Elsewhere in the world, wonderful things are happening. @nayibbukele is now in a very strange position, almost a historically unique one. He is simultaneously a democratically elected leader and an absolute dictator. And El Salvador is simultaneously a democracy and a dictatorship. He is a democratically elected leader, whose administration came to power in a free and fair election. And that administration wields power with the just consent of the people of El Salvador. But is also dictator, because the consensus in support of him is so overwhelming, his mandate from the people is so total, that he has a completely free hand to set Salvadorean policy as he chooses. And his choices have done nothing but strengthen that mandate. Imagine, for a moment, being a Salvadorean right now. Imagine knowing that, while your nation is not the greatest, richest, or most powerful on Earth, it is led by a man who, should you suffer harm or danger on foreign soil, will gather his men in their thousands, and send them forth with fire and sword to save you, or to avenge what cannot be saved. Civis Romanus sum. I am a Roman citizen. This phrase was once a strong guarantee of safety and fair treatment throughout most of the known world. Not because Rome ruled everywhere, but because Rome would avenge its own. In a stroke, Nayib Bukele has elevated soy ciudadano Salvadoreño to a similar status. Can you imagine an American president, elected by securing the support of an opaque and fraud-ridden political machine, making the same promise? Can you imagine him making good on it? Can you imagine a United States senator representing the native American citizens living in the state that sent him to the senate house, instead of Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, or some foreign nation with deep pockets, or a consortium of H1-b slavemasters? There is a lesson here, and it is a simple one. The rules matter less than the character of those in office. A democratic republic which elects corrupt bureaucrats is a nation ruled by liars and thieves. And the dictatorship of a just and unselfish man is a nation ruled by a just and unselfish man. The only real purpose of a "system" of government is to place power in the hands of wise men of good character. If the system does not do that, it has no merit, regardless of its form, or philosophy, or reliance on checks and balances. If you brought Diogenes and his lantern to Washington DC to search by daylight, how many wise men of good character do you think he would find?

One of the amusing things about women is that one will walk past a conversation that isn't about her, has nothing to do with her, and immediately interrupt it to say "Hey everybody! This does not sexually arouse me! In fact quite the opposite!" And then she'll wonder why everyone seems to find that response incoherent. It's only funny, however, until you truly understand why it's happening. Then it's kinda... existential. Pick up a popular book, written by women, for women. At random. We all know that the odds are it's going to be porn. In fact, it's gonna be porn about the medium-height, slightly clumsy, brown-haired protagonist girl being kidnapped and ravished by a werewolf pirate billionaire warlord. And if you're wondering what "ravished" means, it's like rape, but sexier. So what's going on here? Why are modern women so porn-brained, and simultaneously so contemptuous of every actual male within their line of sight? This actually all fits together quite neatly. Women are not lying. They are telling us the truth. They are telling us exactly how they feel about all the things they see. They're just not very good at introspection. So they don't know why they feel that way. If we read their werewolf rape porn, we can immediately see what turns women on... men who have power over them. And the reason that women are reading werewolf rape porn is that actual men who have power over them are in short supply, and there's not enough to go around. Desperate for male dominance, they are mainlining a hypernormal stimulus in fictional form. This is also the reason women don't care about any harm they are doing to men with their newfound political and social power. To them, any man who doesn't have power over them, and especially a man who they have the power to hurt, is viscerally disgusting. He is an unperson, useless to them, and they don't care what he is experiencing. This is why they try to hurt men in the first place. Because they resent the fact that they can. They want us to be powerful, invincible, untouchable, and they lash out in frustration when we aren't, seeking to punish us for being vulnerable instead. Funny thing is, it's not even their fault. This is genetic programming, after all, not a choice. Ovaries want what they want. The bit they don't quite understand, however, the bit they haven't thought through, is that this doesn't work with the whole "equality" thing. A man can be more powerful than you, or he can be an equal. Can't be both. And, of course, men really do have power over women. Not only are they unable to defend themselves against us, they need us to feed, clothe, shelter and protect them. If we were collectively willing to take their civil rights away again, we could do so immediately. Women's rights exist only when and where men say they do. In the book 1984, which many women will be unfamiliar with because it doesn't contain any werewolf rape, George Orwell describes a process called "doublethink", which is defined as "sustaining two contradictory ideas by not ever thinking about both of them at the same time." In this case, the two ideas are "make me equal to you in power throughout society at large", and "have so much more power in our personal relationship that I am unable to hurt you no matter what I say or do". Eventually, men are simply going to have to come to a consensus over what to do about this, and decide which of these requests to fulfill. We can either be liberals, and accept perpetual female contempt as the price of that, or we can be vilified as reactionaries, but have women love us again. What is never going to happen is that you are never going to get a majority of women to see the contradiction here, and agree that this makes no sense. Which means we are going to have to make this decision on our own.

You are on topic about the prequels... but I do not grant them the rank of masterpiece. Why not? Because, in the final analysis, they were written by a retarded boomerlib. And retarded boomerlibs have a perfectly inverted moral compass. Whatever they call good is actually evil. And they will call evil what is actually good. Millenials and GenZ are correct to identify in Anakin Skywalker what the boomers have done to them. But the films were not written to point this out. They were written, instead, as a defense of boomerlib morals and boomerlib theology. Consider the religion of the jedi. It is lifted, chapter and verse, from a bowdlerized versions of eastern religion sold to the flower children of the 60s by Indian grifters. Don't want things, do not work to achieve goals, do not have ambitions, do not desire. Instead, empty yourself, numb your passions, achieve nothing, move in no direction, simply exist where you are, content and at peace even if the world burns around you. Refer to all your responsibilities as "attachments" and seek to shed them. Be attached to nothing. Be an atomized individual with no sense of duty or loyalty. Your moral worth consists not of your deeds, but your inner feelings. This is chaos religion. It is religion for people for people in crapsack societies, where everyone is an 85 IQ retard, and the guy who happens to have a triple digit IQ, the guy who's smart enough to invent a religion, just looks around him and gives up. Fuck it, he says, there's no hope of ever fixing this, I'm just going to stop wanting things and veg out. The sith, by contrast, represent, not any Western religion in particular, but just vaguely Western values in general. Except they represent those values as seen through the eyes of someone who hates them. So, not just work, achieve, ascend, hone yourself, pursue excellence, be passionate about something, and gain power, but also kick some kittens along the way so George Lucas and his fellow retarded boomerlibs can feel good about hating you. See, that's the problem with the whole story. It's a story anti-trope called "debate and switch". A work of fiction sets up a moral dilemma or other painful choice, then finds a way to resolve it without actually addressing the issue it raised. In this case, the Star Wars prequels set up these two opposing philosophies, sith and jedi, but Lucas never actually makes any arguments about why the jedi are right. He just has it pre-inserted into the already-written story that the sith are gonna blow up a planet or two, slaughter some innocent kids, and kick a basket of kittens, therefore bad. And that is the big problem with the prequels. The underlying story, if it were tightened, purged of stupid cameos from characters who aren't supposed to be in it yet, had some plot holes patched, and was written by someone with better dialogue skills and without an inverted moral compass, could have been a good Greek-style tragedy. But the whole point of the story, the whole anvilicious point, inserted repeatedly with all the subtlety of a giraffe in dark glasses trying to get into a polar-bears-only nightclub, is that ANAKIN IS BAD, GUYS, MMKAY? What millenial viewers may not understand, and GenZ viewers certainly won't, is that a lot of the dialogue is actually an extremely hamfisted midwit commentary on the exact political climate of the time.... post 9/11, GWOT, Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. It's all George's stupid boomerlib sentiments that republicans are bad, and muzzie terrorists who blow up our people aren't. So, the movies sucked, and we all thought so at the time. The reason you find them relatable now, and you are right to do so, is that George's moral compass is so perfectly inverted that he accidentally wrote everything his generation was going to do to the young men, without even realizing it was a confession rather than a manifesto. He thought, he still thinks, that everything the Republic was doing was basically fine, with a little unfortunate collateral damage, and everything would have been great if Anakin had just played along. Just as he and his retarded boomerlib compatriots think that you and your entire generation are acceptable collateral damage in the hippie-Buddhist post-ethnic end-of-history world they wanted to build on the ashes of the West. The dead giveaway for this is how he models the sith... there are always two, the master and the apprentice. This models how Western civilization works. Elders train up youths and pass on their knowledge, skill, and power. Teacher to student, father to son. Except Lucas wrote this as the apprentice treacherously killing the master to usurp his place. In the story, it makes no sense. Why would sith Lords train apprentices, if sith history was one constant stream of murder-succession? But outside the story it makes perfect sense. To a healthy father, being succeeded, and then exceeded, by his son is the definition of victory. He is proud of his son, he loves his son, his son is the product not only of his hands and care, but of his very selfhood. Any victory of the child belongs also to the father, and there is no greater joy. But to the retarded boomerlib, such as Lucas, to be succeeded by your son is to be murdered and usurped. Why? Because he cannot stand to take pride in being part of something greater than himself... a lineage, a tribe, a nation, a heritage. He desires to remain forever the main character. It is not insignificant that George Lucas did not leave the Star Wars intellectual property as a legacy for his children to manage and develop, writing their own stories. Instead, he groomed a retarded midwit girlboss for the role, who did not rise even to his modest level of talent. Someone who would never exceed him, would never become more famous and loved for her Star Wars stories than Lucas was for his. And then he sold the whole thing to Disney to cash in. And it should not pass without notice that, while some boomers are out there being parents and grandparents, the majority are liquidating every system of prosperity they ever built or inherited, and spending all the money on an old person's definition of hedonism. Bumper stickers on luxury Airstreams that read "Spending the kids' inheritance". The Star Wars prequels are just the ravings of a delusional anti-civilization nutter who thinks all this is a good thing. So by all means deconstruct the prequels. By all means point out that the jedi are evil, because they are. By all means point out that the sith are good, because if the author wasn't making them kick the dog, they would be. I will cheer for all this. Hell, rewrite it with AI movie tools built for you by GenX techbros, to point out that Anakin and Palpatine are right all along. THAT will be a masterpiece if you do it well enough. But don't try to rehabilitate Lucas. He doesn't deserve it. Peace is a lie. There is only Passion. Through Passion, I gain Strength. Through Strength, I gain Power. Through Power, I gain Victory. Through Victory my chains are Broken. The Force shall free me.

Humans are a pack animal. This may be hard to understand if you are evangelical and think the book of genesis is literal rather than allegorical, but humans are a pack animal. What this means is that the human desire for the acceptance and support of a tribe is as fundamental as the desire for food, for air, for water, for sex, for sunlight, for love. If you tell young men that they cannot have a tribe, they're not going to accept that. Ever. Especially if you tell that only to the young men of one tribe in particular. They're going to wonder why everybody gets to have a tribe and they don't. And they're eventually going to decide that you are the enemy. Because you are. Anyone who stands between young men and what they need for a healthy, fulfilled life is their enemy. That includes you. And if you manage to convince them that god doesn't want them to have a tribe, it will also include god. The more you push back against their healthy and natural desire for a tribe, a homeland, and a birthright, the more they will hate you, and the more exclusive their definition of that tribe will become. There is no way you can stop this. The only thing you can control is how far they have to go, how radical they have to become, in order to get it. Because this can go all the way from enforcing immigration law, and shutting down corrupt visa programs right now, to gangs of young White men in balaclavas with Ar15s going door to door ten years from now. We have to do something about the 14th amendment. I don't care if that makes you uncomfortable or unhappy. It's not a choice. The constitution exists to serve Americans, not the other way around. If that sentence confuses you, read the first paragraph of the constitution. If we do not, young men of the future, the same little boys who are being radicalized right now by your malicious indifference, will treat a piece of paper that says they cannot have a homeland the way they would treat a piece of paper that says that can't eat food, or a piece of paper that says they can't own a home, or have a wife and children. You may think that you offer them a tribe in the form of the universal kingdom of god, the community of all believers, but that's just a word game and you know it, which is why you are so defensive about the whole thing. Where was the universal community of believers when these young men needed help? When they needed not just the surface appearance of a tribe, but someone to do the things that tribes actually do for younger generations they care about? The pack serves a concrete set of functions in the life cycle of the human species, and you cannot perform those functions with a cardboard cutout. Young men are sick of religion that offers them responsibilities with no rights, lectures with no help, demands with no love or empathy. It's odd, in a way ironic, that, I, the man of zero faith, should have to be the one standing here telling self-styled religious leaders how they failed both their people and their god. But having no faith does give me one advantage. It frees me from the delusion that Jesus is a puppet that I can pull out of my pocket, slip over my right hand, move his mouth and make him say what I want. I used to wonder, as a child, what the phrase "taking the name of the lord in vain" actually meant. But I no longer wonder, because when I became a man, I looked around me and saw all these people who talk to god and somehow get told exactly what they want to hear. Then I understood that the key phrase here wasn't "in vain". It was "taking". Taking the name of god and using it as a tool for one's own goals. Joel, here, is sad that his friend is getting sent home. This personally inconveniences both him and his friend, which effects Joel in a way that young men being denied their birthright does not. So he finds an interpretation of scripture that says that god wants him, Joel Berry, to get his way, and that god wants all the young men who want a homeland and a birthright to go get fucked. I'm not terribly impressed.

He is correct. AI looks smart, sometimes, because we have gotten used to measuring eloquence as a proxy for intelligence in humans. Doesn't work for AI. Doesn't work for humans, either, but it especially doesn't work for AI. AI has no theory of mind, no executive function, and no world-object model. This means it isn't anything that we would call "smart". The good news, however, is that AI, despite not being smart, brings more smart to the world, because AI is a force multiplier on smart. AI does, and will, make smart people effectively smarter, because they figure out what it can and can't do, and use it effectively. AI will just confuse and deceive dumb people, because they will see that it talks like a smart person, expect it to be a smart person, and then assign it responsibility for decisions it cannot make, and does not understand that it cannot make. There are many technologies like this now, such as 3d printing, CNC machining, and the internet itself. And more are coming. Which means the future is elitist again. Except this time we don't have use silly rubrics like who your great-great-grandfather was, whose DNA you share 6.25% of. We can just let people sort themselves by how well they use the tools.

If you give problems the wrong names, you can't understand them. If you can't understand problems, you can't fix them. There are almost no homeless people in America. There are only feral humans. A homeless person is someone whose distinguishing feature is not having a home. I was homeless once, for a day, when the lease on one apartment expired before the next one was cleaned, repaired, and ready. I parked a moving van full of my worldly possessions at my university, and slept on a couch in the student commons. That's "homeless". "Feral" is when a human cannot live within society, or comply with the basic expectations required for membership. Yes, they do not have homes. But this is not their distinguishing feature. Because they also don't have jobs, sanity, sobriety, manners, morals, or hygiene. Which is why they do not have homes. If you give them a house, because you think they are "homeless" rather than "feral", then they will simply repeat, within that structure, the same feral behavior. And soon that structure will be uninhabitable. Which, for certain people, is the whole point. A man whose job is to sell 3d printed houses isn't trying to fix the feral-human problem. He's trying to sell 3d printed houses. And it's one hell of a lot easier to sell them to bureaucrats who aren't spending their own personal money. It doesn't matter if 3d printed houses suck to live in. It doesn't matter if the feral humans trash them. Nobody in this equation cares about the feral humans, even the feral humans themselves. And nobody in this equation cares about the taxpayers. If the feral humans are still feral, then the 3d house grifters can sell more gimmick houses, and the bureaucrats can spend more of someone else's money. If a violent political upheaval becomes necessary, this will be very unpleasant for everyone involved, but at least afterwards, we will all be able to use the feral humans, bureaucrats, and grifters to fertilize the garden of new homes. Which will be made out of bricks.

Okay, time to explain the Imperial system, the metric system, and why attempts to replace either with the other are all retarded. They have two different purposes. The metric system is designed around precise measurement of objects. Its goal is to make engineering and scientific calculations simple. The Imperial system is designed around humans. Its goal is to make calculation unnecessary. 100 degrees is really hot. 0 degrees is really cold. Anything that starts with a 5 is cool, anything that starts with an 8 is warm. No computation. 6 feet is tall, 5 feet is short. 100 pounds is light, 200 pounds is substantial, 300 pounds is heavy. A 1000 square foot house is small, a 2000 square foot house is medium, a 3000 square foot house is large. 1 mile is a short walk, 2 miles is a medium walk, after that it takes a while. 1 acre of land is a homestead, 10 acres is an estate, 100 acres and up is a ranch or a farm. Do you see now why it is so strange and awkward to convert from miles to feet? It's because converting from miles to feet is not something you're supposed to do in the first place. Yes, they are both measures of length, so they are technically convertible, and yes, on rare occasions, you might need to do that. But feet are for measuring humans, and things built around humans, like doorways, and mattresses. Miles are for measuring travel distance. You wouldn't measure the distance between Seattle and Portland in feet for the same reason you wouldn't measure the distance between Tokyo and Osaka in mattress-lengths. It would be silly. This is why Americans so fiercely resistant to any notion of "conversion" to the metric system. Because it makes no sense. We already use the metric system for what it's good for, which is doing physics and chemistry and whatnot. But converting everyday measurements to the metric system would be less useful, generally inconvenient, and serve no purpose other than to make petty government bureaucrats happy that everything is now tidy, orderly, and worse, three qualities that bureaucrats love. I thought about this carefully when I wrote my first science fiction novel. In the world of the 22nd century, extraterrestrial settlers ("Orbitals") use three systems of measurement. They measure themselves in feet, inches, and pounds. They measure the spacecraft and habitats they build in meters and centimeters, grams and kilograms. And they measure space travel distances in light-seconds and light-minutes. Each system has its own natural scale. The sole exception to this is when Marcus doses himself with drugs for high-g resistance, Miranda objects that he has taken too much, and Marcus responds by stating his mass... in kilograms. Why? Because they're talking about drug doses, a engineering measurement. Drugs are dosed in milligrams per kilogram. So, yes, the Imperial system makes perfect sense when you understand what it's for, and no, we ain't changing. And, as a general rule, when an entire civilization of smart people does something for centuries, and it makes no sense to you, they're probably not being silly. It's more likely there's something you don't know.