Nelson.R.Bilobran @gggerius

No, these aren’t the Windberries warehouses in Moscow from last week or in Krasnodar from yesterday. They’re the ones in St. Petersburg from today! Mihai Tonsciuc asked me yesterday whether “the Russians are feeling these attacks,” referring to Ukraine’s goal of pushing the war back to where it came from and drawing the population’s attention (also) in the context of the September parliamentary elections and the post-election mobilization. Wildberries employs approximately 50,000 people. The Associated Press and Reuters estimate between 700,000 and 1 million merchants on the platform, and Mediascope estimated that 62% of Russians over the age of 12 accessed the platform at least once a month. If we add all these figures together, we arrive at the conclusion that 60% of the total population would be affected in one way or another if all Wildberries warehouses were destroyed. If we consider that the warehouses in western Russia are the largest and most important—and that they are being systematically destroyed—then we can conclude that the Ukrainians will achieve this objective much more quickly. In recent days, 6 of the top 10 largest warehouses have already been hit or completely destroyed. Estimated losses amount to over $3 billion (not including today’s losses in St. Petersburg, Leningrad Oblast, and Crimea). Most likely, the costs and losses inflicted on Russia by Ukraine in this military operation alone will approach $10 billion by the end of the month. As for the argument that “oh, but these are civilian targets,” the position remains as we’ve established: If you have illegally attacked a country, without cause, without justification, kidnapped over 20,000 children, killed over 20,000 civilians in Mariupol alone, and created over 10 mass graves (Bucha, Irpin, Izium, Borodyanka, Chernihiv, Mariupol, etc.), you are guilty of mass murder and genocide, and in the fifth year, the victim strikes your logistics hubs through which you import parts and products that you turn into weapons to continue the massacre of the victim’s citizens—then yes, don’t complain, and those logistics hubs become legitimate military targets. Slava Ukraini!

Те, кто говорят, что из-за нарастающих украинских ударов российское общество сейчас кааааааак активизируется и мобилизуется, вообще ни черта не понимают в российском обществе. Если завтра НАТО захватит Калининградскую область, если с другого конца страны Китай заберёт Благовещенск, если десяток ракет влетит в Кремль - российское общество не будет делать НИ-ЧЕ-ГО. Нет, разговоров в соцсетях и в кафе будет много. Но никакого коллективного действия, никакой общественной мобилизации не последует. И очередей в военкоматы не будет тоже, это всё бредни престарелой комсомолки. На это есть веская причина, которая называется атомизация общества. Атомизация идёт уже несколько десятков лет, с позднесоветских времён. В 90-е она усилилась, а путинский режим так и вовсе очень её поощряет. Никаких самодеятельных активностей, никаких неформальных объединений, никаких коллективных действий. Вам всё это не надо. Просто молчите и занимайтесь каждый своей частной жизнью. Это один из самых главных мессаджей последней четверти века. Буквально все в России, кто не старше 40-45 лет, выросли и всю жизнь живут в условиях тотальной атомизации общества. У людей просто отсутствует навык самостоятельного коллективного действия. Коллективные активности случаются только по прямой указке власти, пример - обязаловка для бюджетников на "выборах". Неполитическое волонтерство охватывает максимум несколько сотен тысяч человек. Даже воевать идут в основном ради денег, отмени миллионные выплаты - и поток новых контрактников сократится в разы, все это понимают. Никакое отдельное событие не может создать в обществе навык коллективного действия. Для этого нужно время, нужны десятилетия жизни в условиях свободы, нужно прекращение узурпации власти маленькой кучкой людей. То есть в обозримом будущем общественная мобилизация в России невозможна. "Русского медведя" нельзя разбудить, потому что сегодня никакого "русского медведя" не существует.

Joseph Stalin murdered more human beings than almost anyone in recorded history, and he did it with a clipboard and a five-year plan. Let me give you the numbers, because the numbers matter. The Holodomor, the man-made famine in Ukraine from 1932 to 1933, killed somewhere around 4 million people. Stalin engineered it. He confiscated the grain, sealed the borders so starving peasants couldn't leave, and let them die in the snow while the state exported wheat abroad. He collectivized agriculture, meaning he seized private farms and forced peasants onto giant state operations. The productive farmers, the ones who owned a cow or two and actually knew how to grow things, he branded "kulaks" and shipped to Siberia or shot. He destroyed his best producers on purpose. Then came the Great Terror of 1937 and 1938. Stalin's secret police executed roughly 700,000 people in about two years. Not battlefield deaths. Confessions extracted in basements, quotas handed down for how many "enemies" each region should find. Quotas. For arrests. Somebody in Moscow decided your town owed the state 200 traitors, and the local officers went and found 200, guilty or not. The whole thing rests on a simple lie: that a handful of men in a Kremlin office know how to run millions of lives better than those millions running their own. Stalin believed that lie hard enough to build a machine of corpses around it. Property rights aren't some dusty legal technicality. They're the thing standing between you and a bureaucrat deciding your grain belongs to the collective and your life doesn't matter. Stalin proved that 20 million dead is just a statistic to a central planner.

@Perderam_manes @rmotta2 Nananinanão. Ambos (seus governos) eram irmãos de sangue (judeus); tanto os EUA quanto os soviéticos. Stalin implorou pela ajuda americana, sem a qual teria sido fragorosamente derrotado. Os EUA entraram na guerra para lucrar; ela lhes era totalmente estranha.

Richard Feynman stood at a Cornell blackboard in 1964 and explained the problem every AI lab is fighting in 2026. The BBC filmed it. Almost nobody watches it. The lecture is about why nature only answers in mathematics. Every team forcing language models to reason is hitting the wall he mapped 62 years ago. He was 46. The Nobel Prize came 11 months later. The footage survived on film reels and now sits free on YouTube with fewer views than a keyboard unboxing. Watch the blackboard section near the middle. He takes 1 of Kepler's laws and rebuilds it from nothing, with notation a 12-year-old can follow. No slides. No jargon. 1 piece of chalk. An ML engineer I know paused it 4 times and made his whole team watch it before standup. You're 62 years late. The lecture is still free.

the lich @thelichhh

a week ago

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@QuantumGuard17

What has this war revealed, Russians? 1. First. You turned out to be far less intelligent than you believed yourselves to be. 2. Second. Putin is not an alien who accidentally landed in Russia. He turned out to be a fairly accurate reflection of a society that, for decades, wanted greatness without responsibility, victories without hard work, respect without dignity, and an empire without paying the price. 3. Third. You produce very little besides arrogance, fear, lies, hatred, humiliation, and endless explanations of why everyone else is to blame except you. 4. Fourth. The so-called "second strongest army in the world" turned out not to be the army of the future, but a relic of the past—a television myth and a meat grinder for the poor. 5. Fifth. There turned out to be fewer decent people than many had hoped. And the most frightening part is not that there are so few of them. The most frightening part is how easily the majority agreed to live alongside crime, as long as they themselves were left alone. 6. Sixth. Russia's greatest resource is not oil, gas, or missiles. Its greatest resource is the willingness to tolerate any atrocity—as long as it is properly justified on television. 7. Seventh. The greatest catastrophe is not that the authorities lied. It is that millions of people were willing to buy those lies because the truth would have required them to grow up. The war has exposed not only a rotten army—it has exposed a country that spent a very long time believing itself to be great because it was afraid to admit its own immaturity.

Bret Weinstein said something that won’t leave my head: For the first time in 300,000 years of human evolution, we removed the cost from the single biggest reward nature ever invented — sex and pair-bonding. Reliable birth control + abortion = you can now cash the evolutionary lottery ticket without paying the 20-year mortgage of pregnancy, diapers, sleepless nights, and college funds. Result? An entire generation of 18–35-year-olds walking around with the energy, libido, hormones, and protective instincts that evolution spent millions of years calibrating for child-rearing… but with zero actual children. That energy didn’t disappear. It got redirected. Heather Heying’s observation is brutal: young women especially began treating ideologies the exact way evolution wired them to treat babies. Climate change, social justice, whatever the cause of the month is — it gets defended with literal mama-bear ferocity, the same neurochemistry that once guarded a toddler from predators now guards an abstract idea from wrong think. And now Elon is promising the second shoe is about to drop: AI-driven abundance will make money as “free” as sex became in the 1970s. Both of evolution’s primary carrots — mating and resource acquisition suddenly cost almost nothing. Weinstein’s ice-cold question: When producing and protecting actual children is no longer the central organizing principle of adult life… and when creating wealth is no longer required for status, security, or attracting a mate…What is left to give a human life direction, meaning, and structure? Are we about to become a species that invents bigger and bigger dragons to slay just to feel alive? Or do we drift into total listlessness? This 3:52 clip is genuinely haunting. Watch it all the way through, then tell me — honestly — does this explain the absolute intensity we’re seeing in culture right now, or is Bret completely missing something? Real answers only. Quote-post if it hits you in the chest like it hit me.

Oi, @julianadalpiva, tudo bem? Eu nunca tinha sequer ouvido falar de você até descobrir hoje que você me bloqueou. Pelos teus posts e matérias você parece ser uma jornalista investigativa, correto? Então aproveita que você ressuscitou o Sicário e investiga para todos nós as imagens dele se "suicidando" na cela e dele morto no caixão, por favor? É que a mídia toda hora "matava" o coitado, então ficamos na dúvida se ele morreu de verdade. Aproveita também e investiga porque o PT comemorou o fim da CPI do INSS, porque não queria implantar esta e também a CPI do Master e por que estão blindando o Lulinha e o Frei Chico, por favor? Senão vão achar que você é parcial. Bom trabalho!

It has been a great honor to serve the Ukrainian people as the Minister of Defense. Here is what our team managed to achieve: 1. Disabled Starlink access for Russian forces. 2. Took over a Ministry of Defense with zero budget, took a risk, reallocated funds from payroll from the end of the year, and effectively invested them in mid-strike capabilities, fiber-optic FPVs, low-cost reconnaissance, ground robotic platforms, interceptor drones, and deep-strike drones. 3. Launched "Logistical Lockdown", this cut off enemy logistics and initiated the isolation of Crimea. 4. Continued the funding program for the Drone Line. 5. Launched a support program for modern drone-assault units that rely primarily on advanced technologies in combat. 6. Introduced a 70% advance payment policy for procurements made via e-Points on the Brave1 Market portal. 7. Fundamentally overhauled the procurement system. 8. Procured thousands of pickup trucks, buggies, and ATVs for the military for the first time—and did so through open tenders. 9. The drone interception rate rose from 83% to 91%, and the cruise missile interception rate soared from 47% to 87%. 10. Contracted Patriot PAC-2 GEM-T missiles for the first time, and submitted an application through an EU loan to purchase PAC-3 missiles. 11. Launched a baseline drone supply system for brigades and corps. 12. Launched a massive grant program for manufacturers of explosives and missiles. 13. Initiated an unpopular but vital transformation of the military. 14. Conducted three UDCG meetings, where we successfully broke through the Russian information trap claiming our defeat, restoring partners' faith in Ukraine. This secured $40 billion in support announced for this year (excluding the EU loan). 15. Launched the mechanism to utilize the EU loan for our military priorities. 16. Found a way to scale cheap missiles against jet-powered Shaheds and signed a record-breaking contract. 17. Our domestic ballistics. We radically revised the technical specifications, maximized accuracy, and reduced the cost by 30%. 18. Signed a contract to procure Gripen fighter jets. 19. Collaborated with the military to plan and execute Operation Auchan, which halted the enemy's mechanized offensive for six months. 20. Opened up exports under the Drone Deal program to attract investment and scale up domestic defense-industrial complex (OPK) production. 21. Launched the Trophy Lab, providing partners with the opportunity to study captured Russian military technologies. 22. Launched the Defense AI Center A1 to accelerate the integration of artificial intelligence on the battlefield. Thank you to my entire team for their relentless 24/7 service. A special thank you to my family for their patience. Thank you all for your support! I will continue to work toward the mission I originally brought to the Ministry of Defense: defeating the enemy through asymmetry, the speed of innovation, and the power of organization. To be continued.

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Após concluir a investigação da Seção 301, o Escritório do Representante de Comércio dos Estados Unidos (USTR) recomendou a aplicação de uma tarifa adicional de 25% sobre milhares de produtos brasileiros e informou ao governo brasileiro que as negociações chegaram ao fim. Em reunião realizada na terça-feira, 14 de julho, o representante comercial americano (USTR), Jamieson Greer, comunicou ao governo brasileiro que as tratativas foram encerradas e que a recomendação para aplicação de um novo tarifaço já foi encaminhada ao presidente Donald Trump. Segundo autoridades americanas, o governo Lula não demonstrou empenho suficiente para construir um acordo capaz de evitar o tarifaço. Na prática, Washington encerrou as tratativas convencido de que não havia mais espaço para avanços. O resultado chama atenção porque, durante a audiência pública da Seção 301, realizada nos dias 6 e 7 de julho - etapa decisiva do processo - o governo brasileiro não apresentou sustentação oral perante as autoridades americanas. Quem ocupou esse espaço foram representantes da indústria, do agronegócio e o senador Flávio Bolsonaro, que defenderam os interesses dos setores afetados e pediram a revisão das tarifas. Enquanto o governo insiste em afirmar que promoveu diversas rodadas de negociação, o desfecho fala por si: o USTR manteve sua recomendação, criticou a condução brasileira e encaminhou a proposta para a decisão final da Casa Branca. Agora, a palavra final está com Donald Trump. Caberá ao presidente americano decidir se confirma a recomendação do USTR, quais produtos serão efetivamente atingidos pela tarifa de 25% e quais ficarão de fora da lista final. Se Trump der sinal verde, o Brasil enfrentará uma das maiores barreiras comerciais impostas pelos Estados Unidos nas últimas décadas. Apesar do discurso oficial de que havia negociação em curso, o governo Lula terminou o processo sem convencer Washington expondo o seu fracasso, sem evitar o avanço das tarifas e sem entregar o resultado que prometia ao setor produtivo brasileiro. Em outras palavras, Lula não protegeu o povo, não protegeu a indústria e ainda deixou o país pagar a conta de sua própria omissão.

A mulherada de esquerda fazendo aquela pressão psicológica básica do tipo: se não pautarem o PL da Misoginia mulheres irão morrer. Mas engraçado que nenhuma delas votou a favor do PL 1112/2023 que dificultava a progressão de regime para estupradores. É muito desespero para institucionalizar a censura. Agora a Janja diz que criticar os gastos dela é “misoginia pura”.

Karl Marx spent his life explaining an economy he never once participated in. He wrote *Das Kapital* in the reading room of the British Museum, subsisting on handouts from Friedrich Engels, whose family owned the very factories Marx despised. But that irony is the least of his problems. Start with the labor theory of value, the rotten foundation holding the whole structure up. Marx claimed a good's value comes from the socially necessary labor time poured into it. Sounds tidy. It collapses on contact with reality. You can spend forty hours hand-carving a mud pie and it remains worthless. Value lives in the mind of the buyer, not the sweat of the maker. Carl Menger settled this in 1871 with the theory of marginal utility. Value is subjective. A bottle of water sells for pennies in Vienna and for a fortune in the Sahara, and the labor inside it never changed. Once subjective value stands, Marx's "surplus value" story falls with it. He insisted the capitalist steals the gap between what labor produces and what labor gets paid. But the worker gets paid today for output the entrepreneur sells months later, at a price nobody can guarantee. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk named this correctly: the capitalist advances wages now and shoulders the risk of loss. Time preference explains the wage gap. That is not theft. That is a service, and workers line up for it because they prefer a paycheck Friday over a gamble that pays off next year. Then there is calculation. In 1920 Ludwig von Mises demolished the socialist project in a single stroke: without private ownership of capital goods, you have no market prices for them, and without prices you cannot calculate whether building tractors or grain silos wastes resources. The planner flies blind. The Soviets proved it for seventy years, producing shoes nobody could wear and steel nobody needed while people queued for bread. Twenty million dead in the process, give or take a census. Marx predicted capitalism would immiserate the worker until revolution. Instead the worker got refrigerators, antibiotics, and a smartphone with more computing power than NASA had in 1969. His theory failed the exam. Every single question.

“God is dead.” Nietzsche didn’t say this as a celebration. He said it as a warning – and then spent his remaining sane years screaming that nobody understood what it meant. 1. What dies with God is not just religion. It is the entire civilizational foundation – the shared metaphysical ground on which Western values, Western ethics, and Western meaning were constructed. Remove the foundation and the building doesn’t immediately collapse. It stands on habit, on inertia, on the assumption that the values will survive without the roots. They won’t. Nietzsche knew this. He said so. Nobody listened. 2. The replacement religions arrived immediately. Socialism. Nationalism. Progressivism. Wokism. Climatism. Each one borrowed the deep structure of what it replaced — sin, redemption, heretics, chosen people, apocalypse, salvation — and filled it with secular content. The climate activist has the End Times. The woke movement has original sin — called privilege — and ritual confession. The socialist has the promised land and the class enemy. Same architecture. No foundation. Running on stolen moral capital from the civilization they claim to have transcended. 3. Nietzsche is the most stolen philosopher in history. His sister took his manuscripts after his mental collapse and edited them for the Nazis. They took Übermensch as racial superiority – the precise opposite of what he meant (he meant the moral man and had a Polish Noble in mind). The self-help industry took Will to Power as motivational rhetoric. Academics took perspectivism as relativism. Nobody took the actual point: that without genuine values rooted in something deeper than political preference, the will to power produces not greatness but barbarism. 4. Ressentiment — slave morality — is his most precise and least quoted insight. The weak define virtue as whatever the strong are not. Goodness becomes the inversion of power rather than its expression. Merit becomes suspect. Excellence becomes privilege. Achievement becomes something to apologize for. He described this in 1887. It is the operating system of contemporary progressive culture, running at full speed in every HR department and university admissions office in the Western world. 5. The Last Man is his most devastating image – the creature at the end of history who invented happiness and blinks. No aspiration, no risk, no greatness, no tragedy. Warm, safe, comfortable, and completely hollow. Brave New World’s population. Demolition Man’s San Angeles. Tocqueville’s soft despotism taken to its biological conclusion. 6. Nihilism is coming, he said. Into the emptiness left by the dead foundations rush the worst possible substitutes – ideology, group identity, outrage, apocalyptic movements that need an enemy to replace the meaning they cannot generate themselves. He predicted it would take centuries to work through. He was optimistic about the timeline. We are living inside the working-through – and the replacement religions are multiplying faster than anyone is building anything to replace them with.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

4 weeks ago

The Count of Monte Cristo has been voted the most American hero in French literature. (In a poll I conducted:) 1. Edmond Dantès is destroyed by the establishment not because he did anything wrong – but because he was about to succeed. Three mediocre men find it convenient that

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Elon Musk hat Ursula von der Leyen scharf kritisiert und ihre Darstellung der EU als „Demokratie“ als größte Lüge bezeichnet. In einer direkten Anfrage konfrontierte Musk die EU-Kommissionspräsidentin: „Wenn Demokratie die Grundlage der Freiheit ist – warum wird Ihre Position als eine der mächtigsten Führungsfiguren der EU dann nicht direkt vom Volk gewählt?“ Musk warf der Brüsseler Bürokratie vor, nicht gewählte Spitzenfunktionäre würden 450 Millionen Bürgern in der EU Massenmigration, radikale Netto-Null-Politik und massive Einschränkungen der Meinungsfreiheit aufzwingen – ohne echte demokratische Legitimation oder Rechenschaftspflicht gegenüber den Wählern. „Das ist keine Demokratie“, so der Musk. „Das ist eine Diktatur in Zeitlupe.“

A college economics professor stated that he had once failed an entire class. That class insisted that socialism is functional and that no one should be poor and no one rich, that everyone is equal... The teacher told them, "OK, we will do an experiment on socialism in this group. All grades will be averaged, and everyone will get the same grade, so no one will fail and no one will get a 10." After the first test, the grades were added up and divided by the number of students, and everyone got an 8. The students who studied intensively were upset, but those who studied less were overjoyed. As the second test approached, the students who had studied a little learned even less, and those who had studied more intensively told themselves that they also wanted a "handout", so they also studied less. The average of the second test was 6. When the third test was given, the average score was 4. To the great surprise of all the students, they all failed. The teacher told them that socialism will eventually fail because when half the population sees that they cannot work, because the other half will take care of them, and when the half that worked realizes that there is no point in working anymore, because others are the beneficiaries of their labor, then that is the end of any nation The story may be a fable not a fact but the moral is real Get it?

This system does not just produce liars – it produces people who can no longer clearly distinguish truth from the narrative they have been trained to emit. This environment also produces a kind of cognitive adaptation often described as doublethink – the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs at the same time, and to accept both as true when required. It is not merely lying to others, but a learned internal tolerance toward contradiction itself, where inconsistencies are tolerated because survival depends on it. Literally twisting the minds. Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, and others who lived through this recognize the pattern immediately when they see it in Western institutions today. The show trials of Twitter mobs. The compelled speech. The ideological litmus tests for employment. The memory-holing of inconvenient facts. The ritualistic confessions of privilege. To a post-communist eye, it is unmistakable. To eyes that have only known freedom, it looks like a passionate, if misguided, social movement. That gap in perception – between those who have vocabulary for zakłamanie and those who do not – may be one of the most consequential fault lines in the Western world today. Because you cannot fight a disease you cannot name. And you cannot name what your language was never built to describe. The first task, then, is translation – not just of words, but of the lived understanding those words carry. The lie is not a bug in this system. It is the system. Until that is understood, the West will keep arriving, perpetually surprised, to find that the institutions it trusted have been quietly hollowed out from within. 2/2

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. 1/2

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – the original Woke He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a "noble savage", never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached. 1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755. 2. The "Noble Savage" is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it. 3. The "General Will" is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were "properly enlightened". Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation. 4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every "liberation" movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same. 5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair. 6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda (remember the obłuda of communism?👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word. 7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland

3 weeks ago

Marcus Aurelius – the most reasonable guy from 19 centuries ago. Perhaps because Rome was roughly at the stage at which we find ourselves now. He was the most powerful man in the world. He wrote the Meditations — his private journal, never intended for publication — to remind

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Um amigo meu acreditava que só conseguiria ser santo vivendo num mosteiro. Ele pensava que o problema era o mundo. O barulho. As pessoas. As distrações. Então ele foi. Só que aconteceu uma coisa que ele nunca imaginou. Lá, no silêncio, ele descobriu que os pensamentos continuavam. As dúvidas continuavam. As tentações continuavam. Em alguns momentos, pareciam até maiores. Foi quando percebeu uma verdade difícil: Você pode fugir da cidade. Mas não consegue fugir de si mesmo. É exatamente por isso que Dostoiévski faz Aliócha começar sua jornada no mosteiro e depois enviá-lo de volta ao mundo. A santidade não consiste em encontrar um lugar sem conflitos, mas em aprender a amar e agir bem onde Deus nos colocou.