Pavol Rusnak's recent Twitter article - Bitcoin Toxic Maximalism Has Failed "Good people attract good people. If you build a community around hating something, you attract people who hate."

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Pavol Rusnak (@PavolRusnak) on X

Bitcoin Toxic Maximalism Has Failed

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Lately I’ve seen a return to using “gay” as a pejorative. That concerns me. I don’t want to go back to a world where gay bashing is normal. But I call people on it and they are like “nah it’s just a word, it doesn't mean that, relax” And so for those people I have a question… How about when I see something that I think is stupid or an over reaction, or someone just being dense I’m going to note how “male” that is. It’s “male” as a pejorative. I don’t mean that I hate men, of course not. Some of my friends are male! It’s just that things that are silly, or impulsive, or idiotic are “male”. Ya know it’s just a word. And you of course are totally cool with this… right?

Just your periodic reminder that being loud on social media does not equal competence. Life is complex, occasionally there are people who are both loud and competent, but generally, loudness covers for a lack of competence.

Pretty much every Bitcoiner I know has a story about losing funds. I’m unaffected by this latest disaster, but I’ve lost funds in other mishaps. We all have. If this one affects you, I want to tell you that money really isn’t all that important. Which may sound insane when you’re staring at a zero balance with that pit in your stomach. And it’s also a strange thing for a Bitcoiner, with a degree in economics, to say. But, more accurately, I want to tell you that the accumulation of personal wealth is not very relevant to living a good or happy life. Now how money functions, the type of money that the world uses, that is very impactful. I don’t work in Bitcoin to stack sats, or build a citadel, or to drive a lambo, I do this work to separate money from state, to remove a giant concentration of power from the world. And having meaningful work in my life does make me a happier person. Where you spend your time and energy is wildly important, but wealth, the accumulation of stuff, is a different beast entirely. If this one affects you, I want to shake you and yell at you… WEALTH DOES NOT MAKE YOU A BETTER OR HAPPIER PERSON. Please believe me, I checked! ...a few times. I’ve been lucky enough to have seen this issue from many different angles. I grew up in a household that had some wild swings in income. One year a trailer in Florida, one year a month long vacation in Europe. I’ve lived in a roach filled studio apartment on the wrong side of town, and in a house so big you might get lost. I’ve lived among the poors and partied with the super wealthy. One time my ex won the lottery and then fell into a depression. True story. I’ve got some experience with this one! So many of us grew up with the belief that money is how you measure personal value and worth. That understanding is deep in our bones. I believed that for a long time and I fought really hard to ‘get into the room’, and then hated it there. Getting out of poverty will make you happy, but from there the more you climb that ladder, the more you find yourself in rooms filled with people absolutely desperate to prove themselves via money. People who have lost their soul. That is not winning. The accumulation of wealth is not an interesting or valuable goal in life. You can’t take the money with you. You can’t take the Twitter follower count with you. You can’t take the perfectly decorated giant house with you. You do take your story with you. And your story just got a wild new chapter. Welcome to the club.

Can you enjoy something without referencing the achievement map? I’ve been thinking about the zerosum, comparative mindset that most Americans suffer from… that I often suffer from. I’m trying to work this out of my head and I realized that I constantly reference an achievement map. Example, the other day I went for lunch with my husband to a lovely restaurant in Chicago not too far from a place that we used to live. It’s a restaurant that we used to go to years ago. It was nostalgic and when my brain was deciding how much I should enjoy that moment it immediately referenced the achievement map. My brain asked, where am I in my map of things I’m expected to achieve in comparison to where I was on the map when I was last at this restaurant? Am I richer? Do I have more Twitter followers? Am I thinner? On and on. I couldn’t just enjoy a delicious lunch with someone that I love. I couldn’t just appreciate the memories, my brain had to first reference the achievement map to determine if I have achieved enough to be allowed to enjoy this moment.

Good times/bad times don’t make someone’s character, they reveal it. Re this Coldcard disaster, it’s been very interesting to see who is using this to dunk on others, who is trying to CYA, who is using this to gain new customers, and who is simply helping. Noted.

Good morning 🌄☕ The number one predictor of health and happiness is the quality of your relationships. Less doom scrolling, more texting friends.

In case you haven't heard, COLDCARD SECURITY RISK: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED

Bitcoin Magazine

COLDCARD SECURITY RISK: IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED

IMPORTANT: Major security vulnerability discovered in Coldcard hardware wallets. For your own safety read disclosures and take necessary actions im...

I’m so not a Ayn Rand fan, but she did say something brilliant once, “people who are genuinely racist usually are so because they don’t have a better reason to like themselves.” Nailed it! And this applies to all sorts of things and certainly to sexism, and especially to the Red Pill crew. Men who look down on women nearly always do so because they don’t have a better reason to like themselves. There is that zerosum hierarchy again. If you can be above a woman then you aren’t on the bottom… right?

There is this culture that permeates the States. This view of the world, the idea that life is a competition, a race… a zerosum hierarchy. It’s so baked in it’s hidden in phrases, in assumptions, in advertising, everywhere. The comparison is rampant. That person has a better job, a bigger car, went on a nicer vacation, has bigger boobs, their kids are more ‘successful’, #winning. Living the dream! When I’ve been spending time in the States it starts to seep in. The comparison emerges, the anxiety crawls back into the pit in my stomach, the joy starts to drip out of my life. When I leave again I have to detox to coax the peace and curiosity back into my life.

We love for things to be simple. A clear yes, and clear no. One clear line in the sand. But life is messy and complicated and doesn’t often lend itself to clear answers. A sign of maturity and intelligence is the ability to wrestle with a very complex issue and resist the urge to lean on a simplistic answer. If you’d like to test someone’s ability to wrestle with complex issues, ask for their opinion on abortion. Rarely is there an issue that fits this test better. It is complex and for most people it stirs very deep and difficult to manage emotions. Abortion fits this test so well as you have two things that very much matter, a fetus and a woman, and in the scenarios that we debate, their interests are at odds. For every simple and clear answer that you think you can find, once you change the assumptions or scenario, that simplicity evaporates. The question of abortion also reveals someone’s ability to exhibit care and understanding for others whether that other is an unborn fetus or a living woman. The language that someone uses, the examples that they chose… reveals a lot. If you are of the mind that abortion is a simple matter, then I hope that the below walk through of my take on the topic reveals many aspects that you had not been consciously considering. This topic is one where we can very quickly see that the answer will always be context dependent and a constant weighing of the relative importance of conflicting needs. Does a fetus matter? Let’s start before impregnation and imagine an IVF clinic. Here is a classic thought experiment: You are in a building when suddenly the fire alarm goes off and you realize the place is engulfed in flames. As you run to safety you pass an IVF clinic. Inside the open door to the IVF office you see a container holding hundreds of frozen embryos and next to it a crying 2 year old child. You only have the strength and time to save one. Which do you choose? Nearly everyone will choose to save the child. Why? Because while an embryo certainly does have value, it’s value is far less than that of a living child. That child has thoughts, and feelings, a fully functional nervous system that can experience pain, that child has attachments, and has begun forming an identity, a story. While the embryo’s have none of that. This thought experiment illustrates that the value of an embryo grows as it does. Most of us would agree that abortions are less objectionable the earlier in a pregnancy that they happen, and many of us would find a late term abortion to be similar to that of murdering a baby. So let’s move to the very difficult topic of late term abortions. If you were thinking that this one is quite clear, then I’ll tell you about one line that changed my whole perspective on this topic. Years ago I read an article written by a doctor who performs late term abortions, the line that changed my mind was simply “the people who come to me are people who have already painted the nursery.” The stories she proceeded to tell about why prospective parents ended up in her office were absolutely gut wrenching stories of medical tragedy. Situations where the baby won’t make it, and the mother might not either. Stories where the options are to let the baby slip away in peace now, or force the parents to watch their child live in pain and cry in gasps for its last breath of air. The abortions she performed were not done out of revenge or regret, they were a tragedy management tool that saved lives and eliminated certain suffering. With these examples we can see that the bar for when abortion is a decent thing to do raises as that fetus develops. But thus far we’ve only thought about one end of the equation, the fetus, but we can’t forget that this also involves women. Does a woman matter? Thus far in my life I have had two pregnancies. Both well planned and both that resulted in the birth of a healthy child. I have been responsible, but I have also been lucky. Being pregnant was an amazing experience. I had uncomplicated pregnancies and it was mind blowing to feel these new people develop and grow inside my body. They had distinct personalities while still in the womb. I have not been faced with having to make a difficult decision about terminating a pregnancy, and I hope that I never have to make those choices. It would be gut wrenching to end a pregnancy. It is a death of sorts, certainly it is a great loss and a tragedy. But were it my body, my fetus, without a doubt it is my decision. Burden and choice are flip sides of the same coin. Those with the ‘skin in the game’ are those that are best suited to make the choices. Someone in a fancy suit hundreds of miles away who will not have to live with the outcome of the situation is wildly unfit to make difficult reproductive choices for others. No one has more of a right to make reproductive choices than a pregnant woman. Giving someone else the rights to make these difficult choices is to disrespect the rights of women. It is to remove bodily autonomy and make women slaves. While childbearing is certainly natural, it is never easy, and quite often it is very dangerous. Statistically speaking, being pregnant is currently the 6th most dangerous job in the United States. Some years it’s more dangerous than being a police officer. And in parts of the world without modern health care, complications from pregnancy and childbirth are the leading cause of death for young women. When a woman chooses to bear a child not only does she risk her life, she is certain to undergo a very difficult and traumatic experience. Birthing a child is incredibly gruesome work. For most of us we will have a moment of finding ourselves laying in a pool of our own blood and feces wishing we could pass out. With my second child I was unable to get an epidural and I’m pretty sure I maxed out my body’s ability to feel pain. Can you imagine what it feels like to have your body ripped apart from the inside out? No I am not being dramatic, ripped is the right word. And let’s not forget that the recovery is likely to last years. What right does someone have to force another sovereign being through such a process? And I will only touch on the topic of rape. I think any decent person would be appalled by the idea of a woman being assaulted and then forced to risk her life in enduring the birth of her rapist’s child. So which one matters? Both obviously. And that is the difficult and complicated part, that it’s both. I imagine we’ve all seen the very publicized examples of very crass abortion supporters who have done things like throw an abortion party, etc. That’s ugly. And it says that women matter but a fetus does not matter. I’m sure we can all also think of an example of a staunch anti-abortion campaigner who would like to see women forced to carry their rapists babies. That’s horrific. And it says that a fetus matters but a woman does not matter. The tricky part about all of this is that it’s both, and it’s not simple at all. The life and well being of a woman matters, and a fetus also matters. In tragic times and places when their needs are at odds, then very difficult choices about which matters most have to be made. And the ‘answer’ to that will differ in every situation. It’s a constant weighting of conflicting rights at different points in time in different situations. It’s not simple. We can’t make it simple. If we can take a step back from our very understandably intense emotional connection to this topic, we can see that any clear and simple answer crumbles under the reality of varying situations. Having a considered and caring take on abortion requires the capacity to hold complexities. It requires maturity and intelligence.

The audio book I'm listening to asked me a question, what are the moments in your life when you felt most alive? 🤔 What were they for you?

People turn to religion for comfort, but I’ve turned to accepting the unknown for comfort. My experience with religion was about fear and shame a pressure. From my experiences in religion I learned that tragedy is an outcome of sin and is inherently shameful. And wow the anxiety that will give you! But when you accept that “not only is the Universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine” then when something tragic happens you understand that you don’t know why, and you can’t know why. And so holding yourself accountable would be not only silly but wildly narcissistic. What a relief.