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(Disinformation Review, 24 April 2025, https://mailchi.mp/euvsdisinfo/dr361-6228934?e=f10f51a6bd) The myth that won’t die: blaming NATO for Russia’s war In the murky landscape of disinformation, few narratives have proven as stubbornly persistent as the claim that NATO expansion provoked Russia into invading Ukraine. This myth, recycled and rebranded by Kremlin apologists, shifts blame for Russia’s aggression onto the West – ignoring history and facts. It’s time to call this narrative what it is: a convenient distortion designed to justify an unjustifiable war. Myth 1: “Russia was provoked. NATO broke a promise” One of the most common myths in pro-Kremlin rhetoric is that NATO promised not to expand “one inch eastward” after the Cold War. But there is no evidence of any formal [or even oral/A.L.] agreement to that effect. Multiple Western leaders and declassified documents confirm that while there were discussions about NATO’s position in Germany during reunification, no binding or global commitment was made to freeze the alliance’s borders indefinitely. And here’s a crucial point: if Russia truly wanted such a guarantee, it knows full well how international diplomacy works. It would have pushed for a treaty, a formal accord, or at the very least, a publicly documented commitment. But that never happened – because no such promise was ever officially made nor sought. Even Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet leader at that time, confirmed there was no agreement or promise to not enlarge NATO. In diplomacy, if there’s no treaty, no signed agreement, and no public declaration, then there is no binding promise. Russia understands this. It’s not ignorance – it’s deliberate revisionism by Putin. More importantly, sovereign nations in Eastern Europe wanted to join NATO – not because NATO sought to encircle Russia, but because these countries had endured decades of Soviet occupation and invasions, and were determined never to return to that subjugation. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania – these were not pawns being played by Washington. They were democracies making strategic choices for their security. To suggest otherwise is to deny them agency and ignore their history and sovereignty. Myth 2: “Ukraine was about to join NATO. Russia had no choice” Despite repeated claims, Ukraine was not on the verge of joining NATO in early 2022. While Ukraine had long expressed interest in membership, there was no formal invitation, no fast-track process. The idea that NATO membership for Ukraine was imminent is more fiction than fact. It was a distant possibility, not a current policy. Russia’s ultimatum in December 2021 for a guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO was never a genuine diplomatic offer – it was a pretext. Demanding that NATO not only bar Ukraine forever but also roll back its presence from all countries that joined after 1997, erasing decades of sovereign decisions by Eastern European states, was not a negotiation – it was an impossible demand. Putin knew NATO could never accept it without abandoning its core principles and the security of its members. The ultimatum was meant to be rejected. It was a setup, not a diplomatic effort (as we've outlined here). And perhaps the clearest evidence that NATO wasn’t the real reason for the invasion? Putin’s own words. In his February 2022 speech just before the invasion, he hardly focused on NATO at all. Instead, he questioned Ukraine’s very right to exist as an independent state – claiming it was “created by Lenin” and should be part of Russia. That rhetoric points not to defensive concerns, but to imperial ambition. If Russia truly feared Ukraine joining NATO, launching a full-scale invasion is perhaps the most effective way to guarantee closer Western alignment and support. The war did not stop NATO from getting closer to Ukraine – it accelerated that process. That’s not fear, that’s a gamble rooted in different ambitions. Myth 3: “Russia feared NATO on its border” The idea that Russia invaded Ukraine out of fear of NATO is contradicted by its own actions. If Moscow truly saw NATO as an immediate threat, believing NATO was planning to use Ukraine as a launch pad for a war against Russia, it would likely have calculated a more cautious approach, particularly given NATO's military power. In fact, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 demonstrates the opposite: a calculated confidence that NATO would not intervene directly, and that NATO was not seeking a war with Russia. And that calculation was correct. NATO, despite its military power, repeatedly emphasised that it would not send troops into Ukraine or engage Russian forces directly. Putin knew this – and he gambled accordingly. If the Kremlin genuinely feared NATO, it would not have provoked a scenario that could bring NATO’s attention and weaponry even closer. But it did – because the real motivation wasn’t fear of NATO. It was a desire to reassert control over Ukraine and prevent its general westward ambitions. Myth 4: “There was a coup in Ukraine in 2014, led by the West” This tired trope tries to erase the will of the Ukrainian people, who took to the streets in 2013–2014 demanding accountability, reform, and an end to corrupt Russian-backed leadership. The Revolution of Dignity was not orchestrated by the CIA or NATO, it was sparked by President Yanukovych’s abrupt rejection of a popular free trade and association agreement with the EU and his violent crackdown on protesters. The Kremlin frames this democratic uprising as a Western-led coup because it cannot acknowledge that its neighbours might choose a different path – one that doesn’t revolve around Moscow. For authoritarian regimes, the power of free people is always the enemy. What the myth ignores To truly understand this war, look not at NATO’s decisions, but at Vladimir Putin’s own words. In his infamous July 2021 essay and February 2022 speech, Putin dismissed Ukrainian sovereignty and framed the country as a historical part of Russia. His motivations aren’t defensive – they’re imperial. The invasion was about reasserting control over a former Soviet republic, crushing a thriving democracy on Russia’s border, and signalling to other post-Soviet states that turning westward comes with consequences. Putin doesn’t fear NATO. He fears democracy. He fears that Russia’s democratic neighbours, previously occupied by Moscow, would prove Russians could live freely without oligarchs and authoritarianism too. That’s the real threat to the Kremlin’s power. NATO is the excuse, not the cause Blaming NATO for Russia’s war is a narrative of convenience, not credibility. It absolves the aggressor, ignores the agency of smaller nations, and flips the script on decades of post-Cold War history. It’s a myth that serves only one master: the Kremlin. Don’t be deceived. Ukraine did not “provoke” Russia any more than a burglar is provoked by a house installing a lock. This war is not about broken promises or misunderstood red lines. It’s about power, control, and the refusal to let others live freely outside of Moscow’s grasp. The sooner we bury this myth, the sooner we can focus on holding the right party accountable – and standing up for the truth. https://mailchi.mp/euvsdisinfo/dr361-6228934?e=f10f51a6bd

By now you may be aware that some Trumpists are touting his brain-dead and destructive tariff regime as "manly." This is ridiculous on many levels, but it isn't surprising. There is a strain within the alt-right that pushes antiquated and wrong ideas about masculinity, and, while I am not overfly familiar with it, the below sounds par for the course:The author believes his use of this image to be protected as Fair Use under U.S. copyright law.Two Fox Network hosts have bizarrely praised Donald Trump's trade tariffs as the thing needed to bring the masculinity of America's workforce. According to the hosts, masculinity will rise due to the fact that "jobs and factories will come roaring back" to the U.S. as a result of these tariffs. Jesse Watters, one of the co-hosts of The Five, endorsed the argument during the show on Monday. "When you sit behind a screen all day, it makes you a woman. Studies have shown this. Studies have shown this," Watters, who is known for giving his unasked opinions on what it means to be a man, said. "And if you're out working, building robots like [co-host] Harold Ford Jr., you are around other guys," Watters insisted without providing any sort of data. "You're not around HR ladies and lawyers -- and that gives you estrogen." "We shipped jobs that gave men who work with their hands for a living, and rely on brawn and physicality, off to other countries to build up their middle class," she added. "We imported millions and millions of illegals to work in construction, manufacturing, landscaping, janitorial services -- jobs that used to give men access to the American dream." [bold added]I had no idea incels were mainstream now. But to the point, there is so much wrong here it is hard to know where to begin, but Aristotle's seminal identification of man as the rational animal would be a good place to start. The spectacle of people I'd hesitate to hire to clean my toilet preening like stereotypical housewives about the need to steer clear of women and their own non-manual labor type of work on air -- when they could be cleaning a sewer somewhere -- just about takes the cake. For anyone who might be curious about the actual nature of work for an animal possessing a mind, I commend a couple of quotes by Ayn Rand, a woman who immigrated from Soviet Russia and became a successful novelist in America, and who, alas, knows more about masculinity and America than the entire modern Republican Party put together. First, regarding production:Every type of productive work involves a combination of mental and physical effort: of thought and of physical action to translate that thought into a material form. The proportion of these two elements varies in different types of work. At the lowest end of the scale, the mental effort required to perform unskilled manual labor is minimal. At the other end, what the patent and copyright laws acknowledge is the paramount role of mental effort in the production of material values.It is too bad that, along with the millions of grateful people around the world who are alive at all, not to mention living in clover today -- thanks to the inventiveness and thinking of intelligent men -- that ninnies like those on Fox News avoid toil long enough to spout their drivel to the effect that the only good jobs are physically taxing. Rand elaborates a bit when she discusses businessmen, whom they'd presumably admire, (although, to be fair, Donald Trump is a poor example):The professional businessman is the field agent of the army whose lieutenant-commander-in-chief is the scientist. The businessman carries scientific discoveries from the laboratory of the inventor to industrial plants, and transforms them into material products that fill men's physical needs and expand the comfort of men's existence. By creating a mass market, he makes these products available to every income level of society. By using machines, he increases the productivity of human labor, thus raising labor's economic rewards. By organizing human effort into productive enterprises, he creates employment for men of countless professions. He is the great liberator who, in the short span of a century and a half, has released men from bondage to their physical needs, has released them from the terrible drudgery of an eighteen-hour workday of manual labor for their barest subsistence, has released them from famines, from pestilences, from the stagnant hopelessness and terror in which most of mankind had lived in all the pre-capitalist centuries -- and in which most of it still lives, in non-capitalist countries.Do note that Trump's tariffs and unpredictable yanking-around of their rates are making the work of businessmen almost impossible, and take note of whom he put in charge of as many scientists as he could: If this continues for long, the idiots at Fox News may get their wish in the form of finding that what little work is left is back-breaking, menial, and very unproductive. Before I got wind of those remarks, I was inclined to pooh-pooh the idea that there is a crisis of masculinity in America. I was wrong to do so, except that crisis isn't that too many men are free of toil, or that they might get the cooties if they are in the same room as a woman for too long. The crisis is that too many men, exemplified by those at Fox News have no idea what it takes to be a mans, and never will because they scorn their own minds. -- CAVLink to Original

Besides pointing out that you didn’t respond to my questions, I’ll mention that neither breast-augmentation nor breast-reduction are amputations, and these accounted for over 96% of gender-affirming surgeries for minors in 2019, per my link. There were about 150 breast-reduction surgeries for minors in 2019. If you think there’s an epidemic (or hell, even a verifiable example) of kids cutting off their penises because of some nebulous “trans ideology” then I invite you to provide evidence.

Via X, I got wind of an excellent piece on the Abrego Garcia case by Noah Smith, "The Authoritarian Takeover Attempt Is Here". Although it does stand on its own in terms of getting readers up to speed on the case, it is no mere rehash. Smith does well helping readers see the implications of the contempt for due process Trump and his cronies have exhibited, and offers his current forecast of where things are headed:This should scare you, for a number of reasons. First, there's the obvious: Trump is going around arresting innocent people, and sending them to foreign torture-dungeons, apparently for the rest of their lives. Bloomberg reports that about 90% of these deportees had no criminal records in the U.S., and most have not been charged with any crime... Some were arrested simply because they had (non-gang) tattoos. Others didn't even have any tattoos, and were arrested for no apparent reason. It's not clear why the Trump administration is doing this. Perhaps it's to scare immigrants into leaving the country by making an example of a few. Perhaps it's to simply assert power, or to test the boundaries of what they can get away with. Maybe they've really convinced themselves that all of the people they arrested are gang members. Who knows. But what's clear is that this is brutal and lawless behavior -- the kind of arbitrary arrest and punishment that's common in authoritarian regimes. The second thing that should scare you is the lawlessness. The Trump administration insists it didn't defy the Supreme Court, arguing that simply removing any barriers to Abrego Garcia's return means that they're complying with the court order to "facilitate" that return. Trump's people have also argued that the courts have no right to interfere in the executive branch's conduct of foreign policy. And on top of that, they've declared that their deal with Bukele is classified. In practice, the administration is arguing that as soon as they arrest someone and ship them overseas, U.S. courts have no right to order their return -- ever. That means that Trump could grab you, or me, or anyone else off the street and put us on a plane to El Salvador, and then argue that no U.S. court has the right to order us back, because once we're on foreign soil it's the domain of foreign policy. If so, it means that due process and the rule of law in America are effectively dead; the President can simply do anything to anyone, for any reason. The third reason the Abrego Garcia case should worry you is that the Trump administration probably intends to go much further. Kilmar Abrego Garcia isn't an American citizen, but Trump has stated that he wants to start sending U.S. citizens to El Salvador too. Here are three relevant clips from his meeting with Bukele... [links omitted, bold added]In one clip, Trump shows his hand regarding the excuse of sending foreign criminals away: "Yeah that includes [Americans], you think they're a special type of people or something." This is how he speaks of you, whose rights and lives he swore to protect as President a few weeks ago. Smith correctly notes that this is exactly one of things the Founders enumerated in their reasons for rebelling against England, and goes on to offer his analysis of the political situation. He closes with his best sense of how it could play out:Trump 2.0 is still likely to struggle to get big things done, despite having a few more years to prepare. The sad spectacle of the flailing, off-again-on-again tariff announcements seems like pretty clear evidence of incompetence. Trump is more vengeful and far less constrained this time around, but he still may fail to execute the transition to authoritarianism any more effectively than he's executing the transition to autarky. He's not benign, but he's probably not invincible either. It is upon this thin thread that we must hang our hopes for democracy. [bold added]The time to begin fighting back in whatever way is available is now. -- CAVLink to Original

I'm objecting to deporting people without due process.

It's strange that this is the first we're hearing about "authoritarian takeover attempts." Apparently the lockdowns, the sorting of businesses into "essential" and "non-essential," the control of social media to stop "misinformation," de-banking, parents being arrested for complaining about curricula at school board meetings, none of that qualifies as authoritarianism. It's only when Trump does something that it's authoritarianism. Double standards. Trump apparently has lots of precedents he can cite. I wonder who set those precedents?

At The Edgy Optimist, Zachary Karabell presents a "potted history" of the growth of executive power over history, and argues that this excessive power may have already peaked early in this second Trump Presidency. Karabell sees Trump as having squandered this power -- which his predecessors used more sparingly -- to the point that Americans will be ready to cut it back down to size. I agree that the President is squandering his power in terms of helping his country, but not necessarily in terms of consolidating his position atop our political order -- whose Constitution he he plainly sees as a bug rather than a feature. Worse, while the bond market might well force the President to pretend to be semi-sane about tariffs, it won't slow down his attempts to acquire more power, such as by attempting to stifle dissent or relying on foreign dictators to do the dirty work of imprisoning his enemies. In the former case, he clearly plans to abuse licensing power (which he shouldn't have), and in the latter, he is being helped along in an effort to ignore a court ruling. That said, if our Republic dodges or survives the various crises Trump seems intent on inflicting, if he doesn't get away with too much, there is hope. Karabell closes:It remains, however, that the federal government -- and the executive branch in particular -- has grown too powerful relative to the balance that was attempted in the Constitution. The ascension of Trump should be a reminder of that, which even Republicans such as Rand Paul and Ted Cruz appear to recognize. And the past week, with a foolish and expansive use of tariff authority having backfired (for now) spectacularly, may mark the apex of that power. In fact, the Trump presidency overall might mark the beginning of the end of the imperial presidency, which has defied earlier predictions of its imminent demise. People want change, for sure, but they don't want change that they don't want. And you would be hard-pressed to find a plurality of Americans who want a more powerful government. That reality, more than the daily reality show of contemporary politics, is what will matter most to our future -- and that is comfort indeed.The second Trump Presidency is a cartoonish but quite real exemplar of that cliche about crisis being both danger and opportunity: The Founders had recent memory of atrocities by tyrannies of all sorts to draw on as they devised a plan for their new government to be practically impossible to abuse. To the painful extent that Trump punishes a complacent nation without completely consolidating his power, perhaps there will exist a strong- and lasting-enough appetite for limited government to sustain a dismantling of the imperial presidency. -- CAVLink to Original

Before his inauguration (both times) optimists insisted “it won’t be that bad” and during his first, now second, term they insisted “it won’t get too much worse.” Then we had an insurrection and an attempt to coerce election officials to “find votes” for him. Then he stole classified documents. Then he was convicted of crimes but sentenced to literally nothing. Now he’s deporting people without due process to a concentration camp in El Salvador, while his fanbase cheers. Ted Cruz and his fellow congressman could stop trump today if they wanted to, so I don’t see him “understanding” the issue of executive power. Republican politicians and their voters have never opposed big govt, they just want to be in charge of it.

Trump's tariffs can't achieve any one of his stated policy goals, but they can paralyze the economy. *** If we set aside the contradictory stated policy objectives President Trump gives for starting his trade war, we quickly find that -- in addition to being unable to defy the Law of Non-Contradiction -- tariffs also can't achieve any one of the goals. We'll look at manufacturing, since I keep running into pertinent facts on that matter. First, we'll set aside a biggie: The U.S. produces nearly a fifth of the world's manufactured goods, although this part of its economy is less than an eighth of GDP, and it does so with only about one tenth of its workforce. Manufacturing is far from dead here, and had been enjoying a resurgence. But let's game out Trump's tariffs anyway. Andrew Prokop of Vox does this in a reasonably accessible way, explaining several ways that Trump's tariffs interfere with the goal of building more factories here:The supply chain problem;The workforce problem;The confidence problem; and The currency problem.For my money, the worst of these by far is the third, because if it isn't already cutting off the investment needed for our economy, it is close to doing so soon, in spades:If the US president set new high tariff levels and could guarantee that they were permanent, that could be very economically damaging, but at least businesses would be able to plan accordingly. Trump's chaotic policy rollout, and its reliance on poor-quality analysis, has only deepened uncertainty about market conditions in the US in the future. And if businesses feel uncertain -- and like Trump can and will throw their business model into chaos on a whim -- they're going to delay making big new investments in US-based manufacturing. [bold added]See also Ayn Rand on non-objective law:When men are caught in the trap of non-objective law, when their work, future and livelihood are at the mercy of a bureaucrat's whim, when they have no way of knowing what unknown "influence" will crack down on them for which unspecified offense, fear becomes their basic motive, if they remain in the industry at all -- and compromise, conformity, staleness, dullness, the dismal grayness of the middle-of-the-road are all that can be expected of them. Independent thinking does not submit to bureaucratic edicts, originality does not follow "public policies," integrity does not petition for a license, heroism is not fostered by fear, creative genius is not summoned forth at the point of a gun. [bold added]Even if all of Trump's monkeying around were confined to just taxes, the damage even that has done to the ability of businessmen to plan ahead has been impressive. The crisis comes not from the fact that businessmen don't want to work under Trump's policies or with his style of governing; it's that they can't. I'll draw an interesting parallel from one last bit on manufacturing I encountered this morning. According to a poll:"America would be better off if more people worked in manufacturing."80% of Americans agree20% disagree"I would be better off if I worked in a factory."25% of Americans agree73% disagree2% currently work in a factoryTo the degree anyone still imagines Trump is good on the economy, they are failing to see things the way a businessman does in the same way that they like the idea of having more factories until they are asked if they want one of those cruddy jobs. The situation Trump is creating for them might be summed up in a hypothetical poll question: Would you be more likely to make a large purchase if someone could make wild changes to your monthly expenses and seemed likely to do so often, and for little reason? -- CAVLink to Original

I've taken flak for my purported rejection of western Enlightenment values, which obviously points to my "supporting Russian aggression", promoting propaganda, "Putin", and so on, when it's my very support of those values (and the rational good of USA) and the harsh consequences for Ukraine which impelled my efforts. I perhaps naively expected better from "the West", especially America, than to lower their high standards and good sense in allowing this war to begin and to escalate--at the foreseeable price paid by the third party, win, lose or draw - the Ukrainians, who ultimately fought on their behalf. My "double standards" maybe. Since the US/NATO/EU-led West is substantially free-er than Russia (and the Ukraine Government), it ought to have acted on its own standards - so - gone to extremes to prevent a senseless war through concessions from all sides. Rather, the "Russian aggression" was presented to "we the public" as a predetermined fait accompli without cause, like a force of Nature, leaving only one thing to do, conquer it at nearly all costs. Many times you heard "unprovoked and unjustified" - when we know by now there was provocation - while justification for the invasion is arguable. Lately, that early mantra has fallen away in favor of "Putin's full-scale invasion", flying against the facts of the minor invasion force. The PR cover-up and face-saving goes on. Cause-effect. Did NATO cause the problems and disingenuously appear to be the solution to the "problems" it created? It sure seems that they expected trouble by building a formidable half-million NATO-specced Ukraine Army over the years since 2014 while half-promising Ukr NATO accession down the line. Did Putin aggress because of these alarming (to Russians) factors (and the festering civil war) - or - because he 'would have', anyhow - because that's what sociopath Despots with global ambitions are "determined" - to do? Going on available evidence, I've answered to these I believe. One upshot to any who care, is that the Western alliance and the US have lost prestige and a measure of respect in the world's eyes, by not engaging diplomatically from the start toward a peaceful outcome - on principle, one non-sacrificial to the Ukrainians. And by - to the West's foes who appreciate brute force and sacrifice - not "winning the war".

lmao I actually had no idea that was a term. The more you know, I guess. I mean you do already know, even if you're not him. This is the gist. You are him btw lol

Even if DOGE weren't laying off government officials in the careless, haphazard way it has been, Bobby Kennedy's mandate to "go wild" with HHS would probably result in scientists losing their jobs sooner or later. Granted: The government shouldn't be regulating the economy. It also shouldn't fund science outside of a few very limited areas directly related to its proper scope, such as weapons research or medical research related to dealing with infectious disease, and even those on a very limited basis. This isn't the case now, but backing the government out of so many areas should be done carefully, so that the private sector can adjust to take up the slack in areas that would and should be funded in a free economy. Until that is done, the government should keep good people in charge. The Trump Administration has shown, starting with its appointment of Bobby Kennedy, that it is indifferent at best to basic competence. With its "go wild" mandate in particular and as shown by the haphazard, gimmicky approach of DOGE in general, it is also clear that this administration has no real goal of bringing government closer to its proper scope or strategy for doing so. Policies have consequences. If you were a scientist previously employed by the government that just appointed an anti-science kook to head your former employer, and his boss was busy destroying the private sector with tariffs, what would you do? Canadians have an idea, and they're getting ready to lap up the world-class talent that has just been told it is unwanted here:Cuts to U.S. research funding will also create gaps in evidence because there'll be less research being funded and conducted overall, says Kirsten Patrick, the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal (CMAJ). That's why it's all the more important for Canada to step up its research funding, she says. "If we have a situation where, down south, research is not being as well funded as it should be and some research isn't even being done, then we need to have a strong research system in Canada," she said.The CBC piece further elaborates on province- and university-level recruitment efforts. It is still too early to see how Trump's random cuts and Kennedy's rampage through our health and agriculture agencies play out, but if I were a scientist working in any of these affected fields, I would be paying close attention:Let's take a look at two topics that illustrate two different ways that science and public health are being damaged by the Trump administration. One of them is not subtle at all: the ax. That's what has happened to 77 scientific staffers at the CDC who (among their other duties) had been in charge of collecting samples and analyzing data on US-wide sexually transmitted diseases, specifically looking for drug-resistant gonorrhea. ... A second way that things are being undermined is at the regulatory and decision-making level. That's well-illustrated in this piece at BioCentury. Steve Usdin is looking at Mike Makary's FDA and an upcoming decision that will reveal a lot about how things are going to be run. Readers may have noticed that the current version of the Novavax coronavirus vaccine has had a sudden regulatory hold put on it at the FDA - and that was after the agency's own reviewers had recommended approval. The reason for the unexpected screeching halt have not been made public, but Makary has put his new assistant Tracy Beth Høeg in charge of reviewing the application, and this is not a good sign at all. [links omitted]Even if you don't get fired outright, you may find yourself wondering what the hell you're doing there, and for how long you'll still be there or want to be there. The ones getting fired now might well be the lucky ones. -- CAVLink to Original

Economist Alex Tabarrok recommends reading a Maurice Obstfeld piece at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, titled "Trump's Tariffs Are Designed for Maximum Damage -- to America." I found this interesting because it elaborates on the consequences of something I suspected when I heard (on the Yaron Brook show, I believe) that Trump's "reciprocal" tariff formula was based not on tariffs being levied against American imports by any given country, but in large part on the trade deficit with the particular country. I suspected correctly that the more our trade with any given country is saving us money, the more punitive the tariff. Obstfeld lays this out as follows:The tariff plan displays a basic misunderstanding of the reasons why nations trade in the first place -- reasons that imply the United States will run deficits with some trade partners (bilateral deficits) and surpluses with others (bilateral surpluses). The reasons reflect the operation of comparative advantage. For example, the US imports aluminum from countries that can produce it most efficiently, while embodying it in exports where it has the advantage, such as aircraft. This will tend to lower US trade balances with efficient aluminum producers and raise them with aircraft importers. The same is true for households and businesses. I have a surplus with my textbook publisher, Pearson, because I am relatively better at writing textbooks while they are better at publishing and distributing. But I chose to have a deficit this year with my ophthalmic surgeon rather than trying to remove my cataracts myself. Yet the USTR [US Trade Representative] report reveals up front that their "calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing." This is a fundamental misconception and suggests that Trump's administration did not even try to calculate the true heights of trade barriers. For example, Korea was hit with a tariff of 26 percent, even though it has a free trade agreement with America and its tariff rate on US imports was only 0.79 percent in 2024. The tariff's entire justification was Korea's sizable bilateral surplus in goods with the United States, much of it due to Americans' taste for Hyundai and KIA vehicles. [bold and link for comparative advantage added]The piece goes on to discuss further costs that switching suppliers to dodge high tariff rates might also incur. One part of the piece that I found not as clear pertains to the overall trade deficit: This deficit reflects that Americans spend more than they produce, obliging them to import the difference from abroad. This would seem to run counter to the fact that, as the philosopher Harry Binswanger once pointed out in "Buy American Is Un-American:The lucrative workings of free markets do not depend upon lines drawn on a map. The economic advantages of international commerce are the same as those of interstate, intercity, and crosstown commerce. And if we kept crosstown trade accounts, the "trade deficits" that would appear would be as meaningless as are our international "trade deficits." Fact confirms theory: the U.S. ran a trade "deficit" practically every year of the nineteenth century, the time of our most rapid economic progress.While perhaps in the modern era we do overall have a massive debt to other countries, I wonder if, say, foreign investment in the US isn't being accounted for, or I am simply unclear on that point. But surely it is inaccurate to look only at material goods bought and sold in international trade when such things as investment opportunities and services are also major components of any economy. Like wage (which simply means "labor price"), the term trade deficit is unfortunate for the cause of clarity in economic discussions. If we replaced the term wage with labor price, it would be easier to see the similarities between wages and other production costs. The term trade deficit, which merely describes aggregations of individual transactions across a border, bears an unfortunate and confusing resemblance to terms like the federal deficit, which reflects a shortfall of money taken in by the government relative to its expenditures. These similarly-named phenomena are fundamentally different: The first is merely a result of trade (and none of the government's business) and thus harmless; the second should be avoided or eliminated. -- CAVLink to Original

There's no method. Trump administration is mistakenly calling the trade deficits that US has with other countries as "tariffs" on the US and imposing tariffs based on this. There's nothing reciprocal about this. These are not based on actual tariffs imposed on USA. Here are the tariff numbers: Here is how the Trump administration calculated it (I added the last two columns on Excel, the rest are from Wikipedia😞 Idiot Americans are wrongly calling the trade imbalance as "tariffs". They are calling the 'trade imbalance'/import*100 as "tariffs charged to the USA" (they're not) and then initiating tariffs. These aren't reciprocal trariffs. These are just new tariffs, completely initiated by the US and unrelated to tariffs by other countries. Americans are calling it reciprocal tariffs because they want to feel like a victim (countries do impose tariffs on others but these numbers aren't that). Americans are trash enough to pretend to be a victim while also pretending to be kind while initiating theft (hence the fake "semi-reciprocal" claim). It's like the old American claim of spreading freedom while toppling more socialist democracies. US is initiating tariffs and blaming others and dumb conservatives believe whatever the government says. Countries will not be scrambling to reduce tariffs because these "reciprocal tariffs" are not a response to tariffs initiated by other countries (that's just American propaganda). If these were actual reciprocal tariffs, then it might have led some countries to reduce their trade barriers, but these aren't that. These are tariffs initiated against the competitive advantages of other countries. Some countries will have a competitive advantage no matter what, so they'll be tariffed by the US even if they have zero import tariffs (since the tariffs are based on trade imbalance). If anything, other countries are likely to impose reciprocal tariffs against these tariffs initiated by USA (the alternative would be for countries to destroy their own competitive advantage). No country is going to destroy their own competitive advantage to get lower tariff rates from the US. Ideally, they would impose real reciprocal traiffs against the fake reciprocal tariffs of the US and decouple from the US (as US will tariff others regardless of if other countries have import tariffs or not). An even better solution would be to stop using USD as international currecy as most countries will now have no reason to trade with the US as the US will tariff their competitive advantage. That would stop the nonsensical flow of money from the rest of the world into the overvalued US stock market, which is pretty much an artificial bubble. The only "method" is that this is a transfer of income from US consumers to their own domestic corporations (if the corporations can produce goods slightly below the tariff rate). Capitalists are trying to destroy free trade, as they have always done throughout history: by tariffs, mercantalism, colonialism, protectionism and other rent seeking behaviors. Edit: WSJ reported on this: "The tariffs are pegged to amounts it said other countries impose on the U.S. In many cases, those amounts appear to match a basic formula: the size of a country’s goods-trade imbalance with the U.S., divided by how much America imports from that nation." These aren't reciprocal tariffs, and there's no way for other countries to counter these tariffs except by decoupling from the US (the alternative being to reduce their own competitive advantage, which no country will do).

Anti-objectivists are full of triumphant little fairy tales like this: "... and this, boys and girls, is why you shouldn't try to have any principles." But they don't have anything better to offer, and they know it. (In related news, I heard that Elon Musk blew up a rocket once, which proves that all of rocket science is pretentious and useless.)

Objectivist gossip gets less interesting as each generation passes.

"One must never fail to pronounce moral judgment. Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil". AR -- Good men and women - or the youthful - staying silent when they witness a moral injustice (say, racialist and collectivist), a false accusation and any unfair slander on a kid and anyone else, perpetuates such attacks and lends it their tacit consent. Since "the authorities" might not be present - or unable, incompetent or unwilling (often) to take action - you, as the bystander, should take matters in your own hand to articulate a moral judgment. "This is wrong" - could be all that's needed. Broadly, if only a tiny minority speaks up they are not forgotten and cause far-reaching and beneficial ripple effects on the moral health of the school, tennis club, forum or whatever - and the society. Rising to his-her just defense is not only for the benefit of the verbally (or physically) tormented person, it is selfish - in favor of the institution which one is also a part of - - and of one's own moral character.

Each Reach Each reach, root, clasp, or grasp, all flights, all calls, all nests, all pulsing blood, all valves, all meters and accounts, bows of gifts, ties of love, treasures of loveliness in being and thinking[...] Shattered by your loss, Stephen.

@Doug Morris, I see. But I believe this objection is pre-empted by what I already wrote in the post from which you quoted. However, maybe you will find the following argument easier to understand. It is much more direct, explicit, and is broken into exercises that can be performed sequentially. @tadmjones, I am thinking less in terms of axioms and more in terms of what the life of thinking consists of. In the following you can see a Hegelian/Fichtean/Gentilean brand of outlook. Advaita puts consciousness at the center stage, whereas this Western viewpoint puts more emphasis on action and autoctisis. However, there is considerable overlap: duality as Maya, unity between individual and the Absolute, self-consciousness as bedrock. It's also plausible that some of the differences are more differences of emphasis. For example, the Kena Upanishad and the Brahma Sutras locate some active agency in the atman itself [1]. On the other hand, underneath the ever-active thinking of the Western Absolute, we could also say that there is something unchanging and non-describable, just like the Brahman. At any rate, the two traditions seem to complement each-other. I have heard Advaitans saying that this stuff cannot even be comprehended outside of a life of full of action, whereas various Western philosophical voices, with their predilection for "jnana yoga," find it striking that humanity's insatiable "Will" might rooted not in a dumb force, as Schopenhauer said, but in a kind of Absolute. --- The following is meant as a fun primer into some classic German and Italian metaphysics. In order to get the most out of it, I recommend ensuring each point is fully understood before proceeding to the next. I From the perspective of the present moment, thinking cannot err. A skeptic that says "I can't know anything" believes that he is stating a truth, i.e. claims that he knows something. A person that says "I think I might be wrong about X" does not even for a moment doubt that he is right to doubt his belief. In short, there is a sort of false modesty going on in human thinking. A person unconsciously attributes, to her thinking, a sort of absolute authority that can only be attributed to an omniscient mind. So when you say "I don't know", you're claiming to know that you're ignorant, but you hold that piece of knowledge as an absolute truth. Verification: Perhaps you doubt what I wrote above. You might reply, for instance: "I am not believing myself to be omniscient or my thinking to be infallible." Fine. Do you doubt, even a tiny little bit, that your denial of your omniscience is true? This is what I meant by false modesty. You unconsciously attribute absolute truth to whatever is thought by you, for if you didn't think it, you would not think it -- a tautology. II As a corollary of the preceding, it is also impossible to think a falsehood. Verification: Suppose you think that God doesn't exist. As per the previous point, you will not, even for a moment, doubt that what you think is true. Therefore, it is also impossible to think otherwise than you do think. For this exercise, I will ask you to think that God does in fact exist, and that religion is perfectly true. Can you do it? You will find that this is not humanly doable. The only possible way this could happen is if you discovered some convincing proof for God's existence, leading you to change your mind and renounce your atheism altogether. Therefore, you cannot think a falsehood. Which is to say, you cannot think what you don't actually think -- again, a tautology. III So although thinking is free (volitional), it is not free to think whatever it wants. There is a limit to what thinking is capable of thinking. But the limit is thinking itself. The reason I can't truly think that the earth is flat is plainly because I'm not actually thinking that. Thinking has absolute faith in itself. Therefore, in order for something to be error, it must begin by being a truth, else it would not be possible to think it in the first place. Verification: Think of a time when you changed your mind about something. While you held the old belief, did you ever actually believe it was false? If you did, then you didn’t truly believe it. But when you do actually change your mind, you are transitioning to a "new" truth. That is, from your actual perspective you are not moving from a falsehood to a truth, but from a truth to a "new" truth. The old truth is now the limit of your thinking, that which you can no longer think because simply because you are not thinking it now. That is, the old truth is now called Error. IV "My thinking" and "my present thinking" are one and the same thing. A thinking other than present thinking is a contradiction in terms. Verification: Think of something you currently believe in. For example, you might think that the Earth is round. Is that something you actually think? Take your time to answer. Suppose you answered "yes, I do think that the Earth is round." You will then find that the question you replied to was identical with this one: "is that what you think currently?" For if right this moment you didn't truly think the Earth is round, you would be thinking otherwise, e.g. that Earth is flat or square or triangular. V Error is that which is "other" than my currently ongoing thinking. Verification: We may make use of a previous exercise: assuming you're an atheist, try to truly, and without pretense, think that Religion is absolutely true. You will find that this is utterly impossible unless you convert from atheism to religion. Now, if you have confirmed the above for yourself, please pay attention to what Religion is. If you cannot think that Religion is true, then what is Religion for you? You will find that Religion is the "what" that your thinking denies. It is the object being thought about. VI As was shown in the very first point, thinking has a megalomaniac confidence in itself. Whatever it thinks, it thinks as true. So how can Religion even become the object that the atheist thinks about? The answer is that thinking doesn't just arbitrarily declare things to be false; this is what parrots do, and their vocalizations are not accompanied by thinking. True thinking must provisionally grant a thesis in order to see if it holds up when verified. If the thesis holds up, it continues to think it, to believe it. If it doesn't, it thinks a "new truth:" the truth stating that the aforementioned thesis was erroneous in hindsight. In any event, it is a perennial progress from truth to new truth. Verification: When you first encountered Religion, did you just blindly assume that Religion is false -- without ever verifying its truth for yourself? You might have answered "No, because conclusions are arrived at by thinking, they're not simply assumed." If so, then the follow up question is: Even today, is "religion" for you just a cacophony of sounds, or does Religion involve your thinking of what that is, and of how granting it leads to problems? VII The previous point was meant to reinforce the insight that, from the perspective of thinking, there is never a movement from error to truth, only from one truth to another truth. If you have any doubts whatsoever about what this means, I suggest referring back to points III and VI until you have clarified this for yourself. Otherwise, you will have trouble with understanding the rest. This study started with the assertion that thinking has absolute and unwavering trust in what it thinks. As the study progressed, we have also found that Error is not the "parrot's" error, but rather: actual thinking moves from a truth to a "new" truth. Only retroactively does it call the "previous truth" a falsity and error. This has lead us to a circle in thinking. I will describe the first half of the circle here, and the completing half in the next section: A religious person starts by truly thinking, with all of her heart, that God exists. If she then discovers that this belief is false, then "belief in God" is not longer something done, something performed in thinking. It is something thought about. It is the "what" being denied, the "object" being coldly entertained by thinking. Verification: Think of something you used to believe, but no longer do. You will find that, for you, this belief is no longer something actually performed by your soul, by your thinking. Now it is just something to think about. VIII Here is the second half of the circle, completing it: thinking needs something to think about. A thinking about nothing is an absurdity. When the now-atheist thinks about her former spiritual state, her current thinking has something to think about, a "what" to entertain in her thinking. Verification: For now, it is sufficient to verify for yourself whether all thinking is, in fact, about something. The full implications of this will be explored in the rest of this study. IX Thinking is a spiritual state and act, something lived. (if you are unclear what this means, please carefully refer to points VII and VIII until you grasp its meaning). When this spiritual state becomes something merely thought about, then this "something" is just the "what" being entertained by current thinking, not something lived by it. For example, the atheist that looks back at her past religious devotion. But her thinking which looks with Olympic serenity at this now-overcome spiritual state: is it not itself a spiritual act? Yes, it certainly is. The destiny of every spiritual act of thinking is to start by being a spiritual act, and then to become the object or "topic" entertained by a new act of thinking. This new state will, in turn, become the topic studied by an even newer thinking act. Like the serpent swallowing its own tail, thought bends back on itself, ever enriching the pool of topics it can entertain. This is why thinking has unshakeable confidence in itself (see point number I): it unceasingly moves from truth, to a new truth, to an even newer truth etc., because each present act of the spirit ends up becoming a mere object entertained by a new act, which becomes the new spiritual act -- only the act itself is something alive. Therefore, the only "true" thinking is the one that is real by happening right now. Thinking is its own object -- the process of self-consciousness. Verification: If you did not know what thinking is, this post up till this point would have been completely unintelligible to you. But since you read this far, then you already know that thinking can be an "existent," a "what" that thinking can entertain. This point is difficult to understand, so I recommend reviewing it a bit more before moving to the next point. X Thinking is not just "rational calculation." It is any mental act that is performed by us and is determinate. By determinate, I mean that thinking is the opposite of an unconscious blank: it "feels" a certain way, it is sensuous. Verification. Have you ever experienced a state of unconsciousness? It is a contradiction in terms. Thinking, if it is thinking, implies sensation. Try verifying Euclid's postulates without constructing any sensation whatsoever. XI When we move from a spiritual state to another one, we do not "lose" the previous state. That overcome state is swallowed into an ever-developing, ever-expanding pool of material to think about, whether in space (material) or in time (historical). Verification. If you pick up a novel and start reading from page 2 instead of the first one, you won't understand much because you don't have the context of the previous page. But if you do start from the first page, this page will "stay with you" when you move to the next page, even if the two points of time exclude each other. That is, when you move on to the next page, the context of the "old" page makes the next page intelligible. By the time you reach the 10th page, the context of all the preceding pages is there in your soul, else you would not understand anything. Likewise, when you listen to music, the meaning of each tone is established by relating it to the previous ones. No piece of music is a piece of music unless thinking weaves together the notes into a web of meaning. Music is not the tones, the sensations -- music is the listener's creation. First, music is created by the composer, then it is recreated by every performer and by every listener who can appreciate it. XII The primordial product of thinking is sensation itself. No sensation = no consciousness. As discussed in section IX, every sensuous spiritual act starts as act, then becomes what is entertained by a new thinking act, ad infinitum. That something has been thought, however, is something irreversible. It is what thinking must live with, the fact which is deaf to the cries of the Spirit. But what is thought right now is in our power. Reality is not what is, but what develops, what becomes. Morality, art and science are the completion, or rather the completing, of reality. Verification. Thinking is not just a passive calculator. Mind influences the world of fact, and, in turn, the world of fact influences mind. Thinking, when passing into fact (the bodily Will), moves the material body. This movement of the material body then becomes the fact which a new act of thinking must take into account as fact. Thinking philosophy over and over physically strengthens the prefrontal cortex, the anterior cingulate cortex and various brain networks -- all of which are part of the world of fact, of what was already thought, facts which in turn affect subsequent thinking. XIII Thinking is not in Space or Time, but rather the activity of spatializing and temporalizing. Time is not chronological but eternal — the convergence of past, present, and future in the present act of the mind. When you read this post, it seems as if you are sequentially moving from word to word, when in fact all "past" words are preserved and form a whole, an entirety held in the present. Otherwise, it would be a cacophony of isolated bits of data. Time is a "spatial" organizing of experience into a timeline -- the act of a living spiritual activity. The past of philosophy does not live except in the present instant of reconstructing it in thinking. Every poem and piece of music is outside of time insofar as it is always contemporary, always the present experience of the person constructing it internally. The oneness of the universe, too, is a spiritual activity. The concept of "1" serves to differentiate it from "2", "3" so on and so forth. Therefore, the number "1" is only intelligible if you contradict its meaning -- first, by claiming that this number is not the "only one", and second, because every single number is in fact "one" number. In short, to posit the Cosmos as numerically "1" is to forget what "1" actually means. By contrast, the true and effective unity is the act of fusing items into provisional and displaceable "1's". That is, unity is made, not found. It needs thinking. Verification: Try thinking through the provided examples, and notice what your thinking process is reflexively doing behind the scenes. XIV It is not only sensation -- the feeling underneath the skin -- that makes us feel ourselves (the precondition of consciousness). The encounter with other souls is how freedom comes to be sensed. For unless we restrain our freedom out of respect for other souls like us, we cannot "feel" this freedom. An infinite freedom is a nothing; it is not anything that can be sensed. Verification: Perhaps there is no better metaphor than that classic episode of The Twilight Zone, "A Nice Place to Visit" (Season 1, 1960), where a petty criminal dies and wakes up in a world where everything goes his way. At first, he thinks he's in heaven. He wins every bet, gets every woman, lives in luxury -- but slowly realizes that the predictability, the lack of challenge or struggle, becomes unbearable. Love means nothing unless love is a response to values. In the end, the big twist: this was hell all along. XV Truth is not private. We are all directly participating in the life of Mind's development. The only "truth" that is universal for every single thinking being is the one I enunciated at the very beginning, then repeated ad nauseam throughout this study: thinking attributes to itself a kind of authority that only a universal mind could have. When we grasp that 2+2=4 or we think that a piece of music is great, this is accompanied by a feeling that what we are thinking is not "our" truth, to be distinguished from someone else's truth -- we see this truth as universal, not subjective. Our individuality is then absorbed into the Absolute's thinking. In other words, we see ourselves as the whole of truth concentrated into an individual mind. Thinking and the mirror of thinking (self-consciousness) are two, not one. And as has been shown (XIII) the oneness of number is an abstract "oneness." As soon as you assimilate two into a "one," you contradict yourself because a "one" is a form of distinguishing it from other "ones". Omnis determinatio est negatio. The universe is indefinite, not infinite, expanding as much as thinking travails. To be determinate is to be distinguishable from other determinations - to be a something among other somethings. Both thinking and nature are destined to appear as a plurality: nature in space, and thinking in time. But when inspected, this plurality is nothing other the living act of pluralizing. It is an act, a doing. We then saw that thinking is a process, a restless overcoming of old truth to attain new truth, recasting the old truth as myopic and therefore retroactively erroneous. Within the material world of empirical individuals, there is no philosophy, only philosophies; no theory, only theories. No one is deaf to the thinking of others. The other's thinking, even if it conflicts with ours, is instrumental in our development. In a society, no mind is allowed to rest easy. As soon as mind becomes complacent, a new theory comes out that shakes every presupposition we had at its core. We want to reach others with what we consider to be good arguments, only to see them fall flat -- prompting new questions, answers and revision. Truth is movement that never stops. Verification: Reflect on a time when someone else’s insight transformed how you see the world. Maybe a book, a conversation, or an artwork. That insight might have became your own, but you didn’t generate it in isolation. This is the communion of minds -- not telepathy, but the universal Mind in act. Conclusion of the preceding It is not given for man to rest, because reality is not what is, but what develops and becomes. In a word, it is life. Thinking posits itself by overcoming itself, arrives at truth by overcoming old truth, brings good by overcoming evil, reaches Spirit by overcoming Nature. Its process is the encounter with barriers posited by itself, only to overcome them eternally. It is the most empowering thought: a reality constantly outgrowing itself, always having something unsuspected to look forward to.

Where is the evidence that we are enough like Latin America to be in the same danger they're in?

I am so sorry for your loss.

Your poetry's really wonderful. I'm sorry for your loss.

His aim is like aiming a shotgun with an unsteady hand. Anyone who commits a crime or is caught preparing one can be arrested and held without violating due process. Due process also allows putting people under surveillance if there are sufficient grounds. Where is the evidence that we are in any danger of that?

You don't understand what it means to suspend the writ of habeas corpus: it means that law enforcement can detain and remove individuals without what you call "due process". Habeas corpus IS the due process. Trump just suspended it. He just told every cartel member in the known universe: You do not have a right to due process in the US. You will not face a judge, you will not get access to your lawyer, and so on. You are a terrorist, and will be treated as such if you enter the US. And he has the authority to do this. It's been done many times before to Islamic terrorists, enemy agents, even Americans in the Civil War. There are checks on this authority, but they don't involve any of the judges handing out these stupid "orders". The checks lie with Congress and SCOTUS. Everyone else has been shut out of it. They're welcome to be upset about it, but they don't have the power to stop it. These threats of "holding administration officials in contempt of the Court" for example are nonsense. Government officials and US law enforcement can ignore Court orders involving cartel members, under presidential authority. What they're doing is perfectly legal, with lots of precedent for it. And it will work like a charm. This changes the whole game. All of a sudden, it's not longer in the cartels' best interest to take over the US at the retail level. They will still sell their merchandise in the US, of course, but they will sell it wholesale to US based gangs and dealers. Sane, regular criminals, who can be policed through regular methods. No mass graves and industrial scale murder, just the occasional drive by and drug deal gone bad, in which everybody shoots each other in a dingy apartment or in the middle of the desert. The good old days, when the cops and the criminals were fairly evenly matched, and everyone knew what the limits are. When you could watch a nice gangster flick and not think "What the hell am I watching? This is worse than The Pianist".

My condolences.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1k4072e3nno It appears that the Garcia situation is still not entirely clear. It may well be the case that he is indeed a gang member and a violent criminal, but as the above link discusses, the allegations aren’t too well-established at the moment.

When one gets one's head out of the superficial aspects : e.g. "trans", etc., and as I recommend, listens to the origins, methods and direction of the "Woke" movement collated and connected by the remarkable J Lindsay of New Discourses, one might even foresee "showers" in a woke future. Think total "power". Think of the upending and inversions of and in the "repressor/oppressor structure". And Woke's dismantling of reality, identity: the negation of reason, should be the first tip-off to Objectivists. Observe the movement presently at work, globally and societally on, yes, Jews, its first tribal victims.

Right. Wokeists' "intersectionality" provides one clue, the quasi-religion/cult/whatever is *comprehensive* penetrating at all levels and into any human activity allowing no escape. Is it more lethal than Nazism or Communism, has been asked: I think certainly, since it subsumes every prior totalitarian system and (thanks to the internet) fast become global.

No idea what Yaron said, not sure why OP phrased the question this way. I will answer the question he should've asked: Do you support open borders for the US, today? I do not. I don't support non-selective immigration for any rich or semi-rich country that exists today. That would be an insane policy. Coupling non-selective migration with statism is a recipe for disaster of the most hellish dimensions, because of the kinds of immigrants the welfare state attracts. We're talking Twentieth Century Motor Company level hellish. I think that, so long as a welfare state exists, that state must also discriminate about who it allows in. There should be standards that must be met. A good example is Japan's immigration policy. Or at least it was the last I checked (over a decade ago, when I was considering living there). The rules were much too restrictive, but objective (have certain qualifications, a job waiting, enough money to live on for X months, no older than 45, all sorts of hoops to jump through on a path towards permanent residence/citizenship). Ideally, a country would have those kinds of rules, but open to a slightly wider array of people, to allow for greater numbers of high quality migrants than Japan does. I decided it wasn't worth it, for example. Japan's loss more than mine, imo. And no, I see no contradiction between this stance and my full support for Rand's ideal of laissez-faire capitalism. I think capitalism would work wonderfully, if fully implemented, "open borders" and all. I'm putting "open borders" in quotes because it's a bit of a rhetorical device meant to slander capitalism. Capitalism means unrestricted economic migration, not literally open borders. A capitalist government has the right and obligation to control its borders, and refuse entry to criminals and hostile actors.

Why stop at two?

“100% of black crime comes from blacks” and “100 of Arab crime comes from Arabs.” Nobody on this forum is obligated to treat someone who openly mulls the Jewish Question with an iota of respect or politeness, and it would be immoral to do so. Return to the sewers, nazi troll.

The issue being emphasized is that not only are illegal aliens not all violent criminals, not only are they mostly not violent criminals, but proportionally fewer of them compared to citizens are violent criminals. Therefore the rhetoric around them being especially dangerous (which was a Trump platform, and the above poster’s assertion) is not true. here’s a reference for the claim: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/08/1237103158/immigrants-are-less-likely-to-commit-crimes-than-us-born-americans-studies-find

And whichever possible perspective you'd imagine would cut you off from the other, it's almost as bad as the 'following' eye portraits and I mean bad in no way. If I'm ever in Chicago.... (or perhaps in Trump's private aircraft)

Cool post!

I haven’t said anything one way or the other about what I think of the trans issue, though it is correct to say that “trans ideology” is a nebulous concept. All I did was ask you for evidence of a specific claim about amputations, and what you provided was not responsive. If you want to now say “okay I don’t have evidence of that but instead I have concerns about surgery on minors because of xyz” then that’s fine, but I first need clarity about whether you think there’s an epidemic of doctors amputating minors, and if so, based on what evidence.

The extraordinarily elaborate Wiki (and Reuters, and, and -) "investigation", rather testifies to the staged production that was "the Bucha massacre". The "word on the ground" agreed by impartial eyewitnesses and correspondents so far kept unreported in the MSM, was accurate - and, as the facts and truth usually are, much simpler. Simply, the bodies in the streets 'arrived' after the Russians left. Here was an orchestration for world propaganda, doubtless a MI6 psy-op, the dirty work, an atrocity in itself, carried out by Azov battalion, and which came at a crucial moment: Arranged Istanbul peace talks--that must NOT be allowed to proceed. In the words of one writer, Petr Lavrenin: "The story of the Bucha massacre emerged at a time when both the Ukrainian and Russian sides, albeit with varying degrees of optimism, were reporting progress in ceasefire negotiations. “The Ukrainian side has become more realistic regarding issues related to Ukraine’s neutral and non-nuclear status, but the draft agreement is not ready for top-level discussions,” said Vladimir Medinsky, head of the Russian delegation and an aide to the President of Russia. Meanwhile, Ukrainian negotiator David Arahamiya noted that the document was ready, and the two presidents could meet and discuss it. "However, following reports of the “Bucha massacre,” Zelensky withdrew from the peace talks". "The incident in Bucha became a pivotal moment that not only derailed peace negotiations in Istanbul but also intensified Russia’s diplomatic isolation in the West, led to the mass expulsion of Russian diplomats and tighter sanctions, and resulted in Ukraine receiving additional military aid from NATO states". -- But who in the West, to this day exactly 3 years later, was informed and knows there was a ceasefire negotiation on the table initiated by Putin and Zelensky a few weeks into the invasion? Exactly.

Public justification for Boris Johnson's intervention to block early Ukr/Russ peace talks (April 2022) and inciting Ukrainians to fight on until victorious as he assured them, was enhanced by the most timely "Bucha massacre" by Russian forces (- "discovered" days after they'd left the village and voluntarily retreated from Kyiv's outskirts. ) A Press connection advised me soon after, in his circles it was a known false flag operation, and "The Bucha butchery is a buncha lies". Certainly a hoax known by Zelensky and allies concerned. There're sufficient evildoings to level against Putin and Russia without blaming on them the evildoings and evasions by 'our' side and 'our' complicit media.

Hmm. "actuality", you say. You're citing reality as your argument. Really? What is this actuality, that actually exists in the world today, that reminds you of the Great Depression? Don't give me promises about what will happen in the future, from "experts" who oppose Trump ideologically. Give me actuality. Are there hobos running around, with dainty little sacks made of handkerchiefs attached to a stick, looking for a job because of Trump's policies? In actuality? Because the only gap I see is between reality and the doom and gloom of the critics. Trump's been in office for four years before, you know. And he was doing roughly the same things: playing with tariffs to force people to re-negotiate deals. And everyone who hates him promised the same exact doom and gloom back then too. Meanwhile, the only economic gloom came from a childish over-reaction to a mild cough. Not from anything Trump did. So am I looking at a different reality here? Where's this reality that's supposed to convince me that Trump is the second coming of FDR? How am I ignoring my hunger? Clearly, I'm hungry, in this reality of yours. And yet, my belly feels perfectly full. What kind of delusion is this? Were people in the Great Depression also able to magically feel perfectly satiated, while they were starving? Or is it just me?

That's an absurd statement to make. We clearly mean two different things by the phrase "free trade". My definition is "the ability of all individuals to trade on a voluntary basis with each other". What's yours? Here's just one example of a clear violation of what I mean by free trade: https://inplp.com/latest-news/article/the-european-commission-confirms-that-argentina-has-adequate-legislation-for-the-international-transfer-of-personal-data/ That outlines just a tiny fraction of the legislative over-reach Argentina had to engage in, in violation of its own citizens' individual rights, to obtain what you call "free trade with the EU". A very tiny fraction. The EU has blocks of regulation like that for every single industry, that it forces its trading partners to adopt ahead of any trade agreement. The EU bureaucrats aren't interested in free trade. They're after imposing their regulatory framework on the world. They're shaping the world in their own image. And, up to this point, the US has been standing by, just watching, as the European Commission writes laws which are then applied in Canada, South America, Japan, Britain, etc., as a condition of access to the EU market. That's entirely absurd. The US should, at the very least, start offering the same exact deal: access to the US market conditional on the immediate abolishment of every single EU regulation. Start with Canada. Make them choose between trade with the EU and trade with the US. The alternative, of course, would be what Elon Musk suggested the other day: free trade between the US and the EU. Keyword on "free". But that's not a realistic proposal. That's every bit as unrealistic as suggesting free trade with North Korea (requiring Kim Jong Un to step aside, have free elections, liberalize its economy, etc.). The probability of EU bureaucrats stepping aside and allowing actual free trade to happen is exactly the same ZERO. The only thing that will work is a contentious negotiation process that attempts to limit the EU's power, under the threat of tariffs. Another thing: when I buy something from Canada, for example, it's zero tariff, right? But, fun fact: every European government has a tax of 20% or so on that purchase. It's automatically deducted at customs. It's the seller that HAS TO pay it. It works exactly the same way as a tariff would. And some might argue that that's fine, since it doesn't disadvantage to Canadian producers ... oh, but how naive you are. Because here comes the next con: VAT exemption. That's a little favor many European governments hand out to their favorite categories of local producers. So yes, Canadian companies do have to compete with local producers who don't pay VAT. It gets worse: honest Canadian producers also have to compete with Chinese companies that CHEAT. They sell me let's say a pair of $100 shoes. That's $80 for them, $20 for my government, right? Wrong. That's $100 for them, 0$ for my government... because when my package arrives, it says the shoes cost $7-8 on the invoice. Low cost items like that aren't taxed, because the accounting would cost the government more than the revenue. Obviously, my government can't do anything to a guy in China who's evading European taxes. He has immunity. The Canadian guy does not. That's your "free trade". And I'm only mentioning a tiny fraction of the incredibly massive volume of things that make this "free trade" very, very unfree. I'm not talking about a mere tariff, where you hand over the 10% Trump just imposed, and beyond that you get to trade as you wish. This goes to the essence of the issue. This changes the fundamental nature of the trade. Countries which sign deals with the EU, and companies which produce for the EU, aren't just paying a percentage. They're selling their souls. The essence of what they do (how they regulate their economy, in the case of countries, and how they produce their products, in the case of companies) changes fundamentally. [edit] If economic regulations aren't scary enough, another condition of free trade with the EU is adherence to the ICC. That's the so-called "International Criminal Court". The one that wants to arrest Netanyahu, while refusing to indict any living Hamas leader. The one leftist EU bureaucrats set up and are trying to turn into a Court that rules over the whole world. Feel free to look on any EU website for how that Court is described: they're talking about it like it is a global judicial body representative of the population of Earth, legitimately making judgements anywhere on Earth it wishes to. And it's not. It's something that's been imposed on most of the countries that signed up for it. Certainly Argentina. You think Milei wants to be part of the ICC? But he can't leave. The EU will punish him economically for it.

I locked horns with Rand's metaphysics in a previous thread recently, where I stated that she leaped from the realm of logic to the realm of metaphysics without justifying that leap. You should re-read the material you wrote above to see where Rand generated axioms and corollaries for the purpose of validating knowledge. As "touchstones of knowledge," her metaphysical axioms are used to determine what constitutes knowledge. The axioms are regulating the knowledge-gathering process. They are gatekeepers for the knowledge-gathering process. Touchstones are standards of validation. Metaphysics became a frozen regulatory structure. Yes, she did write that metaphysics is the study of existence as such. However, that's as far as it went. No studying was actually carried out. From that point, it was all about regulating knowledge. She asserted a tiny set of axioms, declared them self-evident and irreducible, and then reoriented metaphysics away from studying existence qua existence and toward regulating epistemology. Metaphysics for Objectivism is not a field of study in its own right, but a prohibitor of metaphysical inquiry. From what epoch did other forms of metaphysics appear? All of them, I think. From the ancient Greeks to the present day. Even the anti-metaphysics of the postmoderns is doing metaphysics in a way, because by rejecting metaphysics they are at least engaging in it. Here is a list of the epochs in which metaphysics was studied in its original form, as a science: 1. Ancient Greek metaphysics, Epoch: ~600 BC – 300 BC. 2. Medieval metaphysics, Epoch: ~300 AD – 1500 AD. 3. Early modern rationalist metaphysics, Epoch: 1600–1750 AD. 4. Empiricism and skepticism (still doing metaphysics), Epoch: 1600–1800 AD. 5. Kantian criticism: Metaphysics of Morals, late 18th century. 6. 19th Century Idealism. 7. Analytic Metaphysics, Phenomenology and Existentialism, and Postmodernism Anti-Metaphysics, 20th - 21st century.

CD says that "metaphysics, for Rand, is negative: it puts up a palm and says, 'Only this far, and no farther'." Well, no, that is not what metaphysics is most fundamentally for Rand. It is written that “metaphysics is nothing other than the philosophy of the fundamental principles of our cognition.” But that was not written by Rand; rather, by some pre-Kantian German philosopher, one with some influence on Kant. There have been thinkers who think in the way CD would have us believe is Rand's thought. But no, Rand's fundamental conception of metaphysics did not involve guidance for good thinking. Rand's was in the tradition of Aristotle's metaphysics as "the study of being as being" which is known to any beginning philosophy student. Hers is even not terribly far from Christian Wolff's idea of general metaphysics as a "science of being in general, or insofar as it is being." Rand's conception of metaphysics most fundamentally is "the study of existence as such." CD has it that "Rand repurposed metaphysics [from what model epoch?] to 'serve' us sensory, empirical data, and systematically, to feed data, validated by perception, to epistemology for thinking. Metaphysics governs knowledge in the sense that it determines the first proper channel toward determining truth, which is via the senses." Could we have some specific text of Rand's supporting the proposal of this as her view? Some philosophies have metaphysical axioms. They never have the same role as axioms in geometry. They can be closer to the very different role of axioms in an area of physics when those are put into an axiomatic organization of the area, such as mechanics or thermodynamics. Rand's philosophy has metaphysical axioms. Not put to work as in geometry or in physics. She portrayed her metaphysical axioms as "touchstones" of knowledge. From her metaphysics, one can, for one utility, look at other metaphysics and see places it goes wrong. There was a metaphysics that began with the concept of "nothing" which it took as whatever is contradictory. It then defined "something" as that which is not nothing. That is contorted and not in tune with what is prior to what, logically and in order of learning. So sayeth one in step with Rand (and many other philosophers) on the priority of general existence over nonexistence. One can have various special interests for taking up metaphysics. On might be led to it from religious training, of course. When we die, do we go on existing but in some new form? or do we just go clean out of existence? One might have a sense that there is something metaphysical about great sculpture and come looking into metaphysics. One might come looking from interests in mathematics or science. Or ethics. But metaphysics is not something parasitic on those things (though it should certainly be informed by physical sciences and rightly situated with them). Nor is it parasitic on epistemology. It is needed for right epistemology as it is needed for right comprehension in so many arenas. But to challenge Rand's metaphysics, challenge it head-on. Lock horns with the metaphysics itself. Refute any arguments that have been offered, for example, showing that certain metaphysical tenets cannot be denied without self-contradiction. Talking about a metaphysics as screening for this or that mistaken source of knowledge is not getting on the diamond and actually playing ball.

Trump denial <– But Trump, like all other politicians, only more so, and like many salespersons, lies a lot. What's a lie, a denial of a threat in a phone call, to him? Nothing. $

This, but this reddit user made an insightful point:

—Walter Olson on Facebook ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Barro ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ President Trump has threatened US Auto makers if they raise their prices. This is the closest to Mr. Thompson in power since President Nixon's Wage and Price Controls. With the economic crisis Trump's tariff's will bring about over the next year and with the history of what happened to the Republican Congress in 1890 when they triggered this sort of wreckage, the current President may attempt another fake "national emergency" to interfere with the 2026 election. This could bring us closest to the dark days of Atlas Shrugged since the book was written. No, we don't need a John Galt rescue. We need citizens saying with Galt to this Administration "get the hell out of my way." Let us try freedom. McKinley Tariff

I first used 2023 numbers. Here are the 2024 numbers these fake "tariffs charged to the USA" and the fake "semi-reciprocal tariffs" and pretend kindness are calculated from (last three columns are mine): Countries below 10% got a 10% minimum. Those 10% aren't actual tariffs either, just something made up by brain dead Americans.

No, borders still matter for defining jurisdiction and military aggression. Open borders means borders should not limit people's freedom of movement and should not limit their freedom to produce and trade.

Godel's result applies only to systems that consist exclusively of logically deducing propositions from other propositions. It does not apply to any system that involves induction or reasoning on the level of concepts or starting with the evidence of the senses or checking conclusions against reality. Thus it applies neither to human cognition nor to Ayn Rand's philosophy. Concepts are very different from sets.

A Friday Hodgepodge 1. I've heard of people opting for dumb phones and hunting for dumb television sets and cars with actual knobs for controls. And then there was that spamming refrigerator that made the news a while back. But now, people are rightly getting upset about dishwashers that require an internet connection to do simple things:You have to set up an account on Home Connect, set up the Home Connect app on your phone, and then you can control your dishwasher through the Internet to run a rinse cycle. That doesn't make any sense to me. An app? I mean, I can understand maybe adding some neat convenience features for those who want them. Like on my new fridge -- which I chose not to connect to WiFI -- it has an app that would allow me to monitor the inside temperature or look up service codes more easily. If I wanted those add-on features, which my old fridge didn't have, I could get them. But requiring an app to access features that used to be controllable via buttons on the dishwasher itself -- or are still if you pay $400 more for the fancy "800" model? That's no bueno.Sure, companies ought to be free to offer whatever kind of garbage they want on an open market, but I'll be damned if I'm going to reward ridiculous things like this with my business. And no thanks: I don't want the prospect of things like having to pay a subscription to do something I used to be able to do by pressing a button -- or suddenly being unable to use an appliance if its vendor goes out of business. This may or may not bother you, but I'm going be very careful and picky the next time I have to buy an appliance, even if no one in his right mind would think the internet is necessary for something like it to work. 2. An nice bonus to law and order is that, once in a while, you get to read a good dressing-down of a bad actor who chooses the wrong person to threaten with a lawsuit. I encountered a good example of this recently in the form of a letter written in response to a company with a reputation for extorting settlement money by threatening infringement suits over its intellectual property:I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not. [emphasis in quote from blog post]Tort reform, including a "loser pays rule, would go a long way towards rectifying this situation, since many victims of this strategy can't afford to fight back. 3. There is a nonzero chance that the star Betelgeuse will go supernova in our lifetime. That sounds neat, but what will it be like when that happens?It will be visible during the day. It will be brighter than any planet. It will be almost as bright as the full moon. You'll be able to read a book by the light of the Betelgeuse supernova at midnight. But it will actually be painful to look at because unlike the full moon that is this gorgeous disc in the sky, Betelgeuse is still going to be a tiny pinprick of light. So it won't be comfortable to look at, and it will last a few months before fading away as all supernovae do. But as impressive as it is, it won't be dangerous.Bright enough to read by at night? Good thing it won't last more than too long, then. 4. It was through spell-checking a blog post that I first learned that restaurateur has no n. If that strikes you as odd, here's why:A restaurateur in the Middle Ages was a medical assistant who would help ready patients for surgery. Soon these "restorers" became known for the special meat-based rich soup they would prepare to restore and fortify a person physically and spiritually. That restorative soup was called "restaurant." It wasn't until later that the place where those soups (and other healthy victuals) were served also became known as a restaurant. After the French Revolution of 1789, chefs who used to be in the service of aristocrats began opening public eating places serving all kinds of foods -- not just healthy soups. That's when the restaurant as we now know it by its current name and style began to take shape.You'll have to go there for the main part of the answer, which is in the paragraph before the one quoted above. I found my knowledge of Latin helpful in understanding this, although absent the knowledge of the origin of the terms, I never connected the grammatical dots on my own. -- CAVLink to Original

Over at RealClear Markets this morning, I encountered a link to a blog post titled "Tariff Men." This was quite an interesting read, but not for any sound argument in favor of tariffs. Rather, its interest lies in its being an excellent précis of the case Trump's acolytes and cheerleaders are making on behalf of the President -- who seems allergic to addressing the electorate as if we were adults but in fact just doesn't know what the hell he is talking about. Perhaps the most striking things about the piece are (1) the complete absence of argument or explanation as to what tariffs are or why they are supposed to be good for the economy; and (2) a highly ... selective ... consideration of the history of tariffs in America that reminds me somewhat of a contemporary school of "analysis" of the historical record of the Lincoln Presidency. The Founders used tariffs to avoid outrage over a (more obvious) tax? Whether or not they truly believed tariffs weren't taxes, that doesn't mean tariffs aren't taxes or that the Founders were right to do this. Britain become great through protectionism? Really? Call me crazy, but that greatest of British exports, rule of law, applied to an entire empire that presumably didn't levy tariffs against itself, probably had a lot to do with its rise to prosperity. (See "dropping domestic barriers" below, but on a glocal scale.) Dropping tariffs against the rest of the world would be an extension of the same policy, and not some kind of bolt from the blue. Say's Law? Never heard of it. Trade as mutually beneficial? Isn't it obvious that people become wealthy by stealing crumbs from the destitute and building mansion, yachts, and private jets from them? The piece dismisses the entire discipline of economics -- Today it is widely claimed that Trump's tariffs will lead to trade war and commercial ruin: the policy is decried as archaic mercantilism... -- but reveres the shallow arguments of a single school of that discipline:McKinley's understanding of economics grew out of the American School of Political Economy: a school of thought which argued that measuring wages, prices, and production against each other was the best way to understand the health of an economy. With this in mind, the American School argues for intense protection around the walls of America's economy: tariffs prevent products made by low-wage workers from undercutting American products and workers. But the American School also counters left-wing hostility to capital by minimizing domestic barriers to commerce, allowing productivity and wages to rise faster than prices.What's so magical about an international border that the same benefits that come from "minimizing domestic barriers to commerce" don't also accrue from minimizing international barriers to commerce with friendly nations? I don't know, either, but I somehow doubt that Donald Trump -- who seems ready to exterminate Canadians, but also wants Canada as a state -- does, either. Henry Hazlitt, whose Economics in One Lesson, deserves wide circulation, gives a tantalizing lead at the start of his chapter against tariffs:From another point of view, free trade was considered as one aspect of the specialization of labor... But whatever led people to suppose that what was prudence in the conduct of every private family could be folly in that of a great kingdom? It was a whole network of fallacies, out of which mankind has still been unable to cut its way. And the chief of them was the central fallacy with which this book is concerned. It was that of considering merely the immediate effects of a tariff on special groups, and neglecting to consider its long-run effects on the whole community. [bold added]See also the previous quote. -- CAVLink to Original

Only read Lessing's The Grass Is Singing.