The quote by John Adams, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other," carries profound meaning and holds great importance in understanding the foundation of our republic. Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was expressing his belief that the successful functioning of the Constitution relies on the virtuous and ethical nature of the people it governs. In a straightforward interpretation, Adams is highlighting the necessity for a moral compass and religious principles in the individuals who govern and are governed. He suggests that a constitution alone, no matter how well-crafted, cannot secure the stability and prosperity of a nation without the active participation of virtuous citizens.
What happens when the state encourages the breaking of social contracts? The one I am thinking about is our relationship to work and sickness before Covid and now after.
Before COVID, if you got sick, you only stayed out of work until you were well enough to work again. An exception to this was "taking a sick day" to blow everything off and enjoy a day.
Then Covid came along, and now people would have to stay out of work until they were well again. Not "well enough" but well.
During the height of Covid, even being in contact with someone who had Covid, would get you put in quarantine just for that association. So an enterprising person could simply figure a way to come in contact with as many sick people as possible and ride the quarantine merry-go-round.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury."
"the taker gets free housing and food and the builder gets taxes at the point of a gun." This is not an accident of well-meaning policy makers. It is their strategy, meant to break the chain of social trust (reciprocity as gato sees it) and infuse a slow acting corrosive meant to cause structural disintegration. This is how new players wipe the field of the old ones. Oligarchic football in a phrase.
Not exactly. Instead of seeking to leverage changes to existing policy (reform), they’re seeking to substitute the old system under which policies are formed with a new system (revolution) that leads to new money flows that benefit them.
There is only one worldview that combines reciprocity and empathy in the way that EGM is describing- whether you call it that or not it is Christianity. It is the moral code that is written on our hearts by God. Richard Dawkins, atheist, has admitted that Christian ethics/morality lead to a better society as he faces the demise of UK society at the hands of secularists and Islamists. He blames Islam only, but his fellow material secularists started the slide down the slippery slope.
The core principle of Christianity that applies in high trust societies is the reality that each individual understands this - God sees.
God sees what each is doing publicly and privately and - most importantly- that the individual will be held accountable by God Himself.
Humanity needs the knowledge that accountability is coming to each individual in order to restrain itself from doing evil. This is why it can be said that inherently, humanity is not good but rather has a predisposition to do evil. Humans certainly make the effort to remind themselves to do: Right, Be Just in their dealings with others.
For what it's worth, some of us non-Christians (hell, even the entirely unreligious) do manage to come to these same principles, even *without* religion. It doesn't matter whether or not there is a god watching my actions. *I* am watching my actions.
As I said above, whether you believe or not you were created by Him and he wrote his laws on your heart. Some have hardened hearts and don’t care. Some live according to the moral code imprinted on their hearts, yet don’t give credit where credit it due. I pray that some day all will acknowledge Him. There is more than enough evidence- many deny because they don’t want to submit to anyone else including God.
There isn't. There really, really isn't. Not in the sense that the scientific agnostic mean the term. If there *was*, we'd already be capable of belief. I wish there was. I **absolutely** wish there was. It's not as though I'm blind to the solace that the faithful receive from faith. I'm simply incapable of having the faith itself.
That is because the society you live in developed the mindset / blueprint for society based on religious principles. The other principle that keeps people on the straight and narrow is self preservation for fear of what others would do to you if you step out of line: cheat, steal, rob, rape, or murder. More primitive societies including 3rd world ones do not have the ability to set up rehabilitation centers and prisons. It is more expedient to administer instant justice. Kill you, cut off the hand of a thief, exile you out of the community. Oh, did I mention kill you?
I have never denied -- and in fact have on numerous occasions actively advocated among my fellow areligious libertarians for the position -- that it was Christian philosophy that led to the Enlightenment, and our current society. My point is primarily to make it clear that not *all* of the areligious need to be treated as enemies. Some of us share your values, even if we don't share your foundation for them. Take the allies where you can find them.
You have not been treated as enemies according to the core principles of Christianity. It's what allows you to live in a civilized society where those core principle have been applied to a code of behavior and rule of law.
Endless numbers of my (idiotic) fellow Canadians cannot grasp how the USA system of govt has far more checks and balances than ours.
Our government is even more dependent on people of good morals as proven by the inability to rid ourselves of Trudeau no matter how bad he was. The only thing that got rid of him was his own caucus seeing he was going to finally cost them power and out he goes.
Adams was right. The Ruling Elite, such as Adams, do need a religious people since religion preaches self-sacrifice and a populous convinced that self-sacrifice is a virtue will be far easier to extract wealth and obedience from. It is not a coincidence that the symbol of America's major religion is a nailed-up body. The people have allowed themselves to be nailed up by means of the extortion racket of taxation, the counterfeiting racket of Monetary Policy, the brain-washing racket of government education, and many other rackets designed to rob them of their liberty and property by the gang of parasites called "representatives".
The constitution is nothing more than a floor plan for setting up a parasitic class of rulers who then tell the major lie that this is "self-government", because the people are allowed to choose among a limited list of parasites, all of whom want power over them and all of whom work to erode liberty and property-rights while claiming that "In God we Trust". They actually trust only in government gun-slingers. True self-rule is called Democracy and is dismissed as 'mob-rule' by the mob of parasites that rules us now.
Read 'The Nature Of Evil - Centuries of Parasitic Philosophy' Available on Amazon
You are applying to Christianity what is attributable to a cynical atheistic and malignant growth of parasites that currently inhabit our major institutions, including government and government schools. These are outgrowths of the last century, not ideals promoted by the founders of this country.
Your comments are thoughtful and caring, thank you. I have a number of atheists in my close circle of friends and family. On their good days, they're just my more intellectually lazier loved ones, but on most days, they're mostly just annoying mid-wits trying to appear smarter than me, but I love them anyway. :)
I have many friends and family that are religious. On their good days, they are condescending, but on most days they are liars. Faith is lying. And they think it is a virtue.
The current system is also an utter failure that has resulted in chaotic tyranny. The ideology that works has never been tried. It is called Constitutional Direct Democracy. It is a system in which those subject to the law are the law makers, not a mob of parasitic legislators. It is a system of rules instead of a gang of elite rulers.
The first constitutional rule must be that all rules apply equally to all citizens. There must never be any legal elite ("representatives").
Read 'The Nature Of Evil - Centuries of Parasitic Philosophy' Available on Amazon
The founders did indeed promote representation (themselves in power) and dismissed Democracy as Mob Rule. So we have Mob Rule by a mob of by a mob of parasitic representatives.
They in fact did the opposite. They limited their own power, created a series of checks & balances, and George Washington himself turned down the opportunity to become a king when he was wildly popular and would have been supported in that role. It was in fact a mob of parasitic people who made changes to the Constitution that allowed major mob rule via the tax code, the federal reserve, government "schooling" and the 19th Amendment. It served no one except the parasites to separate voting from responsibility and have every malleable woman and an increasing variety of incompetent retards voting. From there we got NGOs, the welfare state, an increasingly open border and massive levels of fraud. That's just a brief summary of how we got here, none of it having anything to do with the founders.
And in that slow and steady, but rapidly building entropic cycle, universal suffrage and empathetic women at more and more levers of power. In-group, out-group preferences and most importantly, our citizenry being socially engineered to cheer on their own demise. Welcome the newcomers! Social engineering was the Trojan horse entering the minds of Americans — operating system successfully installed.
Pithiest and broadest comment here today. Kudos. The Founders would have turned over in their graves (without yet being dead) at the idea of universal suffrage -- controlling how things work and whose money you can extort because you (possibly) breathe would have been incomprehensible to them.
I was on the main business street of a small town today where I serve as a secretary of the business association. I was trying to bring a conversation with a boutique owner to an end, when she launched into a tirade that ICE was parking at City Hall, detaining people, etc. This person emigrated legally from Ukraine twenty + years ago but she was incensed. I walked away trying to construct a response. Close to 65% of this small Georgia town is Hispanic. How can the town, the county, the state and the nation sustain ourselves if we have to “care” for people who didn’t follow the law?
The business association is engaged in protesting City Hall because they don’t want their taxes raised. It occurs to me that it costs the town when its police have to bust gangs involved in international drug trafficking inside city limits. There has been a couple really spectacular cases in the last few years.
I sure do dislike where we are on both your circular cycle and that of the "4th Turning" theory, (which are basically the same), but I am encouraged by my 20-YO son and his cohorts, as the ones I know are very anti-'The Man" because they had their high school years wrecked by COVID tyranny.
Let's hope they have the mettle it's going to take to get out the other side intact....
If you simply must use a person's printed visage on paper for target practice, I'm offering photo files of Keir Starmer at a very reasonable price point.
We have the stomach and we have been trying. We can't vote these folks out of DC due to big monied interests. They broke the Golden Rule....not us (We the People) .
I'll believe "we have been trying" when I see bodies in the street by the score. That's the part we don't have the stomach for, but it really would solve a lot of problems
Im not sure who created that airplane graphic, but they're a genius.
I agree with your 2 main points, but acting on either requires enough self-worth to actually enforce a boundary or extend generosity without "resentment".
I sorta feel like we're at the point where predation isn't beaten by better reciprocity tactics, it's beaten by lowering the cost of leaving.
In my mind the question is what lowers the exit cost?
I recognized that graphic and asked Grok to explain:
Survivorship bias in the WWII bomber armor study is a classic example of how incomplete data can lead to misleading conclusions. The U.S. military (often associated with the Army Air Forces) examined damage on bombers that returned from missions over Germany, but statistician Abraham Wald highlighted the flaw in their initial approach. 
How the Study Worked
During WWII, Allied bombers (such as B-17s and B-24s) suffered heavy losses from German anti-aircraft fire and fighters on missions over Europe. To improve survivability without adding too much weight (which would reduce range, payload, or performance), analysts collected data on returning aircraft:
• They inspected planes that made it back to Britain and mapped bullet holes and damage locations (e.g., on wings, fuselage, tail, engines).
• A common finding was that certain areas, like the fuselage and wings, showed many more hits than others (such as engines or cockpits).
• The initial, intuitive recommendation was to add armor to the areas with the most observed damage—the “heavily hit” parts—since those seemed most vulnerable. 
This data was visualized in diagrams (the famous “bullet hole” plane illustrations you often see today are modern representations of the concept). 
The Survivorship Bias Problem
The key insight came from Abraham Wald (a mathematician in the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University). He realized the data only came from survivors—planes that were damaged but still able to fly home. Planes hit in critical areas (e.g., engines, which could cause catastrophic failure, or cockpits affecting the crew) were far less likely to return, so those weren’t in the dataset. 
In other words:
• Observed damage (many holes in wings/fuselage) indicated areas where the plane could take hits and still survive → These areas were less vulnerable and didn’t need as much extra armor.
• Missing damage (few or no holes in engines, etc., on returning planes) indicated critical vulnerabilities → Hits there were often fatal, so those planes didn’t return to be studied. Armor should be prioritized there. 
Wald assumed enemy hits were roughly randomly distributed across the plane. The uneven pattern on survivors revealed relative vulnerabilities, not absolute hit frequencies. His mathematical work provided methods to estimate true vulnerability from survivor data. 
Outcome and Impact
Wald’s analysis led to reinforcing critical areas like engines and other “low-damage” spots on returning planes. This counterintuitive approach helped reduce losses and saved lives (and was applied in later conflicts like Korea and Vietnam). 
The story is a powerful lesson in statistics and decision-making: always consider what data is missing and why, not just what’s visible. The famous diagrams illustrate this perfectly, even if some popularized versions are stylized. Wald’s original reports were more mathematical and not heavily illustrated at the time. 
This remains one of the best-known real-world examples of survivorship bias (a type of selection bias) and why rigorous analysis is essential.
> In my mind the question is what lowers the exit cost?
End welfare. Admittedly, this isn't "lowering the cost of leaving" so much as "increasing the cost of staying", but the two seem at least moderately interchangeable.
Not sure how we right the ship when an entire political party is dependent on giving more free stuff to its constituents and despite the unprecedented transfer payments, they are loudly clamoring for more.
Seattle, Washington is a great example of an area heading to the lower left and what happens when the providers have a way out. Over the past several years tens of thousands of high paying jobs have left the City, companies like Starbucks, Fisher Investments, Amazon, Boeing and the like are leaving or have already left taking those high paying jobs with them. The result is a gutted city with a high rise office building vacancy rate in the mid thirties and climbing fast as all the good restaurants and retail businesses can’t survive under the current situation. The “cuz reasons” in this case is the insatiable appetite of the homeless industrial complex to absorb evermore public funds to solve the drug addiction problem AKA “the homeless”. All this has left the City with a half billion dollar budget shortfall over the next three years the prosed solution to which is to tax the producers even more. One insane tax proposal is to hit the empty building owners with a “vacancy tax”. The rationale being that this willincentivize lower rents and fill the buildings with businesses who have decided they no longer wish to be there. Fixing the “drug problem” driving all this would be trampling on the “it’s my body” rights of those who have turned to drugs following the trauma of losing their homes.
Want to learn more? Watch the video “Seattle is dying” available on YouTube. This was produced five years ago by a local television station that saw the future.
Don't leave out "Sound" Transit. Billions of useful dollars for a useless choo-choo , basically to appease the area's vanity. "Other important cities have rail transit" is not a justification for this boondoggle. It is actually less than worthless as it uses up corridors that could/used to support cars and buses and blocks roads at street-level crossings. An apt metaphor for socialism.
The normals versus the abnormals. Good versus evil, no room for equivocation. Humans with no sense of reciprocity or empathy are abnormals, antithetical to a successful functioning society. They represent in a large majority the leftist cult theology of Marxism > Communism devoid of functional human normalcy. This won’t end well for these dysfunctional humans. It never does.
Are you sure the abnormals are not the norm? It seems the golden rule with golden era is the rarity. The vast majority of history and of humanity has been brutal. There has only been one America; the recipe is known and understood but has not been emulated by anyone. A high trust high functioning society is very difficult to build. Maybe impossible in the current era. The big question is; can ee course correct? Time will tell.
Hillel's Golden Rule comes with thousands and thousands of pages of commentary delineating and enforcing right behavior. Every moment and interaction of every day was explicitly set out because people were not trusted to act rightly without the heavy hand of God on their heads.
The quote by John Adams, "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other," carries profound meaning and holds great importance in understanding the foundation of our republic. Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, was expressing his belief that the successful functioning of the Constitution relies on the virtuous and ethical nature of the people it governs. In a straightforward interpretation, Adams is highlighting the necessity for a moral compass and religious principles in the individuals who govern and are governed. He suggests that a constitution alone, no matter how well-crafted, cannot secure the stability and prosperity of a nation without the active participation of virtuous citizens.
a social contract is not a piece of paper, it is a people.
It is a people that recognize every time you honor an unwritten contract, you strengthen it in thr very same moment.
Once a critical mass starts breaking the rule, the rule no longer exists.
And here we are...
What happens when the state encourages the breaking of social contracts? The one I am thinking about is our relationship to work and sickness before Covid and now after.
Before COVID, if you got sick, you only stayed out of work until you were well enough to work again. An exception to this was "taking a sick day" to blow everything off and enjoy a day.
Then Covid came along, and now people would have to stay out of work until they were well again. Not "well enough" but well.
During the height of Covid, even being in contact with someone who had Covid, would get you put in quarantine just for that association. So an enterprising person could simply figure a way to come in contact with as many sick people as possible and ride the quarantine merry-go-round.
that's always the failure loop. the state discovers that taking $1000 from one and giving $100 to 10 buys votes and power.
this is why "redistribution" is incompatible with a just state. the box says "empathy" on the outside but it's always "tyranny" on the inside.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury."
Im stealing your last sentence. Perfect
Very good point. All I can say is the c19 fiasco was a global Reichstag Fire
I'm waiting for the Night of the Long Knives.
Delayed maladies from the jabs?
Ha!
Pear Harbor
"the taker gets free housing and food and the builder gets taxes at the point of a gun." This is not an accident of well-meaning policy makers. It is their strategy, meant to break the chain of social trust (reciprocity as gato sees it) and infuse a slow acting corrosive meant to cause structural disintegration. This is how new players wipe the field of the old ones. Oligarchic football in a phrase.
Cloward-Piven
Not exactly. Instead of seeking to leverage changes to existing policy (reform), they’re seeking to substitute the old system under which policies are formed with a new system (revolution) that leads to new money flows that benefit them.
Can't disagree with that
And worse yet, for 50 years or so we’ve been purposefully bringing those who have no interest in our social contract t into our country.
Join me in a hearty laff once known as the "Speed Limit." Is Everyman a Seagull, these days?
Damn.
That's what ... Thirteen words? Thirteen words that sum up our current global situation better than 99% of the drivel out there.
Talk about pithy.
There is only one worldview that combines reciprocity and empathy in the way that EGM is describing- whether you call it that or not it is Christianity. It is the moral code that is written on our hearts by God. Richard Dawkins, atheist, has admitted that Christian ethics/morality lead to a better society as he faces the demise of UK society at the hands of secularists and Islamists. He blames Islam only, but his fellow material secularists started the slide down the slippery slope.
The core principle of Christianity that applies in high trust societies is the reality that each individual understands this - God sees.
God sees what each is doing publicly and privately and - most importantly- that the individual will be held accountable by God Himself.
Humanity needs the knowledge that accountability is coming to each individual in order to restrain itself from doing evil. This is why it can be said that inherently, humanity is not good but rather has a predisposition to do evil. Humans certainly make the effort to remind themselves to do: Right, Be Just in their dealings with others.
For what it's worth, some of us non-Christians (hell, even the entirely unreligious) do manage to come to these same principles, even *without* religion. It doesn't matter whether or not there is a god watching my actions. *I* am watching my actions.
As I said above, whether you believe or not you were created by Him and he wrote his laws on your heart. Some have hardened hearts and don’t care. Some live according to the moral code imprinted on their hearts, yet don’t give credit where credit it due. I pray that some day all will acknowledge Him. There is more than enough evidence- many deny because they don’t want to submit to anyone else including God.
> There is more than enough evidence
There isn't. There really, really isn't. Not in the sense that the scientific agnostic mean the term. If there *was*, we'd already be capable of belief. I wish there was. I **absolutely** wish there was. It's not as though I'm blind to the solace that the faithful receive from faith. I'm simply incapable of having the faith itself.
You already are capable of deep faith: belief that the scientific method sets the boundary for what is known.
It is a faith that denies both reason (unscientific) and mathematics (ditto: all those postulates!)
You can, but you will not: Non serviam.
Here's hoping you see Reason one day.
That is because the society you live in developed the mindset / blueprint for society based on religious principles. The other principle that keeps people on the straight and narrow is self preservation for fear of what others would do to you if you step out of line: cheat, steal, rob, rape, or murder. More primitive societies including 3rd world ones do not have the ability to set up rehabilitation centers and prisons. It is more expedient to administer instant justice. Kill you, cut off the hand of a thief, exile you out of the community. Oh, did I mention kill you?
I have never denied -- and in fact have on numerous occasions actively advocated among my fellow areligious libertarians for the position -- that it was Christian philosophy that led to the Enlightenment, and our current society. My point is primarily to make it clear that not *all* of the areligious need to be treated as enemies. Some of us share your values, even if we don't share your foundation for them. Take the allies where you can find them.
You have not been treated as enemies according to the core principles of Christianity. It's what allows you to live in a civilized society where those core principle have been applied to a code of behavior and rule of law.
BOOM!
The fundamental flaw in John Lennon's song "Imagine". The song sounds beautiful but it would never work as he imagined. https://genius.com/John-lennon-imagine-lyrics
That song is pretty...and evil. It would be more accurate with lyrics like, "imagine all the killing, deprivation too.."
Endless numbers of my (idiotic) fellow Canadians cannot grasp how the USA system of govt has far more checks and balances than ours.
Our government is even more dependent on people of good morals as proven by the inability to rid ourselves of Trudeau no matter how bad he was. The only thing that got rid of him was his own caucus seeing he was going to finally cost them power and out he goes.
To be replaced by worse.
Adams was right. The Ruling Elite, such as Adams, do need a religious people since religion preaches self-sacrifice and a populous convinced that self-sacrifice is a virtue will be far easier to extract wealth and obedience from. It is not a coincidence that the symbol of America's major religion is a nailed-up body. The people have allowed themselves to be nailed up by means of the extortion racket of taxation, the counterfeiting racket of Monetary Policy, the brain-washing racket of government education, and many other rackets designed to rob them of their liberty and property by the gang of parasites called "representatives".
The constitution is nothing more than a floor plan for setting up a parasitic class of rulers who then tell the major lie that this is "self-government", because the people are allowed to choose among a limited list of parasites, all of whom want power over them and all of whom work to erode liberty and property-rights while claiming that "In God we Trust". They actually trust only in government gun-slingers. True self-rule is called Democracy and is dismissed as 'mob-rule' by the mob of parasites that rules us now.
Read 'The Nature Of Evil - Centuries of Parasitic Philosophy' Available on Amazon
You are applying to Christianity what is attributable to a cynical atheistic and malignant growth of parasites that currently inhabit our major institutions, including government and government schools. These are outgrowths of the last century, not ideals promoted by the founders of this country.
Your comments are thoughtful and caring, thank you. I have a number of atheists in my close circle of friends and family. On their good days, they're just my more intellectually lazier loved ones, but on most days, they're mostly just annoying mid-wits trying to appear smarter than me, but I love them anyway. :)
I have many friends and family that are religious. On their good days, they are condescending, but on most days they are liars. Faith is lying. And they think it is a virtue.
Bless you, John. And please trust me, no condescension here, just sincerity and hope.
There is no alternative though. Every other ideology has failed repeatedly throughout history.
The current system is also an utter failure that has resulted in chaotic tyranny. The ideology that works has never been tried. It is called Constitutional Direct Democracy. It is a system in which those subject to the law are the law makers, not a mob of parasitic legislators. It is a system of rules instead of a gang of elite rulers.
The first constitutional rule must be that all rules apply equally to all citizens. There must never be any legal elite ("representatives").
Read 'The Nature Of Evil - Centuries of Parasitic Philosophy' Available on Amazon
The founders did indeed promote representation (themselves in power) and dismissed Democracy as Mob Rule. So we have Mob Rule by a mob of by a mob of parasitic representatives.
They in fact did the opposite. They limited their own power, created a series of checks & balances, and George Washington himself turned down the opportunity to become a king when he was wildly popular and would have been supported in that role. It was in fact a mob of parasitic people who made changes to the Constitution that allowed major mob rule via the tax code, the federal reserve, government "schooling" and the 19th Amendment. It served no one except the parasites to separate voting from responsibility and have every malleable woman and an increasing variety of incompetent retards voting. From there we got NGOs, the welfare state, an increasingly open border and massive levels of fraud. That's just a brief summary of how we got here, none of it having anything to do with the founders.
"seagull armies of french fry filchery"
You're in fine form today, Gato.
It’s a great metaphor. They steal your stuff, then shit all over you!
And in that slow and steady, but rapidly building entropic cycle, universal suffrage and empathetic women at more and more levers of power. In-group, out-group preferences and most importantly, our citizenry being socially engineered to cheer on their own demise. Welcome the newcomers! Social engineering was the Trojan horse entering the minds of Americans — operating system successfully installed.
Pithiest and broadest comment here today. Kudos. The Founders would have turned over in their graves (without yet being dead) at the idea of universal suffrage -- controlling how things work and whose money you can extort because you (possibly) breathe would have been incomprehensible to them.
This Patrick agrees with that Patrick.
Patrick²
I was on the main business street of a small town today where I serve as a secretary of the business association. I was trying to bring a conversation with a boutique owner to an end, when she launched into a tirade that ICE was parking at City Hall, detaining people, etc. This person emigrated legally from Ukraine twenty + years ago but she was incensed. I walked away trying to construct a response. Close to 65% of this small Georgia town is Hispanic. How can the town, the county, the state and the nation sustain ourselves if we have to “care” for people who didn’t follow the law?
The business association is engaged in protesting City Hall because they don’t want their taxes raised. It occurs to me that it costs the town when its police have to bust gangs involved in international drug trafficking inside city limits. There has been a couple really spectacular cases in the last few years.
I sure do dislike where we are on both your circular cycle and that of the "4th Turning" theory, (which are basically the same), but I am encouraged by my 20-YO son and his cohorts, as the ones I know are very anti-'The Man" because they had their high school years wrecked by COVID tyranny.
Let's hope they have the mettle it's going to take to get out the other side intact....
If you simply must use a person's printed visage on paper for target practice, I'm offering photo files of Keir Starmer at a very reasonable price point.
Lolol
🎯
Every parent – well, every good parent – understands the empathy/reciprocity matrix. That's how civilized people are created.
Unfortunately, it's very hard to civilize an adult barbarian.
We already know what is destroying us. We just don't have the stomach to stop it
We have the stomach and we have been trying. We can't vote these folks out of DC due to big monied interests. They broke the Golden Rule....not us (We the People) .
I'll believe "we have been trying" when I see bodies in the street by the score. That's the part we don't have the stomach for, but it really would solve a lot of problems
Im not sure who created that airplane graphic, but they're a genius.
I agree with your 2 main points, but acting on either requires enough self-worth to actually enforce a boundary or extend generosity without "resentment".
I sorta feel like we're at the point where predation isn't beaten by better reciprocity tactics, it's beaten by lowering the cost of leaving.
In my mind the question is what lowers the exit cost?
I recognized that graphic and asked Grok to explain:
Survivorship bias in the WWII bomber armor study is a classic example of how incomplete data can lead to misleading conclusions. The U.S. military (often associated with the Army Air Forces) examined damage on bombers that returned from missions over Germany, but statistician Abraham Wald highlighted the flaw in their initial approach. 
How the Study Worked
During WWII, Allied bombers (such as B-17s and B-24s) suffered heavy losses from German anti-aircraft fire and fighters on missions over Europe. To improve survivability without adding too much weight (which would reduce range, payload, or performance), analysts collected data on returning aircraft:
• They inspected planes that made it back to Britain and mapped bullet holes and damage locations (e.g., on wings, fuselage, tail, engines).
• A common finding was that certain areas, like the fuselage and wings, showed many more hits than others (such as engines or cockpits).
• The initial, intuitive recommendation was to add armor to the areas with the most observed damage—the “heavily hit” parts—since those seemed most vulnerable. 
This data was visualized in diagrams (the famous “bullet hole” plane illustrations you often see today are modern representations of the concept). 
The Survivorship Bias Problem
The key insight came from Abraham Wald (a mathematician in the Statistical Research Group at Columbia University). He realized the data only came from survivors—planes that were damaged but still able to fly home. Planes hit in critical areas (e.g., engines, which could cause catastrophic failure, or cockpits affecting the crew) were far less likely to return, so those weren’t in the dataset. 
In other words:
• Observed damage (many holes in wings/fuselage) indicated areas where the plane could take hits and still survive → These areas were less vulnerable and didn’t need as much extra armor.
• Missing damage (few or no holes in engines, etc., on returning planes) indicated critical vulnerabilities → Hits there were often fatal, so those planes didn’t return to be studied. Armor should be prioritized there. 
Wald assumed enemy hits were roughly randomly distributed across the plane. The uneven pattern on survivors revealed relative vulnerabilities, not absolute hit frequencies. His mathematical work provided methods to estimate true vulnerability from survivor data. 
Outcome and Impact
Wald’s analysis led to reinforcing critical areas like engines and other “low-damage” spots on returning planes. This counterintuitive approach helped reduce losses and saved lives (and was applied in later conflicts like Korea and Vietnam). 
The story is a powerful lesson in statistics and decision-making: always consider what data is missing and why, not just what’s visible. The famous diagrams illustrate this perfectly, even if some popularized versions are stylized. Wald’s original reports were more mathematical and not heavily illustrated at the time. 
This remains one of the best-known real-world examples of survivorship bias (a type of selection bias) and why rigorous analysis is essential.
From a statistical ignoramus (and daughter of a WWII bomber pilot) thank you for this comment.
Fascinating, thank you!
Thank you- that's the best and most understandable explanation of that graphic I've seen to date.
> In my mind the question is what lowers the exit cost?
End welfare. Admittedly, this isn't "lowering the cost of leaving" so much as "increasing the cost of staying", but the two seem at least moderately interchangeable.
This is a very good point. They really have become 2 sides of the same coin
One answer: Choice = Free flights or prison. The cooperative may even have the plane land before dropping them off.
As much as it pains me to contemplate, you are likely correct.
sadly, yes.
Not sure how we right the ship when an entire political party is dependent on giving more free stuff to its constituents and despite the unprecedented transfer payments, they are loudly clamoring for more.
“one does not build with empathy. one builds such that one may one day be able to afford it.” Exactly. Empathy is a luxury which must be earned.
Romans had the Tarpeian Rock, millennia before choppers, and it worked for centuries, with greater fuel efficiency, just gravity.
They got gravity weapons spot-on
ground rush.
The point at which gravity meets the rest of the laws of physics.
Such as Fudd's 1st law of opposition: "If you push something hard enough, it will fall over."
It's true. Bodies bounce at certain velocities, and seldom land on their feet.
Seattle, Washington is a great example of an area heading to the lower left and what happens when the providers have a way out. Over the past several years tens of thousands of high paying jobs have left the City, companies like Starbucks, Fisher Investments, Amazon, Boeing and the like are leaving or have already left taking those high paying jobs with them. The result is a gutted city with a high rise office building vacancy rate in the mid thirties and climbing fast as all the good restaurants and retail businesses can’t survive under the current situation. The “cuz reasons” in this case is the insatiable appetite of the homeless industrial complex to absorb evermore public funds to solve the drug addiction problem AKA “the homeless”. All this has left the City with a half billion dollar budget shortfall over the next three years the prosed solution to which is to tax the producers even more. One insane tax proposal is to hit the empty building owners with a “vacancy tax”. The rationale being that this willincentivize lower rents and fill the buildings with businesses who have decided they no longer wish to be there. Fixing the “drug problem” driving all this would be trampling on the “it’s my body” rights of those who have turned to drugs following the trauma of losing their homes.
Want to learn more? Watch the video “Seattle is dying” available on YouTube. This was produced five years ago by a local television station that saw the future.
Idiocracy
Don't leave out "Sound" Transit. Billions of useful dollars for a useless choo-choo , basically to appease the area's vanity. "Other important cities have rail transit" is not a justification for this boondoggle. It is actually less than worthless as it uses up corridors that could/used to support cars and buses and blocks roads at street-level crossings. An apt metaphor for socialism.
Great post. White empathy for the swarthy hordes had better end quick, fast and in a hurry - or else…
The normals versus the abnormals. Good versus evil, no room for equivocation. Humans with no sense of reciprocity or empathy are abnormals, antithetical to a successful functioning society. They represent in a large majority the leftist cult theology of Marxism > Communism devoid of functional human normalcy. This won’t end well for these dysfunctional humans. It never does.
Are you sure the abnormals are not the norm? It seems the golden rule with golden era is the rarity. The vast majority of history and of humanity has been brutal. There has only been one America; the recipe is known and understood but has not been emulated by anyone. A high trust high functioning society is very difficult to build. Maybe impossible in the current era. The big question is; can ee course correct? Time will tell.
Yes. Bondage is default
Hillel's Golden Rule comes with thousands and thousands of pages of commentary delineating and enforcing right behavior. Every moment and interaction of every day was explicitly set out because people were not trusted to act rightly without the heavy hand of God on their heads.