Quotulatiousness

April 7, 2026

QotD: Advice for foreign leaders trying to deal with Donald Trump

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

If you want to understand Trump, you have to understand that he’s not a politician.

I do not say this as meaningless praise, just to say, oh, he’s not a corrupt scumbag. I say it with a very specific meaning.

To understand Trump, you must purge yourself of all expectations you have learned from watching politicians, include the assumptions you are not even aware you are making.

Trump is a completely different animal.

Trump is a businessman, and while there are many sorts of businessman, he is of a very specific type. He rose to wealth and prominence by doing two things very well:

1. Brand reputation building.
2. Negotiation.

#1 forms the basis of how he deals with voters.

#2 forms the basis of how he deals with other power blocs within the US, and with other nations.

You see, the true love of Donald Trump’s life is bargaining. He is a business deal sperg. And he’s very, very good at it, because the actual process is his idea of fun, and winning at it is definition of pure satisfaction and joy.

He’s never made uncomfortable by the play of offer and counteroffer, or by butting heads and seeing who blinks first. That is, instead, his happy place. This means that not only is he totally at peace in the moment, he’s also practiced a lot.

When he called his book The Art of the Deal, it wasn’t just because he wants to think he’s good at this, it’s because this is the meaning of his life. The man finds meaning in haggling the way Musk finds meaning in building technologies, or the way I find meaning in explaining things to an audience.

So when Trump is dealing with others, from political office, he’s negotiating as if it were his money. Because that’s just how he ticks.

Now, the ground rule of global politics for the past 100+ years is that no matter who you are, you are allowed to rob American taxpayers and voters, so long as you pay American politicians for the privilege of doing so.

All of us, even democrat voters who don’t want to think about it, know what 10 percent for the big guy meant, and who the particular big guy was.

For all that time, global politics amounted to treating America as a giant cash pinata, and the deals had only two guardrails on them.

1. You must pay American politicians a large enough sum, in a subtle enough manner.
2. You can’t buy anything that your paid-off politicians won’t be able to hide their personal connection to.

That’s it.

Everything else was on the table.

Trump isn’t like that. He can’t be bought.

Not because he’s some kind of saint, which he isn’t, nor because corrupt-politician money is loose change compared to Donald Trump money, which it is.

But because Trump can’t stand to deliberately lose a negotiation for a bribe, any more than Floyd Mayweather wants to throw a match to get paid off by bookies.

And this is how Trump became involved in politics in the first place. He was a standard New York City rich moderate democrat. Believed in the Postwar Dream, bought into the raceblind thing, was all in favor of exporting democracy, and taxed capitalism paying for a moderate amount of welfare state. But as he realized the political machines were selling out America, he got personally offended.

Not because he was principled and deeply cared about middle America. Perhaps a little because selling out America was hurting his real estate interests.

But mostly because bad business deals give Donald Trump the ick.

Trump seems like a loose cannon to a lot of people, because they don’t what he’ll do next. And they don’t know that because they don’t understand what motivates him.

Trump wants America to make better deals and stop being taken advantage of. And to make those better deals, he has to demonstrate to the people who are used to buying American politicians that the rules in play have changed.

So what’s the deal with Venezuela and Maduro?

Simple. If you ride the NYC subway enough, it’s pretty likely that eventually a bum will come up to you, whip out his dick, and piss on your shoes.

Why? Because he wants to feel powerful. Because his day isn’t going well, and so he wants to ruin yours. Because he’s crazy. Because who the fuck cares?

But most of all, because he can. Because NYC is run by out of touch commie liberals, and he knows that if he is arrested, he’ll be fed and let out in the morning, but if you punch him in the teeth, your life will be ruined.

So when things change, people need to be put on notice. The bums aren’t going to read a sign that says “this subway now functions under Tennessee rules”, and if they do read it, they aren’t going to believe it. They’ve heard it all before as a bluff.

You have to actually punch someone in mouth and knock some teeth out. And then have the Tennessee cops show up and say, so what, you shouldn’t have pissed on his shoes, dumbass.

It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maduro was offered plenty of gentle offramps which would have preserved his dignity, lifestyle, etc, if not his pride.

But he didn’t take them, because everything is a bluff … until it isn’t.

Maduro is a head on a spike. A signal that the ground truth of how to deal with America has changed.

A signal that both violence, and personal consequences, are no longer off the table.

Because the whole reason for the existence of governments is to wield organized violence instead of the disorganized kind.

Other nations will now be coming to the negotiating table with this example in mind.

America is tired of being your ATM.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-01-06.

Update, 8 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.

April 5, 2026

“Easter remains one of the major annual high holy days of confectionery derangement”

Filed under: Africa, Books, Food, Media, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At The Freeman, Nicole James remembers her early chocolate obsessions:

Roald Dahl’s chocolate river was the economic policy of my childhood. Dripping with glossy abundance, and available to any enterprising glutton with a low sense of self-preservation. I never looked at Augustus Gloop and thought, “There goes a cautionary tale about excess”. I thought, “There goes a boy with initiative”. I wanted the river. I wanted the factory. I wanted an Oompa Loompa or two, ideally unionized and living in a tasteful outbuilding, making me truffles on demand. I wanted a world in which everything was edible and slightly mad. While everyone else was apparently learning moral lessons, I was busy fantasizing about a life in which I could plunge both arms into a molten tributary of cacao and come up glistening, like some sort of deranged dessert otter.

Easter seemed to offer the nearest thing to this ideal. It was the one annual moment when adults, in a dramatic collapse of judgment, agreed that children should be handed industrial quantities of wrapped chocolate and told to go hard. Easter had tiny eggs hidden in pot plants and larger ones with enough packaging to survive atmospheric re-entry. It was capitalism in a bunny suit.

Then adulthood arrived, lugging excellent literary references. Along came Like Water for Chocolate, with its sexy sorrow and culinary melodrama, and suddenly chocolate was not just a childhood frenzy but a vehicle for yearning and seduction. It could communicate things one would never dream of saying aloud at a suburban dinner party. Chocolate had range.

And this is why the present state of it feels so personally offensive because what is happening to chocolate is a slow-motion mugging. Cocoa is being shaved out. Bars are shrinking. Prices are soaring. Palm oil and vegetable fats are barging into flavor. Chocolate flavor. Not real chocolate, but a cheap mockery of the original deity.

And yet Easter remains one of the major annual high holy days of confectionery derangement. According to Cargill, in the United States, people are expected to plough through around 73 million pounds of chocolate over the Easter season. Around 90 million chocolate bunnies are produced, with — fun fact — 78% being devoured from the ears first.

Easter spending in the US has in recent years hovered around the $23 billion mark, with candy doing much of the heavy lifting. Chocolate, marshmallow Peeps, baskets, flowers, brunches, the whole pastel circus. Christianity may supply the headline act, but the event itself has clearly been workshopped by a mall.

But beneath the cellophane gaiety lies an increasingly grubby truth. Cocoa prices have surged, largely because harvests in West Africa have been hammered. Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, which together produce the bulk of the world’s cocoa, have been clobbered by poor weather, crop disease, supply chain fragility, deforestation, and the sort of labor abuses that make any cheerful Easter ad feel criminal. The global appetite for chocolate remains immense, but the cacao tree itself is having a nervous collapse.

Update, 19 April: To the surprise of many who’ve latched on to the “woe, woe, mankind bad” chorus, there are now reports of a bumper crop of cocoa and the market prices are dropping:

It all seemed to kick off in March 2024 with the BBC’s chief climate headbanger Justin Rowlatt noting that “climate change” was one of the reasons for chocolate Easter eggs getting more expensive. Experts are said to have claimed that “human-induced” climate change had made extreme heat “10 times more likely” in the main cocoa bean-growing areas of West Africa. The story has had excellent fearmongering legs with a couple of years of bad weather-related harvests sending the world price of cocoa soaring. As late as October last year, the New York Times was stating that higher cocoa prices pushed up by climate change had led to companies changing their chocolate confectionary concoctions. Alas, sadly missing in recent chocolate climate claptrap is that an improved recent harvest (no weather-adjusting humans thought to be involved) has led to a massive 75% slump in global cocoa prices from the peak reached in January last year.

Like coral, polar bears and Arctic ice, any narrative-disturbing news is ignored. The media barkers promoting the Net Zero fantasy simply move onto the next promising climate porn project that can be ramped up to Armageddon level. The Great Choccy Catastrophe is a classic of its kind, but it is just the latest in a long and increasingly tedious line of crying wolf climate tantrums.

[…]

They get a lot of weather in the tropics, particularly in countries like Ivory Coast which accounts for up to 45% of world cocoa bean production. Dry periods alternate with wetter conditions, and there is some short-term variability in decadal temperatures. But according to World Bank climate figures, the average temperature since 1900 has risen just 1°C, while rainfall totals have remained remarkably stable. The average annual total since 1900 is around 1,354 mm. This is nearly identical to the 1,283 mm recorded in 2023, and similar to the 1,239 mm that fell in the supposedly drought conditions in 2024. Neighbouring Ghana is the world’s second largest cocoa producer and its 125 year precipitation average is 1,236 mm. This is a little higher than the 2024 ‘drought’ total of 1,181 mm, and a tad lower than the 1,278 mm in 2023.

The tropics have provided good pickings for climate and Net Zero agitators. Temperatures and rainfall can vary widely over individual years and decades. For instance, Ghana had record low rainfall in 1983 of 851 mm compared with a record high of 1,775 mm in 1968. As we have repeatedly seen over the last few years, any departure from the norm becomes the basis for a politicised junk science prediction that the climate is in crisis.

April 4, 2026

If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”

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

Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:

Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!

Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.

We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]

Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.

You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.

Update, 6 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.

Be on the lookout for “toxic confidence”

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

Freddie deBoer disagrees with a recent New York Times piece which proclaims that “toxic confidence” is the current psychological tic of choice:

[…] But then, the whole theatrical embrace of imposter syndrome wasn’t really about a sincere belief that they didn’t belong in the program, that they had gotten in through some mistake. It was, instead, an expression of a very weird element of Millennial culture, which is the embrace of insecurity as a means of belonging.

Which brings me to Savannah Sobrevilla and her recent trend piece, destined to be a New York Times classic, “Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over”. You can already guess the argument here, but I’ll give you the nut anyway:

    … it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.

    Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?

The phrase itself, “toxic confidence”, is doing a lot of work in this essay, and I can just imagine an NYT editor reading the pitch, seeing that phrase, and salivating. But there’s not a lot there, really. Strip away the arch tone and the carefully curated examples (reality-television grifters, Trump-administration blusterers) and what you’re left with is a fairly straightforward complaint: some people believe in themselves too much, and it’s making a certain kind of person uncomfortable. Of course, there’s always been braggarts and narcissists and perennially self-impressed people around us, in any era, and that they’re annoying is not generally considered newsworthy. What makes this a classic NYT trend piece is that it makes an observation that’s comprehensible only to a certain strata of reader — middle aged or younger, culturally savvy, educated, urban in ethos if not necessarily in geography, too online. These people aren’t experiencing the age-old frustration with the conventionally overconfident, but are facing (if Sobrevilla is to be believed) the demise of a recent generational embrace of performative insecurity, which makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth examining, because it reveals less about a cultural pathology than about whose neuroses we’ve decided to normalize.

As usual, I blame my own generation. For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues. This is certainly connected to the phenomenon of illness as identity and disorder as fashion I’m always complaining about […] but is, I think, a distinct phenomenon, the rearrangement of healthy confidence into pathology and pathological self-doubt into virtue. The weird affordances of social media gave certain culturally and socially influential people the ability to imprint their own neuroses onto the wider culture, recasting that neuroses as a sort of down-to-earth norm. In that context, impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; people gleefully declared their FOGO; “I’m the worst”, said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.

What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu — an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur — says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be”, that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.

QotD: Protect us from “disinformation”, Big Brother!

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

    Troy Westwood @TroyWestwood
    The only thing more important than “free speech” is protecting society from disinformation.

Troy is trying to sound enlightened, but unfortunately he has the IQ of a lobster. “The only thing more important than ‘free speech’ is protecting society from disinformation.”

Translation: “I’m terrified of ideas I don’t like, so please, Big Brother, put a nanny filter on everyone else’s brain … just to keep us all safe, of course.”

Nothing says “I trust the marketplace of ideas” quite like demanding a government-approved Ministry of Truth to decide what’s true for the rest of us. Bonus points for implying that the plebs can’t possibly sort fact from fiction without an elite class holding their hand.

Truly the hallmark of a deep thinker. Admitting you don’t believe people are capable of handling freedom, then dressing it up as noble concern for society.

If free speech is dangerous, the most dangerous speech of all is the one declaring that some authority should get to silence the rest. But don’t worry, comrade, they’ll only censor the bad information. Promise.

Another swing and a miss for Troy.

Martyupnorth, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-28.

April 2, 2026

Modern-day serial killers are called “Doctor”

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

At Science is not the answer, William M. Briggs explains why these are the long-foretold “hard times”:

Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early”.

He was right.

If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).

Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr — doctor, doctor — Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.

That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.

There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.

Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.

It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.

We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.

April 1, 2026

“Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”

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

Perhaps it’s just me, but I read Freddie deBoer‘s refutation of Facilitated Communication with a kind of rising horror, that a parent or trusted adult could so take advantage of a disabled person to commit this kind of fraud:

“Facilitated Communication” by Faure P, Legou T and Gepner B is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: The New York Times has again casually endorsed facilitated communication, or FC, a relentlessly-discredited practice that plays on the desperation and credulousness of parents of severely disabled children. As in the past, they’ve done this while barely seeming to understand that they’re doing something controversial at all. The culprit this time is a review of the new novel Upward Bound “by” Woody Brown, a man with severe autism who has been nonverbal his entire life and dictated his book through FC, which is also the means through which he earned a masters degree and other remarkable feats. Brown, like so many others who have been “saved” through FC, was found to have all manner of remarkable intellectual abilities once someone else was “facilitating” his communication.

The review describes Brown “tapping letters on a board” while his mother interprets and voices the words. That is the textbook structure of FC: a disabled person who cannot otherwise communicate produces output while a facilitator mediates, guides, or stabilizes the process. Or so proponents claim. Without the facilitator, the disabled person is mute; with their guidance, they suddenly become remarkably verbally proficient, often learned and verbose. If you’re new to the FC debate, you should trust your skepticism: the fact that the mother has to be present and participating, the fact that Brown cannot manipulate the board without the mother’s involvement, the fact that he has never been subject to rigorous research that involves “message-passing” or “double-blind” tests … This is the inconvenient, damning reality.

Message passing, or double-blind, tests are simple and remarkably effective. Information is provided to both the disabled person and the facilitator, often in the form of pictures or individual words, with both the facilitator and the test subject receiving the same information some times and discordant information other times. That is to say, the disabled person and the facilitator will sometimes both be shown a star or a watermelon or a flower or a bird, while at other times one might get the star picture while the other gets the bird, etc. If the disabled person genuinely crafts their responses, this should be a trivially easy test to pass: the facilitated communication will produce the information that the disabled subject received. And yet very close to literally 100% of the time in rigorous research, across dozens of studies with thousands of combined attempts, interactions produce the information the facilitator received and not the information the disabled person received. Surveying the literature, the consistency of this finding is remarkable — and there is no coherent explanation for how this could happen if indeed FC results in messages being sent from a conscious and alert test subject. Instead, these findings are perfectly consistent with Occam’s razor and the assumption that the facilitator is the one speaking.

Thanks to this overwhelming body of research literature, professional societies have tended to be unusually blunt about FC. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, the leading professional body in this field, states unequivocally: “Facilitated Communication (FC) is a discredited technique that should not be used”. It continues: “There is no scientific evidence of the validity of FC, and there is extensive scientific evidence … that messages are authored by the ‘facilitator’ rather than the person with a disability”. This is not a marginal view; it reflects decades of careful studies across multiple countries. There are many other statements from relevant medical organizations and expert bodies that reach the same conclusion, which is to be expected, considering that the evidence points in only one direction. Are the facilitators deliberately engaging in fraud? No, it’s very likely that they’re being sincere, at least in the large majority of cases. The explanation is the ideomotor effect, the same unconscious motor influence that drives Ouija boards. The facilitator is not deliberately faking communication but unknowingly producing it, usually to satisfy their own desperate longing to connect with the disabled person.

So how did we get here? I guess the Times feels like it’s fine to smuggle in flagrant pseudoscience under the guise of a book review. Hey, it’s just a book review! But I’m afraid that claims of fact that appear in the paper’s pages are the paper’s responsibility, and this review represents a profound journalistic failure. The review treats FC as valid, when in fact FC has been exhaustively discredited for decades. In doing so, it does something worse than merely misinform; it participates in a harmful fiction that exploits vulnerable families and misrepresents disabled individuals. As I’ve said before, this issue is difficult to address in part because the families who fall for FC are so sympathetic. And the FC community goes to great lengths to enable this form of wishful thinking; they’ve created a number of superficially-different approaches to avoid scrutiny and defy the debunkings of the past, including avoiding the term “facilitated communication” itself. They now tend endorse tools like letter boards and techniques like “spelling”, which they claim are fundamentally different. But it’s all still FC, all still a matter of a verbal and cognitively-unimpaired adult “interpreting” the language of a severely disabled person and producing language that they’re consistently and conspicuously incapable of producing on their own.

Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers)

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Wee Nips
Published 19 Sept 2025

Generation Jones and the Temple of Boom(ers) explores the fascinating differences — and surprising overlaps — between Baby Boomers, Generation X, and the often-overlooked Generation Jones.

Were you too young for Woodstock but too old for grunge? Stuck between disco and Nirvana? You might just be a Joneser.

In this video, we’ll compare:

🎵 The cultural touchstones of Boomers, Gen X, and Jonesers

📉 The low points in history that shaped each generation’s outlook

💰 The economic conditions that defined their opportunities

🧠 The attitudes and stereotypes that still stick today

Generation Jones isn’t just a footnote — they’re the missing link between the optimism of the Boomers and the skepticism of Gen X.

0:00 Introduction
1:38 Definitions
2:42 Cultural Touchstones
3:38 Low Points in History
4:53 Economic Conditions
5:42 Social and Attitude Differences
6:38 Humorous Stereotypes
7:09 Overlaps and Connections
8:02 Closing
(more…)

QotD: “Colour-blind” casting

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

Is noticing somebody’s skin colour an important factor in addressing your privilege, or is noticing race itself racist? And should white actors ever play a character whose historical and/or geographical context suggests that they should be played by people of colour? I ask, because people who have been watching the TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall have noticed that there are lots of global majority actors playing roles that — back in the distant past of Series 1 — would have been played by white actors. Should people have noticed that? And should historical accuracy have a part to play? It certainly used to be the case that only racists noticed race, but then racists started trying to disguise themselves by not noticing race, which made not noticing race racist again.

As a regular reader of this column, I have no doubt that you want to remain on the right side of history, and I imagine your instincts are to applaud anything that is annoying for conservatives, like diverse casting in historical dramas. Sometimes being an anti-racist can be hard work, but we don’t tell people to “do the work” for nothing.

First, we need to dispense with the “historical accuracy” argument. There are two ways to do this and the first is to say accuracy should play second fiddle to representation. This is apparently the Hilary Mantel argument. The Times says the Wolf Hall author blessed colour-blind casting before she died, saying that although it was difficult: “you’re in the realm of representation. I think we have to take on board the new thinking.” Everything in 21st Century Britain should reflect 21st Century Britain. We’re in year zero, and hence not employing non-white actors in a production made today, even though there were very few non-white people in sixteenth century England, is simply racist.

The second option is to straightforwardly argue that there were lots of Black and Brown people pottering around the court of Henry VIII, so the production is historically accurate. This is the BBC Horrible History approach. Were you there? Can you prove that it wasn’t full of People of Colour? And is it worth losing your job to do so?

I prefer to hold both of these arguments in my head at the same time. Too much consistency seems a bit right-wing.

Next we need to look at specifically who is being played. Thankfully, the “colour-blind casting” didn’t select any PoGMSTs (People of Global Majority Skin Tones) to play bad guys. This was both on purpose, because oppressed people cannot be bad, and it was also not on purpose, because otherwise it wouldn’t be colour-blind casting. Whichever one it was — and it was both — without PoGMSTs actors playing historic fictionalised evil people, we can avoid the completely random casting process being labelled as racist.

David Scullion, “People of Colour television”, The Critic, 2024-11-12.

March 31, 2026

Reaction to Avi Lewis being elected federal NDP leader

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to an ill-informed snipe at @TheFoodProfessor for a post about Avi Lewis:

This take reads like someone who’s never had to meet a payroll or balance a ledger under real pressure.

Accusing the “Food Professor” of being bribed is just noise. No evidence, no numbers, just a conspiracy to avoid the actual argument. Classic move when the facts aren’t cooperating.

I ran a grocery business. Not a theory. Not a model. A real one. Thin margins, constant spoilage risk, price swings, labour costs, supplier pressure, and customers who notice every 10-cent increase. Grocery isn’t some gold mine. It’s a logistics grind with razor-thin profit.

Here’s the part people like this never mention:
Canada’s total grocery profits are roughly $6 billion. Spread that across 40 million people and you’re looking at maybe $12 a month per person if you wiped out every dollar of profit.

So what’s the fantasy here?

Government steps in, runs stores “for the people”, eliminates profit… and somehow prices magically drop while efficiency improves?

Let’s test behaviour, not intentions.

What happens when you remove profit?

No incentive to optimize operations
No accountability for waste
Political hiring instead of performance hiring
Pricing driven by optics, not supply reality
Losses covered by taxpayers … meaning you, again

You don’t eliminate costs. You just hide them and move them.

I lived through high interest rates north of 20%, carried customer debt, and still had to make the numbers work. Government doesn’t operate under that discipline. It can fail indefinitely and call it policy.

Public grocery isn’t “not Marxist”. It’s not even that sophisticated. It’s just naive.

The real issue isn’t ideology. It’s a complete lack of understanding of how incentives drive outcomes.

You don’t fix affordability by replacing people who have to be efficient with a system that doesn’t.

You fix it by increasing competition, reducing regulatory drag, and letting supply actually respond.

Everything else is theatre.

In the National Post, Kelly McParland outlines the scale of challenge Lewis is facing to make the NDP electorally viable again:

Thumbnail of one of Avi Lewis’s campaign shorts

After two weeks on the road [Jagmeet Singh] finally conceded to reality, allowing that while “I would be honoured to serve as prime minister … I don’t want to presuppose the outcome of the election”.

Maybe Lewis should start straight off with that line, since choosing him as leader saves the party from pretending it expects to find itself in power. “The return of the NDP starts today!” Lewis declared in his victory speech, but as the most out-there ideologue of the candidates he defeated he’ll have a harder time convincing ordinary Canadians than he did winning over his fourth-place party. A film-maker and activist, he’s not just left-wing, but way off in a universe of his own.

His ambitions are dazzling: a Canada powered entirely by renewable energy in which everyone gets a guaranteed income, vast infrastructure projects are built to sustain the environment, farmers produce healthier, affordable, cleaner food while homebuilders concentrate on energy-efficient homes for lower income groups. All this paid for by an economy that somehow remains vibrant while its vital energy industry is crippled, jobs are lost, taxes are raised, royalties are increased, government spending balloons, the carbon tax is re-introduced and “the rich” are somehow found to have plenty of excess revenue to cover the costs.

Voters who continue to back the NDP will now know exactly what they’re casting their ballots for. That wasn’t always clear under previous leaders. Thomas Mulcair didn’t hate trade deals or pipelines enough to satisfy party stalwarts deeply hostile to both. To the unyielding, Singh did a deal with the devil when he agreed to prop up Justin Trudeau’s Liberals, even if the decision succeeded in squeezing out some policy victories.

Small victories aren’t in Lewis’s lexicon. He wants a revolution. “This is more than a rigged economy, it is a war on working people”, he declared on Sunday. “It is immoral, it is unCanadian and we cannot let it stand.”

March 30, 2026

Net Zero or mass immigration, pick one (or better, pick neither)

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Lorenzo Warby points out the blindingly obvious (to anyone with common sense) fact that the top two pet projects of western transnationalist elites — Net Zero and mass third-world immigration — are in direct conflict with one another. But rather than choosing one form of societal suicide over the other, the healthy alternative is to absolutely reject both:

Culturally more homogeneous democracies are happier than more culturally diverse democracies. Also, in the Anglophone countries, where the centre-right won the most recent national election, happiness went up slightly. Where the centre-left won the most recent national election, happiness went down noticeably.

Australia is the latest developed democracy to experience conventional centre-right politics being threatened by a national populist surge. Just as country-club Republicans were Trumped, Gaullists were Le Penned, Forza Italia was Melonied, and the Tories are being Faraged, so the Liberal-National Party Coalition in Australia is getting Hansoned.

What Australia has in common with the pattern in the UK, and the rise of AfD (Alternative for Deutschland) in Germany, is the combination of Net Zero (or equivalent) with mass immigration leading to a national populist surge.

National populism well predates Net Zero. It does not predate the adoption of policies of elite display and elite benefit, particularly regarding immigration. The combination of Net Zero with mass immigration is, however, particularly conducive to surges electoral support for national populism, as we can see in the UK, Germany and now Australia.

It is not hard to see why. Mass prosperity rests on cheap energy: that is much more important than, for instance, free trade. The Industrial Revolution is really the Mass Access To Cheap Energy Revolution. It is that access that is above all else responsible for The Great Enrichment.

As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

    by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

Net Zero means raising the price of energy, thereby narrowing access to it, and, in particular, narrowing the range of economic activity that is commercially sustainable. Even without increasing the population, that will increase contestation over resources.

Add mass immigration to the mix, and that contestation becomes much worse. All the experienced costs of mass immigration — higher rents and house prices; increased congestion; downward pressure on wages and increased fiscal stress (if importing significant numbers of low-capital/skill immigrants); downward pressure on social trust and corrosive effects on the norms and rules that underpin institutions (if importing lots of people from very different cultures); increased crime (if importing significant numbers of people from higher crime cultures) — are then magnified.

March 29, 2026

Women’s highly specific expectations for males showing emotion

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

An older post from Rohan Ghostwind but still fully relevant:

… or, why they have such a hard time sharing their feelings, the same way that women do.

Biological reasons aside, for most men, the answer to this is obvious: They’ve attempted to open up to someone in the past, and had it backfire so spectacularly that they realized they should probably never do it again.

Specifically, a lot of young men realize that in order to be a functional participant in society, it requires them to regularly stuff down their emotions and carry on with the tasks of their daily lives.

Much of the rhetoric around wanting more emotionally vulnerable men therefore comes across as vacuous, because many men subconsciously realize that people (both men and women) only want these emotions at specific times, and in specific contexts.

Women want to see the man who cries at the end of the Disney movie, not the man who’s so depressed that he’s in bed for 18 hours a day. Obviously this is an extreme case, but it’s something that pretty much every man has experienced to some degree or another.

But this hides the fact that women themselves are just as responsible for creating this incentive structure, if not more. For as much as women want a guy who opens up and shares his feelings, this usually comes after the man has developed some degree of competency in all the other relevant domains of life — education, career, finances, looks, etc.

Again, many men have to learn this lesson the hard way; they have indeed attempted to open up, only to find that it hurt their relationship prospects, or otherwise made them less attractive to women. As such, he realizes he has to “win” the game of the patriarchy before he’s given the opportunity of subverting the rules of the game.

In other words, emotions are reserved for the elite — for the rest of us low human capital™, we need to shut the fuck up and get good at tensorflow and B2B sales before we even think about having a hard time.

March 28, 2026

Noelia Castillo Ramos, RIP

Filed under: Europe, Health, Law, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Celina provides the background information you certainly won’t get from skimming the mainstream media’s coverage of the death of twenty-five year old Noelia Castillo Ramos:

This is how broken the West has become. On Thursday, March 26, 2026, in a clinically sterile room within an assisted living facility in Barcelona, Spain, the government executed a twenty five year old paralysed rape victim. Her name was Noelia Castillo Ramos.1 Noelia did not die of a terminal illness, nor did she pass away from natural causes. Rather, she was administered a lethal injection by the Spanish state that had dismantled her family, forced her into a hostile and horribly dangerous environment, ignored her horrific violation, and ultimately deemed her broken existence too inconvenient to maintain.2

A still from Noelia Castillo’s Antena 3 interview on March 24.

While Noelia Castillo’s heart was stopped by a cocktail of state-sponsored chemicals, the unvetted migrant men who gang-raped her, shattered her mind, and drove her to fling herself from a fifth-floor window continue to walk the streets of Europe, entirely shielded from justice. They faced zero consequences. She faced the death penalty.

These were the last words that her grandmother said to Noelia: “I love you, my girl; someday we will be together again”.

The fate of Noelia Castillo stands as a single almost perfect, undeniable illustration of everything that is broken, evil, and actively suicidal about modern Western society under progressive, woke, open-border, and secular-left governance. Progressive Europe has functionally and legally decided that native European women and girls are a disposable commodity, just collateral damage in the grand suicidal project of multiculturalism.

  1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_of_Noelia_Castillo
  2. https://www.v2radio.co.uk/news/v2-radio-world-news/gang-rape-victim-25-to-be-euthanised-after-fathers-legal-challenge-fails/

“Avi Lewis isn’t just left-wing … He’s the Leap Manifesto come to life”

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

The federal New Democratic Party is having a leadership contest with the voting to be tallied this weekend. Avi Lewis is apparently the overwhelmingly odds-on candidate to take it on the first ballot, and as Fred DeLorey explains, it’s likely to be very bad news indeed … for the NDP’s provincial counterparts:

Maclean’s called it a decade ago. (Cover image: Maclean’s, April 25, 2016)

Pundits love to overcomplicate politics, but the math for this Sunday’s NDP leadership vote is painfully simple. For Avi Lewis to be denied a first-ballot victory, the other four candidates on the ballot need to somehow scrape together 50% plus one of the vote.

Let’s be brutally honest: that ain’t happening.

[…]

So, what does this imminent coronation mean for the NDP?

My gut tells me it’s an unmitigated disaster. Avi Lewis isn’t just left-wing; he’s arguably the most radical, far-left extremist to ever take the helm of a major Canadian political party. We’re talking about a guy who literally wants to nationalize our grocery stores, completely defund the Canadian military, and aggressively shut down our entire energy sector by next Tuesday. He’s the Leap Manifesto [Wiki] come to life.

And here is why this is a catastrophic problem for the broader NDP movement. Unlike the federal Liberals or Conservatives, the NDP is one highly integrated entity. There is no structural separation between their federal and provincial wings. Right now, the federal party is a broke, 6-seat laughingstock without official party status in the House of Commons. But provincially? The NDP is a powerhouse, currently sitting as the government or the Official Opposition in 6 of Canada’s 7 largest provinces.

Those provincial machines weren’t built on Leap Manifesto radicalism. Leaders like John Horgan, Wab Kinew, and Rachel Notley found massive success by dragging their parties to the pragmatic, business-friendly middle. Back in my home province of Nova Scotia, Darrell Dexter famously secured his historic majority by literally branding himself a “conservative progressive”.

Avi Lewis wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere near that kind of pragmatism. As federal leader, his extreme views will instantly infect the brand of the entire integrated party. Every time he attacks the resource sector or champions a fringe socialist policy in Ottawa, Conservative and Liberal premiers are going to gleefully hang those quotes around the necks of every provincial NDP leader in the country. He isn’t just going to sink the federal party; he is going to drag the successful provincial wings down with him.

But then again, the world is changing rapidly, and usually in crazy ways. Maybe Canadians can be convinced that they desperately want Canada Post managing their produce aisles. Maybe the electorate is finally ready for a platform where your weekly ration of locally sourced lentils is delivered by a government-appointed bicycle courier.

I remain deeply unconvinced. But these days? Who knows.

QotD: The moment the American empire began to decline

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Middle East, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are two stories from the run-up to the American invasion of Iraq that I can’t get out of my head. The first is that in the final stages of war planning, the US Air Force was drawing up targeting lists for the sorties they expected to make. They already had detailed plans1 for striking Iraq’s air defense systems, but they worried that they would also be asked to disable Iraqi WMD sites. So the Air Force pulled together a special team of intelligence officers to figure out the right coordinates for all the secret factories and labs that were churning out biological weapons and nuclear materials. Try as they might, they couldn’t find them. So … they just kept on looking.

The second story comes from an anonymous source who described to Michael Mazarr, the author of this book, the basic occupation strategy that the National Security Council was settling on. The concept was that once you “cut off the head” of the Iraqi government, you would witness a “rapid and inevitable march toward Jeffersonian democracy”. What I find amazing about this is that nobody even stopped to think about the metaphor — how many things march rapidly and decisively after being decapitated?

I am of the exact right age for the Iraq War to be the formative event of my political identity.2 But even if that hadn’t been true, it still feels like the most consequential geopolitical event of my life. The United States spent trillions of dollars and caused the deaths of somewhere between half a million and a million people in Iraq alone. The goal of this was “regional transformation”, and we transformed the region all right. The war destabilized several neighboring regimes, which led them to collapse into anarchy and civil war. Consequences of that included millions more deaths and the near extinction of Christianity in the place it came from.

As an American, I didn’t feel any of this directly,3 but with the benefit of hindsight the war looks even more epochal for us. It marks, in so many ways, the turning point from our decades of unchallenged global supremacy to the current headlong charge into “multipolarity”. I know this may sound melodramatic, but I truly believe future historians will point to it as the moment that we squandered our empire. Remember, hegemonic empires work best when nobody thinks they’re an empire. True strength is not the ability to enforce your commands, it’s everybody being so desperate to please you that they spend all their time figuring out what you want, such that you don’t even have to issue edicts.

Between the fall of the Soviet Union and the Iraq War, American global dominance was so unquestioned we didn’t even have to swat down any challengers. This is a very good position for an empire to be in, because it means you don’t run the risk of blunders or surprise upset victories that make you look weak and encourage others to take a chance. Conversely, there’s a negative spiral where the hegemon has to start making demands of its clients, which makes the clients resentful and uncooperative, which in turn means that they have to be told what to do. All of this makes the hegemon-client relationship start to look less like a good “deal” and more purely extractive, which can rapidly lead the whole system to fall apart.

Iraq was the moment the American empire went into this negative cycle.

Even if you don’t agree with me about that, presumably you will agree that it was very bad for American soft power and prestige, bad for a number of friendly regimes in the area, and bad for our finances and our military readiness. So to anybody curious about the world, it seems very important to ask why we did this, why we thought it was a good idea, and how nobody predicted the ensuing debacle that seems so obvious in hindsight.

The conventional answers to these questions tend to be either “George W. Bush was dumb” or “Dick Cheney was evil”. I totally reject these as answers. Or I think at best they’re seriously incomplete: if the first Trump administration taught us anything, it’s that the US President can’t actually do very much on his own if the bureaucracy is set against him. The United States is an oligarchy, a kind of surface democracy; big decisions don’t happen without a lot of buy-in from a lot of people. More to the point, the decision to invade Iraq actually was endorsed and supported by pretty much every important politician and every institution, including the whole mainstream media and most of the Democratic Party. Blaming it on a single bad administration is too easy. It’s an excuse designed to avoid asking hard questions about how organizations filled with well-meaning people can go totally off the rails

Fortunately, Michael Mazarr has written the definitive4 book on this very question. It’s not a history of the Iraq War and occupation: it’s a history of the decision to invade Iraq, ending shortly after the tanks went steaming across the border. It’s an exhaustively-researched doorstopper composed out of hundreds and hundreds of interviews with officials working in the innards of the White House and of various federal bureaucracies and spy agencies, all aimed at answering a single question: “What were they thinking?”

John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.

  1. Those plans were provided by the Russians, who prior to multiple rounds of NATO expansion were our allies.
  2. Given that almost everybody in the US mainstream, both Democrats and Republicans, were for it, this probably explains a lot about how I turned out.
  3. Sure, maybe someday we’ll have a fiscal crisis, but the incredible thing about America is that all the money wasted in Iraq still won’t be in the top 5 reasons for it. >
  4. “Definitive” is publisher-speak for “very, very long.”
« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress