Quotulatiousness

July 2, 2026

Canada has to stop defining itself as merely “Not-America”

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

Devon Eriksen responds to a cringey video that claims to explain Canada Day to Americans. The thumbnail image includes some of the usual suspects for this kind of embarrassing nonsense — “free healthcare!” … “poutine!”.

Once again, we see that Canada defines itself as Not-America.

So much so that in the very video where they try to explain their national identity, they require Straw-America as a prop.

But, having embraced multiculturalism and ethnic erasure of White people, they have painted themselves into a corner. Any positive Canadian identity, which identified Canada as what it is, rather than what it is not, would by definition distinguish it from other countries in the world, rather than just America. And this would exclude people of and from those cultures from being Canadian.

Which would be racist, or something.

So what this ends up meaning is that you may talk about what distinguishes Canada from America, and why Canadians are not American and Americans are not Canadian.

But you may NOT talk about what distinguishes Canada from India, and why Canadians are not Indian and Indians are not Canadian.

Or they’ll throw you in jail.

No culture, group, or organization can survive indefinitely by defining itself with a negative, which is why, for example, there are no atheist churches.

Canadians, accordingly, now share no common values, no common ethos, telos, or even logos, have nothing they can agree on, and nothing that binds them together other than physical geolocation and legal jurisdiction.

This is not patriotism, and patriotism, while it is regarded by liberals as a sort of embarrassing social disease, is actually required to get humans to act in concert for mutual good.

Canadians need something to celebrate on Canada Day other than their fear and resentment of Americans who barely think about them at all in any given month.

I honestly don’t know what the average Canadian would say, if he was asked to define a Canadian without referencing America. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include Brits or Australians. If he was asked to define a Canadian in a way that didn’t include government programs and minor food idiosyncrasies.

You can’t just be the nation of gravy and cheese curds on fries.

You have to stand for something.

“Poutine” by JoePhoto is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

YourSmartAsianFriend also responds to the video:

Now from a real Canadian:

You better have a snack with you because wait times in Emergency often exceed 10 hours.

Most of us don’t eat poutine — or do so on rare occasion — but eating probably the most unhealthy dish ever conceived not something to boast about.

The entire system is fine but again, bragging about a your measurement standard is absurd, and moreover if you ask most Canadians what their height is, they’ll respond: 5’6, 6’2, etc. … if you say … he was 184 cm … you’ll get mostly blank looks.

Our plastic bag milk is wholly subsidized and controlled by our government dairy cartel — insuring higher prices for all.

What we also have is: emergencies act unlawfully used to crackdown on citizens including seizing their bank accounts, media funded by the government and thus beholden to them. New censorship laws on the way resulting in even more tech companies saying they’ll leave Canada. The highest cellphone rates because again we have regulated our own phone company cartel. We have severe housing shortages (while importing millions of undocumented and temporary visa foreigners) driving housing prices to astronomical levels. We have indigenous peoples now making legally endorsed claims to developed land calling into question much of Canada’s development — the same indigenous groups who have been funded with huge sums and have carved out their own independent country within Canada with the threat of going even farther.

There are many more issues, however, fear not — we have utterly vapid Liberal memes to distract us!

Full disclosure: on Tuesday I actually did order and eat a plate of poutine in a restaurant. In my defence, it was the first poutine I’d eaten in several months … while I enjoy the dish that has been described as “the culinary equivalent of having unprotected sex with a stripper in the parking lot of a truck stop in eastern Quebec”, it’s a very occasional item in my diet.

July 1, 2026

Scholarship replaced by elitist gatekeeping and bad faith

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It is possible — in fact, essential — to discover and disseminate the facts about Indian Residential Schools. Repeating the unproven (and to many, deeply discredited) narrative and denouncing those seeking the facts as “denialists” has nothing to do with scholarship but it’s very much in line with gatekeeping:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Let’s be honest about what is happening in this video.

This is not academic debate. It is a character attack dressed up as scholarship.

Dr. Travis Hay’s presentation at Mount Royal University, uploaded by Frances Widdowson under the title “Bad Faith: Residential School Denialism and the Academy”, is deeply disappointing. I expected a serious lecture. I expected evidence, argument, and a careful dismantling of claims he believes are wrong.

Instead, what we get is a bad faith lecture.

So yes, Bad Faith is a good title. Just not for the reason Hay thinks.

The real bad faith is pretending to defend scholarship while avoiding the hard work of open debate.

Hay spends much of the lecture drawing a line between “good faith” and “bad faith” criticism. But his standard for good faith appears to be simple: you may disagree only inside the boundaries of the approved framework. You can quibble over details. You can adjust the margins. You can offer polite corrections.

But if you challenge the premise itself, suddenly you are no longer mistaken. You are morally defective. You are a “denialist”, a “grievance merchant”, or some broken person who must be pushed outside respectable academic life.

That is not scholarship. That is gatekeeping.

None of this requires minimizing the real harm done by residential schools. It simply means historical claims should be open to examination. Evidence should be tested. Terms should be defined. Numbers should be scrutinized. Arguments should be answered.

Instead, Hay leans heavily on moral outrage, personal denunciation, and guilt by association. Rather than carefully taking apart Widdowson’s arguments, he drags in old controversies involving other people, uses emotional anecdotes, and builds a mood where the audience is being told what to feel before they are allowed to think.

The most revealing part is the conclusion. Hay says people like Widdowson do not belong in the academy. In other words, the answer to uncomfortable academic work is not better evidence, better reasoning, or open debate. It is expulsion.

That should bother everyone.

A university that cannot tolerate dissent is not protecting knowledge. It is protecting doctrine.

If Widdowson is wrong, prove it. Debate her. Bring the evidence. Take her claims apart in public. That is what serious scholars are supposed to do.

But when the response is censorship, exclusion, and personal insult, it starts to look less like confidence and more like fear.

I came away from viewing this lecture disappointed. Not because Hay disagrees with Widdowson. Disagreement is the whole point of academic life. I was disappointed because the lecture showed so little faith in the public’s ability to hear competing arguments and judge the evidence for themselves.

This lecture does not prove that Widdowson’s arguments are wrong. It proves that parts of the academy no longer know how to handle a serious challenge without reaching for moral panic and professional exile.

QotD: An imaginary obituary for a nation

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I present the following thought exercise to you: if some overeager, industrious journalist were to write an obituary for Canada, how would it read?

    Today, the world marked the passing of Canada, younger than most, older than some. Canada, on her best days was a beacon in the world for freedom, justice, inclusion, poutine and hockey. Canada gave the world the telephone, the lightbulb, the pacemaker, insulin and was the first nation to successfully complete a double lung transplant.

    For the better part of her history, Canada was a trusted ally, a safe harbour for those fleeing persecution, a voice for the voiceless and an example for other nations. People from around the world flocked to her shores to bring the best of where they came from together with others contribute to building a nation that was unlike any other in the world.

    But the last few years of her life did seem to be defined by a nearly psychopathic desire to get in her own way. Anointed by God with a natural bounty that, if mined and managed responsibly could have made her one the fairest and wealthiest nations in the history of the world. And yet that natural bounty remained largely locked away.

    Canadians had built one of the fairest and most equal societies on the planet, and yet they seemed hell-bent on focussing on the minutia and sometimes the mirages that appeared to divide them.

    The 21st century was poised to be the Canadian century, but through much fault of their own, Canadians squandered that opportunity, and today we bid farewell to a nation that had greatness within its grasp, but decided instead to become smaller, to become lesser, to marginalize itself and by extension, made the world a less wonderful place.

    Canada: for many on the outside looking in, gone far too soon. Ironically, the assessment of the Canadian legacy by so many who, through the happy accident of birthright, or another privileged pathway to citizenship is markedly different: she overstayed her welcome.

Ben Mulroney, “Canada’s chance to find itself again”, National Post, 2025-11-10.

June 30, 2026

Leading the grassroots revolt against AI … Homer Simpson

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia posted this a couple of days back, but if you haven’t read it it’ll still be new to you:

Last November I suggested that 2026 would witness a tech backlash of unprecedented intensity. And it’s now happening with a vengeance. Silicon Valley is getting skewered everywhere, and to a degree inconceivable just a short while ago.

Just yesterday, The Economist finally grasped how rapidly tech antipathy is mounting — and made AI backlash its cover story.

The latest survey numbers are devastating. Every demographic group is now opposed to AI—especially young people, previously the most enthusiastic supporters of new tech.

[…]

Not every pushback to encroaching tech is quite so gentle.

Consider the case of “Mr. Daniels,” a 25-year-old man from England. He knows that AI will rob every music file on the web for training — so he decided to poison the data.

How did he do it? According to Tuned Into Tech, it happens like this:

    He took his entire music library of 2,000 records, stripped out the original vocals, and replaced every single one of them with the voice of Homer Simpson. Then he uploaded all of them to Soulseek. He didn’t change the metadata, the file names, the artist tags, the album information. They all stayed exactly the same.

A listener might not notice at first. Some of these songs have long intros, and those are unchanged. But as soon as the singing begins, Homer Simpson takes over. When AI tries to steal this for training, it gets fooled—and contaminates its own data set.

    So somewhere deep in a training algorithm’s data set is the audio of Homer Simpson which the AI will assume sounds like [for example] Madonna, Rihanna, or maybe even Sean Paul. The model doesn’t know the difference. It just ingests the data and treats that like the truth.

    And that is exactly what Mr. Daniels is hoping for.

He wants “to introduce noise, chaos” into the bots that are putting human musicians out of work.

“Mr. Daniels” is not an isolated example. Musician Benn Jordan has also been “poison-pilling” music files in hopes of disrupting AI.

In recent months, he has watched in horror as “tech companies started raising millions of venture capital dollars and scraping my music without my consent”. They now use his own work to generate “shittier music with it that is inadvertently associated with my name — and then attempting to resell that in the same economy in which I make money from my music”.

As a result, he has stopped releasing music. But he hasn’t walked away from the battle — instead Jordan has developed “a type of encoding that not only makes a music file more or less untrainable by generative AI companies, but actually has the ability to decrease the quality and efficiency of their entire data set”.

“Unethical generative AI companies have made artists feel incredibly powerless for quite some time now”, he adds, “but all of that is about to change”.

June 29, 2026

A “good guy with a gun” is responsible for stopping a lot of crime in the US

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

If you’ve paid any attention, you’ll have been told that private gun owners are rarely if ever able to stop a crime, and even that you’re somehow in more danger if you carry a gun than if you go unarmed. The FBI certainly contributed to that message with their annual Active Shooting Reports, which seemed to indicate that civilians with guns were only responsible for stopping gun attacks 3.7% of the time. This understates the frequency by a very large margin:

The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public place, not involving gang violence or some other crime such as robbery. Such an incident could be something as minor as one person being shot at and missed up to a mass public shooting.

While the FBI includes cases where civilians stop active shooters, the news media frequently relies on the limited number of these cases to argue that such interventions are rare. Headlines illustrate this framing: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander” (Associated Press); “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting” (Washington Post); and “After Indiana mall shooting, one hero but no lasting solution to gun violence” (New York Times). The FBI’s reports acknowledge that armed civilians stopped active shooting attacks in seven of the eleven years they reviewed.

When John Stossel asked the FBI about our claim that they had omitted many cases, the Bureau responded: “[Our data is] not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding …”

[…]

Between 2014 and 2024, citizens stopped 178 out of 339 potential or actual mass shootings where we could identify that guns were allowed in the area. So 52.5% of attacks were stopped by people legally carrying concealed handguns.

The numbers indicate that if we didn’t have gun-free zones, we would have more people stopping these attacks.

Finally, even these numbers underestimate the usefulness of legally carried concealed handguns in stopping mass public shootings because many of these active shooting incidents involve only one person being targeted. For example, suppose one person is targeted and only one person may be present. In that case, there is relatively little opportunity for people to stop attacks compared to a mass public shooting where many potential victims are present.

The general public seems to agree. A July 2022 survey by the Trafalgar Group showed that a plurality of American general election voters believe that armed citizens are the most effective element in protecting you and your family in the case of a mass shooting. First on the list was “armed citizens” at 42%, followed by “local police” (25%) and “federal agents” (10%). [“None of the above” was the answer chosen by 23% of respondents.] A survey by YouGov in May – before the Uvalde, Texas, attack – found that by a margin of 51% to 37% American adults supported letting schoolteachers and administrations carry concealed handguns.

June 28, 2026

Multiculturalism in Australia: theory and practice

Filed under: Australia, Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Australia, like the rest of the Anglosphere (with the notable exception of the United States) has adopted multiculturalism as a secular national religion, yet all is not well Down Under, as Celina illustrates:

Pauline Hanson’s National Press Club address last week has thrust the conversation of multiculturalism back into the centre of Australian politics. With One Nation now the most popular party in the polls, her pledge for a “monoculture” is no longer being pushed into the fringes. Yet, as it stands One Nation doesn’t really have any concrete policy on how to abolish multiculturalism.

Firstly, we must distinguish what is meant by multiculturalism in relation to politics. Multiculturalism is not just the presence of different cultural practices in Australia. That is a deliberate straw-man. “Abolish multiculturalism and you lose your Bah mi or Chinese takeaways” is a lazy reductionism pushed by people who are either stupid or as a sarcastic question from the left about the lack of One Nations ability to provide actual policy.

Multiculturalism, as it operates in Australia, is the institutionalisation of minority ethnic and religious lobbying. It is a system in which governments treat organised ethnic, religious and minority identity-based groups as permanent stakeholders with privileged access to policy-making. These groups receive taxpayer funding, sit on advisory bodies, submit formal recommendations, and see their priorities turned into law on hate speech, anti-discrimination, social cohesion and diversity policy. The broader Australian public is expected to accept the resulting consensus.

The Machinery That Actually Exists

Australia maintains a Minister for Multicultural Affairs, an Office for Multicultural Affairs inside the Department of Home Affairs, an Australian Multicultural Council, and a Ministerial Forum on Multicultural Affairs. States have their own legislation: the Multicultural NSW Act, Victoria’s Multicultural Victoria Act, South Australia’s Multicultural Act, Queensland’s Multicultural Recognition Act and others. They create recurring funding streams, annual reporting obligations, advisory councils and grants programs that sustain an entire ecosystem of peak bodies, settlement providers and advocacy organisations.

Commonwealth multicultural grants run into tens of millions annually. Additional streams exist for “social cohesion”, security upgrades for specific communities and settlement services. Peak bodies such as the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC) and the Hindu Council routinely prepare submissions, appear before inquiries and maintain ongoing relationships with ministers and bureaucrats. Personnel overlap between federal and state advisory structures is visible and recurring.

This is what political scientist Theodore Lowi called “interest group liberalism“.1 Lowi’s insight was that the pluralist system does not represent the public interest but rather rewards whichever organised groups can gain access to the machinery of government. The democratic problem is that the state has granted specific groups a structural position that ordinary, unorganised citizens do not enjoy. This results in something called mobilisation of bias, as coined by E.E. Schattschneider. described this form of power as the “mobilisation of bias“, where “some issues are organised into politics while others are organised out“.2,3

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interest_group_liberalism
  2. https://www.powercube.net/analyse-power/forms-of-power/hidden-power/
  3. (2011). “Mobilization of bias”. In K. Dowding (Ed.) Encyclopedia of power (pp. 424-424). SAGE Publications, Inc., https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412994088.n234

“Human writing has a unique shape” and the the end of social media

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

On Substack, Ryan Levesque explains the major differences between human writing and AI-trained-on-human-writing:

Graphic from The Digital Contrarian

It turns out, slop has a shape.

And it’s the reason why AI generated writing sounds the way it does.

In a new study, a team of researchers at the University of Maryland and Google DeepMind ran an experiment.

They took 10,272 writing prompts and gave each one to a human author and to five AI models: Claude, GPT, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Kimi.

They generated 61,608 stories, at around 5,000 words each.

Then, they looked at the underlying structure of each story: how the plot progresses, where the tension and conflict is placed, etc. etc.

And from that structure, they could identify a human-written story from AI-generated slop nearly 93% of the time.

Graphic from The Digital Contrarian

What you’re seeing here in that image is the shape of AI Slop vs. Human Writing.

And there are five distinct ways that the shape of human writing is decidedly different from the so-called slop generated by today’s AI models:

  1. AI over-explains its themes. (instead of letting readers infer)
  2. Human writing is less linear. (more time-jumps and flashbacks.)
  3. AI relies on bodily metaphors to explain emotion. (81% vs. 38% human)
  4. Humans reference specific texts, brands, places. (nearly 2x the AI rate)
  5. AI narrative is less diverse. (fewer subplots and scenes, less dialogue)

[…]

The Beginning of the End of Social Media?

The clearest place to watch this shape materalize?

Social media.

This week, Farah Cormack mapped the predictable sequence, in a piece called “The Beginning of the End of Organic LinkedIn“.

Her argument is that every platform moves through the same five stages:

  1. Early adoption. A small group forms around something they love. It feels like a secret.
  2. Scaling. The crowds show up, and so does the money.
  3. Critical mass. Everyone’s here now. Organic and paid are both running hot.
  4. Enshittification. The business model takes over the product. The feed fills with ads, and the place starts to feel like every other place.
  5. Decline. The people who made it worth showing up for get fed up and leave.

Her read is that LinkedIn just crossed into stage four. The tell is its new Creator Marketplace, a feature that literally puts your reach openly up for sale.

(If your own posts have been reaching fewer people lately, you’re not imagining things … this has been engineered.)

The shape of Enshittification is a five-stage decline, and most of the social media platforms we use are somewhere at stage 4 or 5 right now.

Futurist Sinead Bovell goes further, and argues we’re watching the beginning of the end of the social media era itself.

The reality is that people don’t really post for friends/social circles like we used to even just a few short years ago.

Bovell argues that the entire reason we post is to be seen by other humans.

That’s the whole deal.

We post to signal that we’re employable, or interesting, or worth following, or because we want to sell something …

And we do that, because real people are on the other end, watching us.

Take those real people away, and the entire thing stops making sense …

But that’s exactly what’s happening.

Personally, I think LinkedIn hit stage four a lot sooner than this, almost certainly because it originated as a business-oriented platform. The owner of a company I worked for in the 2000s required that all managers have active LinkedIn accounts, so I was “active” there for a couple of years, but I felt it quickly lost any actual benefits and became a forum of boastfulness and sycophancy. There were serious people on the platform, providing useful and insightful posts, but the vast majority of content was self-promotion and empty flattery.

June 27, 2026

Larry Correia is “not a real writer”

Filed under: Books, Business, Humour, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

While I haven’t read everything Larry Correia has published, I’ve enjoyed reading a lot of his work, but I’m clearly having fun wrong because “he’s not a real writer“:

    T-Lex @T_Saurus_Lex
    “Not a real writer” is an inside joke, from the Sad Puppy era. Something some cunning quarter-wit accused him of because Larry wasn’t prone to bend the knee to the SJW mafia. I think the details are on his blog somewhere.

Yeah, for my newer readers saying I’m not a *real* writer has been a running joke forever.

When you are a writer who annoys the liberal publishing establishment they always make up some reason to disqualify you, so they can dismiss you, and never take anything you say seriously. These are not honest people.

(If you are a proper good thinking liberal writer, don’t worry, you achieve real writer hood by loudly existing and they’ll stick you on panels if you’ve published one short story that was read by six whole people)

So at first I wasn’t a real writer because I only wrote monster adventure pulp. So then I was multi genre (and now I’m successful in more genres than most authors ever attempt). No. Those are the wrong genres.

Then I didn’t count because I wasn’t a bestseller. Until I was.

Then to be a real writer I needed to win some awards. (The big one I got nominated for at the beginning didn’t count because reasons). So then I won some awards. No. Not those! Those don’t count!

Real writers tackle serious topics and impress serious academic critics, until I wrote Son of the Black Sword, which impressed even my snootiest haters … so they promptly dropped that path to real writer hood.

This got super silly at times, and how the title really stuck, one time on book tour one of my haters saw me arrive early to a book signing outside Portland. It didn’t start for an hour so there was only three people there who had driven a long way. So I was just hanging out talking to them.

My hater immediately got on Twitter and told everybody “I saw Larry Correia on his alleged book tour and he only had three people show up. WHAT A FAILURE. WHAT A LOSER!”

The actual signing had 40, which is pretty decent. I was still there when somebody showed me this tweet. We all laughed and responded with a group photo saying learn to count, dork.

But Social Justice Warriors (ah, the good old days) can never admit a mistake. So he doubled down and tweeted I still wasn’t a REAL WRITER because that same store ROUTINELY had book signings for TWO HUNDRED customers.

Problem was, the book store wasn’t that big. To fit 200 they would have to remove all the shelves. And at this point I was still there signing their inventory so I asked the manager. She said out of hundreds of signings they had only hit 200 twice the entire time they’d been in business. Brandon Sanderson post WoT and GRRM at the absolute height of the HBO show, and those had lines out into the parking lot.

So only the top bestsellers on Earth at that moment count as Real Writers. Seems unfair. But okay.

So me and my fans leaned into this super hard to mock the absurd and ever moving goal posts of the terminally online haters. And the rest of my book tour was called THE STILL NOT A REAL WRITER WORLD TOUR. And I got a big group photo at every event for the next week.

And yes, I have hit 200 since, but I’m sure the minute I did the new Real Writer threshold moved to 400. 😀

This has been a running gag ever since, the same way my fans refer to me as the ILOH, though that is a story for another day.

June 26, 2026

To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm

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

If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.

Slide from cyberghostvpn.com

Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.

A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.

The replies tore him apart.

Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.

Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.

“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”

Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.

Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.

“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”

Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.

Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.

The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.

Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.

One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.

That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.

If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.

June 25, 2026

Passively shaping public opinion is one of big tech’s favourite techniques

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

In the portion of this post above the paywall, Celina shows a good example of how social engineering doesn’t have to be blatant to be effective:

Before reading further, open a new browser tab and type the search term “married white woman” into Google Images. Scroll through the first several rows of results. What do you see?

The output which is consistently replicated across different devices and geographic locations is a deluge of mixed-race couples. The output is overwhelmingly dominated by images of white women intimately paired with black or non-white men. To the casual observer passively consuming this digital output, the presentation establishes an immediate baseline for normalcy. The volume and priority of these specific demographic pairings create the distinct impression that such relationships are the standard, ubiquitous, and foundational reality of modern Western society.

Yet, when we contrast this algorithmic simulation with reality, a massive discrepancy emerges. Statistically, interracial marriages remain a distinct minority of overall unions in the United States and across the broader Western world. According to comprehensive data from the Pew Research Center, in 2020, only 11% of all married couples in the United States were interracial or interethnic. When we drill down into the specific pairing that dominates the aforementioned image search, the numbers shrink even further. Marriages specifically between a white woman and a black man account for a mere 7% of that already small 11% sliver of intermarriages. In absolute terms, out of over 51 million married white women in the United States, less than 1% are married to black men.

Despite this statistical rarity, the digital simulation feels entirely “normal” to the modern consumer because media giants like Google, alongside massive stock photography conglomerates like Getty Images and Shutterstock, consciously and relentlessly curate it that way. This immense disparity between reality is the result of neutral, blind code cataloging human existence. It is an intentional act of social enforcement, by artificially elevating specific demographic pairings, media platforms execute a subtle but pervasive socio-cultural engineering project.

It can thus be argued that this engineered visual output serves a distinct ideological purpose: pushing European women toward demographic change and eroding the visual primacy of the homogeneous nuclear family that built and sustained Western nation-states for centuries. When digital representations are manipulated to consistently overwrite physical realities, a significant ontological shift occurs within the host population. The native majority is conditioned to view their own demographic decline as an organic, inevitable, and morally righteous progression. This forces us to confront the question: If images precede and dictate reality, who is engineering our extinction?

I’m long out of the habit of watching TV, so when the NFL season gets started and I’m presented with three-plus hours per week of commercial TV to watch my favourite team play, I can’t help but notice that most commercials that include representations of married couples are inter-racial or non-white. The advertisers are also presenting a small minority of marriages in North America as being the overwhelming majority in their TV ads. Why might they want to do that?

Formerly Peru’s First Lady, Keiko Fujimori is now President in her own right

Filed under: Americas, Economics, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The new President of Peru, Keiko Fujimori, faces a big economic challenge to her nation:

With just over 99% of ballots counted, Keiko Fujimori holds a lead of roughly 40,000 votes over Roberto Sánchez — less than half a percentage point, and the third consecutive Peruvian presidential contest decided by a margin that narrow. Sánchez led through the early days of counting, carried by rural and highland turnout; but the overseas votes, which broke for Fujimori above 63%, pulled the result the other way as the tally crossed 95%.

The outcome is no longer seriously in doubt. What remains in doubt is whether a victory this narrow constitutes a mandate to govern, or merely a turn to occupy the office in impotence.

Fujimori has never held executive power. What she inherits, however, is a name: her father, Alberto Fujimori, governed Peru from 1990 to 2000, stabilizing a hyperinflationary economy and crushing the Shining Path insurgency, albeit with darkly authoritarian techniques for which he was later convicted. Long known as Peru’s answer to Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Fujimori has cast a long shadow over Peruvian politics ever since.

Keiko served as his First Lady through the latter half of the 1990s, then built her own career: a congresswoman from 2006 to 2011, and the leader of Fuerza Popular (“Popular Force”) since. She spent 13 months in pretrial detention on corruption charges tied to Odebrecht financing; a court voided the case in January 2025. She has run for president four times, losing the previous three runoffs by margins under a single percentage point before, now, winning her fourth.

Her governing history is, as a result, tied deeply to her father’s. She has spent two decades defending it rather than living it, which is itself a kind of qualification in a country where economic memory often prevails over institutional memory. The model her father installed — trade liberalization, fiscal orthodoxy, an open door to foreign capital — has outlasted eight changes of president in ten years. The claims of Fujimorismo — the governing-economic doctrine named for Fujimori that has dominated ever since his time — is that it alone can be trusted to keep that model standing.

Keiko Fujimori’s flagship commitments are, consequently, the two pillars of Fujimorismo itself: a hard line on crime, and an unapologetic defense of the market economy.

The security platform proposes deploying the military against organized crime and prison disorder, taking inspiration both from Peru’s own recent past, and Nayib Bukele’s divisive tactics in El Salvador. Alongside this, the platform promises expanding video surveillance, and modernizing this apparatus through the use of artificial intelligence to detect corruption in public contracting. She insists that her father’s system’s abuses will not be repeated.

The economic platform is a much-needed deregulatory shock: cutting investment-approval timelines by 40%, reducing the fiscal deficit from 2.2% to 1% of GDP, and shrinking the state. As for exactly how that shrinking will be achieved besides the aforementioned measures, Keiko is not clear.

Nevertheless, both pillars of the plan were sold on a single word, repeated at her closing rally and in her final debate: order, against the chaos she says the left represents.

In counterpoint to recent claims that cutting USAID funding cost the lives of millions of children who depended on those funds, taking away USAID support in much of South America led to a number of electoral changes:

Why Britain voted for Brexit

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Pat Condell explains some of the reasons British voters chose Brexit over staying in the EU back in 2016:

Why did we vote for Brexit ten years ago? Because we understood that the core purpose of the European Union is to destroy the independent countries of Europe by opening the borders and transforming a diverse continent of sovereign nations into a single homogenous political bloc governed by a committee of unelected bureaucrats, as a model for the planned global dictatorship.

Obviously, you’re not going to get many votes for that if you just lay it out for people, so you start with something innocuous like trade.

You say “Let’s harmonise our trade arrangements and everything will run more smoothly.”

And people say “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

Then you say “While we’re at it, let’s give this small group of people the power to organise all this from one place, and everything will run more smoothly.”

“Well, I suppose that makes sense. We want things to run smoothly.”

Then it’s “Actually, let’s give these people the power to make our laws and override our parliament and justice system, and everything will run much more smoothly.”

“Hold on a second, I don’t know about that …”

“You fascist. You racist. You xenophobe. You bigot. You pig ignorant little Englander. You vermin. You scum.”

Although that attitude certainly helped to tip the balance, the most important reason we voted for Brexit is that politicians had no right to sign away the governance of the UK to a foreign entity, but that is what they did, while pretending it was about trade. They lied to us, and they tried to cheat us out of our country.

That is why we voted for Brexit, and it’s why we’re now being punished for our disobedience by traitors who refuse to secure the border and who are allowing our country to be flooded with millions of unwanted and incompatible immigrants and illegally invaded and occupied by an army of dangerous military age men in whose presence no woman or child is safe.

Forced mass immigration from hostile and barbarous cultures is punishment for Brexit. Our country is being purposely destroyed for not voting the way we were told.

June 24, 2026

This is why the media didn’t want to share the murderer’s manifesto

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

In short, it does not support the narrative. Ezra Levant shares the details of the manifesto left behind by an Alberta man after he killed a police officer in Côte-des-Neiges, a Jewish section of Montreal the other day:

READ HIS MANIFESTO: The Montreal murderer was a Jew-hating Communist censor

The murderer in Montreal has been named: Seth Hatfield, from Alberta. He murdered a policeman in a shooting spree in a Jewish neighbourhood in Montreal.

Soon afterwards, government journalists at the CBC and elsewhere started describing a manifesto that he had left behind. But none of them published the actual document — they just quoted the odd phrase from it, and called him an “incel”. That’s a term for someone who was “involuntarily celibate”, or someone who didn’t do well with women. The usual suspects were doing the media circuit claiming that Hatfield was a “right wing” extremist.

But if that was true, why was the manifesto being shown only to selected, government-friendly journalists? Why were the rest of us blocked from seeing it for ourselves?

Well, that just changed. Rebel News has acquired a copy of the full, 104-page manifesto. You can read it for yourself right here: https://rebelnews.com/manifesto_reveals_alleged_montreal_gunman_s_antisemitic_far_left_and_incel_ideology

It’s true that the murderer had extreme ideas about women. But that was only a small part of his world view. In most of the rest of his rambling remarks, he was indistinguishable from left-wing politicians like Bernie Sanders, Avi Lewis, or half the Liberal cabinet.

He praised Communism. He called for the abolition of private property. He railed against the Jews, and Zionism. And — like Mark Carney himself — he demanded the censorship of the Internet.

Read the manifesto of a crazed, left-wing extremist.

And never forget: the mainstream media lies to you about everything important.

If you trust Grok, here’s a summary of the manifesto:

QotD: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a “symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping”

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

Vox has created a stir this week with a podcast claiming that Ludwig van Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is, for some reason, a particular “symbol of exclusion, elitism, and gatekeeping”. It’s not super clear why Vox singled out the Fifth for abuse, and my conscience is frantically reminding me that I am not to provide sustenance to trolls and nitwits who aren’t me, but this is certainly intriguing. Nate Sloan and Charlie Harding suggest that “women, LGBTQ+ people, (and) people of colour” may resent Beethoven, but they conflate two arguments to produce this conclusion.

One is just that Beethoven is a dead white male who is universally deemed an incomparable composer. The other is that concerts of classical music are kind of classist and snooty, and if you showed up with a piercing or anime hair or dark skin, you might get beaten up, or sneered at, or something.

The first accusation attracts an immediate guilty plea, and identifies a real problem: no one (of any colour or creed or sexual orientation) who takes up music composition in 2020 has any real hope of becoming the equal of Beethoven. Vox found musicians to complain about the suffocating centrality of Beethoven within their tradition of creating and performing, but this sentiment isn’t the exclusive property of minorities, or of musicians. It persecutes all indiscriminately. No young mathematician setting out on a career imagines that he is going to give Euclid or even Poincaré a serious run for their money.

[…]

The second charge in Vox‘s indictment — that concerts of classical music discourage outsiders — is something that (surviving) symphony orchestras have been working their fingers to the bone to address, and not without obvious success. At this point there can’t be an ensemble of any size on this continent that hasn’t spent several summers going to battle in public parks, armed with trendy film scores and orchestral pop, to play for people in jogging outfits and tank tops.

Colby Cosh, “Roll over Beethoven, you exclusionary elitist”, National Post, 2020-09-16.

June 22, 2026

Two-tier Keir resigns as UK Prime Minister

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

History will not be kind to Sir Keir Starmer’s time in office, both for his actions and his failures-to-act. The Labour Party will now select the next person to live at Number 10 Downing Street, as they still hold a majority in the House of Commons and are not required to go back to the people for a new mandate, regardless of who is their party leader.

Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, greeted the news on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

I reposted this on my other social media accounts, saying “Sadly, this is completely true. We belatedly ditched the clown prince of progressivism … only to install Mark Carney, who believes all the same progressive shibboleths that Trudeau did, but he’s far more capable of implementing them by hook or by crook.”

Starmer resigns — he has been a truly disgraceful Prime Minister.

I do not believe him to be a good man or a patriot.

He has deliberately and rapidly accelerated the destruction of our Britain, of our home.

History will not remember him kindly, nor should it.

I sat in Parliament, looking him in the eye, listening to him attempting to justify his decision to block a national inquiry into the mass rape of young British girls.

I will never forgive him. For that, and so much else.

What comes next, I do not know.

Whatever that is, Restore Britain will be ready to offer the British people a democratic route out — a better way, the only way.

But Starmer is gone.

And that is a good thing.

Enjoy it.

Former Manchester mayor and recently elected Member of Parliament for Makerfield Andy Burnham is the most likely successor to Starmer.

Then-Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer visiting Holy Trinity Church of England Primary School in Manchester on 13 April 2026 with Andy Burnham, Mayor of Greater Manchester.
Picture by Lauren Hurley / No 10 Downing Street via Wikimedia Commons.

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