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Falbak wrote that Tiffany Straton had won and had become the first to be a two-time Miss Money in the Bank. He added that the victory would have done Roxanne Perez good and that, instead, she would remain in the background at Judgment Day. #MITB https://t.co/3bzQN2DXc5 #MissMoneyInTheBank #Wrestling #TiffanyStratton (translated)

The author questioned whether error-prone AI had nearly sparked a third world war and mentioned Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender. They wrote that a loss of control might begin not with a machine taking power, but with people gradually deferring their judgment to a system that sounded certain.

Milorad Dodik’s record is documented. He publicly denied that the July 1995 Srebrenica massacre constituted genocide, despite judgments of international courts establishing Srebrenica as genocide. Bosnia and Herzegovina’s state court convicted Dodik in 2025 for failing to https://t.co/0JG6VtXsAX #Srebrenica #MiloradDodik #Genocide #BA

https://t.co/Z52kRPJnUj. Imho, the AI / #IntelligenceRevolution could break the apprenticeship chain before it eliminates entire occupations. #Androrithms - judgment, communication, adaptability and embodied know-how - must be deliberately taught, practised and passed on. #AI #IntelligenceRevolution #Androrithms #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoprovide.

The Return to Feudalism in 21st Century Garb A simple observer's viewpoint, with no claim to hold any absolute truth. The Veneer Cracks There is something strangely archaic about the world unfolding before our eyes, despite its satellites, artificial intelligence, and promises of infinite progress. Here and there, we witness heads of state behaving like feudal lords of another age, patiently nibbling away at the neighboring territory, redrawing borders through force rather than law, as if governing a nation mattered less than expanding one's fiefdom. No names need be mentioned here: current events provide plenty of illustration, and each reader will recognize, according to their own geography and moment of reading, the faces that embody this observation. But this return to the archaic is not confined to grand geopolitical stages. It also permeates the most ordinary daily life—that of social media, where anyone can pour out venom against another without filter, without form, and often without the slightest argument. The verbal jousting of yesteryear, with its codes, its rhetoric, its tacit limits, has given way to raw invective, snap judgment, instant condemnation. We no longer debate: we execute, verbally—and sometimes it doesn't stop at words. The Vanished Inhibition What strikes one, in this dual observation—macro-political and micro-social—is the lifting of an inhibition we thought firmly anchored. Centuries of cultural construction, education, philosophy, sometimes religion, had patiently shaped mechanisms of restraint: politeness as social ritual, argumentation as a mode of resolving disagreement, respect for one's opponent as the very foundation of democratic debate. This civilizational veneer, however fragile it always was, seemed to hold. Today it is cracking, and the question—which for me remains a simple hypothesis, not a certainty—is why. A convenient explanation would blame social media: anonymity, the distance of the screen, the instantaneousness of publication would favor verbal acting-out without the usual mediation of reflection. This is probably true, but likely insufficient. For technology here is only an accelerant, an amplifier—not necessarily a root cause. A Poorly Formatted Neocortex? The more unsettling hypothesis—and I frame it explicitly as hypothesis, not scientifically established fact—is that of a failure in the formation of moral judgment and tolerance toward otherness. The human brain possesses the neural structures enabling empathy, the distancing of impulsive reaction, the acceptance of difference—but these capacities are not innate in their full exercise: they must be built, educated, cultivated, like a muscle that needs patient training from childhood onward. If this education in otherness, nuance, and tolerance of disagreement erodes—for multiple and undoubtedly complex reasons that are not mine to settle here—then older reflexes resurface: instinctive distrust of the stranger outside the clan, the law of the strongest, the logic of territorial or symbolic predation. The other ceases to be a possible interlocutor and becomes once again a potential threat, unless they belong to my tribe, my clan, my party, my digital bubble. Two Scales, One Logic What is striking, in this deliberately provocative reading, is the structural similarity between these two scales. The leader who invades a neighbor in the name of a rediscovered greatness or a reinvented historical right, and the anonymous internet user who insults a stranger in the name of an unnegotiable conviction, may obey the same underlying grammar: that of territory to defend, clan to protect, the other to subdue or exclude rather than understand. The form has changed—satellites instead of horses, tweets instead of heralds—but the substance, in this reading that remains mine alone and commits no one else, seems strangely identical to that of feudal rivalries: the absence of a recognized third party, of an accepted common rule, of a respected arbitrating authority. Everyone becomes judge and party, lord of their own digital or territorial fiefdom. A Civilization on a Knife's Edge Norbert Elias, in his Civilizing Process, showed how Western societies had historically built, with remarkable slowness, an increasing control over impulses and direct violence, in favor of more sublimated forms of social regulation. What we may be observing today—and I stress again the conditional—is a form of regression in this process, or at least a fragilization of the veneer it had patiently laid down. Should we see this as an effect of great technological accelerations, which shake up our cognitive rhythms without leaving education time to adapt? A deeper crisis of the institutions tasked with transmitting these values of tolerance—school, family, religion, the rule of law? Or simply a cyclical movement of human history, where phases of policed civilization alternate with darker backlashes? I have no certain answer, and I would be wary of anyone claiming to hold one. In Conclusion, a Shared Concern This text is only a viewpoint, necessarily partial and subjective, on a world that sometimes seems to replay ancient logics in new clothing. Perhaps I am wrong to perceive a continuity between the feudal lord and the contemporary dictator, between the anonymous online insult and the absence of education in nuance. Perhaps these phenomena are unrelated, or too complex to be thus summarized. But if this reading, even partially, hits the mark, then the question that arises is less one of technological regulation—though necessary—than the far more arduous question of how to rebuild, generation after generation, this capacity to accept the other in their difference, to debate without destroying, to coexist without necessarily dominating. This undertaking, if it exists, will not be resolved by an algorithm nor by an international treaty. It plays out, patiently, in the most elementary education—the one that teaches a child that the other is not a threat, but a possibility. Bibliography Elias, N. (1939). Über den Prozess der Zivilisation [The Civilizing Process]. Oxford: Blackwell (Eng. trans. 1978-1982). Lorenz, K. (1963). Das sogenannte Böse [On Aggression]. London: Methuen (Eng. trans. 1966). Arendt, H. (1970). On Violence. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Han, B.-C. (2013). Im Schwarm [In the Swarm: Digital Prospects]. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (Eng. trans. 2017).

FREEDOM DAY 🇽🇰🇪🇺 @HashimThaciRKS Today, 16 September 2026, the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague are scheduled to pronounce the trial judgment in the case of Hashim Thaçi, Kadri Veseli, Rexhep Selimi and Jakup Krasniqi at 10:00 CET. My position is clear: FREE HASHIM https://t.co/2XlXgh4mg7 #FreedomDay #FreeHashim #KosovoJustice #XK #EU

The Individual as an Antidote to Tyranny The average person today is incapable of governing himself, which is why so many yearn for a new system. They desire external control to order their lives in ways they feel unable to manage themselves. Riddled with fear, they trade liberty for protection. Ideology recasts resentment as righteousness, while loneliness drives them to join a herd. The answer to collective madness is not collective action in the opposite direction. Chaos does not defeat chaos. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Think of every hero story you admire. The hero does not retreat from danger or surrender to evil. He confronts it directly and places himself in the line of fire. A well-ordered individual is not harmless or ineffectual. One competent, strong, and courageous person can carry more weight and provide more value than a mob. As Carl Jung said, “A million zeros do not add up to one.” Being well-ordered does not mean being harmless or indiscriminately nice. It means possessing judgment, competitive instinct, the capacity for force, and a desire for achievement. The question is what those qualities serve: money, power, and lust—or love, family, and God? This kind of person is an antidote to tyranny. If no strong internal ordering principle exists, a movement, leader, ideology, or state will fill the vacuum from the outside. The well-ordered individual is not incapable of rage, vanity, resentment, cowardice, or cruelty. Awareness of these shadow aspects helps prevent ideological capture and frees him from the seductive belief that “they are evil and we are good.” Anyone seeking a solution to increasing social insanity must recognize that a disordered individual cannot bring order to his environment. By becoming a person of virtue, he can carry that order into every role he occupies—as a parent, teacher, pastor, judge, journalist, leader, neighbor, police officer, or citizen.

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.

The Left Didn’t Replace Religion… It Became One Many leaders in the West may reject God, but they often believe with near-religious fervor in something else. The progressive worldview mirrors religion: people still crave meaning, so it gets redirected. Science is treated like scripture interpreted by an expert priesthood; capitalism becomes the fallen world; revolution is purification; climate change is apocalypse with repentance; gender identity is the soul, the “true self” trapped in a betraying body. Without metaphysics, evil must be placed in the material world. For many on the left, Hitler functions as a secular Satan, so anything tied to him can be treated as morally contaminated—nationalism, borders, ethnic identity, masculinity, Europeans, industry, and Western traditions. Jung’s “shadow” is projected onto an enemy, letting adherents feel morally pure while avoiding the harder work of facing their own capacity for evil. Where Christianity locates sin inside every heart (“original sin”), the secular version relocates the flaw into the world—into whiteness, the West, nationalism, borders, or any chosen symbol. This framework makes moral judgment easy and singular: if Hitler is evil, then opponents become “fascists,” “Nazis,” or “Hitler.” Disagreement turns from political to moral and existential. This isn’t a claim that progressives can’t see evil elsewhere—it’s that this framework has become an instinctive moral compass. The ruling class isn’t truly secular: it has its own faith, and increasingly expects you to live by it.

Why Therapy Culture Is Making Us Weak Why, despite unprecedented mental-health awareness and therapy language, does mental health seem to worsen? If both “the cure” and “the disease” expand together, we should ask what culture produces them. Modern therapy culture often teaches us to prioritize feelings, explain flaws through trauma, and treat negative emotions as reactions to others. Carl Jung proposed a different order: consciousness—judgment, values, and will—should govern the unconscious, including instincts and emotions. Health means understanding these forces without letting them rule. Today that hierarchy is frequently reversed: emotion outranks reason, and “lived experience” can outrank evidence. Jung warned this resembles “psychological Bolshevism,” where lower impulses overthrow higher faculties in the name of freedom. Nietzsche cautioned that “for every drive wants to be master.” The key question isn’t only where feelings come from, but whether we govern them. Therapy culture can also weaken self-criticism, treating conscience, guilt, and shame as oppressive rather than corrective. With “concept creep” (trauma/harm expanding to cover normal discomfort), personal agency can shrink: if everything is done to us, responsibility becomes harder to exercise. This can spread socially: victim identities bond through grievance, replacing judgment with collective resentment. History shows where that leads. The defense is older than therapy: govern yourself before demanding the world be changed.

Pathocracy: How Institutions Become Captured by the Pathological **Pathocracy** is the process by which institutions are gradually converted to serve the pathological. It often starts when normal people lose the ability to distinguish honest, well-intentioned behavior from manipulative and perverse motives. The institution may keep its name, image, and stated purpose long after it has changed in practice. A key warning sign is the normalization of pathological individuals: when a community treats the judgments of manipulative, conscienceless people as equal to those of everyone else, pathocracy is already underway. These individuals are rarely obviously unstable; they are often composed, confident, and even charming—so alarms don’t trigger. As more institutions are pathocratized, the pathological begin coordinating across them, reshaping society to match their impulses. Lobaczewski described roles such as ideological architects (producing simplistic “two camps” doctrines), marketing teams (simplifying reality into emotionally compelling narratives), and then psychopaths taking command to capture institutions. He estimated about 6% could become the new authority class and ~12% the intermediaries who make the system function, with at most around a fifth genuinely backing it. The rest usually build quiet networks of resistance. The central lesson of political ponerology: totalitarianism isn’t made only by a single tyrant—it emerges when society can no longer tell the pathological from the honest.

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.”

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

It's surely at least arguable that the Employment Tribunal was biased against Sandie - the judgment included invented and misrepresented references from several legal authorities and some genuinely bizarre legal interpretations #EmploymentTribunal #LegalBias #JusticeForSandie #Nospecificcountrycodesarementionedinthetweet.

AI is making output cheap. It can generate proofs, diagnoses, designs, code, arguments and art. But producing an answer is not the same as understanding the question. The real scarcity in the AI age may be judgment, meaning and responsibility. New article ↓ #AI #Automation #Judgment #Therearenospecificcountrycodesmentionedinthetweet.

This is what the distinguished “educational committee” had to say about the decision to discuss the paper in class: “a serious error of judgment.” It sounds Orwellian, but this is the state of academia today—or at least of @UGent. The problem of ideological capture has been a https://t.co/AicHHNivk6 #AcademicFreedom #IdeologicalCapture #UGent #BE