Quotulatiousness

November 4, 2025

The Great Feminization isn’t catching on in the culture, despite its power in our institutions

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

Lorenzo Warby provides a bit of hopeful news that despite the ever-expanding march of feminization through our various organizations and institutions, the culture is displaying strong resistance and effective:

Western culture is not feminising. How can I tell? The travails of Disney. Disney spent billions buying male-centric franchises — Star Wars, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Indiana Jones … It then proceeded to so alienate the fan bases of those franchises that it is now reduced to openly discussing how to appeal to male audiences that it spent billions acquiring and further billions alienating.

If Western culture was feminising, then Disney should have had no trouble with its feminised products. Clearly, it has had problems. Meanwhile, the Top Gun: Maverick sequel to a 1986 movie can do excellent box office ($1.5bn) precisely because it knows what it is about.

The question then becomes, how and why did Disney so alienate those male-dominated fanbases it spent billions acquiring entree to? A simple answer would be that Disney was a Princess-story factory and it turned its new acquisitions into Princess-stories — stories not necessarily with literal princesses, but with female protagonists.

There is certainly a fair bit of that. A recent study found that Disney has tended, over time, to feminise male characters in its animated movies.

For it was not only that the Disney turned those franchises into launch pads for new Princess stories. Yes, Rey in the Star Wars sequels is an obvious example of doing precisely that. Nevertheless, there was rather more going on.

We can tell this from the Mulan live-action remake. The original 1998 Disney animated Mulan — despite controversy at the time of its cinematic release — acquired some popularity in China. It was seen as an engaging adaptation of the original story: a story deeply familiar to Chinese audiences. Worldwide, the film was a box office success.

The 2020 live-action Mulan remake was not a box office success. It was not for many reasons, but it was also emblematic of the problems of what YouTube critic Critical Drinker calls our post-creativity era.

2020 Mulan turned a female-protagonist story into a “woke” great-because-girl female-protagonist story. It turned a story of filial piety — a girl disguising herself as a boy to train and become a soldier in place of her disabled father, and struggling to overcome the limitations inherent in that — into something rather different.

Animated Mulan becomes accepted into the team of soldiers and triumphs through cleverness and teamwork. What makes the story resonate so well is there is nothing special about Mulan. She takes what she has and works hard at becoming better and succeeds in, and through, doing so. There is no hint of great-because-girl: rather it is fine being girl. Being a girl imposes limitations on her that she has to deal with and overcome: which she does — but not without genuine struggles — by sheer persistence and being clever, a problem-solver.

The key difference between a traditional Disney Princess story and contemporary Disney “woke” Princess story is the injection of great-because-girl. Live-action Mulan is a prodigy warrior with extra qi (or chi) who can do what the boys can do, but better. This is a cinematic version of a classic failing of feminism — by taking a blank slate view of humans, turning what men do into the standard for women. Women are great because they can do everything men can do, but even better. Feminist antipathy for stay-at-home mothers expresses this valorisation of matching men.

Live action Mulan is also much more politically conformist, even retrograde, in its denounement of Mulan celebrating service to the Emperor and going off to be a soldier. Animated Mulan rejecting a job as imperial advisor, and returning to her beloved father, is much less deferential to public authority.

The live-action film virtue-signals at the expense of story and understanding. It sacrifices clever cultural engagement for much flatter message-signalling.

If you want to watch a story set in China about women warriors, then the recent Chinese drama (C-drama) hits of Legend of the Female General and Shadow Love are available. These are smart, character-driven stories with the pervasive professionalism and sense of beauty—anchored in the cultural confidence—that one expects from contemporary costumed C-dramas, which are very much not based on trashing cultural heritage or we-know-better disrespect for source material.

Costumed C-dramas regulary have strong female lead characters while also having strong male lead characters. (As it happens, the male lead characters in both the aforementioned dramas are played by Cheng Lei; the female leads by Zhou Ye and Song Yi respectively.)

Update, 5 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

November 3, 2025

The BC government “has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.”

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

A Fraser Institute commentary by Bruce Pardy addresses the role of the NDP government of British Columbia in undermining the established laws on land title in the province among other actions to the advantage of First Nations bands and to the definite disadvantage of ordinary British Columbians:

Recently, British Columbia Attorney General Niki Sharma said that fee simple title in private property is superior to Aboriginal title. She’s a day late and a dollar short. In fact, her NDP government, led by Premier David Eby, has been doing everything in its power to have Aboriginal title triumph across B.C.

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has granted several First Nations a portion of a 1,846-acre land claim on Lulu Island. B.C. Supreme Court

A few days earlier, the City of Richmond sent out a letter to more than 125 property owners warning them that the security of their land is in doubt. “For those whose property is in the area outlined in black,” the letter reads, “the Court has declared aboriginal title to your property which may compromise the status and validity of your ownership … The entire area outlined in green has been claimed on appeal by the Cowichan First Nations.”

The Richmond letter is a consequence of a recent decision of the B.C. Supreme Court, which awarded Aboriginal title over 800 acres of land in Richmond to the Cowichan First Nation. Wherever Aboriginal title is found to exist, said the court, it is a “prior and senior right” to other property interests, whether the land is public or private.

It is finally dawning on British Columbians that obsequious devotion to reconciliation is putting their land at risk. Sharma claimed that B.C. was pursuing multiple grounds of appeal, but that makes her a hypocrite. Her government did not robustly defend in court against the Cowichan claim. And in a dozen other ways, the Eby government has sought to put title and control of B.C. into Aboriginal hands.

In early 2024, it proposed to amend the province’s Land Act, which governs the use of Crown land in B.C. It planned to give B.C.’s hundreds of First Nations a veto over mining, hydro projects, farming, forestry, docks and communication towers. The government tried to consult quietly, but the backlash was immediate. It withdrew the proposals, promising to be more transparent. But it did not shelve its objectives or its plans. And did not deliver on its promise. Instead, it sought to make agreements over specific territories with specific Aboriginal groups, often negotiated covertly and announced after the fact.

In April 2024, the Eby government recognized Aboriginal title to Haida Gwaii, the archipelago on Canada’s West Coast. Around 5,000 people live on Haida Gwaii. About half are Haida, who voted overwhelmingly in favour of the deal. But non-Haida residents had no say. The Haida agreement says private property will be honoured, but private property is incompatible with Aboriginal title, which is communal. If Haida Gwaii really is subject to Aboriginal title, then no one can own parts of it privately.

Update: I forgot to include the URL to Mr. Pardy’s article … fixed now.

November 2, 2025

“Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?”

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

Mark Steyn has a bit of fun at the expense of the artist formerly known as Prince Andrew, His Royal Majesty King Charles III, and the current British government:

The royal family at Buckingham Palace for the Trooping of the Colour 2010, 30 June, 2015.
Photo by Robert Payne via Wikimedia Commons.

Last night, HM The King announced that his brother, until recently HRH The Duke of York KG KCVO, will now be formally stripped of all his titles, styles and dignities and will be reduced to trying to book fashionable London restaurants — or even Pizza Express in Woking — as plain old Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor. As longtime readers may recall, I dined at Buckingham Palace, midst princes, dukes, earls, viscounts and knights, as the only mister at the table and rather enjoyed it — although, even at that lowly rank, the sense of remorseless imperial decline down the decades is palpable: from Mr Gladstone … to Mr Steyn … to Mr Mountbatten Windsor … Why not go all the way and order His former Royal Highness to wander the streets as Mr Sarah Ferguson?

Be that as it may, it was the final sentence in the Palace’s 109-word statement that caught my eye:

    Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and utmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.

Had the King said that to me in person, I would have had great difficulty in restraining myself from punching him on the nose. Their Majesties have never expressed any “utmost sympathies” for the thousands upon thousands of their own young subjects in virtually every town up and down what passes for the spine of England gang-raped, sodomised, urinated on, dangled off balconies, doused in petrol, burned alive, fed into kebab mincers, etc. A decade ago, when I first met “grooming gang” victims in Rotherham, one of Sammy Woodhouse’s chums told me that “Charles and Camilla” were said to have expressed interest in meeting with survivors — although Sammy herself, ground down by official dissembling even then, expressed some cynicism as to the likelihood of any such Royal audience ever happening.

It never did. The Prince of Wales has his Earthshot campaign to save the planet, and for a while the Duke of Sussex had his HIV-Aids charity in Botswana and Lesotho. You would think one’s “utmost sympathies” for such uncontroversial apolitical causes as climate change and Aids could be easily extended to little girls taken as sex slaves — particularly when it’s visible from the sod-bollocking turrets of Windsor Castle. Just to pluck at random, less than three miles from St George’s Hall, where the King uncontroversially celebrates Ramadan iftars and where equally uncontroversially Princess Beatrice’s masked ball once hosted not only Jeffrey Epstein but also Harvey Weinstein … how does the old song go? “I Danced with a Perve who Danced with a Girl who Danced with the Prince of Wales“? Anyway, less than three miles from Windsor Castle lies Diamond Road in Slough, where a chap called Azid Ahmed was found to have engaged in “five acts of sexual activity with a child”.

Any “utmost sympathy” for that victim, sir? Or does your sympathy in such matters not extend beyond the territorial waters of Epstein Island? England is a land that, literally, rewards sex predators. If you want the Andrew Formerly Known as Prince to bugger off out of sight, why not give him a year’s salary as the British state has just done to Hadush Kebatu? Mr Kebatu is the Ethiopian who two days after arriving by dinghy sexually assaulted a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl in Epping and set off the summer of “far-right” “racist” protests. He was convicted and imprisoned at HMP Chelmsford, which then managed to release him — “accidentally”. He spent two days wandering around the most surveilled city on earth and piling up enough camera footage to outpace the director’s cut of Lord of the Rings. So, for the crime of embarrassing Sir Keir Starmer, he was immediately put on a flight to Addis Ababa and given five hundred quid if he would agree not to contest his deportation.

Average annual salary in Ethiopia: 524 pounds sterling. So Hadush Kebatu is back home living large and telling friends he had a great holiday in England and this King Charles guy paid him a year’s wages for raping a fourteen-year-old.

Next time (he’ll be back by Christmas) he should make like Harvey Weinstein and hold out for a CBE.

The taqiyya mayor of London, soon to be joined by the taqiyya mayor of New York, claims that the “King apologised for taking so long to knight me“. I can well believe it. So Sir Sadiq Khan now outranks Mr Mountbatten Windsor at state banquets (my palace dinner was a little more informal, so I got to sit between Sir Angus Ogilvy and the Earl of Carnarvon). Is that because Sir Sadiq has also expressed his “utmost sympathies” for “victims and survivors”? Not at all. As the political overseer of the Metropolitan Police he has consistently lied about the existence of any Pakistani Muslim rape-gangs in London. The official position of the British state was that “grooming gangs” may all very well be operating in Newcastle, Middlesborough, Blackpool, Bolton, Manchester, Rotherham, Sheffield, Nottingham, Telford, Leicester, Birmingham, Coventry, Banbury, Aylesbury, Oxford, High Wycombe … but that it all mysteriously grinds to a halt once you hit the outskirts of the Metropolitan Line.

Alas, there are now so many dark secrets swept under the rug even Scotland Yard has noticed the bulge. So the Met has just announced they’re “reviewing” one or two … er, actually, no, nine thousand cases of “grooming”.

The striking feature of the end-phase Yookay is its total lack of “utmost sympathies”. Earlier this week, in Uxbridge (where, as it happens, the Metropolitan Line does end), an apparently pleasant fellow called Wayne Broadhurst was taking his dog for a walk when he was fatally stabbed by an Afghan who’d arrived in Britain in the back of a lorry and had, as is traditional, been given “leave to remain” — because of his potential contribution to GDP through increased machete sales.

November 1, 2025

MAGA is not a monolith, thank goodness

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

In The Line, Alex Muir looks at Canada-US relations (such as they are currently) and why MAGA not being a monolith is something Canadian politicians need to understand to stand any chance of successfully navigating our dealings with President Trump and his administration:

If there’s one thing that we’ve seen in recent days, as Donald Trump plays an endless game of “deal or no deal” with countries around the world, it’s that the current administration is volatile.

Why? One answer to that question is factionalism — to an extent that has enshrined unpredictability as a core operating principle of the second Trump term.

Canadians are particularly exposed to this. From north of the 49th, it looks like American policy is oscillating between nationalist populism, business pragmatism, tech conservatism, and social traditionalism. That is, however, a misreading. Administration policy is remarkably consistent if you focus on the current rather than the waves. First and foremost, the president and his team obsess over visible status, a game you can play through flattery or strength and symbolic gesture — there are winning examples of both.

In concrete policy terms, the Trump administration expects us to help them on missile defence, border control, and maritime security. They expect access to our resource and energy assets, on their terms. And they want our manufacturing sector to relocate to America. They also expect Canada to know its place as a loyal American ally.

Zoom out to the bigger picture and all the daily clutter can be understood as moves to advance, or at least attempt to advance, those broad goals. And that understanding, in turn, can help inform a successful Canadian response to U.S. actions.

[…]

You cannot understand what is happening today if you do not understand what factions hold sway within this new structure. I recommend thinking of the United States as a monarchy wearing a representative democracy’s clothes. Decisions do not rest in the administrative state, or even in a political party (like Hungary), they rest in the attention of a restless and aging president and those known to have his ear, and his trust. How close to the president a decision-maker is, and who else has a voice on any given topic, goes a long way toward explaining outcomes.

The various MAGA factions colonizing D.C. share several important background beliefs on Canada. First, and arguably most important, they don’t notice it much, and care even less. Second, they assume all foreigners want to be Americans, or are somehow defective if they do not. Third, Canadians look and sound so much like Americans that the latter assumption is magnified.

Fourth, there is a wide streak of Manichaeism in several of the factions that make up the administration, and the MAGA movement more generally. This means resistance, or even evasion, is quite likely to be taken as evidence of ill intent — or even outright evil intent — as opposed to the furtherance of legitimate competing interests. All of these are wrapped up in a fairly magnificent degree of self-involvement. America is so big, so rich, and so strong, that all administrations overwhelmingly focus on domestic issues and domestic politics since nothing that happens outside their borders is generally seen as existential. (Whereas American elections and culture wars absolutely are.)

For Canada, this has meant many things, none of them positive. We’ve seen the rapid (and apparently random) escalation of tariffs (so far mostly on specific goods, or things not explicitly covered by USMCA), plus the endlessly repeated threats of higher duties in response to perceived Canadian provocations. There have been threats and intermittent moves to sideline Canada from vital security relationships, including the Five Eyes and NORAD. Canada has committed to some initiatives in order to satisfy American demands, like intensified border enforcement initiatives and committing new resources to national security priorities. It is difficult, however, to get out in front of a rapidly moving target in terms of the administration’s desired outcome.

And that’s the crux of the matter — what do the factions of the administration see when they look at Canada, and what do they want? Answering that question involves understanding what the factions are. The following summary of the factions within MAGA has been condensed from my other work, and should help Canadians understand the complexity of what we must face.

October 31, 2025

The “internet of shit” is somehow managing to get even shittier

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

At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia enumerates just a few of the ways that advertisers have abandoned attempts to persuade you and instead now run online extortion rackets to get you to pay to avoid having to see their ads:

Advertising is no longer about creativity and storytelling. Ads are now a matter of annoyance, plain and simple (as I recently described in this article).

It’s a simple concept. Web platforms force people to pay money to avoid the ads — so the more annoying they are, the more money they make.

They used to call it extortion — pay now to avoid pain later. And it always works like a charm. Needless to say you don’t need an English major to run an extortion business. (However, they do make good victims.)

This business strategy started out in media — where it made some sense. People are familiar with the idea of advertising during screen entertainment.

And here is how it played out:

  • YouTube started this with the launch of an ad-free tier in 2014.
  • Paramount announced an ad-supported subscription plan in June 2021.
  • Disney + launched a low-price subscription option with advertising in March 2024.
  • Netflix introduced a similar program in October 2022.
  • Amazon Prime did the same thing in early 2024.
    But in the last few months, it’s gone crazy. The ads are spreading beyond movies and videos — and into almost anything with a digital interface. So we’ve seen the following in recent days:
  • Jeep drivers started complaining about ads on their vehicle touchscreen in early 2025. An ad for an extended warranty allegedly appears every time they stop their car (at a red light, etc.).
  • Meta announced an ad-free subscription option for Facebook and Instagram in September 2025. (initially in the UK).
  • Microsoft announced an ad-supported subscription plan for Xbox cloud gaming in October 2025.
  • A rumor about Apple inserting ads into its map app started spreading in October 2025. This will allegedly launch in 2026.

This is more than annoying — it’s also abusive. A new Jeep can cost $50,000 or more. When you hand over that much cash, you should get an exemption from spam ads on your screen.

But the most annoying move of all is coming from Samsung. They are putting ads on $3,499 smart fridges. They’re rolling out this “software upgrade” right now.

According to Samsung, your smart (or maybe smart-ass) refrigerator will soon share “useful day-to-day information such as news, calendar and weather forecasts, along with curated advertisements”. The display will change every ten seconds.

I definitely rely on my fridge for some things — milk, eggs, orange juice, and an occasional cold beer. But you don’t see curated advertisements on that list.

Ads will never be on the list.

“NFL media is dominated by the nerds” and their “never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism”

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

Freddie deBoer discusses the way NFL media coverage has changed from the retired jocks of old to today’s emphasis on data nerd analysis and clickbait contrarianism:

Being a sports media professional means forcing yourself to have this kind of a reaction every time you’re on camera.
Screencap from Freddie deBoer

Consider how smart football journalism was supposed to be by now. Long the domain of ex-jocks ladling out evidence-free bromides about how you have to pound the ball and causation-flipping claims that time of possession is the ultimate metric, today NFL media is dominated by the nerds, analysts who proudly announce that they’ve never played the game and let their teenage resentments power their never-ending performance of Well, Actually football contrarianism. Experience is out! Numbers are in! Empiricism reigns! The bible was right: someday, the meek will inherit the earth, and it’s happening every Sunday on NFL Twitter, where it’s always time to re-prosecute high school.

And yet … The analytics revolution promised to graft rationality and context onto our game-day commentary, but when it comes to the most common and pernicious trend in NFL analysis — overreacting to small samples and short runs of good or bad performance — nothing has really changed. That’s because NFL new media conditions dictate that even the most temperamentally sober and judicious talking heads operate as 24/7 hype machines. This is not, to put it mildly, a new problem. In 2007, ESPN’s Kevin Jackson wrote that NFL media was “Overreaction Nation – a land where no sample size is too small for drawing conclusions, where the most common movement is the knee-jerk”. That description still fits the NFL media perfectly. Week after week, cable TV and podcasters spin wild narratives, proclaiming teams hopeless or superhuman after one game, seemingly embracing the idea that “no sample size is too small”. That this all comes from people who will tell you that they’re the keepers of the flame of Rational Football Analysis only makes it all more annoying.

Modern front offices have jumped on modern statistical analysis, with every team employing analytics departments and with more and more coaches regularly expressing disdain for yesterday’s conventional wisdom. This isn’t a secret; the Ringer, which has always employed its fair share of football nerds who heap contempt on the old ways, proclaimed back in 2018 that “football’s analytics moment has arrived”, pointing out the rise of modern tracking data and explaining how it gives teams an edge. But if we’re honest, even the Ringer was clear that football will never be baseball in statistical clarity: “Football will likely never be baseball, where statistics can basically explain anything,” Kevin Clark (now of ESPN) wrote – “there are too few games and too many variables”. In other words, the sport I love the most is inherently a beast of variance, full of noise. You’d think that message would temper the beat writers.

Instead, it seems the analytics evangelists and talking heads don’t trust their own analytic philosophy. They invoke “small sample size” as a scolding cliché if you dare overreact, but shamelessly turn right around and do it themselves. With every Monday morning comes a fresh rush of oversimplified hot takes. And time has proven that the ostensibly-objective analytics peddlers are no better when it comes to hype than their old school former player competition.

The Minnesota Vikings drafted J.J. McCarthy last year as their “quarterback of the future” only to lose him for his rookie season with a knee injury in the preseason. He started two games so far this season and got injured in his first loss and will only return to play this coming weekend. Bust? A lot of online fans certainly seem to think so, on the basis of a two-game sample, one of which included one quarter of amazing work earning him NFC Offensive Player of the Week. Fans are fickle at the best of times, but the NFL media hype juices that into a kind of sports schizophrenia.

Could Drake Maye be the next big thing? Sure. He certainly has the physical ability. Or he could be Daunte Culpepper. Could CJ Stroud and Jayden Daniels justify all of the hype from their rookie years? Of course! The point is that I don’t know, you don’t know, and neither do the NFL pundits. Neither does Ben Solak. And what bothers me in particular about this species of condescending NFL pundit is that they will endorse concepts like “small sample size theater” when it conforms to their narratives and then gleefully discard those concepts when they don’t. It’s quite frustrating.

Here are tropes to watch out for when it comes to the NFL hype train:

  • One Game = Season’s Fate A single loss becomes proof a coach’s job is on the line, a single win means the team is a contender.
  • Player of the Year (or Bust) in 48 Hours A QB throws two picks and the media declares him washed up; the next week he goes 25-of-30 and he’s an MVP candidate. NFL pundits alternate between funeral dirges and coronation ceremonies every Monday.
  • Outsized Weighting of One Stat Analysts cherry-pick a percentage or grade and assign it cosmic meaning, AKA “going the full PFF.” (This is, not coincidentally, a big part of why so many ex-players despise PFF.)
  • Vox Populi Misguided NFL analysis has a habit of looking an awful lot like chatter on Reddit; go look for a team’s subreddit and note the way that supposedly adult-in-the-room analysts ape the exact same hype and intensity of the Reddit squad. A lot of new media-style entities even straight-up quote random tweets as if they’re serious analysis. When you’re looking to backstop deeply irresponsible predictions, any evidence will do.

“Devon Eriksen: Professional Racist”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen floats a new business model to take advantage of an unsatisfied market demand. It’s pretty radical:

Years ago, when Jussie Smollet was assaulted by two deep-southern KKK members who happened to be wandering around Chicago in a blizzard with some rope and bleach — you know, just in case — I had an idea.

I speculated that the supply of racism couldn’t keep up with demand, and the price of racism would rise steeply, leading to a surge in black-market counterfeit racism to fill the market gap.

At least until more genuine racism could be manufactured.

Now, the moment has arrived, and lefties, desperate for a new source of racism, have started advertising their willingness to purchase it.

Well, never let it be said that Devon Eriksen doesn’t give the people want they want.

For $1000, I will call you a racial slur on twitter.

For $2000, I will call you a racial slur in person, in front of an audience. (You must pay for all travel arrangements and sign a waiver assuming civil and criminal liability for any violent consequences.)

For $10,000, I will design a custom racist rant wherein I abuse you in public with all sorts of controversial and racially charged language.

I also offer special deals on sexism, and can provide bigotry against homosexuals, Muslims, trannies, Jews, and people who voluntarily live in Luxembourg. I can also do immigration status and intelligence level.

I also offer fat jokes, which I outsource to a team of bodybuilders, fitness models, and personal trainers. Former Olympians also available at a premium.

I don’t anti-Christian. Can’t touch it. Market’s flooded. Maybe in a few years when they start trying to outlaw oral sex or something.

To be honest, this is a bit of side hustle right now, I still pay the bills with writing fiction… and occasionally satire.

But I look forward to the day when I can go full time and proudly hang a shingle over my office door:

Devon Eriksen: Professional Racist.

Update, 3 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.

Halloween Special: Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde

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

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 31 Oct 2019

Some monsters are undead creatures of the night. Some monsters are cosmic horror nightmare gods. Some monsters are existential personifications of dread and decay. But perhaps the greatest monster of all… is man.

Have a very spooky Halloween! And don’t forget the explicit moral of Jekyll and Hyde — that the greatest danger you’ll ever face comes from wealthy middle-aged white men who get away with their crimes because society refuses to believe they would ever do such horrible things. … Hm. Are we SURE this was written in 1886 …?

(Topic originally requested by patron Kyakan!)

MERCH LINKS: https://www.redbubble.com/people/OSPY…

OUR WEBSITE: https://www.OverlySarcasticProduction…

QotD: The Zoomers as human Giant Pandas

Filed under: China, Humour, Media, Quotations, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When was the moment you first realized you’re a cold-hearted sumbitch? For me, it was sometime in my late childhood — early high school, thereabouts — when for whatever reason I became aware of the Giant Panda. I forget the occasion — I think one of the few captive pairs was going to have cubs — but we were treated to a massive media blitz about these gentle giants. And look: they’re cute and all, but the upshot of so many of those stories was that these things are critically endangered, not least because it takes tremendous effort to get them to breed.

Not just “breed in captivity”, mind you. Breed in general. Apparently panda lovin’ is like nerds on date night — the conditions must be perfect, it’s incredibly awkward, it takes massive effort, and even the tiniest misstep can throw the whole thing off forever. Your average MGTOW gets more poony than your average panda … all of which prompted in me the very uncharitable thought: Are you sure God doesn’t want it to be dead?

Which — black pill incoming — is pretty much what I feel about the human race right now.

Take a gander at this. The “aki no kure” guy has a lot of issues, no doubt, but when he’s on he’s a very useful read. If for no other reason than that he keeps up with the Kids These Days, and I just can’t, y’all, I just can’t. And here’s why:

    Well, if Zoomers never leave the home (something they all make self-deprecating jokes about), then you *are* watching their daily lives as they sit in a chair in front of a computer set-up. Their whole lives are online and virtual, not IRL. Their daily activities are not going to the store and running into neighbors who they share funny stories with, it’s scrolling their timeline and engaging with its content. So you are watching them go through all sorts of daily activities — checking their subreddit, uploading pictures to Instagram, clapping back to haters on Twitter, reacting to other streamers’ video clips, sending text messages, and so on and so forth. And the other characters in their online lives are also entirely online — other accounts who they interact with, although every once in awhile they make an IRL guest appearance.

That right there is my definition of hell. Seriously, if that’s “life” in the Worker’s Paradise, I’m punching out. But: That’s what so many people, not just “Zoomers”, seem to want. See “Every single thing about the Holocough, 2020-present”. If that’s what Western Civ has come to, then let me complete my transformation into the goofiest hippie on campus circa 1992: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”

Severian, “Giant Pandas”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-28.

October 30, 2025

Javier Milei’s party does well in mid-term elections

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

J.D. Tuccille on the results of Argentina’s recent elections which returned significantly more of Javier Milei’s allies than pre-election polls predicted:

And things were going so well before 2am …

Argentina’s libertarian President Javier Milei won an important election victory on Sunday when his coalition, La Libertad Avanza (LLA), received a plurality of votes in the country’s legislative elections. With about half of the seats in the lower house up for grabs and a third of the Senate, LLA didn’t gain a majority, but it dramatically increased its share enough to block repeals of presidential decrees by lawmakers from other parties and to support presidential vetoes.

As Reason‘s César Báez commented, the results give Milei and his allies crucial time to continue needed free-market reforms and, hopefully, restore the fortunes of a country once held up as a model of prosperity, but which has been driven into poverty by decades of statist misrule.

In what it calls “a shocking electoral victory”, La Nacion reports that LLA pulled 40.66 percent of the vote. That’s well ahead of the opposition Peronists, who have long dominated the country and drew 31.7 percent of votes. Importantly, LLA won the populous province of Buenos Aires (home to 40 percent of voters), a Peronist stronghold where Milei’s allies were recently trounced in local elections.

From Wealth to Poverty Under Government Economic Meddling

This is good news for anybody who hopes for the advance of freedom, of course. But it’s especially encouraging for Argentines who, over the course of generations, have seen their country reduced from one of the wealthiest in the world to an impoverished basket case.

“At the end of the 19th century, economists agreed: Argentina, the ‘land of silver’, had a golden future ahead of it,” Deutsche Welle noted in 2020. “‘Rich like an Argentine’ was a common phrase at the time.”

The German broadcaster added, “in an unprecedented fall, Argentina went from ranking among the world’s top economies to one at the very bottom of the list. Today, economists simply roll their eyes at the fate of Argentina, which is now a developing country.”

The reason is simple enough: Argentines handed their political fates to a man named Juan Peron. In the 1930s, Peron served as a military observer in Europe, traveling to countries including Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. He was deeply impressed by some of the worst ideas to ever motivate a government and blended them into his own “justicialist” ideology. Through decades of political dominance, first Peron and then successor justicialists demonstrated that, in practice, there’s no real difference between fascism and socialism and that statist economics by any name are destructive.

To illustrate just how destructive Peron’s legacy has been, it’s worth pointing out that after Sunday’s election, The Wall Street Journal reported that Milei’s free-market, smaller-government policies “have restored some credibility to Latin America’s third-largest economy, but about one in three people still live in poverty”. One-third of the population living in poverty is horrifying, but what’s remarkable is that this is an improvement over what went before. At the end of the preceding Kirchner presidency, poverty stood at 41.7 percent and then briefly rose to 52.9 percent before falling to its current level.

In Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that the success of La Libertad Avanza is almost diametrically opposed to what most mainstream media reports were saying in the days leading up to the elections:

Argentine president Javier Milei has won a significant victory in Argentina’s midterm elections, held on Sunday. His libertarian party, La Libertad Avanza (Liberty Advances), claimed more than 40 per cent of the vote, effectively doubling its share of seats in the senate and lower house to 37 (out of 72) and 64 (out of 257) respectively.

The result came as a bitter shock to much of the mainstream Western press. Milei’s assault on established economic orthodoxies since his election in December 2023 led many “experts” to take it for granted that Milei’s party was in for a hiding.

In a primer for the election published last weekend, the Observer had already begun salivating over the prospect of Milei’s defeat. “Argentina is counting the cost of its turn to Javier Milei”, wrote economics editor Heather Stewart. Glum portraits of Nigel Farage and Donald Trump behind Milei loomed above the article. “Politicians around the world are closely watching what happens when populist economic prescriptions collide with reality”.

This was a comparatively soft take compared with what the Guardian published earlier in October. “Farage, Trump, Musk: your boy Javier Milei just took one hell of a beating. Why so quiet?”, blared the headline when Milei’s party was defeated in a provincial election in the capital Buenos Aires. The Guardian said Milei’s “hard right” administration was “melting away”, along with his “once-packed international throng of cheerleaders and wolf-whistlers”.

Unsurprisingly, the BBC struggled to get to grips with Milei’s victory on Sunday, even though its only job was to convey the results impartially. Apparently, the president made gains despite Argentina “hurtling towards an economic collapse”, it editorialised. It said the voter turnout of 68 per cent reflected “widespread apathy”. This might be lower than past midterm elections in Argentina, but it was still higher than turnouts at last year’s US presidential election (65 per cent) and the most recent UK General Election (60 per cent).

None of this should come as a shock. Since Milei’s rise to power in 2023, most of the commentariat has been eager to see him fail. His promises to radically cut public spending and deregulate key industries were seen in the eyes of many economic experts to only mean one thing: the dreaded return of Thatcherite “neoliberalism”, from which, they claim, Britain and America have never truly recovered.

The antipathy is mutual. In a speech to the World Economic Forum in January 2024, Milei famously referred to the world’s political classes as “parasites who live off the state”. That his speech was shared approvingly by Elon Musk on X confirmed, in the eyes of the Western establishment, Milei’s status as a dangerous insurrectionist.

QotD: When species’ mating rituals are disturbed, they don’t mate … and Humans are a species

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

    Rob Henderson @robkhenderson

    The actual truth is a lot of guys are naturally timid and are secretly grateful that approaching women was stigmatized because it gave them a righteous-sounding excuse for their own cowardice.

Is thirty seconds’ thought before posting too much to ask?

If cold approaching strange women was part of the natural human reproductive cycle, no men would [be] afraid to do it, because those who were would not have had descendants.

Every species has mating rituals. If those rituals are not disrupted, they will mate. If they are disrupted, they will not mate.

This is why a cattery run by a middle aged housewife in her own home can breed Occicats, Russian Blues, or Bengals, but the best zoos in the world can’t make two pandas into three pandas.

The basic mating ritual of human beings does not begin with a man cold approaching a strange woman.

It begins with a woman covertly signalling a willingness to be approached, either to a specific man, or in general. Only then is the man supposed to respond with an overt approach.

Women raised under the heel of feminism not only don’t know how to signal, they don’t even know that they should.

Men raised under the heel of feminism not only don’t know how to spot a signal, they don’t know they should be looking for one. And even if they did, it wouldn’t do them any good, because the women are not signalling.

This is why women’s twitter histories are an endless litany of “don’t approach me at the park, don’t approach me in the dark, don’t approach me here or there, don’t approach me anywhere”, alternating with “why don’t I get any attention? *sob*”.

They instinctively know that an approach from a man they do not favor is an affront, so they are affronted, and demand not be approached, when it happens.

Then everyone stops approaching, and they cry.

They want only men they like to approach them, but they have no idea that it’s their responsibility to make this happen.

If you attempt to make them understand this, most of them think you are telling them to overtly cold approach men, and they hate this idea, because it’s not natural to them, either.

Blank slatists, who don’t think humans have mating rituals, or at least don’t want them to, will insist that men “man up” and do all the work of solving this problem by cold approaching a steady stream of women until something clicks.

Or they will try to get women to do the approaching by building a dating website where only women can make first contact.

Doesn’t work.

Because mating rituals aren’t just “things you’re afraid to stop doing”, they are “things that make you feel attracted at all”.

When I was in my 20s, I would certainly cold approach women. But only for sex. If a woman didn’t make some sort of “come-hither” signal to me, sex was all I was in it for, and sex was the highest level of commitment she could expect from me.

Because it was firmly fixed in my mind, on an instinctive level, that she wasn’t actually that enthusiastic about me. And if she wasn’t enthusiastic about me, how could I be about her?

No thanks. I wanted to be appreciated, and so do most men.

Walking around with your breasts on display may attract the male gaze, but it’s not a substitute for contributing some energy and enthusiasm to the process.

This is what men really mean when they say “you told us not to approach you”.

It doesn’t mean “I am afraid of being called a creepy pervert or even arrested”.

It means “I can’t drum up much enthusiasm if you don’t show any”.

It means “You told everyone not to approach you, and you never shot me that eye contact and smile to say ‘I didn’t mean you'”.

It means “You project an air of defensiveness, and I’m not interested in rowing upstream. I want to be appreciated.”

No one wants to dance with a mannequin.

Devon Eriksen The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-07-26.

October 29, 2025

Smartphones don’t belong in the classroom

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

City Journal, whose articles I’ve been linking to for over 20 years, recently started a Substack to highlight articles including this recent post by Robert VerBruggen arguing against letting schoolchildren use smartphones in class:

Today’s kids are getting cell phones — with constant access to viral videos, gaming, social-media bullying, and potentially contact with strangers — as early as elementary school. My ten-year-old reliably informs me that everyone else has one.

Along with parents like me, schools have been struggling to navigate this issue. Phones have become a major source of classroom distraction. There’s a lot of interest in policy action: Earlier this year, my Manhattan Institute colleagues John Ketcham and Jesse Arm proposed strong restrictions on phones in schools. Some places, including Florida, have led the way in pursuing such policies.

A new study, released as a working paper through the National Bureau of Economic Research, evaluates Florida’s experiment. In the authors’ analysis, the rule drastically reduced student phone use, led to a temporary increase in disciplinary incidents, and improved test scores.

Let’s dig in a little.

The study focuses on an unnamed “large urban county-level school district” in Florida. While the state law restricted phone use only during instructional time, this district went further, requiring phones to be silenced and put away for the entire school day. The policy went into effect in May of 2023 and was enforced with disciplinary measures starting in September of that year.

The change reduced student phone use, measured via phone location data captured from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. on school days, by about two-thirds. This is a striking victory if you find it self-evident that kids shouldn’t have cell phones on in school.

The transition was a little rough, with disciplinary incidents increasing over the first year—by around 20 monthly incidents per 10,000 students—especially in schools with higher levels of pre-ban phone use. Male and black students were disproportionately affected, though it’s unclear to what extent that stems from behavior vs. enforcement disparities. At any rate, discipline mostly returned to normal in the second year.

That’s also when the test-score benefits manifested. Scores rose a couple of percentiles, on average: a student at the 48th percentile nationally, for example, would tend to end up around the median. The change was largest in schools with higher pre-ban phone use. Student absences also declined and fewer kids switched schools, which may help explain the improvement.

All in all, this looks like a successful policy: Less distracting phone use in schools, better attendance, higher test scores. More effort is warranted, though, to confirm these results elsewhere — and to figure out the best way of implementing and enforcing cell-phone bans.

October 28, 2025

Whitechapel protest – “an unholy union of witless leftists and menacing Islamists”

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

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill discusses the weekend protest in the Whitechapel area of London, after the police had prevented a UKIP event in the same part of the city:

The next time someone asks what we mean when we say “Islamo-left”, I’m going to show them footage from yesterday’s protest in Whitechapel in East London. What a morally suicidal schlep that was. What an unholy union of witless leftists and menacing Islamists. “Refugees welcome here!”, cried the granola-fed grads of the limp-wristed left. “Allahu Akbar!”, barked the masked mob of religious hotheads. Rarely has the lethal idiocy of the left’s bed-hopping with Islamism been so starkly exposed.

This assembly of godless genderfluids and Koran-botherers was ostensibly a march against UKIP. That knackered old party had hoped to hold its own protest in Whitechapel yesterday. It was clearly a provocation: they targeted Whitechapel precisely because it has a large Muslim population. A Ukipper’s wet dream is to wang on about “Islamist invaders” and the need for “remigration” as Bangladeshi Brits look on with alarm. A wind-up masquerading as a march. The Metropolitan Police, fearing “serious disorder”, put the kibosh on it and told UKIP to do their wailing elsewhere.

So they went to Whitehall instead. Around 75 of them gathered outside the London Oratory with their flags and their hernias. And Whitechapel was left to the Islamo-left, to that seething mob of plummy radicals and gruff Islamists who love to scream blue murder about “Zionists”. And there you have it: in the eyes of the Met it is an offence against decency to let a handful of Ukippers traipse through Whitechapel, but it is absolutely fine to surrender those same streets to columns of black-clad fanatics raging against “Zionist scum“. The hypocrisy stinks to heaven.

The anti-UKIP counter-demo in Whitechapel was not an anti-racist march. We all know it. The dogs in the street know it. It was an orgy of intolerance dolled up as tolerance. It was a display of Islamist arrogance wearing the thin veil of “anti-racism” to fool the overeducated idiots of the bourgeois left. Well, if they’ll believe someone with a cock can be a lesbian, they’ll believe Islamist fanatics who dream of annihilating the Jewish homeland are anti-racists.

For those of us who still have a quaint attachment to the virtues of reason and secularism, it was a sickening spectacle. Mobs of men in black masks hollered Islamist slogans in a distinctly menacing manner. They denounced “Zionist scum” and darkly promised to hound them “off our streets”. They yelled “From the river to the sea” (translation: destroy the Jewish homeland) and sang the praises of “our martyrs” (translation: the Jew-killers of Hamas). And all the while, the pricks of the new left who think it’s bigotry to say “he” about a fella in a dress just stood there smiling.

Anyone who says “They were just criticising Zionism” is going to get slapped. Our crisis is too pressing for pussy-footing. When the devotees of a hardcore species of Islam take to the streets to fume about “Zionists”, we know who they mean. We know they don’t mean people like me – Gentiles who support Jewish nationhood. It’s not the likes of us they want to drive out of Britain, 1290-style. It’s them. Those Zios. The kippah people. Are we really going to do that dumb dance of saying, “Criticising Zionism is not the same thing as hating Jews”? Stop it. I’m tired.

Here’s my question: why is it racism for Ukippers to dream of expelling “Islamist invaders” from the UK, but anti-racism for Islamists and their posh simps on the left to agitate for the expulsion of “Zionists” from Britain’s streets? I agree UKIP’s chants were racist. To brand Muslims “Islamist invaders” and demand their “remigration” is vile bigotry. But why can’t the left say the same about the Zio-bashing that we all know is Jew-bashing? Far from calling that out, they snuggle up to it. They fancy themselves as the righteous enemies of racism when in truth they are the obsequious fluffers of Islamist bigotry.

Andrew Doyle on the “useful idiots” at the protest:

There is a species of leftist that is so blinded to the lack of compassion in its enemies that it sees them as friends. The Chinese even have a word – baizuo (白左) – to describe white Western liberals whose generous nature leaves them open to exploitation. I am reminded of Nietzsche’s remark in Beyond Good and Evil (1886): “There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly”. For the most egregious example of recent years, look no further than the absurdly self-defeating phenomenon of “Queers for Palestine”.

What happened at Tower Hamlets this weekend was a show of strength. The video footage makes that clear enough. Men blocked the streets to pray to Allah in public as a sign of religious dominance, while other men roamed aggressively, virtually daring anyone to object. Women were notably absent.

These chest-thumping, territorial displays followed the Metropolitan Police’s decision to ban a UKIP march through the East End under the banner of “reclaim Whitechapel from the Islamists”. With a significant Muslim population in the area – 40% in Tower Hamlets – this was always bound to provoke. Of course, protests are by their nature provocative, or they wouldn’t be protests. Islamic supremacists are likewise permitted to march peacefully, but we shouldn’t be foolish enough to ignore what this demonstration portends.

Arguments against importing skilled workers

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

I’ve been against the importation of huge numbers of unskilled workers — which we have been doing at an ever-increasing rate over the last ten years — but I generally accepted the need for bringing in those immigrants with skills and talents we needed. On his Substack, Spaceman Spiff argues against even skilled immigration:

In most Western countries there is a determined campaign to normalize skilled immigration. It is not just pursued but celebrated as both enlightened and necessary for our survival.

This is so much a part of the West we overlook the observation it is rejected in most parts of the world.

Foreign people now compete with us inside our borders rather than safely outside. Individuals with whom we will typically share no history, heritage or even outlook, all needed for a stable society. In some cases, groups hostile to our way of living and unwilling to maintain it, even working to undermine it, a recipe for conflict.

When explained in plain English it clearly is an unusual thing for anyone to accept.

We need skilled workers

The importation of skilled workers is always sold as a positive. They are educated or they bring niche talents. They improve our competitiveness to help us take on the world.

The sales pitch is relentless. Even those uncomfortable with rapid demographic change parrot claims about the benefits of foreign workers who then compete with domestic workers.

We are told we are lucky to be able to attract such amazing talent as if the immigrants are choosing from a buffet of impressive options rather than fleeing poverty and corruption as is usually the case.

When all else fails, and the narratives are questioned, they trot out the classic line, that the immigrants do the work our own people won’t do. Naturally they erase the last clause in that sentence, they do the work our own people won’t do for the money offered.

Interchangeable units

We are told many of the blessings of the West would not be possible without importing talented foreigners, despite all evidence to the contrary, not the least of which is the social, economic and technological black holes many of them come from.

If they are so talented why are their homelands so disastrous?

Such obvious questions are discouraged. Instead we are encouraged to think of it as gaining access to the best from around the world, as if countries are just collections of interchangeable economic units.

We are told it is like building up a sports team. The emphasis is on the excellence of the players. The world-class performance is a consequence of being able to cast such a wide net.

But it is really more like drafting in men to play in women’s sports leagues.

October 27, 2025

Trump versus Carney (and Ford, his court jester)

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

Another week, another set of bleak headlines about the trade relationship (or lack thereof) between Canada and the United States. For some, this is the story of how Trump Derangement Syndrome has consumed all levels of Canadian leadership, while for others it’s proof that you can’t deal with Trump as a rational adult and instead need to consider him an overgrown toddler with a nuclear arsenal at his disposal. Or perhaps it’s a little from column A and a bit from column B:

At the risk of overstating my own influence, it’s like the President of the United States read my piece saying he was acting like a toddler and decided, “oh yeah? I’ll show what ‘acting like a toddler’ means!” and did this, presumably once Bluey was over:

    U.S. President Donald Trump says he is raising tariffs on Canadian goods by 10 per cent, after accusing Canada of airing what he called a “fraudulent” advertisement that misrepresented former president Ronald Reagan’s stance on tariffs.

    In a post published on Truth Social at 4:30 p.m. Saturday, Trump wrote, “I am increasing the Tariff on Canada by 10% over and above what they are paying now.”

    Trump’s post cited his frustration over an advertisement produced by the Ontario government that used clips of Reagan warning about the dangers of protectionism and praising free trade.

    “Canada was caught, red handed, putting up a fraudulent advertisement on Ronald Reagan’s Speech on Tariffs,” he wrote.

    Earlier this week, Trump had cut off trade negotiations with Ottawa, explaining it was due to the “hostile” nature of the ad campaign.

    “Their Advertisement was to be taken down, IMMEDIATELY, but they let it run last night during the World Series, knowing that it was a FRAUD,” Trump further said in the Truth social post.

The good news is, at least Trump is coming right out and admitting that his “national security” tariffs are really about nothing more than his fragile ego, just in time for the Supreme Court to hear arguments about this very issue.

The bad news is, I think it’s exceptionally naive to think SCOTUS is going to save us from this madness.

Not because I think they’ll rule that what he’s doing is legal. That might be a bridge too far for even Justices Thomas and Alito.

But because this proposition rests on the assumption that Trump considers himself bound by Supreme Court rulings and that anyone else is going to exercise their power to ensure these rulings are followed.

Or, if you think Canadian leaders are deep in a TDS binge:

How The New Republic saw Donald Trump during the 2024 election campaign.

Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a widespread and serious issue. When one is afflicted by it, their capacity to sense-make becomes compromised. Emotions are a difficult thing for humans to control, and TDS-sufferers seem for the most part unaware of how much their negative, emotional feelings concerning Trump have hijacked their reason.

TDS types reveal themselves in so many ways. One specifically, which often goes unnoticed, is a general uncharitableness when it comes to interpreting the words and actions of Trump, or a general unwillingness to look beyond words – either Trump’s words or anyone else’s which have been inserted into Trump discourse. A prime example of this is the anti-tariff ad campaign involving a 1987 speech by former president Ronald Reagan which the Ford government paid $75 million to have broadcast to American audiences – key Republican areas – for the purpose of undermining President Trump’s economic policy.

Firstly, the uncharitable analysis does not allow that Trump has any right, or any good argument, or reason to be upset about Canada’s trade practices, such as supply management. The uncharitable analysis sees Canada as an innocent victim and Trump as a bully who is trying to destroy us and/or take us over.

[…]

Returning to reason and reality. Trump has justification for being upset with Canada over both our trade practices and in the under-handed and unfriendly tactics of Doug Ford and other Canadian leaders. The ad was an insult to Trump. His reaction or over-reaction to the ad, does not change the fact that what Ford did was antagonistic and not in the best interests of productive trade negotiations. The charitable analysis understands this, and does not lose sight of it, no matter how outlandish the things Trump does may be.

On the other side of the uncharitable Trump analysis concerning Ford’s Reagan ad blunder, is circulating the idea that Reagan was anti-tariff. Why is this idea believed? Because of Reagan’s rhetoric. You can find hundreds of clips of Reagan speaking about the dangers of high tariffs, or advocating for free trade. But the uncharitable analysis refuses to go beyond words. They ignore words that don’t support their argument, and act as if the words that do support their argument were the only ones spoken. Further, they act like words are the be all and end all, by not bothering to investigate the actions of those who speak the words, they pretend that word-speakers always do and intend exactly what they say. Reagan’s oratory contained lots of anti-tariff rhetoric, but his actions included lots of pro-tariff policy in an effort to deal with unfair trading partners.

None of this is difficult once you mea culpa from TDS. If you remain under the spell of TDS, you will not be rational or reasonable, and I for one, will not take you seriously. You will look increasingly foolish as time goes on and Trump’s policies turn out not to be the disasters you hysterical twits dreamed they would be. And the group of people like me, who shake their heads and roll their eyes at you, will grow and grow, under the weight of inevitable mass mea culpa. But you will remain shrouded from truth as you descend further into darkness and gloom and hate. It doesn’t have to be this way … just mea culpa FFS!

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress