Quotulatiousness

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.

November 14, 2025

“Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription” 2 – Electric Boogaloo

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

Canada has only had two brushes with military conscription — after voluntary enlistments couldn’t keep up with casualties in both the First and Second World Wars — and both caused severe resentment in Quebec. Canadian politicians have generally avoided any hint of anything that could be framed as “conscription” for fear of triggering yet another existential crisis between Quebec and the rest of the country. Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t a typical Canadian politician, and does not seem to have any of the built-up scar tissue that most others do. This might make him prone to saying and doing things that seem quite ordinary to him, but trigger civil unrest … like forcing civil servants to become soldiers against their will.

I floated the notion that this might be Carney’s five-dimensional chess strategy to reduce the civil service without having to fire everyone, but it’s far more likely that he genuinely doesn’t understand Canadians and our shared history.

John Carter is … skeptical about the Laurentian Elite being capable of rebuilding the depleted Canadian Armed Forces, as it’s hard to conceal sixty years of open contempt long enough to fake some sincerity:

The Canadian Armed Forces – which refer to themselves as the CAF, pronounced exactly as it’s spelled – recently leaked its intention expand its reserves from the current, anemic 22,000 to 400,000 soldiers. At first I wondered if an extra 0 was added to that number as a typo, but the plan is to grow the Army reserve to 100,000 and the supplementary reserve (which I hadn’t even known existed, and is currently composed of retirees) from a few thousand to 300,000. Further leaked details are that the 300,000-strong supplementary reserve will be created by essentially drafting civilian Federal employees, training them in driving trucks, marksmanship, and drone flying, which really just sounds like the makings of an absolute clown show.

At the same time, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney has committed to a considerable increase in the CAF’s budget – over $80 billion spread over the next five years, with 2025-26 spending rising to around $62B from the previous average of around $35B – with the goal of reaching the 2% of GDP level that NATO members are expected to (but in practice usually don’t) maintain. As part of this build-up, the CAF is hoping to reach its authorized strength of 71,500 uniformed personnel.

[…]

A recent Angus Reid poll indicates that there is very little enthusiasm for military service amongst Canada’s population. Only one in five Canadians would volunteer no matter the reason if their country called them, while 40% would refuse service under any circumstances.

Young men are even less likely to be potentially willing to unconditionally volunteer than old men, while being far more likely to refuse to volunteer under any circumstances (of course, women are almost universally aghast at the idea of serving). Contrast this to World War 2, when about 1/3 of fighting-aged men volunteered.

Governments that find it impossible to motivate their young men to volunteer for military service, but need their warm bodies in uniform anyhow, have historically resorted to conscription. Since they are manifestly not interested at the moment, the political class has begun floating trial balloons about mandatory military service in its media.

[…]

Just because conscription would be unpopular doesn’t mean that the government won’t reach for it, of course. More or less by definition, conscription has never been popular. It is, however, very far from ideal. Conscripts don’t tend to make the most enthusiastic troops. Their morale tends to be low, their enthusiasm non-existent, and their propensities to shirk their duties, avoid danger, surrender, and mutiny are all much higher than those of the committed volunteer.

[…]

The Canadian government has worked hard to systemically alienated the native population. Official state ideology is that Canada is a post-national multicultural state with no core identity built on stolen native land by genocidal settler-colonialists. As such, there’s nothing to defend. There’s no there, there: no identity to identify with, no boundaries of culture to justify the borders of political geography, no in-group to defend against an outgroup. No nationalism without a nation; no patriotism without patria.

Reinvigorating Canadians’ willingness to serve their country and rebuilding Canada’s military into a force that can win wars would both require the Canadian political class to repudiate the ideological territory of globalism, feminism, multiculturalism, mass immigration, and gender-bothering that they have made themselves synonymous with. However, they can’t reverse course without discrediting themselves, and so, they won’t. Fixing the recruitment crisis is therefore a coup-complete problem: it cannot be accomplished absent wholesale replacement of Ottawa’s political class. We only need to look south of the border for demonstration of this. Until 2025, the American military was suffering from precisely the same recruiting woes as afflict Canada and Great Britain, due entirely to a collapse in interest amongst America’s traditional warrior class: white rural Southern men.

The ascendant Trump replaced the shapeless blob Lloyd Austin as the Secretary of Defense with the young, energetic, crusader-tattooed Pete Hegseth as the Secretary of War (and that difference in terminology matters). Recruitment rebounded immediately, with the US Army alone exceeding its 2025 goals by 61,000, four months ahead of schedule. Including reserves, the US military as whole recruited about 325,000 new personnel in 2025, with each branch either hitting or exceeding its recruitment targets (which were also 10-20% higher than in 2024). Adjusting for population ratios, this would be the equivalent of the CAF recruiting 32,500 personnel in one year.

Of course, as we’ve noted here before, the CAF doesn’t have the same kind of recruiting problem that the American services faced (please pardon the self-quote here):

We’ve had surprising numbers of media folks paying attention to the crippling recruiting crisis, as even on current funding, the CAF is short thousand and thousands of soldiers, sailors, and aircrew. Sadly, but predictably, most of that media attention looks at the shortfall of new recruits being trained for those jobs, which is true but incomplete. The biggest problem on the intake side of the CAF is the bureaucratic inability to bring in new recruits in anything remotely like a timely fashion. The last time I saw annual numbers, the CAF had huge numbers of volunteers coming in the door at recruiting centres, but getting the paperwork done and getting those volunteers into uniform and on to job training was an ongoing disaster area. More than seventy thousand would-be recruits applied to join the CAF and the system managed to process less than five thousand of those applicants and get them started on their military careers.

At a time that we’re losing highly trained technicians in all branches to overwork, underpay, and vocational burn-out, we somehow lack the competence to take in more than one in twenty applicants? That is insane.

November 13, 2025

How the school environment encourages male disconnection and stokes extremism

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, a parent describes the experience of visiting a local high school and observing just how politicized and progressivized most of the classrooms are (which also strongly implies that the instruction is part education, part indoctrination):

Wokal Distance @wokal_distance
Nov 11

I despise the Groyper movement, but if you want to understand where Fuentes gets purchase with young men I will tell you how it happened by telling you about my experience at the orientation night when my son joined elementary school band:

My 11 year old son son joined the elementary school band, and so I went to the parents orientation night which was held at a local high-school. As the night went on it became obvious to me why young men rage against the larger social system.

The classrooms were inundated with DEI messages and trans pride flags. On the walls there were posters, stickers and various decorations that all invoked the various totems if diversity. Black lives matter messaging, decolonization messaging, LGBTQ+ messaging, and basically ever sort of race and gender social justice messaging you can imagine was present. The advertisements for post secondary opportunities featured social justice education prominently, including advertising a course on indigenous ways of knowing” as something grade 12 students should pursue upon graduation. Many of the teachers has “this is a safe space” sticker son their doors, and others had variations of “in this house” messaging on their doors or on the walls of the classroom.

The entire aesthetic which dominated the decoration of classrooms was the progressive leftist coded “in this house” and “be kind” aesthetic. As soon as you walked into a classroom there was no doubt as the the political leanings of whichever teacher occupied that classroom. The only way I can describe it is to say that progressive social justice activists have colonized the school and marked their territory.

A woman in a mask (who was in charge) got up and read a number of land acknowledgements before acknowledging the contribution of indigenous people to ways of knowing. Standard leftist land acknowledgement boilerplate. Additionally, every interaction was done in the style of HR style professionalism mixed with progressive leftist coded gentle parenting.

When it comes to how the teachers behaved I am going to draw on both that night and the other times I have been at my sons school in order to explain it. To begin, the boys are treated almost as though they are defective girls. The feminine modes of interaction and socialization are treated as though they are the only legitimate modes of interaction and serve as the taken for granted way to properly interact and navigate the world. Almost all the authority figures at my sons school are women with almost no exceptions. One day my son found out that the school had hired a single male education Assistant, and my son came home and told me, in wondrous amazement, that he saw a “boy teacher” at school. The level of wonderment and surprise he expressed was on par with what I would expect if he had walked into school and seen a triceratops walking the hallways.

My son often comes home from school and expresses utter frustration at the fact that his preferred way of communicating, as well as the things that are aligned with his temperament are treated as though they were somehow inferior. As he is 11 (and being assessed for autism) he lacks the correct technical language to describe this, so it generally shows up as him getting in trouble for being insufficiently “gentle” and “kind” in response to various passive aggressive power plays and instances of bullying carries out by his more socially developed (often) female peers.

To say that band night was feminine coded would be an understatement. It would be more accurate to say that feminized modes of behavior and communication were embedded in every single interaction. It was a totally alien environment for anyone who isn’t well versed in navigating the social codes of progressive leftist institutional spaces. It was like the slogan “the future is female” was taken to be a command delivered from God Himself turned into an education program.

Now, I want you to imagine what it is like for an 11 year old boy to be saturated in that environment day after day. he is an alien in his own school who is treated essentially like a ticking time bomb who needs to be effectively managed rather than engaged with an taught, and he knows this is happening. It is hard to overstate the level of hostility towards boys that is floating around in the ambient culture of the school system. It isn’t so much that there is an explicit form of anti-male bigotry (although examples of that exist) it is more that there is an overall attitude of distaste for anything masculine and an utter indifference towards the interests, fortunes, and inner lives of young boys. The expectations, norms, rules, and standards of behavior cater to the sensibilities of girls and women.

This is the entire social system that a young boy goes through from when he is 6 years old all the way until he is graduated from university.

It’s an old trope on the right to say “imagine if the roles were reversed,” but that would be to miss the point. I know that many on the left will say that all of this is perfectly acceptable because of historical injustices and the pursuit of Social Justice. What I want to point out to you is how absurd the world must appear through the eyes of the average 11 year-old boy. He is basically told he has a host of social advantages (white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, etc) that he has never experienced and will never benefit from, and this justifies the system which he is immersed in. And the worst part is, if young men point any of this out, the very people who are doing it will look them in the eye with a straight face and deny that any of this ever happened. Making matters worse these men begin to figure out that the institutions have been used to advance a leftist political agenda that scapegoated their group (young white men), and when they point this out everyone in authority calls them evil bigots.

And all this happens during their formative years.

Now, Imagine you are a young white male.

You graduate from the school system and are released into the world only to find that the feminine modes of socialization pushed on you are entirely unfit for purpose. That the social skills you were taught fail utterly in both the job markets young men tend towards (construction, engineering, building, landscaping, etc) and have no purchase in the dating market where highly agentic, masculine, wealthy men have a huge advantage over the passive, docile “nice boy.” On top of that, imagine that a great deal of the job listings that you peruse make it clear that preference will be given to women and “diverse” candidates, and that the job interview itself is full of shibboleths, coded statements, and trap questions meant to elicit responses that allow the hiring party to exclude anyone who isn’t sufficiently versed in and aligned with the priorities of the DEI/Woke/Social Justice paradigm.

On top of that, that if a you do get a job you will exposed to various sensitivity trainings, DEI trainings, and intersectionality workshops in which your group (straight white men) are repeatedly scapegoated as the source of all the worlds pathologies. Laid at your feet are patriarchy, colonialism, racism, sexism and a great number of other social evils for which you are taken to be complicit in and have a responsibility for fixing in virtue of being a white male.

While all this is going on a series of scandals (COVID, Men in womens’ sports, trans kids, etc) reveal to you the degree to which the institutions that make up the society you live in have adopted an ideology that is actively hostile to you because you are a straight white male, and have been denying you opportunity while scapegoating you for all societies problems and treating you like you are a defective girl.

Once you understand this, the real question is not “why are some young men radicalizing?” the real question is “why are there any young men at all who have not been radicalized?”

None of this is to excuse any of the extremist radicals who are attempting to harness the resentment and anger of young men for their evil purposes. The point is to get you to understand why young men will attach themselves to any voice who is willing to stridently call for the obliteration of the social system and ideology which lied to them during their formative years and is currently doing things which rob them of opportunities for advancement and success.

The institutions have totally blown their credibility with young men, and have completely destroyed young men’s trust in institutions. Young men view the current set of social institutions as ideologically corrupt and totally illegitimate, and they view the narratives that emerge from those institutions as being expressions of as nothing more then a story told to legitimize an ideology which seeks to hold them back. As such, the institutions and their narratives have absolutely no normative pull on young Gen Z men.

I am not saying the situation is hopeless, but unless you acknowledge what I have laid out here, and engage in a good faith attempt to understand what the school system, Universities, non-profits, HR departments, and other civic institutions have done to young men, you will never be able to gain their trust enough to lead them away from guys like Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate, Andrew Torba, and other pathological influences.

/fin

H/T to Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit for the link.

Blue Hairster Cult: (Do Fear) The Zoomers

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

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this post, Ed West explains why the Boomers and even the Millennials should fear the Zoomers:

“To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty”. I’ve thought about that quote, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, a fair bit recently. I suppose for my generation, 9/11 was the formative event, which signalled the end of the triumphalist Nineties — although the extent to which it affected us is questionable. Perhaps of far greater importance was the financial crisis which unfolded towards the very end of the Bush-Blair era.

What about those born around the turn of the millennium, the so-called “Zoomers”? I suppose it would be the experience of being locked down for a year in order to protect an older generation whose wealth they can never hope to emulate. An already bitter and disillusioned cohort, denied their patrimony by house price inflation, came to adulthood with a period of deliberate social isolation with only the internet at hand — a lockdown that was punctuated by weeks of millennial hysteria over racism.

The intelligent ones would have seen the hysteria for it was — a wild distortion, and realised that the media regularly distorts all sorts of things, and it’s the intelligent ones I worry about. Indeed, when I read the thoughts and worldview of that generation, I feel a sense of dread about what’s coming; perhaps even more so when it comes from the Right.

I only watched a Nick Fuentes video for the first time this summer, an amusingly edited version of a talk in which he rails against Israeli military success. It had been sent by a Jewish friend with strong Zionist sympathies, and it’s very funny — Fuentes is very funny. If I were 20 years old, I might have watched his show, one of many aspects of life in 2025 which I thank God wasn’t around in my adolescence.

After all, most of the things I watched on television – five channels, kids, in fact more like four and half, as the Channel 5 reception wasn’t very good – liked to poke fun at the prevailing morality of the older generation. My favourite comic, Viz, would laugh at the old people whose fault it was that Eddie Murphy’s swearing had to be dubbed over with “freak you, monkeyfeather”. Today it’s only natural that young men should wish to offend woke scolds.

But then, of course, something darker might also be happening. Rod Dreher recalls a fascinating, and disturbing, account of his conversations with young Republican activists this week, writing that: “Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, ‘They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down’.”

There is certainly polling to suggest that younger voters in the US are moving to extremes, if you believe polls. One found that “explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters”, who are five times more likely to have an “unfavourable view of the Jewish people than 65 year olds”. Since 2018, the percentage of American boys who believe in gender equality has shrunk. Far more worrying is that younger Americans are also much more likely to support political violence. and this is more of a problem on the left.

I, Robot: The Ellison Script

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

Feral Historian
Published 4 Jul 2025

Harlan Ellison’s screenplay adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot is arguably the best sci-fi movie never made. Let’s take a look at the script itself, why the film was never made, and how it might have altered science fiction cinema in the wake of Star Wars.

00:00 Intro
01:59 Robbie
04:32 A Little Detour
06:18 A Lifetime and a Galaxy
12:12 Liar
14:06 A New Theory
16:29 The Rapid Rise of the Federation
21:01 Obstacles and Ellison
(more…)

November 12, 2025

Bike lanes are only the start

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

Spaceman Spiff explains how aspirational schemes proposed by our technocratic governments at all levels seem to quickly and effortlessly shift from a nice non-intrusive improvement in life to an overbearing imposition of ever tighter controls on our lives:

Bike lanes on Yonge Street north of Bloor Street in downtown Toronto.
Image from Google Street View

The adoption of cultural novelties follows a predictable path. Some bright idea is proposed and there is nominal support or at least not widespread opposition.

Soon after implementation begins its opposite is condemned. This is the first warning the lunatics have taken over the asylum. We move from a positive, optimistic drive to condemning a perceived negative. By then the intolerant are amassing, attracted to a secular pulpit with which to lecture the rest of us.

More time passes and condemnation of the opposite is not enough. We are commanded to behave in ways more pleasing to our public servants. We learn a key aspect of our future has been decided by a shadowy committee we have never heard of. A well-meaning experiment has become an imperative used to control us.

This absurd sequence is more common than it should be.

A common example in Britain is the creation of bike lanes.

The idea sounds benign. Let’s build cycle lanes to encourage exercise. It is broadly popular, a kind of inoffensive fad to encourage better health despite the weather being an impediment for most.

Few people actively object which is taken to mean they endorse these projects.

It is not long before support for helping cyclists degenerates into discouraging cars since people should be cycling more anyway. The initiative lends moral weight to an otherwise fringe view. The construction of the bike lanes accelerates these ideas as roads are narrowed and traffic slows, frustrating many. There are too many vehicles on the road we are told, all the more reason to get on your bike.

Soon suggestions are made to ban cars completely. The new idea proposed is to shut down the congested roads and replace them with even more bike lanes and pedestrian zones.

Some even openly discuss intentionally making driving awkward and expensive as an explicit goal. The technocratic mind often forgets its charges are people not slaves.

Before long everything shifts, then we wonder how we got to the point our own paid employees can openly gloat we will soon be banned from travelling in ways they dislike as if they are our controllers.

An idea appealing to a minority is imposed on all. Acquiescence to novelties becomes weaponized and subsumed into the ambitions of others. No one ever votes for these things. They seem to just appear.

The end result is often the destruction of goodwill as popular initiatives are rammed down our throats and used to berate us for failing to live up to the standards our public servants impose upon us.

We then tire of the lectures. We wonder where these lunatics come from.

A moment of complacency means unwanted bike lanes but before long it is banned cars, government-controlled IDs and digital currencies. Those who pay attention to the activist world often sense they’d build concentration camps if they could get away with it and all thanks to some benign-sounding scheme we didn’t object to.

The legacy media are still fanatically pushing the “Tories in disarray” line

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

It’s good to see that sometimes you get good value for your money. In this case, it’s the massive financial subsidies the federal government pay out to most of the Canadian legacy media outlets, so that the media ignores stories that the Liberals look bad but push the living bejesus out of anything that makes the Conservatives look bad … even if they have to distort the story almost out of recognition. Brian Lilley has the details:

I told you this would happen, the legacy media is trying to make this whole floor crossing thing into a PC versus Reform Party thing. As I broke down all of the background information that I could muster and tried to present it in a straightforward way, I said this would be a narrative of the MSM.

The reality is, the frustrations exist for a number of reasons but Pierre being too conservative is not the main issue here, it’s that they didn’t win in April. It all goes back to that and how different people interpret that loss and the leader’s response to the loss.

If you haven’t read that piece, it’s worth your time just to understand some of the nuance that you won’t find from other media.

There is no party divide …

The idea that there is still a schism on the modern Conservative Party between old PC voters or members and those that came from the Canadian Alliance or Reform side is not only false, those pushing it are showing their ignorance. The parties merged more than 20 years ago, they governed as the Conservatives for 10 years, anyone that left over this supposed divide left years ago, but the media can’t give this up and so they play into it with Chris d’Entremont on the weekend.

That was followed by Adam Chambers, the Conservative MP for Simcoe North in Ontario who pushed back against the idea that middle of the road Conservatives like him aren’t welcome in Pierre Poilievre’s party.

A hat tip to CBC Watcher on X who grabs so many of these clips and posts them.

Well done by Adam, not that it will help. This is a narrative some in the media are deciding to run with.

They will ignore that d’Entremont first ran under Andrew Scheer, hardly a Red Tory and in fact a so-con and d’Entremont was comfortable with that. Maybe because as a local French CBC outfit pointed out, d’Entremont is also on the pro-life side, the one the Liberals normally hate.

Oh … and another point on CBC’s reporting here. Remember the claim that a staffer was shoved out of the way … this is at the bottom of the CBC article that made the claim.

The Toronto Star will not be outdone …

This is a headline that I can’t believe the Toronto Star actually ran.

I’m pretty sure that columnist Althia Raj is old enough to remember all the way back to the morning of December 16, 2024. I know that was a REALLLLLLY long time ago, like, literally decades (please read that with a Valley girl upspeak).

If you don’t know that date, you will know what happened, because that is the day that Chrystia Freeland stabbed Justin Trudeau in the front, not the back. On the day that she was supposed to deliver the federal government’s fall economic statement, she issued a scathing resignation letter instead.

This of course also came after months of Liberal MPs pushing Trudeau to resign. A letter had even circulated among caucus members demanding he stepped down.

Liberal MPs couldn’t make Trudeau leave, Freeland’s resignation couldn’t make Trudeau leave, the 20 point lead the Conservatives then enjoyed couldn’t make Trudeau leave – it was Trump that did it.

All of that was wilder, had more drama than last week, but sure, tell people we haven’t seen this in decades. The column penned by Raj doesn’t mention Trudeau, it doesn’t mention Freeland, but it does want you to believe we haven’t seen this in like, FOREVER!

November 10, 2025

Enshittification, the book

Filed under: Books, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Cory Doctorow originally coined the all-too-useful name for the steady deterioration of pretty much everything in the online world and now it’s the title of his latest book:

Author and activist Cory Doctorow wants you to understand why online digital platforms are failing users, and he’s fighting for a better internet. “Enshittification” — a word he coined to describe the degradation of online platforms and services — is the slightly profane albeit funny title of his latest book.

[…]

First question from me: “What does enshittification look like in Canada?” (Try saying that word without chuckling). The country had several opportunities to lead as a global digital force to be reckoned with, Cory agrees, and in his view, “we dropped the ball on market concentration”.

“The Competition Bureau has, through almost all of its history, until last year when we got a new bill out of Parliament, been, I think, the weakest competition bureau in the world,” Cory declares, emphatically. It’s hard to refute his assessment: The merger of Shaw and Rogers, two very large telecoms in Canada, was made official in 2023, the year before Canada’s competition law was modernized.

“Wouldn’t you think, at the very least, Canada would have a robust domestic network platform available by now?” I ask. Gander Social, a made-in-Canada social media platform, designed as an alternative to large U.S.-based companies, is only now being beta tested.

“There are any number of people who would like very, very much to host a few thousand of their friends on a little Mastodon or Blue Sky server that can talk to all the other ones, and everyone can be in a conversation,” Cory counters.

“We don’t all have to be on the same server,” Cory continues. “If there’s one thing we learned from the Amazon outage, it’s that putting everyone on the same server is an incredibly bad idea, right? So we can all be on different servers in the same way we’re all on different email servers, drive on different roads. We have to live in different cities; we don’t all have to be in the same place to all talk to each other and be part of a single digital network. That’s what networks are, right?

“You know, what we don’t have, the lacuna in this plan, the thing that we need public investment in, is not the bicycles on the road, it’s the bike lanes, it’s the infrastructure, and it’s the kind of thing the private sector can’t do well,” he asserts. The pain points for small businesses, communities, large businesses, cooperatives or any entity wanting to host a social media platform, Cory suggests, include things like security audits and content moderation tools.

He also recommends “some mechanism to ease people’s passage off (existing) social media and onto a new platform”. Right now, Cory explains, “you have people building these new platforms and wondering how the people on the old platforms are going to get there. This is like West Germans building housing for East Germans in West Germany, without thinking about how they’re going to get over the wall. Except that, we built the wall. We are the ones maintaining the wall. The wall is made entirely of law. The wall could be torn down with an act of Parliament at the stroke of a pen.”

And on the related topic of artificial intelligence being crowbarred into everything we use online:

Cory’s also saying very provocative things about AI. His most-memorable quip: “AI is the asbestos we are shovelling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations”. While he sees the merits of AI to support the work of radiologists or lawyers or software engineers — or nearly anyone — he doesn’t believe AI can do the job. “But,” he warns, “an AI salesman can 100 per cent convince your boss to fire you and replace you with AI”.

November 9, 2025

When “research shows” in a headline indicates “bullshit here”

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

At Science Is Not The Answer, William M. Briggs says we should never trust stories headlined with “research shows X” (although if you’re a regular reader, you probably already know this):

Research Shows headlines are generated from papers by academics, and these all have explicit or tacit claims of cause, all purporting to explain some set of observations (whether gathered in history, the world, or by experiment). To explain is to state or to tacitly point to a cause.

The problem is that the methods science has developed to affirm or claim cause are often wrong: they are not right; they are in error; they are incorrect; they are fallacious; they sometimes make the right decisions, but only accidentally. By which I mean, cause is arrived at not by the methods, but by other means, yet the methods are credited.

I hope it is clear when I say that these methods are not to be used.

But are.

The worst tool, and one whose use is always and every instance a fallacy, is the so-called hypothesis test. We have done (“wee Ps”) in Class so many times, we’re sick of it (or I am). But I want to prove to you “tests” are fallacious another way, using one familiar example and one common situation. And with no math!

The idea is simple: a researcher makes observations, runs a “test”, and makes a pronouncement the cause he thought of is the one correct explanation for the observations.

He might be right about this, but it will only be accidentally, and not because of the “test”. For that same “test” could be used in support of an infinite number of other possible causes. That is the proof against “tests”: that they can support anything.

This will always be the case. As in every time. As in it is inescapable.

Our familiar example comes from A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science by Alexander Statman (his surname guaranteeing I would read the book). It is mostly a review of the 18th Century Jesuit mission to China, and those Jesuits’ interactions with major figures of the so-called Enlightenment.

An important observation Statman makes is man’s proclivity to look for wisdom in the past or the future. One believes those in the past had superior knowledge, knew more secrets and could communicate with God (or the gods) with greater ease and facility, yet somehow that knowledge was lost (possibly wiped away in the flood; China, having the oldest extant civilization was thought to hold vast repositories). Or one believes those to come will be better than we, will know more, and will lead easier and happier lives, if only they are not held back by those who look to that past (China was also by others thought to have stagnated and could only copy their betters).

November 8, 2025

All cultures are not equal, especially when it comes to crimes like rape

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dr. Sydney Watson responds to a post on feminists blaming all men for the actions of some men from other cultures:

    Jessica Pin @jess_ann_pin

    It bothers me so much when some feminists act like men are just as misogynist and violent everywhere.

    That’s not true. Men from some cultures are absolutely worse than others.

    I’m not saying there is a genetic difference. But there are definitely cultural differences, and we need to be careful about who we let in.

    [Full sized images in the linked post]

I don’t know how to explain this succinctly —

But, ages ago I watched this series about prisons around the world. There were a few episodes that focused on prisons in African countries – how the prisons ran, what people were charged with etc.

What stood out to me was that over 50% of the male prisoners were there for some sort of sex crime – rape, sexual assault, child sexual abuse etc.

What was even worse was that, when asked about why they committed these crimes, a lot of the men said things about how they were “teaching the woman a lesson” or raping her was some sort of “punishment.”

And I couldn’t help but think, “well, that checks out. Given how these men from these places come to Western countries and rape women.”

People might not like hearing that, and the less evolved among us chalk it up to “racism” (lol) but if someone comes from a culture that views rape as a form of punishment for unruly women, then why would that viewpoint suddenly change when their feet hit British/Swedish/Canadian soil?

If, culturally, you view women as barely people, why on earth would you suddenly start because you’re in a new place?

Point being – it’s utterly mad to put women and girls at risk because people don’t want to admit that some cultures are horrible. I’m tried of pretending that all cultures are equal when they’re so obviously not.

Update, 10 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.

Think Before You Post | How the UK fell to a sinister new form of censorship

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

spiked
Published 27 Oct 2025

“Think before you post.” Those were the words screamed out by government social-media accounts, threatening to lock up people for “hate speech”, as riots swept the United Kingdom in the summer of 2024. To those who hadn’t been paying attention, it offered a stark insight into a supposedly liberal, democratic nation that had come to police speech as much as, sometimes even more so, than actual violence. Inciting racial hatred, inciting religious hatred, “grossly offensive” online communications – over the past 60 years or so, Britain has written one new speech crime after another into its statute books. And it has led to a situation in which at least 30 people a day are now arrested in England and Wales for social-media posts. This is a documentary about some of those speech criminals. What we found out was even more chilling than the headlines would have you believe. Featuring: Maxie Allen, Rosalind Levine, Toby Young, Allison Pearson, Luke Gittos and Jamie Michael.

The Boomers didn’t do it, but they could have reversed it

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter takes the entire Baby Boom generation out to the woodshed for a well-deserved talking-to:

    toking-the-abacus @_toking

    It’s amazing how catastrophically bad the current job market is in the US. No one wants to train anyone. They want 5-10 years experience in skills that you don’t get unless someone mentors you in a more junior role. Then you have rampant visa abuse.

Boomers mostly got paid to get trained on the job for their jobs.

Then they turned around and demanded college for everything. At a steep markup.

Then they rugpulled all the college grads by hiring foreigners to do the jobs people went into debt learning how to do.

Whole lotta incensed geriatrics in the replies saying “That wasn’t boomers, that was Griggs v Duke Power! Those judges were silent generation!”

Yes. And that was 1970. 55 years ago.

That’s kind of the point.

You were the largest generation in history, boomers. You could have reversed that insane decision. You could have ended the crazy practice of disparate impact. You could have ended the systemic bigotry of affirmative action, which discriminated not only against you, but against your own sons and, now, your grandsons. You could have used your institutional and electoral power to block DEI.

You could have done a lot of things.

But you didn’t.

At most you grumbled some, but not too loudly, because after all dad fought in the big war and you didn’t want to do a Hitler. A lot of you supported all of it wholeheartedly, because John Lennon had an imagination and MLK had a dream and remember Woodstock, man. Some of you profited from it handsomely. As a generation, as a group, whether by action or inaction, you entrenched it in every aspect of law and institutional culture.

You participated, each in your own way, in redesigning our entire society around women’s feelings, black self esteem, and sabotaging the minds, bodies, spirits, and lives of your white sons.

Don’t run from your part in this.

I’m not saying this to be mean.

I’m saying this because we fucking need you.

We need your votes, because as a direct result of the immigration policies of the last half century – which, again, yes, have their origin with Greatest and Silents, but whose most severe consequences unfolded on YOUR watch – we are absolutely, 100% screwed if we don’t deport an absolutely incredible, historically unprecedented number of people in a very short period of time. If that doesn’t happen it’s game over for America and, frankly, Western civilization. For now, for as long as you’re still breathing and capable of casting a ballot, whites are a bare majority. When you’re gone we’re outnumbered, the third world swallows the first, and it’s over.

We need you to confront the consequences of your actions and your complacency, to really feel what its done to your descendants, and to be filled with rage at the way you were misled by evil and selfish men, and an implacable determination to spend what remains to you of your lives doing whatever you can to reverse enough of the damage you allowed to be done to salvage something from this crumbling wreck of a society.

That is why we bully you.

Because we need you to see.

QotD: Singing in church

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

So, this is oriented toward, primarily, Father Erik and Father Tim, who are certainly free to disagree with me, but anyone who attends mass regularly might find it of use. I also do not know if what I see in my church is normal, but suspect it is.

Note: I used to have a good singing voice, not quite commercial quality, IMHO, no, but quite good nonetheless. I loved to sing. I still do, the songs I can still handle, too.

Almost nobody sings reliably in my church. Oh, they can, but they generally do not. The exceptions are hymns everybody knows the tunes to, some of the responsorials, ditto, and, notably, last 4 July, “America the Beautiful”. And, at Christmas, the traditional Christmas songs.

So why those and not the others. Well, the typical hymn in the typical modern church was penned by a couple of nuns from the Order of the Discalced Sisters of Sappho, or priests from the Gay Jesuit Alliance, and printed in the hymnal largely as an exercise in flattery.

Okay, that’s not really true … or not entirely anyway. No, the real problem is that, and I cannot emphasize this enough, NOBODY KNOWS THE BLOODY TUNES, SO OF FREAKING COURSE THEY DON’T SING, WHILE THEY CHANGE THE HYMNS SO OFTEN — WEEKLY, AS A MATTER OF FACT — THAT NOBODY EVER HAS THE CHANCE TO LEARN THE TUNES.

So I propose the following: Pick five hymns — among my recommendations, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, “We Gather Together”, “Amazing Grace”, “How Great Thou Art”, “Abide with Me”; but I’m not a fanatic about it — and use only those five for however long it takes for 75% of the congregation to sing all of them. Then change ONE and keep at that until 75% will sing that. And keep doing that until you have a repertoire of 20-25 songs everybody knows and most everybody will sing.

“Make a joyful sound unto the Lord” and see if your parish doesn’t grow and if your parishioners aren’t a lot happier in mass.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-03.

November 7, 2025

“BookTok on its own sounds innocent enough”

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

I’ve seen occasional references to BookTok on other platforms but as it seemed to be as female-coded as an online community can be, I’d never bothered to pay close attention to it. If Zoomertea is to be believed, it’s a weird and disturbing space for the unprepared to visit:

Image from “The Female Gooner Epidemic” at Zoomertea

If you’re smart enough to have never downloaded TikTok, then you’ve probably never heard of BookTok and the resulting epidemic of female gooners (a term borrowed from porn culture to describe obsessive arousal and fixation). BookTok on its own sounds innocent enough, women rediscovering the joys of reading, romanticising cozy nights in, or even joining a book club. In theory, what could be more wholesome? However, the reality is more concerning. It turns out the bookish girls have traded the likes of Pride and Prejudice for highly pornographic dark fantasy erotica, stories that make Fifty Shades of Grey seem tame.

Women have always enjoyed a flair for romance. Once it was the slow burn longing of Romeo & Juliet or Wuthering Heights – the stories weren’t explicit, yet still roused deep, passionate feelings. By the 2000s, romance had evolved into “chick lit” – breezy novels about friendship, love and self-discovery. Books like Bridget Jones and the Devil Wears Prada swapped tragic love for witty realism, capturing the struggles of modern women navigating careers, dating, and independence. It seems like in all aspects of modern culture, people have been pushing for the “reliability factor” – they wanted to see themselves in the characters and storylines. But somewhere along the way, the realism and reliability factor lost its appeal.

During the pandemic, while the virus spread and the world stayed home, TikTok spread too, surpassing 2 billion downloads by mid-2020. With endless free time, people picked up new hobbies: some tried Chloe Ting’s “Get Abs in 2 Weeks” workouts, others turned to BookTok and rediscovered their love for literature. Booktok isn’t just for explicit romantasy novels, however it’s become synonymous with women who obsessively consume dark romance. On BookTok, desire isn’t intimate anymore; it’s performed.

While Fifty Shades of Grey, a book very explicitly about sex, came almost ten years before BookTok, it wasn’t exposed to the algorithmic amplification loop we see today. Although its release did shock readers and spark feminist critiques about patriarchal relationships and sexual themes, it still felt more like a dirty secret. Its eroticism was discussed privately, even sheepishly. It was a book club secret, not a TikTok performance. Now, even the most unassuming women are flocking to BookTok and demanding books with a maximum “spice rating”, without an ounce of shame. But how did this happen?

Somewhere between the isolation and scrolling, the lines between fantasy and reality began to blur. The algorithm on TikTok can be very dangerous for enforcing unhealthy habits on its users. When a woman watches or likes just one “spicy book” video, even just out of curiosity, TikTok interprets it as interest in similar content. Without the user’s knowledge, suddenly their ForYou page is filled with similar videos, “books with a max spice rating”, “extreme taboo book recommendations” or “Top five dark romance recs”. The more they see, the more they engage, the more the algo pushes darker more extreme content. Essentially, the algorithm learns: You like desire, here’s more. Louder. Darker

Crossing the floor in Parliament

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

It’s not an everyday thing, but I saw someone mention on social media that there had been over 300 floor-crossings since Confederation. The latest Member of Parliament to switch parties … to literally walk across the floor in Parliament to join Carney’s Liberal party is Nova Scotia’s Chris d’Entremont:

The speculation in Ottawa about floor crossers is getting silly, some of the names being pushed don’t make any sense. Which makes me think that this is really an attempt by the Liberals to try and destabilize the Conservatives.

Sorry, that would be “destablise” in Mark Carney’s new English but more on that shortly.

We have seen Liberals push name after name including Chris d’Entremont who did cross, but others who have said they have no interest in crossing. That was the case for Dominique Vien the Conservative MP from Quebec’s south shore who had to post a video after jerks like me published her name following weeks of speculation.

If you don’t speak French, let me summarize, or sumarise in Carney English. She says that she’s heard the rumours that she would be leaving the Conservative caucus to sit as a Liberal or an independent, but that’s not true. She states clearly that she is and will remain a Conservative and that she doesn’t like Mark Carney’s budget.

Meanwhile, Joël Godin, the MP for Portneuf—Jacques-Cartier a riding northwest of Quebec City, who has been named as a possible floor crosser declined to answer questions entering caucus on Wednesday. Does that mean he’s ready to cross or not just putting up with the BS?

Conservative insiders tell me that he won’t be changing teams anytime soon.

The rumour mill is insane, with Liberals pushing the idea that all kinds of Conservatives are looking to jump ship. I’ve had several Liberals tell me that Michael Chong has been looking to cross the floor, an idea that is so ridiculous that I didn’t even call Chong to ask him because anyone floating that doesn’t know the man or conservative politics.

After I mentioned that on 580 CFRA in Ottawa, Chong called me to assure me that he wasn’t crossing to the Liberals. Michael, I never doubted you.

It’s doubtful that other names Liberals are pushing will come to fruition.

What is clear is that Carney and the Liberals are reaching out to Conservative MPs and making them offers to switch parties. Are they making illegal offers? I’d really like to know what has been put forward.

Is a “comfy landing” being offered for those that will cross? It wouldn’t be the first time that kind of thing has been offered.

As to the particular motivations for d’Entremont decamping to the Liberal benches, discussions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter indicate that he just barely got elected this time around, that he’d been fired by Pierre Poilievre as Deputy Speaker, and he decided he had a better chance of getting back into Parliament as a Liberal in the next election. Quinn Patrick reports that the Liberals had been trying to get d’Entremont to join them for quite some time:

Industry Minister Mélanie Joly said the Liberals had been courting former Conservative MP Chris d’Entremont behind the scenes for five years before he ultimately crossed the aisle.

“We’ve been trying to recruit him for a long time,” Joly told reporters in French on Parliament Hill on Wednesday. “Finally, he saw the light.”

D’Entremont had served as a Conservative MP for six years, after first being elected in the 2019 election.

As several people pointed out, that conveniently meant he’s qualified for the platinum-plated MP pension plan … but I’m sure that’s not why he switched parties.

Liberal MP Kody Blois, who also represents a riding in Nova Scotia, confirmed that he and d’Entremont had been speaking “for a long time about the ways in which we can collaborate.”

“It’s great to see Mr. d’Entremont join. If there’s other members of Parliament feeling the same way, again, I think we’re always welcome to those conversations,” said Blois.

While Blois didn’t explicitly say he had been attempting to enlist d’Entremont, he said the Liberals are a big-tent party with room to accept more “moderate” conservatives.

When asked if the Carney government was actively trying to recruit more MPs, Blois said that “wouldn’t be a conversation I’m going to have right here in front of the media.”

The former Conservative MP met with Prime Minister Mark Carney at a post-budget media conference on Wednesday, saying he didn’t believe his values as a “red Tory” were being “represented.”

“I didn’t find I was represented there … my ideals of an easterner, of a red Tory and quite honestly of trying to find ways to find solutions and help the community rather than trying to oppose everything that’s happening,” said d’Entremont.

He also alluded to the possibility of other Conservative MPs “in the same boat” but stopped short of naming anyone specific, saying he would let them share their stories “if the time comes.”

However, he has been the only one to cross the aisle thus far.

Conservatives and their supporters have accused d’Entremont of betraying his constituents and his values in pursuit of his own ambitions.

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