Quotulatiousness

September 19, 2026

Internal migration patterns in the United States

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s become a commonplace to see yet another tech company pulling up stakes and leaving California … and the state government seems determined to get rid of many of their biggest economic contributors with new legislation to make life harder for companies and wealthy individuals (see the second item, for instance). But it’s not just California losing population to other states:

Universities in the NCAA Southeastern Conference.
Map from Wikimedia Commons

Americans have long expressed their political preferences at the ballot box and their economic preferences with moving vans. Increasingly, they are expressing a third preference — where their children attend college — and the destination looks remarkably like the other two.

In 2025, North Carolina gained more than 84,000 residents from other states, more than any state in the union. Texas added over 67,000. California lost more than 229,000, and New York lost nearly 138,000, continuing a migration that has by now acquired the character of a rout rather than a trend. Yet few have noticed that the same states drawing families and factories are drawing something else: students, and with them, the institutions built to educate them.

For most of the 20th century, the hierarchy of American public higher education was as fixed as the Electoral College map of a one-party era. Berkeley, Michigan, Wisconsin — these were the names invoked when a public university wished to be mentioned in the same breath as Harvard. They remain formidable.

But formidable is no longer synonymous with singular.

Consider what the Southeastern Conference, or SEC — an organization whose reputation was built on forward passes rather than research grants — has quietly assembled. Texas A&M enrolls more than 79,000 students, a figure that would have seemed a typographical error a generation ago (see here and here). The University of Florida enrolls roughly 56,000 (see here, here, and here). Collectively, SEC institutions now educate more than half a million students, with total enrollment around 620,000 (see here and here), a statistic that ought to interest university presidents in blue states rather more than it apparently does.

This is not the result of some coordinated Southern strategy hatched in a statehouse. Universities are lagging indicators of demography, not leading ones. States that attract families acquire, in due course, college students. States that generate jobs retain their graduates rather than exporting them, as Rust Belt states have exported so much else.

States that welcome capital acquire, eventually, the tax base with which to build ambitious public institutions. Ambition, it turns out, is portable. The family that leaves Illinois for Tennessee brings its expectations for its children along with the furniture, and both eventually find a permanent address in Knoxville or some other city in the Volunteer State.

Affordability, too, plays its part, and Americans have noticed that a nationally respectable degree from a Southern flagship costs a fraction of what state flagships elsewhere demand for a comparable credential, at a moment when the public’s confidence in the value of a degree generally has become, to put it charitably, provisional.

One of California’s most impactful proposed pieces of legislation has been their “Billionaire tax”:

California’s proposed “billionaire’s tax” on the assets of wealthy state residents enjoys a slim lead in the polls leading up to the midterm elections, though so do two measures that, if they draw more votes, could render the scheme unenforceable. That makes for a high-stakes battle as many prosperous Californians are already fleeing to escape a tax that could force them to surrender ownership stakes in companies they’ve founded. Even if it doesn’t pass, a new report warns that the proposal is based on faulty research and could do vast economic damage.

[…]

The Wealth Tax Scheme Is Based on Unusual Accounting

Now, a new report finds the proposed wealth tax is not only dangerous for California’s economic prospects; it’s also based on bad research. According to the report’s author, Independent Institute research fellow Kristian Fors, “this proposal has been heavily influenced by the work of UC Berkeley professors Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman to justify the concept of wealth taxation”. Saez and Zucman have generated news headlines with their claims that the wealthy are undertaxed in comparison to lower-income Americans. But as Fors points out, the estimate that drew so much news coverage claimed that “the overall tax rate for the top 400 richest households in the nation was 23 percent”, while just a year earlier, Saez and Zucman “estimated that the top 1 percent paid an overall tax rate of approximately 36 percent; the authors found a share of 41 percent for the top 0.001 percent of earners in the most recent year of their survey, a category encompassing billionaires and high multimillionaires”.

The discrepancy, according to Fors, comes from how the economists treat corporate income taxes. Conventional analysis assumes that corporate taxes burden shareholders, workers, and consumers as the tax gets passed on. That results in the earlier estimate of a 41 percent tax rate for the wealthiest. To reach their much lower 23 percent estimated rate, Saez and Zucman used a non-standard analysis — and while the results of that approach won news coverage, they weren’t subject to peer review.

“Saez and Zucman’s empirical work on the California billionaire tax proposal retains these same unconventional accounting practices from 2019 without addressing their conflict with the mainstream corporate tax incidence literature,” cautions Fors.

The Independent Institute report observes that privacy laws prevented Saez and Zucman from drawing on personal income tax and other financial records. They relied on the Forbes 400 list, and “a 2010 study by a group of IRS statisticians found that the Forbes 400 dramatically overestimates the net worth of individuals in their lifetimes when compared to probate records of their estates after death”. Adjusting for that discrepancy produces estimates of “an average effective tax rate of 38 percent between 2018 and 2020, as compared to the 24 percent claimed by Saez and Zucman for this period”.

September 18, 2026

One disruptive kid can ruin class for all the others

Filed under: Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I remember talking to the teacher who taught the special needs kids at my middle school … Mr. Gibson was the only black teacher in the school and he was far more qualified than any of the others. It also helped that he had the patience of a saint: I doubt any other teacher there could last more than a day with the kids he looked after. At some point in the decades since I was in school, the powers-that-be decided that integrating all the children together was the right decision. By any sensible reckoning, it has been the worst thing they could have done, both for the special needs children and all the other children, as GenX Anecdotes relates on Substack Notes:

GenX Anecdotes didn’t include this in her post, but I thought it to be appropriate, in a way.

Having worked in schools and hearing my daughter’s experiences, it just can’t be the case that a tiny minority of extremely disruptive kids ruin the learning for all the others. Yet I have seen time and time again how one or two disruptive kids with severe behavioural issues can derail a whole lesson.

The dogged insistence that all the kids must be thrown together regardless of capabilities and behaviour is insane to me.

I have seen the amount of time, effort and extra staff required to deal with just ONE kid who clearly needs “round-the-clock” close supervision.

I have often thought those kids should not be in a “normal” class or school. They need to be somewhere else where they can get specialist support. And I don’t care how many times you shout “inclusivity” at me. Those kids would be better off somewhere else too.

I have watched kids who, during lunchtime, will smash up a whole table of kids’ lunches and try and run out of the school gates; kids continually shouting in lessons; bully and “hit” other kids repeatedly; demand all the other kids play games exactly as THEY want them to be played; derail a whole lesson and be continually brought out of the classroom, but only to be brought back in again!

Then I see the adults pander to the disruptive ones time and time again and expect all the other kids to suck it up and put up with their bullshit. All under the guise of some “neurodivergent” excuse. If their “neurodivergence” continually negatively impacts everyone around them, then they need to be removed from everyone else. Sorry. It’s not everybody else’s responsibility to put up with it.

Time and time again, the needs of a minority of kids prioritise the needs of many.

I remember when I worked in one junior school, attending a training day for teachers and support staff, which was conducted by the school head teacher.

When I raised this issue, he just went over to his laptop and brought up that “equity” meme of the three people standing on boxes looking over a wall onto the big screen and said THIS is why.

He didn’t like the fact that I had brought this up, especially since some of the teachers agreed with me. He very quickly shut me down, and his whole tone was this kind of patronising and smug “you don’t understand at all do you?” Like he was having to explain basics to me. There were a thousand things I wanted to say about it, but I didn’t.

What really got me was how all those teachers who had agreed with me looked at the meme and were nodding! They were impressed by it and acted like they hadn’t seen it before. It was beyond infuriating. I SO wanted to get up and go over to the laptop and find the other “equity in reality” meme, which is far closer to the truth.

But I didn’t, because I didn’t want to derail the whole thing and be the only “disrupter” in the room.

It was close to lunchtime, and it was already running over, and everyone was clearly eager to get out of there, so I didn’t want to turn it into an ideological battle of wits. In hindsight, I wish I did.

But I wasn’t brought up to be that person. And yet, ironically, here we are. Raising a generation of people who WOULD totally hold everyone up and much worse.

I left that job soon after that. It wasn’t just that. It was a lot of things related to this. I watched daily as things that I thought could actually be quite easily made better with some practical adjustments were continually and self-evidently made worse for EVERYBODY because of an adherence to this arrogant and utterly insane ideological bullshit.

It drove me nuts.

QotD: Higher education as a vast money laundering racket

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Have I mentioned my theory (which I regard as a certainty) that Higher Education is best understood as a massive money laundering operation? We all had a good chuckle, I’m sure, at that title [“fellowship at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation at King’s College in London”], just as we’ve had good chuckles at the ridiculous titles of all the Angry Studies programs infesting colleges nationwide. We’ve probably concluded — correctly — that these are just make-work for otherwise unemployable PhDs who check a few of the Diversity quota boxes.

But when you consider just how much money is involved, it’s a lot harder to laugh. Your average tenured prof makes north of $100 K, and for every one of them, there are at least two administrators, four outreach coordinators, and uncountable Special Assistants to the Assistant Provost’s Special Assistant for Diversity and Inclusion. Not to mention all the classroom space, office space, etc. that this requires (including paying the very real people who have to coordinate that stuff — no easy task — the custodial staff and so on). I’d bet that just one of these programs, all in, runs at least a million dollars per year when you throw in bennies and whatnot.

That’s a LOT of scratch, for one or two classes a semester that barely even make their enrollment numbers.

I dunno what nefarious purpose the Angry Studies programs serve (aside from the obvious, perpetual one of “burning down ambient civilization, just because”), but the “national security” ones I’m sure are basically just “diplomatic” cover for cloak and dagger shit. They used to use academic conferences like that back during the Cold War — who else but an officially credentialed diplomatic representative gets to travel around his enemies’ territory? In this case, of course, none of these people are actually going anywhere near war zones (with the exception of Mx. Kagan, of course, who decided to take command of American forces in the field). But academic “conferences” are good ways to make contacts and pass suitcases full of cash and other goodies around …

… I suspect.

Severian, “Klown Kollege”, Founding Questions, 2022-08-28.

September 15, 2026

“Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education”

Filed under: Education, Europe, History, Military, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

InfantryDort responds to a complaint that military leaders are taught Clausewitz without the career of Napoleon for context:

THE THING WE STILL CAN’T TEACH

I’ll bite on this one. Napoleon remains the ghost in professional military education. Why? Let me take a stab at it …

Jomini watched him and tried to turn the phenomenon into rules. Anyone in the U.S. Army has seen this before. If you do something exceptional on the field (especially in training), then you’re often coached that you went outside the lines and need to get back in. You may have succeeded, but it COULD have been a disaster. So we try “putting baby in a corner” because the science of war is safe. The art scares people.

Clausewitz watched the same fire in Napoleon and concluded that rules would never be enough. Two centuries later we are still dissecting the campaigns, naming principles, drawing arrows on maps, and trying to explain what exactly lived inside that man.

Again, why?

There is a part of command that refuses to become curriculum. T.E. Lawrence called it the “kingfisher flash”. Clausewitz reached for the genius. It’s the instant when one mind sees through fog what a hundred educated men cannot see at all, then possesses enough violence of will to act before the moment disappears.

Read that last part again 👆

You can feed that gift with history, sharpen it through hardship. But you CANNOT manufacture it with another degree. It MUST be revealed.

Yet modern institutions are built around the opposite assumption. We stack schools, evaluations, gates, boards, and credentials high enough and convince ourselves that eventually genius will emerge from the assembly line. It won’t. It can’t. Ever.

Worse, the machine often recognizes the dangerous talent and rejects it precisely because it cannot reproduce it. The unusual man is “reckless”. The instinctive one is “unserious.” The officer who refuses the approved path becomes “unqualified”.

READ. IT. AGAIN. 👆 👆 👆

Then war arrives and burns the paperwork. That is the lesson Napoleon keeps trying to teach us from two hundred years away. You can study the flame forever. You still have to recognize it when it walks into the room.

The closest we can come to discovering this genius is testing our officers on it. No more reliance on pure paperwork. I say to these officers: Show us the gift you’re supposed to possess for the highest commands.

Or step aside for someone who will.

September 7, 2026

“Don’t forget to like and subscribe!”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Along with the earlier post on the recent steep decline in basic literacy, here’s Christopher Gage discussing the same phenomenon of younger Brits’ increased dependency on videos while also demonstrating reduced verbal skills. A mere co-incidence, we can be sure:

La Cigarette by Henri Lebasque (1921)

A friend of a friend of a friend — a primary school teacher — reckons her pupils spend so much time glued to screens that they speak in YouTube English.

Rather than greet one and other with “Hello” they say, “Hi, guys! Welcome to my channel!” When saying goodbye, it’s “Don’t forget to like and subscribe!” Apparently, these little dopamine fiends cannot endure one moment without suckling on the eternal teat of Mother iPad. With their scrolling fingers they tear the pages in strange, ad-free artefacts once known as “books”. Reader, I don’t know if this little fable is entirely true or some semblance of the truth. But it rings truer than false.

Am I being facetious? Not really. The British government, in a rare bout of usefulness, conducted a study into screen-time amongst primary school children. That recent study by the education department found that the more a child spends scrolling on a screen, the less good their vocabulary be.

Please excuse that example of mongrelised English. Then again, perhaps we should call it Future English given that, in just a few years, the YouTube kids will speak in that very bastardised tongue.

According to a bleak wave of childhood study, spending hours tethered to screens quite literally dissolves learning. Researchers found that the “heavy users” — a term usually reserved for heroin addicts — recalled significantly fewer words from a list than their less addicted peers. These screen-addled sprogs spend more than five hours chasing that dopamine dragon. In Plain English, them don’t talk good and shit. At least when compared to their mates who spend less than one hour on a screen. Them kids know more words and shit.

They asked kids to recall words from a list of 34. The ones double-stitched to iPads upwards of five hours daily recognised barely half the words whilst their peers recalled two thirds. Eighty-six minutes. That figure represents the tipping point between literacy and a life talking in the mangled English of a failed rapper.

The study arrived at a rather chilling conclusion: If a child spends over an hour and a half each day thumbing through brain-bleaching bilge on YouTube, their grasp of language withers faster than a doormat outside a crack den.

Of course, these are hyper-sensitive times. The researchers keenly doled out the old “correlation doesn’t imply causation” disclaimer mandatory in a neurotic culture which treats truth like hazardous waste. And who am I to judge? The ability to express one’s thoughts isn’t utterly essential. The development of language — I’m sure a Foucault-addled academic might agree ­— is elitist and racist and sexist and ableist and all that.

And so, I am intensely relaxed about this brave new world in which the brains of the next generation dissolve in a swamp of TikTok reels and YouTube videos. There is nothing to worry about. This is progress. And progress must always progress. Words are just words and you can still talk good and shit without knowing them words in them things that don’t even have videos on them pages.

An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?

The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.

Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?

But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.

Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.

September 2, 2026

Americans’ notorious disinterest in learning foreign languages

Filed under: Business, Education, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Malevitus points out some of the sensible reasons most Americans don’t learn how to speak other languages … and why it makes perfect sense for this situation:

There’s a common complaint about Americans online that goes something like this: “Americans are so dumb. They only know one language, most of the rest of the world is at least bilingual. Why can’t they learn to speak another language?”

To be fair, we Yankees are a pretty monolingual bunch. Only about 20% of Americans speak a language other than English, and for those that do, its mostly because they’re immigrants or children of immigrants. That doesn’t compare favorably to Western Europe, where the majority of adults can speak at least one foreign language (guess which one?)

This is often brought up in the long list of America Bad™ talking points. It’s yet another example of American idiocy. “Europeans can master four languages while Americans are too stupid to master one.” This is pretty much pure copium.

The American Empire

The world we live in is an American world. Since at least the 1990’s (and arguably since the 1940’s), the US has been the undisputed economic and cultural hegemon of the world. Americans don’t learn French or German for the same reason that a Roman in 100 AD would balk at learning Gaulish or Illyrian. Provincials learn the imperial tongue, not the other way around.

For your average non-Anglophone, learning English opens up opportunities in international business, makes it easier to keep up with news from the imperial core, and lets you talk to people around the world (who learned English for all the same reasons you did). For your average American, speaking not-English is a cool trick that takes 600+ hours to learn.

As with any respectable empire, the culture of the periphery is downstream of the core. The influence is largely unidirectional. A typical Frenchman has probably seen Avatar and Titanic. A typical American has definitely not seen Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis or La Grande Vadrouille. The world is buying our blue jeans and listening to our pop music.

[NR: Emphasis mine.]

August 24, 2026

It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):

We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.

There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.

Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.

But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.

The use and abuse of moral mascots

The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.

The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.

The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.

In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.

History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.

The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.

Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.

The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.

The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.

QotD: The difference between “book smart” and “street smart”

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

    Joca @jocadbz
    Translated from Portuguese
    How many geniuses have you heard about in recent years? They all had very superior IQs and were supposedly going to change the world
    Know what happened? Nothing. Nothing ever happens

We hear a lot of people go on about the difference between “book smart” and “street smart”.

But psychologists who test and study intelligence know there’s no such thing. Smart is smart. So is this all just a way of coping with envy of higher IQs?

No. We’ve all met that guy who is clearly very intelligent, but can’t seem to accomplish anything outside a cloistered academic environment.

But we always seem to find him in a academic environment, don’t we?

“Book smart” is an incorrect name for a person who is intelligent, but has been mentally and psychologically harmed by an educational system, to the point where he can’t actually use that intelligence properly for tasks outside that environment.

Ironically, the more a child is obviously intelligent, the more the education system conspires to destroy him … because everyone with a “degree in education”, almost without exception, is either actually stupid, or is himself the end product of this same sort of mental mutilation.

Here’s how it works.

There are two types of intelligence tasks: answer tasks and result tasks.

A result task is graded by the reaction of the environment to your work. Either your software runs, or it doesn’t. Either your rockets fly, or they don’t. Customers buy millions of your product, or none.

You have unlimited tries unless you run out of money, but there’s no partial credit, and you can’t talk the universe into accepting your answer if it doesn’t.

Result tasks typically require a lot of work, are data-intensive, and have lots of sub-problems, because the ones that didn’t are already solved.

Result tasks are why we care about smart at all. Because smart people are the ones who can do this. And every human advancement or achievement ever was a result task.

Answer tasks are quite different. They are artificial problems created by a human being for another human being, whose goal is to produce the known answer.

Tasks like this have useful features. They can be tightly calibrated for appropriate difficulty. They are easy to grade. They can be used to teach particular subjects or skills.

But there are certain things they don’t teach.

How to do the boring parts that don’t impress anyone with how talented you are.

How to fail and try again.

How to change the question instead of answering it, because the question itself was wrong.

How to absorb from others what they had to learn the hard way, instead of reinventing the wheel.

How to deal with problems that have no solutions, only tradeoffs.

How to work with others and pass the ball.

How not to adapt instead of freezing when the universe gives the exam before the lesson.

How to substitute the adequate you can afford for the ideal you can’t.

How to prioritize what is needful over what is elegant or cool.

Without this learning, and other similar lessons, the talent child turns into an adult with an unbalanced intellectual development, like a bodybuilder who skipped far too many leg days.

You’ll find a lot of men like this in academia because it provides them with a sheltered, tightly controlled environment, where the problems are abstract if not utterly fake, and the persuasiveness of a solution trumps its workability.

They tend to scorn achievers, especially achievers with modest academic credentials or none, and this invites scorn in turn from people with real jobs.

But really what they are is victims. Entire campuses and networks full of what was potential greatness, crippled in it youth by bureaucracies that claim to serve it.

Homeschool your children.

Give them projects, not puzzles.

Teach them to build things.

Devon Eriksen, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-05.

August 23, 2026

It is indeed a great curse to get everything you wished for

Filed under: Business, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

I have no idea how authentic these are, but even if they were dreamed up in the 1940s by a chain-smoking ad guy trying to sell pre-printed matchbooks to Chinese restaurants, they have a distinct ring of truth to them:

  1. May you live in interesting times
  2. May you be recognized by powerful people
  3. May you get what you wish for

John C. Wright suggests that the third curse adequately explains why womens’ organizations are always so angry:

Photo from John C. Wright

Here is a comment from Twitter from a writer with the persican but cutting name of Peachy Keenan:

    Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted.

    Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well.

    They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer.

    They won: they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat.

    Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.

So many women are so angry precisely because they won.

Women are naturally submissive and self sacrificial, loving and supportive. Feminine.

The lone wolf quality of being one’s own man is lonely, self supportive, selfish and domineering. Masculine.

But the sole reward for being a lone wolf, a pioneer, a masterless man, is the promise that one day, after proving yourself, you will win the love of wife and child, and she will turn your cave or hut into a home. The reward of being an independent man, a lonely man, a rebel who plays by his own rules, is finding a wife who will love, honor, and obey.

Woman obviously cannot have that reward. Women are attracted to rebels, bad boys, wolves, winners. They do not want to be them.

Women do not want to win wives.

Woman naturally want to turn huts into homes, and make their man happy. They do not want to live in the hut, run in the rat race, fight in the war.

Women do not want to crush their enemies and drive their enemies before them and hear the lamentation of their women. That is Conan.

Women, by and large, far prefer character assassination, whisper campaigns, false friendships, as the means to undermine enemies: alive but humiliated, and forced to recant and apologize.

A womanly way to win a debate is not through facts and logic, obeying the rules of debate. That is the behavior of a sportsman, a knight in a joust. A womanly way to win a debate is by humiliating the opponent into silence, by threat, by backstabbing. Cancel culture is the perfect tool for the feminine approach.

Women as well as men would rather live in a world run by men. Men aspire to run a world with rules, with honor, with chivalry, where confrontations are direct, juries rule on evidence rather than feelings or group-loyalty, innocence is rewarded and virtue punished. Women, and womanly men, aspire to run a world as a welfare state, a nanny state, where good intentions matter more than good results, and you never get a change to confront the accuser nor answer the whispered accusations. No arguments, no debate, no discussion is allowed, because that would produce conflict, disharmony, and someone might get his feelings hurt.

We have seen in countless cases how a feminized world works: if a mother strangles her children to death, the female world defends her. If a notorious academic fraud is awarded a position far beyond his competence to serve, and commits suicide rather than face the shame of exposure, the female world defends him. Cowardly assassins shooting bankers or public speakers, third-world rape gangs, cross-dressers in woman’s sports or prisons, Mohammedan child-molesters, spotted owls, endangered whales, or anything or anyone who is or who can be shoehorned into being a victim, a sad sack, a crybaby … the female world leads the otherwise healthy and normal maternal instinct to comfort crying babies into comforting any and every monster and madness imaginable, and female fear of social disapproval does not allow her, even in her own mind, to question her master.

August 20, 2026

The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century

Filed under: Books, Education, Europe, Germany, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:

Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.

The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.

The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.

Prove it wrong.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

August 13, 2026

A minimum 12-year sentence

Filed under: Cancon, Education — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’ll probably be no surprise to anyone who’s met me, but I was a terrible student in school. While I quite enjoyed learning (about some things, anyway), I hated the environment where that learning was supposed to be taking place. I did well enough in primary and middle school, but I dropped out of high school and finished my diploma through correspondence. I have a great deal of sympathy for those kids who don’t fit into the institutional framework, as I certainly didn’t feel I fit in during my sentence. (It’s often worse for boys, as it’s more difficult for boys to sit still and stay quiet, and teachers readily interpret distraction and fidgeting as something needing medical intervention rather than signs of normal human development for half the species.) At Without Diminishment, Sam Dagres considers the plight of the vast majority of children locked in to that minimum 12-year incarceration:

You’re sitting there, one eye on the clock, eagerly waiting for the bell to ring. How you crave the chime of that sweet-sounding bell, a ring marking the start of your allotted outdoor time. You rush outside, feel the sun on your skin, eat a snack reminding you of a world that exists on the other side of the fence. But for most of the day, you are sat, effectively immobile for 8 hours. Stillness is the highest virtue, and any violation leads to punishment and an ADHD diagnosis. Day in and day out, you wait for the last bell.

Most of us will have experienced this kind of imprisonment, befitting what crime, you may wonder? We are punished for the crime of being born into a society where all forms of care are by default institutional, a society whose “child care policy is adult policy, not early childhood policy”, as Katharine B. Stevens noted.

According to Statistics Canada, approximately 5.5 million students are enrolled in K–12 public schools, dwarfing the 67,000 who are home-schooled. Nearly 99 per cent of all school-aged children in Canada are currently institutionalised.

In 2025, 58 per cent of children aged 0 to 5 were in childcare facilities, representing approximately 1.4 million children. One-quarter of those were aged under 1.

As someone who attended public schools all my life, I never thought of it as anything but natural. But as I reach a point in my life where family formation is uppermost in my mind, I wonder whose interests are prioritised whenever I walk by a school and hear, not see, kids playing on the other side of a tall brick wall.

We do not leave it to children to decide very much for themselves, which means their interests are ours to safeguard. Luckily, the research exists: institutional, non-familial care is not what is best for most of our young.

The incomparable Institute for Family Studies recently enumerated the relevant studies, one of which is the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which followed 1,000 children from infancy through adulthood and found that “children who had spent at least 30 hours per week in those settings beginning in infancy had three times the rate of social-emotional difficulties, including lower social competence, higher externalising behavior, and more conflict with teachers and peers. These effects persisted through elementary school, and by adolescence appeared as impulsivity, risk-taking, and substance use.”

Similarly, studies of Quebec’s universal childcare system have shown that the programme “has been associated with increased anxiety, aggression, hyperactivity, worse parent-child relationships, and lower self-reported life satisfaction in adolescence. By young adulthood, the negative effects extended to a 22% increase in criminal conviction rates.”

The foundations of our emotional and cognitive lives are formed early on while we bond with caregivers, and early institutionalisation disrupts that. The emotional downsides resulting from the systematic separation between the young children and their mothers are not broadly grasped, since the opposite is widely believed. When I share my musings about home-schooling with my friends, without fail, I receive the unanimous response: “Aren’t you worried they’ll turn out weird?” To that I respond, “Have you been paying attention?”

We are living through an era of weird, surrounded by friendless, non-eye-contact-making, socially anxious individuals. Nowadays, most schools encourage gender exploration and, through intense anti-bullying campaigns, demand a near-total embrace of any and all quirks. Not to mention that these tiny balls of anxiety, for some reason, require Vietnam-War-vet-levels of pharmacological intervention. I had someone tell me, “In my current role, I feel more like a pharmacist than a teacher”.

We can attribute the explosion of weirdness to a whole host of factors, notably digital devices and their role in mass social atrophy, but the forced dislocation of young children from their families is the foundation for a lifetime of alienation.

August 11, 2026

Cambridge has turned into a “Quality Learing Centre”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Even as I typed Sunday’s headline, I knew the fallout from the Jason Arday affair wasn’t going to be over quickly: it’s too high profile and gores far too many sacred cows to just fade out of the headlines. On his Substack, Francis Turner remembers what a Cambridge education used to mean and what progressive racists have turned it into now:

Once upon a time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Back in the day when men were real men, women were real women and Cambridge’s contribution to the national sense of humour were people like John Cleese, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams. Cambridge students were well aware that we were at the top of the intellectual tree and generally proud of the fact. In fact for many of us (e.g. your humble correspondent) coming to Cambridge was where we discovered that there were people far far smarter than we were for pretty much the first time in our lives. It was humbling. And once we got over that, exhilarating. You could have discussions about quantum mechanics or code optimizations or whatever with people who understood the concepts at least as well as you did. You could be lectured by professors who had Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes; often they had literally written the standard text book in the field. Sometimes they would drop digs about colleagues or rivals and you had to know that “Tony” was Tony Hoare who was in charge of Computer Science at the slightly inferior other place. And so on. Yes it was elitist. I’d say it was proudly so. Yes there were concerns about there being too many Old Etonians and other “public school”1 students compared to those from state schools but the solution was seen as going out to state schools and ruthlessly headhunting the top students rather than putting a cap on the number of privately educated students.

Some forty years later it seems that Cambridge no longer aspires to such intellectual heights — at least not for some areas of study. It is true that back then we generally held the Education Department and the associated students of Homerton College to be at a slightly lower level of intellect — and since they were mostly of the female persuasion many male chauvinist jokes were made at their expense. Also those of us reading for the more challenging degrees also disparaged some of the less challenging ones (sociology, land economy …) but even the most elitist MCPs agreed that even the ladies of Homerton had some intellectual assets to go along with what John Cleese might have called their attractive large tracts of land. However I doubt that even the ladies studying education back then would have put up with the quality of tuition offered today by professors such as J Arday, PhD.

However it isn’t just that the quality has gone down, what has also happened is that the racism, sexism and disableism has gone up at the same time as a deliberate part of the process. What do I mean by the racism etc. has risen?

Start with this excellent substack by Katy Barnett

You should read the whole thing because it is truly excellent, but the most relevant bit is this:

    Arday’s appointment might make Arday’s enablers feel a righteous glow in the short term — “Look at how wonderful we are, we appointed a Black, disabled scholar!” — but when the web of falsehood disintegrates, it leads people to doubt the worth of all Black or disabled scholars more generally. It also does a disservice to all scholars and students at an institution. From what I have seen on social media, several former Cambridge graduates who had come from less advantaged backgrounds, and had worked exceptionally hard to be admitted, felt particularly betrayed.

    I can understand this: they must feel that their hard work has been mocked. Instead of working so hard, why did they not embroider a story of sadness and use that instead? I, too, have felt this bitterness. Am I fool for not using my disadvantage?

    If you want to know my “lived experience” before you think I’m worth listening to, you can have it. I have suffered from cerebral palsy since birth, because I was born at 29 weeks — and yes, I have proof of this! — but I do not think that this is relevant to my academic work. […]

    I do not think my disability is a reason to promote me, nor do I think it is a reason why I am better than other people. It is certainly not a reason why I am more worth listening to on questions of private law. […]

    Just presuming that someone is worthwhile simply because he is Black and disabled and from a disadvantaged background is patronising. But so, too, is dismissing someone simply because he is Black and disabled and from a disadvantaged background. These two positions are two sides of the one coin: using a simple, superficial heuristic to decide worth, without looking at the reality.

    The sole relevant consideration is does this person produce good work, and can they do what is needed? I worry that the coin may flip in society, and we’ll go to a position where women and those from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds are presumed to be worthless. If the academy continues on this path, they will produce the very thing they fear: a backlash against minorities.

This is bit at the end is exactly the problem. If you promote incompetents to positions they are not suited for because of their gender, race etc. then you inspire everyone to look at other people with the same gender, race etc. and wonder if they too are incompetent. This is not a philosophical point, it is a real practical issue. I know people, some of whom read this substack, who make a conscious choice of choosing the older, white, male doctor if they can because they can be sure that this doctor was not given a helping hand due to his gender, race etc. and that therefore he will be more likely to give correct medical treatment.

Medicine is far from the only field where this is the case. You may recall the DC crash in early 2025 where a female helicopter pilot collided with a jet. There was a lot of commentary wondering whether (or outright saying that) she was unqualified and only got the job because she was a woman of the right (i.e. left) political leaning. I don’t know whether that is true or not — from what I recall at least some of the so-called evidence against her turned out to be rubbish — but the fact that such commentary sounds plausible and the responses are mostly of the form “Sexist!!!” with no evidence provided makes my point. Likewise the Florida university bridge collapse where the primary engineering firm was all female and (IIRC) Hispanic.

The fact that the phrase “DEI hire” exists and that everyone knows that a DEI hire is known to be less capable is the result of this racist behavior. And I do in fact mean racist. To quote Katy again:

    In fact, their attitude strikes me as profoundly racist and not in the least “progressive”. The subtext is, “Black and disabled people can’t manage it, let’s turn a blind eye to any flaws and let this guy in anyway, so we can look good.”

This is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

  1. i.e. private, boarding school

August 9, 2026

Hopefully the last word on “L’affaire Arday”

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On her Substack, Helen Dale discusses the recently resigned Cambridge professor Jason Arday, the people who positioned him to fail, and what their motivations were in doing so:

Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off.

Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair.

Oceans of ink have been spilt already on this issue, so I’m not going to relitigate the main background. Instead, I want to make four observations, in no particular order.

1. Oh, the humanities (and social sciences)

The problems across these two large disciplinary areas long predate the idiotic wokery that got Jason Arday appointed to a professorial chair at Britain’s second oldest, second most famous university. Yes, wokery has made them worse, chiefly because the theoretical frameworks animating it — which Lorenzo Warby has written about both here and at his own place — deny the possibility of truth outside that of personal experience. This means people don’t just get their own opinions, they also get their own facts.

[…]

2. Nathan Cofnas is not racist

There are two distinct things going on in the background to the Arday appointment(s). The first is that he was appointed despite being a complete doofus and as dumb as a stump. The second is that while there probably are black candidates out there qualified to be a Cambridge professor, there won’t be many, and they are highly unlikely to be the descendants of slaves (from the Caribbean, the United States, or South America). They’re much more likely to be from a posh Nigerian background, and a particular Nigerian tribe (Igbo).

In the words of computer scientist Eric S. Raymond:

    This is completely predictable to anyone who has spent 10 minutes reviewing the data on racial differences in mean IQ and knows what that implies for the right end of the bell curve.

    The intersection set of people with predominantly sub-Saharan African ancestry with people sufficiently bright to deserve a university professorship is not empty, but it’s vanishingly small. The demand greatly exceeds the supply.

    Which is why we’ve seen this movie many times before, and will again. They can’t help it. Corrupted academia would rather hire thousands of other incompetents than let go of its “anti-racism” to hire on merit alone.

The refusal to grapple with the black-white average IQ gap is astounding, and while the (mostly) white people responsible for appointing Arday look like absolute fools, the black intellectuals who refuse to accept an established fact look both truculent and dishonest. They don’t have to accept it’s genetic. They do have to accept that it’s real. As far as I’m aware, only one major black intellectual, Wilfred Reilly, accepts the existence of the gap (disclosure: I have been a guest on Wilfred’s podcast). If there are others, I would be delighted to know their names.

Two issues fall out of this. The first is that Nathan Cofnas is not racist for pointing it out. Facts are not racist. The second is that if people disagree with Cofnas’s secondary argument that the reason for the gap is primarily genetic, then yelling racist! at him does not prove him wrong. Evidence is what you need if you want to prove someone wrong, not moral abuse.

3. It’s the rule of law, Jim, but not as we know it

The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights — coupled with social preferment — over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.

Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people — and especially humanities and social science academics — think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists — albeit in limited form — in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

[…]

4. Enter Carter-Ruck, or Journalism v. Law v. a bloke with a blog

It’s been widely — and accurately — reported that junior academic Nathan Cofnas broke the Jason Arday story on his personal blog. However, it shouldn’t have been his job to do. The same (or very similar) research had been done separately by both a retired academic (John Harris) and a journalist with Times Higher Education — an outlet dedicated to the tertiary education sector and owned, ultimately, by Rupert Murdoch. In response to both sets of revelations, either Cambridge or Arday or perhaps both in concert (this is unclear on the facts available to me) instructed Carter-Ruck, the most famous — and aggressive — specialist defamation law firm in the United Kingdom. Historically, Private Eye magazine (often a victim of their attention) referred to them as “Carter-Fuck” and, more recently, “Farter-Fuck”.

Despite the fact that the THE has libel insurance and Murdoch generally defends his publications, the magazine backed down. Jack Grove is the reporter who had his story spiked. I have it on good authority that several Cambridge academics — and perhaps people from other universities — then approached Cofnas with the material that they (and possibly the THE) had collated. Cofnas — being young & junior — is what lawyers call “a man of straw”. Suing him in defamation would benefit no-one, least of all Carter-Ruck. He published, scooping Jack Grove.

August 8, 2026

Pointing the finger of blame accurately

Filed under: Britain, Education, Humour, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Librarian of Celaeno wants you to know that former professor Jason Arday did nothing wrong:

Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.

The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens — he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records — and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.

Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.

He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.

On Substack Notes, Michael Southon also points the finger at the people who enabled Arday’s rise and attributed racist beliefs to anyone who asked questions:

Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Cambridge University was so proud of its choice of Jason Arday that they invited the BBC to film Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, welcoming Arday to his new post. In the clip you can hear Cremin gushingly tell Arday:

    We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.

Arday himself is incredulous and suggests that some people will see his appointment as “tokenistic”. In response, Cremin assures him he is “world class”.

The Telegraph reports that when Arday’s students complained that they weren’t being properly supervised, they were told they were being “racist”.

The truth is that Cambridge was desperate to appoint more people of colour. His alleged autism ticked another box on the identity politics agenda. The dreadlocks were icing on the cake.

Will this episode, which has been reported around the world, finally convince the establishment that DEI is a disastrous social policy that lowers standards and turns august institutions whose reputations are based on centuries of meritocracy into the laughing stock of the world?

I doubt it.

Also on Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes finds the behaviour of Hilary Cremin to be emblematic of a kind of condescending attitude found most frequently among liberal white women:

We know the type.

And it does tend to be a woman.

They love nothing more than to put on that awful softy, patronising voice, as if talking to a small child.

I am reminded of that excrutiating clip of Hilary Cremin (Head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education) “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do“.

Really? “The best in the world”?

Like the bestest in the whole big wide world ever! 😂

I’m surprised she didn’t lean in and give him a pat on the head.

Wtf?

And that tone. 😭

It’s bad enough when they do it to kids.

I have posted about this “tone” before.

Near where I live there’s a Waitrose. The spiritual home of such a woman.

There used to be a Muslim woman wearing a hijab who would beg for money outside. I never gave her money because she seemed fake to me.

Always clean and well presented with the latest new iPhone (!), she would look up from her phone when she saw someone approaching, visibly completely change her facial expression, tilt her head to one side in a kind of puppy dog, “poor me” way, and put on a kind of fake whimpering “please help me!” and hold her hand out.

It was so obviously fake af!

One day I was waiting outside the shop for my daughter who had run in to get something.

As I waited, these two middle class, middle aged women stopped to talk to her.

They were both fawning over her, using that same softy patronising tone, falling over themselves to praise her. One of them said “you’re so beautiful and brave” and the other put her arm around her.

It was such a sychophantic display of patronising bullshit, I think I might have thrown up a little bit in my mouth.

This pathological sickly, performative fawning over their little pet minority groups, is something to behold!

And they were both being played.

This beggar wasn’t homeless. So obviously! You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think so.

But they really are a special kind of stupid.

They just wanted to feel good about themselves. It’s all about their need to feel like they’re “good kind people”.

Then, no doubt make a FB post about it so all their other annoying cloying phoney friends can “coo” over how much they adore their little darling minority pets.

🤮

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