This is why we have this seemingly schizophrenic messaging from the mainstream media: the world is falling apart, the enemies are at the gates, and the only acceptable solution is to vote for one of the same two parties that has been running the same show for generations.
Your patterns of thinking and feeling are what get you to spend money, associate with certain groups of people, vote for political candidates, and make decisions about when and how you use violence.
It’s critical that you wield your emotions, and that they don’t wield you.
In the age of the “information bomb”, humans must increasingly exercise discipline over their limbic responses. Media literacy means recognizing that you are ownable through emotional responses.
We should be truly thankful that the pioneers of the internet fought to make it an OPEN internet—and we must continue that fight.
The paradox of human relating is that relating with care is both draining AND energizing.
It’s draining because giving anyone your full attention, and holding space for others, requires real mental and emotional resources.
The most valuable thing about life—the single greatest determinant of happiness—is human relationships.
But being good at relating is a skill. It doesn’t come for free. It requires insight and practice.
People who substitute the illusion of principle for actual principle long enough may eventually feel threatened when they encounter the real thing.
Even worse, though, are the cynics who no longer believe it’s even possible to be principled.
The principle of popular sovereignty is the foundation for our constitutional republic.
The U.S. Constitution begins with the words "We the People." Not "We the Federal Government", or "We the Supreme Court", or "We the States", or any other precision of that phrase.
The People rule. This is not an Article of the Constitution--it is a principle that precedes and gives legitimacy to every Article of the Constitution. The Constitution has no bearing without it.
Many today have no memory of how long it took the internet to become a viable commercial platform.
#bitcoin will platform the next generation of commerce—it will just take longer than those with high time-preference would like.
It’s impossible to “fight an ideology”. (At least, in any way that actually diminishes the power of that ideology.)
It is possible to build something that offers people a greater purpose—that is more worthy of their lives—and invite them to join in.
Just showing up every day to make incremental progress toward a big goal creates magical-seeming momentum ✨
People tend to take communication for granted (assume it comes for free), but it’s the hardest part of every job.
Communicating well is a hard skill.
A self-governing, autonomous community is one where people respect one another and work to persuade others of their point of view, recognizing that they won't always be successful in that.
Without this moral core, no form of government can be truly representative.
Both the political and expert classes are suffering from a crisis of imagination, which also becomes a crisis of purpose.
The promise of monetary neutrality and facilitation of exchange articulated by Buchanan ⬇️ is delivered by the #Bitcoin network. - Buchanan's "Economists Have No Clothes", published in 2009-
As fiat payment networks become more advanced, it is bitcoin's "global bill of rights" that differentiates it from other instantaneous, cheap modes of transacting and storing money.
You can’t trust power.
Power will lie to you up until the very last second.
Then it will pretend that what it was lying about was always inevitable and transparently disclosed.
This is why none of the “assurances” by governments that a CBDC won’t be launched can be trusted.
Once the state has the ability to see something, it will routinize seeing it, no matter what the law may be. The three-letter agencies have not, in practice, required warrants to surveil private domestic comms for decades.
Privacy builders understand that the fact that criminal acts sometimes occur in private settings does not justify removing privacy permanently, for everyone. And that is exactly what the anti-privacy absolutists would do.
Rights are fundamental, not contingent on good behavior.
