Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2024

Canada’s current situation, as viewed by Fortissax

Fortissax recently spoke to an audience in Toronto. This is part of the transcript of his speech:

No doubt, many of you already have an idea.

The fact of the matter is this: 25% of the people in this country are, or soon will be, foreigners. Most of them are not the children of immigrants but fresh-off-the-boat migrants.

The economy? It’s in the dumps. Canada has the lowest upward mobility in the OECD for young people. One of the lowest fertility rates in the Western world. And the fastest-changing demographics in the Western world — as I’m sure you’ve all noticed here in the streets of Toronto, the old capital of Anglo-Canadians.

Think about this: approximately 4.9 million foreigners are classified as “temporary migrants.” Combine that with permanent residents, refugees, and immigrants, and that number swells to 6.2 million in just four years.


And it doesn’t stop there.

Crime is reportedly the highest it’s ever been. We have no military. The Canadian Armed Forces has faced retention issues for two decades. And what is command preoccupied with? Men’s bathrooms stocked with tampons and servicemen being “radicalized” by wearing extremist clothing like MAGA hats.


Let’s not forget foreign influence.

The Chinese Communist Party exploited the Hong Kong handover in the 1990s to infiltrate Canada, using British Columbia as their foothold. As Sam Cooper exposes in Claws of the Panda and Willful Blindness, they established a stronghold in Metro Vancouver, taking over the business community.

This “Vancouver Model”, as we Canadians ironically call it, normalizes our capitulation to foreign hostiles. Triads, working hand-in-glove with the Chinese communists, built a global drug empire. Fentanyl, mass-produced in football field-sized factories in China, is shipped to Vancouver and distributed across the entire Western Hemisphere.

Let this sink in: more Canadians have died from this economic warfare than all our soldiers lost in the Second World War.


And now, there’s India.

Intelligence agencies from the Republic of India have demonstrated their ability to conduct assassinations on Canadian soil. Recently, a Khalistani nationalist and separatist was killed — a figure I’ll leave to your sympathies or judgments. Regardless, this marks a disturbing shift.

India weaponizes its diaspora against the international community. In exchange for non-alignment with China, the West — particularly the Anglosphere — uses Indian migrants as wage-slave labor to suppress costs.

The result? A disaster.

In Canada, Australia, the U.K., and increasingly the United States, we see Indians climbing the ladders of power, pursuing their own interests — often brazenly. In Brampton, part of Greater Toronto, a 50-foot statue of the Hindu god Hanuman looms.

And let’s not forget the Punjabi Sikh population. They openly support an independent Khalistan — or remain at best indifferent to the cause. They have infiltrated Canada’s state apparatus, even reaching the Ministry of National Defense, where Harjit Sajjan prioritized rescuing Afghan Sikhs during Kabul operations over broader Canadian interests.

In Surrey, British Columbia, the trucking industry is effectively controlled by Sikhs. In online spaces, Sikh nationalists demand Brampton be recognized as a province, seemingly aware that their homeland exists more abroad than in Punjab itself. The leader of the NDP, Jagmeet Singh, serves as yet another example — barred from entering India due to his sympathies for separatism.


But foreign influence is only half the story. Among our own lies another problem: disintegration.

Decades of Western alienation and economic parasitism by the federal government are fueling separatist movements in places like Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Quebec, the Parti Québécois is polling higher than the ruling CAQ, openly advocating for secession from Confederation.

Meanwhile, the federal Conservatives court immigrant voters, alienating native Canadians and abandoning their base.


And then there’s the economic misery.

The average Canadian home costs $700,000. The median income? Just $48,000. Upward mobility is nonexistent. The managerial regime hoards wealth and power, gatekeeping opportunity through credentialism, exorbitant tuition, and crushing taxes.

55% of Canadians have post-secondary education, and yet most have nothing to show for it. The regime is not run by titans of intelligence or visionaries. It’s run by ideologues — loyal to their cause, not to competence or merit.


The final insult: demographics.

Over the next six years, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba will become majority non-Canadian. The 50% threshold will be breached, with profound consequences for local politics.

Ontario will hover just above 50%, while Quebec and the Maritime provinces will remain over 70% and 80% Canadian, respectively. This is not a death sentence, but it is a profound transformation for Western Canada, which has historically been more propositional and less identitarian than the East.


This is where we are.

Our sovereignty is compromised. Our identity is eroded. But we are not yet defeated. What happens next depends entirely on us.

The Korean War 025 – UN Forces Abandon Pyongyang – December 10, 1950

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 10 Dec 2024

This week, UN forces in the west pull out of the North Korean capital Pyongyang. In the east, the marines continue to fight their way towards safety. Over in Washington, the aftershocks of the Chinese intervention have shaken high command as much as they have the troops on the ground, and America’s allies, especially Britain, grow alarmed over the US response.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:26 Recap
01:20 The Blame Game
03:58 Retreat in the West
07:43 The Chinese Situation
10:59 Escaping Chosin
13:57 Atoms and Attlees
18:07 Summary
18:20 Conclusion
(more…)

Norway finds the perfect tool to drive away those pesky entrepreneurs

Filed under: Business, Europe, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Don’t you just hate having all these bothersome start-up companies in your country, creating new jobs and new investment opportunities? Norway sure does, but good news: they’ve found an almost perfect way to not only deter existing entrepreneurs but to punish those who try to leave after they’ve been successful:

Norway is a fantastically beautiful country, but lately they’ve decided they want as few new companies as possible.
“Norway” by Nouhailler is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Norway’s entrepreneurs are disappearing. In the past two years alone, 100 of Norway’s top 400 taxpayers, representing about 50 percent of that group’s wealth, have fled the country to protect their businesses.

In Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand paints a vivid picture of a dystopian society where government overreach and socialist policies kill innovation and demonize entrepreneurs. Present-day Norway mirrors this scenario in unsettling ways. The Nordic countries have long operated on an egalitarian ideal—citizens pay high tax rates for a generous safety net and effective public services. But Norway has taken the ideal to destructive and bizarre extremes.

Norway spends 45 percent more than Sweden on healthcare per capita with approximately the same health outcomes. Norway spends 50 percent more than Finland on primary and secondary school with worse results. And it splurges on green virtue-signaling with, for example, a $3.2 billion offshore wind project that industry experts believe is financially unworkable. That $3.2 billion, by the way, is roughly equivalent to the total revenue raised by the wealth tax.

To socialist politicians in Norway, entrepreneurs are mere piggy banks to be raided for ever more spending. When confronted with the reality that you can’t pay taxes with money you don’t have, the response is a vague moralism like “those with the broadest shoulders must bear the heaviest burdens.” Any dissent is waved away, deemed invalid because. . . free healthcare.

Earlier this year, instead of scaling back the tax blowout, the government doubled down, not only increasing the wealth tax but adding a vise grip on business owners in the form of an “exit tax” on unrealized gains as well. That means if you move from Norway, you’re immediately liable to pay 38 percent of the market value of your assets. It doesn’t matter if you have no cash on hand, if your assets are risky and could plummet in value, or even if your company fails after you leave—you still owe the tax. (Luckily for me, I left before this tax became law.)

The intent is to corral entrepreneurs inside Norway, impeding them from heading for the exits. The inevitable result: They’ll leave even before starting their businesses. After shooting itself in one foot, the government is now aiming a bazooka at the other one.

Rome: Part 5 – Between Two Wars, 241-218 BC

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published Jul 21, 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 5: Between Two Wars (241-218 BC)

• Carthage after the First Punic War
• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Rome and the East
• Rome and the Gauls
• The Emergence of Hannibal
• The Outbreak of the Second Punic War
(more…)

QotD: Simon Leys on George Orwell

Filed under: Books, Britain, China, History, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the very title of one of his essays, “The Art of Interpreting Non-Existent Inscriptions Written in Invisible Ink on a Blank Page”, tells you the essentials of what you needed to know about the decipherment of publications coming out of China and the kind of regime that made such an arcane art necessary, and why anyone who took official declarations at face value was at best naive and at worst a knave or a fool.

What Leys wrote in 1984 in a short book about George Orwell might just as well have been written about him: “In contrast to certified specialists and senior academics, he saw the evidence in front of his eyes; in contrast to wily politicians and fashionable intellectuals, he was not afraid to give it a name; and in contrast to the sociologists and political scientists, he knew how to spell it out in understandable language.”

Leys drew a distinction between simplicity and simplification: Orwell had the first without indulgence in the second. Again, the same might be said of Leys — who, of course, like Orwell, had taken a pseudonym, and with whose work there were many parallels in his own.

But immense as was Leys’s achievement in destroying the ridiculous illusions of Western intellectuals, as Orwell had tried to do before him, it was a task thrust upon him by circumstance rather than one that he would have chosen for himself. He was by nature an aesthete and a man of letters, and I confess that great was my surprise (and pleasurable awe) when I discovered that he was, in addition to being a great sinologist, a great literary essayist.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Rare and Common Sense”, First Things, 2017-11.

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