Quotulatiousness

November 24, 2025

The Canadian paradox – “settlers” will never belong but “migrants” and “refugees” instantly belong

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

In the National Post, Mark Milke and Tom Flanagan outline one of the major issues dividing Canadians — the state and state-funded propaganda demonizing “settlers” that also lionizes much more recent arrivals as if they’re automatically better than non-Indigenous Canadians:

A depiction of Samuel de Champlain’s first encounter with the Iroquois (Mohawks) in 1609, a forest skirmish on future Lake Champlain, including fanciful rowboats, rather than canoes.
Caption from the National Post, image from the National Archives of Canada

If Canadians care to understand why our country is increasingly fractured, one key driver is the notion that non-Indigenous Canadians — “settlers” as they are called — should be grateful to live anywhere in the Americas.

The “settler” label is mostly directed at those of British and European ancestry. But it can apply to anyone whose families arrived from anywhere — Africa, Asia, the Levant, the Pacific — who were not part of the prior waves of migration to the Americas.

According to the most recent scientific knowledge, human settlement in the Americas began about 15,000 to 20,000 years ago. These pioneers of settlement must have arrived from Asia by boat and hopscotched along the Pacific coast because the interior land was glaciated. They migrated as far south as modern-day Chile, but it is unknown how far inland they penetrated and whether they survived to merge with later migratory settlers.

Another wave of migration started around 13,000 years ago when an ice-free corridor opened through Alberta between the two great glaciers covering North America. This made it possible for people from the now submerged land of Beringia to move south through Alaska, Yukon and Alberta across North America.

Later, but at an unknown date, came the movement of the Dene-speaking peoples now living mostly in Alaska and Canada’s North (though the Tsuut’ina got to southern Alberta and the Navajo to the southwestern United States). Their languages still show traces of their relatively recent Siberian origins.

The Inuit migrated from Siberia across the Arctic to Greenland around AD 1000. Another group inhabited the Arctic starting around 2500 BC, but their relationship to the Inuit is uncertain.

In short, the Americas were settled in waves from Asia. Everyone alive today is descended from settlers. The latest “Indigenous” settlers arrived barely ahead of the first European settlers, the Vikings, who settled in Greenland and Newfoundland, and of Christopher Columbus, who started Spanish settlement in the Caribbean.

Singling out Europeans as “settlers” drives land acknowledgments, as well as demands for compensation and reconciliation. It plays on guilt about the actions of actors long since dead, while the concurrent demands for land, decision-making power and financial settlements occur on an open-ended basis. Internationally, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) also assumes the Indigenous vs. settler-colonial divide is valid.

Why does this matter? Because peaceful, relatively prosperous nation-states are not guaranteed to last. In fact, they’re the exception, not the rule. To make actual progress in unifying Canada as opposed to watching it break down and fragment into hundreds of inconsequential principalities (a separate Quebec, a separate Alberta, and multiple First Nations with state-like powers, of which there would be up to 200 in British Columbia alone), it is overdue to dissect these assumptions, and the related belief that Canadians have done little to make up for some of the wrongs done in history.

November 23, 2025

John Cage’s 4’33” meets the anti-clanker protest song

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

Ted Gioia on Paul McCartney’s latest single — his first in several years — and what he’s protesting against … clankers in music and the arts:

Paul McCartney is releasing a new track. It’s his first new song in five years — so that’s a big deal. But there’s something even more significant about this 2 minute 45 second release.

The song is silent. It’s a totally blank track — except for a bit of hiss and background noise.

What’s going on? Has Paul McCartney run out of melodies at age 83? Is he nurturing his inner John Cage. Did he simply forget to turn on the mic?

No, none of the above.

Macca is releasing this track as a protest against AI.

His new “music” is part of an album entitled Is This What We Want? It’s already available on digital platforms, and is now coming out on vinyl. All proceeds will go to the non-profit organization Help Musicians.

“The album consists of recordings of empty studios and performance spaces,” according to the website. In addition to McCartney, more than a thousand musicians are participating, including:

    Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, Billy Ocean, Ed O’Brien, Dan Smith, The Clash, Mystery Jets, Jamiroquai, Imogen Heap, Yusuf / Cat Stevens, Riz Ahmed, Tori Amos, Hans Zimmer, James MacMillan, Max Richter, John Rutter, The Kanneh-Masons, The King’s Singers, The Sixteen, Roderick Williams, Sarah Connolly, Nicky Spence, Ian Bostridge, and many more.

I keep hearing that protest music is dead — and has been losing momentum since the Vietnam War. But there’s now a new war, and it’s stirring up creators in every artistic idiom.

They are fighting for their livelihoods and IP rights. And, so far, it’s been a losing battle.

You can see the new battle lines across the entire creative landscape.

Vince Gilligan, one of the most brilliant minds in TV, admits that he “hates AI”. He calls it the “world’s most expensive plagiarism machine”. For his new show Pluribus, he has added this disclaimer to the credits:

    This show was made by humans.

AI represents the exact opposite of creativity, Gilligan warns. It steals the work of others. So any attempt to legitimize it as a creative tool is built on lies. A bank robber might just as well pretend to be a financier. Or an art forger claim to be Picasso.

[…]

This is the new culture war.

And it’s very different from the old culture war — which was a dim reflection of politics. This new battle is happening inside the culture world itself, and threatens to cut off artists from their own longstanding partners and support systems.

This new culture war will only escalate. The stakes are too high, and artists can’t afford to stay on the sidelines. But they face heavy odds, with the richest people on the planet opposed to their efforts.

How will this battle get decided? It really comes down to the audience. If they prefer AI slop, we will witness the total degradation of arts and entertainment.

I’d like to think that people are too smart to fall for this crude simulation of human creative expression. Who wants to hear a bot sing of love it has never experienced? Who wants a nature poem from a digital construct that exists outside of nature? Who wants a painting made by something with no eyes to see?

Will the public find this charming. Or even plausible? Maybe a few twelve year olds and fools, but not serious people. That’s my hunch.

In any event, we will soon find out.

Do older Canadians really hate their children and grandchildren? The fiscal evidence says “yes”

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

As I posted a few days back, the real political divide in Canada is no longer the left versus the right: it’s the old financially parasitizing the younger generations. At The Line, Ben Woodfinden discusses how the smug, comfortable boomers are being confronted by, for lack of a better term, a “new right” of far less comfortable younger voters:

eLbOwS uP!

The specific complaints from people like d’Entremont and other grumbling voices are less about ideology and more the tone and style of Pierre Poilievre (though perhaps the two are connected). Poilievre’s temperament and style rubs certain people, including some Conservatives, the wrong way. Now, full disclosure, I worked for Poilievre for a few years, and I can confirm he’s a demanding boss. But so is the prime minister, reportedly. And Poilievre is also in my experience the hardest working person I’ve ever met.

The tone battle is not a revival of Red vs. Blue. It’s not clear those terms are even relevant today. “Red Tory” is often used pejoratively to describe a “Liberal Lite” voter who identifies as a conservative but is indistinguishable from a Liberal — those who fit the “social progressive, fiscal conservative” moniker. This is not what Red Toryism historically meant; it’s actually the opposite of this. Red Toryism is a distinctly Canadian tradition of conservatism that was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States, and emphasized the role of the state in this. It blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism — that’s what the “red” part actually means, not liberalism but socialism. This kind of Toryism — “conservatism with a conscience” — is committed to public institutions and is pro-market but not entirely libertarian.

But Red Toryism is no longer a dominant force in Canadian conservatism; today it’s a remnant, largely in Atlantic Canada. What we’re really looking at here is a generational fault line that cuts right through the heart of Canadian conservatism.

Many older Canadians are conservative, and these older Tories are (in general) fairly well off. They are retired, or well advanced into their careers. They own homes that are paid off, or will be in the near future, and worth a lot more than what they paid for them. Many of them have been able to help their children get started in their own careers, or with down payments on homes of their own. They value stability — it is essential if they are to continue enjoying their prosperous lives. These people have long enough memories to remember the political battles that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 — some of them were no doubt even participants, and may still identify with one faction or the other.

Now contrast this with many of the leading voices on the other side of the debate. They call themselves “the new right”. In the absence of a better term, I’ll use that. Canada’s new right tends to be younger, and this matters not just because the old PC/Reform divide means very little to them, it matters because they are much angrier with our general state of affairs, and for good reason.

The emerging flagship publication for this collection of young conservatives is the Substack Without Diminishment. In some ways, the emerging conservative opposition in Ontario to Premier Doug Ford centred around an organization called Project Ontario (discussed in last week’s On The Line podcast here) is also a good representation of it.

The voices and figures involved in this movement are younger, often very online, and eager to pick fights with this older generation of conservatives. For some of the writers at Without Diminishment, the archnemesis of their conservatism is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. He represents, for them, an outdated kind of “Boomer conservatism” that does not speak to them or the issues they care about. New conservatives have also recently written, after Ford ran ads featuring Ronald Reagan in America, that it’s time for “the gatekeepers of the Canadian right … to move on from 1984” — namely Reagan-era conservatism.

Twenty years ago, I’d often quote Andrew Coyne’s columns, but at some point he had a significant change of heart and one of the first Without Diminishment articles I linked to was what I characterized as “The Anti-Coynist Manifesto“.

November 22, 2025

Why did the US Enter WW1?

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Military, USA, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 11 Jul 2025

In early 1917, the United States was still neutral in the First World War. Meanwhile, German leaders were getting desperate — if they couldn’t find a way to break the war of attrition on the Western Front, the Allies would probably defeat them. The result was multiple gambles that staked everything on a quick victory with the risk of drawing the US into the war.
(more…)

November 21, 2025

The “spat” between China and Japan is far more important than western media are reporting

Filed under: China, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Claire Berlinsky explains why we should be paying far more attention to what our media are treating as a minor diplomatic spat as Beijing reacts furiously to the new Japanese PM’s comments:

You need to see the Chinese media today to get a feel for this. Front pages of the relevant organs are devoted to frothing in fury at Japan. They’re rectifying bad thoughts like a house on fire.

Here’s why I’m worried by this. Both the Chinese- and Japanese-language press are treating this as a major diplomatic incident. (In English, it’s mostly being described as “a row” or “spat” — then back to Trump and Epstein.) Let me walk you through what it looks from Beijing and Tokyo, with help from ChatGPT on the translations.

The trigger was a comment in by the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. She told a parliamentary committee that a Taiwan contingency involving the use of force might constitute a “sonritsu kiki jitai” (a “survival-threatening situation” — I think we’d use the phrase “existential threat”) for Japan under its 2015 security laws, and justify the exercise of collective self-defense, using Japan’s self-defense forces.

Beijing exploded. China summoned the Japanese ambassador in Beijing for a formal démarche, and it allowed the PRC consul general in Osaka, Xue Jian, to post a (now-deleted) tweet calling for her decapitation—”that dirty head that trespassed should be cut off, are you ready?” The Xue Jian post has, of course, become a media event of its own. Beijing issued a travel advisory urging Chinese citizens to avoid Japan, and told students to “carefully reconsider” study plans. It stepped up coast-guard activity near the Senkakus, and cancelled the Xi–Takaichi bilateral at the G20.

But this arid account doesn’t begin to convey the way the Chinese and Japanese media are talking about this. The Chinese coverage is nothing short of hysterical. To read the Party-line outlets, you’d think Takaichi had just ordered the immediate re-invasion of Manchuria. Her comment, they said, was an evidence of a “dangerous rightward turn” in Japanese politics. They’re calling it a “sky-collapsing opening“, accusing her of “reckless ranting” and tearing up the China-Japan relationship.

The headline in a widely circulated China Daily article:”If China and Japan go to war, Japan will be destroyed“. They found the inevitable panel of “peace-loving international friends” — including Okinawan peace activists and pro-PRC overseas Chinese — to denounce Takaichi as the reincarnation of “Japanese militarism”. The peace activists dutifully warned that the Japanese people would be “dragged into catastrophe” by their government. A CNR column accuses her of “brazen provocation”, and claims that “Taiwan compatriots are also outraged” at the prospect of Taiwan being turned into a battleground between China and a “militaristic” Japan.

The Party line: Taiwan is a “settled” internal issue; any talk of Japanese collective self-defense in the Strait is aggression and a “serious violation” of the post-1945 order. Takaichi represents “unrepentant militarism.” Chinese pieces quote her opponents at length to argue that “sober Japanese elites” are deploring her recklessness. Chinese-language coverage of the travel advisory is not treating it as a minor consular notice. They’re claiming it’s the first coercive step.

In Japan, this is front-page foreign policy news, not a minor gaffe. Mainichi ran an editorial saying, more or less, that Takaichi’s words were legally consistent with the 2015 security laws, but prime ministers should be more discrete about hypothetical military contingencies and show more prudence. Opposition figures are saying she “went too far” and threw the relationship into “a very grave state”. They called it “frivolous” for a commander-in-chief to talk so specifically about use-of-force scenarios.

On the other hand, there’s clearly a domestic constituency that sees this as long overdue. Some in her party see any hint of retraction as “weakness toward China”, and they’re praising her for drawing a firm line on Taiwan. (The coverage about whether to expel Xue Jian is divided: His post was a death threat, obviously, but the Foreign Ministry seems reluctant to escalate this further.)

TV explainers are reminding viewers that the 2015 security legislation already contemplated a Taiwan contingency — what’s new is that the prime minister has now said this out loud. And a prime minister with an openly revisionist profile — that’s definitely new.

So there’s a lot of signaling going on. Beijing is signaling to its own public: “We’ll never again let Japanese militarism threaten China. The Party is the bulwark against a repeat of the 1930s.” To Tokyo: “We’ll punish any step toward military involvement in the Strait, first with economic coercion — then worse. We are not kidding about this.” To the wider region and Washington: “Japan is a destabilizer — this woman isn’t right in the head. If things go wrong in the Taiwan Strait, blame Tokyo. Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Update, 23 November: 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.

November 20, 2025

“Oh my God, the Conservatives support children starving at school”

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

In the National Post, Chris Selley profiles my local MP, Jamil Jivani:

A screengrab from MP Jamil Jivani’s video that is critical of the Liberals’ national school-lunches program. Photo by Jamil Jivani/X

A few eyebrows raised earlier this year when Toronto-area MP Jamil Jivani, long heralded as an essential younger voice in the Canadian conservative movement, wasn’t offered a critic role by party leader Pierre Poilievre. There are 74 official Opposition critics, which is more than half the Conservative caucus. And if Poilievre and Jivani don’t see eye to eye, one might still have thought Jivani’s relationship with U.S. Vice-President JD Vance would be a useful resource.

There’s also the fact that Jivani is rather good at defending conservative policy, especially on the social side — better, one might argue, than Poilievre. On Monday, Jivani posted a video of himself arguing that Canadian children should go hungry at school. Or at least, that’s how certain hysterics chose to interpret his opposition to the Liberals’ national school-lunches program.

“It should frighten us that there are parents who can’t buy their own kids lunch,” he tells a constituent in the video. “(But) the government shouldn’t be your daddy; the government shouldn’t be your mother. We have families, and families should be strong enough to provide for their children, and when they’re not that should break our hearts. … It should not be used as a justification for the government to have even more influence, even more input, even more control over our lives.”

The program is already underway, with $1 billion in funding over five years committed as transfers to the provinces in 2024 — three years after the Liberals first promised it. And the Liberals recently announced plans for more. “Permanent” funding of more than $200 million is set to kick in in 2029.

The response anywhere to Jivani’s intervention, anywhere to his left, in a nutshell: “Oh my God, the Conservatives support children starving at school”. Even among some conservatives we hear the traditional timid refrain: Is this a “winning issue”? Or is the party just making itself look callous? What will the media think? Jivani, unlike many more seasoned Conservatives, seems not to care so much about the potential blowback.

Lunches served at school — paid or subsidized — are hardly a brand-new statist invention. They’ve been around forever, although they’re more common in certain kinds of schools than others. A 2013 Queen’s University study looked at 436 Canadian schools and found only 53 per cent had a cafeteria. (When I was a kid, many of my friends walked home for lunch and back afterwards.) And Jivani concedes in the video that many Canadians will like the sound of a national school-lunch program. Who would argue against it? It’s obviously far more important that kids eat breakfast and lunch (and dinner) than it is who provides it.

But that assumes a national school-lunch program, or even a provincial or local school-lunch program, is the quickest and easiest way to make sure kids are fed. It obviously isn’t, but trust in government, somehow, is a tough nut to crack in this country. Mass pandemic-era supports like CERB weren’t unalloyed successes, but they proved governments at least know how to shovel money out the door when they feel it absolutely necessary.

Especially since so many Canadian schools don’t have cafeterias — 53 per cent of elementary schools in the Queen’s study, and 82 per cent of combined elementary-secondary schools — it would make much more sense just to mail every parent who needs one a subsidy and let them pack the lunch, or the lunch money, that their kids need.

I’ve mentioned many times that I’m not a Conservative, but I don’t mind Mr. Jivani as my Member of Parliament because he doesn’t seem to me to be a typical Canadian Conservative (I thought it was significant that the PPC chose not to run against him once he became the Conservative candidate). In my YouTube recommendations, this video appeared with some sensible views from the Deputy Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, Melissa Lantsman:

The trouble, as always with parties in opposition, is that they can sound like they’ve got great ideas and will energetically address the problems they identify while not in government … but once they go into office, sound remarkably like the government they just defeated and little or nothing actually changes.

Our free-speech documentary has been cancelled! | A London cinema has banned Think Before You Post

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

spiked
Published 19 Nov 2025

Our new documentary, Think Before You Post, about the rise of the British speech police, was due to have its premiere in London next week. Last night, the venue got in contact to say it would be cancelling our booking, because the event does not align with its “values”.

Here, spiked‘s Tom Slater tells all.

We are working flat-out to find a new venue for the same night. So if you bought tickets, do bear with us. But if we can’t find somewhere else in time, we’ll refund everyone and postpone it for a later date. If you’d like a refund now anyway, get in touch and we’ll process it.

At least they’re proving our point …

About spiked:

Founded in 2000, spiked was a pioneer of 21st-century journalism – the first online-only political magazine in the UK.

Now edited by Tom Slater, spiked reaches millions around the world with hard-hitting articles, incisive essays and a growing roster of podcasts and videos.

QotD: What happened to the “Lucky Country” when the luck ran out?

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

I used to think that being born Australian was the greatest blessing in history.

Without thinking too deeply about it, I sensed we had inherited some of the best British qualities: we understood that a batsman should walk when he knew he was out, regardless of the umpire’s decision; and that the best hangover cure began with a cup of tea.

We ridiculed our friends because there was no greater compliment than offensive humour, but didn’t overdo it because brevity was the soul of our wit. (Google it, Abdul.)

Then I discovered that the British colony in Australia was founded 12 years after Americans declared that all men (not just American ones) are created equal, and with certain inalienable rights, and realised that their belief in liberty, too, was part of our precious heritage.

By developing in lockstep with them and marching to every subsequent war alongside them, we had been imbued with Americans’ rugged individualism, but cleverly managed to avoid their gullibility for life’s more superficial panaceas.

For a while, we even gave the Americans a run for their money in the pursuit-of-happiness caper. Our island continent had more room, stranger animals and nicer cities, and we had a bigger middle class, which confirmed to us that egalitarianism, the bedrock of our culture, worked.

Then, in 1983, the crew aboard the Australia II yacht showed the New York elite that their unlimited money was no match for our gritty ingenuity.

What a time to be alive! How brilliant were we! We were six-foot-four and full of muscle, and we thought it would last forever.

That it hasn’t is partly our fault. We constantly called ourselves The Lucky Country, conveniently forgetting that Donald Horne coined the name as a warning, that one day the luck would run out. That’s what luck is: it changes.

We revelled in our prosperity and mocked the idea, fundamental to our founders, that prosperity is a two-way deal.

And we lazily imported “vibrancy” instead of building on the sophisticated western civilisation, going back to Socrates and Aristotle, we were unbelievably fortunate to inherit.

But for all our complacency, at least we never deliberately sought our own demise, which, it is now clear, is what our own government is doing with grim determination and sinister skill.

As a free and prosperous nation with unlimited resources, Australia should have the pick of the richest, cleverest, most urbane migrants in the entire world. Instead, it has opened the door to millions of low-skilled peasants from Third World countries who aren’t even slightly interested in assimilating, if they don’t outright hate our culture and want to subjugate us.

There is more to this than Labor merely symbiotically importing freeloaders whose votes can be bought with unaffordable largesse. […]

As the brilliant Adam Creighton said on X last week, referring to our demographic transformation: “The Australia of your youth won’t remotely exist in 20 years. It will still have nice weather, at least”.

Our cultural suicide aside, this record intake of migrants reduces our already inadequate amount of available housing.

By how much? The Australian Bureau of Statistics isn’t saying. Its biennial Survey of Income and Housing was due out about now, but will not be released at all because of “data collection issues”.

In other words, ABS staff were unable to survey the people most affected by unprecedented levels of immigration because those people kept shifting between city laneways and homeless shelters.

Fred Pawle, “All They Can Manage is Decline”, Fred Pawle, 2025-07-21.

November 19, 2025

Julia: A Feminist Retelling of 1984?

Filed under: Books, Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 11 Jul 2025

Julia, a 2023 novel by Sandra Newman, does more than just retell Orwell’s 1984 through Julia’s eyes. That perspective switch presents an Oceania that is both more mundane and more familiar. It’s certainly a companion piece more than a stand-alone work, but it does have something to offer both in how it examines Orwell and a few times, how it contradicts him.

00:00 Intro
02:18 a Different Perspective
09:30 Caught in a Trap
12:45 Backstory
15:40 Departures
20:18 Endings and Beginnings
(more…)

QotD: Rum Sodomy & the Lash

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

Released 40 years ago by London Irish legends the Pogues, the album is named not after a decent night in old Soho, as the title would suggest, but an apocryphal quote of Churchill’s. “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition,” he’s purported to have said. “It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash”. For many years, listening to the album while writing and drinking in this adopted riverside local, I’d no idea it was recorded a stone’s throw away in Elephant Studio, in the basement of Metropolitan Wharf. Or that the pubs of the area, such as this one, were frequented by Pogues musicians: their frontman and chief songwriter Shane MacGowan and the album’s producer Elvis Costello.

The album was even launched on the river, upstream, on board HMS Belfast with the band wearing Nelson-era naval regalia. They’d been ferried to the moored cruiser from Traitor’s Gate, arriving to find the assembled journalists (one of whom ended up, temporarily, in the Thames) already tearing into the drink. After the gig, MacGowan’s admiral’s hat vanished; in one story settling onto the river bed with all that other historical debris. At the time, the album felt like a raucous act of vandalism. Now, it’s viewed almost universally as a stone-cold classic.

The cover, a remade version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the band themselves are among the wretched shipwrecked crew, acts as a framing device. What Rum Sodomy & the Lash does is allow erased, abandoned or sidelined histories to erupt — the piratical and press-ganged, the adventurous and the damned — in a way that gracefully, modestly hides the band’s self-taught virtuosity and the lyricist’s songwriting genius. It was an album that, at that time, socially and politically, shouldn’t have existed, but through courage and sheer force of nature had to.

The Thames may not forget, but society is all too willing to. There are, alas, few signs of gratitude or even recognition of the colossal impact the Irish have had on London. A statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Butcher of Drogheda, stands pride of place outside the House of Commons, but there’s scarce trace of his Hibernian victims. It took the London Irish Centre to erect a plaque in Camden Square, in 2017, to the “Forgotten Irish”, “who left their homes, counties and country … to work and rebuild this city and country, ravaged and destroyed by war … Many would never return to Ireland”.

[…]

Even at the time of the album, in fact, the Pogues ran into opposition, and not just among musical snobs and gatekeepers in England. In Ireland, their adversaries were two-fold — traditionalist embalmers of folk music, and cringe-beset “cosmopolitans” who were mortified with anything too Irish, too plebian, too diasporan. Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music, and more authentic examples of cosmopolitan hybrid-culture, than their adversaries, exemplifying the maxim that, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”.

At the heart of Rum Sodomy & the Lash‘s success and legacy is embrace of apparent opposites: high and low culture, Ireland and England, city and rural, home and exile, intellect and soul, sacred and profane, debauchery and dignity, stars and gutter. So you get “Navigator”, a tribute to the Irish workers who built the railways, and MacGowan’s rowdy “Sally MacLennane”, a tribute to his uncle’s Irish pub in Dagenham, the Irish car-making workforce it served and the real-life characters he encountered, some less than salubrious. There’s also a fierce and atmospheric instrumental, “The Wild Cats of Kilkenny”, inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, or else the industrial hangover of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, especially poignant at a time of deindustrialisation.

The true legacy of the Pogues exists not in print, of course, but in music. Their inheritors include the drone and conscience of the modern band Lankum, the otherworldly transformations of the past in the music of Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn, and the pulse of the new in Fontaines DC. But the album also impels its listeners to articulate discontent, defy the rot, preserve the fire, to genuinely transgress, to face reality in surreal or raw terms, to lament and howl not in the transience of placards or social media, but in an art form that hits far deeper, than rusting plaques, and lasts much longer. It’s all out there, more than ever, out of sight, below decks or at the bottom of the river, waiting to escape.

Darran Anderson, “The Pogues soundtracked Irish London”, The Critic, 2025-08-05.

November 18, 2025

Canada’s divide isn’t left versus right, it’s old versus young

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Older Canadians seem to be taking joy in sticking up their elbows and robbing younger Canadians of opportunities, jobs, and hope. It’s quite literally un-Canadian, but the Boomers have always been a generation apart and this is merely the latest manifestation of their self-centred worldview. Alexander Brown wonders if this divide can be fixed before the country itself is ruined:

“eLbOwS uP!”

“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.

The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.

The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the “safe” choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.

If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.

    The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!

    At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian …

    We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.

On and on. Yada and yada.

Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.

Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.

Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction“, or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.

Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism”. But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.

Of course, the Liberals survived Monday’s budget vote … for now:

When I saw Elizabeth May stand up and ask Mark Carney what looks like a completely planted question, I assumed the budget would pass and I was correct. Planted questions normally come from government MPs and are a soft way for the government to push their agenda.

This time, it wasn’t a Liberal MP, well at least not a Liberal MP in name and fact. Instead it was Green leader, or deputy leader, or let’s be honest the lonely lady in the corner who is the only Green MP asking the question.

That statement put the Liberals one vote closer to passing their budget and of course May later confirmed ahead of the vote that she would back the budget. This was after saying couldn’t back the budget, might back the budget, would probably back the budget, definitely wouldn’t back the budget and finally would back the budget.

How anyone can take Elizabeth May seriously is beyond me.

How the other votes went…

Ahead of the vote there were lots of questions about how things would go. Would all MPs show up or be able to vote online? Would people abstain? Would MPs vote for the budget without crossing the floor?

In the end, the budget passed 170 to 168 with two NDPers abstaining. That leaves five votes not accounted for and we will figure out.

Here is how the vote went.

Now, some members who were not in their seats did vote electronically. I didn’t see Matt Jeneroux vote electronically and I’m told that he is in British Columbia with is family. Also not voting, Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs.

Conservatives Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid both voted no but only in the time that is allowed for MPs voted electronically to claim tech problems. They were both in the House, so why were didn’t they vote in person?

Regardless, the NDP rushed out to say they voted against the budget but also made sure that it passed with their two abstensions.

As for all this talk of a Christmas election, had the government lost this vote and the PM gone to see the Governor General tomorrow, the earliest election date would have been December 25.

A Christmas election.

Canada’s major projects announcements are an economic “hostage release” program

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg vents about Dear Leader Carney’s penchant for even-more-Trudeauesque-than-Justin performative governing. Far more emphasis is put on the PR value of an announcement than on the common sense practicality of the thing being announced. And Carney is also starting to re-announce already announced “projects” as if speaking it aloud will magically manifest it into reality:

Canada’s major projects announcements are a national embarrassment — an economic “hostage release” program — that tells the world just how uninvestible Canada has become under the Liberal party.

1970s central planning Liberal govt arrogance is at an all time GDP destroying high.

Try naming another OECD nation (we’re at the bottom now) where the press waits with bated breath for a “dear leader” politician who has never built anything in his life to fly in to grant a bureaucratic benediction on a few projects his bureaucrats will allow past the gate of the caps, taxes, green rules and red tape his govt imposes on everything.

Idea: set up the Major Dumb Redtape office in Calgary instead and get rid of the 10 anti-business rules written into law by the Montreal green alarmist fringe that’s holding Canadian energy, ag, forestry, and manufacturing back while other nations grow …

But PM Carney seems to like his bureaucratic power over what used to be a leading free market economy. Even while our GDP grinds down to the worst in the OECD.

The arrogance is breathtaking.

So is the ineptitude. This same central planning genius just punched a record new $78billiom hole through our public finances because he can’t manage basic public service delivery without more crushing debt.

The budget is a train wreck solidifying the final year of a Liberal decade steeply eroding purchasing power, national wealth, personal security and living standards and public services.

The irony is that this has driven Canada to ever-greater 51st state economic dependency. Donald Trump didn’t do that. They did.

But he’s been a too-convenient way to con the elderly with “elbows up” PR.

But should the next generation really be forced to lend this govt another $78bn in addition to the 1 trillion they’ve already taken to fund their failed decade of central planning, green slush funds and EV mandates while real infrastructure projects wait years for the Liberal party to bless them?

It’s not going to last.

Fitch just questioned the sustainability of all this. Unlike our lacklustre press they aren’t buying “net debt” or “operating/investment” Liberal financial illiteracy.

I had high hopes PM Carney would return fiscal sanity to Canada after openly borrowing Conservative policies to get elected by cutting the carbon and cap gains taxes.

But this budget, this major projects farce and his inability to kill a dozen economy killing rules of his own govt is showing the work how uninvestible Canada has become — and it’s accelerating national economic decline.

2026 is the end of the Liberal lost decade. First recession. Then debt downgrade. Then an election. And Carney can go back offshore to his assets and all the other global investors who like him don’t invest in Canada under Liberal mismanagement.

@SteveSaretsky thx for the brilliant line chart as usual.

A day later, after his post got significant attention on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, he posted this follow-up:

This angry post I wrote a day ago got 300,000 views.

Canadians are tired of the fake “major projects” PR by the same people who prevented those projects for a decade with their green taxes and prohibitions.

Announcing the release of 7 hostage projects is a joke. Some of these projects aren’t major and most aren’t new. None needed the govt to do anything but get out of the way from the beginning.

All the several hundred major projects still in purgatory need is for this govt to reverse their anti-job and anti-infrastructure tanker ban, industrial carbon tax, emissions cap, and electricity regs.

Oh — and also clarify by law that in Canada property rights are not overridden by leftist judges and UN wishful thinking.

Then get out of the way so a couple trillion dollars can flow in, major projects can get built and the govt revenue will flow to better public services — and to pay down that debt they just added $78bn to.

November 17, 2025

The US Supreme Court considers whether Trump’s tariffs are legal

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

Thanks to the staggering incompetence (and/or deliberate provocation for domestic political advantage) of the Carney government’s dealings with President Donald Trump, the current case before the Supreme Court is of significant interest to those of us on the north side of the US-Canadian border. On his Substack, David Friedman discusses the issues before the court:

There are three things wrong with Trump’s tariffs. The first is that they cannot be expected to provide the benefits claimed, can be expected to make both the US and its trading partners poorer; the arguments offered for them depend on not understanding the economics of trade. For an explanation of why that is true, see an earlier post.

The fact that the tariffs make us poorer may be the most important thing wrong with them but it is irrelevant to the Supreme Court; nothing in the Constitution requires the president to do his job well. The questions relevant to the Court are whether what Trump is doing was authorized by past Congressional legislation and whether it was constitutional for Congress to authorize it.

What Counts As An Emergency?

Tariffs are under the authority of Congress, not the president.1 Trump’s justification for setting them himself is congressional legislation, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

    (a) Any authority granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may be exercised to deal with any unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States, if the President declares a national emergency with respect to such threat.

    (b) The authorities granted to the President by section 1702 of this title may only be exercised to deal with an unusual and extraordinary threat with respect to which a national emergency has been declared for purposes of this chapter and may not be exercised for any other purpose. (IEEPA, 50 U.S. Code § 1701, emphasis mine)

Trump declared that his Worldwide Reciprocal Tariffs were intended to deal with the US trade deficit.2 Whether the deficit is a threat and whether tariffs are a good way to deal with it are questions for economists3 but whether it is unusual is relevant to judges, since if it is not the IEEPA does not apply.

[…]

The Court on Trial

Delegating to the president the power to impose tariffs, a power explicitly given to Congress in the Constitution, is a major question. Under doctrine proclaimed by this court that means that the legislation claimed to delegate that power must be read narrowly. On a narrow reading, on anything but a very broad reading, the legislation fails to apply to President Trump’s tariffs for two independent reasons:

    It only grants power in an emergency, which under the language of the Act neither the trade deficit nor the illegal drug problem is; the deficit has existed since 1970, the War on Drugs was proclaimed in 1971.

    The powers granted to the president in the Act do not include the power to impose tariffs.

If the six conservative justices believe in the principles they claim, the administration will lose the case 9-0.

  1. The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises … To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations … (U.S Constitution, Article I, Section 8).
  2. “I found that conditions reflected in large and persistent annual U.S. goods trade deficits constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and economy of the United States that has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States. I declared a national emergency with respect to that threat, and to deal with that threat, I imposed additional ad valorem duties that I deemed necessary and appropriate.” (Executive Order July 31, 2025).
  3. The answers are no and no.

Yet another example of the Liberal focus on symptoms rather than underlying problems

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

The Liberals under both Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney have amply demonstrated that they care far more about appearances than achievements. The immigration crisis is merely the latest example of the government reaching for something that will look good on TV and in the newspapers rather than addressing the root cause of the problem:

Perhaps the most intractable policy disaster handed to Prime Minister Carney by the Trudeau government is the immigration file. The ugliest detail in that file is undoubtedly the astronomic increase in temporary residents (largely foreign workers, international students, and asylum seekers) – a population that expanded from 3.3% in 2018 to 7.5% in 2024. The Carney government’s solution is to limit the inflow of new temporary residents significantly, while at the same time giving permanent residency to many of the ones already on Canadian soil.

The base problem is far too many people entering the country, driving up demand for housing, overloading healthcare facilities, absorbing more and more government assistance at a time the government is running record deficits, and undercutting young Canadians for entry level jobs while youth unemployment is skyrocketing. But this “solution” will look like firm action as it will be presented by the tame media, so from the point of view of the government, it’s “mission accomplished”.

The Carney government’s first annual Immigration Levels Plan commits to “reducing Canada’s temporary population to less than 5% of the total population by the end of 2027”. To this end, Canada’s annual intake of new temporary residents will be cut from 673,650 in 2025 to 385,000 in 2026, and 370,000 in 2027 and 2028. This cut will hit international students the hardest, with annual new study permits cut in half from over 300,000 to 155,000 in 2026, and 150,000 in 2027 and 2028.

This major cut will ease the strain on Canada’s housing, healthcare, food banks, roads, and social services – a strain that is no longer denied by politicians, and is freely acknowledged across the political aisle. But, as is the case with many policies, the devil is the details. It turns out that one of the ways which the federal government intends to shrink the size of the temporary resident population is by making a large number of them permanent residents.

In the recently released 2025 Annual Report to Parliament on Immigration, Immigration Minister Lena Diab says the Carney government intends to “give priority for permanent residence to temporary residents already living and settled in Canada, further reducing the number of new arrivals”.

How many temporary residents will get permanent residency under this plan is unclear, but we can extrapolate from the data we have.

The Carney government’s Immigration Levels Plan sets the annual permanent resident rate at 380,000 for the next three years – or, a total of 1,140,000. The very last Immigration Levels Plan of the doomed Trudeau government – which committed to transitioning many temporary residents to permanent residency – predicted that temporary residents would account for “more than 40% of overall permanent resident admissions in 2025”.

If the Carney government is heralding the idea of transitioning more temporary residents as a way to slow down the catastrophic population growth Canada has experienced in recent years, we can safely assume that this proportion will be at least a little bit higher than the Trudeau government’s rate. A rate of 50%, say, would mean that 570,000 temporary residents will receive permanent residency over the next three years.

See, Canadians are telling the government that there are too many temporary immigrants, so by waving a magic wand and transforming the bulk of the temporary immigrants into permanent residents, the government can pretend they’ve solved the problem. And the sycophants, fluffers, and cheerleaders in the media will laud them to the skies for their brilliant solution.

November 15, 2025

There’s not much room for men and boys in the “Female Future”

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

Janice Fiamengo responds to a recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson which was intended to be about men’s lives but “quickly becomes a conversation about what women want”:

Chris Williamson: “It’s very hard to try and put forward something that doesn’t sound like putting the brakes on women. And I don’t think that’s what either of us …”

Here is the problem in a nutshell. We must never say No to a woman, no matter the social atrophy and misery she and her sisters are causing. Carlson, in turn, gives the only permissible response: “Are women happier than they were?”

A conversation about men’s lives quickly becomes a conversation about what women want.

**

Men’s issues have long been the purview of a tiny group of outliers who gained traction in the early days of the internet and were popularized in Cassie Jaye’s The Red Pill.

Following in the footsteps of iconoclasts like Ernest Belfort Bax (The Legal Subjection of Men, 1896), Esther Vilar (The Manipulated Man, 1971), and Warren Farrell (The Myth of Male Power, 1993), they questioned standard feminist wisdom, focusing on male disposability (see also here) and the empathy gap. For years, they were voices crying in the wilderness.

Now, decades into our Female Future, it’s becoming harder to ignore the suffering and plummeting fortunes of men and boys — and their knock-on social effects. But what happens when the red pill begins to go mainstream?

As the recent discussion between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and happiness coach Chris Williamson makes clear, most hard truths get leached away, and we’re left with half-hearted calls for a compassion that the influencers themselves seem unable to maintain.

Spoiler Alert: “Chris Williamson’s Guide to Being Happy, and Debunking the Feminist Lies Sabotaging You” doesn’t debunk any feminist lies. Even the MeToo movement, which harmed or destroyed thousands of men’s lives through unproven accusations (some of them almost inconceivably ridiculous and trivial), is accepted as an attempt to “sanitize the toxic elements of male behavior”. Accusers’ falsehoods, ‘Poor-me-I’m-so-desirable’ showboating, manipulations, and blithe indifference to evidence are all passed over in feminist-compliant silence.

Sadly, the discussion is full of feminist lies.

**

Near the beginning of the discussion, Williamson expresses frustration that in order to acknowledge any of the troubles of men and boys in the modern world, it has become obligatory first to rehearse women and girls’ (always at least equal, if not greater) suffering. Unfortunately, Williamson is a prime example of such gynocentric genuflecting, visibly uncomfortable every time the conversation seems to be moving into non-feminist territory.

In order to talk about the drastic decline in men’s higher education attainment, for example, Williamson seems to think it necessary to point out that women were at some point in the past discouraged from getting university degrees. Both Williamson and Carlson refer to men’s diminishing earning power, but pivot immediately to stressing how hard this is on professional women looking for marriageable men.

The sexual revolution is alleged to have mainly benefited men who can now, with impunity, “use and abuse women”; nothing is said about women’s rampant OnlyFans activity or their exploitation of men in divorce.

It goes on and on like this: for every male suicide, divorce-raped father, falsely accused or incarcerated man, there must be at least one woman somewhere who felt at some point that she wasn’t encouraged to do something.

There is a small amount of criticism directed at women, but only when women act badly towards other women, as is the case, according to Carlson, with female bosses. But about female cruelty to men or children (over half of child maltreatment, for example, is female-perpetrated), we do not hear anything.

There is a good deal said about women as a civilizing force, how much women bring to family life, how women are better with social cues, how they are “unbullshittable.” Carlson even gushes about how kind women are to their hubbies: “They wash your underwear. They listen to you snore,” he rhapsodizes. For the considerable number of men who have rarely had a kind word from any woman or who have gone through a hellish marriage and/or divorce with a vindictive shrew, the adulation seems quite unhelpful.

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