It has been a tragic avalanche of violence unfolding. Yet if we point to the start of the avalanche many will say; but what about further down?
I acknowledge the rights of jews and palestinians to live safe from harm, and this probably requires two separate regions and jurisdictions.
The U.N. partitioning of land after WW2 caused deep enmities that are hard to solve. In Turkey, the Kurds ended up without a Kurdistan, which would have included small parts of Iran, Iraq and Syria, iirc.
Historically Judea was renamed Palestine under the Roman occupation. For some reason the left have insisted that the people who lived in Judea before the Roman occupation are new occupants. I acknowledge that the history is complex, but the Hamas sloganeering that jews should be removed from the river to the sea is deeply troubling. That's not an acceptable outcome.
Allen Farrington:
"when you go from the UK to the US and you sell your pounds for dollars, you aren’t “speculating”, you’re just pretty sure the people there are gonna prefer them in exchange for stuff.
bitcoin is like that except when you are going to the future."
Not bad as a starting point. The tattoo artist can likely adapt them to a good tattoo based on the references.
Agreed. Yet I often hear people throw around the term 'statist', but it doesn't form an argument by itself.
I don't have a problem with individuals voluntarily forming a state. If I respect their voluntary statehood, then that would be enough to make me a 'statist'. I.e. respect for voluntarism becomes statism.
Being practical, I think the idea of complete anarchy is interesting and deserving to be tested, but I can't assume that it will work before the code is run and evaluated, so to speak.
If we have a plethora of small jurisdictions competing for capital, entrepreneurs, skills and workers, that would be a perfectly fine voluntarist solution, even though it qualifies as 'statist'.
I meant to write 'opinion- and behavior engineering', to be more precise.
I'm sure we will see subscription models on Nostr if we don't already have that, paid in sats of course.
The problem is getting the traffic to Nostr to make zaps + subscriptions matter. I'm sure we will get there eventually.
Twitter/X will likely evolve into a social credit system in the coming years, since an 'everything app' is a giant honeypot for government opinion-engineering.
Absolutely. I was discussing this topic on another platform and for me the most compelling angle is the liberty dimension.
#Bitcoin is an investment in liberty.
That's the only investment we truly need.
A few reasons why Bitcoin is not an investment.
Bitcoin represents a gradual replacement of the catastrophic fiat money monopoly, based on inflation (expansion of the money supply).
Buying Bitcoin is a vote for neutral money that can't be printed, corrupted or confiscated.
Bitcoin is the 'sly roundabout way' by which property rights can be secured in the 21st century, without relying on or trusting a State, corporation or third party.
It represents individuals owning the fruits of their labor, in contrast to owning government-issued coupons that can be frozen and confiscated at any time. This is particularly true in light of Fiat 2.0: CBDC's.
As hard money outcompetes inflationary money over time, and as millions of people align with property rights for all on an open, decentralized network, we both avoid the emergence of a 1984 society, are able to decentralize power and in addition benefit from the network effect of replacing corrupt money.
The long term network effect of replacing corrupt money is prosperity and higher spending power of each unit of money.
Liberty and property rights for all just happens to lead to prosperity. Freedom is more profitable than slavery.
Hence, investing in liberty is the real investment.
If anarchy involves voluntarism, and voluntarism allows free association, it seems to me that free association leads to at least small jurisdictions due to competitive benefits. Minarchism therefore seems as a more likely goal to move toward.
1. Individuals form families
2. Individuals form communities
3. Individuals congregate into towns or cities
The anarchist term 'statist' simply denounces the voluntary congregation of individuals into a jurisdiction.
Personally I believe in small, competing jurisdictions, between the size of a town, upward to the size of a municipality or county.
We can never solve deep divides such as the matter of abortions. The only possible outcome that I see is having competing jurisdictions either allowing or disallowing abortion, while adults vote with their feet.
In terms of practical matters of defense, that's a more complex dimension since it involves future uncertainty, which will differ from geographical regions.
Revenge of the Sith I meant, I have recently quit coffee. 😄
Interesting, I wasn't aware.
Luke was also initially named Starkiller, iirc.
I wrote an analysis of Return of the Sith and the corruption path of Anakin, if anyone is interested:
Bitcoin makes everything feel better.
I stopped with coffee recently, had cut it down to half a cup before. It feels as if I wake up more rested now, as many coffee quitters have reported, though it's too early to tell.
Can be tough. Where I lived close to the sea in Norway, many apartments available for a reasonable rent had mould, even some expensive ones. Have had my share of bad apartments over the years. On the positive side, more sats saved.
I'd like to follow Stella Assange, do we have any confirmation that the account belongs to her?
Alignment to reality trumps intelligence.
The practical results of not aligning with reality is always detrimental over time.
This is one of the reasons why we say that Bitcoin is for everyone. Aligning with reality is not the exclusive privilege of the theoretical class or the pedestal-born.
Reality is the compass.
To be fully to the point, this statement is not about favoring any political viewpoint.
I respect sovereign individuals to form their own conclusions. Our conclusions are tested over time by reality.
It is not up to us to be arbiters of truth;
reality is the final arbiter.
At the end of the day, even a cat or a dog can be more reality-aligned than a prestigious academic. A child with a modest IQ can reject imaginary genders as evidently false while a professor with a genious IQ can fall into a theoretical trap for decades, or even longer. The pivotal point is the reality alignment, not the IQ.
The intersection between theory and hard reality is engineering, with truth as its sole guide. Bitcoin therefore appeals to both the theoretical and the practical mind, where theory and real world results overlap in a natural flow of truth.