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🇪🇺🇧🇦 NO HONOURS FOR RATKO MLADIĆ. NO EU REWARD FOR GENOCIDE GLORIFICATION. Today’s glorification of Ratko Mladić is a disgrace. @vonderleyen Mladić was not a hero. He was a convicted war criminal, sentenced for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The victims of https://t.co/FAssFWbAjI #NoGenocide #WarCrimes #Mladić #EU #BA

🇪🇺🇧🇦 NO HONOURS FOR RATKO MLADIĆ. NO EU REWARD FOR GENOCIDE GLORIFICATION. Today’s glorification of Ratko Mladić is a disgrace. @UrsulaPomwenger Mladić was not a hero. He was a convicted war criminal, sentenced for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The victims of https://t.co/wMkew8kvJb #NoHonorForMladić #GenocideRecognition #WarCrimes #EU #BA

In Sept 1939, Poland was attacked by Nazi Germany (Sept 1st) and Soviet Russia (Sept 17th). The Poles were first victims of joint German-Soviet invasion. The truth about aggression against Poland must never be forgotten. #OTD #history #WWII https://t.co/6NutuxOFkL #history #WWII #Poland #PL #DE #RU

This is another tragedy in Cyprus. How irresponsible to do this trip under such unusually bad weather! Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims’ families. We hope that they soon find ( hopefully alive) the missing persons. The organizers should be brought to justice. #CyprusTragedy #MissingPersons #JusticeForVictims #CY

I am saddened by the tragic loss of life following the sinking of a passenger boat off the northern coast of 🇨🇾 Cyprus. My deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the victims, and my solidarity with the people and authorities of the Republic of Cyprus, in #Cyprus #Condolences #TragicLoss #CY

🎙️ TWO PODCASTS. TWO STANDARDS? Ukraine: The Latest is excellent journalism. It names the aggressor, defends the victims and confronts tyranny with moral clarity. But Iran: The Latest is a profound disappointment. In my assessment, its coverage is virulently anti-Israel and https://t.co/ZE3bErXYPn #Ukraine #Iran #Journalism #UA #IR #IL

SREBRENICA GENOCIDE DENIAL MUST BE OUTLAWED ACROSS THE EU. More than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered in July 1995. International courts have established that Srebrenica was genocide. Europe cannot allow convicted war criminals to be glorified, victims to be mocked, or https://t.co/M2K39s5YJN #Srebrenica #Genocide #HumanRights #BA #EU

Compassion as a Weapon Western civilization is increasingly trapped in a culture of entitlement, where victimhood can become a route to status, privilege, and power. Some elite universities report unusually high disability registrations—e.g., 20%+ at Brown and Harvard and around 40% at Stanford—far above community colleges. Whatever the causes, it raises a troubling question: when systems meant to protect the truly vulnerable become incentives, what happens to everyone else? Rob Henderson describes how accommodations can turn into “status games.” Extra time, special housing, and exemptions can make diagnosis feel like the logical choice, and the lesson travels outward: tomorrow’s leaders in journalism, HR, law, academia, and politics may learn that displaying weakness is rewarded. Research links habitual victimhood displays with traits associated with the Dark Triad (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy). That doesn’t mean genuine victims are manipulative—it means rewarding victimhood gives manipulators an incentive to enter. In the “virtue game,” grievance becomes currency. Pity can also function as covert power: the weak person gains leverage, while the giver gains moral superiority. When compassion is treated like a currency, it can become a mutually reinforcing racket. The danger isn’t helping the weak. It’s teaching that appearing weak is the surest way to gain power.

The Pathology Behind Compassion Something sinister can lurk behind compassion. Caring for others is noble, but when institutions are rewarded not for reducing suffering—only for managing it—care can become pathological. Munchausen syndrome by proxy shows the logic: a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in someone dependent on them to gain sympathy and attention. The caregiver looks devoted; the “sickness” is manufactured. In that sense, devotion can hide control. I call this the Daycare Governance model: society splits into infants to be protected (oppressed), caregivers who provide protection (allies), and predators to be removed (dissenters). Caretakers gain prestige, funding, and moral authority by managing suffering. Many may believe sincerely, yet incentives can overpower intentions—if status and resources grow with the number of “vulnerable” people, the system has reason to expand the victim class. It does so via concept creep (“trauma” broadens until ordinary difficulty counts), and by creating the perpetual patient, where normal sadness becomes pathology and struggle is rebranded as dysfunction. Care institutions and “victims” then reinforce each other. Dependency costs competence. True care prepares people to stand alone; pathological care keeps them dependent. Endless expansion of victimhood risks producing more dependency. We call it compassion—but compassion without boundaries can become control.

The Three Roads to Evil We live in an age of unlimited access to information. Most of it is a gift, but it also gives us an unbroken view into horror—images on screens, the Epstein files, and constant stories once confined to nightmares. Some shut it off; others stare until it stares back, leaving them cynical. But it has always been this way. Long before Epstein, there was Caligula—years of sadism and cruelty on Capri. In every era, there have been people whose evil makes rationality struggle to explain it. I see three roads to evil: worshipping the wrong things, succumbing to ideology, and becoming so bitter you resent life itself. First: worshipping wrong values. Some make wealth, lust, power, or status their highest good. They lie, cheat, and steal to obtain it, then declare morality and law for the weak. Everyone else becomes an instrument. Second: ideology. When someone abandons a religious worldview, they may fill the vacuum with an ideology that claims to explain everything and promise a perfect world. Communists reduce history to class struggle; Nazis to racial struggle. The ideologue believes society can be remade by controlling causes and effects—people become cogs, sacrificed for utopia. Third: resentment. Those who see themselves as helpless victims can come to hate life itself. They treat hardship as injustice and life as something done to them. Their values invert: strength becomes evil, weakness virtue; love is attacked while lust is celebrated; wealth is theft—and criminals become victims while their victims are the privileged. These roads always exist, and always will. You can’t stop others from walking them. But it’s your responsibility not to.

Daycare Governance and the Tyranny of Compassion Something sinister can hide behind compassion. Caring is virtuous, but it becomes pathological when institutions gain power by expanding the number of people who need care. Munchausen syndrome by proxy shows how: a caregiver fabricates or induces illness in a dependent person, then gains sympathy by performing devotion. The sickness is manufactured, but the care is real. The claim: modern society can scale this into governance. Call it the daycare governance model: (1) victims to protect, (2) caregivers to provide protection, (3) dissenters to remove. Health, therapy, NGOs, academia, media, and bureaucracy gain prestige, funding, and moral authority by managing ever-expanding categories of suffering. It unfolds in two stages. First, the victim class expands: “trauma” drifts from specific, severe harms to everyday experiences, lowering the threshold for suffering until demand is nearly limitless. Second, the perpetual patient forms: ordinary difficulties are medicalized—strength as toxicity, sadness as disorder, restlessness as pathology—creating a cycle where caretakers and victims gain status or protection. This drives a crisis of competence. Victimhood can shield accountability, and institutions are rewarded for treating problems rather than eliminating the need for themselves. Plato warned against doing for people what they can do for themselves: removing every burden removes the reason to grow stronger. True care aims to make itself unnecessary. That’s the difference between a good mother and a poisoning one: one allows appropriate hardship to build independence; the other denies it. Failing to distinguish these forms of care makes the pathology hard to recognize—and easy to applaud.

Why Leftist Activists and Revolutionaries Can Never Declare Victory Leftist movements face a paradox: they use oppression narratives to gain institutional power, then keep claiming victimhood as that power grows. Instead of disappearing, activism “shapeshifts” inside bureaucracy, media, academia, corporations, and the arts. Even when DEI is challenged, its structures often remain under new names—diversity becomes “belonging” or “inclusive culture.” The logic is permanent revolution: influence depends on the struggle never ending. Goals shift, new categories of oppression are defined, and intersectionality divides people into ever finer oppressor/oppressed groups, creating an endless hierarchy of grievances. If activists declared victory, the justification for ongoing mobilization would collapse. The risk is social atomization: identities replace shared citizenship, and the state shifts from neutral protector to an instrument for redistributing power between designated victims and oppressors. Bureaucracy and propaganda can replace community and argument. History shows recurring purges—once the revolution’s machinery turns inward, yesterday’s enforcers become today’s targets. The result is also a ressentiment psychology: identity forms around an “enemy,” not one’s own strength. This dynamic helps sustain the consultancy model—identify the guilty, define the aggrieved, and perpetuate conflict. Equality with a finish line is manageable; equality of outcomes is not, so there is always another disparity, injustice, or enemy. The movement fears completion less than failure, because ending would make its power machinery unnecessary.

A Culture of Violent Ressentiment A lust for violence is spreading through the worst among us. After shootings, murders, and attempted political violence, some celebrate and idolize the attackers—while others online applaud harm done to those deemed deserving, even for things like “misgendering.” People claim these are unrelated, but I see a shared conviction: blood is the only route to a better world. We debate which ideology “caused” a given attack—incel culture, Marxism, anti-Zionism—but the pattern is similar. Radicalization is often treated like infection: belief first, impulse second. I think the reverse is more common. Corrupted people don’t stumble into dangerous ideas. They go looking for them. Ressentiment—Nietzsche’s term for the slow poison of hopeless victims—builds moral systems that make a grudge feel like justice. The feeling takes the throne first; philosophy follows, recruiting whatever justifies what the person already wants. Ressentiment focuses on enemies and punishment while offering vague utopias. It subtracts, locating suffering entirely outside the self and proposing removal of its “source.” That’s why it rejects self-improvement: it requires agency. What we face is not one ideology, but the spirit that turns failure and frustration into someone else’s crime—and therefore treats violence as justice.

Empathy, Compassion, and the Limits of Emotional Moral Judgment Empathy is widely regarded as a foundation of morality, but psychological research suggests that it is not an unqualified virtue. Paul Bloom (2017) argues that affective empathy—the experience of sharing another person’s feelings—has important limitations when used as a guide for moral judgment. First, empathy is biased. We respond more strongly to suffering that is vivid, identifiable, and psychologically close. Research on the “identifiable victim effect” shows that people can be more willing to help a specific individual than anonymous victims, even when the latter represent a much larger number (Kogut & Ritov, 2005; Lee & Feeley, 2016). Emotional salience therefore does not necessarily correspond to moral significance. Second, empathy is innumerate. Human emotional responses do not naturally scale with the number of people suffering. A single identifiable victim can evoke a powerful response, while thousands or millions of anonymous victims may produce comparatively little emotional engagement. This creates a problem when moral decisions concern suffering on a large scale (Bloom, 2017). Third, empathy can be exhausting. Repeatedly sharing the distress of others may produce empathic distress and emotional fatigue. Research suggests an important distinction between empathic resonance and compassion: while empathic engagement can increase negative affect, compassion can promote positive affect, motivation, and prosocial behaviour (Klimecki et al., 2014; Weng et al., 2013). The implication is not that we should care less. Rather, caring and feeling are not the same thing. Compassion allows us to recognize suffering and remain motivated to alleviate it without necessarily absorbing the suffering ourselves. Empathy may therefore be valuable for human connection, but it is a poor stand-alone system for making large-scale moral decisions. When millions of lives, limited resources, and competing needs are involved, compassion must be combined with reason, evidence, and deliberate judgment. The goal should not be to feel everything others feel. It should be to care deeply enough to help, while remaining clear-headed enough to help effectively. References: Bloom (2017); Kogut & Ritov (2005); Klimecki et al. (2014); Lee & Feeley (2016); Weng et al. (2013). Empathy and Its Discontents https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27916513/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

I am saddened by the severe flooding in Nepal & China, which has claimed many lives, left people missing, and caused widespread destruction.    I extend my condolences to the families of the victims, and I wish a swift recovery to those injured. My solidarity is with all those #NepalFloods #ChinaFloods #Solidarity #NP #CN

🚨🔴⚪️ Atlético Madrid statement to Marca: “There is a 0% chance of selling Julián Álvarez to Barcelona”. “The player is being portrayed as the victim, but the only victims of the Julián saga are US. This is about dignity”. https://t.co/TFcT0gULyS #AtléticoMadrid #JuliánÁlvarez #Barcelona #US #ES

On 23 August, the Int’l Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition, we remember the victims and their resistance. @UNESCO’s #MoW Latin America & the Caribbean includes 18 inscriptions from 24 countries, keeping memories of slavery alive for future generations. https://t.co/olFEwYtRd3 #SlaveTrade #Abolition #UNESCO #LA #CA

🕯️ Today, August 21, is a Day of Mourning in Kyiv & region for the victims of Russia’s deadly attack. At least 16 people were killed in the Russian strikes overnight on August 20. Memory to the victims. My deepest condolences to their loved ones. 🥀💔 https://t.co/nMk01a0H8C #Kyiv #DayOfMourning #StandWithUkraine #UA #RU