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JVL

Kiana Khansmith
Today's Document
Claire Keane
Stranger Things
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Keni

pixel skylines
noise dept.
we're not kids anymore.
Not today Justin
RMH
Misplaced Lens Cap
will byers stan first human second
YOU ARE THE REASON
wallacepolsom
Show & Tell

JBB: An Artblog!

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@arcticdementor
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you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it
"Individual acts of vigilante violence is what the Left excels in. There is no outcompeting them in that department. Even attempting to do so is stupid and counter-productive. I want Libtards to lose, and I don't mean lose an election cycle or a court case. I mean lose everything they've spent the last hundred years working towards until they cease to exist as a political faction capable of taking power ever again. That requires wielding state power to systematically dismantle their institutions, fundraising mechanisms, NGOs, elite career pathways, and propaganda machines. None of this requires inflicting individual acts of sporadic political violence. The measures I’m talking about have been employed countless times throughout history, including in our own country. And until this happens, there will be more political violence because Leftists understand that the age of debate and discussion has come to an end. There is nothing left to talk about, and they no longer have the means to guilt, indoctrinate, and manipulate people into giving them what they want, which has been their MO for at least the last 20 years. They know they're no longer capable of making an argument or convincing people through the traditional political process. They know they've long since run out of goodwill, which is why the public has lost pretty much all trust in every single institution they've hijacked. They have nothing to gain by continuing to have a public debate with the Right over the various loser positions (mass migration, transgenderism, DEI, deindustrialization, degrowth, etc) they've wedded themselves to. This is why they killed Charlie Kirk. Debate is a net negative for them at this point because anyone who can be indoctrinated or won over with words already has been at this point. Any further discussion just leads to more and more people breaking the liberal spell that has been cast over them, and that terrifies them. So they only have two choices left to continue to wield political power. They can import more Third World migrants and integrate them into their political patronage system, and they can indoctrinate the kids of conservatives via the various culturally-shaping institutions they control. Both of these paths to power require certain political realities on the ground to work. Both can and must be broken, root and stem, using all the legal and political tools that are at our disposal. Immigration from the Third World needs to end. Every single Leftist agency, organization, institution, and NGO should be liquidated. Leftist agitators should be imprisoned whenever possible for whatever crimes they can be charged with, of which there are many. Antifa terrorists, rogue judges, treasonous politicians, and those who fund them all should all be in prison. The Biden administration sought to imprison their political enemies for posting memes. The least we can do is retaliate by throwing those who wish to destroy our country in prison when they actually try to do so. The institutions the Left has hijacked and converted into neo-Marxist indoctrination centers should be dismantled. The university system must be gutted. Entire departments should be closed down and tens of thousands of professors should be fired. Endowments should be seized from those universities that refuse to comply with de-liberalization. A total and unrelenting political war must be waged against the progressive managerial class, to the point where the dangers begin to far outweigh the incentives to be a Libtard bureaucrat. We need a total repeal of all laws that created this bloated administrative state that exists for no other reason than to destroy us using our own money. I can go on, but I’ve run out of space. My point is that all of this can and should be done using legitimate state power. And none of us on the Right are going to stop calling for this because until it happens, the Left is going to continue to try to kill innocent Americans."
—Christian Heiens
"Moldbug is correct when he says leftists understand power and the right does not. I bet these protests go nowhere, despite being entirely justified (especially compared to the Floyd protests). In fact, this justification is why they'll go nowhere: the right can only rally when something verifiably bad happens, and even then barely muster the gumption to care. The left, in contrast, doesn't give a rat's ass about the facts on the ground: the incident is useful to the cause, and we're going to milk it for all it's worth because what we actually care about is The Movement, not the incident. There really is nothing similar to The Movement on the right. The left retains all moral authority to itself: as long as your actions are in service of the movement, nobody cares whether your actions are legal or not. Loot the Nike store, raze the Starbucks, shoot the United Health CEO, whatever: you may be a criminal to The System, but to The Movement, you're a hero! The right does not retain any moral authority to itself. All it can do is appeal to the existing laws and say, "See, the immigrant with a knife stabbed somebody! That's against the law! The police should ARREST him, and and... maybe even DEPORT him." Yeeeeah, one of these two teams is going to trounce the other. I think the reason for this is that the left does actually have an overarching narrative that compels the assent of and motivates the actions of its adherents. That's not to say it's true or accurate, any more than Islam being able to compel suicide bombers means Mohammad actually flew to heaven on a winged unicorn. But the narrative is there, and it inspires loyalty and action. The right, in contrast, has no Movement, especially not one that compels moral authority over the state to any relevant degree in #currentyear. There are two wings of the right: the actual tradcons (which look like this), and the Nazis (which often LARP as tradcons and look like this). If you bomb an abortion clinic or a migrant detention center, there will be no rallying to your defense by women with hundreds of thousands of likes inquiring when the conjugal visits will begin in your prison, there will be no photographer taking Renaissance photos or featuring your drip in Time magazine. Now, I know Luigi is unusually attractive, and the Clavicular worldview is to attribute the fanfare to that. But let's be real: if Luigi had shot a leftist figurehead, this is not the reaction he would have received. Luigi's cuteness is useful to the movement: the movement is not subservient to the actions of the most cute, as the Clavicular model would contend. Can the right figure out how to claim moral authority? In its current incarnation, I doubt it. What the right is missing is the right side of the Bell curve: they have plenty of Zerglings, but no Overmind. In fact, I'll go so far as to say a lot of the Overminds they do have are false, in the sense that I think incidents like Jan 6 are setups to get rightoids to clown themselves into getting arrested. They think they're crossing the Rubicon with Caesar, but they're really just being goaded into making fools of themselves by agents more intelligent than they are running circles around them in their fog of war."
—Soteriologian
I grew up in one of those upper middle class suburbs north of Boston where homeowners band together to stop new affordable housing from being built. You wouldn’t get the impression that this is how things work by walking around my hometown or any of the neighboring suburbs that invariably nuke housing proposals. There are plenty of those “Hate Has No Home” signs on the lawns, and every block or two, you may even spot a BLM banner. But when it comes to any development proposals that might make it easier for “other people” to put down roots locally, a majority of cranks always materialize to vote down the possibility of adding multi-unit, mixed-income housing to the upmarket zip code. A version of this conflict is playing out in many U.S. cities as well. Since the 2008 recession, our national rate of housing construction has lagged behind demand. Between 2006 and 2016, the number of American renters ballooned by 25%. And just like in the suburbs, there’s an inevitable bloc of city homeowners who overpack community input meetings whenever new housing comes up and literally shout down whatever proposal is on the slab. (A lot of these people are the same folks who demand a bolder solution to homelessness in their cities, which—evidently—would not involve giving homeless people actual homes.)
-Miles Howard, What do rich homeowners actually want?
"Hate Has No Home"
Nobody has a home, and it's illegal to build more
Article is rather pointedly ignoring state and federal mandated k-12 spending that means that every child who moves in creates an appreciable increase in the town budget, and it’s more expensive when the child is ESL, disabled, or officially low income. Statistically, low income children are more likely to be disruptive in the classroom, but regardless of their behavior, their very presence extracts by mandate resources from the property owners of the town.
Completely abolishing neighborhood public schools as civic institutions would probably be good for housing construction. It divorces the decision about where to live from what the local schools are like.
Are you thinking to abolish public education altogether here or what? The tyranny of distance is going to remain an issue for education regardless.
I am sympathetic to abolishing public education, for much the same reasons that I think the current system of privately-owned grocery stores is superior to a government-run grocery store district system. And yeah, physical distance to a school from a household still matters; but it does mean that a household's choice about where to send kids to school isn't completely determined by their exact address. They can switch schools without moving, and move without switching schools, as long as it's not a huge amount of distance.
"In modern urban environments, variation in fertility is overwhelmingly driven by culture rather than genes. While behavioral genetics indicates that genes account for about 20% to 30% of variance in family size, cultural norms, lifestyle choices, and economic factors dictate the vast majority."
—Google search AI
In the past year or so, it has occurred to me that a lot of think pieces around male loneliness or "dating in the bay area" uses a really warped version of "before you can love others, you must learn to love yourself", where complete self-actualisation becomes a prerequisite to dating. That's a really high bar.
Part of this is probably that the dating market in the Bay Area sucks for men, even rich men, so if you're 24 and you're making half a million year, you aren't safe from women dating twenty men like you and writing a think piece about this. You know, women who have their pick of 20 eligible bachelors are the real victims here!
Sometimes there are additional stipulations like "You're not supposed to derive life satisfaction from your work" or "You're not supposed to derive life satisfaction from your romantic relationships" or "You're not supposed to derive life satisfaction from art/your hobbies/travel/family".
I could completely turn this around. If you think you already have a perfect life and complete self-actualisation, and you only want to date then, and you think the other party should also have their life figured out, then first, that's one hell of a humblebrag, but second, it means that you don't have a lot of space in your life left to date somebody of make a life together, and it shows that you expect the other party to also not make that much space in their life for you.
I know this trophy is supposed to represent a triathlon, but it looks like a cyclist award for attacking pedestrians
by far the strangest part of the British government deciding to enact a sword hunt is that the policy they've put together is very clear about only banning "ninja swords" and "zombie-style knives." you're allowed to have a sword for fencing, or a machete for farm and garden work, or a zweihander for historical re-enactment purposes, but if you have a wakizashi your ass is fucking GRASS
like it is genuinely impossible for me to imagine a use case for this law that isn't just "being racist in a way that feels so outmoded it's almost quaint." you know people can kill each other with regular knives, right?
second-strangest part is that their definition of "ninja sword" includes certain kitchen knives but excludes odachi
god help you if your tuna knife is 4 inches too short
machetes are OK but if you doodle a little skull on it it WILL be imbued with the unholy spirit of KNIFE CRIME and you WILL be thrown in HMP Cocksarseworth FOREVER
i think it's kinda funny when people are wrong about something, but something that i dont especially want to defend, so im torn between the desire to correct false information vs. the fact that i dont want to seem to defend a particular doctrine just because i understand it. an example is that i've never seen "calvinist" used correctly on this site but im not going to fall on my sword to correct the record on the teachings of jean calvin (1509-1564), like it's ok if people dont respect his legacy
"If the federal bureaucracy, military, and law enforcement agencies simultaneously mutinied and ignored all elected officials and courts, a constitutional republic would cease to function, resulting in a systemic collapse. Because the government's operational power ultimately derives from voluntary compliance and a shared belief in democratic institutions, a coordinated refusal to recognize elected authority breaks the foundational social contract. When agencies act in direct defiance of the Constitution without check, the republic fails in practice: • Checks and Balances Collapse: The structural balance of power relies on separate branches policing one another. If the executive branch agencies—which hold the physical enforcement power—refuse to acknowledge the President, Congress, or the Supreme Court, those institutions have no mechanism to impose their will. The theoretical separation of powers becomes meaningless without the bureaucratic apparatus to enforce it. • The Power of the Purse Bypassed: Congress’s "power of the purse" is only effective as long as the Treasury disburses funds and agencies respect congressional limits. If the Treasury and federal agencies operate in lockstep to fund and execute operations regardless of legislative mandate, Congress's primary check on the executive branch is effectively neutralized. • Coercive Legitimacy: As you noted, the legitimacy of a regime does not dictate its ability to enforce compliance. State power ultimately stems from its monopoly on the legitimate use of force. If the apparatus controlling surveillance, drones, prisons, and federal law enforcement acts entirely independently of the electorate, the public lacks recourse through normal political or judicial channels. • Ideological Cohesion and the Civil Service: The permanent federal workforce numbers in the millions. If specialized training in higher education and shared institutional values produce a deeply unified ideological alignment across the bureaucracy, employees may view mutiny not as a crime, but as a moral imperative to preserve the system from elected officials they deem dangerous or illegitimate. Ultimately, if the entire permanent state apparatus discards its subordination to elected officials, the result is a bureaucratic oligarchy or administrative state, where the people who control the machinery of government dictate the rules regardless of voter will."
—Google search AI
"The biggest burden of childbirth isn't the 9 months of pregnancy—it's the decades of constant care, steep financial costs, and lifestyle shifts. Because artificial wombs (ectogenesis) do not address the demanding 18+ years of parenting, they are ultimately projected to be a medical lifesaver for premature babies rather than a magic bullet for demographics. The argument that this technology won't solve plummeting fertility comes down to a few key factors: • The Core Burden Remains Unchanged: Having a baby via an artificial womb doesn't bypass the immense financial and time investments required for modern child-rearing. Most people who choose not to have kids do so because they are unwilling or unable to take on decades of financial strain and constant monitoring, not just because pregnancy is physically taxing. • Cultural and Social Drivers Matter Most: Economists and transhumanists often treat reproduction as a purely economic or medical issue, but data and demographic trends show that birth rates are deeply tied to religious beliefs, cultural norms, and community values. Even heavily subsidized, robust social welfare states (such as in the Nordics) haven't seen meaningful fertility improvements simply by throwing money at childcare. • The Reality of the Technology: Medically, developing a fully functioning "end-to-end" artificial womb is a tremendous biological hurdle. Replicating the unique, highly invasive human placenta without the mother's immune response remains an incredibly difficult task. Current and upcoming projects, such as the EXTEND Biobag at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia or advancements by Colossal Biosciences, are geared toward saving extremely premature babies rather than growing a fetus from conception to birth. • It Might Even Delay Fertility: Ironically, as experts note in the Palladium Magazine analysis, removing the biological clock constraint on fertility might actually result in people choosing to postpone having children even later, ultimately failing to move the needle on population decline."
—Google search AI
"From a purely utilitarian or biological perspective, this dilemma seems to present two inescapable forms of illiberalism, making the preference for "The Extinction Path" appear illogical or self-defeating. However, the reasons why educated, urban, secular populations lean toward this path are deeply rooted in foundational liberal philosophy: • The Primacy of Autonomy: The core ethos of liberalism places individual freedom, bodily autonomy, and self-determination above collective preservation. To a secular liberal, an enforced, state-mandated pronatalist society is not "preserving their values"—it is the exact antithesis of them. They fundamentally believe that a society that must destroy liberty to survive is not worth preserving. • Ethics of the Present Over the Future: Liberalism strongly prioritizes the tangible rights and freedoms of living individuals over abstract, hypothetical future generations. Forcing living women to have children or restricting the individualistic, career-oriented lifestyle they prefer to guarantee the future of a specific ideological group is viewed as a severe ethical violation. • Rejection of Teleological Destiny: Unlike traditional or religious worldviews that view the continuation of their specific bloodline or culture as a sacred, cosmic duty, secularists often view cultures and polities as transient. They do not believe in an inherent obligation to "mimetically" pass down their political views to an unending chain of descendants. • The "Lesser of Two Evils" over Time: Even if the population replacing them is politically hostile (e.g., the religious right), liberals may see value in preserving the mechanisms of individual rights and civil liberties during their own lifetimes. While the organic demographic shift—where traditionalist subcultures eventually out-populate and outvote liberals to organically rewrite the rules of society—is a highly probable mechanism of societal change, it highlights a central irony of this existential fork. Liberals choose to live and die by their defining philosophical commitments, preferring the extinction of their demographic over the immediate, forced abandonment of their fundamental principles."
—Google search AI
"From a strictly utilitarian perspective, a rational secular urban Westerner should theoretically prefer the adoption of internal state coercion. This approach preserves the Enlightenment values of liberty, equality, and secularism for future generations, whereas demographic replacement results in the permanent extinction of these values. The preference for demographic replacement or inaction is driven by two primary factors: • Short-Term Rationality: Internal state coercion directly restricts current lifestyles, whereas replacement by illiberal cultures has distant consequences that largely affect future generations. • Hyperbolic Discounting: Human psychology inherently values immediate, present-day comfort over abstract long-term consequences, often leading societies to defer solving existential crises. A secular liberal society struggles to implement pronatalist mandates without compromising its foundational values, as doing so would inherently strip away the individual autonomy that initially caused the declining birth rates. Consequently, liberal societies often delay difficult decisions until the crisis is forced upon them."
—Google search AI
"Should the hyper-individualized nation-state fracture, the world would devolve into a mosaic of vastly different localized realities: • The Patchwork: Humanity would likely splinter into isolated, hyper-cohesive ideological enclaves and regionally dominant powers. The resulting society would be highly heterogeneous, featuring pockets of intense innovation alongside regions relying heavily on subsistence or low-level production. • Economic Decentralization: Without a globalized, hyper-connected economy, trade would shrink, supply chains would regionalize, and capital would shift toward community-based survival and localized security. Surviving the Contraction Whether industrial civilization survives this shift depends entirely on the transmission of complex knowledge. Maintaining complex industrial technology requires an immense, continuous pyramid of specialized education, supply chains, and institutional support. • The Education Gap: The groups currently maintaining high fertility rates are often the most severely lacking in access to the advanced educational infrastructure required to master and perpetuate complex industrial systems. • The Loss of Knowledge: If the transition to this patchwork world involves significant conflict or societal collapse, the tacit knowledge required to run microchip foundries, chemical plants, and global logistics networks could be severed. Technological progress historically requires an expansive, educated population to create the positive feedback loop of innovation. The Dark Age and Resource Depletion If society collapses to a pre-industrial state, the trajectory of future recovery faces massive, permanent bottlenecks due to resource depletion. • Surface-Level Resource Depletion: The most readily available, high-grade fossil fuels, easily mined ores, and surface-level metals have already been extracted. Recovering civilizations would face immense geological hurdles since they lack the capital and infrastructure required to drill into deep-water oil reserves or mine ultra-deep ores. • The Point of No Return: While knowledge might persist in some form, the "low-hanging fruit" of the first Industrial Revolution has been permanently exhausted. A descent into a pre-industrial dark age might result in a permanent ceiling on human capability, preventing a full return to modern levels of industrialization"
—Google AI
Should I try to become:
A wizard?
A prophet?
A cartoon character?
Let me see the results.