Quotulatiousness

November 12, 2026

The US Post Office resumes an old, old role – surveillance of dissidents

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s nice when a long-standing institution goes back to one of its earliest roles … in theory. In practice, there should be a lot of questions about why the US Post Office took up responsibility for detecting and observing online dissidents:

We know that mission creep is a thing, but is it entirely necessary for every federal agency to try to reimagine itself as Big Brother?

OK, silly question. Of course, it’s not necessary for the Post Office — that’s the agency under scrutiny this time — to engage in mass surveillance. It just seems to be an activity in which all government bureaucracies inevitably engage. That’s the most logical explanation for why the U.S. Postal Service decided that it should monitor the internet for information about political demonstrations.

The Mailman as Political Cop

“The law enforcement arm of the U.S. Postal Service has been quietly running a program that tracks and collects Americans’ social media posts, including those about planned protests”, Jana Winter first reported in 2021 for Yahoo! News.

“Analysts with the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS) Internet Covert Operations Program (iCOP) monitored significant activity regarding planned protests occurring internationally and domestically on March 20, 2021”, according to a March 2021 bulletin from the iCOP that was included in the article. “Locations and times have been identified for these protests, which are being distributed online across multiple social media platforms, to include right-wing leaning Parler and Telegram accounts.”

Among the organizations alarmed by the disclosure was the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which filed suit to learn more about the surveillance program. “After years of delays and technical failures that led the agency to lose access to a trove of emails discussing the program,” wrote EFF Deputy Legal Director Aaron Mackey, the organization was finally able to extract some key documents about iCOP from the postal cops this month. Others were apparently destroyed.

“The disclosures include a series of bulletins created from iCOP, which show that the postal service used the program in 2020 and 2021 to monitor and circulate information about a wide range of planned protests” from “across the political spectrum,” Mackey added. “They included a planned ‘Million MAGA March‘, a gun rights advocacy event and counter-protest in Virginia, a nationwide Save the Post Office Saturday protest, and planned protests in front of then-Postmaster General Louis DeJoy’s home in Washington, D.C.”

Reports revealed that postal investigators ran keyword searches on social media posts and created “anonymous, untraceable email and social media accounts”, the better to monitor Americans’ conversations. They applied Clearview AI facial recognition software to photos scraped from online platforms for comparison to a database of billions of images.

November 1, 2026

Optimism about the west, despite current events

Filed under: Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam explains why it’s still possible to be optimistic about western culture, even in the face of things like the coup in Poland this weekend:

People always ask me why I’m so optimistic about the West.

A few weeks ago, I told a friend I’d never been more bullish on our future. He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. So I gave him two predictions.

First: the EU, as it exists today, is going to collapse.

Second: we are going to hold a Nuremberg trial for communism. Not for people. For ideas. Because those ideas are still the ones killing us today.

Then I explained why.

There’s one law I’ve watched play out everywhere, in startups, in family fortunes, in empires:

The more a system is full of money and empty of intelligence, the faster it decays.

Take the simplest example. The son or daughter of a billionaire who inherited the money but not the education that came with it. They become parasites on what their parents built. They don’t understand what they’re running. But they’re surrounded by courtiers telling them they’re brilliant, so they feel invincible. And they start breaking things, one confident decision at a time.

That’s the West’s ruling class right now. And here’s the part people miss: a decadent system with no intelligence left doesn’t slowly drift. It collapses. Because it can’t stop making mistakes, and every mistake is bigger than the last.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

In 2024, Marc Andreessen sat down with officials from the Biden administration. By his account, they told him not to bother funding AI startups. AI would be a game for two or three giant companies, working hand in hand with the government. When he pointed out that AI is just math, they told him that during the Cold War they classified entire branches of physics, and they could do the same with the math behind AI.

Think about who they said that to. The man who wrote “Software is eating the world.” The man who understood decades ago that whatever the state gets its hands on, it ruins. Nobody with a functioning brain walks into a room with Marc Andreessen and says that. Those people did. With total confidence.

And now, this week: Donald Tusk.

Police surrounding Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal. Government-backed judges declaring the chief justice suspended. All of it on a Friday evening, while the elected president was on a plane to Senegal, forced to turn around and fly back to Warsaw.

When you’re winning the argument, you don’t send the police to the courthouse.

This is what decadence looks like up close. Endless money. Zero feedback from reality. High on their own supply. Surrounded by people who will never tell them no.

Systems like that don’t reform. They break.

So yes, people find me optimistic. This is why. I’m not betting on these people fixing anything. I’m betting on what gets built after they’ve finished breaking it.

October 31, 2026

ESR reads the amicus briefs in the Chicago AR-15 ban appeal

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

I don’t follow the twists and turns of US gun laws — it’s depressing enough trying to follow Canada’s determined attempts to suppress private gun ownership — so I wasn’t aware of a US Supreme Court case coming up soon:

Remember the scene from the movie “Billy Madison” where the judge says “… what you’ve just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I’ve ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

I’ve been reading the anti-gun-rights amicus briefs in Viramontes v. Cook County, the case challenging Chicago’s ban on AR-15s (thank you @MorosKostas for making them generally available on X). They are like that — a ferrago of absolutely dizzying stupidity.

I’m used to the graboids making dodgy, crappy arguments, because what else can they do really? They don’t have any good ones. Their normal rhetoric isn’t designed to persuade the disinterested, merely to provides a colorable excuse for a judge that already agrees with their position to put a judicial stamp on it. Usually, though, they manage to utter at least a plausible simulation of intelligence.

This, though … these briefs are a whole ‘nother level. The quality of writing and argument is so bad that I repeatedly found myself rereading sentences I had just run my eyes over to verify that, yes, they did actually go there.

What does it all mean?

The fun, paranoid theory would be that the graboids have been infiltrated and this is deliberate sabotage by pro-2A law clerks. Could this be? Naah … but it’s telling that this is actually a tempting idea.

My actual theory is that everybody involved with this litigation knows that the anti-2A side was doomed from the beginning, so they’re not sending their best. They’re doing just enough to comply with somebody’s political direction.

If you trace it back far enough, you probably get to some politician grifting money from the Bloomberg and Soros advocacy machines. Wacky incentives leading to Kabuki theater, everyone involved performing an increasingly stylized and threadbare simulation of competence.

The oral arguments on December 2nd are going to be *lit*.

October 27, 2026

“Originalism” doesn’t mean freezing rights to the technology of the Founding Fathers

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Have you ever been in a conversation with an intelligent-but-undereducated youngster? They’re likely to come up with highly original takes on issues, like “the US Bill of Rights only applies to the kind of guns they had at the time it was written“:

An 1829 printing press. The Founders clearly didn’t intend the freedom of the press to only apply to the printing technology of their era.
Woodcut by George Baxter, Public Domain.

Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, is the latest politician to suggest that the Second Amendment might shield the right to bear arms, but only those that existed at the time that it was adopted: namely, flintlock muskets. It’s a not-so-clever way of trimming back the Constitution’s protections. The argument’s flaws should be clear: the U.S. Supreme Court has already dismissed that line of reasoning, and a world in which the Bill of Rights applies only to 18th century technology would be one where freedom exists only in museum exhibits.

“Everyone Should Have Equal Rights to a Musket”

“I’m gonna swear an oath to the Constitution. The Constitution has a Second Amendment in it, but the Second Amendment, just so we all are clear, even the most conservative folks, they hew to this idea called originalism, and originalism is the idea that you should interpret the Constitution in the context in which the Constitution was written”, El-Sayed insisted at a campaign rally. “When they promised the right to bear arms, they had muskets. So, yeah, everyone should have equal rights to a musket.”

So clever. The Bill of Rights passed in the 1780s, so it must only apply to 1780s things. Except that the courts have thoroughly dismissed that ridiculous line of reasoning.

“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment”, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). “We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications … and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search … the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

The Founders Lived in a Time of Rapid Innovation

The reason for this should be obvious. The founders were not unaware of progress. Many of them were scholars and innovators. They were certainly aware of (and enthusiastic about) continuing advancements in technology. During the then-recent revolution, American troops had faced off against a small unit of redcoats armed with Ferguson breech-loading rifles. A decade before the Bill of Rights was adopted, the 22-shot Girandoni repeating air rifle was introduced, one of which was later sent along on the Lewis and Clark expedition. And Kalthoff and Lorenzoni repeating flintlock firearms had existed for well over a century.

Not to mention, the founders made extensive use of printing presses to distribute pamphlets and official government documents, including the new Constitution, rather than having them hand-copied as they would have been a few centuries earlier. Technology marches on.

That last point illustrates the foolishness of the only-1780s-tech argument, as Scalia pointed out. What use is a First Amendment that applies only to hand-cranked printing presses and unamplified voices? That would leave the internet, television, radio, telephones, and all post-revolutionary means of communications unprotected from government censorship.

October 26, 2026

Reality refuting the beliefs of the gun-grabbers

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

The shooting in Bend, Oregon is turning out to not follow the gun-grabbers’ narrative even a little bit. It’s getting noticed:

I was told by anti-gun extremists that any “Good Guy with a Gun,” would be mistaken for the bad guy and immediately shot by the police, after he was easily shot by the bad guy because the Good Guy with a Gun wouldn’t know how to use his own gun …

What happened in Bend, Oregon? None of that happened …

ESR responds:

Yes, I’ve been thinking that the Bend shooting turned into the graboids’ worst nightmare, and it keeps getting more so as people process it.

Oregon has an A- rating from Giffords. That means its laws were already doing almost everything that the graboids claim should prevent mass shootings. But obviously didn’t.

Giamfranco is soft spoken, articulate, and photogenic. There’s no dismissing him as a scary redneck. And he’s not a veteran or a hunter or anything, just an ordinary family guy who stepped up.

He popped the bad guy with surgical precision. He didn’t hit a bystander, and he didn’t get shot himself either by the bad guy or the cops. Of course this is usually the way it goes, but most people who aren’t gun-culture themselves don’t know that.

The obvious questions is raises are: if gun control didn’t work in Bend, why would it work anywhere? And if an ordinary chill dude can step up to save lives when the laws failed, what kind of idiot do you have to be to want to stop that from happening?

What is it the kids say nowadays? Ah, yes. Cope, seethe, and mald, graboids. This intervention was everything you hate, and that’s good news for the rest of us.

October 23, 2026

Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:

The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.

A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.

And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.

For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.

They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.

And now the machinery is encountering resistance.

Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.

The kids kept playing.

Fucking beautiful.

There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.

And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.

The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.

The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.

They tried to rewrite normalcy.

Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.

October 20, 2026

QotD: What is “hate speech”?

Filed under: History, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What is “hate-speech”? It’s speech the authorities hate. No doubt, it is often worth hating. It may be speech that every right-thinking person ought to hate, but it is also, by definition, speech that falls short of unlawful or tortuous speech — i.e., speech that’s fraudulent, defamatory, seditious, conspiratorial — for which a person could be either sued or charged criminally. Hate-speech legislation seeks to regulate speech that is not against any law — logically, since unlawful speech doesn’t need to be outlawed. Here’s the paradox. Hate-speech legislation can only ban free speech. Prohibited speech is already banned. People often say that freedoms aren’t absolutes and they’re right. Free expression is anything but “absolute” in free societies. It’s hemmed in by strictures against slander, official secrets, perjury, fraud, incitement to riot, and so on. The question is, should laws go beyond these strictures? And if they do, won’t they suppress opinion and creed in the end?

The answer is yes. There is nothing else for them to suppress. Repressive positions are difficult to defend for those who wish to keep their liberal credentials intact. They usually do so by quoting bits of pernicious nonsense from the kind of speech they would ban to illustrate how worthless and abhorrent it is. But pointing to the abhorrent nature of despised speech is insufficient because no speech is legislated against unless it’s abhorrent to some. Nobody outlaws Mary Poppins, not even the Human Rights Commissions (though this could be famous last words).

If suppressing opinion breaches axioms of liberalism, can it be justified by utility? Canadian defenders of hate-speech laws rarely offer any examples, other than the dubious benefit of distinguishing ourselves from Americans (one Human Rights-type called free speech an American concept in a recent court case) but one suggestion is that such laws would have stopped a Hitler. The problem is, the Weimar Republic had such laws. It used them freely against the Nazis. Far from stopping Hitler, they only made his day when he became Chancellor. They enabled Hitler to confront Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels, who stood up in the Reichstag to protest Nazi suspension of civil liberties, with a quotation from the poet Friedrich Schiller: “‘Late you come, but still you come'”, Hitler pointed at the hapless deputy. “You should have recognized the value of criticism during the years we were in opposition [when] our press was forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak for years on end.”

The Nazis would have been just as repressive without this excuse, but being able to offer it made Hitler’s task easier. Like Canadian supporters of hate-speech legislation, supporters of the Weimar Republic thought that their groups and causes would occupy all seats of authority and set all social and legal agendas forever. Shades of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association or the Canadian Jewish Congress! They couldn’t envisage the guns of their own laws being turned around to point at them one day. Eradicating hateful ideas through free discourse is liberal; trying to eradicate them through legislation is illiberal. “There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother’s keeper”, wrote Eric Hoffer, “will end up by being his jail keeper”.

Another thing: “Banned in Boston” sells tickets. As Victor Hugo put it: “The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people”. I’d think twice before banning neo-Nazis for this reason alone.

George Jonas, “Regulating speech that is not against any law”, CanWest Publications, 2008-04-02.

October 10, 2026

Tim Worstall argues that the BC drug decision was correct

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I don’t always agree with Tim Worstall‘s takes, but he’s quite convinced that the recent decision in British Columbia to create a new human right to buy and sell drugs is correct and will lead to better outcomes than the existing law:

Image courtesy of Meme Generator

Drug dealing — branded drug dealing — is now legal. Or it will be once the 6 month stay expires or the Canadian Parliament changes the law.

The change in the law that should — won’t, but should — is that branded drug dealing should be legal.

That humans like to get blitzed is true. That humans like to get blitzed so much that every time anywhere tries to stop it — short of immediate execution for users and dealers — means that whatever the law says there’s always that market in ways to get blitzed. There are two arguments for making it legal to get blitzed. One is the simple liberal point that it’s our own life to waste and we each get to chart our own path — whether sooner or later — to the inevitable grave. The other is that for most drugs the consumption of the pure stuff doesn’t do much harm.

Sure, sure, cocaine turns people into obnoxious wankers but decent heroin has few physical problems and users tend to spend their time contemplating the joys of an enhanced reality. Not my thing but, you know, Meh.

The illegal stuff kills at least tens of thousands to get to us and then tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more through being stepped upon, cut, polluted and then the basic public health problems of AIDS ridden whores — of both, or any, sex — tricking to pay for the next dirty needle full.

We have a solution to this. A known solution. Capitalism. Capitalism in the full light of day and under the rule of law. We don’t just want we positively lust after corporations to make pure junk. Branded, pure, junk. Their brand dependent upon how good the highs are at the price of how few deaths. Their profit depends upon maintaining the value of that brand.

That is, turn that always present human greed into our purity guarantee. Same thing that keeps the rats out of our bread supply — WonderLoaf finding that rat bits in the sandwich reduce their sales.

So, Marlboro branded heroin, that’s the thing. And, yes, Marlboro, they’ve already got that association with horse, haven’t they?

October 8, 2026

Utah’s VPN rules don’t fare well in court

Filed under: Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Like many other jurisdictions, Utah wanted to apply age restrictions to online sites “to protect the children”. It didn’t go well in court:

“Virtual Private Network (VPN)” by Infosec Images is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

As I write, I have my virtual private network (VPN) set to show me as surfing the internet from Berlin, Germany, despite my location in Arizona, for no good reason other than that I can. Given that Germany has rather tight restrictions on speech, this is probably the reverse of how a VPN is usually used between the two countries, but it illustrates the utility of technology that anonymizes internet traffic and lets users pick their points of origin to bypass censorship and surveillance. Germans can bypass controls on “hate speech” and insults directed at politicians, the Chinese can work around restrictions on Winnie the Pooh memes, and people in places like Utah can ignore intrusive age-verification rules.

That’s why it’s important that a federal court just paused enforcement of Utah’s effort to regulate VPNs.

Utah Pushes Age Verification and Targets VPNs

“Signed into law earlier this year, SB 73 attempted to regulate adult websites by requiring them to block VPN users or to identify the physical location of visitors using them or similar tools that mask their network traffic,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) Rindala Alajaji details in a response to the case. “It even went so far as to prohibit websites from offering instructions on how to use a VPN to bypass these checks. This made Utah, to EFF’s knowledge, the first state in the nation to target the use of VPNs to avoid legally mandated age-verification gates.”

Utah was sued over the law by Aylo Freesites Ltd. and Aylo Group Ltd., the owners of Pornhub. The plaintiffs didn’t challenge the law’s age-verification requirements but went after its insistence that the law applies if a user is “actually located” in Utah without regard to the use of “a virtual private network, proxy server, or other means to disguise or misrepresent the individual’s geographic location to make it appear that the individual is accessing a website from a location outside this state”.

Utah’s focus on VPNs and similar tools comes after decades of technological innovation intended to allow internet users to bypass censorship, firewalls, and surveillance imposed by authoritarian regimes that want to monitor and muzzle dissidents. VPNs, perhaps the most popular of the tools, route internet traffic through intermediary servers, encrypting data in the process and concealing users’ locations. That’s extremely handy for people suffering under oppressive rule. In recent years, though, speech restrictions have been increasingly imposed by nominally liberal democratic governments.

VPNs are a good thing, and any government attempting to crack down on their use “to protect the children” is up to no good.

October 1, 2026

“Motte and bailey” doesn’t work with this argument

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Yesterday was nominally “Truth and Reconciliation Day” in Canada, but the government and progressive activist groups are actively trying to suppress honest questions about the whole Residential Schools topic and threatening jail time to those who refuse to mouth the slogans:

This is an interesting thread, because he makes the motte and bailey explicit in a way they’re not usually careless enough to do.

No one denies that the residential schools were rough, that the kids who went there were probably kind of sad, and that some of them died, due to contagious disease mostly. That’s all very unfortunate but doesn’t amount to much more than “kids get homesick at boarding school, discipline back then was often severe by modern standards, and medicine was primitive especially in remote areas”. This is the motte and it isn’t all that impactful because none of it is all that different from conditions that white kids lived through at the time, particularly in remote areas.

But it was very specifically the claim of mass graves due to deliberate genocide that supercharged this issue back in 2021, with the implication that the residential schools were actually a cover for a policy of systematic extermination. At least I assume this is the charge, as they keep saying “genocide” and that’s what genocide is commonly understood to mean. This is the bailey.

The problem is that there is no evidence for mass graves. The few times that they’ve been investigated no bodies were found. At the Kamloops site they deliberately refuse to even dig, which strikes people as suspicious. So people ask questions. It’s only natural to want something more concrete than “because I said so” when you’re being accused of genocide.

So they then retreat to the motte of “well things were hard in the schools”, and okay, yes, they were, but that isn’t genocide. But the implication is that anyone asking for evidence in support of the genocide claim – anyone attacking the bailey – is engaging in “denialism” that the schools even existed or that conditions in the schools were often not ideal. Which literally no one does.

This entire debate comes down to one question. Is the Canadian government guilty of a deliberate, systematic policy of genocide? Did it set out to exterminate the First Nations via the mass murder of their children? That’s it, that’s the issue, that’s what we’re fighting about.

And there’s a very high bar of evidence for proving something like that. At a minimum, you need a whole lot of bones.

Got any bones out in that bailey?

Marc Emery argues that the reservation system was a mistake and it has permanently immiserated most First Nations people and enriched a tiny minority who capture most of the benefits for themselves:

We should have abolished reservations and this idea of tribal land. Each native should have been given land that stays in that person’s family in perpetuity, and then we should have been done.

Instead, tribal lands, reservations, the Rez, have been the worst places on Earth to have been a child or female.

Rape, incest, predation, neglect and child abuse, alcoholism, drug addiction, abandonment, murder, violent assault, domestic violence; no child or youth was spared being witness to this grim experience in their tribal homes.

Statistics don’t lie. No one hates their women more than native men.

The residential schools were much safer.

That was one of the main reasons for residential schools and the 60’s Scoop, get the children away from the dangerous and predatory reserve life. Many mothers who sent their children to residential schools knew this.

This is the truth that must be reconciled. The Whites have paid their dues in triplicate. No more tribute, no more money, no more land.

The natives have to raise themselves up. Blaming the Whites is over. The children of today should not be tax slaves to a pay tens of billions of dollars in annual tributes to a culture that has been so barbaric to women, children, that had slaves, were in constant warfare before the establishment of Canada, that invented nothing, that received the benefits of every technological advance at no cost to these “indigenous” who gladly — eagerly — abandon their ancient traditions for every benefit of European/Canadian invention and wonder.

September 22, 2026

The future of online free speech for Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Liberals in Ottawa prefer not to hear uppity citizens yapping about Liberal policies, and having a majority in the House of Commons means that there’s very little chance that they won’t be able to ram through a bill to curtail the ability of Canadians to speak freely online — that’s why I put a “warrant canary” in my daily Substack summary of blog posts. On X, John Carter has some advice that may be helpful to Canadians who don’t agree with the government:

Carney is essentially trying to implement Yookay style online speech controls. With his stolen majority government, there’s no way to stop him, and so no reason to expect that he won’t succeed.

Canadian nationalists therefore need to start being smart. Use coded language. Avoid overt “hate speech”. Don’t advocate violence. Use positive messaging, love of country rather than hatred of other. Make their job as difficult as possible.

This is nothing the right hasn’t seen before. The bad old days of Twitter censorship are not so far behind us. Britain and Europe already have very similar laws. That hasn’t stopped their nationalist communities. Censorship doesn’t change the underlying social conditions. At worst it prevents people from being too direct. Furthermore, by forcing dissidents to be clever, it exerts a selective pressure that raises the intellectual level of dissidents, while making the censors themselves increasingly ridiculous.

Censors themselves are usually very stupid people. Coded language tends to go right over their tiny heads. They don’t handle satire well. It’s also very easy to mock a regime like this by parroting its own vocabulary. Elbows up, everyone. Diversity is our greatest strength.

State capacity is another factor. How many censors do they actually have? How competent are they? (diversity is our greatest strength!) How many people can they actually enforce these laws on? Every time someone gets dragged into court the state is burning a significant quantity of time, energy, and attention. The cost-benefit of tasking bureaucrats, police officers, lawyers, and judges to punish random shitposts is math that doesn’t math very well. The entire strategy relies on making an example of a few to cow the many. If the many aren’t cowed, because for instance despite the censorship they can see with their own eyes what’s actually happening to their country on the street, all censorship does is piss people off and further undermine the legitimacy of a regime that would not be resorting to censorship in the first place if its legitimacy was beyond reproach.

This is bad. I’m not looking forward to it. But panic won’t help. Keep your wits about you, stay calm, be smart.

September 15, 2026

“I will choose a path that’s clear, I will choose free will”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For some reason, the idea that humans don’t really have free will is very popular among progressives, even if they know individually that they have free will they believe most of the rest of humanity somehow doesn’t:

A simplified free will taxonomy
Image by Richardbrucebaxter via Wikimedia Commons.

A fashionable view of human behavior holds that because everything has a cause, no one is truly responsible for their actions.

In his 2023 bestseller “Determined,” Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky argues that free will is an illusion. “We are nothing more or less than the cumulative biological and environmental luck, over which we had no control, that has brought us to any moment”, he writes. Author and podcaster Sam Harris has spent 15 years making the same case to a popular audience. “Our wills are simply not of our own making,” he writes in Free Will (2012). “Thoughts and intentions emerge from background causes of which we are unaware and over which we exert no conscious control. We do not have the freedom we think we have.”

Common sense pushes back. Consider an example from the psychologist Paul Bloom. Imagine a man who thrashes violently in his sleep and accidentally strikes his wife, breaking her nose. They both wake up, and he is horrified and ashamed. Now imagine a second man who resents his wife and wants to hurt her. He waits until she is asleep and then hits her in the face. When she wakes up, he pretends it was an accident. The difference between these two men is obvious. Any legal or moral system that doesn’t recognize that would collapse.

Yet much of elite discourse encourages us to blur that distinction. Determinists like Messrs. Sapolsky and Harris tell us that behavior can be explained through systems, incentives, trauma, inequality, neurochemistry and social pressure. Much of this is true. But a culture that speaks only this language teaches people that they are spectators in their own lives. The implication, rarely stated outright, is that no one really chooses anything. We are all the first man in the example above, thrashing in our sleep.

The determinists don’t deny that we have wills, or that our actions follow from them. Their argument is that will and action are themselves the products of deeper causes, such as genes, molecules and the environment, and so we can’t really be called free.

Stuart Doyle offers a useful analogy that challenges this claim. Suppose we ask whether an apple is red. The determinist looks closer. He realizes the apple is nothing but atoms. Because no individual atom is red, he concludes the apple can’t really be red. The error is obvious. Color exists at the scale of the apple, not at the scale of an atom.

Free will works the same way. A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn’t prove that choice is an illusion.

September 9, 2026

Government pension funds

Filed under: Economics, Government, History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

If there’s anything that offends a government, it’s a big investment fund sitting there useless (that is, useless to the government, not to the beneficiaries). There’s a pattern when governments start looking interested in private pension funds:

Every pension system a government controls becomes a government slush fund. This is the historical record, not cynicism.

Argentina’s government nationalized $30 billion in private pension assets in 2008, converting workers’ individual accounts into state-controlled funds. The official rationale was protection from market volatility. The actual result was that the Kirchner administration gained a captive pool of capital to finance deficit spending. Your retirement savings, transformed into political currency.

Hungary pulled the same move in 2010, effectively confiscating $14 billion from private pension accounts under Viktor Orbán. Poland followed by seizing roughly half of private pension fund assets in 2013 to reduce its reported public debt. These are the predictable endpoint of any arrangement where the state holds custodial authority over your savings, not fringe cases.

The United States did it more slowly. Congress raided Social Security’s trust fund beginning in the 1960s, replacing actual assets with government IOUs and spending the cash on discretionary programs. The system now carries $23 trillion in unfunded liabilities. Workers who paid into it for forty years will receive whatever Congress decides to give them: a grant subject to political revision, not enforceable property.

Private ownership means enforceable claim. A pension fund you own contractually cannot be redirected to cover a budget shortfall in Buenos Aires or Budapest. The moment government intermediates between your labor and your retirement capital, political priorities start competing with your financial security. They generally win.

Socialists will do anything within their power to get their dirty paws on your hard-earned money. We should do everything we can to stop them.

September 7, 2026

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

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

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

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

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

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

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

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

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

September 1, 2026

Despite police efforts, the Dominion Society successfully holds their conference

Filed under: Cancon, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The Dominion Society of Canada had planned to hold their conference at a venue in Hamilton, but Hamilton police took it upon themselves to harass the owners of rental facilities to ensure that the conference could not take place. Despite active police intervention, the organizers found an appropriate site in Burlington and the event went ahead after all:

It’s always a good look when the local police are trying to intimidate businesses to prevent a peaceful legal gathering from taking place.

On August 29th, the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) hosted a sold-out conference bringing together domestic and international speakers.Taking place in Burlington, the event was originally announced for Hamilton and was elevated to the status of international incident by legally dubious political policing, the likely unconstitutional interference of federal agencies, and numerous violations of political neutrality by local municipalities and charitable organizations.

Launched in 2025 and swelling to several thousand members by 2026, the DSC exists to advocate for immigration restriction and Canadian nationalism. Controversially, this includes a ten-year halt to immigration and the deportation of millions of non-citizen residents.

DSC’s first conference, this was a deciding moment for the increasingly notorious organization and was strongly opposed by left-wing and anti-nationalist groups, including local civic and social planning organizations, the Jewish rights and advocacy group B’nai Brith, Hope Not Hate, and the state-backed Canadian Anti Hate Network.

The event nearly passed with little notice. But moderates and liberals across the country were alarmed at a chilling assault on free assembly and expression mobilized against DSC at all levels of power.

Ahead of the event, the Hamilton Police Service urged venues “to consider the impact this event and its messaging may have on the broader community when making decisions about hosting it” and claimed “the messaging associated with DomCon is divisive and exclusionary and can negatively impact the sense of safety and belonging within our community”.

Dominion Society founder Daniel Tyrie condemned the move to use police resources to dissuade venues from hosting the conference: “Today we learn that they are going venue-by-venue to pressure businesses into canceling on us or refuse our booking. Is this an appropriate use of police resources in a city as dysfunctional as Hamilton?”

In a call with Wire Tap Media, Inspector Darren Murphy denied that Hamilton Police Service (HPS) were engaged in political intimidation, and confirmed the steps taken by HPS to keep DSC out of Hamilton.

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