Quotulatiousness

January 11, 2026

“The Paradox of Indifference”

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

Kulak describes the experiences of crafting takes for the gaping maw of social media and getting … nothing. You might as well not have bothered — we all know how that works, don’t we? But sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle and your post goes viral and then you get the worst kind of feedback:

People don’t show up to comment “No one gets it”, “Another miss”, “You aren’t funny”, “You’re wasting your life on Twitter” [as they tweet at you], “No one loves you”, “You never get laid”, “you’re a whore”, “you know nothing about BDSM Romance in Desert Storm, nor how that relates to the Czech Surrealism”, “No one cares”

When you are actually wasting your time and getting no traction, Not a soul alive is going waste their own time EVEN MORE-SO to sit there and commentate your embarrassment and failure.

Think about it, No matter how much Jehovah’s Witnesses or street preachers are wasting their lives and no one is listening, you’d be wasting your life even more so to sit there trying to persuade them of that fact.

Indeed the ONLY times you’ll EVER get comments like these … Is when you ARE getting traction.

It’s really amazing! Countless times you’ll tweet or post something you thought was clever, insightful, drole, important, philosophically or spiritually relevant … And nothing.

Then one of them Moon-Shoots, takes off to 6, 8, 10 MILLION impressions, 10s of thousands of likes …, thousands of retweets … And suddenly THAT ONE you start getting “No one cares”.

I’ve seen THOUSANDS of comments, “No one cares” “you’re weird for caring” all on the same tweet, RETWEETS from accounts with a MILLION followers “Who cares what this person thinks!? No one’s listening to them” They tweet out to a million people.

YOU DO!

Otherwise you would have just kept scrolling.

Its actually really remarkable the amount of effort, collective work, and social organization that goes into this.

I’ve seen Tweets with THOUSANDS OF COMMENTS, getting hundreds of retweets and hundreds of comments that “No one cares” … Sometimes these retweets themselves get comments and conversations going in circles “These people really think we care what they think?”, “I know right? They’re obsessed with us, as if we care” and if you’re looking closely you can actually see various followers of the people who “don’t care”, Comment themselves that they “don’t care” beneath their favorite E-Celebrity “not caring” that they also “don’t care”, and then follow their way back to your original tweet to say “We don’t care”, before Retweeting you themselves to say “God, these people. They actually think we care!?”

Indeed there’s an entire MEME FORMAT — the only meme as far as I can tell the left has ever successfully created for themselves — That exists solely to express that they “don’t care”

“Giant Thumb Guy”, Look at us Cool people in our group collective, and you outside it, and how we just barely acknowledge you then go back to ignoring you.

You see you can tell it’s a leftist meme format because they didn’t use any wojaks or existing memes … Also it’s poorly constructed and uses a redundant three panel format that has been on its way out in memes since 2015.

I’ve seen various leftists create elaborate Photoshops of this meme … Just to respond how little they care, because that’s what you do when don’t care.

Now admit it, Can you tell a redditor created this? Look at the alt-text that came embedded in the image. (No I don’t actually know what Guilty Gear is…but we’ll be charitable and assume its just a fun and well enough written game and not barely concealed porn)

And of course other times their innate violent impulses infect the meme:

Because escalating immediately from words to threats of violence shows how cool and unconcerned you are.

“But Kulak!?” I hear you say, in a bout of inner-Redditor cleverness, “You’re a hypocrite! You clearly care too! You’ve written this entire piece so far just going on about how you don’t care, about them not caring, about your thing that you did that they didn’t care about!!! Would you have done that if you don’t care?! A-Ha! We got you!”

Ugh … Of course I care. This is fascinating. My anthropological instincts are tickled to the core!

Simply fascinating.

My working hypothesis is that leftists, a wide cross-section of women, effeminate men, the SSRI’d, men who’ve suffered genital trauma, the unintelligent, the weak willed, and just generally those of poor inner conviction, reason, hormonal health, and disagreeable virtue (but then I’ve repeated myself many times now) … Interpret their emotions and ideas via a complex communicative social environment they maintain with each-other.

Their minds and reasoning depends on a group, or longhouse, or “Community”, or “friends” … whereas the superior Chad, Chadette, Chud, and Chudette western autists are able to forgo, for extended periods, any need for such a social mental framework or even forego such “friends” and “community” entirely.

Thus, like the apex predators they are, these noble solitary creatures are able to rely upon their own superior reason and judgement. Inside of you are two wolves … and one of them is fallacious and gay, and the superior rational man should ignore him.

It’s a long post and covers a lot of territory, so do read the whole thing.

Iran in the news

Filed under: Media, Middle East, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

There’s a major upheaval going on in Iran, but the western media seem to be incapable of covering it with any depth — or in far too many cases, at all — even though it’s exactly the sort of thing they used to be very interested in. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tahmineh Dehbozorgi provides useful context:

The Western liberal media is ignoring the Iranian uprising because explaining it would force an admission it is desperate to avoid: the Iranian people are rebelling against Islam itself, and that fact shatters the moral framework through which these institutions understand the world.

Ideally, to cover an uprising is not just to show crowds and slogans. It requires answering a basic question: why are people risking death? In Iran, the answer is simple and unavoidable. The people are rising up because the Islamic Republic of Iran has spent decades suffocating every aspect of life — speech, work, family, art, women, and economic survival — under a clerical system that treats liberty as a crime. There is no way to tell that story without confronting the nature of the regime.

Western media refuses to do so because it has fundamentally misunderstood Islam. Or worse, it has chosen not to understand it.

Islam, in Western progressive discourse, has been racialized. It is treated not as a belief system or a political ideology, but as a stand-in for race or ethnicity. Criticizing Islam is framed as an attack on “brown people”, Arabs, or “the Middle East”, as if Islam were a skin color rather than a doctrine.

This confusion is rooted in historical illiteracy. Western liberal media routinely collapses entire civilizations into a single stereotype: “all Middle Easterners are Arabs”, “all Arabs are Muslim”, and “all Muslims are a monolithic, oppressed identity group by white European colonizers”. Iranians disappear entirely in this framework. Their language, history, and culture — Persian, not Arab; ancient, not colonial; distinct, not interchangeable — are erased.

By treating Islam as a racial identity rather than an ideology, Western media strips millions of people of their ability to reject it. Iranian protesters become unintelligible. Their rebellion cannot be processed without breaking the rule that Islam must not be criticized. So instead of listening to Iranians, the media speaks over them — or ignores them entirely.

There is another reason the Iranian uprising is so threatening to Western media is economic issues.

As you know, Iran is not only a religious dictatorship. It is a centrally controlled, state-dominated economy where markets are strangled, private enterprise is criminalized or co-opted, and economic survival depends on proximity to political power. Decades of price controls, subsidies, nationalization, and bureaucratic micromanagement have obliterated the middle class and entrenched corruption as the only functional system. The result is not equality or justice. It is poverty, stagnation, and dependence on government’s dark void of empty promises.

Covering Iran honestly would require acknowledging that these policies are harmful. They have been tried. They have failed. Catastrophically.

This is deeply inconvenient for Western media institutions that routinely promote expansive state control, centralized economic planning, and technocratic governance as morally enlightened alternatives to liberal capitalism. Iran demonstrates where such systems lead when insulated from accountability and enforced by ideology. It shows that when the state controls livelihoods, non-conformity becomes existentially dangerous. That lesson cannot be acknowledged without undermining the moral authority of those who advocate similar ideas in softer language.

Western liberal media prefers not to hear this. Acknowledging it would require abandoning the lazy moral categories that dominate modern discourse: oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized, white and non-white. Iranian protesters do not fit. They show that authoritarianism is not a Western invention imposed from outside, but something many societies are actively trying to escape.

That is what terrifies Western liberal media. And that is why the Iranian people are being ignored.

So the silence continues.

John Cleese:

On Substack Notes, Fergus Mason shares what might be the most iconic photo of the young year:

Update, 12 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 10, 2026

Luxury beliefs thrive when there is no personal cost for embracing them

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

Lorenzo Warby on the inevitable result of well-to-do people espousing luxury beliefs when there is no feedback mechanism to inform them of the negative impact of those beliefs:

Look at anyone making consequential decisions. Ask the question: what penalty do they suffer if they are wrong? That is, what are the consequences for them if they adopt a belief that is not true; if they make a decision hostile to human flourishing; if they retard the operation of the organisation or society around them.

For a horrifying number of people in our modern, highly bureaucratised, highly regulated, highly taxed, highly subsidised societies, the answer is: nothing. Nothing happens to them if they are wrong.

Note, this is different from the question of: did you follow the correct process? It is relatively easy for failure to follow the correct processes to have consequences. The what-if-you-are-wrong question also applies to: what if you follow the correct process and are wrong?

Source. A luxury belief is a belief insulated from reality-tests that there are social motives to adopt — e.g. as shared status play; as a resource or power grab — that imposes costs on others (typically, lower down the social scale).

The question of being wrong has lots of layers. Something can simply block good things from happening, but those good things’ lack of happening is typically invisible.

Economic stagnation is a normal condition of human societies, in large part because what is blocked from happening is invisible. Such has become more visible in the world since the 1820s, as mass prosperity has been demonstrated to be an achievable thing. Compare, for example, the post-2008 economic performance of the UK and much of the EU with, say, the US. But such is more visible only by comparison with other societies—we cannot directly observe good things that are blocked from happening.

Source. Japan shows the compounding effects of economic stagnation. Those of us who can remember the 1980s commentary on how the US needed to copy Japan can enjoy the irony and suggest caution about similar commentary re: China.

Even in the US, comparing the path of median incomes in different postwar periods shows that there has been a fair bit of blocking of good things from happening.

Moreover, comparison does not always resonate. People can not bother to compare or think that the comparisons do not apply. This time will be different has a great deal of wish-fulfilment appeal.

Across so much of modern societies, the what-are-the-consequences-of-being-wrong? question has the horrifying answer of no consequences to the person being wrong. (Real consequences, but very delayed, is not much better.)

I have already discussed this no consequences for being wrong with regard to the universities. But the same point applies across much of the non-profit world, the apparatus of the welfare state, etc. It applies intensely to UN bodies.

Why Greenland of all places?

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

President Trump’s renewed interest in Greenland seems inexplicable to most of us, unless it’s part of his notorious 51st state plan to further encircle Canada (forget I said that, the Liberals might use it to scare the boomers again…). A few days back, CDR Salamander discussed the “unfortunate Greenland kerfuffle” on his Substack:

It would be an understatement to say that I am not all that pleased with where we are in January 2026 with the Greenland question. This would not have been the productive path I would have recommended because, in the end, this is a very serious issue.

Sure, in the first few months of 2025, the meme-ish nature of it all was fun and funny … but only to a point.

In 2026, Denmark is not going to sell or otherwise transfer Greenland to the USA like they did with the now-U.S. Virgin Islands a bit more than a century ago.

However, before we go further, if you have a knee-jerk reaction to support or oppose anything or any topic because DJT is involved, please repress that feeling until at least the end of the post. It isn’t productive, enlightening, or good for your health — so give it a rest for a bit until we are done, then you can carry on as before.

Next, let’s do as we should in most things: let’s go to the chartroom.

Object Zero’s crayon work on the Arctic Institute’s map is superb to illustrate that point.

The Europeans have whipped themselves into an almost comical lather over it all. Having lived with their NATSEC nomenklatura for years, I’m not shocked. They tend to be very narrowly read, get their ideas about the USA from NYT, WaPo, the usual suspects in East Coast Universitlandia, and their nomenklatura is worm-ridden with the same people who opposed Cold War NATO efforts to counter the Soviet Union’s militarism and supported every anti-USA trend of the fiscal quarter, etc. It is always 1968 or 1983 with these people.

Unhelpful to trans-Atlantic cooperation has been an almost gleeful approach to triggering these people who never thought DJT would come back to power, and from 2020-24 acted like it. The vengeful and bitter are fighting with the frag-pattern hitting everyone else.

Behind that triggering and, at least from this side of the pond, trolling, is a very serious security concern in the high north that Greenland is, literally, right in the middle of.

At The Conservative Woman, Jonathon Riley wonders if Greenland is worth more than the NATO alliance:

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

Greenland is the world’s largest island, (just) contiguous with Canada, and geographically part of North America. It was colonised by Denmark in the tenth century but the Norse settlements, which farmed sheep and cattle, died out during the mini-ice age of the medieval period, not long before the rediscovery of America by Columbus.

The majority of the population is now Inuit with only about 10 per cent being Nordic. Following a 1979 referendum, Denmark granted Greenland home rule and in 2008, self-government increased further. Denmark retains control of citizenship, security, finance and foreign affairs. Greenland joined the EU with Denmark but has since left. As a self-governing part of Denmark, it remains a member of Nato.

Greenland sits astride an area of great strategic importance. First, the Arctic ice is retreating as the result of an entirely natural process of cyclical warming – nothing to do with so-called man-made “climate change”. This will end when the world enters the next ice age, which is long overdue.

As the Arctic ice retreats, ships can sail through the north-east and north-west passages, sought for so long by explorers. This means not only that transit times can be reduced but also that the Russian “shadow fleet” of unregistered oil tankers engaged in moving sanctioned oil can more easily dodge interception, as is happening to Venezuelan oil tankers.

Second, Greenland probably has reserves of oil, coal and gas concealed beneath the ice cap, but exploration has been slow and difficult, for obvious reasons. Estimates put Greenland fourth in terms of likely reserves in the Arctic region.

Third, in Greenland’s territorial waters in the Arctic Ocean there are huge reserves of fish, shrimp, whales and seals – valuable food resources especially for China and Japan.

Finally, there is the matter of fresh water, an increasingly scarce commodity in many parts of the world. The Greenland ice sheet holds about 10 per cent of the world’s fresh water.

It is therefore easy to see why both the Russians and the Americans see Greenland as a valuable asset. Donald Trump made aggressive noises about “acquiring” Greenland during his first presidential term and has now made further remarks, perhaps emboldened by his successes in Iran and Venezuela.

Special envoy Jeff Landry has been appointed to examine how the US could acquire Greenland. The means so far mentioned have included diplomacy, a territorial purchase – the US has done this before in its history, for example Louisiana and Alaska – or a lease agreement.

The problem here is that the Greenlanders and the Danes are having none of it. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the BBC: “As long as we have a kingdom consisting of Denmark, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, we cannot accept actions that undermine our territorial integrity”. Rasmussen is on solid legal ground, as the UN Charter specifically states that frontiers must not be changed by force.

In his weekly post, Andrew Sullivan says that Trump is conducting a “Viking foreign policy” (trigger warning: contains Andrew Sullivan):

(more…)

January 9, 2026

QotD: “My goal is to get paid for having fun”

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

My critics consider me a pulp hack, but I’ve proven I can do the deep, dark, and serious better than they can. I’ve demonstrated that I can hop into whatever genre I feel like and do well there. But mostly I just like to have fun and entertain my fans.

True multi genre authors are rare. I’ve done really well in a bunch of different genres because I’m good at recognizing what people enjoy about those, and then giving them what they want, with my own spin on it. I can tweak it, but I shouldn’t break it.

“What if your childhood heroes are really losers and here’s a new girl boss? OOOOH SO EDGY.” That kind of shit bores me.

Far too many authors are pretentious shit heads who climb up their own ass thinking they need to “subvert” expectations, but they’re really not brilliant enough to pull that off. They’re just crapping on the stuff that made people like those genres to begin with. They’re not nearly as clever as they think they are.

Me? I’m happy to be a pulp hack. If I’m writing epic fantasy, I’m going to do the big, deep, thematic, emotional, stuff (and Saga of the Forgotten Warrior rocks) and if I’m doing progression fantasy then it’s going to be fun and adventure and scrappy nobodies trying to make it in the world and becoming heroes along the way. American Paladin is a dark and gritty vigilante story (with monsters in it). And Monster Hunter is urban fantasy soaked in testosterone and gun oil (that’s next for 2026). I’ve done sci-fi. I’ve done horror. I’ve done comedy. I’ve done thrillers. Hell, I’ve done stuff like Hard Magic where good luck pinning down what the hell genre that is … alternate history, hard boiled, pulp noir, super heroes? Hell if I know.

My goal is to get paid for having fun. 😀

Larry Correia, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-10-08.

January 8, 2026

Minnesota in the news

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

Like most people, I don’t normally pay much attention to news from Minnesota unless it involves my favourite NFL team. Thus far, thank goodness, the Vikings seem to have avoided being entangled in the latest scandals, starting with YouTuber Nick Shirley’s exposé of blatant fraud in daycare centres in and around Minneapolis that triggered Governor Tim Walz to end his re-election campaign. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Andrew Neil summarizes the situation so far:

The usual suspects have been claiming on X that the Minnesota fraud scandal is no big deal and that it was racist to place Somalis at the centre of it. They lie. Some facts:

The fraud scandals in Minnesota are a very big deal, involving (so far) the theft of over $1 billion in taxpayer funds across multiple schemes, primarily from federal and state programmes meant for child nutrition, autism services and daycares during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Federal prosecutors have already charged almost 100 people. Dozens convicted or pleading guilty. Investigators suggest the total could exceed $9 billion in fraudulent claims.

It is already the largest pandemic-related fraud case in US history, with money siphoned off for personal luxuries like expensive cars and real estate, rather than the intended recipients — like low-income children.

The majority of those charged (around 85 out of 98 defendants in the core cases) are Somali-American. Why? Because the fraud often involved networks of Somali-owned “nonprofits” and businesses inflating claims or billing for nonexistent services.

Governor Tim Walz labeled the scandal being inflamed by “white supremacy” In fact, systemic fraud was enabled by his state’s lax controls. Walz now so discredited he won’t run for Governor again. His political career is over. How this bozo ever passed Kamala Harris’ vetting procedures to be her running mate is a mystery.

At PJ Media, Matt Margolis discusses the latest Nick Shirley video release:

Shirley’s new video dials things up to 11.

David Hoch, co-founder of Minnesotans for Responsible Government, joined him on the ground in Minneapolis, revealing an insane truth: this fraud hits hundreds of billions nationwide. Minnesota’s slice? At least $80 billion. Layers of shell companies obscure the cash trail, including 1,200 medical transport outfits in the area that do nothing while collecting taxpayer dollars.

Hoch swears by his evidence. “I have been to many of these transportation companies, and I’ve been time-stamping my photographs for a whole year at one facility in Minneapolis, and those vans in that parking lot had not moved one inch in an entire year. They’re all still sitting there.”

Hoch also revealed a widespread ballot-harvesting operation tied to Somali communities in Minnesota, claiming the scale of the activity is “way beyond anybody’s imagination,” adding that “the state doesn’t even know” and “the feds don’t even know”.

Shirley asked Hoch why a judge would allegedly defer to what he described as the “head of the Somali mafia”. Hoch responded that the influence stems from raw political power. He described the Somali community as a unified voting bloc that has effectively held Minnesota Democrats hostage. “What they say is if you do something to go against our community, we’re gonna vote for, and they all vote together, and there’s ballot harvesting, I’ve seen them do it, that, ‘We’re gonna vote for your opponent, unless you do what we tell you to do’.”

“And so it’s all purely for votes?” Shirley asked.

“Yes,” Hoch replied.

The conversation then turned to Cedar Riverside, a massive apartment complex in Minneapolis. Hoch said it was just one of many similar developments. “You’ve got 20 more just like this around the Twin Cities, and they’re all Somali,” he said. Hoch estimated “probably 100,000 or more people,” claiming they live rent-free and receive taxpayer-funded benefits. “They’re driving a vehicle that you paid for. They’re eating food that you paid for. Everything they do is, is something that you paid for,” he said.

Hoch also described how he claims the voting process works within the bloc. He alleged that a single individual collects ballots for large numbers of residents, with little oversight. “They’ll have one person go there and collect all the ballots and nobody tracks,” Hoch said. He added that apartments can claim inflated numbers of residents: “They could say they have nine people living in an apartment. They’re gonna send them nine ballots,” which are then gathered by a designated collector.

Later on Wednesday, an altercation between organized protesters and law enforcement resulted in the death of a woman after she tried to run down an ICE agent, who shot her in self-defence. The mayor of Minneapolis (Mogadishuapolis?) responded as you might expect:

The debate over this incident breaks down on the usual partisan lines. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Kurt Schlichter summarizes the pro-law enforcement position:

On the other hand, it’s the lockstep belief of the anti-Trump politicians and activists that the agent shot a “legal observer” in the performance of her peaceful, completely legal duties:

“Kidnapping the head of a sovereign state with whom you are not at war is also nuts”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, David Knight Legg responds to an Andrew Coyne post on the legality of the US operation to capture Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela:

Image from CDR Salamander

    Andrew Coyne @acoyne
    Kidnapping the head of a sovereign state with whom you are not at war is also nuts, Jason. The two go together.

Andrew @acoyne this isn’t accurate.

– Maduro was definitively not the elected President of Vanzuela. He was rejected as such by 50 nations incl the EU in 2024. He was a known narco-terrorist and cartel leader that used state capture and the army to run and enforce his drug and sanctions evasion empire.

– Biden put a $25million bounty on his head Jan 2025 for crimes against humanity and the USA cocaine trade, because destroying his nation for a decade, he fraudulently took power in 2024 and committed atrocities against his opponents after losing in a landslide so he could keep using state capture to run Venezuela — with the aid of terror groups and China Russia and Iran who protected him there and at the UN in exchange for oil, gold and a western hemisphere base of operations.

He was taken by the US to face trial just like Noriega in 1990 (on almost identical charges).

It may not suit your politics but bringing him to justice any other way had proven implausible. This is all well known.

Venezuelans around the world are celebrating wildly after two decades of socialist ruin and the worst humanitarian crisis in the western hemisphere creating 8 million refugees.

Honest question: what would you have done instead?

– status quo? let him stay in power with the help of Russia, Iran and China while actively torturing and murdering his opposition?

– more legal proceduralism at a UN Security Council where Russia and China protect him?

– bureaucratic inertia: letting people die and regional security deteriorate under the protection of another strongly worded reminder to abide by international law and stop the narco terrorism and atrocities?

There aren’t easy answers. It’s going to take a lot of work for Venezuela to come back from a deeply embedded Baathist-style state capture, but this is a critical first step for that nation.

If this is actually about Trump instead of the outcome, would you feel the same way if Biden instead of Trump had executed the same strategy to follow his bounty on Maduro?

The demise of Maduro is such an obviously good thing in so many ways it baffles me to see the debate revert to (often inaccurate) readings of legal minutiae with the underlying idea that it was better for him to be left in place …

A few days back, Daniel McCarthy suggested that the Venezuela operation reveals useful information on the “Don-roe Doctrine”:

A small detachment of Canadian “semi-professional leftist protesters” swapped out their Palestinian flags for this photo op.

President Trump is a wager of “un-war”, which confounds his critics and some of his supporters alike. The capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro over the weekend is a case in point. The usual semi-professional leftist protesters are hitting the streets of Europe and a few American cities to decry America’s latest war – but what kind of war lasts just two-and-a-half hours?

US troops didn’t invade en masse. A handful of special forces were dropped in, they killed el presidente‘s guards, nabbed their man and got out. Whatever one thinks about the justice of the whole thing, calling it a “war” is ridiculous. If that’s what this was, then Jimmy Carter waged a war with Iran in 1979 when he launched a doomed military mission to rescue US hostages. And the US must have been at war with Pakistan in 2011 when special forces raided Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden.

Critics of US foreign policy have long mocked the tendency of neoconservative hawks to frame every foreign tension as a replay of 1939. Such mockery is well deserved. Yet many of the same people who perceive the idiocy of treating every dictator as a new Adolf Hitler treat every US intervention, however small or brief, as a new Iraq War. Whatever else the Venezuelan operation might be, it isn’t that.

In fact, what Trump did in Venezuela isn’t even really “regime change”: the socialist regime that began under Hugo Chávez is still in power, only with a more pliable successor to Maduro now in charge. Former vice-president and now acting leader Delcy Rodríguez, despite initial remarks condemning the US action (and who would expect her to say anything different?), appears to be willing to de-escalate and cooperate with Washington. Trump’s own record, such as his intervention last summer in the Iran-Israel war, suggests he will want to de-escalate as well. He’s now made his point.

That doesn’t mean the situation isn’t perilous, of course. This may not be a war. There’s no ongoing fighting and Venezuela has continuity of government, albeit not the same president as a week ago. But even if Rodríguez and Trump both want a thaw in US-Venezuela relations, there are a multitude of scenarios that could lead to disaster. Hardliners or malcontents within the Venezuelan regime could stage a coup against Rodríguez. Or a popular revolt, with perfect justice on its side, could lead to bloody confrontations between the government and people. Trump seems to be inclined to minimise those risks by not pushing for speedy democratisation and liberalisation, but there may be some in his administration with less patience and more idealism.

January 7, 2026

More anti-anti-boomer discussion from Scott Alexander

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

I linked to Scott’s original article last month and thanks to the interest it generated (and perhaps my clickbait-y headline) it got linked at Instapundit thanks to Sarah Hoyt. Scott got a lot of feedback on his post and shares some of that here:

“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”

First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:

  1. Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
  2. The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
  3. Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.

Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions — I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support — rather than letting them switch among them as convenient — then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.

Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.

Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.

I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.

[…]

1: Top Comments I Especially Want To Highlight

…

Sokow writes:

Many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust.

I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite — that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context — but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.

Kevin Munger (Never Met A Science) writes:

    Hating Boomers (and talking about hating Boomers) is uninteresting and I agree morally dubious.

    But it is *emphatically* false that “Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation”. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since (and we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body IN THE WORLD other than apparently Cambodia), they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election…), they controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions (especially academica).

    They are a historically *unique* generation, for three intersecting reasons: 1. They are a uniquely large generation 2. they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing 3. they are sticking around because of increased longevity. These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call “Boomer Ballast” — a concentration of our societies resources in one, older generation that increases the tension we are experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and this I think is the major source of the anti-Boomer frustration.

    On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) — the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.

I agree this is a strong argument, and part of why I think it’s helpful to separate the three points I mentioned at the beginning.

RH writes:

    We [Boomers] did [vote for ourselves to pay higher taxes and get fewer benefits]. My lifetime SS benefits will be 20-25 percent less than they would have been under previous law, and I voted for that. My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect, and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient.

    Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate — people too old to work and too poor to live — will return.

I think this says something profound about politics. The problem is less that there’s some group of people who don’t believe in fairness, but that fairness is very hard to calculate.

Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration. Then whether Boomers are paying “their fair share” or not depends on whether immigration is good or bad (a hard question!), and on whether we think of high vs. low immigration as the natural unmarked state of the universe (such that immigration opponents must “own” closed borders and compensate the losers), and on what kind of compensation the losers from closed borders deserve.

Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?

Red Star: The Dawn of Soviet Sci-Fi

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

Feral Historian
Published 15 Aug 2025

Soviet science fiction is a long winding road and it starts with Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Let’s start down that road.

00:00 Intro
03:15 Introducing Martian Socialism
06:35 Tektology
10:03 Crafting Communism
15:08 Mars Has Problems
19:06 Old Man of the Mountain
20:32 The Engineer Menni
(more…)

QotD: Refuting “Limitarianism”

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

The visible edge of economic populism — the slogans, the soundbites — often conceals an intellectual iceberg beneath: ideas inherited from defunct economists, or sometimes living ones. One such idea with deep roots is limitarianism: the belief that there should be a cap on personal wealth.

Thomas Piketty defines it as “the idea that we should set a maximum on how much resources one individual can appropriate”. Its most articulate modern advocate is Ingrid Robeyns, whose recent book, Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, calls for a global wealth cap, which she suggests could be set around $10 million per person.

But limitarianism rests on an old intellectual error. An error common not only on the Left but even among some classical liberals too: the mistaken division between “production” and “distribution”. The assumption is that production happens through economic forces and that distribution is purely political, so policymakers can reshape who gets what without damaging how much is created.

This assumption leads to the view of the economy as a fixed pie. If one person has a large slice, others must go hungry. As Percy Shelley put it in Queen Mab (1813), “The rich have become rich by the toil of the poor … they increase in wealth by the misery of the workers”. While that may describe life under socialism, it misunderstands how wealth is generated in a capitalist system.

In capitalism, you can grow rich by making the pie bigger: creating products, companies, jobs and innovations that benefit not only yourself, but millions of others. This insight was first observed by French sociologist Gabriel Tarde, and later expanded by economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek. Tarde noted how luxuries eventually become necessities. His example was forks and spoons, once the preserve of the wealthy, now found in every home.

For our generation, consider childbirth. Queen Anne had 17 pregnancies, yet none of her children survived to adulthood. Today, even the poorest families in developed countries can expect their children to live. This transformation wasn’t delivered by committees or redistribution. It was driven by the freedom of innovators to experiment, often starting with products only the wealthy could afford.

As Hayek wrote in The Constitution of Liberty:

    What today may seem extravagance or even waste, because it is enjoyed by the few and undreamed of by the masses, is payment for the experimentation with a style of living that will eventually be available to many.

Mani Basharzad, “What Zohran Mamdani Doesn’t Understand about Wealth”, Foundation for Economic Education, 2025-09-30.

January 5, 2026

International law is more like International “law”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Konstantin Kisin points out that calling it “International Law” gives it a semi-mythic quality that it absolutely does not deserve:

All the bleating about “international law” shows just how completely deluded some of our elites have become.

International law was a pleasant fiction that lasted for a few decades. It was never real and now the world has reverted to its default setting: Great Power politics.

This is why, as a strong Ukraine supporter, I have never talked about international law or called Putin’s attack an “illegal invasion”.

Laws are based on submission to an overarching authority backed by force. There is no such international authority and even if you view the UN as one, it does not have the ability to use force against those who violate “international law” other than against small countries with weak militaries.

When the US attacked Iraq, the UN did nothing.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the UN did nothing.
If China invades Taiwan tomorrow, the UN will do nothing.

If you cannot enforce a law, it’s not a law.

I do not support Ukraine because naughty Vlad broke the rules. I support Ukraine because it’s not in OUR interest in the West to have Russia marauding its way through friendly countries on the borders of Europe. It’s in our interest for us to be as strong as possible and for our adversaries to be as weak as possible.

President Trump is a realist and a pragmatist. He sees through the fictions other “leaders” cling to.

A good leader advances the national interests of his country. If more Western leaders did this, our civilisation would be in a much better place.

I commented on another post that,

For a lot of people (Canadian Liberals and American Democrats in particular), the invocation “international law” has a mesmerizing effect on their ability to reason [insert usual disclaimer that if they could foresee the results of their enlightened beliefs, they wouldn’t be progressives]. They seem to have a quasi-religious belief in the UN as if it were some kind of God-given supergovernment that is always right and must always be obeyed. “World opinion” might as well be the hand of God to them, so any time the legacy media can portray the US (and Trump in particular) as going against “world opinion” they want to get out the sackcloth and ashes … or sack a city and turn it into ashes, whichever comes first.

vittorio analyzes the default position of most progressives on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

most political issues nowadays can be explained by understanding that american leftists dont have positions, they have oppositions.

their entire belief system is defined by negation of whatever the right supports. this is why portland chants “free maduro” while actual venezuelans celebrate in the streets. they’re not pro-venezuelan or pro democracies, or pro tyrant, or pro maduro, they’re simply anti-american-right.

they’ve outsourced their worldview to institutional narratives for so long that genuine self-reflection would require questioning everything. for them it’s much easier to just oppose. the beliefs arent coherent because they were never meant to be coherent. they only need to signal tribal membership, and leftist membership is gained by opposing the right.

trump does X? the left screams and cries because they wanted Y

trump does Y? the left screams and cries and riots because even if they said they wanted Y, what they meant is that X was the way to go

trump cures cancer? they’ll argue that the cancer cells are alive have a right of free determination

trump saves lives? they’ll protest because somehow those lives didn’t matter and should have been ended

no coherent word model. no logic. pure opposition

at some point you just have to stop engaging with it as if it’s a real political position. it’s not. it’s aesthetic opposition wearing the costume of ideology

As Severian at Founding Questions often remarks, progressives’ core belief is The Great Inversion: “whatever is, is wrong”.

Bingo Bobbins makes the case that “International law is fake and gay”:

Was this operation necessary? Was Maduro really a “narcoterrorist”? I admit that I haven’t really been following all the drama with Venezuela recently, but my intuition is that Maduro was probably accepting bribes to look the other way with regards to drug trafficking, rather than being directly involved. And sure, he was a socialist dictator but there’s plenty of those around. The US doesn’t go and topple dictators unless there is a perceived US interest in doing so.

What Maduro was actually doing was cozying up to China. In fact, he had just finished a meeting with some Chinese ambassadors hours before Delta Force snatched him up by the scruff. This was actually a warning to China not to mess around in our hemisphere. The Trump administration is re-establishing the Monroe Doctrine, or, as he recently called in a press conference, “The Donroe Doctrine“. As far as I can see, this is completely in keeping with my preferred Vitalist Foreign Policy.

You can agree or disagree with this show of force, but please don’t whine to me about “International Law”. International Law is fake and gay. I certainly don’t care that the Trump administration “targeted a political leader”. This is the complaint being leveled by many leftists in regard to the operation. Really, this is just because leftists are anti-American third-worldists, and they are filled with butthurt because “their guy” lost. But, let’s examine this “rule” of not being allowed to target a countries rulers, because it’s particularly ridiculous.

If you have a problem with a specific country, who do you really have a problem with? You have a problem with that country’s leaders, since they are the ones making the decisions. Why wouldn’t you target the leaders? The only reason is that all the leaders from all the countries got together and agreed that they wouldn’t target each other. They would rather resolve their differences by throwing cannon fodder at each other, while keeping themselves off the table. And sure, I understand why that is great for them, but not why it would be great for me (or you).

Of course, the CIA has been ignoring this “international law” for decades, but they’ve been doing it in a very effeminate way, skulking about the world, funding Color Revolutions and clandestinely arming insurgent groups in order to subvert existing regimes. The Donroe Doctrine is much better. Imagine if the Trump administration had tried to handle Maduro the way the Obama administration tried to handle Assad. Fund a decades long civil war, accidentally establish a caliphate, fight a war against said caliphate, facilitate the deaths of tens of thousands of Christians, all to have an even worse dictator eventually rise to power.

Update, 6 January: 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.

January 4, 2026

“You will eat the bugs, peasant!”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR reacts to yet another “bugs are yummy, peons, you are going to eat them” post:

Contemplating this picture, I had a realization about the people who want you to eat bugs.

The fact that the bugs are disgusting to you is the whole point. Enlisting you as the principal enforcer of your oppression is the program. Fucking with your head is the actual goal, not just a tactic.

It doesn’t matter whether or not Western prejudice against eating insects is irrational. In an alternate world where we routinely eat insects, the people who want you to eat the bugs would find some other kind of disgusting garbage and play to make you eat it.

Because this isn’t sustainability or any of that bullshit. The degradation is the point.

However, even the powers-that-be can’t magically create economic conditions in which insect factories earn profits:

In the renewable frenzy of the early 2020s Ÿnsect raised €600 million to “Reinvent the food chain” and pioneer alternative foods that “respect the planet’s boundaries”. Some $200 million of their funding came from hapless taxpayers somewhere. But in record time, seemingly before it began, it has already gone. Bankrupted. And not because people don’t want to eat mealworms (which they don’t) but because there wasn’t much market in making animal feed either. It turns out that farm owners didn’t want to spend 2 to 10 times as much on “sustainable” cattle fodder. So the company shifted focus to high end pet food, where besotted owners have money to spare, but that crashed too.

h/t Tom Nelson

    How reality crushed Ÿnsect, the French startup that had raised over $600M for insect farming
    By Anna Heim, TechCrunch

    The company’s demise is hardly a surprise, as Ÿnsect had been embattled for months. Still, there is plenty to unpack about how a startup can go bankrupt despite raising over $600 million, including from Downey Jr.’s FootPrint Coalition, taxpayers, and many others.

    Ultimately, Ÿnsect failed to fulfill its ambition to “revolutionize the food chain” with insect-based protein. But don’t be too quick to attribute its failure to the “ick” factor that many Westerners feel about bugs. Human food was never its core focus.

It’s only money …

    And revenue was the problem. According to publicly available data, Ÿnsect’s revenue from its main entity peaked at €17.8 million in 2021 (approximately $21 million) — a figure reportedly inflated by internal transfers between subsidiaries. By 2023, the company had racked up a net loss of €79.7 million ($94 million).

The vainglorious heady days of climate communism meant some bureaucrats thought it made sense to spend $200 million dollars feeding bugs to cows to try to change rainfall in 2100 AD.

QotD: The boomerang effect

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

I’ve noticed a common phenomenon. Let’s call it the boomerang effect.

Lament the rise of an opinion or policy without noticing how your preferred policies helped cause it.

Vaccination rates down — because you wrecked the reputation of vaccines during the pandemic by over claiming.

Anti-immigrant feeling leading to difficulties for legal immigrants — because you welcomed millions of illegal immigrants and prevented them being deported.

Prosecution of political opponents — because you did it too.

Dislike seeing people cancelled for their opinions — because you started it.

Rising climate scepticism — because you censored reasonable criticism of climate extremism.

Anger at trans rights activists — because you shouted down concerns about men pretending to be women in sports and prisons.

Government attacks on universities — because you turned them into ideological madrassas.

Patriotic nationalism turning uglier — because you told people flags were racist.

Criticism of judges — because they became nakedly political.

Defunding of biotechnology — because you failed to call out dangerous gain-of-function virology as the likely cause of the death of 20 million+ people.

Etc etc

Matt Ridley, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-09-27.

January 3, 2026

America’s secret UBI programs

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:28

On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds puts the Somali daycare scandal into its proper perspective: it’s not old-fashioned graft but something far bigger and far more destructive to the pillars of western society:

The explosive unveiling of the wildly extensive Somali-run daycare scams in Minnesota has drawn attention to a huge shadow economy, and not just in Minnesota. America, it turns out, is full of people, companies, and organizations that basically live off of fraud. We’re not talking old-fashioned waste, like $600 hammers or $1200 toilet seats. We’re talking about entities whose sole reason for existence consists of being a conduit for taxpayer money to flow directly to the people controlling them, with some of the proceeds being diverted to politicians and political organizations.

People are noticing.

This reverses an old joke told by my Nigerian relatives. A Nigerian visits his rich relative in the United States and is awed by the penthouse apartment, the limo, the private jet and so forth. “How did you make so much money?” he asks. The relative points out the window. “See that bridge? 15%. See that shopping mall? 15%. See that train station? 15%.”

The visitor, inspired, returns home to Nigeria and becomes fabulously wealthy. His rich cousin from America visits and says “How did you make so much money so fast?”

“You see that bridge over there?”

“Nope,” responds the confused relative. The Nigerian cousin points at himself and says “One hundred percent!”

Well, this joke has now been turned around. Leaving aside that we don’t really even build train stations, bridges, or even shopping malls in this country anymore, now it’s America where people are pocketing one hundred percent and not even trying to actually deliver any goods or services. That the people doing this are mostly Africans only adds to the irony.

But what happened?

Well, several things. At base, people defraud the government for the same reason that dogs lick themselves — because they can. One of the things you find in these programs is that there are virtually no controls to ensure that the recipients of the money are legitimate, that the money is spent as promised — in essence, that the bridges get built. (Or, in the case of California, the high speed rail lines.) That lack of controls, of course, is no accident. The systems are designed to promote fraud and to make it hard to catch or punish.

Second, the culture is weaker. In a high trust society, people get angry when there is fraud and move to punish and ostracize the perpetrators. In a low-trust society, people expect it.

Older generations of politicians used to engage more in what George Washington “Boss” Plunkitt called “honest graft”. He defined honest graft as legally exploiting insider knowledge and opportunities from one’s position for personal financial gain, while also benefiting the public or party. A classic example he gave was learning about upcoming public projects (like a new park or bridge) and buying nearby land cheaply before the plans became public, then selling it at a profit to the city. He famously summarized it as: “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em,” comparing it to savvy stock trading on Wall Street. In contrast, dishonest graft involved outright illegal acts, such as blackmail, embezzlement, or extortion (e.g., shaking down gamblers or saloon keepers).

God knows what he would have said about simply taking money for nothing. Would his reaction have been horror? Or admiration?

Is The Matrix a Right-Wing Story?

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

Feral Historian
Published 2 Jan 2026

This is gonna be one of those crazy comment feed vids … The film has made its mark on American political discourse, not only with the adopting of some of its terminology but with opposing sides claiming the story as their own. The Matrix resonates for reasons far beyond authorial intent or individual pieces of inspiration, it has transcended that. And yet, as much as it resonates with the Right, perhaps it shouldn’t when we get to the core of it.

This one really has to be considered in its entirety. Trying to argue about individual sentences in isolation on this one is to miss the point entirely.
(more…)

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