Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2025

Your words are violence to an astounding 91% of US college students surveyed

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

J.D. Tuccille presents some depressing poll results from American college students who have massively bought into the illogical position that words can be the same as actual violence:

Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.

Most Believe Words Can Be Violence

“Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse”, FIRE announced last week. “The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.”

The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere — 2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.

Specifically, one question asked how much “words can be violence” described respondents’ thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment “describes my thoughts completely”, 25 percent said it “mostly” described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at “somewhat”, and 15 percent answered “slightly”. Only 9 percent answered that the “words can be violence” sentiment “does not describe my thoughts at all”.

It’s difficult to get too worked up about those who “slightly” believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students “completely” or “mostly” see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That’s a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.

Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public “completely” or “mostly” agree. Fifty-nine percent at least “somewhat” believe words can be violence.

In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that “growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers” and that the rise in mental health issues “is better understood as a crisis of resilience”.

Conflating Words and Violence Encourages Violence

Telling young people who haven’t been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding “in kind” is justified.

“At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence,” Haidt and Lukianoff added.

December 10, 2025

QotD: The “rules” of Gonzo journalism

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

Thompson now had the recipe for his journalism career, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs.

  1. The story behind the story is the real story.
  2. The writer is now the hero of each episode.
  3. All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.

Why couldn’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson.

But it grows tired and predictable in the hands of today’s imitators — and the Gonzo King never invited either of those modifiers. Yes, blogs and Substacks are part of his legacy, formats that blur the line between diary, confession, and journalism. But he did it before all the rest, not as a desktop publisher — instead putting his life at risk on the road with total fear and loathing.

So if Substack is the grandchild of Hunter Thompson and New Journalism, it is a tame, well-behaved descendant — and nothing like its brave forebear, who kept going full speed without a helmet until the end.

Even the reader has to run to keep up.

Ted Gioia, “The Rise and Fall of Hunter Thompson (Part 2 of 3)”, The Honest Broker, 2025-09-08.

December 9, 2025

The “Great Feminization” of western culture

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

In the National Post, Barbara Kay outlines the way society has been trending further away from traditional values and more and more toward the values of “empathy, safety, and cohesion” which have been predominantly feminine values in contrast to more male-oriented values of “rationality, risk, and competition”:

In September, public intellectual Helen Andrews caused a stir when she delivered a provocative 17-minute speech, titled “Overcoming the Feminization of Culture”, to the National Conservatism Conference, later published as an article for Compact, titled “The Great Feminization“.

Andrews summarized feminization as the prioritizing of feminine over masculine interests, but additionally prioritizing “empathy over rationality, safety over risk, cohesion over competition”. All these traits combine, she believes, in institutions where females are numerically dominant, to define “wokeness” and “cancel culture”.

Andrews points to Bari Weiss’ 2020 resignation letter from the New York Times where Weiss was labeled and ostracized for her social ties and cut off by perceived friends. In 2018, the newsroom there had tipped to a female majority which Andrews argues changed the work environment’s dynamics to one where cohesion is preferred, and covert undermining would replace open debate in favour of emotional harmony.

And I would argue that the more feminized society’s institutions become, the more readily extreme, empathic attitudes replace rational decision-making at policy-making levels, and the more society loses confidence in its ability to thrive.

Ironically, instead of directing empathy towards our own citizens, feminization also tends to direct empathy internationally. That is exactly what is happening at our national level, when our government earmarks funds for programs such as “Gender-Just, Low-Carbon, Rice Value Chains in Vietnam”.

This is also happening at a micro-level to the Jewish community in North America. Our spiritual leadership in non-orthodox synagogues is growing increasingly female, and, by no coincidence, is wokeness spreading, and, by no further coincidence, so is alignment with radical anti-Zionism.

[…]

Claims that Israel was guilty of genocide and apartheid, the authors write, were a constant feature of their education. Most shockingly, they write — and this at a rabbinical training institution headed by a female rabbi — that “the sexual violence Israelis experienced (on October 7) was never mentioned, even during Women’s History Month”.

What about the Christian clergy? A 2024 report on female Christian clergy found that in a 2018 sample, about 14 per cent of U.S. churches were headed by a senior female clergyperson. So, churches are not yet in danger of feminization. Good luck to them.

If there is a solution to the feminization-linked problem of anti-Zionism in the non-Orthodox rabbinate, I don’t know what it is. I only know this trend cannot end well for our community. What is essential in Jews’ spiritual homes now, more than ever in our history, is that they be spaces where “ahavat Yisrael” — love of Israel — is the prevailing norm. If we are not for ourselves, who will be?

On a more individual level, the Great Feminization has worked not to make women equal, but to increase their existing privileges and to demonize men who even notice the inequality now runs directly opposite to the narrative:

Image from Steve’s Substack

Over thirty years ago, I knew a woman who felt ecstatic joy taunting men with her nudity. She loved to flash her breasts at truckers on the highway. Thrilled at the thought that she left them frustrated, she would boast about her sexual power.

This is clear, unequivocal abuse. Imagine her taunting a village of starving Africans with BBQ’d steak. She then flees to her 5-star hotel, laughing and bragging that she had left them hungry and frustrated. This is how the West raises women. Self-obsessed, over-entitled and insufferable (insert obligatory, “not-all-women” clause here – yawn).

Feminists have gotten more sophisticated with their abuse since then. We now have transgressions that include absurd accusations like prolonged looking, mansplaining and manspreading. TikTokers go to the gym essentially nude in order to video and humiliate men who happen to notice.

We had the, “Yes means Yes” campaign that insists a man should repeatedly pester his partner with endless questions for permission during every intimate encounter. Never mind that a normal woman is likely to leave the bed after a few of these interruptions, rightly despising the insecure man who obeys that tripe. Anywhere outside of a deep feminist indoctrination camp, a woman will wonder whether your mother dropped you on your head as a child. I’ll bet that not even the most committed believer follows their own advice. This is not good communication — it denies healthy context, body language and facial expression.

And there’s nothing romantic about it; it is designed for feminist power. There is no number of reassurances that could possibly satisfy. The emphasis upon a non-stop verbal Q&A is courtroom strategy. And that’s the point: eliminate the human context, and set a trap for the man. “Did he ask permission to engage in number 17 of the 32 listed steps before sex? No, your honor, that’s where the sexual assault happened.”

Human intimacy is negotiated using mostly unspoken signals, and everybody likes it that way. Obviously there’s a need for clear communication, especially in a new relationship. I only need to include this disclaimer because the world is filled with pedantic manhating feminists eager to accuse me of denying women’s humanity. Grow up, child. Healthy women have absolutely no problem setting their own limits during intimacy. I’ve never met one who didn’t.

We cover for even the worst of women’s transgressions. When a woman murders her child, we call it infanticide and blame postpartum depression. When she murders her husband we call it battered wife syndrome, which is the title of a book by Canadian feminist law professor, Elizabeth Sheehy. Feminist lawyers even argue to eliminate female incarceration and close all women’s prisons, and for decriminalization of husband murder. This nonsense from the feminist cult for women with daddy issues protects mentally ill women who need psychological help, and/or belong in prison.

Every woman has a plethora of options, and near-infinite sympathy and support, in Western culture. Maybe that’s the problem: we don’t hold women responsible for their own behavior. Many women have not been socialized into adulthood.

At risk of making this a TLDR post, here’s Mark Steyn on the cultural side of our ever-more-feminized culture:

Welcome to another in our ongoing series of As I Said Twenty Sod-Bollocking Years Ago. Women have inherited the thrones of great powers — Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Victoria — and presided over massed ranks of courtiers drawn from the “pale, male and stale” (thank you, David Cameron). But America and its client states are the first in history in which every significant venue aside from ladies’ sport is now dominated by women. The west is closer than any society should be to the end of men — which is a big source of the terrible confusion in our schools that has led children to offer themselves up for bodily mutilation and irreversible infertility. Helen Andrews’ much noted “viral” essay on the phenomenon informs us inter alia that by 2024 American law schools were fifty-six per cent female and that sixty-three per cent of judges appointed by Joe Biden’s autopen are likewise on the distaff side. Elsewhere, fifty-five per cent of New York Times reporters are women (up from ten per cent half-a-century ago) and 57.3 per cent of US undergraduates are what we would once have called “coeds”.

At the same time, the principal source of immigration to the west is from a patriarchal culture even more severe (if you can believe it) than 1950s sitcom dads. If you live in London, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm, Dearborn, do you see more body-bagged crones on the streets than you did a generation back? Are you figuring on seeing more still in another twenty years? Or are you betting that the tide will have receded?

It is at the intersection of these two not entirely compatible trendlines — a feminised society with a patriarchal immigration policy — where lies the future (such as it is) of the western world. With that in mind, the annual commemoration of the 1989 Montreal massacre each December 6th has a symbolism that extends far beyond my own deranged dominion. Not just because it was an early example of the state hijacking the actual news to impose a narrative more helpful to its own needs. In the dismantling of manhood and manliness, no lie is too outrageous. As I wrote in The National Post of Canada on December 12th 2002 – twenty-three years ago:

    For women’s groups, the Montreal Massacre is an atrocity that taints all men, and for which all men must acknowledge their guilt. Marc Lépine symbolizes the murderous misogyny that lurks within us all.

    M Lépine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, whose brutalized spouse told the court at their divorce hearing that her husband “had a total disdain for women and believed they were intended only to serve men”. At eighteen, young Gamil took his mother’s maiden name. The Gazette in Montreal mentioned this in its immediate reports of the massacre. The name “Gamil Gharbi” has not sullied its pages in the thirteen years since.

The Gazette notwithstanding, that might open up many avenues of journalistic investigation, don’t you think? The potential implications of Canadian immigration policy. The misogyny in particular of Islam, and its compatibility with developed societies. But instead everyone who mattered in the Dominion’s elite decided it was all the fault of Canadian manhood in general — of Gordy and Derek’s, or Émile and Pierre’s, culture of toxic masculinity. That narrative has held for two generations. The only even slight modification has been from a sliver of academics who posit Gamil Gharbi as “the first incel“. I’m not sure “incels” — young men who are “involuntarily celibate” — existed as a mass phenomenon back in 1989: they are a consequence of the societal feminisation Ms Andrews writes about. The “incel” segment was by far the most interesting part of the Tucker/Fuentes convo, and the least remarked upon, but the notion that they’re itching to kill women bolsters the original 1989 framing, so the media are minded to entertain it.

Yet we all know, surely, that the young ladies in that Montreal classroom would have benefited from a little bit of available “masculinity” that day. Alas, the men to hand were in a certain sense far more profoundly disarmed than the wildest dreams of “gun control” advocates. From my book After America:

    To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal’s École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.

Which is the more disturbing glimpse of Canadian manhood? The guy who shoots the women? Or his fellow men who abandon them to be shot? For me, the latter has always been the darkest element of the story. From my column in Maclean’s, January 9th 2006:

    Every December 6th, our own unmanned Dominion lowers its flags to half-mast and tries to saddle Canadian manhood in general with the blame for the Montreal massacre — the fourteen women murdered by Marc Lépine, born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an Algerian Muslim wife-beater, though you wouldn’t know that from the press coverage. Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate — an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

So the annual denunciation of manhood in general is the precise inversion of the reality of the event. That was unusual in 1989, but has become routine since: the UK Government’s “Prevent” programme, set up in the wake of the July 7th Tube bombings to “prevent” further “Islamist” attacks, now focuses its energies on the threat from a “far right” boorish enough to insist on noticing all these Islamic provocations; January 6th is an insurrection for which trespassing gran’mas have to be hunted down and banged up in solitary, but Thoroughly Modern Milley telling the ChiComs he’ll ignore his commander-in-chief or James Comey taking to Twitter to urge his chums to “eighty-six” the President is true patriotism of the highest order; in German cities saving democracy is so critical that it is necessary to ban the leading political party.

So the inversion of reality is pretty much standard operating procedure these days. There is, however, a sense in which that terrible one-off atrocity from the late Eighties has become a portent of tomorrow — of a western world thoroughly unmanned. Your average feminist lobby group doesn’t see it that way, naturally. “The feminism I think of is the one that embodies inclusivity, multiculturalism and the ability to change the world through the humanity that women do bring,” says Stephanie Davis, executive director of Atlanta’s Women’s Foundation. “If there were women in power in representative numbers — fifty-two per cent — I think that the World Trade Center would still be standing.”

December 8, 2025

If Britain’s political leadership were trying to destroy the country, what would they have done differently?

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

My Canadian readers — and possibly the occasional Aussie or Kiwi — can read Spaceman Spiff‘s essay and feel it applies almost 100% to our respective nations as well:

Image from Postcards from the Abyss

Britain is a disaster. The country seems to be in terminal decline.

Not only do we see a lack of ability to turn things around we witness leaders and prominent decision makers evidently clueless about normal life and the hardships many now face.

The political and media classes best reflect this phenomenon. Their views are insular, fictional and at odds with reality. They promote unorthodox ideas that are widely derided yet their enthusiasm is evident as are their hostile responses to being challenged.

Minor comments about immigration are treated as precursors to genocide. Criticism of a biased media unwilling to report events is dismissed as conspiracy. No discussion of climate policy and its unaffordable costs is tolerated. Deviation from the establishment view means excommunication and social exile.

Those in leadership positions drive Britain’s descent into authoritarian governance. Attempts to discuss changes to society leads to extreme overreactions, including jailing noticers, something they now boast about.

Britain has become a madhouse. Our leaders are unable to think like normal people. None of them are facing reality. They seem crazy.

Or, rather, they seem neurotic.

Neurosis is everywhere

Britain has degenerated into a technocratic regime that views the public as its enemy. Normal people disgust the country’s leaders and it shows. They no longer hide their contempt.

But there is a palpable sense of fear emanating from the powerful. Their reactions to normal events paint a troubling picture of who is leading the country, particularly the political and media classes.

If the British establishment were a person we would think them mentally unstable. The qualities we see most are those of a neurotic individual, a type that is well understood.

Here are some features visible in Britain’s ruling class.

Chronic anxiety and worry

A key attribute of neurosis is persistent fear or worry. Rumination is commonplace, circling around and around the same problems. There is also a tendency to overreact, with the response disproportionate to the issue at hand.

The current British regime is wracked with anxiety and worry. This defines them. They are vocal about their concerns.

We are reminded of an endless series of horrors we must attend to; systemic racism, lack of diversity, an imperial past and our cultural dominance along with our impact on the world.

One simple example illustrates the degree to which minds can become distorted by excessive worry.

James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1769 which kickstarted in the industrial revolution, changing the world forever. This would ultimately elevate most nations on earth and led eventually to the establishment of cheap abundant energy for almost everyone.

Until recently these events were viewed as an epoch-defining moment of engineering brilliance. Now this has been recast as a dark stain on Britain’s place in the world, with climate zealots keen to blame the British for all pollution caused by industrialization.

Instead of pride we now see embarrassment and even anxiety about the “damage” Britain has done to the world because it ushered in an era of cheap widespread energy for everyone.

Any rational person would understand this extreme view to be a distortion of reality and excessively negative, yet it permeates everything. Those who rule Britain are ashamed of our past. They worry about it. Only they do this, normal people are proud of our history.

[…]

Welcome to the madhouse

A system of governance driven by neurotics takes on their characteristics. Britain has become a neurotic bureaucracy; a neurocracy.

Neurotics overthink and live inside their heads. They lack the calm, detached strength needed to govern sensibly. Power structures inevitably take on these qualities.

The British government has become paranoid. Digital IDs, internet regulation, censorship. They jail normal people for social media posts. Dissenting views are increasingly punished with custodial sentences.

These are not the actions of the mentally strong. This is an embattled minority fighting reality and becoming desperate.

A gulf is opening between the rulers and the ruled. Increasingly no common ground is even conceivable as the fictions needed to maintain narratives grow. They become overtly false but are needed to feed the neurosis.

One of the things I like about the social media site formerly known as Twitter is how quickly authoritarian bullshit like this can get called out:

Update, 9 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

QotD: Austerity versus “austerity”

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

Too great attention to the use of language is a distraction from the essential and easily becomes mere pedantry; but to pay too little is to risk being deceived or manipulated by those who use language wrongly. Words, Aristotle said, should not bear more precision than possible; but neither should they bear less than possible.

Words have connotations as well as denotations, and one way of insinuating an untruth into someone’s mind is to disconnect the two, so that the denotation and the connotation are at variance and even opposite. An excellent example of this is in the use of the word austerity as applied to certain government economic policies. Frequently one reads, for example, that the difficulties of countries such as Britain and France in the matter of responding to the Covid-19 epidemic were caused by previous government austerity, that is to say, failure to spend more. But irrespective of whether, had the governments spent more (and France already devotes a greater proportion of its GDP to healthcare than the great majority of countries at the same economic level), the epidemic would have been more easily mastered, their policies in restricting their expenditure cannot be called austerity, because they still spent more than their income: as, in fact, they had done almost continually for forty years.

Supposing I were to say, “This year I’m going in for austerity. Last year I spent ten per cent more than my income, but this year I am going to spend only five per cent more,” you would think I were uttering a sub-Wildean paradox. But if I were to say only, “This year I’m going in for austerity,” you would think I were going to wear a hair shirt and subsist on locusts and honey. To say that the British and French governments have exercised austerity is to mean the first and imply the second, which is clearly dishonest: though we should note that the proper term, reduction of the deficit, is neutral as to whether it is economically wise or unwise. After all, I can borrow equally to start a business or drink champagne for breakfast.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Controlling Thought”, New English Review, 2020-06-09.

Update, 9 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

December 7, 2025

“Anglofuturism” – slogan or beacon of hope?

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

At Without Diminishment, Robert King argues for Anglofuturism as the most hopeful path forward from the morass all of the Anglosphere seems to be bogged down in:

(From the Ministry of Space, created by Warren Ellis, 2004.)

Born in the digital backwaters of podcasts and Substacks, Anglofuturism has climbed into public view like a rocket nearing the King Charles III Space Station, gathering both attention and indignation as it ascends.

The New Statesman mutters about it being rooted in “nostalgia“, while the far-left activist group Hope Not Hate insists it is something deeply sinister. Yet their agitation merely confirms a familiar sequence. First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.

At its essence, Anglofuturism is a project of civilisational renewal.

It begins with the conviction that Britain’s decline is not destiny but a decision, and the consequence of decades of political miscalculations that consider the national story to be over, Britain’s very own “end of history”.

Just turn on the news and you will see evidence for this everywhere. Strategic islands like the Chagos Islands surrendered to the vassals of hostile powers. A once-thriving energy sector crippled by the ritual self-flagellation of net zero policies, despite abundant North Sea oil resources.

The capital city of London, once envied for its composure, now deafened by the shrill chants of imported grievances, “From the river to the sea”. Britain was once a country whose streets were said to be paved with gold, according to the legend of Dick Whittington.

Today, they are paved with boarded banks, betting slips, and vape shops. The country’s future is already playing out in London, a place where the nation of Britain has faded into the idea of “the Yookay”. Britain is told that because it once colonised, it must now invite colonisation, that because it once conquered, it must now submit.

The result is a people bending ever lower in the hope of forgiveness from a self-appointed virtuous minority at home, and from the ever-growing numbers of strangers who now claim the country as their own.

Anglofuturism is the vanguard against this ideology. It insists that love of one’s civilisation is a duty, not a sin. It binds identity to optimism, and pride to ambition. It seeks to remind Britons that its best days may yet lie ahead, but only if it learns once more to have confidence in itself.

[…]

The policy of splendid isolation simply will not work for the twenty-first century.

Enter CANZUK, the proposed alliance of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Four constitutional monarchies, four democracies, and four maritime powers linked by law, language, and lineage. Together they would represent over 140 million people and a combined GDP exceeding $6 trillion. It would be a realm on which, once again, the sun would never set.

Our shared day of remembrance on November 11 is a reminder that we partake in traditions born of shared sacrifice.

Such a bloc would not be a re-creation of empire, but a confederation of equals who share the responsibilities of defence and trade, coordinating space and science, and projecting stability from north to south and east to west.

It could stand apart from American turbulence, Chinese authoritarianism, and European stagnation, and be a new civilisational pole rooted in innovation and freedom under common law. It could even be a new contender to lead the free world.

Britain is still a nation successful at exporting ideas like capitalism, liberalism, and, regrettably, Blairism. Anglofuturism could be its most powerful export to the Anglosphere yet.

For those of us at the edge of that world, in Cape Town, Perth, or Vancouver, the message of Anglofuturism is that our story is not over. Our civilisation may be weak, even fading, but it can be revived. Doing this will demand the same courage that built it, in the spirit of the pioneers and soldiers, the engineers and thinkers who shaped continents and defended freedom when it was under siege.

Like this, but better.

December 5, 2025

Censorship and “cancel culture” are symptoms of a cultural sickness

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

A guest post at Woke Watch Canada by C.C. Harvey lays out the evidence that our culture — and most of the western world — is struggling with a spiritual sickness and that arbitrary cancellations and formal censorship of dissenting views are symptoms of that ailment:

When a society begins to suppress intellectual and spiritual searching and dreaming — by punishing speech, regulating thought, discouraging questions, denying the existence of spiritual reality — it is not only a political decline, but a sign of deep unwellness.

Where populations lose respect for liberty of conscience, inquiry, and discourse, society becomes nasty and brutish. Truth-seeking, spiritual health, and peace are inexorably linked. Across formerly open, stable, safe western societies, censorship and repression have been rising as safety, cohesion, and quality of civic life decline.

We must resist cancel culture and speech codes for the following reasons:

  1. Suppressing Truth-Seeking Violates a Fundamental Human Impulse

    2. Across religious and knowledge traditions, truth-seeking is expressed as a moral duty. When authorities obstruct honest questioning, they interfere with something built into the human spirit.

  2. Fear Becomes the Organizing Principle

    3. Where dissent is forbidden, fear takes the place of reason. Fear diminishes moral clarity, discourages integrity, and pushes people toward silence rather than responsibility. A fearful society cannot become a virtuous society.

  3. Conscience Is Treated as a Threat Instead of a Gift

    4. In every major tradition — religious or philosophical — conscience is seen as a source of moral insight. When institutions punish people for following their conscience, they reveal a belief that the individual soul has no intrinsic worth, only value as a compliant unit.

  4. Dialogue Is Replaced With Dogma

    5. Healthy societies debate, persuade, and refine ideas through open conversation. Unhealthy ones replace discussion with mandatory narratives and speech codes. Leaders who fear questions fear the truth those questions might uncover. Dogma can be secular or religious. It is ideologically rigid, generally not truth-seeking.

  5. Collective Identity Replaces Individual Worth

    6. Authoritarian systems elevate the group above the person: the party, the ideology, the movement, the “community”. When people are valued only as members of a group rather than as individuals, conscience becomes irrelevant and conformity becomes the main civic expectation. This is materialism, and denial of spiritual reality.

  6. Repentance and Correction Become Impossible

    7. A culture that silences criticism cannot correct its own errors. Without the freedom to point out problems, there can be no course correction, no growth, and no accountability. Mistakes multiply because they are protected by enforced silence.

  7. The Vulnerable Are Punished First

    8. Censorship and ideological enforcement nearly always fall hardest on those with the least power — dissidents, researchers, students, teachers, and ordinary citizens. When moral pressure is used to intimidate rather than uplift, society reveals a deeply inverted understanding of justice.

  8. Curiosity and Creativity Decline

    9. When questions become dangerous, people stop asking. When our human body, spirit, and intellect work in tandem without fear, we are capable of incredible scientific, artistic, and intellectual discovery and achievement. A society that punishes inquiry slowly starves itself of spirit in the form of innovation and insight.

  9. Tribal Narratives Replace Shared Reality

    10. When open debate disappears, competing ideological factions manufacture their own “truths”. Without a shared standard for evidence or meaning, society fragments into groups that can no longer communicate across boundaries. This is a recipe for distrust, polarization, and alienation … in dogmatically religious societies: a recipe for holy war and violent oppression.

  10. A Culture That Punishes Dissent Is Living by Avoidance, Not Truth

    11. Suppressing dissent is always a sign that an ideology cannot withstand scrutiny. Societies that silence critics pretend confidence but are insecure. The greater the fear of open conversation, diverse thought, and public debate, the greater the underlying instability and spiritual decay.

  11. Each Soul’s Journey Is Sacred — And Faith Must Be Chosen, Not Forced

    12. Across traditions, genuine belief is understood as something voluntary:

    • Love and faith cannot be coerced.
    • Insight cannot be mandated.
    • Moral understanding cannot be imposed through fear.

A society that tries to control belief tries to destroy the inner space where thought, reflection, and integrity develop. Coerced belief is not belief; it is compliance. An individual’s free relationship with God is sacred. No human rightfully owns another’s body, mind, or soul.

Update, 7 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

Star Wars and Aliens: A Look at Interstellar Communications

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 2 Feb 2024

I’ve said before that Star Wars originally appears to not have real-time interstellar communications. Many have disputed that, with several good points. Here I finally explain my reasoning with a solution that fits everything we observe in the film without requiring convoluted excuses for why they have to fly an Astromech droid around. Think of this as off-week bonus content.

00:00 Intro
00:53 Taking It Seriously
02:10 Dantooine
03:43 They Tell Two Ships …
06:56 Is the Falcon Really that Fast?
07:50 Delegation

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
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December 4, 2025

“… the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled”

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

On his Substack, Freddie deBoer decries the New York Times viewpoint that “there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities”:

(you would find this horribly condescending too)
Image from Freddie deBoer

I’m not joking! Paula Span has produced this particular bit of scolding for The Official Publication of Liberals Who Occasionally Look Up From Their Crosswords to Disapprove of Everyone and Everything. Span writes

    Identifying as a person with a disability provides other benefits, advocates say. It can mean avoiding isolation and “being part of a community of people who are good problem-solvers, who figure things out and work in partnership to do things better”

Of course, you can enjoy those benefits without identifying as disabled, without allowing one unfortunate aspect of your life become an entire identity. But that doesn’t fly in the world of the brownstone liberals who fund and run the New York Times, who seem to believe that there is no such thing as a person, only beings that exist to function as sets of interlocking identities.

Here’s the maddening thing about this piece: it quietly smuggles in a worldview that has metastasized across the discourse, a worldview in which the biggest problem facing disabled people is that they aren’t eager enough to call themselves disabled. Not, you know, being blind or paralyzed or suffering from dementia or constantly wracked with chronic pain, no, all of that is subservient to the only question anybody seems to care about anymore, the all-devouring question of identity. The whole thing hums along with the cheery institutional conviction that the answer to every human frailty is more identitarian self-labeling. If only the elderly would embrace the capital-D Disability identity, we’re told, everything would be better — their health care would run smoother, their interactions with institutions would be less demeaning, their sense of community would blossom. Maybe they’d even be happier! The Times treats this as self-corroborating common sense, like, well, everything else argued in the New York Times.

What this kind of thinking actually represents is the natural endpoint of a cultural project that has turned medical pathology into a personality type. It’s the codification of a worldview where suffering is not something to address, treat, alleviate, or recover from, but a new kind of boutique identity, complete with community membership, branded discourse, and moral status. It turns vulnerability into a form of social currency, rewarding performance over authenticity and turning genuine suffering into a spectacle for peer validation. In doing so, it erodes the very possibility of meaningful treatment, because the focus is no longer on recovery or well-being, but on cultivating a carefully curated self-image that fixates on impairment. And what I think, as I read this person tut-tutting senior citizens for not embracing that new ethos, is “Maybe they just feel like they’re too fucking old to take part in such nonsense?”

The piece insists, without evidence or even really argument, that treating disability as an identity will improve access to accommodation. Disability accommodations matter; of course they do. But what this article is concerned with is patently not getting older adults the practical support they need. The piece is instead fixated on the idea that the real issue here is that people don’t want to be disabled in the metaphysical, self-defining sense, as though the reluctance of an 84-year-old to call herself Disabled-with-a-capital-D is some retrograde psychological failure rather than a perfectly sane human impulse born of a lifetime of struggle. Span frames this as a story about insufficiently enlightened seniors who need to be ushered into the disability “community”. But maybe the reluctance they’re describing is the whisper of something older and much wiser: the understanding that disability is not a polity you join, not a club whose membership conveys special epistemic authority, but a condition of life that you endure and attempt to mitigate. These older people don’t identify as disabled because they remember, stubbornly enough, the distinction between having a problem and being the problem. They treat disability as a practical reality, not an existential category. And they’re right to do so.

Update, 5 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

Don’t put a lot of trust in the “surging Canadian GDP stories” they’re pushing

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Stephen Punwasi put together an interesting thread on the latest “rosy scenario” GDP numbers the state media have been making such a big deal about:

2/ What do we see? Imports contributed 0.7 points out of 0.6 points of Q3 GDP growth. The rest of the economy was a net drag.

Imports contribute to GDP as a part of net exports: exports minus imports.

Smaller imports boost net exports. Imports made the biggest drop since 2022.

3/ What we’re seeing is a phenomenon called import compression: the balance was boosted by falling imports.

It’s a superficial improvement due accounting mechanics. The only growth is actually weakness.

We figured it out. But wait — how do they get import/export data? 😬

4/ Let’s start with imports. I recalled reading about the CBSA’s new customs & revenue management (CARM) platform.

Totally normal bedtime reading for weirdos, I know.

CARM delayed data to StatCan, who had to estimate on trend & revise. I can’t recall the issue being resolved.

4/ I contact StatCan. Delays have improved but recent data is heavily impacted.

They warn to expect larger than usual revisions to September — a third of Q3. 😅

It gets funnier: 🇺🇸’s gov shutdown means 🇨🇦 can’t get data for ~75% of its exports. Trend estimate again.

5/ so all GDP growth was imports, which fell faster than exports.

Imports & exports are estimates based on trend.

But wait — what exactly is a trend? It’s based on seasonal adjustments — smoothing predictable variation.

In 🇨🇦, that means suppressing summer & boosting winter.

6/ non-predictable variations to consumption like recession & trade wars can’t be filtered out.

The adjustment over/understates. e.g. 🇺🇸 Fed research shows this overstated recovery & lengthened the financial crisis. Ditto with COVID.

It can’t be fixed until years later.

7/ let’s put this together:

– 🇨🇦’s GDP grew exclusively due to the trade balance.

– import compression — a weakness that overstates growth

– trade had to be inferred via trend

– trend overstated by irregular shock

Yup.

8/ just to clarify — none of this is StatCan’s fault.

They’re tasked w/a deadline over the past year & 🇨🇦 decided to overhaul its trade data during a trade war.

They told me Dec 11th will be when revisions for imports come in & we’ll get an update on CARM.

9/ Bonus fun facts for the pros:

– by pushing it back to the 11th, this overstatement helps suppress yields for the GoC cash management program

– the 11th is after the last auction data is provided to dealers

Fascinating combo while 🇨🇦 is asset cycling for short-term optics.

10/ anyway, full write up, direct quotes from StatCan, & a fun bonus GDP fact for the kiddos.

Also, follow @BetterDwelling if you found this interesting.

We take research & insights reserved for deep-pocketed investors & give it away to normies w/plain english explanations.

December 3, 2025

Like him or loathe him, Trump’s response to the DC shootings was “spot on”

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

In The Conservative Woman, Richard North makes the case that US President Donald Trump is the only western political leader who can stop the migration crisis:

Like him or loathe him, question his inconsistencies and his many other flaws, but in my view Donald Trump’s response to the shooting of two members of the West Virginia National Guard in Washington DC by an Afghan migrant was spot on.

There was none of the pussyfooting “my thoughts are with …” etc. Without equivocation, he immediately branded the shooting “an act of evil, an act of hatred and an act of terror”, adding: “It was a crime against our entire nation”.

Shortly thereafter, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted a tweet declaring: “President Trump’s State Department has paused visa issuance for ALL individuals travelling on Afghan passports. The United States has no higher priority than protecting our nation and our people.”

Attached was an official tweet from the Department of State making it clear that the ban was of immediate effect, with the Department “taking all necessary steps to protect US national security and public safety”.

This added to the ban in June when Trump imposed restrictions on citizens from 12 countries, including Afghanistan, but that ban did not revoke visas previously issued, and holders of Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) were exempt.

Now Trump has gone further. In a Thanksgiving message posted on X, he offered a salutation which, in Trumpian style, didn’t mince words. It started with: “A very Happy Thanksgiving salutation to all of our Great American Citizens and Patriots who have been so nice in allowing our country to be divided, disrupted, carved up, murdered, beaten, mugged, and laughed at, along with certain other foolish countries throughout the world, for being ‘politically correct’, and just plain STUPID, when it comes to immigration …”

That was only the start of a very long and quite extraordinary tweet which, if nothing else, can be criticised for a complete absence of paragraphs and sentences which rivalled in length those in a Dickens novel.

With his opening out of the way, Trump asserted that the official United States foreign population stands at 53million, most of whom, he averred, “are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels”.

“They and their children,” Trump continued, “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who, because of their beautiful hearts, do not want to openly complain or cause trouble in any way, shape or form”.

Warming to his theme, he declared: “They put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so! A migrant earning $30,000 [£27,000] with a green card will get roughly $50,000 [£38,000] in yearly benefits for their family. The real migrant population is much higher.”

Pressing his point, he stated what none of Starmer’s motley crew will admit.

“This refugee burden is the leading cause of social dysfunction in America, something that did not exist after World War II (failed schools, high crime, urban decay, overcrowded hospitals, housing shortages, and large deficits, etc)”, the Donald wrote.

In a passage which might have got him arrested had he posted in the UK, with refreshing candour, the President gave the example of “hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia” who were “completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota”.

Somali gangs, he said, “are roving the streets looking for ‘prey’ as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone”.

No matter which country they end up in, Somalis tend to be bad news. There are multiple reports stretching back to 2007 of a plague of criminal gangs among the 32,000 Somalis who have settled in Minnesota.

Recently the Minnesota gangs have been associated with a series of massive welfare fraud schemes, the proceeds of which may have been funnelled to the Somalia-based terror group al-Shabab.

The largest fraud scandal involving Somalis was the “Feeding Our Future” scheme. Prosecutors racked up 56 criminal convictions in what they alleged was a plot to steal $300million (£270million) from a federally funded programme meant to feed children during the covid event.

The clankers aren’t going away

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

In the National Post, Colby Cosh says that we should think of the clankers as they exist right now in the same way we consider verifiably insane people:

The market-liberal economist/pundit Noah Smith has written a fun “stranger in a strange land” essay about his unusual fondness for the emerging species of “generative” artificial-intelligence bots. Smith points out that 100 years of science fiction has prepared us all to have convenient, convincingly intelligent, multilingual automaton life assistants; they are an accepted part of the background of almost all imagined futures, with exceptions like Frank Herbert’s Dune universe (wherein even basic mathematical computing is outlawed on religious principle).

Now these creatures have appeared in our midst overnight, and Smith feels delight, but he acknowledges that the public reaction is mostly dominated by hostility and suspicion. The rule that technological advancements are in general good, even if they have some bad initial effects, seems to apply only in retrospect: we laugh at the Luddites of old, little suspecting that we might just be the same people at a different cusp of progress.

The caveat about “bad initial effects” is extremely important (as is remembering that the Luddites really were personally endangered by progress). Technological leaps creating social fracture and mass violence are a real feature of history going back to the Neolithic Revolution. The printing press set off an orgy of religious wars, aviation created strategic bombing and the carnage of the First World War (along with its 19th-century nationalist and imperialist preludes) couldn’t have happened without railways and the telegraph. Twentieth-century fascism and communism can both be understood as mass-media phenomena, as consequences of asymmetrical human adoption of mass media. I’m sure some of you are keeping one eye on the horrible AI-driven mini-arms-race happening in Ukraine, as the interceptor drones and the attack drones of both sides in the war co-evolve at warp speed, and, like me, you wonder about the implications for the entire political order of the world.

Those news stories are a reminder that Darwin never sleeps, and that you don’t get to take a nap break from history — but also that our species survived these crises and has (so far!) prevailed, escaping the old Malthusian prison to arrive at a period of relative plenty and peace even for the worst-off. In any event, technological leaps are one-way doors: the only way out is through.

Consumer artificial intelligences really are marvels, but you’ve heard me emphasize that they are to be regarded for the moment as insane, and to be trusted only as far as you would trust a genuinely insane human being. We don’t yet know whether, or to what degree, this feature of generative AIs can be corrected.

Full disclosure, while I’ve used Elon Musk’s Grok a few times to generate images to accompany stories here on the blog, I do not use clankers to generate text and I can’t imagine doing so in the immediate future. One of the better signs that we’ll be able to adapt to clankers being omnipresent (as tech bros seem to be all of one mind that they need to add AI to everything they can, accelerating the enshittification of so much technology) was this little anecdote reposted on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

Update, 4 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

December 2, 2025

The elites will continue pushing high immigration despite the obvious social costs it imposes

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

One of the very tip-top luxury beliefs is that massive immigration is always and under all circumstances a good thing. A great thing, even. One of the things about the holders of luxury beliefs is that they are almost always completely insulated from any of the consequences of their beliefs, and this is especially true in this case. As Lorenzo Warby points out, the elites’ devotion to this cause contributes to collapsing levels of trust in the society absorbing all those immigrants and deeply undermines confidence that the leadership have anyone else’s but their own best interests at heart:

There is a straightforward, respectable view on immigration to Western countries. More people means more transactions, means more gains from trade, so immigration is a good thing. Immigration grows the economy, it increases GDP, so sensible folk support immigration.

There are extra bells and whistles, such as providing needed skills; compensating for falling fertility; willingness to do jobs locals are not. All the extra bells and whistles have responses. Why not train locals (i.e., citizens)? Won’t the immigrants’ fertility also fall? (Yes, though possibly more slowly.) The real willingness is to do jobs at lower wages and conditions than the locals would accept. For instance, potentially using US H1B visas to bring in entry-level employees who will work for less, and in worse conditions, than the locals.

Moreover, increasing total GDP is not the same as increasing per capita GDP. Even with per capita GDP, there are always questions about the distribution of those gains to GDP.

Nevertheless, the basic intuition is: immigration means more transactions, more gains from trade. Those who believe in markets — in positive-sum interactions — should support immigration.

This is not the trumping response it appears to be. Immigration does not only import workers—nor even just increase mutual-gain transactions — it imports people, so potentially affects all aspects of the receiving society. This means, of course, that there are a much wider range of possible concerns about immigration that “yes, but more gains from trade” is not an adequate response to.

Efficiency and number of transactions are not the only issues for a social order, particularly not a flourishing social order. There are also issues of social cohesion; social resilience; connections and social capital; the distribution of GDP gains; effects on relative prices; congestion costs; how well institutions are managing the influx; effects on local communities; cultural differences; social coordination issues and the ability to manage collective action problems; increased competition for positional goods — goods that cannot, or are blocked from, responding to increased demand.

These are all legitimate grounds for concern that are not answered by “yes, but more gains from trade“. How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with mass rape and sexual exploitation of young women and girls as a cost of culturally divergent immigration (and its systematic mismanagement)? How many of those “yes, but more gains from trade” folk have grappled with violent disturbance, even civil war, as a potential cost of immigration, even though we have historical examples of precisely that?

If, on one hand, the respectable people insist “yes, but more gains from trade” is an adequate response, and that other concerns are not legitimate, this will almost certainly be taken as the contemptuous dismissal it is. Not only will it not be persuasive, it will (and does) generate anger and resentment.

If people have concerns that the “reasonable”, “liberal-minded” folk will not deal with — or, worse, are dismissive of such concerns even being raised — then people will turn to unreasonable and illiberal folk, if they are the only people who will respond to their concerns. Significant gaps in political markets will be filled by political entrepreneurs.

If folk are told that “if you believe in markets, you have to support (high levels of) immigration” then many folk will respond with “OK, I reject markets“. Moreover, it is simply false that market economics entails that mass immigration is a good thing.

The idea that there is some economic phenomena such that marginal costs exceeds marginal benefits for all people over all ranges in all forms is not Economic thinking, it is magical thinking. (More precisely, it is class-signalling parading as Economics.)

It is magical thinking that falls foul of economist Thomas Sowell‘s dictum that there are no solutions, only trade-offs. Immigrants may be engaging in lots of positive-sum, gains from trade transactions, yet still be imposing more costs than benefits on a society, and on resident citizens, precisely because societies are not just efficiency arenas for free-floating transactions and no one is just an economic transactor.

Update, 3 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

Dead Wrong: How Canada got the Residential School story so wrong

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

Juno News shares Candice Malcolm‘s foreword to Dead Wrong by C.P. Champion and Tom Flanagan:

Canada is off track. We’ve lost our way.

How else could we make sense of the moral panic produced from a half-baked report coming from a small Indian Band in Central British Columbia in the spring of 2021? In response, the country lost its mind. Following reports of 215 “unmarked graves” at the site of the former Kamloops Residential School, the supposedly trusted sources of our society – journalists, elected officials, academics and so-called experts – reported fiction as fact, without doing any due diligence or research into the still unproven and questionable claims of mass graves and secret midnight burials of hundreds of deceased children.

A failure of this magnitude doesn’t happen instantaneously. It’s built over time as those who profess to speak the truth deliver deception, doublespeak, and misinformation – all in the name of addressing some grievance, advancing an agenda, and creating a narrative.

The only conclusion we can now draw is that our country is not what it should be, not what it was.

There are a myriad of complicated reasons to explain our clear downward trajectory – institutional capture, a hard-left consensus among political and cultural elites (driven in large part by government-funded journalists and the state broadcaster pushing woke propaganda), a large and inefficient bureaucracy that stifles growth and

innovation, institutions built upon a moral code that became unfashionable, and so on.

Canada has become a feminist country that proudly discriminates against men and diminishes the role of mothers. It has become a post-national country that loathes its founders and openly discriminates against individuals based on skin colour. It isn’t just post-Christian, it’s anti-Christian – evident from the treatment of Evangelical prayer leader Sean Feucht, the coordinated attacks against him in the summer of 2025 and the cancellation of tour stops across the country, not to mention total disinterest and cover-up of the 120+ churches that have been decimated and destroyed in the wake of the unmarked graves fiasco.

Over the past decade, we’ve witnessed our country fall from a functional system, into something almost unrecognizable.

The Canada I grew up in was safe, stable and secure. We knew our neighbours, we trusted institutions and didn’t worry too much about politics. Being Canadian meant something. We had a community, an identity, a shared purpose. Most of us believed in upward mobility and the Canadian dream: that if you work hard and play by the rules, you will have the same – or dare I say better – opportunities and quality of life than your parents.

This is clearly no longer the case for most Canadians under the age of 45, and that is a major problem for all of us.

I came across a simple social graph by William Meijer that clearly explains what has happened better than anything else I’ve seen. You could apply this to countries, companies and even personal relationships.

Simply put: kindness got in the way of truth.

Meijer writes the accompanying caption: “An extreme commitment to the truth makes relationships acutely dysfunctional but systems chronically functional (think Elon Musk).

An extreme commitment to kindness makes relationships acutely functional but systems chronically dysfunctional (think Sweden, UK).”

Canada perhaps represents the “kind dysfunction” better than any other place.

November 30, 2025

The plight of most young western men

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

At Postcards from Barsoom, John Carter explores the dangerous psychological rift in western thought that casts young men into a literal no-win situation and yet blames them for not succeeding:

La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Frank Bernard Dicksee, 1901

A great deal of Discourse revolves around the desultory state of the broken modern young man. We wring our hands about porn brained incels, and about the incel’s mirror image in the sociopathic gym bro fuckboy. We talk about how men need to man up, put down the console controller, get out of the basement, talk to real girls, and wife them up. At the same time, we do everything we can to make this as difficult and unappealing as possible. Male sexuality is relentlessly demonized, and this is at the root of great deal of social dysfunction.

Our society has established new social norms that make talking to girls in the wild, or even looking at them, tantamount to a sex crime. Buying a girl a drink at the bar is an imposition, an implicit expectation that she will at the very least say thank you, and this is essentially sexual harassment. As a result of this men do not buy girls drinks anymore. Glance at a girl’s cameltoe as she places her yoga pants between you and the mirror to do hip thrusts while you’re trying to focus on your deadlift, and get put on blast on TikTok as a perv. As a result men carefully avoid looking at girls, and girls wonder why they don’t get attention. Office romances are right out: ask Betty from accounting if she’d like to get a coffee, and you’re rolling the dice between getting lucky and getting a talking to from HR (if you’re lucky). Friend-group romances are discouraged: they bring too much drama.

The only romantic avenue still permitted is the dating apps. The de facto proscription of every other venue was so abrupt and thorough that I can’t help but wonder if MeToo was engineered by Match Group, in order to do to dating what Uber did to taxis. Just like Uber took an occupation that was able to provide a reasonable living standard for working class guys and turned it into piece-work for an imported third-world precariat, so Tinder wiped away thousands of years of accumulated social technologies optimized for the purpose of bringing young men and women together into stable, loving, and fecund matrimony, and replaced it with a winner-take-all meat market in which a small minority of the best-looking men swipe their way through a digital harem of emotionally crippled cum-dumpsters, while women retaliate by using their matches to get free meals and ghosting as soon as the cheque comes without so much as a thanks for the company. Commoditizing romance left everyone more lonesome and miserable than ever, but would you look at that market cap.

The decay set in long before Tinder, however.

Feminists have gotten a great deal of mileage out of Freud’s Madonna-whore complex. This is the idea of a Manichean division of femininity: the chaste purity of the innocent nurturing mother, contrasted with the wanton looseness of the degraded prostitute. The Madonna is embodied by the Virgin Mary, whose only begotten child was conceived immaculately, which is to say without actually having sex. Both archetypes are caricatures that fail to capture the full range of feminine sexuality, but a traditional, god-fearing society effectively forced women to choose between one or the other. Either she represses her instincts and lives a passionless life of quiet misery, or she becomes a fallen woman.

Unlike much of Freud’s oeuvre, which largely consisted of the author’s barely concealed fetishes, the Madonna-whore complex has held up fairly well in the era of evolutionary psychology. Freud’s explanation for the phenomenon – that it is rooted in the Oedipal desire to rut with your own mother – is of course nonsense (except possibly insofar as it may have applied to him). Its origin is more plausibly in the predicament of paternal uncertainty which has bedevilled men since before the dawn of mankind, and which leads to a trade-off between short- and long-term mating strategies with easy women on the one hand (with whom paternity is always in question, and in whom investment should therefore be kept to a minimum, but since they’re easy you can sow your seed in lots of them), and chaste women on the other (with whom paternity can be more reliably determined, and in whom greater investment is therefore warranted). It doesn’t matter that we have paternity tests now: evolved instincts don’t care about your technology.

In the aftermath of the sexual revolution female sexuality was freed from these ancient constraints. Women are permitted to dress as they please, date who they want, have sex with as many partners as they desire. Any attempt to dissuade women from such behaviour is attacked as slut shaming, a ploy by the patriarchy to control their bodies.

Promiscuous premarital sex was once a one-way street to single motherhood. The pill and legal abortion reduced that risk considerably, which provided the justification for eliminating sexual restraint in the first place. Male sexual psychology presents its own problems, however. Revealing attire invites male attention, and often not from the males whose attention a woman wants to attract. Women enjoy male attention, and so dress to attract it. Sexually excited men are liable to behave badly. Badly behaving men result in women getting hurt. Obviously, if a man behaves badly, society will punish him … but the wise course is to avoid putting temptation in his way in the first place. Those ancient restrictions on female sexuality weren’t there to oppress women: they were there to protect women from themselves.

Women may have chafed under the chastity belt of the Madonna-whore complex, but it caused problems for men too. Men don’t generally want either a frigid Victorian schoolmarm or a drunken slattern for a wife: he wants the happy medium between the two, purity in the streets but a prostie in the sheets, a girl who enjoys sex and is good at it, but only has it with him. The Madonna-whore complex is a schizoid separation of these two conflicting desires, which then leads to the romantic frustration of both sexes: men have to choose between two equally unappealing options, and women are required to deny one or the other aspect of their own sexuality.

Just like men, women tend to want two, somewhat contradictory things from the opposite sex. First, they want men to protect and provide for them: to build what needs building, fix what needs fixing, pay for dinner, buy them pretty jewellery. In other words, they want men to sacrifice their time and energy of their behalf. At the same time they want men who are dominant, strong, confident, and at least potentially dangerous, for the obvious reason that men must compete with other men, and men who do not possess these traits make terrible protectors and providers in comparison with men who do. The necessary tension is that dominant, aggressive men are generally much less interested in protecting and providing: a man who won’t submit easily to other men, won’t submit to women either; a man who can force other men to submit to his will, can also force a woman to do the same. This mirrors the tension in male desires: a girl who’s a good lay might not be the most impeccably virginal of innocent maidens.

We can’t call women whores anymore in order to enforce virginal purity, but bad romantic decisions still carry bad consequences, and women also need to be protected from those consequences (and can’t ever be held responsible for them). The emphasis has therefore shifted from policing female sexuality to policing male sexuality. The result of this is the emergence of the simp-rapist complex.

The only way to create a safe environment for women whose behaviour is entirely unrestricted is to ruthlessly suppress precisely those masculine traits of dominance and aggression that women find attractive in the first place. All of these traits get included into the broad category of “rape culture”. Even looking at a woman without her expressly stated positive consent becomes a problematic act. Men who violate these norms become, according to this standard, “rapists”.

Update, 1 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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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