status, which in turns lowers his. 2. She is implying that he doesn't generate the kind of sexual arousal that would cause her to "make bad decisions," i.e., the kind of arousal that overwhelms her. He's "safe." 3. She's comparing him to other men explicitly but not framing him as clearly superior within that hierarchy. That's akin to saying "you're not the smartest but you're funny." It's backhanded.

Ban all foreigners from national parks. Also, a lifetime ban for citizens for are caught littering even once.

It's helpful to understand that "fascism" was a reactionary movement to two Enlightenment era ideologies: 1. Liberalism 2. Communism The basic argument of fascism was that liberalism was that it atomized people into competing parties (divide and conquer), and stripped them of their spiritual strength, leaving them incapable of ensuring national unity, and then saddling them with a slow, corrupt, and unresponsive government, all of which would ultimately weaken a state such that it was susceptible to communism. The modern appeal of fascism is rooted in the same argument because liberalism hasn't actually been able to address those concerns effectively, and fascism will maintain some appeal until it does.

Children's books today are bizarre but this one is old-school in a positive way: it teaches little kids a practical lesson about setting expectations and respecting other people's time and space. It doesn't try to deal with modern problems. It's just a simple lesson: kids need to learn that everyone can't give them attention whenever they want it, and if you respect that, people will be more and not less likely to want to spend time with you.

Her position is that we haven't tried everything and thus she refuses to abandon her blank slate position. She's saying "all of the evidence says the opposite of what I want to believe, and so I'm going to hold onto my beliefs until a standard that I have described as likely impossible, is met." This gives you a good sense as how committed someone can be to a ludicrous belief. But more so, the blank slate position is the most absurdly privileged and elitist position imaginable because it's only possible to hold such a position if you've never spent any serious amount of time around genuinely stupid people.

Sigh... I guess it's up to me to explain what's going on here. Unlike my post about the Eagle's Nest, I will not write it casually. This, I will explain seriously: In short: the most common political scale used globally today is “socialist on the left and Nazi on the right.” Why? In the U.S., the right wing is largely libertarian, while Communists, Nazis, and many “liberals” all sit on the left by American standards. What is going on? The answer starts with the “Great Patriotic War.” That is the term the Soviets used for World War II. The Russians won that war at the cost of over 25 million lives and acquired nearly all of Eastern Europe as a result. It was a costly but grand victory for the communists. Russia and Germany had been rivals for centuries. After World War I, Russia was taken over by the Bolsheviks. The Nazi theory was that a “superior” Germanic elite had previously ruled the Russian Slavs, but that this elite had been murdered, starved, and displaced by a new ruling group: the Jewish Bolsheviks. This made Russia an existential threat to Germany in Nazi eyes. This piece of Nazi fan-fiction is critical. Their basic position was that Germans ruling inferior peoples produce great and powerful civilizations. They now imagined a villainous group had just taken power over their nearby rival. As a result, the Nazis were intensely anti-communist. They were not “right-wing” in any sense that maps cleanly onto American politics, but the “Commie versus Nazi” scale became the defining one because of the war. Russia (the Soviets) won World War II and spread their version of the narrative: anti-fascists versus fascists. After 1945, their story of heroic anti-fascists confronting the pure evil of fascism spread globally into institutions and education systems through activism and propaganda. What resulted was that complex and regionally specific political dynamics were reduced to “antifascist versus fascist.” Thus Pinochet, Franco, Bukele, and Trump are routinely labeled “fascists,” even though the analogy makes little sense. They are often law-and-order authoritarians or populists, but because the antifascist/fascist framework is so universal, it is the only language most people have available. Nazi Germany was a specific German phenomenon under a very particular set of conditions. It is not a universal template for “the right.” There are no “Nazis” anymore. World War II (or the Great Patriotic War) fixed that moral framework into most postwar global institutions, which then spread into individual nations such that the paradigmatic evil is expansionist, racially defined authoritarian nationalism of the German type. Anything that can be analogized to it carries a potent stigma. That is why (I'm potentially overstating this cause but with good reason: it's rarely discussed as a motivation) global and Western institutions have spent decades systematically stripping institutional power from right-wing factions. The explicit or implicit justification is almost always “no future Hitler.” Pinochet, Franco, and various Latin American or European right-wing projects were never Nazis; they were anti-communist authoritarians or nationalists of other kinds. The template still gets applied because the 1941–45 framing is sticky and useful. World War II was genuinely traumatic and devastating for Russia. They also had something of an inferiority complex relative to the West, especially Germany. Their victory over that rival became the central legitimizing myth of the Soviet Union; Victory Day (May 9) is still celebrated today. The defeat of the Nazis catapulted the USSR into second place behind only the United States. That is why the binary was spread with such fervor. It did what Marx could not: it legitimized communism. That binary was never exclusively about pure ideology. It was, at least in part, about Germany versus Russia, with the political labels riding along. Outside those specific historical conditions the map is a poor fit. It did not accurately describe Franco or Pinochet, and it does not describe Trump, Bukele, or most contemporary right-populist or nationalist movements. Applying it anyway converts ordinary political conflict into a reenactment of 1941–45. The practical result is an asymmetry that has outlived its original context and master (the USSR is dead, but the binary narrative lives on). Right-wing projects are routinely tested against the Nazi template and stripped of legitimacy when the analogy can be made to stick. This is not because every right-wing movement is secretly National Socialist. It is because a regional collision that became a global war left a victor’s narrative that proved extremely portable. Soviet losses and propaganda gave the antifascist version unusual weight; Western institutions absorbed enough of it to make “fascist” an unusually potent accusation. The long march through the institutions carried pieces of that framing with it. Interestingly, the roles have even inverted in places. Contemporary Russia now deploys the antifascist charge against its own opponents, while Putin’s Russia more closely fits the fascist narrative, with the EU (often led by Germany) occupying the socialist side. And that is why this lady thinks you cannot have a white Christian nation. As ridiculous as that is, that is the reason. She has so thoroughly accepted the communist narrative of World War II that she cannot see the world any other way. It's worth pointing out that this narrative has so thoroughly saturated global politics that it has caused some on the right to adopt it as well, thus gaining sympathy for the Nazis and reframing them as defenders of Western civilization and Christendom. This is equally absurd. My bottom-line is that the "anti-fascist versus fascist" (socialist versus Nazi) dichotomy is a crude residual myth from WW2 that is unsuited to the task of understanding modern politics.

This post probably has the worst comments of anything I've ever posted. My point has nothing to do with Hitler being a hero. The post is simple: the MERE FACT that someone find significance in Hitler's old vacation home is enough to drive someone to burn it down. That precise logic extends beyond historical villains like Hitler all the way towards burning down churches and anything else that can be framed as villainous. The point isn't that Hitler is bad, it's that ALL of Western civilization is increasingly described as bad and "fascistic" for the sole purpose of justifying its destruction. Everything is Hitler now, and so everything can be destroyed. That's the meaning of all of this.

This is, by far, the best and funniest response to my explanation about the "Eagle's Nest" being burnt. That post has produced a dismal quality of comments but this is most excellent. Well done.

I will explain the significance of this. The "Eagle's Nest" isn't a shrine. It's more of an internet meme. It's of no consequence so why burn it down? Why trek all the way up there and risk imprisonment in order to burn something down that is completely unknown to all but a few terminally online people? Because you're not allowed to have any heroes. You're not allowed to have any temples or shrines. It's not about fear of Hitler. It's about ensuring that you (European people, roughly speaking) can never have anything that attaches you positively to your history. Hitler is incidental. Hitler's little vacation retreat isn't some sacred location but to some, the beauty of it and its location serves to support the idea that there was something better in that specific past. That's enough to justify its destruction. You will not be allowed to have an affection for the past. Your ancestors were all evil. Their aesthetic tastes were evil. Their goals and actions were evil. If you ever find anything redeeming about them, it will be destroyed. That's the meaning of this.