Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2026

Britain’s Amelia phenomenon

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

On his Substack, Fergus Mason talks about the new Queen of English Resistance, Amelia:

Amelia, the new queen of the British right.

Independent journalism is a pretty grim business right now. Writing about the state of our poor broken country can be soul-destroying. Good news is thin on the ground; new calamities seem to arrive daily, either a fresh atrocity committed by an illegal immigrant or some new Labour assault on our freedom. So it’s nice when something a little more light-hearted comes along — even if it does make some serious points, too.

A couple of weeks ago the media started reporting a new online game funded by Prevent, the government’s (completely dysfunctional) department for diverting people away from extremism. Commissioned by Hull City Council and produced by “creative social enterprise” Shout Out UK, the game — called Pathways — is intended to “Encourage learning about the concept of extremism and radicalisation through the process of choice and safe exploration”.

As games go, this is a spectacularly dull one. Players choose a character, from a very limited selection — there are two, one male and one female, but they’re both called Charlie and use they/them pronouns. They then have to navigate their character through a series of scenarios, answering multiple-choice questions. The idea is that if you give the “wrong” answers you’ll get referred to Prevent, but it soon becomes obvious that almost any answers will get you referred to Prevent. The constant theme is that there are approved views and ways of acting — which don’t, for example, include doing research to find out if something you saw on the internet is true or not — and that, if you deviate from this, the state will step in to “support” you. A lot of this support looks suspiciously like re-education:

[…]

Of course, if you know much about the online right, you’ll probably see the problem already. As one stunned Reddit user commented, “Wait, are you telling me they made the cute goth e-girl the ‘racist’? Do they understand how the internet works?”

Well, they certainly do now.

The Daily Telegraph published an article about Pathways on 9 January, bringing the game to public notice. That same day, X user Bovril-Gesellschaft posted “I think I’m in love with Amelia”. It seemed many other right-wingers were too, because within hours Amelia memes were appearing in large numbers. Mostly produced with AI, these depicted Amelia in a wide range of styles (probably reflecting their creators’ personal tastes), but all featured her purple hair and most stuck with the outfit of a pink dress and purple hoodie or cardigan the game depicted her in. Images ranged from cartoons in the style of the original game to photorealism. […]

There’s a lot to laugh about in this. For example, brightly coloured “danger hair” has generally been the hallmark of women on the far left. Amelia subverts this by giving our new heroine her distinctive purple bob. Will we see the pro-Hamas nuts and trans cultists abruptly return to natural hair colours to dissociate themselves from Amelia? That would be funny.

January 23, 2026

“Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one”

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

On Substack, Maninder Järleberg illuminates the problem of functional illiteracy in higher education in the west:

The Age of Functional Illiteracy

Functional illiteracy was once a social diagnosis, not an academic one. It referred to those who could technically read but could not follow an argument, sustain attention, or extract meaning from a text. It was never a term one expected to hear applied to universities. And yet it has begun to surface with increasing regularity in conversations among faculty themselves. Literature professors now admit — quietly in offices, more openly in essays — that many students cannot manage the kind of reading their disciplines presuppose. They can recognise words; they cannot inhabit a text.

The evidence is no longer anecdotal. University libraries report historic lows in book borrowing. National literacy assessments show long-term declines in adult reading proficiency. Commentators in The Atlantic, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times describe a generation for whom long-form reading has become almost foreign. A Victorian novel, once the ordinary fare of undergraduate study, now requires extraordinary accommodation. Even thirty pages of assigned reading can provoke anxiety, resentment, or open resistance.

It would be dishonest to ignore the role of the digital world in this transformation. Screens reward speed, fragmentation, and perpetual stimulation; sustained attention is neither required nor encouraged. But to lay the blame solely at the feet of technology is a convenient evasion. The crisis of reading within universities is not merely something that has happened to the academy. It is something the academy has, in significant measure, helped to produce.

The erosion of reading was prepared by intellectual shifts within the humanities themselves—shifts that began during the canon wars of the late twentieth century. Those battles were never only about which books should be taught. They were about whether literature possessed inherent value, whether reading required discipline, whether difficulty was formative or oppressive, and whether the humanities existed to shape students or merely to affirm them. In the decades that followed, entire traditions of reading were dismantled with remarkable confidence and astonishing speed.

The result is a moment of institutional irony. The very disciplines charged with preserving literary culture helped undermine the practices that made such culture possible. What we are witnessing now is not simply a failure of students to read, but the delayed consequence of ideas that taught generations of readers to approach texts with suspicion rather than attention, critique rather than encounter.

This essay is part of a larger project to trace that history, to explain how a war over the canon helped usher in an age in which reading itself is slipping from our grasp, and why the consequences of that war are now returning to the academy with unmistakable force.

The Canon Wars: A Short Intellectual History

To understand the present state of literary studies, one must return to the canon wars of the 1980s and 1990s — a conflict that reshaped the humanities with a speed and finality few recognised at the time. Although remembered now as a dispute about which books deserved a place on the syllabus, the canon wars were in truth a contest over the very meaning of literature and the purpose of a humanistic education.

In the decades after the Second World War, the curriculum in most Western universities still rested upon a broadly shared assumption: that certain works possessed enduring value, that they spoke across time, and that an educated person should grapple with them. This conviction, however imperfectly applied, formed the backbone of the humanities. It was also increasingly at odds with a new intellectual climate shaped by post-1968 radicalism, the rise of identity politics, and the importation of French theory.

By the early 1980s, tensions that had simmered beneath the surface erupted into public view. The most emblematic flashpoint came at Stanford University in 1987–88, when student demonstrators chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!” in protest of the university’s required course on Western civilisation. The course was soon dismantled, replaced by a broader, more ideologically framed program. What happened at Stanford quickly reverberated across the country. Departments revised reading lists, restructured curricula, and abandoned long-standing core requirements.

On one side of the debate stood defenders of the canon—figures such as Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom, E.D. Hirsch, and Roger Kimball—who argued that the great works formed a kind of civilisational inheritance. The canon, they insisted, was not a museum of privilege but a record of human striving, imagination, and achievement. On the other side were scholars like Edward Said, Toni Morrison, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha, who contended that the canon reflected histories of exclusion and domination, and that expanding or dismantling it was a moral imperative.

But beneath these arguments lay a deeper philosophical rift. The defenders assumed that literature possessed intrinsic value, that texts could be read for their beauty, their insight, or their power. The critics, armed with concepts drawn from Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, argued that literature was inseparable from structures of power, that meaning was unstable, and that reading was less an act of discovery than an exposure of hidden ideological operations.

The canon wars ended not with a negotiated peace but with a decisive transformation. The traditional canon was not merely expanded; its authority was dissolved. And with it dissolved a set of shared assumptions about why we read at all.

January 22, 2026

Carney in Davos … “the mismatch between message and messenger is … very special”

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

I make it a point not to listen to politicans’ speeches, as I need to keep my blood pressure within safe ranges for health reasons. A lot of Canadian commentators have been gushing with praise for Prime Minister Mark Carney’s bloviations at the WEF gabathon in Davos, because of course they have. Brave Mr. Carney standing up to the Bad Orange Man and getting ovations from the kind of people he’s most comfortable dealing with. How very nice for him. But as Chris Bray explains, it didn’t play quite as well with the rest of the non-Davos-attending world:

Mark Carney gave a speech in Davos, that fortress of democratic pluralism where hotel rooms inside the security zone cost thousands of dollars a night and no one with an expense account has to be lonely because the massive security forces don’t try to interfere with all the sex trafficking, which is very democratic. Anyway, the speech was stunning and brave, and everybody clapped a lot.

Someone put the word “flexes” next to the word “Canada”, apparently not intending to cause laughter, but yes: Mark Carney flexed and warned and puffed himself up like a man who’d just eaten the wrong part of the fugu.

You should watch it. Don’t try to eat or drink during the speech, because you’ll choke, and push any breakable household goods away from the reach of what will soon be your flailing arms, but you should watch him perform this extraordinary set of stranded symbols. The mismatch between message and messenger is … very special.

I was physically paralyzed as an effect of hearing this sentence from this face for a full ten seconds, and then I spasmed. It’s like watching Erich Honecker stand up to the East German regime. “We cannot tolerate misogyny, warns Jack the Ripper.”

Carney hinted broadly that the rules are breaking down in international relationships …

… which for the first time in a long time are being reshaped by mere power, a rare thing on the global stage, because there’s meanness and bullying and a rejection of friendly norms and restraint from … someone very bad, not that he was naming names, and so Canada is turning to new partners, extending the hand of friendship to nations and leaders that still care about rules and values and democracy.

The central banker who was selected as his country’s head of government before he’d ever stood for election to any office anywhere ever, the prime minister of a country where the government had just been rebuked by its courts for faking a national security emergency so it could suspend the rule of law and crush dissent, gave a real tubthumper about democracy and the rule of law.

The total absence of connection between “things being said” and “things being done” sets a record, here.

January 21, 2026

“It is a deal so bad that only Keir Starmer could have negotiated it”

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

In Spiked, Fraser Myers says that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer fully deserves to be humiliated over his give-it-all-away negotiations for the Chagos Islands, which includes the strategic naval base at Diego Garcia:

In the middle of that map is Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory and home to one of the most strategic airfields and anchorages on the planet. […] The red circle is 2,000 nautical miles from the island. The purple circle is 1,150 nautical miles, roughly the distance from London to Malta, that represents the distance from Diego Garcia. That circle is also the distance from Diego Garcia to the island of Mauritius.
Caption and image from CDR Salamander.

With the assistance of the brightest and best of the UK Foreign Office, the Labour government agreed to an arrangement that would hand over territory containing an Anglo-American military base to an unfriendly country, condemn its former inhabitants to permanent exile, and pay tens of billions of pounds for the pleasure.

I’m talking, of course, about Chagos (officially, the British Indian Ocean Territory), which has briefly caught the attention of the world’s most powerful man. This morning, amid a flurry of Truth Social posts about his designs on Greenland, US president Donald Trump’s gaze briefly alighted on this small, tropical archipelago on the other side of the planet. And he did not hold back in his criticism of Britain’s plans: “Shockingly, our ‘brilliant’ NATO Ally, the United Kingdom, is currently planning to give away the Island of Diego Garcia [the largest of the Chagos Islands], the site of a vital US Military Base, to Mauritius, and to do so FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER”, he wrote. “The UK giving away extremely important land is an act of GREAT STUPIDITY”.

Trump’s reaction has widely been described as a major about-turn. But, in truth, his team has veered all over the place on the Chagos question. In October 2024, when Starmer initially agreed to hand over the islands, Marco Rubio, then still a US senator for Florida, reportedly warned that this would allow “Communist China” to spy on the US Navy, given Mauritius’s alliance with China. Yet in February 2025, when Starmer visited the Oval Office, the US president said he was “inclined to go along with” the UK’s proposals. And by May, when the deal was signed between the British and Mauritian governments, Rubio, by now US secretary of state, welcomed it. He claimed that Trump himself had “expressed his support for this monumental achievement”, hailing the deal that would cede sovereignty to Mauritius, while Diego Garcia would be leased to Britain for the next 99 years.

Of course, Trump’s motivation for bashing Starmer’s deal now has little to do with the Chagos Islands themselves. The real prize for the US president is in a different hemisphere entirely, as he freely admits. In a bizarre non-sequitur, the US president’s Truth Social post goes on to say that the Chagos deal is “another in a very long line of reasons why Greenland has to be acquired” by the US. This smackdown over Chagos, this attempt to humiliate Starmer and Britain on the global stage, is clearly part of Trump’s broader pressure campaign against the European powers, in his bid to seize Greenland for the US.

Nevertheless, it really should not have taken Trump’s intervention to put the brakes on the dreadful Chagos deal. Whichever way you spin it, this arrangement has never been in Britain’s national interest, nor the interests of the Chagossians who call the islands their home. It poses a risk to Western security interests, handing sovereignty over a territory, where almost 400 UK and US troops and 2,000 contractors are based, to a country that’s allied to China. The cost of leasing back Diego Garcia from Mauritius is also eye-watering. Although the Labour government tried to present the cost as just £3.4 billion, the true figure is believed to be 10 times as much, at around £34.7 billion.

So what on Earth possessed Starmer to sign up to such a risible deal? What leverage was a tiny island like Mauritius able to gain over Britain?

January 20, 2026

Those awful AWFLs

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

On Substack, Rohan Ghostwind responds to a recent New York Times opinion from Michelle Goldberg pretending not to understand why “the right” is against Affluent White Female Liberals (AWFLs):

Michelle Goldberg recently wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times called “The Right Is Furious With Liberal White Women”

Specifically, she talks about the rising contempt for the AWFL: Affluent white female liberal.

The first part of the opinion piece is a play-by-play of the Renee Good situation, pointing out that the right is freaking out about roving bands of Karens.

The part I find interesting is in the final paragraph:

    It wasn’t long ago that casual contempt for white women was the domain of the left, at least that part of the left that took books like “White Fragility” seriously. So it’s striking how easily conservatives, who’ve been stewing over insults to white people for at least five years, have singled out a group of white women as the enemy.

Here’s the interesting part: throughout the course of her opinion piece, she touches on White Female Liberal part. Conspicuously missing is the first part of the acronym: affluent.

This is par for the course for an NYT Opinion piece: play into the identity politics aspect while simultaneously downplaying class. This is, of course, a big reason why the Democrats lost ground with working class people during the 2024 election.

[…]

Rob Henderson popularized the term luxury beliefs …

And if it was ever one group of people who embody the most luxury beliefs per capita it would be the AWFL’s.

What makes them uniquely annoying is their persistent refusal to acknowledge how sanctimonious they come across to the rest of the world. As far as they’re concerned, they are the only intelligent and moral group of people, and they will eventually get what they want by scolding everybody else into submission.

People hate this, because people would actually prefer bigotry to infantilization — but the affluent white woman, by virtue of being affluent, never has to reality test her beliefs against the real world.

Mark Steyn on demographics, Trump, and Greenland

Filed under: Europe, History, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Mark Steyn was warning about demography in the west twenty years ago, and at the time he was dismissed as a crank. Now, not only have the demographic forecasts matched what he predicted, they’re actually worse:

As noted yesterday, twenty years ago this month — January 2006 — The Wall Street Journal and The New Criterion published the first draft of what would become the thesis of my bestselling book, America Alone.

The Journal headline sums it up:

The sub-head makes plain what’s at stake:

    The real reason the West is in danger of extinction.

And the lead paragraph spells it out:

    Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries.

Two decades ago that scenario was dismissed as “alarmist” by the bleepwits of The Economist. Today it is assumed by elites of all stripes, from the authors of the new US National Security Strategy …

    Trump warns Europe faces “civilizational erasure” in explosive new document

… to peer-reviewed papers positing that all Western European nations other than Portugal and micro-states such as Andorra will become majority Muslim …

… to the Deputy Leader of Britain’s supposedly “populist” party reacting to news that native Anglo-Celts will become a minority in the UK by 2063 — and in England rather sooner than that:

    I’ll be long gone by then.

So, in the twenty years since my Wall Street Journal essay, the ruling class has gone from “alarmism” to “yeah, it’s happening, but maybe not until 2100” to “okay, it’s a fait accompli, but what’s the big deal?” As to Richard Tice being long gone, which is devoutly to be wished, 2026 to 2063 is thirty-seven years — or Whitney Houston to now.

This is why nobody cares about the pleas of the “expert” class to save the “rules-based international order”, which is a long-winded way of saying “1950”. Trump, for one, is moving on:

The obsession with Greenland, so bewildering to US “allies”, derives from America’s need for an Israeli-style “Iron Dome”, which, as the mighty builder of Trump Tower, the President has upgraded to a “Golden Dome”. Why would he seek such a thing? Because in this scenario America’s Israel …and Western Europe is Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Iran.

Twenty years ago, my eventual book-length argument was summarised in the Toronto Globe and Mail by the eminent “political scientist” William Christian as “quite possibly the most crass and vulgar book about the West’s relationship with the Islamic world I have ever encountered“. Professor Christian has evidently led a sheltered life: he was born in the Queen Charlotte Islands, which are now officially known as “Haida Gwaii”, a bollocks name invented in hopes of appeasing “the Haida nation”; it turns out that these days nowhere is really that sheltered, don’t you find?

But just because something is “crass and vulgar” doesn’t mean it’s not correct. It’s certainly straightforward. The western world is going out of business because it’s given up having babies. The mid-twentieth-century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending the first third of your life in “education” and the last third in “retirement”, was carelessly premised on mid-twentieth-century fertility rates, and, as they collapsed, the west turned to “migrants” to be the children they couldn’t be bothered having themselves. The condition of your maternity ward may be “crass and vulgar”, but it’s not a speculative prediction.

eugyppius discusses the European response to President Trump’s public statements about Greenland:

Eager to make an epic display of retardation demonstrate resolve and independence in the face of these sudden American ambitions on Danish territory, a variety of European countries announced they would send soldiers to Greenland in a display of “military solidarity” with Denmark. Germany sent a grand total of 13 or 15 soldiers (reports vary) to defend the icy island against the Americans. They departed on a matte grey A400M Atlas military transport with plenty of press on hand for photographs. You could almost hear Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” between the lines of the press coverage.

Alas, the Eurotards also did not want to possibly in some hypothetical world perhaps overstep by maybe potentially creating conditions for anything that might conceivably be interpreted by the Americans as a show of force on Greenland itself, so the Luftwaffe A400M landed politely in Denmark, thousands of kilometers away from the disputed territory. From there, all the soldiers boarded a completely non-threatening commercial airline to Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. While this was happening, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius desperately assured the press that it was a purely routine and preplanned mission.

The next thing to happen, while our soldiers were sitting in Greenland for no reason, was that all these efforts to make a statement while not really making a statement to avoid annoying the Americans backfired, in that the Americans got annoyed anyway. U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that all participants in this publicity junket would be slapped with punitive 10% tariffs, to be increased by 1 June 2026 to 25% tariffs, “until such time as a Deal is reached for the Complete and Total purchase of Greenland.”

Hours after Trump posted this note, the Greenland weather soured and our soldiers cancelled an “exploratory tour” they had planned for Sunday afternoon and returned to the Nuuk airport to fly home a few hours ahead of schedule. This lent the impression that Trump’s wall-of-text Truth Social post had scared them into a retreat from Greenland, inspiring hours of social media mockery. In the end we did succeed in making a statement, if not precisely the one we had intended.

Update, 21 January: 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.

January 19, 2026

Regulating the clankers

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At the Foundation for Economic Education, Kevin T. Frazier and Antoine Langrée consider how artificial intelligence can be regulated by state and federal bodies:

Yes, I’m still 12

President Donald Trump’s executive order on artificial intelligence invites analysis of a question so complex that it rarely gets asked: “What exactly do states have the authority to regulate?”

The current, somewhat trite answer is, “The residuary powers reserved under the Tenth Amendment”. Omitting the legalese, that means that states can do whatever the federal government cannot.

States have the power to look out for the health, safety, and welfare of their residents. Thus, for instance, they have the power to address local concerns through zoning laws, professional certifications via licensing regimes, and ensure public safety through law enforcement. These authorities make up what’s often referred to as a state’s “police powers”.

While this generic reading of state power is not necessarily wrong, it’s imprecise. As the AI Litigation Task Force created by Trump’s EO starts its work, a more specific answer is warranted.

The task force is charged with challenging “unconstitutional, preempted, or otherwise unlawful State AI laws that harm innovation”. Reading between these lines, its mission is to contest state laws that interfere with the Administration’s vision for a national AI policy framework. This isn’t an unlimited charge, though. Federal courts reviewing state laws will only strike them down if they fail to align with the Constitution’s allocation of authority or otherwise prove unlawful.

Many stakeholders in AI debates liberally interpret the authorities afforded to states. Based on concerns of existential risk to humanity and the idea that states must protect the health of their citizens, state legislators have proposed and enacted laws that impose significant obligations on the development of AI. Some assume they must have this right, since protecting the lives of their residents is a core priority and unquestioned authority of state governments. After all, since the founding, states have been able to enforce quarantines out of a concern for public health — aren’t aggressive AI laws just extensions of such public health measures, but tailored to the threat of modern threats?

It’s not that simple. States’ police powers are reasonably broad, but not unlimited. States must respect both an upper bound — the purview of enumerated powers reserved for federal authority — and a lower bound—the rights retained by the states’ citizens. These constraints have been tested in litigation throughout our Constitution’s history, notably when state law conflicts with the federal government’s exclusive authority over interstate commerce and when states unduly limit the freedoms of their residents.

These notions are relatively blurry and highly contextual. As national regulatory policy evolves, so too does the extent of preemption. The Lochner era, for example, was a paradigm shift for state police power: as courts expansively interpreted the individual liberty to contract, states’ police power over health, labor protections, and market regulation shrank significantly — only to be restored later. Likewise, individual liberties and valid justifications for their abridgment have evolved to fit developments in civil rights law — from Brown v. Board to Dobbs and Lawrence.

Despite these significant changes in context, the constitutionality of states’ exercise of their police powers follows a bounded framework. This can be observed in the jurisprudence on public health measures — a prime example of police powers. Quarantine orders, from nineteenth-century epidemics to Covid-19, have a direct link to protecting local communities — one of the most important elements of state police powers. They respect the upper and lower bounds of police powers. First, they are geographically specific: they only affect local residents or people coming into local communities. Second, they directly reduce the risk to state residents: quarantines are known solutions to real threats to the health and safety of local communities. They infringe the individual liberties only insofar as is necessary to protect state residents’ vital interests.

January 18, 2026

“Voluntary”. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

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

The federal government, rather than abandoning its ridiculous and ineffective “voluntary” firearm buyback program, is determined to carry on:

🇨🇦 The “Voluntary” Trap: Ottawa’s Buyback Is Coercion, Not Consent 🇨🇦
by GoC Admins

The federal government unveiled the next phase of its firearms confiscation program on Saturday, insisting, yet again, that the process is “voluntary”. But as the details emerge, that claim collapses under the weight of its own contradictions.

What the government is offering Canadians is not a choice. It is a trap designed to force compliance through financial coercion and the threat of criminal prosecution.

Beginning January 19, licensed firearm owners will be contacted by the National Firearms Centre and invited to voluntarily declare their property. The declaration period runs until March 31, 2026. Those who comply may receive compensation. Those who do not will be required to surrender, deactivate, or export their legally acquired property before the amnesty expires on October 30, 2026, or face criminal charges for illegal possession.

That is not voluntary. That is coercion dressed in bureaucratic language.

The “Voluntary” Deadline Is a Financial Squeeze
The most manipulative aspect of this program is its timeline.

The government has set the amnesty to expire on October 30, 2026, but the window to declare firearms for compensation closes seven months earlier, on March 31, 2026. Owners who wait to see whether a future election, court ruling, or policy reversal intervene are punished for doing so.

This gap is not accidental. It predictably pressures owners to act early, before political uncertainty can resolve itself.

If you wait until the summer or fall of 2026 to see whether the law changes, you will have missed the compensation window entirely. At that point, your only options will be to surrender your property for free or face criminal liability.

Yes, owners can technically wait until October 30, 2026, but only if they are willing to receive nothing in return.

That is not a voluntary choice. It is a financial ultimatum.

🇨🇦 Surrender First, Get Paid … Maybe 🇨🇦

Perhaps the most astonishing revelation from the government’s announcement is that declaring your firearms does not guarantee compensation.

Payment will be issued on a “first-come, first-served” basis, subject to available funding.

In any other context, forcing people to surrender lawfully acquired property without guaranteed compensation would violate basic principles of fairness and due process. Under this program, owners are asked to declare thousands, or tens of thousands, of dollars’ worth of property with no legal assurance that the money to compensate them actually exists.

If the budget runs dry, you are still left holding a prohibited firearm you must destroy or surrender. The cheque may never come.

Compliance is mandatory. Compensation is optional.

🇨🇦 A Pilot Project That Already Failed 🇨🇦

Ottawa insists this national rollout will succeed, despite the fact that the pilot version of this program was an embarrassment.

Public reporting indicates that when the government tested the scheme in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, it resulted in the collection of approximately 25 firearms from just 16 individuals. After millions spent on administration, IT systems, and police coordination, only a handful of people participated.

If this were a private-sector initiative, it would have been cancelled outright. Instead, the government is expanding it nationwide without addressing the structural failures that doomed the pilot from the start.

🇨🇦 It’s Not About Safety; It’s About Control 🇨🇦

The government inadvertently revealed its true motivation when officials remarked that they do not want owners using compensation money to “buy an SKS”.

This statement exposes the emptiness of the public-safety argument.

The SKS is already licensed, regulated, and subject to existing Canadian firearms law. By acknowledging that owners might simply replace prohibited firearms with other legal ones that function similarly, the government is admitting that the bans are arbitrary.

The objective is not to remove a particular mechanical risk from society. It is to financially exhaust and discourage lawful firearm ownership altogether.

This program is not designed to stop criminals. Criminals do not declare firearms. Criminals do not comply with amnesty deadlines. Criminals do not interact with government portals.

Only compliant, vetted, RCMP-checked Canadians do.

🇨🇦 The Deadlines Are Real. The Logic Is Not 🇨🇦

Government officials closed their announcement by warning Canadians that “the deadlines are real”.
They are right about that.

The government is fully prepared to criminalize people who followed every rule it imposed. People who acquired their property legally, stored it safely, and harmed no one. It is prepared to spend billions enforcing a program that criminals will ignore entirely.

This is not a buyback. It is not voluntary. It is a forced surrender program aimed at the easiest possible target: responsible firearm owners.

While those driving Canada’s violent crime problem continue entirely outside the scope of this policy, law-abiding citizens are left facing a stark reality: Comply now, or be punished later.

History will judge this program not by its press releases, but by its results. And all available evidence suggests it will deliver exactly what it already has: massive cost, deepened division, and no measurable improvement in public safety.

QotD: Having zero agency

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

I am not sure I remember too much from my high school philosophy class, other than the lesson that I probably would not be actively pursuing a career in philosophy. But I remember one discussion about displaying one’s rebellious nature by doing the exact opposite of whatever an unfavored person said. The teacher made the point that if you always did the exact opposite of what person X says, then you are just as much ruled by X as any of X’s most cultish followers. In such a case you have completely abdicated your agency to X.

I took the lesson from that, which I still try to follow to this day, that you have to process people’s actions and ideas one by one. Certainly this is not to say that there is no room for trust and reputation. If I have found myself agreeing with someone historically and they have been proved right on certain topics time and again, I am going to give their next statement a lot of credence — but I am still going to mentally challenge it to some extent. And for individuals, this sort of reputational trust can vary by topic. If my wife gives me a read on a person, I am going to assume she is correct; if she opines on navigation issues when we are walking around an unfamiliar city, I am going to treat that with a lot more skepticism.

Most will have guessed where I am going with this — the opposition to Trump has reached this point of zero agency. Smart people I know will mock everything Trump says, even if it is something they would normally agree with or at least entertain. People who are extraordinarily skeptical of all medication suddenly think that concerns about Tylenol during pregnancy are totally absurd. The whole Tylenol story is actually pretty interesting — a Harvard dean’s imprimatur seems to tick the credentialism box that was so prominent in COVID, but a look at the quality of the research and the money involved tends to make one very skeptical. And of course a lot of what RFK says makes me skeptical. The whole story is a really interesting, including appeals-to-authority issues we had during COVID, only with the parties reversed. But no one really looks because if Trump said it, it must be mocked.

Coyote, “On Having Zero Agency”, Coyote Blog, 2025-10-02.

January 17, 2026

Shout Out UK – “… embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf”

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter looks at the most amazing political own-goal I’ve encountered in a long, long time:

Somewhere in the suffocating fog of the unhappy and restless Yookay, a minor functionary of the government’s behavioural shaping bureaucracy is staring at her computer screen in appalled alarm at the horror she’s accidentally helped to summon from the churning depths of the Immaterium.

Shout Out UK, which describes its mission as “countering disinformation through political and media literacy”, released a “visual novel” called Pathways, subtitled “navigating the Internet, gaming, and extremism”. The game itself is of course terrible, a ham-fisted “teaching aid” intended to remind British teenagers that even innocuous and entirely peaceful activities – downloading memes, speaking your mind, watching videos, researching things for yourself, attending rallies – will complicate their lives if they draw the concerned and empathetic eye of the managerial state, which after all just wants what’s best for them.

Prevent, if you haven’t heard of them, are a group of government-funded busybodies whose remit is to prevent extremism via early intervention, catching impressionable youth before they can be radicalized. The organization was nominally started to deal with Islamic terrorists, but in recent years it has focused on the “right-wing extremism” of the native British to the exclusion of all else. The Southport butcher Axel Rudakubana, for instance, was referred to Prevent multiple times for his open glorification of white genocide, which Prevent ignored completely.

The player can choose either a male or female character, both of whom are amusingly and awkwardly referred to with they/them pronouns, with grammatical abominations such as “Charlie decided to look for themselves” sprinkled throughout. The character is then placed in a series of scenarios and made to choose between good and bad options: downloading extremist content or telling an adult; agreeing with a classmate that ethnic minorities are being shown favouritism at the expense of native youth vs clapping back at her unconscionable bigotry; watching a video and reading more about the subject or ignoring it; accepting or refusing an invitation to join a secret group chat; attending an anti-immigration rally or staying home. If you make the bad choice, a little “extremism meter” goes into the red.

[…]

If you want to play the game for yourself, your best bet is probably to download the archived version of the Government Approved Goth Girl Dating Simulator. I was able to play it a week ago, but since then it gets stuck on the loading screen, which at first I thought was because they’d taken it offline, but is probably just because Shout Out UK has gotten DDOSed by an entirely unexpected surge of interest in their execrable product (or maybe it’s just that the Shout Out UK website has a dead link on its page, as after poking around a bit on their website I was able to find one that works). Alternatively, you can find most of the screenshots archived here.

Had it not been for one unfortunate creative choice made by the development team, no one would have taken any notice of Pathways. It would have been one of countless cringe-inducing training aids churned out by regime-adjacent quangos cashing in on the flood of taxpayer lucre sluicing through the DEI-and-disinformation industry. But for some reason, which can be explained only by a calamitous failure on the part of Shout Out UK to develop an accurate theory of mind for their target audience, the creators of Pathways decided that it would be a great idea to cast the awful bigot leading the protagonist step by step to his ideological doom in the form of a cute alt girl, thereby sending the message that embracing right-wing extremism will give you a shot at getting a manic pixie dream girl gf.

Update, 18 January: 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.

How would Greenlanders cope with a sudden case of American citizenship?

Filed under: Americas, Europe, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Only a minority of Canadians would welcome Donald Trump’s offer to become the 51st state, and Canadians have a long history of coping with the overflow of American politics across the border. Greenland is suddenly a target for involuntary statehood if Trump gets his way, yet few seemed to be concerned how the actual people in Greenland feel about this proposed change of legal status:

Satellite view of Greenland, Iceland, and parts of Northern Canada.
NASA/Ames Research Center, 17 May, 2005.

According to President Donald Trump, taking possession of Greenland is a national security necessity. It’s so critical, he claims, that he’s willing to take the chilly island the “easy way” or the “hard way”. Denmark, which governs Greenland, isn’t eager to surrender the territory. Even more important, the residents of Greenland, most of whom don’t especially want to be Danish, have even less interest in becoming American. The leader of a country founded on high-minded sentiments about the “consent of the governed” should consider taking that into account.

[…]

“56% of Greenlanders answer that they would vote yes to Greenlandic independence if a referendum were held today, 28% would vote no, and 17% do not know what they would vote for,” The Verian Group announced a year ago about a survey it conducted in Greenland.

With regard to Trump’s long-voiced desire to acquire Greenland for the United States, Verian’s Camilla Kann Fjeldsøe added, “the results show that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to leave the Realm and become part of the United States, while 6% want to leave the Danish Realm and become part of the United States, whereas the remaining 9% are undecided”.

Greenland’s 57,000 people don’t want to be Danish, but they really don’t want to be American. If forced to choose between remaining an appendage of one country or joining another, they’ll likely take the devil they know over the one they don’t.

What About the Consent of the Governed?

That’s a problem for Trump’s imperial ambitions — annexing Greenland would have to happen over the objections of the people who live there. The U.S. could get away with that sort of thing when it didn’t even pretend to give a damn about what the Sioux and the Cheyenne wanted, and when it bought the Louisiana Territory and Alaska from autocratic regimes. It’s not as if Napoleon Bonaparte or Czar Alexander II were going to offer their subjects a say in the matter anyway. But Denmark is a relatively inoffensive liberal democracy that holds regular elections. Greenlanders are accustomed to picking their own political leaders and having input into their fate. If asked, they’ll almost certainly reject the offer.

So, is Trump really going to opt for doing it “the hard way” and just grab the island?

When the United States decided its own fate 250 years ago, the Declaration of Independence set out grievances with the British crown, as well as some basic principles for the new nation. Among them:

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Most Americans no longer consented to be governed by King George III or the British Parliament and so set up a new country with a government of its own. What excuse would we have for foisting American governance and laws on Greenlanders if — as seems likely — they reject political affiliation with the U.S.?

In his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan — who has never in his life been a fan of Donald Trump — warns that “Greenland is a Red Line” and crossing that line will destroy the American constitution (Warning – contains Andrew Sullivan):

(more…)

Scott Adams, RIP

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

Another Scott, Scott Alexander, has a long essay about the career and life of the late comic strip artist, author, and internet personality. When I first encountered his Dilbert comic strip, I was living the cubicle life and far too many of the jokes and situations felt like Adams must be in the same company — possibly even the same department. I read a couple of his non-Dilbert books, but I didn’t follow his work very much after I escaped the cube farm, so reading this essay told me a number of things about Adams that I didn’t already know:

Thanks to everyone who sent in condolences on my recent death from prostate cancer at age 68, but that was Scott Adams. I (Scott Alexander) am still alive.1

Still, the condolences are appreciated. Scott Adams was a surprisingly big part of my life. I may be the only person to have read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. For some reason, 10-year-old-Scott found Adams’ stories of time-wasting meetings and pointy-haired bosses hilarious. No doubt some of the attraction came from a more-than-passing resemblance between Dilbert’s nameless corporation and the California public school system. We’re all inmates in prisons with different names.

But it would be insufficiently ambitious to stop there. Adams’ comics were about the nerd experience. About being cleverer than everyone else, not just in the sense of being high IQ, but in the sense of being the only sane man in a crazy world where everyone else spends their days listening to overpaid consultants drone on about mission statements instead of doing anything useful. There’s an arc in Dilbert where the boss disappears for a few weeks and the engineers get to manage their own time. Productivity shoots up. Morale soars. They invent warp drives and time machines. Then the boss returns, and they’re back to being chronically behind schedule and over budget. This is the nerd outlook in a nutshell: if I ran the circus, there’d be some changes around here.

Yet the other half of the nerd experience is: for some reason this never works. Dilbert and his brilliant co-workers are stuck watching from their cubicles while their idiot boss racks in bonuses and accolades. If humor, like religion, is an opiate of the masses, then Adams is masterfully unsubtle about what type of wound his art is trying to numb.

This is the basic engine of Dilbert: everyone is rewarded in exact inverse proportion to their virtue. Dilbert and Alice are brilliant and hard-working, so they get crumbs. Wally is brilliant but lazy, so he at least enjoys a fool’s paradise of endless coffee and donuts while his co-workers clean up his messes. The P.H.B. is neither smart nor industrious, so he is forever on top, reaping the rewards of everyone else’s toil. Dogbert, an inveterate scammer with a passing resemblance to various trickster deities, makes out best of all.

The repressed object at the bottom of the nerd subconscious, the thing too scary to view except through humor, is that you’re smarter than everyone else, but for some reason it isn’t working. Somehow all that stuff about small talk and sportsball and drinking makes them stronger than you. No equation can tell you why. Your best-laid plans turn to dust at a single glint of Chad’s perfectly-white teeth.

Lesser lights may distance themselves from their art, but Adams radiated contempt for such surrender. He lived his whole life as a series of Dilbert strips. Gather them into one of his signature compendia, and the title would be Dilbert Achieves Self Awareness And Realizes That If He’s So Smart Then He Ought To Be Able To Become The Pointy-Haired Boss, Devotes His Whole Life To This Effort, Achieves About 50% Success, Ends Up In An Uncanny Valley Where He Has Neither The Virtues Of The Honest Engineer Nor Truly Those Of The Slick Consultant, Then Dies Of Cancer Right When His Character Arc Starts To Get Interesting.

If your reaction is “I would absolutely buy that book”, then keep reading, but expect some detours.

  1. As is quantum complexity blogger Scott Aaronson.

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Buck Throckmorton remembers Scott Adams:

Scott Adams’ death is being eloquently covered by others, so there is not much I can add. But I do want to offer up a few quick thoughts. Aside from Dilbert being my favorite cartoon for decades, I was a loyal reader of Mr. Adams’ blog for many years before his greater celebrity during the Trump era. Mr. Adams often expanded my views, and occasionally frustrated me, but he helped me understand how rational people can understand things differently.

Back in 2016, when I doubted that Donald Trump was in any way conservative, and when I thought Trump had no chance to beat Hillary in the presidential election, Scott Adams was one of two writers who made an impact on my attitude toward that election. Mr. Adams famously wrote about the reasons why Trump was likely to win. He was right. (The other writer was John Hinderaker of Powerline, who was the first legacy conservative I read who stated that of course we traditional Republicans needed to vote for Trump.)

I was flattered once when Scott put out a call for Dilbert topics and he ended up using one of my submissions. As I recall, his invitation to the public was something to the effect of “You provide the workplace situation and I’ll provide the humor“. I wrote him and offered up what a special hell it was to be working for a company campaigning for recognition in a local “Best Places to Work” contest. Shortly thereafter he used that in a cartoon.

Finally, my favorite Dilbert character was one who got very little screen time. Scott Adams may be gone, but Mordac, The Preventer of Information Services lives on.

I think of Mordac every time I have a spontaneously obsolete password, or I’m blocked from being able to access a system necessary for my job, or I can’t access an SaaS app because there are too few licenses, or I’m logged out of a system because I got called away for a short meeting, etc. In all these circumstances, I give a tip of the hat to Mordac, and I applaud his success in protecting my employer by preventing me from doing my job.

Everything you need to know about art deco

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

Dezeen
Published 29 Apr 2025

To mark the centenary of art deco’s debut, Dezeen features editor Nat Barker rounds up everything you need to know about art deco.

In this video produced by Dezeen Studio, Dezeen explores the history and context of the movement, and the most notable characteristics of the style.

Art deco was a design movement that rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s. Its origins are often disputed, but most agree that art deco’s entrance on to the world stage took place 100 years ago, at the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris.

#artdeco #designhistory

January 16, 2026

Rapidly declining democracy in the home of the “Mother of Parliaments”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Europe, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

As I’ve mentioned before, it sometimes seems that Australia, Britain, and Canada are in a three-way race to de-democratize themselves as fast as they possibly can. Here’s the free-to-cheapskates portion of Ed West‘s essay on the return of liberal authoritarianism:

“Palace of Westminster” by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

It’s around this time of year that various NGOs give their assessment on the state of democracy and freedom of the world. The Fraser Institute’s Human Freedom Index was published earlier in December and Freedom House’s next report will arrive in February. It was at the start of last year that Romania was downgraded to a “hybrid democracy” by another body, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), while France is now merely a flawed democracy. Sacré bleu!

What about our own beloved island, the mother of Parliaments? It will be interesting to see where Britain features in this year’s reports, and whether recent developments will impact on our rating.

Just recently, for instance, the British government postponed four mayoral elections until 2028, elections they are certain to lose. The Electoral Commission warned that it risked undermining “the legitimacy of local decision making and damaging public confidence”, while the chairwoman of the Labour Party even refused to rule out delaying the next General Election, leading Nigel Farage to accuse her of having “total contempt for democracy”.

Keir Starmer has also taken effective control of the House of Lords and will almost entirely eliminate opposition among peers by 2027, which he is able to do to the second chamber thanks to Tony Blair’s constitutional reforms. While the government extends the franchise to children, and even plans to place voting booths in schools, a clear violation of rules about politicising the education system, they’re also keen to restrict who can stand in elections.

As the i reported, Emily Darlington, Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, “is seeking to make the Electoral Commission recommend enhanced DBS checks for candidates and then publish whether or not parties have agreed to the vetting. The aim is to ensure political parties justify whether their candidates are fit for office and name and shame those who refuse to participate.”

This is troubling when one considers that DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks include not just criminal history but “non-crime hate incidents“, which may even appear on the records of people who haven’t been contacted by police. These highly-political charges are far more likely to be directed at those with Right-wing opinions.

When western European countries do things like this, I try to gauge whether this is normal by asking the question: what if Hungary did this? In most of these cases, I imagine the assessment would be that it was an assault on liberalism and democratic norms. In which case, what if Britain is undergoing the sort of “democratic backsliding” usually levelled at central European countries with conservative governments? What if Keir Starmer is actually one of these illiberal “strongmen” we read about, just not a very effective one.

There are a number of accepted symptoms of democratic backsliding, among the most commonly listed being rejection of democratic rules, a disregard for constitutional norms, attempts to use legal mechanism to sidestep democracy, which is described as “stealth authoritarianism”, denial of opponents’ legitimacy, and the tendency to characterise them as outsiders or a threat to national security; on top of this, one might consider a willingness to curtail civil liberties, restricting the power of the media, and violating freedom of speech and association. Finally, and worst of all, is the toleration or encouragement of violence against opponents.

Credit: the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago

By these broad definitions, Britain arguably meets many of these criteria (but not, most importantly, the last). There is certainly censorship, which has increased with the Online Safety Act, designed to combat “hate” as well as “misinformation”. Misinformation, of course, is everywhere, but its existence certainly provides a convenient excuse for governments to clamp down on the sort of information they dislike. The Government has also pondered banning Twitter, and while I feel that the widespread disgust at the Grok “deepfake” feature is reasonable, such a ban would completely cripple opposition, returning control of the discourse to the old media.

As for the British state’s definition of “hate”, there is a widespread belief that people motivated by hostility to mass immigration are extreme and dangerous, so the full force of the law must be used to stop them gaining support among a public who are totally guileless when it comes to absorbing information. This belief has grown more entrenched with the rise of populism, and makes western European governments increasingly sceptical of democracy itself.

It’s obvious that many people are concerned about the prospect of Nigel Farage becoming prime minister, and as the election date comes closer, and if he’s still in a position to win, the tone will become more shrill. Starmer admitted to this terror when he said, tellingly, that “If there is a Conservative government I can sleep at night. If there was a right-wing government in the United Kingdom, that would be a different proposition.”

Update, 17 January: 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.

January 15, 2026

Having it both ways, thanks to the miraculous powers of “climate change”

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

Remember those news reports from a few years back, when the media urgently informed you that your home town was “warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet”? Sure you do, because every major outlet latched on to the idea and juiced it for that local angle. In the days before the internet and social media, it would have worked, too. This is an example of the amazing powers of climate change, but far from the only one. Apparently the wonders of climate change can both speed up and slow down the rotation of the entire planet:

Here is a headline from Forbes 4 August 2022:

Here, five short days later, is a headline from The Independent 9 August 2022:

It is possible to reconcile these two messages, if you are are dedicated The Science follower who greatly fears being called a science denier.

This is how: that on or before 8 August 2022, you swear the earth is spinning faster, and you say that any who doubts this is a troglodyte MAGAtard, and that 9 August 2022 and after, you swear the earth is spinning slower, and say that any who doubts this is mouth-breathing redneck.

The Science is self-correcting in this way.

Now what is amusing about this is not the hubris and over-certainty of scientists, which because scientists are people have characteristics in them no different than in non-scientists. What matters to us are (a) the alleged causes of the changes in rotational speed, and (b) AI.

[…]

I have been trying, with little success, to explain that AI is programmed to be sycophantic, to give users a feeling that what they (the users) believe is right, and that they are right to believe whatever it is they want to believe. Press any of these AI models strongly and consistently enough, and you can get them to “admit” just about anything — that they haven’t been hard coded not to notice. DIE is still with us, even, or especially in, AI.

AI has sworn that earth is both speeding up and slowing down, promising both were true with searches I did (for the article titles) separated by less than a minute.

Now this is partly to blame on the training material, because scientists themselves are claiming the same things AI found. Which brings us to the alleged causes of both.

Climate change.

Well of course it was climate change. Climate change, as we discovered earlier, is responsible for all things on earth. All bad things, that is. Climate change simultaneously causes earth to spin both slower and faster. Climate change is therefore a branch of quantum mechanics, where outcomes both happen and don’t happen, depending on which scientist is looking.

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