Cognitive Dissident, thinking at right angles to everyone else. Sometimes my thoughts don’t translate well into English.
Australia
Joined October 2017
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The left/right political spectrum doesn’t model reality. What we observe is clusters of ideas; if you hold one idea in the cluster, you’re likely to hold others.
Currently in western countries, there are two major clusters, which I call the Left and the Normal People. You can probably identify the ideas in these two clusters. Note that what you would call Normal are those held by the vast majority of people until the last few decades.
These clusters aren’t stable: ideas become more or less popular and associated to others over time. White supremacy may be an example: widely held to some degree a century ago, it’s now an outlier. The inverse, white racial guilt, is a firm member of the Leftist cluster. This is why, although not all leftists are racist, most racists are leftist.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Sitting in court watching Stephen Gray’s appeal against a conviction for reposting a meme which mocked Islam and Muhammad marrying a child. He had 15-20 followers on Facebook. A (non-Muslim!) neighbour, who Stephen has previous disagreements with, decided to report him to the police claiming it caused him distress…
The fundamental argument from the CPS is that Stephen was not making a political point. That he expressed his objection to Islamic child marriage in a way that was simply to offend because it singled out Islam, and he should have made his post more nuanced and sensitive if he was making a political point.
The defence is having to point out that Muhammad did in fact marry a 6 year old according to Islamic texts, and that child marriage does still occur in Islamic countries AND there are prominent Islamic scholars IN THE UK who openly say that they are content with child marriage. And either way, it is not illegal to offend others, and you are allowed to make political points that are not nuanced.
To think of all the actual, serious crime in Middlesbrough — let alone the rest of the country — and the time being wasted on this nonsense. Actually witnessing the amount of public resource and time being funnelled into prosecuting people for causing offence by highlighting a factual point is acutely infuriating.
Anyway, join the @SpeechUnion because you never know when it might be you having to explain why you don’t like child marriage, or anything else that Islam permits.
This theory of what has happened in Haiti makes a disgusting amount of sense. It needs to be fleshed out and the parties involved identified, but I’m going to watch is subsequent events support its conclusions.
The chaos in El Salvador before Bukele was never an accident, and the chaos in Haiti today is not an accident either.
The media told you that the gangs were just poor boys who went bad on their own, but that story falls apart the moment you ask one simple question.
Where does a poor sixteen year old boy living in a slum with no job and no money get an AK-47 and an AR-15 and a Glock and thousands of rounds of ammunition, and where does he get a brand new Toyota Hilux and motorcycles and speedboats and drones and encrypted phones and bulletproof vests and night vision goggles, and who pays his monthly salary and pays for his safe house and pays his lawyer when he is arrested and pays the police and the judge and the prison guard to look the other way, and who pays his family when he dies?
A poor boy cannot afford even one bullet, so someone else is paying for all of it.
That someone is the multimillionaires and the billionaires and the wealthy entities who profit from chaos, because chaos is a business and a broken country is the most profitable business in the world.
When a country is in chaos its land becomes cheap so they can buy it, its gold and its drugs and its resources can be stolen without anyone asking questions, its government becomes weak so they can control it, and its people become so scared that they obey anyone who promises them a little safety.
In El Salvador the gangs were not fighting the system, the gangs were the system, paid to keep the poor terrorized so the poor would never rise up and demand a better country.
In Haiti it is the same story, the gangs are not independent, they are funded and armed and protected by rich families and foreign businessmen and foreign NGOs who want Haiti to stay weak so they can keep stealing its ports and its gold and its labour.
And when a man like Bukele comes and says I will lock up all the gangs and end this in two years, who attacks him? It is the same people.
The same billionaires who fund the gangs fund the media that calls Bukele a dictator, the same wealthy entities who arm the gangs fund the NGOs that cry human rights for murderers, the same people who profit from chaos fund the political voices that hate real help in Haiti and sabotage anyone who is actually capable of doing it.
Look at the pattern and it becomes clear, when a gang kills a hundred innocent people there is silence, but when a leader kills a hundred gang members there is outrage.
When a gang rapes children there is no campaign, but when Bukele locks up rapists there is a global campaign against him.
That is because the media is not independent, it is owned by billionaires, the NGOs are not independent, they are funded by billionaires, and the politicians are not independent, they are bought by billionaires.
They do not want Haiti saved and they did not want El Salvador saved, they want them broken, because a broken country is cheap to buy and easy to control.
Bukele exposed them, he proved that gangs can be destroyed in months if you have the will, and that terrified them, because if El Salvador can be fixed then Haiti can be fixed, and if Haiti can be fixed then Africa can be fixed, and if Africa can be fixed then the billionaires lose their business.
That is why they demonize Bukele, that is why they sabotage Haiti, that is why they hate any man who actually helps the poor.
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This was from the days when the British constabulary was the most respected in the world.
Unlike today, when it is rightfully despised.
The constable strolled over, admired the gun and asked how it worked. As Gardes changed the magazine to show him, he was tackled and arrested.
He got seven days in jail, and it's the only instance I'm aware of where a coup d'état was foiled by good manners. 3/3
ALT Sark's tiny two-cell stone prison, dated 1856, with bicycles parked outside on the car-free island. Credit: Hannes 2, CC BY-SA 3.0, via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prison_-_Sark.jpg
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PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
为什么非洲一直没发展起来？我来讲一个实例：非洲第一大国，尼日利亚，人口2.5亿。面积92万平方公里，面积约等于三个华北平原，水土丰茂，一年三熟，降雨量丰沛，全境几乎都是平原和低矮丘陵。介于丛林和荒漠之间，最北的荒漠带边缘，降雨量也和山东相当。
很多人都觉得非洲穷，是因为土地贫瘠、资源匮乏、老天不赏饭吃。但事实恰恰相反，非洲遍地是宝藏，只是很多国家硬生生把一手绝世好牌，打得稀烂。
今天咱们就拿非洲人口第一大国尼日利亚举例，看完它的真实境遇，你就能彻底读懂非洲百年发展困局的核心症结。
毫不夸张地说，尼日利亚的先天条件，放在全球发展中国家里都是天花板级别的存在，完全是老天爷追着喂饭。
这个国家坐拥92万平方公里国土，全境以平缓平原和低矮丘陵为主，没有高山阻隔、没有恶劣戈壁，地形条件远超很多多山国家。
气候更是得天独厚，全境雨水充沛，即便是国土最北端的边缘区域，年降雨量也能持平我国山东。
最让人羡慕的是，这里全年高温无霜，土地肥力出众，一年可以稳定种植三季庄稼，发展农业的自然优势得天独厚。
除了土地和气候，尼日利亚还有最核心的人口红利。全国总人口超2.5亿，劳动力数量庞大、人口结构年轻，完全不缺干活的人力。
靠着这份顶级天赋，早年间的尼日利亚妥妥的农业强国，花生、可可、棕榈油等农产品远销全球，是当时全球知名的农产品出口国，农业基础打得格外扎实。
有地、有人、有气候、有产业底子，按理说这样的国家，就算发展不到发达国家水平，也绝对能让百姓安居乐业、衣食无忧。
可现实狠狠打脸：如今的尼日利亚，早已褪去往日荣光，彻底沦为贫穷、动荡、落后的代名词。
数据不会骗人，目前尼日利亚有超过1.39亿人口深陷贫困线以下。
离谱的是，守着一年三熟的肥沃良田，这个国家居然无法实现粮食自给，每年都要花巨额外汇进口粮食、衣物、日用品等基础物资，无数普通民众连温饱问题都难以解决。
好好的王牌国家，为何会沦落到这般境地？所有悲剧的开端，都源于半个多世纪前的一场“暴富骗局”。
上世纪50年代，尼日利亚境内勘探出大量优质原油，丰富的石油资源让这个国家瞬间看到了“躺赚”的捷径。
在此之前，国家财政、百姓收入全都靠农业支撑；石油被发掘后，海量原油源源不断卖出，巨额外汇轻松入账。
赚钱变得太过简单，让从上到下彻底丢掉了踏实发展的心思。政府直接放弃深耕农业、布局制造业，把国家所有经济命脉，全部押注在石油单一产业上。
全国的资源、政策、人力全部向石油产业倾斜，大片肥沃良田无人耕种、逐渐荒废。普通农民也看清了现实：种地辛苦一年赚的钱，远不如去城市从事石油相关零工赚得多。
于是千万农民放下锄头、涌入城市，传统农业体系彻底崩塌。短短数十年，尼日利亚从享誉全球的粮食出口大国，彻底变成了依赖进口的缺粮国。
产业单一畸形，只是尼日利亚衰败的第一步，治理混乱和分配不公，才是压垮国家的核心利刃。石油产业创造的财富是天文数字，但这些巨额收益，从来没有惠及普通民众。
绝大部分石油财富被少数权贵阶层垄断瓜分，普通人别说分红，连基本的就业、福利保障都得不到。
更讽刺的是，作为石油核心产区的尼日尔三角洲，不仅没靠石油致富，反而常年遭受原油开采带来的污染，土地盐碱化、水源被污染、庄稼无法生长，当地百姓世代承受着环境破坏的恶果，苦不堪言。
巨大的贫富差距、资源分配不公，持续激化社会矛盾，各类武装冲突、地方暴乱此起彼伏。
局势一旦动荡，工厂停工、农田荒废、外资撤离，没人敢来投资兴业，经济发展彻底陷入“越乱越穷、越穷越乱”的死循环。
而制度的严重短板，直接彻底封死了尼日利亚的翻身之路。
当地土地产权极其混乱，全国仅有极少数农民拥有合法土地证，想要发展规模化农业、引进企业落地投产，都会被产权问题卡住，农业现代化根本无从谈起。
同时当地行政体系臃肿低效、办事流程繁琐，腐败问题根深蒂固，营商环境极差。
最基础的民生保障更是缺失，全国电力供应极不稳定，日均供电仅有三四个小时，绝大多数工厂无法正常生产。没有工业支撑，日用品、工业品全部依赖进口，国家彻底丧失自主生产能力。
尼日利亚的教训给所有国家敲响了警钟：自然资源从来不是发展的终极底牌，稳定的制度、长远的眼光、踏实奋斗的心态，才是一个国家行稳致远的根本。
空有绝世好牌，却没有驾驭的能力，最终只会白白浪费天赋，困在贫困落后的泥潭里无法自拔。
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
2/ But don’t worry. She’s landed on her feet - and her new bio contains a few details that are rather… interesting. israellycool.com/2026/11/12/…
I didn’t know this backstory.
This journalist at The Economist pushed hard for Jensen Huang to be purged.
It's really funny because I knew Corbin Duncan in real life. We were good mates until he basically sided with a bunch of CCP supporters who bashed me at a pro-Hong Kong rally when I was 20.
Honestly a very funny backstory. We were mates to the extent that he personally recruited me to the Australian Labor Party when I was 18. I really looked up to him because he was one of the smartest guys in the young Brisbane politics world and got into Harvard from high school.
I really wanted to be his mate so I joined his Labor faction. He brought me along to the classic Fortitude Valley Labor Right stack branch to listen to some boring speech by Jim Chalmers before I was formally inducted to the Party. We got Nandos after the meeting and I remember telling him that I reckoned he would be PM one day.
Anyway, we basically stopped being friends after I began protesting against the CCP. I held one pro-Hong Kong rally at my Australian university (University of Queensland) and was violently assaulted by masked CCP supporters.
Corbin tried to argue that I was the aggressor, even though Queensland Police ultimately charged a masked thug who assaulted me.
The Brisbane Chinese Consul General Xu Jie - also an ''Honorary Professor'' at UQ - put out a statement endorsing the ''self-motivated patriotism'' of the CCP supporters who attacked me on campus. Chinese state media outlets like The Global Times then began to call for my expulsion from university.
UQ ultimately spent half a million dollars hiring two of Australia's top four law firms to build a case to expel me. They whipped up a 186 page expulsion document filled with trumped up charges, including the absurd claim that I stole a pen from a campus art shop. UQ even hired a PR firm to defame me to journalists, mocking me as a ''virgin.''
Newspapers like The New York Times and Washington Post read the full 186 page expulsion document and concluded that I was being punished for my political opposition to the CCP - Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd even put out a statement condemning the expulsion and accusing the university of ''bending the knee to China.''
But Corbin insisted that the university was right to expel me. He insisted that I had ''defamed'' UQ Chancellor Varghese and Vice-Chancellor Høj by loudly pointing out that Høj had received a confidential six figure bonus each year for meeting secret China related performance KPIs. Høj had even received an official award from the Chinese government for promoting Confucius Institutes worldwide. But I had ''defamed'' him by pointing this out.
Anyway, I ended up leaving the Labor Party partly due to the abuse I copped from Corbin and his mates in Young Labor Right.
He then started calling me a “rat” online and sending rat emojis to me to symbolise the fact that I had allegedly ratted on the Party.
He also mocked the fact that I went to an Australian university instead of Harvard like him: ''Hate to dash your post-grad plans but paying for an MPA doesn't really count. Unlike being a UQ undergrad like yourself.''
UQ ultimately suspended me for only six months. They wanted to expel me for life but Senator Marco Rubio and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo intervened behind the scenes to voice US government disapproval of attempts to permanently expel me from university.
This was the only thing that put a stop to their full scorched earth campaign against a 20 year old student; US government pressure was the one countervailing force able to resist Chinese government pressure on the university.
I was happy that I ultimately avoided life expulsion with the help of Rubio, Pompeo and Rudd but I was still spewing.
I lost my spot on the UQ Senate and I couldn't get that back. Prior to my suspension, the student body elected me as their representative to the board that ran the university. I automatically lost my elected position the second I was suspended.
So I concocted a genius scheme during my six month sojourn/exile from uni to try get back onto the UQ Senate.
The student union president automatically got a seat on the UQ Senate, so I got my mate Taylor Wass to legally change his name to Drew Pavlou and run a Drew Pavlou ticket in student union elections on my behalf. If he won he was going to resign the post for me so that I could get back to the UQ Senate.
Corbin was outraged at our ingenious plan so he established an anti-Drew Facebook campaign page called ''FRAUD WITH DREW PAVLOU.''
The page accused me of ''anti-Chinese racism'' and ''assaulting Chinese students.'' One of his mates tracked down Pauline Hanson to try get her to ''endorse'' my student ticket and then used that endorsement to call me a Nazi. It was all round psychotic, venomous and insane.
Corbin loudly positioned himself against me and he set himself up as a China dove. He retweeted dire warnings that the West wished to encircle and destroy China and reposted open CCP shills like Bob Carr. He claimed that Australia's spy agency ASIO subverted Australia's foreign policy towards China, a common Beijing line.
He ultimately got a Schwarzman scholarship to China and studied at Xi Jinping's alma mater Tsinghua University. Next thing I know he's a China expert with The Economist.
I tried to reconcile with him a few years later but he ignored me. I see that he's still being a smug smarmy know it all, so I thought I would give this backstory to the world.
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PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
My brother’s friend drives a Tesla. This is 3 videos of the same accident. The Tesla, on self drive, sees the approaching car coming from behind at excessive speed and moves out of the way. Driver of speeding car was killed. Amazing technology @elonmusk.
Well said.
The problem with trans is not so much with trans people, but trans ACTIVISTS.
J.K. Rowling has NOT mistreated me, a member of the "Trans Community".
Transgender Ideology on the other hand deserves the ridicule from she/you/I (pronouns, cuz 'you know') it has earned by the promotion for the mutilation of minors and self identified men masturbating in public places frequented by women.
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PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
All the best people declare war on Hogwarts. Have you ever considered dividing your gender identity into separate pieces and storing it in hidden objects, so you can’t be invalidated to death?
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
If it was legal it was legal. The rest is just opinion. What about the rape gangs?
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Regardless of personal opinions about Russell Brand, on the exact same day he received a prison sentence of ten years and six months, an Afghan national appeared in court for three counts of rape and penetration of a child under 13, but received a two-year suspended sentence.
🤬😡🤬😡🤬😡
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
White House Counsel Will Scharf sends a characteristically measured and thoughtful letter to incoming House Oversight Chair Robert Garcia. Garcia has made several outlandish statements that extend beyond the traditional oversight role. And Scharf explains the problem with that
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
BC College of Nurses tipped the scales of justice, argued Amy Hamm’s lawyer Lisa Bildy on day 1 of Supreme Court appeal. Bildy faced constant interruptions, belittling & hectoring from the judge.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
So how did a property adviser end up posting about Andy Burnham and Abu Dhabi?
All we wanted was a planning permission.
It took Manchester City Council over nine years to give us one. In that time Renaker put up about a dozen towers, seven of them around our site.
My client has owned a site on Great Jackson Street in Manchester for 40 years. In October 2017 we started work on planning for 1,037 flats there. We are Manchester born and bred. Friends in London warned us that development in Manchester was "the Wild West". We didn't know how right they were.
We were told we had to provide £28.8m of affordable housing. So we asked what Renaker's Deansgate Square next door had paid. The answer:- Nothing. Zero. Nada. Zip. 1,508 flats and no section 106 agreement at all. Nobody at Manchester City Council could explain why. On four Renaker schemes MCC has "lost" the viability files.
We were told we had to pay just over £1m as an upfront payment. Exactly £1,000 per flat. Across 20 Renaker towers and 8,543 homes, Manchester City Council took just £487,000. That is £57 a home.
So we kept looking. We found £598m of public loans from Andy Burnham's GMCA to Renaker. Add in the other public sources and it is £868m, to companies controlled by one man. None of these loans were ever publicised and the loan terms remain almost entirely hidden.
It took nearly four years just to get to the planning committee. Over nine years on, nothing is built.
We then asked MCC for permission to knock down our own empty warehouses. It refused, giving ten flimsy reasons. So off to court we went. In January 2026 a High Court judge rejected all ten and held that MCC had "acted unreasonably". That case cost MCC over £200,000 of public money. And for what?
My client also owns the main Royal Mail depot on Oldham Road. MCC has since told us that land sits inside its joint venture with Far East Consortium. It has kept over a third of that agreement hidden, including the plan, and won't show it to us. Why?
So we carried on asking questions.
Then they blocked my emails.
We never set out to investigate anyone. We asked one question, got no answer, and kept digging.
We still are.
#ProjectCleanCity
@SianReform @NathanEvansTeam @JoshHalliday @rbrooks45 @DeclanGCarey @jackdulhanty
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
If my friend @TRobinsonNewEra wasn't fighting much more serious battles, and if he really did have infinity money for legal work, and if the British legal system wasn't massively stacked against him every recovering his good name...
I'd have him send this to @guardian
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
NASA handed Boeing $5.1 billion on a fixed-price contract for Starliner development plus six certified crew missions to the ISS.
What did America get?
One disastrous half-mission that couldn’t even complete its job… and a vehicle that still isn’t certified for humans. Boeing just got another $399 million to keep failing. Total: $5.5 billion for **zero** completed human missions.
SpaceX got $2.6 billion for development and six flights. NASA was so impressed they added eleven more missions, taking Crew Dragon through 2028. Total: about $5.6 billion.
One company delivered and then some.
The other burned through billions and still can’t get astronauts home safely.
Now Democrats are promising to cancel every SpaceX government contract the second they get power.
Let that sink in.
They want to punish the only company that actually works… while Boeing’s failure gets more money and a free pass.
Canceling SpaceX contracts doesn’t just “own Elon.” It risks grounding the ISS. Maybe that’s the point.
America’s space program shouldn’t be a political weapon. It should reward results. SpaceX delivered. Boeing didn’t.
h/t: Restore Washington.
PragmaticLibertarian retweeted
Recently I told you there are two kinds of people in this system: cynics and believers.
Ursula von der Leyen, I put her with the believers. And that's exactly why you need to understand how the machine works.
Because cynics are very rare. Soros, I put him in that category: he knows exactly what he's doing, and he has never hidden it.
He read Popper, he has a theory of change, and he understood early on something the right still hasn't figured out: you don't change a society by winning an election. You change it by funding, for thirty years, the people who will write the reports, train the lawyers, and advise whoever wins the elections.
$24 billion spent by Open Society since its creation. More than 50,000 grants. In 2015, he wrote in plain text that the EU must accept at least a million asylum seekers a year, and mobilize NGOs, churches and businesses to take them in.
All of it is public. That's the most impressive part.
Here's how the system got hacked, in three steps.
Step one: selection.
Nobody recruits idiots. No need. The money does the selecting on its own.
A grant never goes to the person who doubts. It goes to the person who already believes. Repeat that over thirty years and tens of thousands of grants, and you get an entire ecosystem where the free thinker was filtered out at the door. He wasn't fired. He just never got funded.
What's left: people who are sincere, credentialed, conformist, and whose paycheck depends on the cause.
Step two: funding manufactures conviction.
Try explaining something to someone whose paycheck depends on not getting it.
The NGO produces a report. The report gets cited by an expert. The expert testifies before the Commission. The Commission turns it into a directive. And the NGO guy ends up in a cabinet, then goes back to a foundation.
Everyone knows each other, cites each other, funds each other. It's an echo chamber with a budget.
Step three: emotion.
You never debate results. You debate intentions.
One photo beats a thousand statistics. Every objection backed by numbers becomes a moral failing. And when reality contradicts the narrative, the dissonance always gets resolved the same way:
"It's a necessary evil."
"It's collateral damage."
"The real problem is elsewhere."
Immigration is never a problem. The problem is your perception.
The result: the system doesn't produce corrupt people. It produces NPCs. People reciting a script while convinced they wrote it themselves.
Ursula doesn't need to be bought. She has spent her entire career in an environment where every expert, every report, every "civil society" group tells her the same thing. She is convinced she's on the side of good. And that's what makes her immune to facts.
And the best part of the story: Soros isn't even the system's biggest funder anymore.
You are.
Between 2021 and 2023, €7.4 billion in EU funds went to more than 12,000 NGOs. The European Court of Auditors itself says it can't get a reliable picture of who gets what.
The hack worked so well that the machine now runs on your taxes.
This is not a conspiracy. A conspiracy hides. Here, the amounts are public, the op-eds are public, the recipients are public.
It's an incentive system. And you don't fight an incentive system by insulting the believers. You fight it by cutting off the tap and demanding total transparency: who funds whom, to say what.
As long as it stays opaque, they'll keep shipping believers at scale.
