Quotulatiousness

June 22, 2026

Progressive intellectual arrogance

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

John Konrad tries to explain the apparently universal intellectual snobbery of progressives, which has brought pretty much every western country into the era of the expert:

Why is the left so arrogant?

Because they put their trust in a global elite. Not directly, but through the media and the universities the elite manipulate.

My dad always said it the other way around: privilege comes with responsibility. But responsibility is hard. Responsibility requires knowledge.

And in a world growing more complex and unpredictable by the year, understanding what’s happening around you takes more and more of it.

Twenty years ago you could walk through Manhattan around noon on a Sunday and watch half the city reading the Times. The thing was massive, but a fast, educated reader could come away with a decent picture of the whole world in a few hours.

Then two things happened.

Craigslist gutted newspaper revenue, and DEI mandates swapped great reporters for morally indignant j-school hacks. The quality and accuracy of information cratered.

At the same time, the internet roared to life and the world got radically more interconnected overnight.

So the elite grew less informed exactly as complexity exploded.

To cope, they borrowed a trick from NASA. There aren’t enough hours in the day to be the best rocket scientist and the best navigator and the best flight surgeon all at once. So mission control compartmentalized. The best person in each silo got a desk. Thruster problem? Everyone turns to the engine expert. Someone’s hurt? Everyone turns to the flight surgeon. The rocket guy never had to learn a thing about medicine.

The elite copied the model. They switched their brains off for anything outside their lane. Everyone specialized inside their own bubble.

But compartmentalization runs on trust. Put one bad actor in mission control, and the moment everyone turns to him, bad things happen.

To guard against that, they doubled down on credentialism. They learned to trust only the experts minted by certain colleges and blessed by certain think tanks.

And the bad actors had a field day. Fraud, disinformation, theft, all of it could happen inside a silo, unseen. And it did.

Then came a mission control director who told them not to worry. Everything was fine. They didn’t know what was going on, but he did, and he was smarter than all of them. He said so, right there in the meetings.

Everyone loves a brilliant, competent boss, especially a charismatic one who seems kind, because it means they no longer have to worry. He’s got it handled. Just trust him.

And trust Obama they did.

But he had nothing handled except his own aura. And he let Marxist actors run loose inside the silos that mattered, education and HR chief among them.

The right was skeptical, so they kept reading, kept hunting for alternative sources, kept trying to make sense of the complexity themselves. Nobody cracked it completely. But they started seeing the big red anomaly lights blinking across the dashboard.

So the smart people on the right kept building broad knowledge while the left stayed siloed. Ten years passed, and the left’s elite fell far, far behind.

They’re starting to see that Obama was a fool. But they’re stuck. You can’t cram ten years of missed homework into a few months. And they’re rich and powerful and have no interest in going back to school.

They have two options. Admit they were wrong and put in months, maybe years, of hard work to take responsibility for their actions. Or keep acting like sheep. If the rewards weren’t there, some might choose the work.

But the system is so riddled with fraud, so many hollowed-out silos kept on life support, that there’s more than enough money sloshing around the NGOs to fund their posh lives.

They have the privilege with none of the responsibility. It’s a comfortable place to sit. They don’t want to change.

But holding that position requires one thing: they have to believe their mission control director has it all under control and is smarter than anyone on the right.

The bottom line is the have to be arrogant. Or the whole house of cards comes down.

Sparta vs Athens – 2(b): Ostracism, Demagogues, and Why Athenian Democracy Worked (Until Rome)

Filed under: Government, Greece, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

Athenian democracy is often dismissed as mob rule. This segment explains why that is too simple. Athens developed habits and structures that stabilised debate: frequent Assembly meetings, repeated exposure to the same issues and speakers, and a politically literate citizen body shaped by practical participation.

I also cover the darker logic: fear of tyranny, fear of dominance, and why Athens accepted instability and even injustice as the price of preventing permanent concentrations of power. Ostracism is discussed as a precautionary tool, and demagoguery as a permanent risk that the system managed rather than “solved”.

Finally, I explain how Athenian democracy ended — not because it decayed internally, but because Rome rendered the institutions meaningless. Empire does not tolerate participation.

QotD: When the US switched to the All-Volunteer Force in 1973

Filed under: History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

This of course forms the context for the creation of the All-Volunteer Force (AVF), the effective conversion of the United States military into a professional, fully standing military, which I’d argue is the single most dramatic shift in the civil-military relationship in American history, the full impact of which is not yet clear. For almost 200 years, the United States military had been an essentially civilian force which relied on conscription. For the decades prior to the creation of the AVF in 1973, conscription had been a fact of life. While the United States had demobilized substantially after WWII, there had been at least some conscription in every year from 1940 to 1972 except for 1947. In every year between 1950 and 1972, conscription had never been lower than at least 80,000 new conscriptions a year.

This was a huge change. For such a major change, I find that it draws surprisingly little attention. The 50th anniversary of the AVF passed with relatively little fanfare in 2023. I’ve mentioned For the Common Defense (1984, 1994, 2012) as the dominant textbook for introductory American military history: the shift to the All-Volunteer Force is dealt with in a single page (page 568, for the curious). The textbook I’ve seen most recently used for US Naval history (and which I used), J.C. Bradford and J. F. Bradford, America, Sea Power and the World (2016, 2023), doesn’t even give it that much: the shift is discussed in a single paragraph on page 351 (308 in the 2016 edition).1

The likely impacts of the shift to an AVF were studied prior to implementation in the Gates Commission, a report that had a preordained conclusion – it was convened to provide Nixon the cover to do the thing (end the draft) he had promised to do already in his campaign – and which honestly I find disappointing in its approach, which is mostly “happy talk” designed to justify what Nixon had already decided to do. It is striking to me, for instance, that the Gates Commission did not include a single historian to perhaps discuss how the shift towards fully professional militaries had gone for republics in the past. Instead, the focus is on the economics of the shift, with fairly blithe assertions that the civil-military relationship would remain unchanged despite the fairly obvious implausibility of that given the shift from “everyone serves” to “only a small portion of society serves”.2

As I’ve noted elsewhere, the Romans also seem to have thought that they could professionalize their army without reducing its ability to scale up in an emergency or altering the civil-military relationship and for quite a few decades that more or less worked, while the old norms held. But as those old norms decayed, the institution increasingly became what you’d expect from its institutional structure: a permanent political faction, advocating for its own interests, often with violence, to the point that the emperor Septimius Severus’ advice to his sons as he lay dying in 211 was, “Be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men”,3 a fairly open admission that the soldiery was not just a political constituency, but the most important one. It took time for those norms to shift, but when one is building or rebuilding institutions, the long-term is the term that matters.

I do not think necessarily that this is the direction the All-Volunteer Force must go. It has two and a half centuries of strong norms pushing it away from this direction. But careful maintenance of the civ-mil bargain is made all the more necessary when the military is effectively fully professional. For my own part, all cards on the table, while I greatly value the service of the United States’ military personnel (there’s that third part of the bargain!) and think they serve honorably, I am quite skeptical of the long-term implications of the All-Volunteer Force. Its creators assumed that fully professionalizing the military would not impact the civil-military relationship and that it would always be possible to shift back to a mass-conscript army in the event of a major war, but historical examples suggest it is not so easy.

But the All-Volunteer Force is not the direction from which I see now the principal threat to the civ-mil bargain.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The American Civil-Military Relationship”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-07-04.


  1. In that book’s defense, the Navy has a really big set of reforms associated broadly with CNO Elmo Zumwalt that happen at basically the same time and are connected and it opts to focus on those. I will note that the position of the paragraph has changed because the updated 2023 version of the book has opted to grapple more extensively and more successfully with this period as one of increasing diversity in the navy, with a chapter by Kristy N. Kamarck on that specific topic. It is a marked improvement over the first edition, though I think both FtCD and the Bradford and Bradford remain too hagiographic, too willing to sweep the military’s problems under the rug and only comment on military diversity when they can tell the story as a happy tale of progress.
  2. Especially as that small portion tends to be concentrated, a thing the Commission essentially refuses to consider as a first principle of their analysis; they assume cheerfully that the AVF will naturally continue to reflect a cross-section of the United States. In some ways that is true, but in other ways it is very much not – there certainly are “military families”, where service tends to “run in the family” in the United States now – and the emergence of those patterns would have been a pretty obvious thing to expect, given that the same trend is extremely visible in the Roman army of the early empire.
  3. Dio 77.16

June 21, 2026

Jean Rapail’s The Camp of the Saints, translated by Robert Laffont

Filed under: Books, France, India — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Copernican reviews Jean Raspail’s The Camp of the Saints which was reprinted in an English translation by Robert Laffont earlier this year:

It is time that I throw my own hat into the ring regarding this particular piece of polemic fiction. It’s particularly topical given the recent events in the UK and the Western World. A look at toxic progressive empathy taken its natural conclusion.

Written by Jean Raspail and published in 1973, Camp of the Saints is a book infamous among those the media describes as “Far Right” and virtually unknown outside of that. Were history set upon an even keel, Camp of the Saints would sit on the bookshelf of every high school right next to the classic works of the same genre: notably 1984, Brave New World, and Fahrenheit 451.

This book was so dangerous that for decades, now, the English translation has been out of print, available only as an expensive antique, or through the Internet Archive, [as] a single shoddy .pdf. The corporate owners of the English translation rights have, despite considerable interest, refused to republish it. That was until September of 2025, when a new translation was created and distributed.1

As of now, what was once an antique book is now cheap and in-print. What’s more, it’s been converted to an audiobook available on Audible.2 It took the destruction of Western Culture for us to see published the one work of dystopian fiction that warned us of it.

Given its relevance, it makes sense that over ten percent of the run-time consists of various forwards from the author, translator, and the publisher, that describe the political and cultural push against its own publication. It’s worth it to read (or listen) through the numerous forwards to better understand the context and the author.

An Introduction to the Text

Among the dangerous books written in the late 20th century, Camp of the Saints takes the self-destructive anti-nativism of the neoliberal world order and draws it forward to its own natural conclusion. Like other works of fiction, it takes popular ideas and asks the question: “What if these beliefs are taken to their ultimate logical end?”

The book is written from the perspective of an omniscient historian who witnessed the events of the text; he knows that his work will be censored, silenced, or redacted. In the context of the book, the accurate recollection of the events described is inherently destructive to the (now) dominant anti-racist political regime. The force of political progressivism will destroy any such history on the basis that it may “incite racial hatred” or “create division”.

A fascinating bit of forethought in that those are the exact reasons why Camp of the Saints was itself banished from public view for the last half-century: Liberal cultural diversity transitioned smoothly to violent censure and virulent “anti-White” or “anti-Western” genocidal hatred.

The book is a dramatization of the Fall of the West. Not in pitched battle, but as it has lost its spiritual core to rampant idealism. The “other” is always to be given deference over our own people. The sympathy that is demanded for the “other” is also silenced and denied for our own. At what point do a people become so spiritually deracinated that they lose all legitimacy to exist? At what point do they become so deluded as to lack totally a theory-of-mind of the “other”, and at what point does sympathy for the foreigner overwhelm survival?

Camp of the Saints answers these questions in sometimes graphic detail. Some of the horrors written on those pages hadn’t happened to innocent Western children yet … but now, fifty years on, and they have happened. Many times over, in many places and nations, across the West.3 In comparison to the reality of the West in the 21st Century, Camp of the Saints is a tame warning.

The book begins with a great migrant fleet setting off from Calcutta, India. The poor, the starving, the diseased, and the malformed set out for the West- A land where milk and honey flow freely and where the rivers are rich with Fish. The people of India want a better life for themselves, even if they have to walk, unarmed, onto foreign lands to get it. They, like many peoples, believe that their land is simply poor and that Western nations are simply rich. Failing to understand that it is not some “magic dirt” that made France, England, Australia, and the United States rich, but rather it was the French, English, Australians, and Americans. The West doesn’t horde “magic dirt” but “magic people”, so to speak. Were the West to be flooded with Indians, it would become just like India, not magically make the invading Indians wealthy and intelligent.4

I doubt that it’s possible to explain that fact to third-world migrant retards.

To conclude a spoiler-free version of the review: You should read it. It should have been taught in high schools for the last 50 years. You should probably buy a copy before the beast of Progressivism finds a new way to censor it. If you buy the Audible copy, use a tool to convert it to an .mp3 file so that it can’t be deleted from your personal library after the fact.5 There’s a reason it’s been censored for the last 30 years or so. It’s dangerous, subversive, and intelligent in a way that modern dystopian authors wish they could be.


  1. Here is a direct link [https://www.amazon.com/Camp-Saints-Jean-Raspail/dp/B0FG4MJS8K] to where you can purchase the book on Amazon. A shoutout to Vauban Books for doing the work that every other publisher has been unable, or too scared, to do.
  2. I kind of enjoy audiobooks. Though Camp of the Saints can be particularly tricky to listen to over reading directly due to its complex cast and jumping around in the timeline.
  3. The Rape Gang Inquiry Report by Rupert Lowe is particularly poignant and well-timed here.
  4. A fact that is in stark relief as of 2026, with over 10% of their population (official sources say it’s close to 7%, but I don’t believe them) now being Skaven imports from India … and the wealth, safety, culture, and prosperity of Canada now vanishing at an alarming rate.
  5. The “Open Audible” tool is works for this, but it isn’t free.

Gad Saad discovers that Canada has an “exit tax” … and it’s insane

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The other day, I shared a post from Gad Saad that alerted me to something I’d never heard of before: a steep tax the federal and provincial governments levy when a Canadian emigrates to another country:

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Vesper provides more information:

The Great Scam

After what @GadSaad posted yesterday, something I had no idea existed … an “Exit Tax” I did some digging. This is what I found.

Canada’s departure tax is one of the biggest scam taxes on the books. Apparently when you leave the country, the government treats you as if you sold every investment you own, even if you sold nothing.

You get hit with a tax bill on money you never touched, never withdrew, never spent. They literally invented a fake sale to justify taking your money.

Here’s what makes it even worse. The stocks they’re taxing? Those are foreign companies. Apple, Samsung, whatever you hold, those grew because of what those businesses did in their own countries, their own markets, with their own workers.

Canada had absolutely nothing to do with it. Zero. But they still want a cut just because you happened to live here while you owned them. They did nothing and still want to be paid like they did.

And before 1996 this didn’t even exist the way it does now. Chrétien’s government expanded it that year and buried it in section 128.1(4)(b) of the Income Tax Act like they hoped nobody would notice. Italy doesn’t do this. Portugal doesn’t. Belgium, Switzerland, the UK, none of them pull this shit.

You paid income tax every year. You paid sales tax. Property tax. You held up your end of the deal the whole damn time. And when you decide to go live somewhere else, they hit you with a bill for money that was never real to begin with.

Canada under any Liberal is a Scam!

And followed up with:

FYI- Just to make clear why I posted that image instead of Clause 17 it was meant to make an additional point, that I’m not sure Gad was informed about. The system is one-directional and rigged.

That image explains that The exit tax locks in your gains the day you leave at whatever the market says that day. You have no choice, no timing, no flexibility.

If your portfolio drops 30% the week after you leave, too bad. Canada already took their cut on the higher number. The gain was real to them the moment you packed your bags. The loss that came after is entirely your problem.

If you want to see the stocks section it’s this

You can read it for yourself:

https://publications.gc.ca/collections/Co

Update: After some online mockery, Gad Saad explains that he’s not just upset on his own behalf.

People are astoundingly stupid. My comments about the departure tax is not that I should be treated differently from anyone else. I am making a point about the extent to which taxes are confiscatory. As I have previously explained, there was a time when ZERO cents of income tax were levied in Canada and the US. Then bit by bit, that “temporary” measure, to be applied to only a few, and at a very low percentage rate of your income, becomes a mammoth monster that takes more than 50% of your earnings. It can occur because there are no repercussions if governments do not balance their budgets (other than voting them out). Hence, what starts off as a small temporary tax on a few becomes an existential theft that is orders of magnitude larger than the so-called illegal extortion tax of the Mafia. It can exist only because the great majority of people BENEFIT from this form of parasitic taxation. But someone has to pay for everyone else, and when you are that someone, you are not necessarily pleased to be funding the ultimate Ponzi scheme. I’m making a moral, philosophical, and ethical argument. It’s not just about me.

How To Make War Inevitable – Death of Democracy 20 – Q4 1937

World War Two and Spartacus Olsson
Published 20 Jun 2026

By late 1937, Nazi Germany’s rearmament economy had trapped itself. Autarky was failing. Hjalmar Schacht was pushed aside. Göring’s Four-Year Plan dominated economic policy. And at the secret Hossbach meeting of November 5, Hitler turned economic impossibility into an argument for territorial conquest.

This episode covers Q4 1937: the Hossbach Memorandum, Schacht’s resignation, the Anti-Comintern alignment, Lord Halifax’s visit, Himmler’s police-state consolidation, the December “Preventive Crime Fighting” decree, and the antisemitic propaganda exhibition Der Ewige Jude.

The argument is not that war was metaphysically inevitable. It is that the Nazi regime built an ideological, economic, and police-state machine that made war look increasingly necessary to its own leadership. This is a historical analysis of Nazi dictatorship, antisemitic propaganda, and war planning. It condemns Nazism and uses extremist material only for educational and documentary context.

Chapters:
0:00 Q4 1937 Intro
0:53 The world at the end of 1937
1:36 Germany’s quarter of acceleration
3:30 Himmler Tightens Police Power
6:26 Der Ewige Jude and dehumanization
8:30 Hossbach: autarky fails
11:16 Halifax and diplomatic confidence
13:03 Mood inside Germany
15:09 Mein Kampf has become policy
17:16 Conclusion: the politics of beasts

Explaining our failure to expand beyond Earth to an alien

Filed under: Economics, Government, Humour, Space, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen pens an ultra-short story in response to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s claim that “we” need to take a lot more money from Elon Musk to benefit “everyone”:

This-individual has an outstanding query for you-individual.

Yes, Dee-six-twenty-four-prime? Ask your question.

When we-collective initialized language-idea-exchange with you-collective, you-collective had no settlements on the surface of other planets in your-collective own star system.

Yet you-collective possessed advanced chemical propulsion technology sufficient to leave your-collective native gravity well. For over a hundred cycles around your-collective star, you-collective possessed this.

Why did you not use it?

Well, all that technology was worth a lot of money.

Value-consideration-tokens, yes. Continue.

So we decided to take it away from the really talented geniuses who built, break it up for parts, sell the parts, and throw a big free stuff party.

A … free stuff party?

Yeah, for like, average dudes. The kind of guys who don’t know calculus or anything. The ones you’d want to have a beer with. We thought we’d buy them some stuff.

Instead of leaving your home planet?

Yeah.

This-individual understands, now. Conclusions have been submitted to collective-thought-matrix. Please line you-collective up in an orderly fashion for processing, classification, and reassignment and/or biomass reclamation.

How Britain Made the L1A1 SLR: archive film with intro by Jonathan Ferguson

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Royal Armouries
Published 21 Jan 2026

Following last week’s look at the very first L1A1 SLR ever produced (1957), we’re sharing a remarkable Royal Small Arms Factory (RSAF) Enfield archive film, shot in the 1960s, showing the key stages of L1A1 manufacture and a rare glimpse of the original Enfield pattern room.

Then we step back and let the film speak for itself, nearly an hour of pure production and engineering process.

0:00 Intro
3:05 Enfield + Pattern Room
3:57 Planning & Tooling
4:37 Rifle body: Heat treat → Machining → Inspection
18:16 Barrels: Drilling, Rifling, Plating & Production line
34:28 Housing/Trigger, Furniture & Magazines
50:16 Assembly → Proofing/Testing → Packing & Dispatch
(more…)

QotD: Wishful thinking

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The wish is often father to the belief, never more so when our interests are in play. But even without material interests, we are often so attached to our ideas or theories that wishful thinking easily overcomes evidence that casts, or at any rate ought to cast, doubt on them. No one is immune from wishful thinking, and therefore from special pleading. Not surprisingly, the latter is easier to spot in others than in oneself.

There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

June 20, 2026

“Every system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud”

Filed under: Europe, Military, Russia, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Most wars are not significant drivers of technological change and military innovation. The Franco-Prussian War, the Boer Wars, World War 1, and World War 2 are some of the exceptions where the fighting accelerated innovation and adoption of new and untested technologies that were proven or discarded on the battlefield. The Russo-Ukraine war has been going on long enough and requiring new and improved weapons to such a degree that modern arms shows clearly reflect at least some of the technological changes in response to the ongoing combat:

Thales RapidStriker SHORAD, I think. Oddly, what struck me about this image was how much it reminded me of very early WW1 armoured cars, both in general outline and in its being a quick reaction development to a current combat situation.
Photo from Eyes Only with Wes O’Donnell

I was thinking recently about the good ole pandemic days; ah, what a simpler time …

At the time, I was writing for military and cybersecurity magazines about whether NASA spacesuits can be hacked and hypersonic tomfoolery.

Six years ago, a defense expo like this was mostly about better armored boxes. Things like thicker protection, a nicer turret, an upgraded engine, a fire-control system with a new acronym.

The headline acts were tanks and infantry fighting vehicles, things that go very high and very fast, and the unspoken assumption underneath all of it was that war would look roughly like it always had, just with more cowbell.

Then 2022 happened.

Then Operation Spiderweb.

Then a year of Russian glide bombs and Ukrainian refinery strikes and FPV drones turning hundred-dollar quadcopters into tank-killers.

Then the Gulf woke up to Iranian missiles in March. And the entire defense industry got the same text message at the same time, written in other people’s blood.

You can read that message on the Eurosatory floor this year.

Almost every serious system on display is an answer to a question the war in Ukraine asked out loud:

How do I shoot from farther away so I don’t die?

How do I kill cheap drones without going bankrupt?

How do I send a robot instead of a soldier?

How do I keep my tank’s roof from becoming a Thermador pizza oven set to “broil?”

Back then, I also used to write listicles, like “Top Ten Gifts for Veterans!” In that tradition, I’ve put together a hand-picked list of ten weapon systems emerging this year at Eurosatory in Paris, and every one of them is really a story about how much war has changed since 2020.

Lessons learned: “In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not”

The flare-up of anti-immigrant/anti-government violence in Belfast has drifted out of the headlines lately, as state-oriented media try to get their audiences back onto safer topics like footy and hissing at the Bad Orange Man. But the situation in Northern Ireland has not resolved itself in the preferred way — preferred, that is, by the British government. John Carter responds to some American social media users who loudly wonder why British men generally are not “doing something” now:

In response to the migroid atrocity du jour, one often hears Americans ask “why haven’t British men done anything?”, to which Americans will flatteringly reply to themselves, “It’s because those BRITCUCKS have gone SOFT, they gave up their GUNS like little BITCHES, but you won’t see anyone trying THAT in a SMALL TOWN”. Which conveniently elides the awkward detail that American men, armed to the teeth as no other people on Earth, have allowed themselves to be pushed around this way and that since the sleep of the good Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior (PBUH) was disturbed by his little dream. “Just you wait”, Americans will promise when this is pointed out, “The electric boogaloo will come any day now, you’ll see!” Sure we will. In the meantime, all those guns have done precisely nothing to prevent the relentless incursions of Section 8 housing, disparate impact, affirmative action, DEI, anti-discrimination training, Title IX, human resources, and all the rest of the soft tyrannies that flew out of the Pandora’s box of America’s ersatz race communist constitution. There was no resistance to any of this. Heavily armed red state Americans abandoned the cities for the suburbs rather than standing and fighting for them, and then stolidly watched as their kids were sidelined in education and employment while being terrorized by black criminals.

American speech is protected by the first amendment and backstopped by the second, yet nevertheless you will not find many Americans daring to even so much as mutter the forbidden word of power. This is not because white Americans don’t understand the problems. They have developed an elaborate vocabulary of “bad neighbourhoods” and “good schools” and “urban crime” and “troubled youth” and so on and so forth with which to discuss, in whispers, after glancing twice over their shoulders, the realities of life in the USSA. There is no law against parrhesia [Wiki], technically an American citizen may say whatever he pleases without consequence, but of course frank speech in this Greek sense requires courage by definition, and there has been a great shortage of that. You can say whatever you please, yes, of course, fill your boots, but you will find yourself ostracized, divorced, unemployed, and homeless if you speak too directly, so you know, shut up. The unspoken strictures of the longhouse are a more effective prison than iron bars for those whose spirits have been cowed.

Meanwhile, last week there was a minor uprising in Belfast. Hadi Alodid, a gentlemen of Sudanese extraction, enriched the face of Stephen Ogilvie, a local bloke with special needs, providing him with extensive tribal scarring in a generous act of cross-cultural exchange, and only claiming two of his eyes in payment. The entire incident was caught on video. Ogilvie’s life, though not his sight (and he was already hard of hearing) was saved by three Irish men who rushed in to beat the innocent Sudanese rocket surgeon off with their hurling sticks. In the aftermath, it emerged that Ogilvie had helped Alodid move in to his new accommodations just a few days before. No good deed, etc.

[…]

The uprising was variously described as a protest and as a riot, but it was neither of these. A protest is when an angry crowd gathers to chant some slogans and wave around some signs, pretending that their numbers are a display of power, and deluding themselves that Power will redress their grievances because a noisy lump of quivering biomass is somehow intimidating to Power. A riot is an explosive release of emotional energy that results in some property destruction and futile confrontations with armoured riot police, typically ending with the rioters being rounded up and jailed. In some cases, it’s true, protests and riots appear to produce political change, but this is almost invariably because Power has orchestrated these little carnivals in order to sanctify the policies it’s already decided upon under the guise of “bowing” to “pressure” from the “public”. The Canadian government, by the way, has long since mastered a non-violent variant of this dark art: practically every “public policy research group” in the country is funded by the government to pressure the government to do what the government already wants to do. Show me what Our Democracy looks like; this is what Our Democracy looks like.

There were no signs being waved around in Belfast, no chanting of slogans. While there was a great deal of violence, it was not random and senseless, but methodical and carefully targeted. It unfolded with the tight discipline of a coordinated military operation.

The day before the uprising started, a communique was sent out to local businesses, instructing them to close before the fun started. At the appointed hour loose formations of young men, indistinguishable in black hoodies, fanned out across the city.

[…]

The uprising in Belfast was not nihilistic violence for the sake of violence, though I’ve no doubt the lads were enjoying the opportunity for mayhem. It was violence towards a specific political objective: driving the foreigners out. Migrants whose domiciles were destroyed were directly deprived of housing. Migrants who managed to avoid this were made to worry that they will be next. Landlords taking government money to house migrants, or even thinking about doing so, now need to worry about the immediate cost of repairs and the ongoing expense of higher insurance premiums, making the Home Office’s lucre a lot less attractive. Landlords also need to worry about escalation: reportedly, letters were circulated which heavily implied that bricks and petrol bombs were just the first step on the violence ladder, and that the paramilitaries would be quite happy to take more decisive measures against the landlords themselves should the message not be received.

All of this is very sad, and I don’t want to seem heartless. The immigrants whose houses were destroyed were probably innocent; there was one particularly touching video of a nurse from Ghana or somewhere. Unfortunately, that is the nature of these things. They were brought in by the government en masse as a form of biological warfare against the native population. The government wants them there, the people want them gone, and the government refuses to listen, so, this is what happens.

Only 27 migrants were actually made homeless by the arson, but reportedly, quite a few are already clearing out on their own. The British government quite naturally condemned the violence, organizing a rally against racism in the aftermath, but it also responded by instructing the media to emphasize that it would be cracking down on illegal immigration into Northern Ireland. Underneath the condemnation, there is a clear message to all of this: in this case, violence worked.

That message has been sent before in Northern Ireland. Exactly one year to the day before the uprising in Belfast, there were riots in the small town of Ballymena after the courts let two gypsy boys off with delicate wrist taps for raping an Irish girl. The rioting went on for two weeks, and resulted in two thirds of the gypsy population clearing out. Again: violence worked.

Contrast Ballymena with the other major British protest movement last summer: the anti-migrant hotel protest in Epping, a London exurb populated largely by Londoners driven out of their city by diversity, which started when one of the migrants diversified a teenage girl. In contrast to the eruption in Ballymena, the protest in Epping was explicitly non-violent: the only violence came at the hands of the cops arresting people for flying Union Jacks. The mothers of Epping spent months gathering outside the migrant hotel, holding signs and raising awareness. The council also fought the migrant hotel in the courts, and enjoyed early success when a judge found that the location was zoned as a hotel but not as a migrant dormitory, essentially telling the Home Office that they didn’t have a loicense for that. This legal victory was short-lived. The decision was overturned almost immediately by a higher court judge, who explicitly found that whatever the concerns of the people of Epping as to their children’s safety, these were outweighed by the human rights of the mystery meat that had washed up on Britain’s shores, and by the government’s interest in housing them. As a result, parallel lawsuits that had been launched by councils across the country were dropped. The migrant hotel in Epping was eventually shut down, but this likely had more to do with the government’s switch to “Operation Scatter” in which migrants were garrisoned in smaller houses all over the country, rather than concentrated in a few large centres, than it did with the government responding to the concerns of British subjects.

In Ballymena and Belfast, violence worked; in Epping, peaceful protest did not.

Update, 22 June: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substackhttps://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

Bill C-22 passes the Commons “as MPs raced for home for the summer”

Canadian Members of Parliament care more for their summer vacations than they do for the rights of Canadian citizens. While this isn’t really news, it’s just the latest proof that our elected representatives are … well, I was about to describe their moral failings in great detail, but that could get me arrested and jailed if-and-when the many authoritarian measures the Liberals want to enact become law. Instead, here’s Michael Geist‘s summary of the way Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Bill, got sent to the Senate on Thursday night:

Bill C-22, the lawful access bill, passed the House of Commons yesterday with the government invoking a single motion to approve several bills without further debate or individual votes as MPs raced for home for the summer. Bill C-22 will now head to the Senate, where it can expect a rougher ride when study begins in the fall. Rather than use the final days of the House session to answer the privacy, security, and oversight concerns raised by the Privacy Commissioner, academics, technology companies, and civil society groups, the government spent the time ensuring it would not have to, rushing the bill through committee, cutting off debate, and maligning critics with tactics that they once decried when in opposition.

The final days of Bill C-22 in the House marked a genuine abrogation of democratic norms. The government moved a motion to shut down the clause-by-clause study in the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security, preventing the committee from adjourning until the bill had been pushed through. That led to a session that stretched past midnight, as MPs were barred from introducing new amendments and were left to vote on amendment after amendment without any discussion, debate, or even public disclosure of their contents. By the end of the committee session, no one could have known the contents of the bill that MPs had duly approved and sent back to the House for final approval. As noted, once back in the House, there was no further debate, discussion or even a vote. Just a motion that said the deal was done.

If the process was troubling, the rhetoric was embarrassing. I wrote earlier this week about Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree’s Vic Toews moment, as he said it was time for opposition parties to “choose” whether to stand with law enforcement and victims of crime (a refrain that sounded a lot like Toews’ 2012 comment to Liberal MP Francis Scarpaleggia, who is now the Speaker of the House, that he could “either stand with us or with the child pornographers”). Government House Leader Steven MacKinnon pushed that posture further on Thursday by dismissing the bill’s critics as wearing “tinfoil hats” engaged in “paranoia.” The charge fits a broader pattern in which this government treats independent privacy scrutiny as an obstacle rather than a safeguard, seen most clearly in the Bill C-36 approach to strip the Privacy Commissioner of authority over private-sector privacy law altogether.

The committee did approve some government amendments to the bill that improve aspects of the lawful access plan but they are still likely to leave companies, security experts, and privacy advocates concerned. For example, the maximum metadata retention period the government can impose drops from one year to six months, and a category of metadata can now be mandated only where the Minister is satisfied that the category and all of its elements are essential to investigations. That is better, but still not good enough as it is not tied to any actual evidence about why six months is needed and both the costs and risks associated with metadata retention, which is not a requirement in the U.S., are largely unchanged.

As The Reclamare explains, this bill is yet another likely irritant in US/Canadian affairs, as it will expose US citizens’ data to Canadian government oversight:

– A USA person creates/maintains a social media account — lets call it “XXX”

– Using its new C22 law, Canadian RCMP develops a “reasonable grounds to suspect” of “XXX” to a CDN investigation (a low investigative hunch standard under C-22).

– RCMP obtains a Canadian judicial authorization (an “Order”) and sends the Social Media company an International Production Request, which is not a USA warrant, not a §2703(d) order, and not routed through full MLAT (Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty) review.

– The social media company is bound by US law (SCA/ECPA), treats the request as a formal foreign inquiry.

– The social media company discloses limited metadata: summary of login IP ranges, account country setting, and other classification signals to prove USA origin

– This disclosure happens at Canada’s “reasonable suspicion” threshold, which is lower and less scrutinized than the US domestic requirement of “specific and articulable facts showing relevance and materiality” under 18 U.S.C. § 2703(d) for the exact same type of data.

– The USA user’s metadata, which would normally enjoy stronger 4th Amendment derived judicial protections, if sought directly by US authorities, is handed to a foreign government on weaker foreign grounds, without the same level of US court filtering or notice that a purely domestic US request would trigger.

– The 4th Amendment protection is effectively diluted because the platform’s good faith compliance with the foreign lower bar creates a new, easier pathway around domestic US constitutional safeguards for accounts that platforms classify as American

Canada’s Liberal government continues to chip away at our “Charter of Rights”, under the guise of “Protecting Citizens” and we are moving towards authoritarianism

While I loathe to create friction, I also hope your Rights can help slow Canada’s devolvement

It impacts you too

“Get off your high horse”

Filed under: Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen responds to a post from a Japanese man who claims not to understand American racism:

“United States, Canadian and Japanese Flags on Seventh Avenue” by Jim, the Photographer is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

    NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga

    Honestly, racism is one of those things many Japanese people struggle to understand.

    If we see a white person, we think, “Oh, they’re white.”

    If we see a black person, we think, “Oh, they’re black.”

    If there were blue people, we’d probably think, “Oh, they’re blue.”

    And that’s about as far as it goes.

    If someone is nice, we think they’re nice.

    If someone is an asshole, we think they’re an asshole.

    If we like them, we like them.

    If we don’t, we don’t.

    We grow up being told not to cause trouble, not to fight, and to get along with the people around us.

    Maybe that’s why judging someone by their race feels so foreign to a lot of Japanese people.

    We’re usually too busy judging people by whether they’re good people or not.

This is what we, in America, call a “Luxury Belief System”.

That means something you can believe, and advertise your belief in, precisely because your privileges shelter you from the negative consequences of believing it.

You, @japan_nobunaga, live in a nation that is 99% Japanese, just like you.

You have plenty of time to evaluate gaikokujin as individuals. There are only a few of them around, and they probably aren’t going to stab you while you are trying to figure out the content of their character.

So you have the luxury of telling everyone “look at me, I am not a racist, I am an enlightened being who makes no judgments about wolves” … because you do not live near any wolves, and run no risk of being bitten.

In America, we have another saying … “Get off your high horse”.

This does not mean a literal horse.

But it is meant to make you think about how the daimyo‘s son, on his expensive thoroughbred stallion, does not understand why the peasants have muddy boots.

If you get down off the horse, and walk, you will understand why the farmer’s boots are muddy.

There were some dissenting comments to the original post:

I’ve heard similar stories of Japanese racism toward other East Asian peoples, never mind what they said (and probably still do say) about American black servicemen.

Caesar Augustus – The man and his story

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Jan 2026

An overview of the career of the man who became Rome’s first princeps (or emperor as we would call him). Heir to Julius Caesar’s private estate, he somehow managed to make himself Caesar’s adopted son and political successor, plunging himself into Rome’s violent politics at the age of just nineteen and in turn beating all his rivals. Supreme master of the Roman empire in his early thirties, he then ruled for four decades, profoundly changing Rome, its empire — and by extension shaping the modern world.

My biography of the man — Augustus: First Emperor of Rome is being released as a new edition from Basic Books in the USA on 27th January 2026.

QotD: The word “alchemy”

Filed under: China, Europe, History, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

My favourite thing in this chapter is an etymological nugget that I suspect is too good to be true, but which I desperately want to believe. The word “alchemy” comes from the Arabic al-kīmiyāʾ (الكيمياء), which in turn comes from the Greek khēmeia (χημεία), but that’s where our knowledge of this word stops. χημεία has no known Indo-European origin, and no obvious cognates that would suggest a borrowing. There are some hand-wavy theories that it might derive from khēmet, the word for Egypt in ancient Egyptian, but it’s a stretch to put it mildly. Needham proposes the Chinese 金 meaning “gold” as the ultimate source. In modern Mandarin, this word is pronounced like jin, but the Classical Chinese pronunciation is better preserved by the Southern dialects, which variously render it as gum, gim, or, in Hakka and Southern Min, as kim. The list of English words with Chinese origins is short,1 and it would be nice to add this one.

But the Chinese alchemists by and large weren’t after gold, their goal was eternal life instead. In fact aurifaction originated as an instrumental “warm-up” exercise for the main event. Everybody knew that the reason gold was the most perfect metal was because it was a harmonious and balanced combination of the elements. So if the same harmoniousness and lack of internal contradiction could be achieved within a living organism, then the consequences would obviously be physical immortality and superhuman abilities. Elemental harmony, biological harmony, social harmony — in the light of Chinese metaphysics these goals were all reflections and intimations of one another. And the first two at least could be brought about by the same methods: the application of various potions and elixirs designed to increase or reduce the influence of a particular element. The same principle forms the cornerstone of Chinese medicine today.2

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Science in Traditional China, by Joseph Needham”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-08-14.


  1. My favourite of these, since it seems so unlikely, is “ketchup” deriving from 茄汁 (“tomato sauce” in Cantonese), perhaps via the Malay kicap.
  2. Needham’s third lecture is about the most recognizable and well-traveled example of Chinese medicine — acupuncture — and contains the intriguing assertion that naloxone administration totally cancels acupuncture’s efficacy for pain relief. This suggests that acupuncture’s mechanism of action may have to do with stimulating the body’s production of naturally-occurring opioids. There’s some evidence the placebo effect could be related (fascinatingly, naloxone also appears to eliminate the placebo effect).
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