Quotulatiousness

September 12, 2025

Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Government, Health, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown calls for the end to the Canadian federal temporary immigration scam programs:

It’s not hyperbole to say that Canada has built an entire economy on exploiting cheap, foreign labour through TWFP, as well as the International Mobility Program (IMP). These are two slightly different programs that allow foreign nationals to work in Canada, with most going to Ontario. But contrary to its name, there is nothing “temporary” about the TFWP. Its original purpose was to remedy proven labour shortages while Canadians were hired and trained to eventually do the jobs in question. Meanwhile, the IMP allows international students to work—with or without a proven labour shortage—while they’re studying in Canada.

Between 2019 and 2023, the TFWP increased by 88 percent and the IMP increased 126 percent. They account for close to 1.58 million work permit holders, equal to roughly 7 percent of Canada’s labour force.

Taken together, the results of the TFWP and IMP are deplorable. The TFWP allows foreign nationals to be recruited abroad in vast numbers, brought to Canada, housed in degrading conditions, paid the minimum wage, forced to work long hours, pressured into not joining a union, and required to work for only one employer. Yes, the IMP is more flexible, but it’s more pernicious because it does not even pretend to address labour shortages.

Both schemes are also of course bad for Canadians themselves. The problem is especially grievous for young Canadians trying to get started in the labour market. Canada lost 40,800 jobs this past July, the unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent, and youth unemployment (those between 15 and 24 years old) is now 14.6 percent.

Both the TFWP and IMP are used as business models. Hiring foreign nationals at minimum wage keeps prices low and profits high—most notoriously in the hospitality and trucking sectors, but no industry seems untouched now.

Addicted to cheap foreign labour

The use of the TFWP in the healthcare sector, for example, has grown by an appalling 1,700 percent since 2000. That dramatic rise has no doubt been abetted by the absence of uniform standards and credential recognition among Canadian provinces. If medical personnel could move easily from one province to another, shortages could be filled by Canadians. But historically this has not been possible, and so medical institutions have had to turn to the TFWP. Ontario’s recent determination to solve this problem by speeding up recognition of 50 “in-demand” professions from other provinces is a step in the right direction, and hopefully not too little too late.

Meanwhile, the IMP is a vehicle for outright fraud, ranging from fake acceptance letters from bogus “colleges” to elaborate human-trafficking schemes. Not long ago, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were working and attempting to settle here, rather than studying at any Canadian university or college. Most were migrants from India, and some were trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law-enforcement to investigate alleged links between dozens of “colleges” in Canada and two “entities” in India allegedly facilitating passage into the U.S. When we reflect that an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire this year, we have reason to believe that this abuse, exploitation, and fraud are on a much larger scale that we understand.

The consequences for young Canadians

Both the TFWP and the IMP serve to keep wages artificially low and profits high, and to price Canadians out of the job market. It wouldn’t be wrong to view these programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market, given that temporary workers overwhelmingly earn less than the median wage. And yet, we’re constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ “unwillingness” to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers.

It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of employing younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more cooperative because they are bound to their employers like serfs. They face normally insurmountable barriers to joining unions and have no attachment to the community in which they’re expected to work. In comparison, the domestic population is generally better educated and rooted in the local community.

Young Canadians can afford to be discriminating and should rightly expect higher wages than foreign nationals. Employers should instead work harder to invest in and reward their domestic workforce. In any other era, this would have been obvious. But now there is little incentive for businesses to look beyond cheap, foreign labour.

To get an idea of the magnitude of our collective failure here, consider the following fact. A 2024 study by RBC Economics revealed that Canadian businesses are sitting on a stockpile of cash worth almost a third of our country’s GDP. In other words, Canadian companies have the means to invest in hiring and training Canadians, but simply refuse to do so. The results of this refusal are stagnant wages, structural unemployment, and a de-skilling of the domestic population.

September 11, 2025

The Archbishop of York misunderstands a recent child poverty report

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

Tim Worstall knows that it’s unrealistic to expect a prelate of the Church of England to believe in anything, but in this case His Grace Stephen Cottrell, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Archbishop of York appears to believe that child poverty in Britain is a very serious problem:

His Grace Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York since July, 2020.
Photo 2014 via Wikipedia Commons.

So we’ve the Archbishop of York here telling us all how it should be. Of course, given that that prelacy is Church of England he doesn’t actually believe anything, of course not. But he does roll out what he considers to be facts. Which, sadly, are not.

    With all children across the UK back in school as of this week, I am reminded that almost one in three are in poverty. That statistic is shocking enough – but behind every number is a child, and what this statistic means is children arriving at school hungry, living in insecure housing, and missing out on the activities that help them thrive.

Well, no. His near one in three comes from this JRF report. Which is not measuring poverty at all. It’s measuring inequality — the number of people living in a household on less than 60% of median household income. Which is not, in fact, poverty.

No, think on it. If we doubled the — real — income of everyone in the country then clearly we’d have less poverty. But by this measure, the one of inequality of incomes, the number in poverty would change by not one single person nor child. Equally, if we halved everyone’s incomes — real incomes that it — there would be a lot more poverty. But by this measure there would be no change at all.

There’s also this:

    I visited a school in the north-east of England a couple of years ago where many of the pupils turned up with empty lunchboxes. There was a breakfast club that fed them on arrival. They were eligible for free school meals, so got a hot lunch. After school, trestle tables were set up in the playground laden with food donated from the local food bank. As they went home, they filled up their lunchboxes so that they could have some tea.

    I have rarely been so shocked. This is the reality of child poverty.

Kids are packed to the gunwales with food and this is a sign of poverty? Eh? Sure, sure, I know consubstantiation is pretty heady stuff but really, a little contact with reality please? Kids get two full meals and tuck to take home. This is all free. So, logically, their parents send them to school with empty tuck boxes so that they get two free meals and stuff to take home. I mean, free stuff, who wouldn’t?

Who goes to the pub to pay £7 a pint when booze is flowing free from the town fountain?

Update, 12 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 10, 2025

The hard limits of education

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

On his substack, Freddie deBoer argues that “education doesn’t work”, in that you can’t educate someone beyond their innate abilities no matter how much money you throw at the problem:

For some time now, I’ve been arguing for a perspective on the value of education that does not map cleanly onto any major contemporary ideological position, political party, or school of educational philosophy. My overall thoughts on education1 are as follows:

  1. In any given population, the ability to excel academically (whether or not you call it “intelligence”) is, like almost all other human abilities, plottable as a normal distribution: that is, a few people will be really bad at it, a few people will be really good, and the majority will be somewhere near the middle.
  2. Because some people are simply better at school than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students; this means that “closing the performance gap” between the worst and best students will only be possible if you use the best strategies for the worst students and the worst strategies for the best ones — and even then the most talented students will probably adapt pretty well, because that’s what being a talented student means. Another way to put it: if every student in America were equally well funded and every student equally well taught, point 1 above would still be true.
  3. Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)

In so many human domains, we’re willing to accept that some people are naturally advantaged, bound by some inherent trait to be better than others, whether it’s physical attractiveness, the visual arts, musical performance, athletics, memory, sense of direction, language learning, charisma … We are, generally, perfectly willing to accept that different human beings have profoundly different strengths and abilities. But with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse. It wasn’t always this way. For much of human history, that some people were simply smarter than others was accepted as a matter of course. In particular, and unfortunately, inherent group differences have historically been asserted in cognitive ability, and education was typically walled away from those who weren’t of the right class, gender, race, or station; this, obviously, was unjust and a terrible waste of human talent. In the last 50 years, however, a combination of forces2 has led us to overcorrect and embrace the opposite conclusion, that all individual people have equal ability to excel academically. This has led to all manner of ugly consequences, including blaming those who lack academic talent for their own immiseration and unfairly pinning educational failures on schools and teachers that they are not responsible for.

Our educational debates are largely useless because most people engaged in those debates assume out of hand that, absent unusual circumstances like severe neglect or abuse or the presence of developmental or cognitive disabilities, any student can be taught to any level of academic success, and any failure to induce academic success in students is the result of some sort of unfortunate error. Some tend to ascribe the failure to reach academic excellence as the result of exogenous social variables (like poverty and racial inequality) while others insist that students who have failed to learn to standard are evidence of failing schools and feckless, untalented teachers. My own perspective insists instead that as with any other kind of human ability, academic ability is unequally distributed across the population, with some destined to excel, some destined to struggle, and many destined to meet various levels of mediocrity. My belief is that this tendency is the result of some sort of intrinsic or inherent academic potential, that just as in natural talent for playing a musical instrument or playing a sport, there is such a thing as talent in school, and like all other talents, this one is not distributed equally to all people and is thus not fair.

I in particular hold these three beliefs with descending levels of confidence – the first is an empirical truth that is not debatable, the second is an obvious conclusion to draw that’s difficult to avoid given the first, the third is speculative but appears to be the most likely reason for the first two:

  1. At scale, the relative academic performance hierarchy is remarkably static, with very few students significantly moving to higher or lower positions of educational success over the course of academic life.
  2. The remarkably consistency in student performance over time, even in the face of immense investment and relentless pedagogical and policy efforts to alter student performance, strongly suggests some individual attribute that constitutes an inherent or innate academic potential, predilection, or tendency.
  3. The most direct and parsimonious explanation for this attribute is genes.

What I’m here to demonstrate today is the core empirical point that makes up the first belief: despite the widespread assumption that any student can be educated to any level of performance, in reality students demonstrate a certain level of overall academic ability and gravitate to that level of ability throughout their academic lives, with remarkable fidelity at the population level. Decades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement.3 We can reliably teach some (but never all) students certain knowledge, skills, competencies, and concepts that they did not possess before being taught, which we might call absolute or criterion-referenced learning. But all of these can also be assessed on a relative basis; whether students can read or do algebra or apply the scientific method are all questions that have polychotomous rather than binary answers. That is to say, students can be better or worse at the various cognitive and academic tasks learned in school, and we can assess these abilities and then assign them ranks in a relative distribution, which if our instruments are sound will almost always be normal or Gaussian – some kids will be excellent, some will be terrible, some will be in-between, and they number in each percentile will follow a predictable curve.

  1. Helpfully summarized by my friend Alan Jacobs here.
  2. On the well-meaning side, you have a cheery kind of simplistic egalitarianism, which is emotionally defensible but which ultimately hurts people who lack natural talent, as The Cult of Smart describes; on the less salutary side, the rise of educational blank slate thinking can be traced to the neoliberal turn in American economics, where the dismantling of the labor movement and the steady erosion of the social safety net left ordinary people with no path to basic economic security other than through the college-to-white-collar-work pipeline – which only works for everyone if everyone is equipped to handle that kind of school and work.
  3. Absolute performance = teaching students to do/understand something they couldn’t do/understand before. Taking a student who couldn’t do long division before and teaching them how to do long division is absolute learning; teaching a student the steps in the Krebs cycle such that they can describe them after not knowing anything about them previously is absolute learning; helping a toddler to memorize the alphabet is absolute learning. Tests that are concerned only with the demonstration of the ability to perform a given academic competency or skill (AKA criterion referenced tests) are fundamentally tests of absolute learning. Relative learning = helping any individual students or group of students improve relative to peers/the performance spectrum. One student outperforming other students on a test of long division is an expression of differences in relative learning; observed performance gaps like racial or gender gaps are reflections of relative learning; competitive admissions processes are evaluations of relative ability/learning. Aptitude and achievement tests (AKA norm referenced tests) are fundamentally tests of relative learning.

September 6, 2025

QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles

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

Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3

The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”

There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.

But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5

Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.

    1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:

    “Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”

    2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.

    3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”

    4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.

    5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.

    6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:

    “I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”

    7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.

September 1, 2025

QotD: The Ivy League

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

I’ve been around Ivy Leaguers, y’all, and everything you think is true about them IS true, in spades. The Ivy League is “elite”, all right, but it’s surely not because of the education.

The Ivies are now what they’ve pretty much always been — the equivalent of those Higher Party Academies in Moscow. They’re finishing schools for the Apparat. Oh sure, you can probably find a graduate of Ohio State or some such place at Quantico or Foggy Bottom … but I promise you, he hears about it every single day of his life. If they don’t actually teach classes called “How to be a Toady in the DOJ” and “Catching a Senator’s Farts” at Dartmouth, they might as well.

Take your Basic College Girl, make her unisex, crank her up way past eleven on meth and steroids, and that’s the typical Ivy League grad. And they all go directly into Government. Just in case you still cherished some vague hope we could vote our way out of this, remember that guys like Robert McNamara and McGeorge Bundy were the absolute best the Ivy League has produced in the modern era. The Democratic People’s Republic of Vietnam says hi!

Severian, “First Mailbag of the New Year”, Founding Questions, 2022-01-07.

Update, 2 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 15, 2025

Ted Gioia on Hunter S. Thompson

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

I must admit that I got hooked on Hunter S. Thompson’s writing very early. I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in my mid-teens and it blew my mind. I couldn’t actually believe everything he wrote, but I couldn’t completely discount it either. I certainly haven’t read everything he wrote … especially his later sports commentary, but I have read most of the best-known books. On his Substack, Ted Gioia is running a three-part series on the writer and his work:

That’s Hunter Thompson. There’s always someone in control behind the wheel — even when he seems most out of control.

This hidden discipline showed up in other ways. Years later, when he ran for sheriff in Aspen or showed up in Washington, D.C. to cover an election for Rolling Stone, savvy observers soon grasped that Thompson had better instincts and organizational skills than some of the most high-powered political operatives. People rallied around him — he was always the ringleader, even going back to his rowdy childhood. And hidden behind the stoned Gonzo exterior was an ambitious strategist who could play a long term game even as he wagered extravagantly on each spin of the roulette wheel that was his life.

“I don’t think you have any idea who Hunter S. Thompson is when he drops the role of court jester,” he wrote to Kraig Juenger, a 34-year-old married woman with whom he had an affair at age 18. “First, I do not live from orgy to orgy, as I might have made you believe. I drink much less than most people think, and I think much more than most people believe.”

That wasn’t just posturing. It had to be true, merely judging by how well-read and au courant Thompson became long before his rise to fame. “His bedroom was lined with books,” later recalled his friend Ralston Steenrod, who went on to major in English at Princeton. “Where I would go home and go to sleep, Hunter would go home and read.” Another friend who went to Yale admitted that Thompson “was probably better read than any of us”.

Did he really come home from drinking binges, and open up a book? It’s hard to believe, but somehow he gave himself a world class education even while living on the bleeding edge. And in later years, Thompson proved it. When it came to literary matters, he simply knew more than most of his editors, who could boast of illustrious degrees Thompson lacked. And when covering some new subject he didn’t know, he learned fast and without slowing down a beat.

But Thompson had another unusual source of inspiration he used in creating his unique prose style. It came from writing letters, which he did constantly and crazily — sending them to friends, lovers, famous people, and total strangers. Almost from the start, he knew this was the engine room for his career; that’s why he always kept copies, even in the early days when that required messy carbon paper in the typewriter. Here in the epistolary medium he found his true authorial voice, as well as his favorite and only subject: himself.

But putting so much sound and fury into his letters came at a cost. For years, Thompson submitted articles that got rejected by newspapers and magazines — and the unhinged, brutally honest cover letters that accompanied them didn’t help. He would insult the editor, and even himself, pointing out the flaws in his own writing and character as part of his pitch.

What was he thinking? You can’t get writing gigs, or any gigs, with that kind of attitude. Except if those cover letters are so brilliant that the editor can’t put them down. And over time, his articles started resembling those feverish cover letters — a process unique in the history of literature, as far as I can tell.

When Thompson finally got his breakout job as Latin American correspondent for the National Observer (a sister publication to the Wall Street Journal in those days), he would always submit articles to editor Clifford Ridley along with a profane and unexpurgated cover letter that was often more entertaining than the story. In an extraordinary move, the newspaper actually published extracts from these cover letters as a newspaper feature.

If you’re looking for a turning point, this is it. Thompson now had the recipe, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs:

  1. The story behind the story is the real story.
  2. The writer is now the hero of each episode.
  3. All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.

Why can’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson …

August 11, 2025

Smug Canadian boomer autohagiography rightly antagonizes the under-35s

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Education, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Fortissax had an argument with one of his readers over a smug, self-congratulating meme about how wonderful Canada was in the 1990s and early 2000s:

What we lived through long before Trudeau was the Shattering, the breakdown of Canada’s social cohesion, driven by left-liberalism with communist characteristics applied to race, ethnicity, sex, and gender, and punitive almost exclusively toward visibly White men. My generation, those millennials born on the cusp of Gen Z, saw post-national Canada take shape not in the comfortable suburban rings of the GTA or the posh boroughs of Outremont and Westmount, but in self-segregated, ghettoised enclaves of immigrants whose parents never integrated and were never required to.

Memes like that are dishonest because they feed a false memory. The 2000s were not normal. Wages were stagnant, housing was already an asset bubble, and immigration was still flooding in under a policy that explicitly forbade assimilation. Brian Mulroney had enshrined multiculturalism into law in 1988. Quebec alone resisted, carving out the right to limit immigration under the 1992 Quebec–Canada Accord. After Chrétien, Stephen Harper brought in three million immigrants, primarily from China, India, and the Philippines in that order.

The Don Cherry conservatives of that era were Bush lite. They were rootless, cut off from their history, their identities manufactured from the top down since the days of Lester B. Pearson. They conserved nothing. For Canadian youth, it was the dawn of a civic religion of wokeness, totalitarian self-policing by striver peers, and the quiet coercion of every institution. My memories of that decade are of constant assault — mental, physical, spiritual — from leftists in power, from encroaching foreigners, and from the cowardice of conservatives.

Your 2000s might have been great. For us, they were communist struggle sessions. In 2009 we were pulled from class to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama, a foreign president, as a historic moment for civil rights. Our schools excluded us while granting space to every group under the sun: LGBT safe spaces and cultural clubs for Italians, Jamaicans, Jews, Indians, Indigenous, Balkaners, Greeks, Slavs, Portuguese, Quebecois, Iroquois, Pakistanis — every culture celebrated except our own. Anglo-Quebecers and Anglo-Canadians got nothing but an Irish club, closely monitored for “white supremacy” and “racism” by the HR grandmas of the gyno-gerontocracy of English Montreal. Students self-segregated, sitting at different cafeteria tables and smoking at different bus shelters. At Vanier, Dawson, and John Abbott College, these divisions were institutionalised. I remember walking into the atrium of Dawson, my first post-secondary experience, greeted by a wigger rolling a joint while a Jamaican beatboxed to Soulja Boy.

We became amateur anthropologists out of necessity, forced to navigate a nationwide cosmopolitan experiment from birth. We learned the distinctions between squabbling southeastern Europeans of the former Yugoslavia, and we did not care if Kosovo was Serbia or whether Romanians and Albanians were Slavic, they all acted the same way. We learned the divides within South Asia, the rivalries between Hindutva and Khalistani, the differences between a Punjabi, a Gujarati, a Telugu, a Pakistani, a Hong Konger, a mainlander, and a Taiwanese. We know the shades of Caribbean identity, the factions of the Middle East, and the intricacies of North African identity. We should never have needed to know these things, but we do.

For us, childhood in this cesspit was the seedbed of radicalism. We never knew an era when contact with foreigners was limited to sampling food at Loblaws. All we know is being surrounded by those who hate us, governed by a state that wants to erase us, with no healthcare, no homes, no jobs that are not contested by foreigners, and no money to start families.

July 26, 2025

The desperate narcissism of the “Cool Professor”

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

Freddie deBoer on the pathetic academic specimen sometimes known as “Bob” or “Biff” or “Lizzie” — the dreaded self-imagined “cool professor”:

“heh, probably never expected to have a professor with full sleeve tattoos, huh? well, that’s not the last time your mind’s gonna be blown this semester …”
Image and caption from Freddie deBoer’s Substack

Let me tell you about the saddest figures in the American university. They wear black jeans and Chuck Taylors to class, except maybe on the first day, when they stroll in wearing semi-ironic suits designed to contrast with their ample tattoos. Their syllabuses are printed in Helvetica. They mention Chappell Roan in the first fifteen minutes of the first day of class. They tell their students, with a wink, that they don’t believe in grades — why, who are they to judge their students! They encourage everyone in class to call them by their first names, or perhaps a contrived nickname. They hope to blow everyone’s minds when they theatrically announce that in their classes, students pick the readings, because the students are the ones who really know what’s worthy of their time. They describe themselves as “friends” or “guides” or “partners”, not as teachers or professors. They disdainfully invoke the words “rigor” and “standards” only with ironic scare quotes and want you to know that they don’t believe in deadlines. They subtweet the provost on BlueSky. They are the Cool Professors. And they are frauds.

The Cool Professor fundamentally does not want to teach, as teaching requires the teacher to sometimes be the bad guy. The Cool Professor can’t stand to be the bad guy, chafes at the very idea. That’s the core of all of this. The posture, the cultivated aesthetic of rejection, the performance of cool — none of it’s about students, even though Cool Professors will not shut the fuck up about how they run a “student-centered classroom”. Their affect isn’t about pedagogy. It’s about insecurity and narcissism, their desperate need to be perceived as the rare exception, the rogue academic, the anti-institutional rebel. Cool Professors aren’t trying to liberate students. They’re trying to be loved, and in being loved by students stave off their horror about growing old. And if that means letting students drift intellectually, if that means mistaking chaos for creativity, if that means failing to ever give anyone a hard but necessary lesson, then so be it. Because the thing the Cool Professor wants to avoid at all costs is being perceived as an authority figure, and that is precisely what students most need them to be.

It’s a common misunderstanding, particularly among faculty who feel alienated from the bureaucracy of the university or who fancy themselves transgressive thinkers, that teaching should never be hierarchical. The idea is that it’s somehow oppressive to know more than your students or to presume to evaluate their performance; that knowing more than your students and evaluating their performance are publicly understood to be core parts of being a teacher typically goes ignored. Many who consider themselves modern or progressive in the academy insist that education should be horizontal, an equal exchange between learner and guide, that the classroom is a site of resistance or liberation. But these ideas, while maybe flattering to the professor’s ego and superficially appealing to a certain kind of idealist, are incoherent. They’re built on a fundamental category error: mistaking the classroom for a club meeting, or a dinner party, or a DSA breakout session. The classroom is none of those things. It’s a site of instruction, and in a site of instruction one party knows more than the other; one party evaluates the other; one party is, necessarily, in charge.

(And, for the record, the fundamental dictate of critical pedagogy is always and forever self-defeating: if you inspire your students to rebel against your authority in your own classroom, they’re still following your lead and thus not rebelling at all. The ubiquitous goal of prompting students to resist top-down education, whatever that means, is unachievable, because if you do prompt them to resist, they’re actually complying with your desires, not resisting them. It’s a good old fashioned paradox and not one you can bluff your way out of with abstruse academic vocabulary.)

The plain fact that a teacher must necessarily have some sort of control over the classroom space that the students do not makes people uncomfortable. Authority always does. But then, the job of a teacher is not to minimize discomfort; indeed, a good teacher will necessarily make their students uncomfortable, on occasion, as it’s often only in the space of genuine discomfort that we’re inspired to achieve our deepest growth. The professor’s job to be responsible for the intellectual development of students, which inevitably involves making judgments: what is true, what is false, what is well argued, what is sloppy, what is insightful, what is clichéd. If you aren’t willing to say those things, if you shrink from judgment, you’re abandoning the role you signed up for, you’re copping out. You’re indulging yourself, and your own flattering self-mythology, at the expense of the people you’re supposed to be teaching.

July 25, 2025

Autism, then and now

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

At Psychobabble, Hannah Spier traces the rise of autism from its first formal definition to something that 1 in 36 kids is diagnosed with:

When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.

From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.

Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock Holmes have helped turn the image of autism into a badge of honour. It means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.

People with narcissism and psychopathic traits exploit wherever they can, we know this. And yet again, psychiatry, the ones who should be the best at recognizing these, made it easy pickings by flinging the diagnostic gates wide open. Longtime readers will recognize the pattern: I’ve written before about the diagnostic creep in trauma, expanding definitions that blur the line between disorder and ordinary variation. The same diagnostic creep has unfolded here. Autism, once narrowly defined, was steadily loosened through each revision of the DSM.

The Great Diagnostic Expansion

Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures. These were not quirky introverts. These were children who required full-time care and specialized schooling. In the DSM-III of the 1980s, it was called infantile autism. The criteria required clear onset before 30 months, marked language delays, gross deficits in social interaction, and repetitive behaviours. These were developmental dysfunctions, not misunderstood personalities. And neither clinicians nor parents had a problem naming them as such.

Then came the DSM-III-R in 1987, which introduced pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and broadened the field significantly. Suddenly, language delay and intellectual disability were no longer central. Subclinical cases were included. Asperger’s Syndrome followed in the DSM-IV in 1994, adding high-IQ individuals with no language delays but poor social functioning. A child who spoke on time but didn’t understand jokes, had poor eye contact, and rigid routines was now also autistic.

But the most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. The subtypes were eliminated. Autism became one spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: social communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviours. A person needed to meet just six out of twelve traits, spread across these two clusters. Language and cognitive delay? Optional. Even the requirement for early onset was removed. A diagnosis could now be given based on historical symptoms. Questionnaires like the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) are so broad and subjective they can be easily gamed. This made it possible for 30-year-olds to recall feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing to receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care.

The diagnostic category has become a black hole, pulling in people with no clinical resemblance, collapsing distinction into sameness. From what I’ve observed, three distinct autism “patients” now account for much of the increased prevalence, none of whom would have qualified under the original criteria.

July 24, 2025

The vicious competition for Indian civil service jobs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Education, Government, India — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Once upon a time in most of the Anglosphere, the advantage of civil service jobs was that they were nearly impossible to get fired from and had a relatively good pension at the end of a long career. Private sector jobs were far less permanent, but paid more, had better benefits, and more prestige. Over the last fifty years, little of that is still true — civil servants still have fantastic job security, but they’re also better paid, have better benefits, and for many there are opportunities to retire and get re-hired back into a similar position with even higher pay while collecting a generous pension. The private sector no longer pays better nor offers significantly better benefits, so lots of people look to get into the civil service who once would have shunned positions like that.

It’s apparently much worse in India:

In India, government jobs pay far more than equivalent jobs in the private sector — so much so that the entire labor market and educational system have become grossly distorted by rent-seeking to obtain these jobs. Teachers in the public sector, for example, are paid at least five times more than in the private sector. It’s not just the salary. When accounting for lifetime tenure, generous perks, and potentially remunerative possibilities for corruption, a government job’s total value can be up to 10 times that of an equivalent private sector job. (See also here.)

As a result, it’s not uncommon for thousands of people to apply for every government job — a ratio far higher than in the private sector. In one famous example, 2.3 million people submitted applications for 368 “office boy” positions in Uttar Pradesh.

The consequences of this intense competition for government jobs are severe. First, as Karthik Muralildharan argues, the Indian government can’t afford to pay for all the workers it needs. India has all the laws of, say, the United States, but about one-fifth the number of government workers per capita, leading to low state capacity.

But there is a second problem which may be even more serious. Competition to obtain government jobs wastes tremendous amounts of resources and distorts the labor and educational market.

If jobs were allocated randomly, applications would be like lottery tickets, with few social costs. Government jobs, however, are often allocated by exam performance. Thus, obtaining a government job requires an “investment” in exam preparation. Many young people spend years out of the workforce studying for exams that, for nearly all of them, will yield nothing. In Tamil Nadu alone, between one to two million people apply annually for government jobs, but far fewer than 1% are hired. Despite the long odds, the rewards are so large that applicants leave the workforce to compete. Kunal Mangal estimates that around 80% of the unemployed in Tamil Nadu are studying for government exams.

Classical rent-seeking logic predicts full dissipation: if a prize is worth a certain amount, rational individuals will collectively spend resources up to that amount attempting to win it. When the prize is a government job, the “spending” is not cash, but years of a young person’s productive life. Mangal calculates that the total opportunity cost (time out of the workforce) that job applicants “spend” in Tamil Nadu is worth more than the combined lifetime salaries of the available jobs (recall that jobs are worth more than salaries, so this is consistent with theory). Simply put, for every ₹100 the government spends on salaries, Indian society burns ₹168 in a collective effort of rent-seeking just to decide who gets them.

The winners are happy but the loss to Indian society — of unemployed young, educated workers who do nothing but study for government exams — is in the billions. Indeed, India spends about 3.86% of GDP on state salaries (27% of state revenues times 14.3% of GDP). If we take Mangal’s numbers from Tamil Nadu, a conservative (multiplier of 1 instead of 1.68) back-of-the-envelope estimate suggests that India could be wasting on the order of 1.4% of GDP annually on rent-seeking. (Multiply 3.86% of GDP by 15 (30 years at 5% discount) to get lifetime value, and take 0.025 as annual worker turnover.) Take this with a grain of salt, but regardless, the number is large.

July 22, 2025

Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class

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

Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:

There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.

Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.

Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.

Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.

While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.

How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?

Rebels searching for causes

Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.

The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.

Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.

The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.

The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.

This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.

Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.

[…]

What to make of all this?

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.

They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.

Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.

Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.

Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.

The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.

QotD: Social assistance as a Western cargo cult

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

Part of the problem with social policy here in America is that it is conducted like a South Pacific Cargo Cult. We looked around and saw that the majority of successful people owned their own homes and had college degrees, so we figured that if we grabbed any old slacker and subsidized them a home and a college degree, then they, too, would become successful. It’s got cause and effect completely out of whack.

Tamara Keel, “From a conversation elsewhere…”, View From The Porch, 2020-06-10.

July 21, 2025

“Normal”? Dude, that’s extremist right-wing hate speech!

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

The Bone Writer on the huge increase in young people “identifying” as something other than what unreconstructed cavemen used to call “normal”:

Walk through any high school, scroll through TikTok, or attend a freshman orientation, and you’ll see the new hierarchy of modern identity:

  • Straight white male? Bottom rung.
  • Bisexual nonbinary neurodivergent? Stunning and brave.
  • Confused, anxious, fluid? You’re seen. You’re valid.
  • Rooted, stable, and clear? YOU must be dangerous.

It’s not just a cultural shift anymore. It’s a cultural mutation. A slow but total dislocation from reality.

We are no longer celebrating the diversity of life. We are celebrating the diversity of escape routes from it.

Identity as a Compass? No … It’s Identity as Camouflage

There was a time when “identity” meant something integrated, a clear expression of who you are, shaped by your values, your upbringing, your nature.

Now, identity is:

  • A product
  • A protest
  • A mask

It’s often less about expressing truth and more about shielding from judgment.

And nowhere is that clearer than in the explosion of LGBT+ self-identification, especially among the young.

The Numbers Don’t Lie but No One Wants to Look at Them

In 2012, Gallup found ~3.5% of Americans identified as LGBT.

By 2021? Over 20% of Gen Z now identify somewhere on the spectrum.

Among Gen Z women, bisexual identity has grown by over 400%.

Do you really believe this is all “just visibility”? Do you really think the human genome changed this much in 10 years?

Of course not.

What changed was the culture. And culture now rewards deviation and punishes normativity.

Reported by Axios in 2021

QotD: The parasitic classes

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

A parallel case may be found in the “civil” services, regulating authorities, non-profits, &c. Jobs in these areas, which command high salaries and pensions, and present delicious opportunities for graft, are outwardly the opposite of productive. They parasitically consume, on a colossal scale, the resources of the productive.

Look into almost any kind of “charitable” activity, such as social work, and one will find that only a tiny proportion of the cash “trickles down” to the characteristically desperate “clients”. And when it does, they use it to buy not only drugs and licker, but truly useless things, such as lottery tickets.

“Education” systems, in the modern West, exist chiefly to enrich semi-literate, unionized schoolteachers. In many parts of Ontario, for instance, a teacher will make at least double what the average parents make, and therefore feel justified in sneering. The teachers naturally consider that the little ones belong to them, for they are the necessary source of their income. What rights should parents have to interfere in their upbringing?

My best argument for the parasite class (always granting that some may be sincere), is that they protect society from gathering excessive wealth, or living lives of too much ease. Without them, we might easily suffer from the vices associated with too much freedom.

How I preferred the deadbeat, layabout, very English London of the Labour Party, when I lived there in the ‘seventies — to the cosmopolitan, rich, over-swept London of the Thatcher years. There are some advantages to socialism.

And there are other arguments, too, for putting depraved Leftists in power, though on examination they reveal special pleading. For instance, teachers may claim to offer child-minding services, so that mothers, especially, can go to work. But it is because heavy taxation requires the dual income, or women to do horrible and demeaning paid work when their husbands run away, that these services were ever made necessary.

The government does, arguably, “create” employment. Among the most farcical examples are the tax lawyers and consultants. Taxpayers need these to navigate incredibly elaborate tax codes, for their own protection. Only a professional can find the loopholes. Whereas, a comprehensible, flat tax system would put all these “experts” out of business. It would shrink revenue departments spectacularly, and by extension, threaten to shrink taxes. To a professional politician, this would never do. It would shrink his power.

David Warren, “Answering to a ‘need'”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-18.

July 20, 2025

QotD: Above all else, helicopter parents hate … helicopter parenting

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

It’s a very weird, but oft-observed, phenomenon that the biggest opponents of “helicopter parenting” are … helicopter parents. You can go into a Starbucks and announce to the gaggle of Karens: “Kids these days are so soft; their parents never let them get hurt or make any mistakes, and so they never learn anything!” all you’ll get complete, enthusiastic agreement. Meanwhile, they’ve got their Jayden and Kayden and Brayden and Khaleesi coated in bubble wrap, wearing three masks and taking hand-sanitizer baths every half hour.

If the kid gets anything less than an A-triple-plus in Zoom School, Karen is immediately on the horn to the teacher … and since all schools these days, even the rare physical ones, are all wired up with “classroom management software”, they can bombard their kids’ teachers with emails and text messages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Helmets, knee pads … kids these days wear more safety gear than a mountain climber just to ride their bikes, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them kitted out like hockey goalies if recess ever becomes a thing again. Can the day be far off when every kid is trailed by xzheyr own personal injury lawyer, and parents are forced to sign waivers to let their kids use the bathroom?

Everyone knows how bad this is for childhood development, but if I told some kid with a scraped knee to rub some dirt on it, you’ll be fine, I’d probably get hauled up on child endangerment charges.

How can kids advance past age twelve, mentally and emotionally, if they’re never allowed to get hurt? To fail? To suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions?

I’m no developmental psychologist, but it seems obvious that such learning is time-limited. If you haven’t learned that X brings pain — and WHY — by the time you hit twelve years old, then on some fundamental level you’re never going to learn it.

Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress