Quotulatiousness

June 12, 2026

Protests and riots send different messages to the PTB

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

While this is specifically related to the situation in Belfast, it applies to protests and riots generally:

The message of a protest is “we don’t like this”.

The message of a riot is “we don’t like this, and we’re able to do something about it”.

People who unconditionally call for peace and calm, regardless of the provocation, don’t fundamentally understand how politics works in the real world.

They do understand that the purpose of politics is to provide an alternative to violence, but that’s as far as their understanding goes. They don’t think through the implications, usually because they are quite comfortable with things as they are.

If politics is an alternative to violence, then politics is a proxy for violence.

And that means you have to dole out power in proportion to capacity for violence. Or someone’s going to figure out they can do better by flipping the table.

Monarchy wasn’t replaced by democracy because of fine-sounding philosophical ideals and eloquent documents declaring this or that.

Democracy happened because if you added rifling to the flintlock firearm, suddenly a individual farmer with a tube was the pinnacle of military technology, and now you had to keep all the farmers with tubes happy by giving them political power.

(Ancient Greek democracy had a similar relationship with the hoplite warrior.)

When political systems work well, for a while, the violence they represent becomes further and further from people’s minds, and those who can’t effectively commit or direct violence worm their way into power, and begin to take it away from those who can.

And they’ll defend their position by saying that violence is unthinkable, barbaric, always bad, must be disavowed at all costs, etc.

This isn’t some sort of high-minded principle on their part. It simply means one of two things. Either “the status quo works for me, so I don’t want you to upset it”, or “I suck at violence, and I don’t want to have to fight”.

They want young men demoralized, so that their artificial meritocracy of spreadsheets, or their non-meritocracy of patronage networks, can be protected from the natural meritocracy of conflict.

This means that riots aren’t actually for achieving any specific material aim. They are for reminding the comfortable that judges and bureaucrats and policemen have home addresses and families. And that violence is always on the table.

A protest would only send the message that the Irish don’t want to be ethnically cleansed. But the bureaucrats and judges and lawyers already know that. They just don’t care.

A riot reminds them that they have to care, because the Irish have a long tradition of doing something about it.

QotD: George Bernard Shaw

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

My own feelings about George Bernard Shaw are equivocal. He was a high-profile, publicity-seeking crank who espoused many bad causes, and in general preferred a bon mot or notoriety to the truth. He called Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister frauds, and to the end of his life did not believe in the germ theory of disease. He likened marriage to legalized prostitution and said many other destructive things to draw attention to himself. How far he believed in his worst pronouncements and expected anyone to be influenced by them is moot.

On the other hand, he was one of the few playwrights in English whose plays can still be performed for the pleasure of an audience a century later. One or two of them might even, without absurdity, be called great. He was undoubtedly very witty, and if he was unbearably opinionated, his prose was always vigorous and quite often elegant. I learned to write from him. Many of his bons mots are still nearly as funny as those of Oscar Wilde.

It was as a playwright — one whose fame stretched around the world — not as a thinker or guide to policy that he is commemorated in the name of the theatre [at Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art]. His plays have been in print ever since they were written. His achievements in the theatre can hardly be denied. He is virtually the founder of the modern drama in English. I can extract at least 20 of his plays from the vaults of my mind.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Man and Underman at RADA”, City Journal, 2020-09-17.

June 11, 2026

Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act

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

As promised/threatened, the Liberal government introduced a new bill to address ongoing concerns about “online harms”: Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act. The ever-informative Michael Geist provides an overview:

The government tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act, earlier today, marking its third attempt at online harms legislation after the failed 2021 consultation and Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act that died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election. As I wrote on the day Bill C-63 was introduced, that bill was effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of platform regulation provisions built around a duty to act responsibly and a clear list of identifiable harms, contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act reforms, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission with considerable regulatory discretion. My view at the time was that the contentious provisions should be removed and addressed separately, since they were certain to dominate the debate at the expense of what really mattered, namely the platform regulation piece. That is precisely how it played out as the speech provisions undermined the bill for months, and by the time the government conceded and agreed to split the bill, time ran out.

Bill C-34 suggests the government absorbed only part of the lesson. The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions are gone, but in their place the government has thrown in everything else: the original Online Harms Act platform duties, an under-16 social media ban backed by mandated age verification, Bill S-209’s pornography age verification requirements, a new AI chatbot regulatory regime, and sweeping powers for a Digital Safety Commission that will write the rules, enforce them, and decide which platforms escape the ban restriction. It is an everything-all-at-once approach in which nearly every key component, including which services face the restriction, how age gets verified, which AI systems are covered, and what standards govern exemptions, is left to regulations that do not yet exist.

I’ve been working on this piece since before the bill was introduced with the expectation that many provisions from the prior proposal would resurface. This post is long, but seeks to provide a very initial review of key elements in the bill. For those looking for the key takeaways, there are five. First, the platform regulation elements with a duty to act responsibly once again offers a good starting point for working through regulation. Second, the inclusion of a social media ban for those under 16 is bad policy that will take considerable time to implement and raises serious privacy concerns that will affect tens of millions of Canadians. Third, the AI chatbot regulations are consistent with emerging standards, but the uncertainty of who it covers is not. Fourth, the government is creating a bureaucracy comparable to the CRTC in the Digital Safety Commission as it will wield serious power and be tasked with fleshing out much of the detail of how the law will work. Fifth, the uncertainty of this bill has the hallmarks of a government wanting to do something quickly, but the “trust us” approach likely means years of implementation work and potential court challenges.

The Foundation: A Duty to Act Responsibly

The aspect that attracted the broadest support in Bill C-63, namely the platform regulation rules, survived largely intact. The bill features the same seven categories of harmful content (intimate content communicated without consent, content that sexually victimizes a child or revictimizes a survivor, content that induces a child to harm themselves, content used to bully a child, content that foments hatred, content that incites violence, and terrorism or violent extremism content) and revives the duty to act responsibly that requires platforms to assess and mitigate the risk of exposure to that content. There is also a duty to make certain categories of content inaccessible within 24 hours backed by a complaint path to the new Digital Safety Commission, and a duty to be transparent through public digital safety plans, record-keeping, and researcher access to data. These measures target how platforms actually operate and provide a credible starting point.

[…]

The Social Media Ban for Under 16’s

The headline measure, widely reported as a “temporary” ban on social media for those under 16, leaves many questions unanswered since the application of the ban, age verification methods, and exemption rules are all left to future regulation. The word “temporary” appears nowhere in the bill. […]

The AI Chatbot Regime: Mainstream Duties, Unbounded Definition

The government wisely took the duty path rather than the ban path on AI chatbots, an approach I argued last month would be even worse than the social media ban. There is no chatbot ban and no under-16 account restriction for chatbot services. Instead, the bill creates duties that track the emerging international mainstream found in California’s SB 243 and New York’s AI companion law. […]

The Commission: More Power, Fewer Limits, Smaller Penalties

The third concern is the one the government never resolved the first time. My day-one assessment of Bill C-63 flagged the Digital Safety Commission’s regulatory power as a serious concern. The answer two years later is an even more powerful Commission with more undefined limits. Bill C-63’s three-pronged approach of the Commission, a Digital Safety Office, and a Digital Safety Ombudsperson has been consolidated into a single Digital Safety Commission of Canada that develops the regulations and guidance, assesses compliance, manages complaints, conducts audits, issues compliance orders, levies administrative monetary penalties, and decides the exemption applications that determine which platforms escape the under-16 restriction. Once again, the amount of uncertainty is the real story since the design features at the heart of the duty to protect children are simply those “set out in the regulations”, and the user thresholds that determine which services are covered at all are to be determined.

“Thoughts and prayers” in a Two-Tier Keir accent

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

Sir Keir Starmer posted to X in response to the attempted beheading of a Belfast man a few days ago:

It drew some angry responses like this:

And a longer response from Jim Chimirie:

.@Keir_Starmer, your statement says you have absolutely no tolerance for abhorrent scenes of violence like this on our streets.

With respect, tolerance is not the issue. Nobody tolerates a near beheading on a residential street in Belfast. The question your statement carefully avoids is prevention. And prevention requires honesty about a pattern your government has consistently refused to name.

A man in his thirties, a Somali national, pinned a man to the ground on a residential street and stabbed him repeatedly in the face and neck. Members of the public intervened with a hurling stick. A woman required hospital treatment for the stress of witnessing it. This happened in Northern Ireland, a place that has known more than its share of violence, and even there residents said they had never seen anything like it.

Your government has presided over record small boat crossings. It has failed to proscribe the IRGC despite repeated promises. It has blocked the grooming gang inquiry for a year before being forced to concede it. It has spent £10 billion on asylum accommodation contracts. It has actively resisted measures that would have reduced the number of unvetted individuals entering and remaining in this country.

The victims of these attacks are not statistics. They are British people, going about their lives on their own streets, who were failed before the attack happened. Failed at the border. Failed by a system that prioritises the rights of those who arrive illegally over the safety of those who were already here.

Your thoughts are with the victim. So are ours. The difference is that thoughts are not policy. Thoughts do not secure borders. Thoughts do not remove individuals with no right to be here. Thoughts do not protect the next victim, whose name we do not yet know, on a street we cannot yet identify, from an attack that has not yet happened.

How many more before the thoughts become action?

The family of the victim talked to the media and it in no way seems to have been pre-scripted by the government and was clearly uncoerced and of their free will and is in no way any kind of hostage statement:

Northern Ireland has seen a lot over the last few decades, but I doubt anybody expected to see the two opposing sides of “The Troubles” joining forces:

Between them, the Ulster Protestant paramilitaries and the IRA operatives have a lot of hard-won skills at avoiding the authorities and committing direct violence. At The Bugscuffle Gazette, Ian notes that he predicted this earlier:

In June of last year I penned an essay titled “Popular Misconceptions” in which I opined that if the “good men and true” of an area get “fed up with lawlessness” they tend to take matters into their own hands.

We are now seeing this play out in real time in Northern Ireland.

For those of you not paying attention to the news, a refugee from the Sudan attempted to saw off the head of an Irish man in Belfast on Monday, 08 JUN 26. He was on a public street when he did so, and several locals rushed to stop his assault. His victim has lost an eye from the attack, and is in critical care at a local hospital.

If you read my previous essay, I postulated that when the vigilance committees show up, a lot of collateral damage come with them — so nobody should be shocked to understand that a whole bunch of immigrant homes and businesses are currently on fire in Northern Ireland.

I will now expound upon that previous essay. I will even go so far as to issue a warning that the people who should heed said warning are going to ignore:

If the “good men and true” get the perception that the government and officialdom are not only facilitating what has them all riled up, but just might be a source of what has them all riled up … well, history has shown that the “good men and true” have very little problem with expanding the “extra-judicial punishments” to include Minions of the Law and Government.

And for those folks who pish-tosh any sort of threat from the British “subjects” — this is Northern-bloody-Ireland. The time and area where the locals refined the “Vehicle-Borne Improved Explosive Device” to the point a popular cocktail was named after the practice.

This is the area where there are more SLRs, Sterlings, and Browning Hi-Powers buried around that little island than any three countries in Africa.

Hell, the Irish made the AR-18 famous.

I speak to the government and officials of Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the United Kingdom: Listen to me — you won’t, but listen to me … You’d better — at the very least — pay some sort of lip service towards a credible perception that you give a tinker’s damn about what has the people all lathered up, and make the people believe that you’re doing something about it.

If you don’t — and you won’t — don’t come whinging to me when your dance card abruptly becomes filled with such exhilarating numbers as: the Hemp Fandango, the Beatdown Boogie, and the Arson Waltz.

You have failed the people. You have failed them utterly, completely, and totally. They’re about to rectify that situation. You might want to get ahead of that power curve before you find yourself watching folks get loaded onto cattle cars alongside you.

John Ringo on X:

One more post on the subject of the Irish getting their dander up.

The Irish Troubles (a continuous low level insurgency) lasted from the 1960s to 1998. But they were the continuation of “Troubles” stretching back to the 1800s.

1998, that’s a bit over 25 years ago.

Both sides in the Troubles, the Catholics and the Protestants, are one generation away from a civil war that lasted for TWO GENERATIONS.

The Gen Z men of today were raised on the stories of the heroism and patriotism of their fathers and grandfathers and THEY HAVE HAD NO SIMILAR OUTLET.

The IRA did not invent the vehicle borne IED. The Vietnamese used it before them.

They just invented a cocktail from their name as well as a drinking song.

“Former” IRA weapons dealers are still some of the top illegal weapons dealers in the world.

1/10th of “British” SAS come from Ulster. A significant fraction of the British infantry as well.

Many of them served in GWOT so they have a recent master’s class in insurgency.

And now Keir Bloody Starmer and the Irish Government have given BOTH SIDES a reason to start again, but this time UNITED.

We may be about to get a glimpse of what a civil war in the US looks like up against a massive surveillance state.

Take notes.

Update, 12 June: 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.

June 10, 2026

To protect under-16s from harmful content, everyone will now need to show their ID online

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

Australia’s attempt to ban under-16s from accessing social media and other online sites blew up rather quickly. Britain and Canada, seeing what happened down under, chorused “Hold our beers!“:

“Automotive Social Media Marketing” by socialautomotive is licensed under CC BY 2.0

The government is expected to table the Digital Safety Act on Wednesday with reports that it will include a ban on social media for those under 16, framed as a “temporary” measure that platforms can exit once a new digital regulator certifies their safety standards. I have been writing about these issues, from the original Online Harms Act to mandated age verification and website blocking and now the kids’ ban, for several years. This FAQ gathers the analysis in one place, with links throughout to the longer pieces for anyone who wants to go deeper. The key takeaway is that a kids’ social media ban is an ineffective and harmful policy that raises privacy concerns for tens of millions of Canadians through mandated age verification requirements. The policy fails to address the underlying concerns with social media and the prospect of a “temporary” ban makes little sense since the requirement might be reversible, but the data collection and regulatory infrastructure are permanent.

What is the government reportedly about to introduce?

According to the Globe and Mail, the forthcoming bill would bar anyone under 16 from social media. The government will indicate that this is a temporary safeguard with an opt-back-in once a regulator certifies safety standards. The government will frame this as “temporary” measure, but I argue that once established, there is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube given that the policy will require a regulator and proof of age from everyone.

Didn’t this start with Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act? What happened to it?

Bill C-63 was the government’s 2024 online harms bill, and from my first-day take I described it as effectively three bills in one: a defensible set of provisions focused on platforms that featured a duty to act responsibly, more contentious Criminal Code and Canada Human Rights Act provisions, and a powerful new Digital Safety Commission modelled on the CRTC to be funded by the tech companies. My view was that the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions should have been dropped or incorporated into a separate piece of legislation. Bill C-63 itself died on the order paper when Parliament was prorogued ahead of the 2025 election, but the duty-to-act-responsibly model is likely to survive as part of the forthcoming bill.

Why is a kids’ social media ban bad policy?

I set out at least six reasons in this post on the issue. The most important is the first: the harms people associate with social media, such as algorithmic manipulation, addictive engagement design, weak content moderation, inconsistent enforcement, inadequate transparency, and privacy risks, affect users of every age. Treating them as a children’s problem misidentifies both the source of the harm and the right target of regulation. By focusing legislative attention on who is permitted to use social media rather than on how the platforms operate, an age-based ban lets legislators and the companies off the hook from more effective broad-based regulation. The other reasons identified in the post include the absence of evidence that bans work, the privacy harms they create, and the constitutional rights of the children they claim to protect.

Does the ban actually work?

The evidence to date says no. Australia’s under-16 ban took effect in December 2025, and the eSafety Commissioner’s first compliance report found that roughly 70 per cent of children who had accounts before the ban retained access to at least one platform three months later, with no discernible reduction in cyberbullying or image-based abuse complaints from under-16 users. Children route around age gates through VPNs, borrowed accounts, and false birthdates, and the most at-risk users are the most likely to circumvent them. Professor Lisa Given laid out much of this on a Law Bytes episode before most of the data was even in. Canadian politicians now citing the Australian approach with approval are pointing to a model whose own regulator’s data suggests has thus far proven ineffective. At a recent Canada 2020 event in Ottawa, Australian professor Amanda Third confirmed that kids are actively circumventing the ban and indicated that parents are concerned that their children are now less safe.

Doesn’t polling show overwhelming public support for a ban?

The headline number is real but misleading. The March 2026 Angus Reid Institute survey found that three-quarters of respondents support a full ban on social media for those under 16, and politicians have cited it repeatedly. But as McGill’s Sara Grimes documented on this Law Bytes podcast episode, the less-quoted numbers in the same survey complicate the picture: 72 per cent said parents, not governments, should be primarily responsible for regulating teens’ social media use, only 32 per cent picked 16 as the right threshold, and the survey did not ask respondents anything about the mechanism any ban would actually require. Simply put, public support for “protect kids from harm” is not the same as public support for “every Canadian must submit ID to a third-party provider in order to use the internet”.

Hasn’t social media been proven harmful to kids?

The data on social media harms to kids is far more mixed than is often portrayed in the media and in Jonathan Haidt’s Anxious Generation book that has fuelled much of the legislative panic. Grimes has produced a very accessible explainer on the issue that walks through the science. As she notes in Panic First, Evidence Later, “there is a serious problem. Researchers who have spent their entire careers studying adolescent mental health, children’s digital media, developmental science, and media psychology – the people who actually built the evidence base Haidt draws on – have raised sustained, substantive objections to his core claims.”

Read all of Michael Geist’s FAQ here.

June 9, 2026

“… prior opportunities for mental health evaluations were missed”

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

So shocking a crime, yet the reaction of the elites really does seem to boil down to “black on white violence is just something we have to put up with” or, even worse, “it’s the fault of systemic racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc., etc. …”. This was originally posted last year, but nothing significant has changed:

In the 6 weeks since the gruesome murder of Iryna Zarutska, we’ve had time to learn what politicians and the courts and the media think her death means.

And that’s this: Nobody is responsible. Brutal black-on-white violence is either a depersonalized fact of nature, like bad weather, or it’s a sort of just retribution by the oppressed against a racist society. We’re to avert our eyes, to forget the psychotic mumbling “I got that white girl! I got that white girl!” He’s just crazy. The mumbles don’t mean anything, and if they mean something it means that white people deserved it.

But it does mean something very definite. It means that white girls like Iryna can no longer trust that society will make any systematic effort to deter Black psychotics from murdering them.

An LLM, asked to summarize, says “prior opportunities for mental health evaluations were missed”. That agentless, passive language is perfect; no one did anything. No one is responsible, and no one, not even the murderer, can be held accountable.

The purpose of a system is what it does. The purpose of our justice system is to allow grisly murders to happen, as long as the victim sorts into an oppressor class and the perpetrator to sort into an oppressed one. If Iryna’s death hadn’t been caught live on video all our institutions would have colluded to make us forget it.

Institutions like the Community Relations Service. Which for 60 years until President Trump just defunded it, strongarmed white victims of racial hate crimes into keeping silent or uttering anodyne denials that race hatred could be a factor.

Blacks, 13% of the population, commit at least 60% of serious index crimes, murder and rape and felony assault. The actual percentage is probably higher, since there’s increasing evidence that Black crime is underreported by police and officials as a way of managing racial tensions downwards. In a fair system, this would predict that a solid majority of the state and federal prison population is Black. The actual percentage is about 33%

Blacks are privileged. They’re under-arrested, under-indicted, under-imprisoned, and (despite popular mythology) less likely to be killed during a police stop than a white person is.

It’s exactly by treating Blacks as a privileged class, licensed to act from racial hatred and mumble “I got that white girl!”, that we got to the point where. Iryna Zarutka bled to death on live video.

The grimmest fact about her murder other than the horrific death itself is that six weeks later, nobody is talking about black privilege.

It’s time to start having that conversation, and it’s time to start using the term “black privilege” for the combination of systematic averaion and viciousness that led to Iryna Zarutska dying, innocent and alone and abandoned by the system that should have protected her.

Stop buying stadiums for billionaires!

Filed under: Business, Economics, Government, Media, Politics, Sports, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

ReasonTV
Published 6 Feb 2026

Sports subsidies suck.

If sports is a trillion dollar industry, with billionaire team owners and millionaire players, and hundreds of thousands of enthusiastic fans, and weird pervert mascot creatures, why is the government giving them your money?

June 6, 2026

Lies “in a good cause” are still frickin’ lies

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

This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:

The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.

This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.

Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.

All of that might be true.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.

Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!

Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.

Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.

Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)

So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfait™.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.

Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.

Brave browser users and X’s latest algorithm changes

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

While I use the Brave web browser, I don’t access the social media site formerly known as Twitter with it, so I haven’t seen the described behaviour, thank goodness:

Recent algorithm changes on X may be unfairly hammering Brave users. And there’s a larger issue here about bad interactions between robots and privacy measures.

@nikitabier
@brave

My friend Jay Maynard, who some of you may know as Tron Guy, just got permabanned off X for “inauthentic behavior”. His appeal was swiftly denied.

Jay is not a spammer, scammer or engagement farmer; he is, in fact, exactly the kind of good citizen X says it wants. Jay asked Gemini for analysis, and now thinks he knows what happened.

Brave, as a privacy measure, randomly changes the identity presented to sites in order to avoid tracking by the ad vampires. Gemini suggested that some code at X interpreted this as spammy behavior using multiple browsers. If so – and this does seem plausible – everybody trying to protect their privacy with Brave is at risk.

This is a general problem, not just an X glitch or a Brave issue. Social media sites are increasingly relying for security on forms of heuristic AI that are prone to unacceptably high false-positive rates.

More specifically, platforms are increasingly treating a user’s refusal to be tracked, fingerprinted, and categorized as a hostile act. When a site makes it impossible to connect via a privacy-focused user agent without getting flagged as a malicious bot, it stops being “security” and effectively becomes a retaliatory lockout for protecting oneself.

Worse yet, such system architecture provides no circuit breaker – humans are only rarely and exceptionally asked review for errors. Jay’s appeal denial came back so fast that it was obvious no meat-brain ever saw it. He has filed complaints within the Minnesota Attorney General and the Better Business Bureau, because what else can he do? The robots have locked him out.

Badly designed robots and zeal to squeeze human oversight out of the system forces regular citizens to rely on state law enforcement or consumer protection bureaus.

Allow me to gently suggest to the people running X that unless you want politicians poking their noses into your business and imposing constraints on you that you are not going to like, you need to fix your security and appeal processes so running to the law isn’t necessary.

QotD: Richard Nixon – more sinned against than sinning?

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

Fifty yards from Richard Nixon’s grave, which sits not quite in the shadow of the modest home where he was born, a series of exhibits at his presidential library describe him as a psychologically unbalanced fool.

The Nixon White House, museum display panels announce, was consumed by “a climate of deep suspicion”. The infamous Plumbers took action against “perceived political opponents within the Federal Government”. A video display allows visitors to choose clips on the theme of Nixon’s “Conspiracy Thinking”. Paranoid, the president mindlessly lashed out at enemies that he hallucinated. This is still the official history, in museum exhibits curated by the National Archives and Records Administration.

On Friday morning, the consistently pro-Nixon docents hadn’t heard about the important Feb. 8 story in The New York Times that describes a plot within the government to spy on the Nixon White House, with Navy Yeoman Charles Radford stealing documents and sending them to the Pentagon as insurance against budget and policy meddling from the person serving as the president of the United States.

The revelation from a newly declassified document, longtime journalist James Rosen concluded, “bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the ‘deep state’. … Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but also that he, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.”

Chris Bray, “The Nixon Library Is Wrong About Nixon And The Deep State”, The Federalist, 2026-02-13.

June 5, 2026

Canada’s AI “strategy”

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

I’m at the point where I honestly can’t tell whether this is parody or actual Canadian government policy:

AI in Canada lost before it even got started.

They literally are trying to get AI to give a Land acknowledgement before any session.

Here are 6 statements that show how Canada already blew AI like we all knew it would.

1. “The Government of Canada commits to applying Gender-Based Analysis Plus in a meaningful way across policy design, skills development, innovation, and governance to ensure that AI reflects our values, protects those most impacted, and leads to outcomes that are safe, inclusive, and beneficial for all Canadians.”

2. “Canadian AI must support, reflect, and project Canadian culture, which includes our customs, our history, and our heritage. Canadian voices, languages, communities, and knowledge must also be represented in how AI systems are designed, built, and used.”

3. “support Indigenous self-determination over how AI is built and used in Indigenous contexts, and build domestic capacity to address the specific harms Indigenous Peoples face”.

4. “promote the world’s first AI equity-based national standard on accessible AI to drive inclusive and accessible AI and remove accessibility barriers from AI systems, and ensure Canadian AI reflects the Accessible Canada Act principles.”

5. Repeated framing around “disproportionate exposure and impacts of AI harms to equity-seeking groups” and the need to “address the systemic barriers experienced by racialized communities, persons living with disabilities, and others who too often fall on the wrong side of the digital divide”.

6. “Canada will support and amplify Indigenous-led AI initiatives that reinforce cultural expression and linguistic vitality in Canada and around the world, building on existing efforts …”

The Canadian economy, RIP

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, James E. Thorne writes an obituary for the Canadian economy:

For the record.

In Canada, It Matters How the Economy Dies.

The Canadian economy is dead. It just didn’t die with a crash big enough to satisfy the models. No Lehman moment, no Covid-style cliff, just two negative quarters of GDP, years of falling output per person, negative productivity, and a private sector slowly strangled by rates and regulation while the establishment insists the patient is “resting”.

On the facts, this isn’t ambiguous. Real GDP has contracted for two consecutive quarters on an annualized basis. Labour productivity has been flat or negative since 2021. Real GDP per capita is below its pre-pandemic level. Ontario has logged its worst non-pandemic quarterly job losses since the mid-1970s. The only consistent growth is in government payrolls and compliance, not in private enterprise and investment. If that isn’t recessionary, the word is meaningless.

And yes Macklem threatens rate hikes through all of this insanity.

Yet Canada’s official guardians insist nothing fundamental has broken. The C.D. Howe recession-dating committee says the downturn is not “pronounced, persistent, and pervasive” enough. The central bank warns against overreacting to “technical” weakness. Bay Street talks about “soft landings” and “resilience”. In some quarters, the answer to this slow-motion collapse is not relief, but further rate hikes. Ignore the body on the table, we are told, the vital signs aren’t quite bad enough yet to fill out the certificate.

Their rulebook was built for heart attacks, not cancers. It excels at spotting sudden collapses in aggregate GDP and jobs. It barely registers slow organ failure: a few tenths off real GDP per capita each year, productivity edging down, ugly quarters for private-sector employment and capex offset by public hiring. None of that triggers the old alarms until the damage is permanent.

Meanwhile, Canada has been busy throwing away the advantages that once justified its prosperity. Energy and resource projects are stalled or strangled. Business investment per worker trails peers. A country rich in capital, talent, and geography behaves as if it can live forever off inherited endowments while making it harder to build anything new. That is not “resilience”. It is delusion.

Canada’s economic establishment needs to wake up.

Two negative quarters of GDP, negative productivity, falling GDP per person, historic job losses in the core province, a suffocated private sector and calls for more tightening on top, are not signs of an economy “cooling toward trend”. They are signs of an economy that has already crossed the line from stagnation into decay.

The Canadian economy is dead in the way that matters: as an engine of rising living standards and a place where private capital is rewarded for building the future. It just didn’t die loudly enough for the old definitions. The real question now is not what we call it, but how long our institutions will keep pretending the corpse is “resilient”.

As the propagandists of the mainstream media do everything they can to deflect any hint of blame from their Liberal paymasters, we can still see that things are getting worse, not better:

The federal Liberals are getting fantastic return on their investment … giving our money to the presstitutes of the legacy media in return for kid-glove treatment of the government and attack-dog tactics against the opposition:

Why Do 50% Still Support Carney? My long-winded response.

That is a question we need to take seriously.

Leger’s latest federal polling has the Liberals at 50% support among decided voters, their highest level in that firm’s tracking since the Liberals first formed government in 2015. Abacus also found the political environment still favourable for Carney and the Liberal government. So this is not imaginary. This is not just CBC fairy dust sprinkled over Ottawa. The support is real. The harder question is whether it is rational.

My answer is simple: many Canadians are not voting for results. They are voting for the illusion of relief.

Even though Carney was in the economic background since 2020 he appeared to arrive after the Trudeau years like a man in a clean suit walking into a room after the dog crapped on the floor. Trump threatened 51st State. Carney looked calm. Unlike Trudeau. He spoke in complete sentences. He had the central banker aura. For exhausted voters, that was enough. They did not examine the wiring. They just saw someone who did not seem to be setting the curtains on fire.

Carney’s appeal is not built mainly on performance. It is built on contrast. Compared with Trudeau’s theatre-kid government of slogans, selfies, and moral lectures, Carney looks serious. But “serious” is not the same as right. A surgeon can look serious while operating on the wrong leg.

Canada’s economy is now weak enough that Carney himself has had to acknowledge ugly economic data. Reuters reported him addressing Canada’s technical recession and warning that some data will be “uneven” “ah ah ah” as the government pushes through policy changes. The Wall Street Journal reported GDP weakness, including two consecutive quarterly contractions, while Carney framed the pain as part of a broader economic rebuild.

That is where the sales pitch gets slippery.

When the economy weakens under Conservatives, it is called failure. When it weakens under Liberals, it becomes “transition”, “restructuring”, or “long-term transformation”. Same corpse, nicer label on the toe tag.

The deeper problem is that Canadians were never really asked whether they wanted Carney’s ideology. They were sold competence, not doctrine. They were sold expertise, not a governing philosophy that puts the state, regulators, climate finance, and elite managerial planning at the centre of national life.

Nobody knocked on doors saying, “Would you like a prime minister who believes markets should be bent around elite-defined social and environmental values?” No. They said, “He is smart. He ran banks. He knows Trump. He will steady things.”

That is not a mandate. That is a branding exercise.

And this is why the Conservative attack has to get sharper. Not louder. Sharper.

Calling voters stupid is a dead end. Many Carney supporters are not stupid. They are terrified of Trump. They are tired. They are anxious. They are looking at housing, debt, food prices, crime, productivity, health care, and a country that feels smaller than it used to, and they want someone who looks like an adult. Carney gives them the visual. He gives them the voice. He gives them the vibe.

But vibes do not build houses. Vibes do not raise productivity. Vibes do not lower debt. Vibes do not attract investment. Vibes do not make young Canadians believe they have a future.

The Carney government’s strongest weapon is not success. It is emotional permission. It lets Liberal voters tell themselves they have moved on from Trudeau without admitting the Liberal machine remains fundamentally intact. Same operating system, cleaner looking wallpaper.

That is why 50% still support him.

They are not endorsing the results. They are postponing the verdict.

Canada does not need a better-spoken manager of decline. It needs a government willing to reverse the policies that caused the decline in the first place.

Because a tight ship headed toward the rocks is still headed toward the rocks.

June 4, 2026

The murder of Henry Nowak and the failure of British policing

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

Andrew Doyle notes that the very first mention of Henry Nowak’s murder in Spain’s El País (approximately Spain’s equivalent of the Toronto Star, The Guardian, or the New York Times) frames the story as “evil extremely extreme extreme-right-wing Führers pounce”:

While the country is still reeling from the horrific murder of eighteen-year-old student Henry Nowak, an astonishing article has appeared in El País, Spain’s largest national newspaper. Rather than focus on the failures of the police officers, or the institutional bias within the force, the headline steers its readers away from the case and towards the outlet’s own obsessions. The headline translates as “Farage’s far right stirs up hatred in the UK after a young man is stabbed to death by a Sikh man”.

As Alejo Schapire (an Argentine journalist based in France) has pointed out, this is the first and only article produced by El País on the subject of the Nowak killing. Instead of an image of the victim, the newspaper has opted for a photograph of Nigel Farage. The Guardian was similarly histrionic and detached from reality in its coverage: “As ethnonationalist far right drives racist agenda, Reform UK leader felt need to weigh in on murder of Henry Nowak”.

It is one thing to take issue with those who seek to weaponise human tragedies for their own political gain, and quite another to dismiss legitimate criticism of a failed system. Reform UK is by no means a “far right” party, but of course the term has been so promiscuously misused in the press that at this point it might be best to dispense with it altogether. But of course, this is not really about Farage or his response to the murder at all. It is a cynical means of deflecting from the fate of Nowak and what it reveals about the state of policing in the UK.

So what exactly did Farage say to have the Guardian fulminate about his “racist agenda” and for El País to make him the focus of the story rather than the victim? During a live broadcast, Farage praised the Nowak family for their “extraordinarily dignified” response following the conviction of their son’s killer, and went on to say: “I suggest the rest of us respond to this with pure cold rage”.

And why not indeed? Let’s not forget the shocking details of what happened in this case. Nowak was stabbed multiple times by Vickrum Digwa using a Sikh ceremonial dagger. His mother hid the murder weapon, and his brother called 999 claiming that Nowak had been racially abusive. When police arrived, Digwa repeated this lie. And when Nowak repeatedly told the officers he had been stabbed, one replied “I don’t think you have, mate” and handcuffed him as he lay dying.

At Always the Horizon, Copernican shares his thoughts on the political response to the murder:

Riots have been growing over the last few years in the UK when incidents like this occur. Nigel Farage addressed the incident in a youtube video here. Referring it as a “moment to take a long hard look at ourselves and the country that we’ve become”. He proceeds to say, “All the values and standards of living in a free country, where everyone is judged equally before the law, have been trashed and thrown away”. Nigel Farage demands that “the police complaints operation, the IOPC, needs to get to the bottom of this and produce a report very very quickly.” He also states that the sentencing is unacceptable, as the sentencing of the Sikh was less severe than the minimum recommended for a sustained, aggressive, murderous assault.

Nigel knows how to fix this: file some more reports. Maybe even reprimand a judge for being too lenient. That will surely bring back the murdered man, make whole his family, and un-rape and un-murder the children that have been attacked over the years by numerous violent psychos imported from the third world by domestic traitors. What a British solution: file another report about it.

Keir Starmer took another position. He condemned Nigel Farage for “Whipping up” division against the wishes of Nowak’s family. He believes “Nigel Farage’s Reaction” is the “wrong reaction”. We wouldn’t want division at a time like this. What we really need to do is respect the wishes of the cucked cowards whose son was killed and who took no flesh or blood from the offending Sikh as recompense. Who were cowed by government processes and report filing. Those are the people whose feelings we should be worried about. We would hate for the Sikh community to feel threatened.

To be honest, I agree with Keir Starmer. Nigel Farage’s reaction is the wrong reaction

Rupert Lowe, an MP of the “far-right” British Reform party [correction: Lowe is the leader of the Restore Britain party], is getting closer to the correct reaction when it comes to this murderous Sikh, his community, and the managerial bureaucracy that brought them here and protected them.

That said, I think Rupert Lowe is also heavily couching his language for fear of public backlash, or getting arrested for “inflaming racial tensions”.

Update, 5 June: 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.

Bill C-9 is “what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa”

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

L. Wayne Mathison explains how the Canadian government persuaded itself to push a “hate speech” bill that will upend centuries of free speech practice and criminalize good-faith arguments. Like many such brainfarts, they cannot imagine what consciously evil people will do with these legal tools in hand:

AI-generated image by L. Wayne Mathison

If you want to see what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa, look at Bill C-9.

This is not just another “hate speech” bill. It is a sign of a much bigger shift.

The old political arguments were about wages, factories, class, ownership, and the economy. That was the old Marxist world. Today’s politics is about language, symbols, identity, emotion, culture, and who gets to decide what “harm” means.

Parliament has stopped arguing about who owns the factory.

Now it wants to control the dictionary.

Bill C-9 reads like a critical theory seminar that escaped campus, found a suit, and got hired by the Department of Justice.

Under the older liberal model, the law punished actions. Assault someone? Crime. Vandalize property? Crime. Block access to a building? Crime. The state dealt with what you actually did.

But C-9 moves the centre of gravity from action to meaning.

What did your words mean?

What did your symbol represent?

What was your motive?

What cultural message did your expression create?

That is not law as a neutral referee. That is law as a cultural therapist with police powers.

The most revealing part is the proposed removal of the long-standing “good faith” religious defence for hate propaganda. That defence existed for a reason. It protected freedom of conscience. It recognized that in a free country, people may express religious beliefs that others find offensive, outdated, or wrong, as long as they are not wilfully promoting hatred or violence.

That was not a loophole.

It was a guardrail.

But to the modern ideological mind, an ancient religious text is not treated as a source of conscience. It is treated as an artifact of power. A legal protection for religious speech is no longer seen as freedom. It is seen as oppression wearing a church hat.

So the guardrail has to go.

And what does government offer instead?

Trust us.

Trust that prosecutors will be reasonable. Trust that judges will interpret the law narrowly. Trust that ordinary Canadians will not get dragged through the process for saying something unpopular, traditional, religious, or politically unfashionable.

Sorry, but that is not how liberty works.

Rights are not protected by hoping the state behaves itself. Rights are protected by limiting what the state is allowed to do in the first place.

That is what makes the Senate debate so revealing. The Senate was supposed to be sober second thought. The old establishment airbag. The place where bad laws were supposed to slow down before hitting the public at full speed.

But now even the Senate is wrestling with a bill built from an intellectual toolkit designed to dismantle the very traditions the Senate was created to preserve.

Bill C-9 does not build social cohesion. It does not repair trust. It does not ask why people are angry, alienated, or radicalized in the first place.

It does what modern bureaucratic progressivism always does.

It manages symptoms by expanding state power.

It turns culture into a compliance file. It treats offensive expression less like a social problem to be answered with argument, courage, and moral confidence, and more like a hazardous substance to be regulated by experts.

The Frankfurt School wrote in dense, foggy jargon to expose hidden systems of power.

The joke is on everyone.

The modern state did not reject those tools. It absorbed them, stripped out the revolutionary romance, bolted them onto the Criminal Code, and called it public safety.

Bill C-9 is what happens when cultural theory becomes administrative power.

It is what happens when the state stops protecting public order and starts managing public meaning.

And that should worry anyone who still thinks freedom means more than government-approved speech.

“It’s called Starship Troopers, not The Big War with the Bugs“

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen explains why filmgoers still identify with the humans in Verhoeven’s unfaithful-to-the-story film of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers:

Here’s a hint:

It’s called Starship Troopers. Not The Big War with the Bugs.

There’s a reason for that. Heinlein was one of the 20th century’s greatest authors, if not THE greatest, and he was also the 20th century’s greatest philosopher and it’s not even close.

So he didn’t name things by accident.

Starship Troopers isn’t about the war. It isn’t even about war. And it’s certainly not about the fucking bugs.

All that shit is just stage dressing for the story is really about. That’s why the book doesn’t end with defeating the enemy. It ends with Rico meeting his father again, facing future fights together.

Starship Troopers is about the military life, the relationship between armies and the civilizations they serve, and what it means to be a soldier and a man.

Eurotrash communists failed to get the point, not merely because they have the “media literacy” of a sack of wet hammers, but also because they don’t understand soldiering, civilization, or manhood.

So, yes, Verhoeven tried to make fun of Heinlein and failed miserably because Heinlein was a better storyteller, a better man, and a better human being by a margin so great that the Earth can barely encompass it.

But even though his failed satire makes humanity clearly the good guys, the war clearly righteous, and soldiers clearly cool and heroic, it still doesn’t recapture the actual meaning of Starship Troopers.

Because the real themes were so invisible, so incomprehensible, to Verhoeven that he couldn’t even see them to disagree with.

So enjoy the film for what it turned out to be … a fun, campy, morally unambiguous story of heroes squashing disgusting bugs. Suitable for popcorn consumption.

Then, read more Heinlein.

Update, 6 June: 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.

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