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don't look the other side: #Israel is doing this with OUR complicity OUR #armsExports and the impunity which the West grants to #Netanyahu and his #WarCriminals make this possible https://t.co/hEEwFnzUa3 #Israel #Netanyahu #WarCriminals #IL #US

The Politics of Pity For a decade, the West has argued whether empathy should be its highest value. Some praise it as a superpower; others call it harmful. Gad Saad’s “Suicidal Empathy” topped the New York Times list. Elon Musk called empathy a weakness; John C. Reilly called it a superpower. Ideas should be judged by consequences. Compassion-justified policies have coincided with worse addiction and homelessness, rising crime, mass migration, social fragmentation, higher living costs, and controversial medical interventions for gender-dysphoric minors. When these fail, advocates often claim it was not implemented “strongly enough.” ## An Inversion of Truth A quote often attributed to Hannah Arendt claims “the death of human empathy” precedes barbarism, but no source supports it, and her writings argued almost the opposite. Arendt contrasted the American Revolution’s institutions and law with the French revolutionaries’ “politics of pity.” Pity is not compassion: it ranks “fortunate” and “unfortunate,” grants the pitier moral authority, and overrides rights. Arendt argued this enabled Robespierre’s Terror. ## The Trojan Horse Empathy can become projection—imposing your values as if they were others’ needs. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system.” Nietzsche described societies so “soft and tender” they side with those who harm them. Orwell noted equality preaching alongside elite privilege. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs.” I call it suicidal narcissism: acquiring moral status by appearing compassionate while policies erode the foundations others rely on. The reward is immediate; the damage comes later.

Orwell’s Five Warnings About the Psychology of Totalitarianism Orwell understood totalitarianism’s psychology: unlike dictators who seek wealth and status, totalitarians aim to reshape humanity. They often claim to act “for our own good,” with conscience on their side. After reading Orwell, five lessons stand out: 1. Political correctness can become mind control “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Words frame reality and limit solutions. 2. Doublethink is the hallmark of propaganda “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” When contradictions become acceptable, rational thought collapses. 3. Control the past and you control the future “Who controls the past controls the future.” Rewriting history turns gratitude into guilt and inheritance into theft. 4. You cannot fight for freedom with a shackled mind “Until they become conscious they will never rebel.” Team loyalties replace judgment; challenging the narrative grants permission to ask questions. 5. True power is the power to shape perception “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes…” The goal isn’t mere obedience, but surrendering the ability to distinguish truth from what authority declares true. Orwell’s warning: don’t let it happen—resist arbitrary power by holding to truth, conscience, family, community, faith, and the people you love.

Why Weak Societies Choose Tyranny The pinnacle of tyranny would be a system that allows politicians, elites, and bureaucrats to control a population without force or coercion because the people love their servitude. Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World, an eerily relatable dystopian novel, with this idea at the forefront. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, there is no overt oppression. The state does not have to stamp on human faces with its jackboots or erect an inescapable surveillance state. Rather, the people of Brave New World happily chain themselves with meaningless pleasure and distractions. The authorities do not rule through terror and rage, the central elements of 1984, but instead give the people everything they ever wanted. A pharmaceutical called Soma becomes the opiate of the masses. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller, likens it to Christianity without tears. While religion requires years of moral training, Soma allows citizens to achieve peace simply by swallowing tablets. It is the perfect escape from reality, a holiday from the facts. Lenina, the female counterpart to the protagonist Bernard, cannot comprehend why he refuses Soma, preferring discomfort to something that can remove it. When Bernard states, “I’d rather be myself, myself and nasty, not somebody else, however jolly,” Lenina sees this as a sort of pathology and repeatedly encourages him to take the wonder drug. Bernard explains, “I want to know what passion is.” He understands that there is more to life than merely being content, craving genuine experience, including suffering and intensity, rather than being emotionally regulated by the World State. Lenina’s bewilderment stems from her conditioning to regard unhappiness as a technical problem, encapsulated in the society’s common saying that “a gram is better than a damn.” The people of Brave New World are not captives but satisfied customers. Children are produced by the scientific state, relieving people of the responsibility of parenthood. This grants them the ability to engage in promiscuity, where everyone belongs to everyone else, while filling their free time with cheap entertainment and endless sporting events—what would be referred to as slop today. As Neil Postman observed, Orwell saw totalitarianism through the lens of fear, while Huxley saw it through pleasure. There was no need to ban a book in Brave New Worldbecause there was no one who wanted to read one. An abundance of low-quality information rendered censorship unnecessary because no one could hear the truth through all the noise. Huxley threw shade at civil libertarians who passionately opposed tyranny because they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions. Humanity in its rawest form is portrayed by John the Savage, an outsider free from the World State’s conditioning. Upon coming face-to-face with this spiritually neutered society, he completely rejects it: “I don’t want comfort, I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness, I want sin.” Huxley’s dystopia is not imposed on an unwilling population but instead requested by a hollow one. Which leads us to the question: How do people become so weak that they get on their knees and beg for totalitarianism? Good times make bad times possible. Once a certain level of luxury and safety is achieved, people start to resemble the hobbits from the Shire. They are so far removed from evil that they forget it even exists and become defenseless in the face of it. Andrew Lobaczewski, who studied the psychology of totalitarianism from inside Poland’s communist takeover, wrote: “During good times, people progressively lose sight of the need for profound reflection. They lose the capacity to differentiate human nature, and emotion begins to dominate intellect. Once a critical mass starts operating on the pleasure principle, any excess mental effort seems like pointless labor.” Lobaczewski warned that it is not as simple as some people losing the ability to think rationally. It is worse, because those people then shame anyone capable of doing so. A clever, liberal, and merry individual is a good sport. A more far-sighted person predicting dire results becomes a wet blanket, a killjoy. The ability to have uncomfortable conversations without emotion taking over is, in Lobaczewski’s view, an indicator of whether a society’s future will be good or bad. It is easier to think about pleasant things. This leads people to eliminate any data or facts that cause them discomfort. That becomes a habit and eventually a custom accepted by society at large. Once the general populace accepts that inconvenient truths should be left unsaid, it becomes incapable of reaching correct conclusions. After all, how could you ever describe a picture that you refuse to look at? “Catastrophe waits in the wings of the communities that lose the capacity for psychological reason and moral criticism,” Lobaczewski wrote. “It is on the other side of this weakening of thought that the processes of the generation of evil are intensified at every social scale until they give rise to bad times.” It is precisely man’s dreams of happiness that can lead to chaos and suffering. This hedonistic view of happiness contains the seeds of misery, feeding the eternal cycle whereby good times give birth to bad times. Friedrich Nietzsche viewed socialism as demanding comfort for the greatest number of people possible. To question whether it is good for the masses to live in comfort has become a form of heresy. This reveals the spiritual atrophy that so many suffer from. Considering only the weak believe comfort to be a virtue, it is what Carl Jung would describe as the infantile dream state of mass dependency: the desire to gently slip back into the kingdom of childhood, into the paradise of parental care. Except this lack of friction has consequences. The perfect state destroys the soil in which great intellect grows. Genius, struggle, passion, strength, and wisdom are required to build a safe and abundant society. Yet once a certain level of comfort is achieved, it can destroy the very virtues required to obtain it. Nietzsche observed that it is the warmest heart that aims to alleviate suffering and hardship but fails to realize that it thereby wills the destruction of its own foundation. Comfort breeds mediocrity, which is then called good. Small people want one thing above all: that no one hurt them. We have taken this pathology to such a degree that we now obsess over hurt feelings and call this virtue. Pleasure, in its proper place, is a byproduct of meaningful goals, not a goal in itself. Aristotle saw that pleasure and comfort distort perception and proper judgment. While they do not cause us to misjudge something like geometry or mathematics, they can destroy our ability to decide what is worth pursuing and, therefore, what to do. Consider The Odyssey. Homer depicts Odysseus’ men on the island of the Lotus-Eaters, where they taste the fruit and lose all desire to go home. Much like Huxley’s Brave New World, they are not imprisoned. Rather, they simply stop wanting anything more. Odysseus has to drag his men back to the ships while they weep to stay. This is what comfort can do to men. It empties them of purpose. We intuitively understand this but fail to apply it to our own lives. We must make the same choice as Odysseus when he refuses Calypso’s offer of endless comfort and immortality. He knows she is more beautiful than his wife Penelope waiting at home. He knows that he and Penelope will grow old and die, a fate he could avoid by staying with Calypso. No one who reads these stories wishes he had stayed. We want him to choose the hard way home because if he took the offer, he would stop being admirable. Yet staying is exactly what our modern society asks of us. We are told that the island is the good life. But what happens to the man who caves to this temptation? In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche imagines a risk-averse society taken to its logical endpoint. The elimination of all struggle produces a man so diminished that he fails to possess even self-contempt or higher aspiration. Safety and sameness become the highest goals, creating “no shepherd in one herd.” Anyone who seeks to be anything more than normal becomes an aberration to be dealt with. Or, as Nietzsche puts it, they have “made the wolf a dog in man himself, man’s best domestic animal.”

Thanks to donors Japan 🇯🇵, the EU 🇪🇺, and contributions through GMDF, IPDC and MDP, @UNESCO helps Ukrainian media, journalists & memory institutions with emergency grants, safety equipment, psychological support, legal training and equipment to protect archives. @JapanUNESCO #Ukraine #MediaSupport #UNESCO #JP #EU #UA

An explosion that occurred in Moscow near a café has resulted in at least three deaths and 21 injuries, an event described as a major scandal by Russian political scientist Vera Grantseva for supporters of Vladimir Putin, as authorities identified a homemade explosive device as the cause of the incident. (translated)

Germany warns US against election interference after it announces $3 million grants to Europeans who "address national sovereignty, migration, censorship, lawfare challenges, with shared political philosophy, law, common western civilizational heritage” https://t.co/iluwCMFso1 #ElectionInterference #Sovereignty #WesternValues #DE #US

US government plan to defund science — All federal grants to be assessed by officials, not by civil servants and peer-review panels. They could deny them because they don't fit Trump's agenda. Grants could also be terminated at any time for the same reason https://t.co/FR7Lep6MXw #DefundScience #ScienceFunding #TrumpAgenda #US

Elon has donated at least $350 million to MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump's political operation. A large share of the Musk Foundation's grants has gone to organizations closely tied to himself, his employees, or his businesses. Elon is Lex Luthor. https://t.co/Q79dwOy5AX #ElonMusk #MAGArepublicans #LexLuthor #US

"ISDS grants fossil fuel investors excessive protection against government policies, including climate policies and fossil fuel phase out." 🌐⁣ ⁣ Eunjung Lee, Senior Policy Advisor at @e3g, breaks down ISDS: a legal mechanism embedded in 2,500+ investment treaties that lets https://t.co/TTHy0ngVyy #ISDS #FossilFuels #ClimatePolicy #Therearenospecificcountrycodesmentionedinthetweet.

🇪🇺 The ERC launches ERC Plus Grants to support visionary, high-impact science across Europe. With up to €7M per project and €210M in funding under the “Choose Europe” initiative, the programme aims to attract top global research talent. https://t.co/PjriTgQGfI https://t.co/ft9LG4WUq2 #ERCGrants #ChooseEurope #ResearchFunding #EU

Britu drošības eksperts Glens Grants brīdina Latviju par potenciālo draudu pastiprināšanos attiecībā uz spārnotajām raķetēm un planējošajām bumbām, uzsverot vajadzību pēc labākas gaisa aizsardzības un politiskās gribas, lai novērstu līdzīgas situācijas kā Ukrainā. #Drošība #Aizsardzība #KaršUkrainā

Britu drošības eksperts Glens Grants kritizē Latvijas valdību par lēnīgu un nolaidīgu rīcību attiecībā uz drošības jautājumiem, norādot uz ilgstošām problēmām un nesekmīgu zemessardzes apmācību, kas saistītas ar uzticības zudumu aizsardzības ministram Andrim Sprūdam, īpaši pēc nesenā dronu incidenta Latgalē. #LatvijasValdība #dronuIncidents #GlensGrants

Eksperts Glens Grants norāda, ka dronu incidenti Latvijā ir nopietna nacionāla problēma, kas prasa steidzamu risinājumu, uzsverot nepieciešamību izveidot efektīvu un integrētu sistēmu reaģēšanai uz šiem apdraudējumiem, kas ietver sadarbību starp visām valsts aizsardzības institūcijām un politisku kontroli. #droni #nacionālādrošība #kritika

The newly established £48 million Wound Innovation Institute in Hull aims to revolutionize the treatment of chronic wounds by collaborating with academics, NHS clinicians, and industry partners to research their causes and develop innovative therapies, with significant funding support from both private companies and government grants. #WoundCare #MedicalResearch #HealthcareInnovation #GB