/libpol/ - libpol

This is a politics board; we should have a libpol reading list. Or even a book club. Doesn't need to be identical to the /r/neoliberal reading list although some overlap is to be expected.

Let's start by listing the books that we think have had the most impact on our worldviews. For me some examples would be:

Why Nations Fail (obviously)
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Superforecasting by Philip Tetlock
The Origin of Political Order by Francis Fukuyama

Anyone down with this idea? List your favourite lib books and essays, explain why they're goated. If we get enough interest we could do a Book of the Month and pin it here for discussion.

if you are seeing this image, p00bix has already banned you

https://www.jalopnik.com/2114737/kansas-invalidates-drivers-license-trans-woman-never-changed-gender/

Kansas Invalidates Drivers License Of Trans Woman Who Never Changed Her Gender Marker

>You'd think that with everything else going on, state legislatures would have more important things to do than target a group that only makes up 1% of the population, but last week, Kansas notified trans drivers that their licenses would be revoked. Not 90 or even 30 days in the future but overnight. It was very obviously a move designed to punish drivers for being trans, but in case you needed more evidence that was the case, Assigned Media reports that the state also revoked one trans woman's license despite the fact that she never changed her gender marker.

>After her legal name change officially went through in December 2025, Andrea Ellis updated her driver's license on January 7. But because she knew S.B. 244 would soon go into effect, she decided against updating her gender marker. "I saw the writing on the wall after listening to [Attorney General] Kobach's testimony for H.B. 2426," Ellis told Assigned Media, referring to the initial bill that would eventually become S.B. 244, the law that now "requires Kansas-issued driver's license and identification cards to reflect the credential holder's sex at birth."

[Substack]

Kansas Secretly Spent Years Making a List of Trans Residents. Today, the State is Taking Their IDs.

>As it turns out, unlike other states that have restricted trans people’s documents, an investigation by Transitics has revealed that Kansas has been quietly collecting and storing information on trans people for at least the better part of a decade.

>First, there’s the Office of Vital Statistics. Back in 2019, the state began allowing trans people to update their birth certificates following a lawsuit settlement. These changes were entirely administrative: all Kansans had to do was present an updated ID or a statement from a medical professional confirming their gender identity. The OVS would then review the evidence and issue a new certificate that showed no trace of being amended—or at least that should’ve been the case.

>Instead, the OVS decided to internally flag trans people’s amendments.

>Speaking to those familiar with the vital records system, Transitics has learned that, since 2019, trans people’s birth certificates have been very visibly marked within the system itself. And most importantly, the label used for trans people is separate from the label used for amendments due to clerical error.

>When the state legislature banned gender marker changes in 2023 and mandated that any certificates issued after its effective date display the person’s sex assigned at birth, state employees were able to quickly determine which certificates it needed to revert.

Have you done your Anki today, anon?

In the interest of facilitating free trade and open borders, you should learn a foreign language.
If you don't know which language to learn, you should learn Vietnamese.

https://www.justice.gov/epstein

>what you have to understand, john, is that sometimes there are forces and events too big, too powerful, with so much at stake for other people or institutions, that you cannot do any­ thing about them, no matter how evil or wrong they are and no matter how dedicated or sincere you are or how much evidence you have. that is simply one of the hard facts of life you have to face. you have done your part. you have tried to expose the evil and wrongdoing. it has hurt you terribly. but it has not killed you up to this point. i am telling you, get out of this before it does. sometimes things are just too big for us to deal with, and we have to step aside and let history take its course. for you, john, this is one of those times," bill warned, with sally nodding her head in affirmation.

The Franklin Cover-up: Child Abuse, Satanism, and Murder in Nebraska by John DeCamp

making a thread here and not twitter because i feel as though there will be better discussion here than there.

> qott: do you think it is fair for trans women to compete in women's sports?

I CAN'T FUCKING FIGURE OUT WHAT "BOYMANDERING" IS, WHAT THE FUCK

Pic related, but also if you were to look at recent polling (especially out of South Korea), you can see a gender divide where younger men seem to be more attracted to far right/right wing populist parties.
While stories as extreme as picrel aren't terribly common, whenever anyone brings this problem up, the answers are almost always censorship or "they need to be raised better."
Maybe that will work with children, but as the polling shows, many adults are like this too, and all censorship will do for them is make them feel even more vindicated.
Thoughts on this?

Because grievance status is awarded as political compensation for economic incompetence, it constructs an automatic cultural mechanism that advocates for dysfunction. The Universalist creed, with its reflex identification of inequality with injustice, can conceive no alternative to the proposition that the lower one’s situation or status, the more compelling is one’s claim upon society, the purer and nobler one’s cause. Temporal failure is the sign of spiritual election (Marxo-Calvinism), and to dispute any of this is clearly ‘hate’.

This does not compel even the most hard-hearted neo-reactionary to suggest, in a caricature of the high Victorian cultural style, that social disadvantage, as manifested in political violence, criminality, homelessness, insolvency, and welfare dependency, is a simple index of moral culpability. In large part – perhaps overwhelmingly large part – it reflects sheer misfortune. Dim, impulsive, unhealthy, and unattractive people, reared chaotically in abusive families, and stranded in broken, crime-wracked communities, have every reason to curse the gods before themselves. Besides, disaster can strike anyone.

In regards to effective incentive structures, however, none of this is of the slightest importance. Behavioral reality knows only one iron law: Whatever is subsidized is promoted. With a necessity no weaker than that of entropy itself, insofar as social democracy seeks to soften bad consequences – for major corporations no less than for struggling individuals or hapless cultures — things get worse. There is no way around, or beyond this formula, only wishful thinking, and complicity with degeneration. Of course, this defining reactionary insight is doomed to inconsequence, since it amounts to the supremely unpalatable conclusion that every attempt at ‘progressive’ improvement is fated to reverse itself, ‘perversely’, into horrible failure. No democracy could accept this, which means that every democracy will fail.

His letters give the impression that he's /ourguy/. He writes about various incidents, some of which he predicted or solved, but the FBI is holding back and doesn't even want to share the information with the rest of the world. He also wants the cops to collaborate with mediums (like Ace Attorney, lol).
There's also mention of some unseen energy source and superpowers in five unknown individuals.
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA00165439.pdf
https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/mmis/2025/ex/comm/communicationfile-188136.pdf

Can someone explain what exactly is wrong with right wingers

They've spent 10 years obsessing over pedophiles in government and now we have concrete evidence that this is the case and they just dont give a shit

what's going on