I'm been banging on libertarians here for a bit, so let me steel-man the case for them. For me, the biggest counterargument against them is what happened in El Salvador. You had a shithole country, with the highest murder rate in the world, and it took a strongman to bring the criminals to heel, and now by some accounts it's a paradise. I've never been there, so I don't want to say that's exactly true, but it's hard to argue that it's at least much better than it was. Libertarians would have abandoned it or if they stayed had a rough go of it. But it also occurred to me as the story was happening how uncanny it was that Bukele was able to do it. Wouldn't the CIA/drug cartels intervene and take him out? The last thing the WEF/Biden admin/commie overlords would want is proof of concept. And it would seem trivial to take out a third-world leader. It happened a few times during covid in Africa to leaders who didn't care about covid measures. A few of them were assassinated. So I was (am) a little suspicious. I certainly want it to be true, but it's possible it only happened with permission of said overlords. If that's the case, then the El Salvador model which is basically just a more extreme version of what Trump is trying to do with ICE -- re-establish the rule of law, create conditions for prosperity -- could be an op of sorts, wherein they let things get so out of hand and then point to the law and order as a huge relief. I remember Ed Dowd saying a few years ago, the "eat bugs and own nothing" pitch was so bad, no one would really go for it, but to beware of the counter-proposal which will seem reasonable by comparison. Moreover, there's another guy on Twitter Donnie Discerned who cites biblical prophecy to argue that when the beast arises, the people will embrace him because he'll seem like he's delivering them from captivity and then they'll actually make war on Israel (which had fallen into bad ways) thinking they were being righteous, but actually the messiah would arise from it, and they'd be making war on Jesus himself. Forget about all the Israel atrocities for a minute and the theories that "the Joos are behind it all" for a second and consider how this is playing out -- Israel is a pariah now, Gaza is in the process of being taken out of its hands, and the UAE, Saudis and Trump are re-imagining the region as a corporatist paradise. In other words, by vanquishing WEF, Netanyahu and other malefactors, it might seem like law, order and the triumph of good, but now you're in the Palantir surveillance based world of "prosperity" and "peace" via strength. Seems better than Netanyahu killing civilians, but a prison nonetheless. He says (I'm not especially knowledge about the Bible) that the beast will reign through a false peace and use it to convince people to go along. But prophecy aside, you can see the idea -- that we're being played, and that it was a setup the entire time, the globalist scourge, the covid totalitarianism, etc. to get people to embrace the alternative, a government of law and order where you can buy and sell and enjoy the world's various pleasures, at the expense of real sovereignty, and by sovereignty I mean connection to meaning, to purpose, to God. In other words, we sell out our highest consciousness for something safe and resembling prosperity, a deal with the devil most are eager to snap-call given how bad the alternative was. And really that is Trump's MO -- make outrageous demands such that the counterparty settles for what he actually wants because it's so much better than the alternative. We accept our overlords, lose trust in God (or whatever word you want to substitute for our deepest selves) because they've staved off the horrors of whatever the fuck the WEF et all were proposing for us. In that case, Bukele was an op, Trump is an op, and we should reject all of it, even if it's so obviously better in the short run. The libertarians reject centralized law and order because even if it takes care of certain acute problems it will never lead to real sovereignty. I am sympathetic to this because even though my base case is that Bukele has done a great job, and Trump is cleaning up a horrific mess that was left to him, I am under no delusion that the powerful suddenly care about me or any other individual, even if our aims are temporarily aligned. The libertarians are ineffective, and that's the drawback, but perhaps to be effective in that way is ultimately the path to slavery. Again, this is not my base case, and my beef with them is they fail to take into account human nature as it is (rather than how we would like it to be), and given that, we're faced with Popper's Paradox of Intolerance (about which I have written) wherein if we value tolerance we must be intolerant of intolerance, lest the intolerant dominate and swallow up any chance of tolerance at all. So that's the tension. But I like to take on the steel rather than straw man because it's the only path to finding out what's actually true.

I really want to use AI for more things, but I just don’t have a use case. Zero chance I’m going to outsource it for my personal private messages, even though it’s tempting to experiment with it. I’ve tried a bit to get it to generate fantasy baseball rankings or NFL bets, but that task seems too hard for it as yet. I use it now basically as a search engine and to look up basic facts or learn about some topics, but I feel like I’m missing out on something, like I should build something useful with it. I just can’t think of what that would be.

Went to the dentist today for a teeth cleaning, 10 am appointment. They're always on time, never make you wait. At 10:15 they apologized, asked if I wanted a coffee. I said yes, At 10:20, they took me into a red-light therapy room, for a free session, apologizing as someone apparently had a dental emergency, needed the dentist. At 10:45, they came in, said she was ready, told me the cleaning would be comped. That's how you run a business, and I can't tell you how rare this is in Portugal, but these guys know what they're doing.

I grew up in NYC. When I got to college in 1989, there were a lot of leftist “cool” guys on campus. Long hair, smoked weed (so did I), were not nearly as woke as it is now, but it were woke-ish. They had beliefs about things that if you didn’t share, you were considered kind of a bad person. Like you were insufficiently concerned about racism or whatever. It was a bit of a contrast coming from NY where everyone just joked aobut racist shit all the time about Jews, blacks, Italians, Irish, Polaks, Puerto Ricans, etc. That shit was verboten there. But whatever, it wasn’t that big a deal back then, no one got cancelled, it was more just discouraged and frowned upon. It was an ethos of being the sort of person who is good and cultivated and refined. These cool guys felt they were “good” because they had the right beliefs. I was friends with a couple of them. One of them went to work for Goldman Sachs I think, not sure, I lost touch. But it was the first time I really encountered people patting themselves on the back for their “right-think.” Again it was nothing compared to woke social media of the last 10 years, but more similar to what I see on nostr now. Cool guys patting themselves on the back for the correct beliefs, virtue signaling their adherence to the “freedom” ethos. Some of them will parlay it into some sats via building a following, most will just be aspirational, generating a few likes and some in-group approval. It’s fine — no one gets canceled on nostr. Just noticing the same pattern. Find it mildly retarded, but a good reminder human nature isn’t suspended just because you’re on the “freedom protocol.”