The bridges I burn light the way
Joined November 2022
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Sam_Spade retweeted
Good point by @jcenters here.
Money is a measure of fucks given.
You get it because you did something someone gave a fuck about. You use it to make people give a fuck about something they otherwise wouldn't.
Except the act of using money to make people give a fuck about something is called "spending".
How many fucks people give about you is not proportional to how much money you have, it's proportional to how much money you spend, and how wisely you spend it.
Many wealthy people, who self-describe as right-wing, expect to be influential because they have money, not because of how they use money. We have a fair handful of right wing billionaires, who want right-wing values to win, but they are fundamentally confused about what their role in that victory needs to be.
I've often joked that the difference between a billionaire and an intellectual is that an intellectual doesn't think he's a billionaire. But unfortunately, I'm not much of a comedian, and this particular joke is only funny because it's true.
Far too many of the right-wing billionaire class thinks that their role is thought leadership. But they are investors, not persuaders, and certainly not practical philosophers.
The actual power they have isn't to inspire or lead, it's to provide resources to empower others and create organizations and networks.
This means that when someone says "it would be good to have 100 million dollars to make a right-wing, non-subverted version of The Odyssey", the correct answer is not "rent computation time on my company's AI slop cannon, and make it at your own expense while working a day job".
This means when someone says "we need to create some right-wing networks", the correct answer is not "buy a ticket to listen to me spitball abstract religious theory".
The correct answer is "hey, you're good at networking, here's a middle class salary so you can devote your full-time efforts to recruit and building a team of full-time lobbyists, and here's some money to pay them with".
The correct answer is "hey, you're writing kids' books about fighting monsters, instead of about exploring your unique gender identity, here's a middle class salary so you can do it full time".
The correct answer is "hey, you're good at rooting out left wing corruption, and exposing it to sunlight, here's a middle class salary so you can do it full time without worrying about monetization, and a legal team on retainer for when they come after you".
The correct answer is "oh, you got arrested for being rude to some foreigner invader in blatant left-wing lawfare? Well, here's a paid-off legal team to help you, and a guaranteed job for life at one of my companies so you don't care about what this does to your criminal record, and, hey, fuck it, I'll pay off your mortgage as well. Let's see how well they can use the system to intimidate people when being targeted by them is like hitting the lottery!"
The correct answer is "oh, your fantasy novel series got cancelled because you refused the publisher's demand to put in a gay character? Here's 30K to cover self-publishing expenses, and I'll use my massive multibillion dollar social media platform to promote it for free."
Why is @DataRepublican having to monetize on her own with {website I can't even mention because god forbid X.com doesn't get all the clicks}? Why does @monsterhunter45 not have a single movie deal {because god forbid the right make a movie that isn't about Jesus or Ayn Rand}?
What are we even doing here?
Right wing money is not being spent in a disciplined or intelligent way. We're all just noodling around. Our moneyed class spend on physical self-protection so someone doesn't shoot them, but very few of them spend much of anything on political self-protection except Musk.
And none of them spend anything on cultural self-protection, because it hasn't sunk in that culture, art, and entertainment are upstream from politics.
Buying Twitter protects the people who already agree with you from censorship (sometimes), but it doesn't move the needle with anyone else, because they show up to the conversation with their opinions already formed by Disney Star Wars and Harry Potter and Queers of War.
Look, this isn't about what you "should" do. It's about what you have to do if you want to survive.
Just because left can steal the money they spend doesn't mean they aren't getting something for that money. Which means you have to spend to fight them, even if you have to spend the actual money you earned.
It doesn't matter if you "should" be safe from political prosecutions and confiscations just because that's morally right, or if broke right wing artists and commentators like me "should" pull ourselves up by our own well-worn bootstraps, because something something individualism self-reliance avocado toast.
I'm not talking about what should be.
I am talking about what is.
Fighting wars costs money.
The left is so corrupt and incompetent right now that their gay race communist trash costs ten times what it actually costs to make.
And the left is so delusional and untalented right now that people would prefer literally any alternative to their art and entertainment.
But books still cost money to write and publish. Movies still cost money to shoot. Culture wars still cost money to fight.
You can't expect the left, however crippled, to lose a war with nothing and no one. And if they don't lose, they are going to gulag you and take all your stuff. 100% of it.
They don't want to rob you because they hate you.
They hate you because they want to rob you.
These guys think their money magically protects them somehow. No, what protects you is the influence and protection you buy with the money. The money just sitting there paints a huge target on your back. This is what @Cernovich has been trying to tell them.
Sam_Spade retweeted
You are at the pharmacy, picking up your daughter's prescription.
You tap your phone. Declined.
You have money. Plenty. But last week you shared a post the algorithm labeled misinformation. Your digital ID was flagged. Your wallet was restricted.
The cashier shrugs. She cannot override it. Nobody in the building can.
You call the bank. They say it is a compliance action. They cannot tell you who ordered it.
You walk out with no medicine and no one to argue with.
No arrest. No judge. No trial. Just a payment that no longer works.
This is what a CBDC makes possible once it is joined to digital ID and AI. And online child safety laws are how the ID gets installed.
Share this with someone who still thinks cash does not matter.
Follow me. Every day I show you what is coming and how to stop it.
Sam_Spade retweeted
If you've ever wondered why smart TVs are so cheap, this is why.
@log4j rooted his Samsung and found an always-on hot mic, automatic content recognition, geolocation, network mapping, ad targeting and user profiling, shared with Samsung's "400 partners".
A lot of it can be blocked in <15 min, wrote a basic guide below.
What your TV is doing
The main culprit is ACR (automatic content recognition). Your TV screenshots what's on screen, fingerprints it, and sends it home to build your ad profile. Samsung does it every 500ms, LG every 10ms [1].
What is insane: it happens on connected devices too.
Plug in your laptop, your console, your work machine, and your TV can fingerprint that via HDMI [1].
He also found that if your Samsung doesn't have a mic, it'll look for one from a connected soundbar or bluetooth device.
teapawt.net/log4j/status/211376224…
It's on by default, and you likely agreed to it on the setup screen you clicked through in 10 seconds.
Step 1: Turn off ACR
Samsung: Terms & Privacy → Viewing Information Services
LG: Live Plus
Vizio: Viewing Data
Roku: "Use info from TV inputs"
Sony/Google TV: Samba Interactive TV
Menus vary by model, but those are the names to look for. While you're in there, opt out of interest-based ads, reset your advertising ID, decline every optional privacy agreement, turn off voice recognition, and delete apps you never open.
Step 2: Give smart devices their own network
Put the TV, cameras, speakers and vacuum on your router's guest/IoT network. The logic is simple: these devices rarely get patched. If one gets compromised (getting drastically more frequent with AI), it shouldn't be able to see your other devices or home network.
Step 3: Block trackers for the whole house with DNS-level filtering
NextDNS (cloud-based) is easy and has a solid free plan. Pi-hole is a little bit more work if you prefer self hosting. For simplicity we'll focus on the former.
1. Sign up at nextdns.io (free tier is plenty)
2. Privacy tab: add a blocklist (OISD is a good bet) and turn on Native Tracking Protection for Samsung, LG, Roku, Amazon (see attached image)
3. Setup tab: copy your endpoint
4. Paste it into your router's DNS settings as DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS (or use the IPs + "Link IP" if your router only does plain DNS)
5. Bonus: block outbound port 53 except to your router. Some devices hardcode their own DNS to get around you
Then open the NextDNS logs and watch how often your TV phones home. It's eye-opening. If an app or update breaks, find the domain in the logs and allowlist it.
Why they do this
TV prices are down 97% since 2000 [2]. Most of that is better manufacturing and brutal competition. But once margins on the hardware hit zero, the cost moved to you.
In Q3 2024, Vizio lost $6.7M selling TVs and made $115.8M in gross profit from ads and viewing data [3]. They've said on earnings calls that they keep TV prices low to grow the audience they sell to advertisers. Walmart bought them in 2024.
This isn't a conspiracy theory either. Vizio paid $2.2M to the FTC in 2017 for tracking 11 million TVs without consent. Last December, Texas sued Samsung, LG, Sony, Hisense and TCL over ACR. Samsung and LG have since agreed to stop collecting that data without explicit consent [4].
TL;DR
1. ACR off
2. Ads + voice off
3. Smart devices on their own network
4. NextDNS filtering on the router
Sources:
[1] ACR study: arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
[2] Cost of US consumer goods: aei.org/economics/chart-of-t…
[3] Vizio Q3 2024: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…
[4] Texas v. Samsung: texasattorneygeneral.gov/new…
Sam_Spade retweeted
Most Western democracies have been hacked. Not with code. With institutional architecture. Let me show you how it works, using the most advanced example: the European Union.
First, how it works. Once every five years, you vote for a European Parliament that cannot even initiate legislation. The body that proposes laws is the Commission: 27 commissioners nobody elected, appointed after backroom bargaining between heads of state. Bills are then negotiated between the Commission, Parliament and Council in "trilogues", closed-door meetings where the real decisions get made. A law that will apply to 450 million people goes through corridors that 99.9% of them will never see.
Now look at who's in those corridors. Brussels has become the lobbying capital of the world: nearly 18,000 organizations on the transparency register, tens of thousands of lobbyists, more than 50 for every single MEP. And that's just the declared part. Add the revolving door: a former MEP only has to wait six months before becoming a lobbyist to the EU himself.
The real problem is distance. A national MP who votes for a law that ruins the farmers in his district runs into them at the market on Saturday. In Brussels, the decision-maker never meets the people who live with his decisions. But he meets lobbyists every day: at lunch, at cocktails, at conferences. So the system doesn't optimize for the wellbeing of the people. It optimizes for the interests of whoever is in the room. You don't even need corruption for that, incentives are enough. Although sometimes, as Qatargate showed, there's corruption too.
The result: the system has a structural incentive to accept things the people would never vote for.
Take Mercosur. Twenty-five years of negotiations. France votes against it in the Council in January 2026 and gets outvoted. To keep national parliaments from blocking it, the Commission splits the deal into two texts, including a trade agreement that only needs a vote in Brussels. The European Parliament itself writes, in black and white, that this split circumvents the right of national parliaments, and refers the deal to the EU Court of Justice. The Commission's response: it has been applying the agreement provisionally since May 1, 2026, without waiting for the Court's opinion. Farmers were protesting outside Parliament. They lost anyway.
And remember the one time the people were actually asked about Europe directly: in 2005, France and the Netherlands rejected the European Constitution. The text came back two years later as the Lisbon Treaty, ratified by parliaments. No more referendums.
But the worst of it is immigration. In 2015, relocation quotas were imposed by qualified majority on countries that had voted against them. Since June 12, 2026, the Pact on Migration and Asylum applies across the entire Union, with its "mandatory solidarity" mechanism: you take people in, or you pay. Not a single European people has ever been consulted directly on this, even though it's the issue that is transforming our societies most profoundly.
And this is where we have to talk about the most sophisticated piece of the machine: George Soros.
Soros understood before anyone else that you don't need to win elections if you shape the ecosystem around the people who make decisions. His network, the Open Society Foundations, describes itself as the largest private funder of advocacy groups in the world. In Brussels, it runs its own lobbying arm aimed at EU institutions, the Open Society European Policy Institute.
Here's what we know from internal documents leaked in 2016: a document titled "Reliable allies in the European Parliament" listed more than 200 MEPs. Strategy papers described building "inside-track groups" to caucus "internal allies" who could advance their goals in their daily work. Training sessions were organized for MEPs on how to counter so-called populist parties.
The mechanism is brutally elegant. Think tanks produce the "expertise". NGOs produce the "demand from civil society". Legal NGOs litigate in the courts. Funded media outlets produce the narrative. The Brussels decision-maker, cut off from the population, hears the same message from every direction and ends up believing that this is what people want.
And the craziest part: the institutions fund the loop themselves. Between 2021 and 2023, the EU paid around €7.4 billion to NGOs, and the European Court of Auditors found the use of that money insufficiently transparent. It even came out that the Commission had funded NGOs to lobby MEPs in favor of its own Green Deal legislation. The institution pays "civil society" to ask it to do what it already wanted to do.
All of this is legal. That's exactly what makes it a hack and not a crime. The system works exactly as designed, except nobody designed it for the people anymore.
The patch is simple to state and hard to impose: bring decisions back closer to the people who bear them, hold referendums on issues that change a civilization, create a mandatory register for every influence actor, NGOs included, with their funding sources, and shut the revolving door. Until that happens, European democracy will remain what it has become: a user interface sitting on top of a system that runs for someone else.
🤖 Made with AI
Sam_Spade retweeted
Mental Communism – How to Recognize It.
You don't need a party card to be a communist anymore. You don't even need to have read Marx. Mental communism is not an ideology. It is a way of thinking – and you meet it every day: in the office, in the newsroom, at the dinner table, in the ministry.
Here is how to recognize it.
1. Words before things. Rename a problem and it's solved. Insecurity becomes "a feeling of insecurity." Rioters become "youths." Censorship becomes "fighting disinformation."
2. Intentions before results. A policy is good because it means well and sounds good. That it failed is a detail – usually someone else's fault.
3. Humanity before people. He loves humanity. He can't stand his neighbor.
4. The model before reality. When the world doesn't fit the theory, the world must change. A new law, a new program, a bigger budget.
5. An enemy for every failure. The plan never fails. It is sabotaged – by the rich, the speculators, the "far right," the weather.
6. Appearances before reality. Poses before acts: the flag in the profile picture, the slogan at dinner, the open letter signed with a hundred others. Then nothing.
7. Rights for me, rules for you. Free speech for his side, "hate speech" for yours. Private schools for his children, public ones for yours.
8. He never pays. Being wrong costs him nothing – he moves on to the next cause, the next post, the next promotion.
9. Consensus instead of evidence. "Experts agree." "Studies show." "Everyone knows." Ask which study, and you become the problem.
10. No exit. Ask him what would prove him wrong. Silence – or outrage.
Poles recognize it instantly. We lived inside it for forty-five years: the meetings where everyone knew and nobody said, the newspapers reporting record harvests, the slogans on the walls. The regime only partly fell. The habit stayed. And in the West, it never even needed a regime.
What unites all ten? One thing. For the mental communist, reality doesn't exist – only his wishes, his words, his poses, and the power to impose them. Every sign is the same gesture: putting something in reality's place. Words instead of things. Intentions instead of results. A model instead of the world. An enemy instead of a mistake. A pose instead of an act. Consensus instead of evidence. That is also why he never pays and never admits he was wrong: you cannot be wrong about a world you don't believe exists.
Like children living in their fantasies. Children believing that wishing makes it so – except these children have power.
The good news: a habit of mind can be broken. It starts with one sentence, said out loud: the world doesn't work like that.
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.
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Sam_Spade retweeted
Les goulags existent toujours en France.
Ils n'ont plus de barbelés. Plus de miradors. Plus de Sibérie.
Ils sont virtuels. Et ils sont redoutablement efficaces.
Giesbert pose la question : la France est-elle un pays communiste ? Je vais plus loin. Oui. Mais pas le communisme qu'on vous a appris à reconnaître.
Le communisme soviétique était dessiné. Un Politburo, un plan quinquennal, une police politique, un chef. Une architecture voulue, imposée d'en haut.
Le communisme français est émergent.
Personne ne l'a décidé. Il n'y a pas de comité central. Il est sorti tout seul de millions de micro-décisions : un DRH qui préfère éviter les ennuis, un service conformité qui « gère son risque », un journaliste qui sait ce qu'il ne faut pas écrire, un prof qui sait ce qu'il ne faut pas dire, un élu qui sait ce qu'il ne faut pas voir. Comme une fourmilière : aucune fourmi ne commande, et pourtant la colonie a une volonté.
C'est ça, le génie du système. Il n'a pas besoin de chef. Donc il n'a pas de tête à couper.
L'État pèse 57 % du PIB, mais l'économie n'est que la partie visible. Le vrai collectivisme est mental. C'est la collectivisation de ce qu'il est permis de penser.
Et comme tout communisme, il a besoin de ses camps.
Évidemment, ce n'est pas comparable en horreur. Le goulag soviétique tuait. Mais la fonction est la même : retirer du jeu ceux qui dérangent. Le goulag soviétique prenait ton corps. Le goulag virtuel te laisse ton corps et te prend tout le reste.
Ton compte en banque. Ton emploi. Tes contrats. Ta plateforme. Tes invitations. Ta réputation. Tes amis, qui ne répondent plus au téléphone.
On ne t'envoie plus en Sibérie. On t'envoie dans le néant social.
La débancarisation n'est pas une théorie du complot. Cet été, le parti en tête des sondages n'arrivait pas à obtenir un prêt pour financer une campagne présidentielle, au point que le Premier ministre a dû convoquer les banques. Des médias, des associations, des essayistes ont vu leur compte fermé du jour au lendemain. Des députés ont dû poser la question officiellement à l'Assemblée. Dans une démocratie.
Pense à ce que ça veut dire. Personne ne t'a jugé. Aucun tribunal. Aucun droit à la défense. Juste un courrier : « nous mettons fin à notre relation commerciale ». La sanction sans le procès. C'est exactement ce qui rend le système si puissant : il punit sans jamais avoir à assumer qu'il punit.
Ensuite, il y a l'ostracisme. Le collègue qu'on ne réinvite plus. L'intellectuel qu'on déprogramme. L'entrepreneur dont les partenaires se retirent après une campagne sur les réseaux. Le chercheur dont la carrière s'arrête parce que ses données ne disaient pas la bonne chose.
Et le plus fascinant : la plupart de ces gens n'ont rien inventé. Ils ont décrit le réel.
Ceux qui parlaient de la dette il y a vingt ans étaient des « déclinistes ». Ceux qui défendaient le nucléaire étaient des dinosaures, jusqu'à ce que l'État ferme Fessenheim puis annonce de nouveaux réacteurs. Ceux qui parlaient d'insécurité entretenaient un « sentiment ». Ceux qui alertaient sur l'effondrement de l'école étaient des réacs.
Le schéma est toujours le même. D'abord tu décris le réel. Puis on t'accuse de mal penser. Puis le réel arrive. Et personne ne s'excuse : ceux qui t'ont lynché reprennent ton diagnostic en jurant l'avoir toujours porté.
Václav Havel a décrit ce mécanisme mieux que personne. Dans Le Pouvoir des sans-pouvoir, il raconte l'histoire d'un marchand de légumes qui met dans sa vitrine une pancarte « Prolétaires de tous les pays, unissez-vous ». Il n'y croit pas. Il s'en fiche. Il la met pour qu'on le laisse tranquille. Et c'est précisément parce que tout le monde met la pancarte que le régime tient.
Le communisme émergent tient exactement comme ça. Pas par la terreur. Par la pancarte. Par la phrase qu'on ne dit pas en réunion. Par le like qu'on ne met pas. Par le silence qu'on appelle prudence.
Mais un système fondé sur le déni a un problème : le réel ne négocie pas.
Et c'est ce qui est en train d'arriver. La déconnexion entre une grande partie des médias, de la classe politique et du pays réel est en train de leur exploser au visage. Les gens ont arrêté d'écouter. Ils ont changé de chaîne, de média, de réseau. Ils votent contre tout ce qu'on leur a recommandé. Ils voient la dette, l'école, l'hôpital, la rue, et ils comparent avec ce qu'on leur raconte au 20h.
Quand le récit officiel et la vie quotidienne divergent trop longtemps, ce n'est jamais la vie quotidienne qui cède.
Le bloc soviétique ne s'est pas effondré parce qu'il a perdu une guerre. Il s'est effondré parce que plus personne ne croyait à ce qu'il racontait. Quand les marchands de légumes ont retiré leur pancarte en 1989, des régimes qui semblaient éternels sont tombés en quelques semaines.
On y est. La pancarte est en train de tomber.
Soljenitsyne avait donné la seule règle qui compte : tu n'as pas besoin d'être un héros, tu as seulement besoin de refuser que le mensonge passe par toi.
Décris le réel. Calmement. Avec des faits. Sans haine.
C'est l'acte le plus subversif qui reste dans ce pays.
La France est un pays socialo-communiste mais elle croit encore vivre dans l’enfer néolibéral.
Franz-Olivier Giesbert a tout résumé dans La France est-elle un pays communiste ? : on baigne dans un « communisme mou » pas de goulag, pas de Guépéou, juste un État-nounou obèse qui a collectivisé une part record de la richesse nationale. Les dépenses publiques frôlent les 57 % du PIB (57,2 % en 2025).
Un niveau que même les régimes socialistes et communistes historiques auraient regardé avec envie, financé par des déficits structurels et une dette qui dépasse 115 % du PIB.
Le paradoxe est total. Pendant que les idéologues marxistes (et leurs relais) martèlent que la France est gangrenée par l’ultralibéralisme, l’assistanat sans limites, la suradministration et l’agonie de la valeur travail font le reste. Les fonctionnaires sont plus nombreux qu’ailleurs, les normes punitives (économiques et écologiques) s’empilent, et la redistribution a dévoré la production de richesse.
La suradministration est le cœur du système. Giesbert le résume crûment : pour une personne qui produit, il en faut cinq ou six qui supervisent, contrôlent ou normifient.
Gorbatchev aurait lâché la formule la plus cruelle : « La France est le seul pays où le communisme a réussi. » Blague ou diagnostic, elle colle.
Ce n’est pas le communisme dur des Soviets. C’est le mou, le français, celui qui s’est installé dans les élites, l’école, les normes et l’inconscient collectif. Les partis communistes électoraux se sont ratatinés ; le collectivisme bureaucratique, lui, est resté.
Tocqueville avait prévu le despotisme doux de l’État-providence omniprésent.
Giesbert constate qu’il est là, accepté par confort, et qu’il paralyse le pays tout en se faisant passer pour la victime.
Le déni est le dernier verrou. Tant que les Français resteront persuadés d’être dans la géhenne néolibérale, le « communisme mou » continuera de prospérer.
A bon entendeur. 👌
Sam_Spade retweeted
Capitalism has a win condition. Socialism does not.
Here's why, explained so simply a 10-year-old could get it. It starts with a book written in 1944 by an Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek: The Road to Serfdom.
Imagine a classroom of 30 kids. One day the teacher says: "From now on, I decide what everyone eats for lunch, which games you play at recess, and who sits next to whom. It's fairer that way."
First problem: the teacher doesn't know what you like. You hate carrots. Your friend is allergic to peanuts. Lucas wants to play football, Emma wants to draw. 30 kids, 30 different wishes. Nobody can know all of that, not even the smartest teacher on Earth. Hayek called this the knowledge problem. The information needed to run an economy is scattered across millions of heads, and it can't be gathered in one office.
Second problem: the kids start fighting. "Why does he get the window seat?" "Why football again?" Before, everyone just chose for themselves. Now every choice is a fight, because every choice is made for everyone.
Third problem: the class can't agree on a plan, so someone says "we need one person in charge who just decides." This is Hayek's key insight. Planning doesn't fail because planners are evil. A plan needs everyone to agree on the same goals, and free people never agree on everything. So the plan needs force to work.
Fourth problem, and it's the scariest one: who wants that job? The kind kid doesn't want it, because the kind kid doesn't want to force 29 people to eat carrots. The job attracts the one who likes giving orders and doesn't mind punishing those who disobey. Hayek wrote a whole chapter on this, called "Why the Worst Get on Top." It doesn't happen by accident. It happens by selection.
Here's the trap. When the person who controls your lunch also controls your job, your home, your shop and your newspaper, they control your whole life. You can't say no, because there's nowhere else to go. Controlling the economy doesn't mean controlling one part of life. It means controlling the means to every goal you have.
That's the road to serfdom. Nobody votes for a dictator. People vote for "someone should fix this," then for "give them more power to fix it," and one day they wake up with no one left to say no to.
The USSR, Maoist China, Cambodia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela. These are different countries with different cultures and languages, and the story has the same ending every time. When a script produces the same ending every time, it isn't bad luck. It's the script.
Now capitalism. Back to the classroom. Instead of one teacher deciding everything, every kid can trade. You give me your carrots, I give you my apple, and we both walk away happier. Nobody needs to know what everyone wants, because prices do that job. A price is a message telling millions of strangers what's scarce and what's wanted, with no one in charge.
That's the win condition. In capitalism, you get rich by making something other people freely choose to buy, so your success depends on serving others. In a planned system, you get ahead by pleasing whoever holds power. One rewards usefulness. The other rewards obedience.
And this isn't theory. Two centuries ago, almost every human being was extremely poor. In 1990, about 38% of humanity still lived in extreme poverty. Today it's under 10%. More than a billion people escaped it in a single generation. It happened when China, India, Vietnam and South Korea opened up to markets, trade and private enterprise. The largest reduction in poverty in human history came from letting people trade.
So why do so many people hate capitalism?
Because what they hate usually isn't capitalism.
They hate the bank that got bailed out with their taxes while they lost their house. They hate the giant company that writes the regulations so no startup can compete with it. They hate rent they can't afford because building new homes has been made nearly impossible. They hate the lobbyist who gets a subsidy while the small business owner drowns in paperwork.
Look closely at each one, and you'll find a state handing out privileges. A bailout is not the market. The market would have let the bank fail. A regulation written by incumbents is not competition. It's protection from competition. None of this is capitalism. It's cronyism, which is what happens when businesses stop competing for customers and start competing for politicians.
People see the symptom and blame the wrong cause. They say "capitalism failed" and ask for more state. That gives more power to the same people who created the problem, and it puts us right back on Hayek's road.
The answer to bad capitalism isn't less freedom. It's less privilege. That means fewer bailouts, fewer protected incumbents, fewer permits, and more people allowed to build, compete and trade.
Capitalism has a win condition: make things people want. Socialism has an end condition: someone has to be in charge. And history keeps showing us who ends up in that chair.
Sam_Spade retweeted
小孩问庄子，什么是诡辩。庄子反问：我家来了两个客人，一个很干净，一个很脏。我请他俩洗澡，你觉得谁会洗？
小孩脱口而出；肯定是脏的那个!
庄子摇摇头：不对。干净的人爱干净，脏的人不在乎脏，应该是干净的人洗。
小孩赶紧改口：那就是干净的洗。
庄子又笑了：又错了。干净的人没必要洗，脏的人才需要洗，是脏的洗。
小孩情了：那到底是谁洗？
庄子说：干净的人有习惯，脏的人有需要，两个人都洗。不等小孩反应，他又补了一句；其实俩人都不洗，干净的不用洗，脏的不爱洗。
小孩彻底迷糊。
庄子这才点明：这就是诡辩。逻辑都通顺，但答案却不一样，很多人跟你争论，逻辑听着都没问题，但结论可以随意变换。
绕来绕去，目的不是求真，只是把你绕晕。
遇到这种诡辩，不必争辩。
Sam_Spade retweeted
Lorsqu'on a demandé à Tchekhov quelle était la nature des sociétés défaillantes, il a répondu :
"Dans les sociétés défaillantes, il y a mille sots pour chaque esprit éclairé, et mille paroles grossières pour chaque mot conscient. La majorité reste toujours ignorante, et l'homme raisonnable est constamment vaincu. Si vous voyez des sujets futiles dominer les discussions dans une société, et les sots occuper le devant de la scène, alors vous êtes en présence d'une société très défaillante.
Par exemple, les chansons et les paroles vides de sens trouvent des millions de gens pour danser et les répéter, et le chanteur devient célèbre, connu et aimé. Au point que les gens prennent son avis sur les questions de la société et de la vie.
Quant aux écrivains et aux auteurs, personne ne les connaît et personne ne leur accorde de valeur ou de poids. La plupart des gens aiment la futilité et l'anesthésie. Quelqu'un qui nous anesthésie pour nous éloigner de nos pensées, et quelqu'un qui nous fait rire avec des futilités, est meilleur que quelqu'un qui nous réveille à la réalité et nous fait mal en disant la vérité. C'est pourquoi la démocratie ne convient pas aux sociétés ignorantes, car c'est la majorité ignorante qui décidera de votre destin." Le monde littéraire.
Sam_Spade retweeted
Power selects for a specific personality type, and it is not yours.
F.A. Hayek spelled this out in 1944. In a centrally planned system, the people who rise are not the most competent or the most honest. They are the most willing to exercise force against strangers, the most comfortable with contradiction, and the most skilled at coalition-building through favors rather than merit. Government filters for the bad ones from the start.
The mechanism is straightforward. Political power means controlling resources you did not earn. Capturing that control requires outcompeting rivals who have no ethical constraints. A principled candidate refuses to promise contradictory things to different voter blocs. An unprincipled one does it without blinking. The unprincipled one wins. Repeat this selection pressure across hundreds of electoral cycles and you get the U.S. Congress in 2026: a body where the average member has held office for over a decade, raised millions from interested parties, and delivered almost nothing measurable to the people who voted for them.
Bureaucracy compounds the problem. Once entrenched, state agencies attract people who want authority without accountability. You cannot fire most of them. The FDA, the TSA, the Federal Reserve all function this way, staffed by individuals whose career advancement depends on expanding the agency's reach, never on serving you efficiently.
Sam_Spade retweeted
Homem é tão solidário, mas tão solidário, que arrisca a própria vida só para ajudar um desconhecido em risco… 👏
Sam_Spade retweeted
Sony:
Full version of GTA6 with every perk is $100.
- Consumers complain
No collectors edition, no physical disk
- Consumers complain
No online mode for what looks like two years
- Consumers complain
Game locked at 30FPS on PS5
- Consumers complain
Undetermined PC release
- Consumers complain
Pre-sales are at an historic high, on pace to smash records. Play Stations are sold out in many venues because of the pending release. Hype is through the roof.
Is it any wonder that game corporations feel that they can do whatever they want because consumers lack the backbone to say no?
It’s your fault.