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

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.

I literally defended the pragmatism of voting for this guy but he's made it nearly impossible to maintain that position. It's absolutely astonishing.

There is a very worthwhile dynamic to consider here that I've not yet seen developed: the problem of competition between girls and boys. In a marriage, competing with your spouse is generally a terrible idea, but modern people spend almost their entire lives competing with the opposite sex, first starting in school. Suddenly, they need to abandon that in order to have a healthy marriage and, of course, they can't. "Malfoid" can't even admit to loving Potter because, in part, she's spent her entire life learning to compete with him. Hogwarts is egalitarian. They're both learning how to be equal but they're not learning how to be unequal, and it's the latter that's so crucial in a romance. A romance can only emerge when both parties are different. Part of the struggle for Harry and Malfoid can't be merely contrivances of pride. There has to be a genuine failure of know-how. Otherwise, it's cheap drama. As I conceptualize it, the best character development for her is: 1. She should be "better" than Harry in most things, but not by a lot (as is the case with Hermione). 2. She should strive to beat him, and he responds in kind. 3. She's unable to accept, much less express, romantic attraction to him because it doesn't fit into her model for how the world works. 4. She should be the one to move first, expressing her interest and in a reverse-Darcy (Pride and Prejudice) it should be him who rejects her. That's shown in some of the "Malfoid" clips where she suggests he go to the ball and he, thinking he's being ridiculed, rejects her. 5. The impetus to beat him should come to a head through Voldemort where ultimately she realizes that she doesn't want to defeat him. This should put her at great risk. 6. She should then be put into a position where she offers herself up as a sacrifice to save Harry from Voldemort but Harry rejects that sacrifice because he resolves her conflict by informing her (this can be done through actions, not words) that he cannot defeat Voldemort alone NOR with her sacrifice, but only together... only through love.

We don't talk about this but it's true. Skinny people subsidize fat people (or even just excessively large) everywhere, from airplanes to clothing sizes to healthcare. It's as exhausting as it is unjust. I should be paying more than the small and medium but less than the XL and larger. I'm tired of subsidizing gigantos and protecting their feelings. Let the fatties cry themselves into a smaller size.

El Salvador is surrounded by four basket case nations in Honduras, Guatemala, Belize, and Nicaragua. The entire region would be better if he slowly worked towards consolidating all of those countries and improving them. And frankly, the United States should help. It's a disaster for us to have dysfunctional countries all around us. It is in our strategic interest to stabilize and improve our neighbors, when possible.

This is a great test of your ability to evaluate pathological psychology in someone. Other sources confirm that Holmes is an abusive maniac who knew exactly what she was doing BUT this person's analysis is based solely on the movie. She failed the test. The lesson can only be learned by reading accounts of Holmes' behavior and realizing that you are unable to correctly identify a high level sociopath and are thus vulnerable to them.

Am I supposed to follow people? I mean, I'm not going to. I just want to know if I'm being rude or not.

Okay, this is genuinely funny (it might even be funnier if he doesn't do it) but also interesting. Modern technology as a tool to restore small-community moral regulation.

This is a reasonable example of the moral character of Democratic politicians.

This is a good example of the dishonesty inherent to Islam. This woman is relying on people not listening to what he says, which is that the man was fired for assaulting a woman in the workplace.

So I have now read this book in full... and it's good, but here's the funny thing: it's not actually very controversial. The entire book is an exercise in tracing sources. Every aspiring and practicing historian and journalist could use this as a model of proper methodology. The book's entire tone feels mildly exasperated. Maybe I'm reading into it too much but it certainly feels as if it's the end of a long argument where he loses his patience and says "fine, I'll do the work myself." If you just imagine him arguing with people on X or Reddit, you'll laugh out loud more than once. It's a good read... from my perspective, primarily because it's just clear reasoning and sourcing. It's just technically good work, and we don't see that much anymore. It's good for your brain to read proper thinking. So if you spend too much time on the internet, this is a bit of cognitive "timeline cleanse."