Quotulatiousness

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.

🤮

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

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

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

August 4, 2026

“Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times”

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

The Jason Arday affair has only just drifted into my view, but it seems utterly fascinating that a young man with such a … varied and colourful personal history … has risen to be the youngest black professor at Cambridge. His backstory is (probably) too perfectly aligned with progressive worldviews to be true:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Jason Arday’s improbable claims have turned him into a Walter Mitty for our times. As the youngest black person ever to be appointed a professor at the University of Cambridge, there are good reasons why those who have championed him are rushing to his defence. But with each passing day, new revelations of his slippery relationship with reality seem to be emerging.

As with many fabulists, it is difficult to know where the truth ends and the fiction begins. Some of Arday’s boasts are quite obviously false. For instance, nobody believes that he completed the last nine of thirty consecutive marathons with a fractured leg that had swollen “to twice its normal size”. Or that he appeared in the television series Seven Up! as a child, even though its participants were selected in 1963 and Arday was born two decades later.

Other claims might well be embellishments on kernels of reality. No doubt he has raised money for charity, but it seems highly unlikely that his vaunted sum of £5.5 million is accurate. We know that he played snooker, but his assertion that he did so professionally would carry more weight if someone on the circuit had heard of him. Few would dispute that Arday is a keen amateur athlete. But if his claim to have run six hundred miles in six days were true, that would place him among the world’s elite sportsmen.

Perhaps most serious of all are the accusations of plagiarism. Cambridge has been quick to dismiss the matter, stating that an investigation has already been conducted by Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD thesis, and no evidence of plagiarism was found. Many readers who have compared the relevant passages side by side have reached a different conclusion. Numerous examples have been collated by Nathan Cofnas and can be seen here.

The refusal of the authorities at Cambridge to investigate the allegations properly has naturally raised suspicions that Arday is being protected because he is the poster boy for DEI. If it is true that he was raised on a council estate, diagnosed with autism at the age of three, first spoke at the age of eleven, and learned to read and write at eighteen, then his success story is unparalleled. Yet plagiarism is an extremely grave matter for an academic, and the evidence is difficult to dismiss.

The failure to hold Arday to the same standards as anyone else is, of course, a soft form of racism …

On Substack Notes, Michael Southron says he’s getting a strong Jussie Smollet vibe from this story:

The Jason Arday affair is beginning to remind me of Jussie Smollett.

Not because we know that Arday fabricated anything. We don’t. But because of the strange self-protecting logic that surrounds allegations of racism.

Smollett’s story was initially believed because it fitted so perfectly with what many people already believed about America: a black, gay actor attacked by racist, homophobic Trump supporters. The allegation seemed almost to validate itself.

Something similar is happening with Arday.

He says a severed pig’s head was sent to his family home. Yet police can reportedly find no record of the investigation he described. The butcher he said police visited says no officers ever came. There are apparently no photographs or contemporaneous messages.

He also says a masked man twice entered his Cambridge faculty building and threatened him, on one occasion with a knife. Yet the man was apparently captured by no CCTV, seen by no colleagues, and Arday reportedly warned nobody in the building at the time.

“To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me,” Arday told the Guardian. “Why would I lie?”

That sentence may be the most revealing part of the whole affair.

Because questioning Arday’s claims now risks being folded into the very narrative those claims are supposed to establish.

Arday says he has been targeted because of racism. Questions are raised about the evidence for his claims. Those questions are then portrayed as part of a “vile campaign” against him — which becomes further evidence that he is being targeted.

The allegation begins to protect itself.

He is a victim of racism, therefore questioning his account may itself be racist; and because questioning his account may be racist, his claim to be a victim of racism receives less scrutiny.

It is a perfect circle.

August 1, 2026

QotD: The “tiers” of US post-secondary education

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

First, there are at least three tiers of “higher ed”, and “publish or perish” only applies to the top level. And by “top level” I mean strictly by volume, the size of the student body. You want tenure at Ohio State (student body pushing 70,000), you’d better publish your ass off, because Ohio State (etc.) are what’s called “Research-1” universities. That is, they exist to do research. I know, I know, they’ve got a Latin motto that says something about citizenship and character development and whatnot, but fuck all that. Their money comes from grants, so you better be cranking out the research.

Level two is your SPLACs [Small Private Liberal Arts College (the denizens of a SPLAC are of course Splackavellies, in honor of the stupidest song of the 1990s, which is an amazingly high bar)]. The Ivy League schools are SPLACs, and the rest of them are their lesser (sometimes extremely lesser) imitators. You don’t need to publish squat to get tenure at Yale or Harvard if you bring something else [visible diversity, for example] to the table.

The third level is the junior college level. They call themselves “community colleges” in most cases — can’t use junior, it’s able-ist or age-ist or some shit-ist — but you know what I mean. Lots of kids do their first two years at one, getting all the BS “liberal arts” requirements out of the way before they transfer to Ohio State (etc.) to do their major classwork, so lots of History (etc.) profs work at JuCos. (This is the way to do it if you feel you must go to college for some reason, which 90% of the time you mustn’t).

I’ve done time at all three, because of academia’s worst-kept secret: Something like 75% of ALL classes, nationwide, at all levels and in all disciplines, are taught by non-tenure track faculty. Lots of these instructors are grad students, who will theoretically go on to get tenure-track jobs, but there’s a vast floating pool of scab labor known as “adjunct professors”, and I was one of those — a guy with a PhD who isn’t on the tenure track …

… and now never will be, because “adjunct professor” is like “sex worker” — yeah, it’s theoretically just a job now, but good luck getting hired to do anything else once it’s on your resume.

In my case that was by choice, as I loved my field, I loved teaching, but I did NOT love all the rest of the shit that goes along with university employment, and since I had (and have) an ad libitum gig that pays the bills I could follow my bliss, as they said back in the Sixties (I’m told). And since all eggheads are tech-illiterate I was able to do a lot of “online ed”, too. Which is the easiest money you’ll ever make as a professor (yep, I was one of those guys, not University of Phoenix but similar, and y’all, I have stories … oh, how I have stories. Everything you think about “online ed” is true, in spades. If you’re a few credits shy of that AA degree and just need a rubber stamp, then by all means go that route. If not, the University of YouTube has you covered).

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-01.

July 31, 2026

Nobody “designed” capitalism

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Education, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of Karl Marx’s cleverer notions was to come up with a label for the economic system that had slowly emerged from the feudal period in Europe. It wasn’t ever the result of some overarching plan or campaign, it was just the easiest way for producers and consumers to connect without coercion or force. It had no real name until its declared enemy named it:

Capitalism did not begin in a boardroom. Voluntary exchange, repeated across generations, built the fairs, the credit networks, the double-entry books that Luca Pacioli codified in 1494. Nobody planned this. That’s the whole point.

The story you learned in school runs backwards. You were taught that greedy factory owners exploited children until noble legislators rescued them in 1833. What actually happened: the Industrial Revolution dragged English living standards up so fast that population doubled between 1750 and 1850 because people stopped dying. Wages rose. Life expectancy rose. The factory that horrifies the modern reader was an upgrade from a life of starving on a tenant farm at the mercy of the harvest. Children worked because their families were poor, and the factory made those families less poor. The reformers arrived after the market had already done the heavy lifting, then took credit for the sunrise.

Real capitalism needs sound money, and here is where the tragedy sharpens. Between 1815 and 1914, under a classical gold standard, prices in Britain fell gently while output exploded. You could save a coin and expect it to buy more later. That world died in stages: 1914, when governments suspended gold to print [money for] war; 1933, when Roosevelt confiscated citizens’ gold at $20.67 an ounce then revalued it to $35; 1971, when Nixon closed the window entirely and handed us the pure fiat regime you live under now.

What followed was corporatism wearing capitalism’s coat. When the Federal Reserve can conjure trillions and hand them to the banks and firms closest to the spigot, you no longer have a market allocating capital. You have a cartel allocating privilege. The 2008 bailouts were a monetary system doing exactly what a monetary system built on the printing press does.

When someone blames “unfettered capitalism” for the mess around you, ask them to point to the fetters.

The answer is to let go. Less regulation, no central bank, less tax, less government. Not more!

A few days ago, Severian point out:

Title page of Das Kapital in the first German edition of Volume 1.
Wikimedia Commons.

At its broadest, “system” means something like “the appearance of rule-governed behavior”, and so yeah, “capitalism” is a “system” in that sense. The “law” of Supply and Demand is a “rule”, if you like, and we can start piling on the ACK-shullies from there. But it’s not particularly useful trying to analyze why and how it happens; the only thing we need to proceed is to acknowledge that it does.

“It” being “reification“, which you’ll recall means “treating an abstraction as if it were a real object”. Synonyms (per Wiki) include “concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, and while I personally dig “hypostatization” — it’s got that groovy Gnostic ring to it — “reification” is easier to type; plus it was very successfully repurposed by Marx and we might need that later, so “reification” it is. Calling “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage” Capitalism is a reification. It’s useful rhetorical shorthand …

… but it carries with it a tendency to mistake the map for the territory, you dig? Instead of confining yourself to “the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage”, you inevitably start talking about the “rules” or “laws” of Capitalism. And from there, it’s just a short leap to our course title: the morality of Capitalism.

Because that’s what rules are for, no? To keep things fair — or equal, if you prefer. If we want to find out who’s better at tennis, let’s say, we set up a bunch of rules, to eliminate from the outcome every “inequality” but skill (and dumb luck). Both players have to agree on the scoring. Tennis, therefore, really is a system, strictly speaking. It really is a game, in the mathematical and linguistic senses.

Tennis is not a reification. When we talk about tennis, we are talking about the rules of the game, or the outcome of an individual match. That’s it.

But watch what happens when we start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism. The very word “rule” (or “law”) unavoidably contains the notion of fairness. The rule determining “out of bounds” in tennis is explicitly designed to make the game fair, because that’s what game rules are for — to make the players equal in every respect but skill. You couldn’t know who is the better tennis player if the rules were arbitrary; “out of bounds” has to be clearly defined, and universally applicable.

If you start talking about the “rules” of Capitalism, then, you might not think about “fairness”, but you can’t help but feel it.

Which the contrast with Communism makes worse. Because of course “Capitalism” and “Communism” are “dialectically constructed”. I don’t like throwing Marxist jargon around, but it’s useful in this case. Because Communism is a system, or a game, or whatever word you prefer. Communism does have rules, and they are explicitly designed — like the rules of all games — to ensure equality.

(And they do, comrades, they really do. As P.J. O’Rourke pointed out back when he was funny, Communism is as fair as it gets. We’re all equally broke, starving, and dead, but goddamn it, we’re equal).

I’m sure I don’t have to tell this crowd what a bad idea it is to let your enemies define things for you, but that’s what “Capitalism” does. Karl Marx his own self invented that term. Pick your famous “Capitalist” thinker — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, whoever. They didn’t call themselves “Capitalists”; they called themselves political economists. They weren’t devising rules for a game; they were describing phenomena they observed. It was only after Marx slapped the “Capitalism” tag on the natural human tendency to exchange stuff for other stuff, each party pursuing what he perceives to be his own advantage, that we started seeing “Capitalists”.

July 21, 2026

Business idea – socialist-themed holiday camp

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

This idea is a banger, but it won’t attract the audience who really could benefit from the experience: the camp experience is what they want you to have, not for themselves.

New startup idea: a socialist-themed holiday camp where affluent Westerners pay premium prices to experience the system they keep voting for.

Picture it. You arrive at Camp VS (Virtue Signal) and hand over your passport (you won’t need it, exit visas take eleven years to process). Staff assign you to a concrete panel block, 320 square feet, shared with two other families you’ve never met. The heating works from 6 to 8 a.m. The elevator works never. Authentic Khrushchyovka construction, guaranteed.

Your daily itinerary: Wake at 5 a.m. Stand in the bread line until noon in minus 15 Celsius. The bread runs out at 11:40, but the queuing builds character, and character is the only thing not in shortage. Afternoon activities include a second line for toilet paper (there is no toilet paper) and a mandatory lecture on how the shortages prove capitalism sabotaged the harvest.

For guests seeking the deluxe package, we offer the Gulag Experience: rock-busting in a quarry under armed supervision, with optional whipping for anyone who fulfills less than 110 percent of quota. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote 1,800 pages about this amenity. Rave reviews, in a sense.

Every fourth guest works as an informant. You won’t know which one. Complaining about the food earns you a midnight interview with camp security, and the food gives you plenty to complain about: it’s cabbage. All of it. Abolish market prices and you abolish economic calculation, so nobody can know what to produce, in what quantity, or for whom. The planners guess. The planners guess cabbage.

Checkout is where the theme really lands. You can’t. The wall around the camp faces inward, and East Germany shot 140 people at theirs between 1961 and 1989 to keep paying customers from leaving the workers’ paradise.

The irony here is that this business would only survive under capitalism, because it needs voluntary customers, market prices, and profit signals to exist at all. Run it as an actual socialist enterprise and within a year the camp has no bread, no rocks, and no guests. Just like the original.

July 14, 2026

QotD: Subaltern Studies

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

Thinking more about the Stupid Smart Guy, I took a quick peek at Salon.com, because nobody is dumber than a Salon writer … and no one thinks he’s smarter. Fully acknowledging it’s sufficient to say “Dunning-Krugerrand: The Website” and move on, nonetheless I persisted, and I came up with a theory I want to run by y’all: The Left are externalizers.

You can come at this in a few different ways. In the History biz, a big buzzword used to be “agency”. Not as in “three letter”, but as in “ability to meaningfully affect your environment”. One has “agency” insofar as one is able to get one’s way. It’s a big deal in the ivory tower, because if the grand sweep of History since the Middle Ages tells us anything, it’s that White guys tend to get their way, while brown guys do not. There are entire continents (and Subcontinents) full of millions of people, run by a handful of honkies.

Obviously that’s very very bad for them … but very very good for you if you want tenure, providing you can find some way to prove that the honkies weren’t really in charge. Subaltern Studies, for instance, is a field where, at its worst, literally anything a brown person does, or doesn’t do, is an example of “agency”, because it’s an example of “resistance” — doing exactly what Whitey says is really sticking it to Whitey, because extremely dense polysyllabic theory-laden reasons.

The stated goal of all this being, to give “agency” to the subaltern. But that’s the funny thing: While explaining at enormous length why “doing exactly what Whitey says” is somehow “resistance”, these folks were in fact acknowledging the massive agency — no quotation marks — of the British. They said “Jump, frog!” and seven hundred fifty million people asked “How high?” There’s only so much jargon can do to disguise that basic power dynamic, which is why “Subaltern Studies” isn’t the hot new thing anymore.

Severian, “Externalizing”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-14.

July 13, 2026

QotD: They took away recess – and then wondered why boys struggled

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

For years, schools have acted as though more learning comes from more sitting, more compliance, more desk time, and more control.

But children do not learn best by being treated like machines.

And boys, especially, often do not thrive when movement, noise, spontaneity, and unstructured play are stripped from the school day.

One of the revealing things about modern education is how casually it has pushed recess aside. What was once understood as a normal and necessary part of childhood is now often treated as expendable — a frill, a reward, or a distraction from the “real work” of school. But the research points in the opposite direction. Recent reviews continue to find that recess is associated with academic and cognitive benefits, behavioral and emotional benefits, physical benefits, and social benefits. The strongest modern claim is not that recess is a magic cure for every school problem, but that it helps children function better and does so without harming academic achievement.

That matters for all children.

But it matters in a special way for boys.

Not because girls do not need recess. They do. But many boys are more movement-driven, more physically expressive, and more likely to regulate themselves through action. A school culture built around prolonged stillness can turn normal boyhood into a problem to be managed. Then, when boys struggle under those conditions, the system acts as though the flaw lies in the boy rather than in the environment. Recent research continues to find sex differences in recess physical activity, with boys on average being more physically active during recess than girls.

Tom Golden, “They Took Away Recess – And Then Wondered Why Boys Struggled”, Men Are Good, 2026-04-06.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress