Quotulatiousness

October 7, 2025

Big management shake-up at Cracker Barrel’s corporate HQ

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

Back in August, the US chain restaurant field saw a corporation decide that doing what their customers wanted was actually a pretty good strategy … after they’d tried the opposite and nearly gone the way of Bud Light:

Last week was the Red Wedding for Cracker Barrel.

Some senior people who were in the headquarters office last Monday weren’t there anymore as the weekend drew near, some old managers from an earlier corporate culture came back to rewind the clock, and the branding consultant that advised on the now-fatally-wounded rebranding effort was sent packing. The new logo departed. The redesigned stores were acknowledged as a failure and an embarrassment.

[…]

See what they said about the redesign? “We won’t continue with it”. The whole thing collapsed, a $700 million rebrand that slammed into a concrete wall and exploded.

It remains to be seen how much the rebranding of the rebranding will matter, and this is what Cracker Barrel stock looks like in the last month:

Now, a reminder: The New York Times columnist David French explained, just over a month ago, that the controversy over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding was an absurd fake crisis ginned up by right-wing idiots who were just pretending that something had gone wrong at the company. Along with the Sydney Sweeney thing, he concluded that we were watching some “completely frivolous and meaningless cultural disputes,” examples of the way “right-wing media both mobilizes its base and bends political reality”. If you believed that the Cracker Barrel rebranding was poorly done and would alienate the company’s customers, you were falling for an invented reality that was completely meaningless and frivolous.

Then Cracker Barrel fired a bunch of managers and its rebranding consultant, abandoned the rebranding, and apologized profusely, while its stock plummeted.

If you listened to David French, if you trusted the op-ed pages of the New York Times to explain the world to you, your understanding of the most basic outline of factual reality was flipped over, turned precisely upside down. He was only wrong about literally every single detail, completely missing what was happening, what it meant, and what would happen in the near future as a result of it. To listen to this idiot is to abuse your own mind, trapping yourself in the confines of an absurd house of ideological mirrors. He is inevitably wrong, completely wrong, reliably wrong to the point of absolute and unyielding madness.

An unexpected Gen Z “influencer” – Shakespeare

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

Ted Gioia describes the plight of a young man who had to move home after college and falls into a state of depression thanks to his hopeless situation and his dysfunctional home and social life. His name is Hamlet:

This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s almost uncanny how relevant it feels right now.

So if I were directing Hamlet in the current moment, I’d give the title character an iPhone and game console. I’d have the characters onstage share photos on Instagram — and put up a big screen so the audience could see them posted in real time.

Hamlet could add pithy captions to his social media images. What a piece of work is a man! or maybe The lady doth protest too much!

Yes, Hamlet is many things, but one of them is, perhaps, a failed influencer.

Along the way, we may have answered the classic question about this play. For generations, critics have wondered why Hamlet wastes so much time, and can’t be bothered to take action.

Maybe he’s just too busy gaming and scrolling.

Okay, it sounds ridiculous. But is it really? Shakespeare possessed tremendous insight into the human condition — perhaps more than any author in history. So maybe he really did grasp the dominant personality types of our own time.

The Prince of Denmark still walks in our midst. And maybe — just maybe — careful attention to this play might help us, in some small degree, to heal the Hamlets all around us. Their number is legion.

Of course, the larger reality is that Shakespeare has proven himself relevant to every time and place. We can see that easily be examining how other generations viewed this same play.

Hamlet‘s original audience, four hundred years ago, clearly enjoyed the spectacle of violence and adultery. Nine key characters die during the course of the play — most of them murdered. Audiences loved these kinds of dramas back then, and Shakespeare always knew how to please the crowd.

But more sophisticated viewers, circa 1600, would have seen Hamlet as a political commentary — a reflection of all the tensions and rivalries of Elizabethan England. Nobody knew better than Shakespeare that monarchy is a dangerous game, and he always looked for opportunities to refer to current events in roundabout ways.

But two hundred years later, the Romanticists were in ascendancy, and they saw Hamlet as a very different kind of play. They ditched the politics, and embraced the Prince of Denmark for his pathos and personality. They tapped into the intense emotional currents of Shakespeare’s heroes — and the plays seemed perfectly suited for this kind of interpretation.

It’s no exaggeration to say that Hamlet continued to change for each new generation. He always feels timely and relevant.

A hundred years ago, critics began grappling with psychology and the unconscious — and Hamlet was a perfect character for these kinds of interests. In his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud focused on Hamlet as a case study in repression.

And who could disagree?

But fifty years later, Hamlet changed again. It now was the perfect play for those who had survived World War II. Jan Kott insists, in his book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, that these old plays were more relevant than ever during the Cold War — just as timely as Beckett or Sartre or Brecht or Ionesco.

October 6, 2025

“[Starmer’s] love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways”

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

Britain’s current prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, is not having even the echo of a political honeymoon despite the utter collapse of the Conservatives in the last general election. Andrew Sullivan, who knew Starmer in school, thinks that Starmer’s plight is a useful illustration of what might have happened in the last US federal election if Kamala Harris had won:

The other day I sat, slack-jawed, reading Kamala Harris’ book — which was not easy to do with my eyeballs permanently rolled into the back of my head. (On one issue that killed her campaign, trans policy, she still hasn’t got the slightest clue what she’s talking about.) At one point, I even tried to imagine what America would be like today if this woke lawyer had actually won last year.

Then it occurred to me that we already kind of know. We actually have a pretty good test case of exactly that: a center-left lawyer-politician coming to power last year after a massive immigration wave had discredited and ousted the previous incumbent. Enter Keir Starmer, my high school frenemy, and now prime minister.

But unlike Harris, Starmer has at least shown signs of understanding his problem: he kicked the far-left Corbynites out of the party, called out anti-semitism, and in his big speech to his party’s annual conference this week, spoke proudly of flying the Union Jack, saying “we placed too much faith in globalization”. In office, he backed Israel’s war against Hamas strongly for a year-and-a-half, followed the science by banning puberty blockers and sex changes for kids, tightened immigration rules a bit, and pursued deregulation of the private sector, especially housing.

So how is he doing?

In one recent poll, his approval rating is 18 percent, with 61 percent disapproving. His government, just a year old, is polling around 19 percent. And in his first year in office, the new anti-immigration Reform Party has doubled its support from 15 to around 31 percent. The Tories — who gave Brits a massive wave of non-white, non-European immigration after Brexit — are at a historic low of 15 percent. Boris may have done what no leftist could: destroy the most successful political party in the West.

This, to put it mildly, is an earthquake. A party barely a year old is almost more popular than the Tories and Labour combined. On paper, Starmer still has four years to right the ship. But in reality, a prime minister who is loathed by four out of five Brits is like Wile E Coyote five feet off the cliff edge. To get a flavor of the general public’s view of Keir, check out this hilarious profile. Money quote:

    Then there is the voice — a cornucopia for sketch writers. We could fill pages with descriptions of the thing — an expiring corncrake, a Dalek suffering stasis of the lower bowel, a fart in a coffin, etc. His love of football feels like something an alien would simulate, trying to blend in with our ways — “I follow the game like any other carbon-based life form”.

The fart in a coffin did his best this week — and survived. Critically, he acknowledged the centrality of mass immigration to the national discourse, the way it has undermined a sense of common culture, undercut wages, begun to replace Christianity with Islam, required ever higher levels of censorship, killed Jews, and turned the cities my grandparents knew into something they wouldn’t even recognize as British.

No vote was ever taken on this policy of making London 40 percent foreign-born, a place where English is now often not heard at all — and even where it is, is almost always in a foreign accent. But the minute anyone ever proffered the slightest objection to mass migration (around a million migrants a year for the past four years), the charge of “hate” and “racism” was instantaneous and deafening.

Elite right and left were as one, defying the public for decade after decade. The hangover, especially after Boris’ brutal betrayal, is now here. (For a single glimpse, think of yesterday when a British citizen named Jihad attacked a synagogue, with two dead, and a flash mob of Hamas supporters swarmed Downing Street.)

Update, 7 October: 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.

“Hate speech” bans work perfectly to eliminate mean words and mean thoughts … and the rivers will run uphill

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

I have to assume that the headline captures the mentality of the people who call for more “hate speech” legislation, because the real world evidence clearly fails to support the notion. Many well-meaning people want the government to have the power to suppress speech they don’t like, never thinking that a different government could use the same laws to quash opinions they support. In the National Post, Chris Selley argues that the last way to achieve reconciliation with First Nations would be to ban “residential school denial”:

Two years ago, I ruefully predicted that Canada’s new law purporting to outlaw Holocaust denial would likely lead to a law purporting to outlaw “denying” the impact of the residential school system. That hasn’t happened yet, but we are well on our way.

The Liberals recently announced plans to table legislation that would purportedly outlaw displaying the Nazi or Hamas flags or symbols of other hate movements, and that has only intensified calls for that law outlawing “residential school denialism”, or indeed denying Canada’s “genocide” against Indigenous peoples.

“What is the difference between Holocaust Denialism and Residential School Denialism? I suggest there is no difference at all,” author Michelle Good wrote in the Toronto Star Tuesday on the occasion of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. “The inclusion of Holocaust Denialism in the criminal code is obviously to prevent the denial of the Jewish genocide of World War II. Therefore, after clearly illustrating that the residential school system was genocidal in nature and intent, it is difficult to find any reason whatever that Residential School Denialism should not be criminalized as well.”

I say these two new and proposed new laws would “purportedly outlaw” atrocity-denialism and hate symbols because they aren’t outright bans on the speech in question. Rather, to fall foul of them, you have to use your argument, flag or symbol to “wilfully promote hatred” against the group in question. It was and is already illegal to wilfully promote hatred against a religious or ethnic group — albeit with some huge caveats, more on which in a moment.

At some point in the future, should the Liberals remain in power — and perhaps even if they don’t — the government is likely to knuckle under to the calls for censorship of certain residential-school opinions. It’s just not worth the political blowback to object, or so one can imagine a backroom strategist reasoning. They would probably introduce the new law just in time for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. If police are willing to enforce these laws, there’s little reason to believe Crown prosecutors would be interested in pursuing the cases. That, in turn, would only frustrate the people who see value in this censorship, and would likely lead to ever-stronger laws … that themselves likely wouldn’t be enforced.

This is not good lawmaking, and it’s a chilling argument when the simple act of pointing out how many bodies have actually been discovered on former residential school sites is widely considered a form of “denialism”.

Fatherland: Alternate History with a Point

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

Feral Historian
Published 11 Oct 2024

The 1992 novel by Robert Harris is a great example of the otherwise generally mediocre “Germany won WWII” alternate history premise. By removing the regime from its current almost mythologized status as a unique and singular evil, instead portraying it as merely a repressive state in a Cold War, Fatherland illustrates an uncomfortable truth about realpolitik and atrocities.

00:00 Intro
00:55 The Case
02:20 Out of Myth, into the Mundane
06:13 Detente and Bureaucracy
09:11 HBO’s Adaptation
10:01 Ignoring Inconvenient Truths

CORRECTION: Somehow I put up a picture of Bormann when I was talking about Buhler.

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian

And my own book, not alternate history, Ninti’s Gate is available on kindle and in paperback,
🔹 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYXH9BWD

QotD: Britain’s immigration crisis

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

One of the consequences of massive, indiscriminate immigration – equivalent to the entire population of Sheffield, every year – is that it radically alters the general mood of those on whom this demographic transformation is being imposed. One might, for instance, aspire to the role of gracious host, as it were, of making newcomers feel welcome. But this ideal presupposes an immigration policy that is limited and selective, and in which newcomers have good reason to feel lucky – and grateful.

The graciousness of the locals, the ideal, depends on the notion that the host country is regarded as something special, a desirable thing, something worthy of respect.

But massive, indiscriminate immigration undermines that ideal. If seemingly anyone can walk in and demand goodies, any ill-mannered flotsam of the world, and if they can do so with no discernible sense of gratitude, or any expectation of such, and with no apparent regard for the norms and values of the host society, as if they were unimportant, then the indigenous population may feel they have little reason to be gracious. Indeed, being gracious may be something of a struggle.

I realise that even the idea that the locals might dare to think in such terms – of being the gracious host – is, for some, anathema, a basis for tutting and scolding. But the sense that the value of one’s society – one’s home – is being pissed away, sold off cheap, is not a promising basis for coexistence.

And yet here we are.

Doubtless there are progressives who would regard the “gracious host” attitude as wickedly hierarchical and “othering”, or even racist. But I suspect it’s how quite a few people process a sudden influx of newcomers, regardless of the gasping of lefties. I suspect that something along those lines is a necessary precondition of any subsequent coexistence. A social lubricant.

And were I to relocate to, say, South Korea, I think I would feel much like a guest – and feel a corresponding obligation to be on my best behaviour. Possibly on an indefinite basis. I very much doubt I’d feel entitled to disregard queueing norms, or to, quite literally, shit on the doorsteps of the indigenous.

But hey, maybe that’s just me.

David Thompson, Explaining Civilisation”, Thompson, Blog, 2025-07-01.

October 5, 2025

The New York Times finally decides that there’s a case for “splitting the Autism spectrum”

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

Freddie deBoer on the stereotyped way that the “Gray Lady” — the New York Times — once again lets the independent media do all the serious work to investigate an issue before “the Grey Lady squats down on that issue and says ‘this is mine now'”:

You may groan! You may say, “Again?” You may roll your eyes. But I’m going to talk about this one more time, and then I think I’m done. But I’ve always been right about all of this, and it needs to be said.

The Times has once again parachuted into a conversation that has been going on for decades, planted its flag, and declared itself the discoverer of new territory. Yesterday they published a piece on autism, neurodiversity, RFK Jr., and whether the autism spectrum should be split up — split back up, that is, to reflect on the massive differences between those with profound autism and those for whom “neurodiversity” is mostly a social badge, a tidbit to be displayed on a Bumble profile. (The answer is yes, of course the spectrum should be split up again, for reasons I’ve written about at great length.) That issue, unusually raw, will bubble on, as it sits at a genuinely uncomfortable intersection of liberal identity norms, online culture, and the genuinely debilitating reality of severe autism. In terms of progressive discourse rules, the plight of the severely autistic and their loved ones is truly a problem from hell: those rules insist that you can’t ever question someone’s diagnosis, no matter how dubious; they demand that you acquiesce to claims made from a position of disability, no matter if they cut directly against the claims made by others from their own position of disability; they have long ago lost sight of any distinction between identity and disorder; and they’re governed by a selective and incoherent vision of standpoint theory that insists that only the autistic can speak out about autism – which perversely empowers the least-afflicted and silences the interests of the most-afflicted, as the most-afflicted literally cannot speak for themselves. You know my rap on all this.

In meta terms, though? This tendency of the NYT to helicopter in to long-simmering debates and bless them with the paper’s attention, and in so doing anoint those debates as worthy of attention by grownups, is only the latest example in an old, ugly dynamic. The little people in independent media ask difficult questions and engage in rancorous debates and stick their necks out in the service of ideas, which is what the media is supposed to do. Then, once the heavy lifting is done, the Grey Lady squats down on that issue and says “this is mine now”. The paper’s consolidation of both prestige and financial security — its status as both far and away the most prestigious publication in world media and maybe literally the only financially healthy newspaper left in the United States — has all manner of pernicious, perverse consequences in an industry that can only function when people within it are engaged in debates with real stakes and real hurt feelings. Again, nothing you haven’t already heard from me. But when there is only one endpoint for the ambitious to aspire to, there’s an inherent and unavoidable silence about that endpoint’s myriad failings. The Times, for its part, has walled off criticism within its own pages with its “we don’t do media criticism” rule, a profoundly self-interested and cynical policy that helps them evade ever having to justify their own widely-criticized practices. And for all manner of complex reasons, the broader world of stodgy old media, dying though it may be, still holds all the cards when it comes to defining debates that involve institutional stakeholders, as the debate about autism’s future certainly does.

I don’t begrudge any writer for wanting to weigh in on these issues — God knows they matter and need more attention — but what’s striking about the Times‘s coverage is how effortlessly it erases the long history of people already fighting these battles, and the richness of the debate that preceded them. Whole archives of independent writing, analysis, and advocacy disappear when the Paper of Record decides that a question now exists. Until then, the issue is marginal, unserious, relegated to the sidelines; afterward, it’s real, it’s official, it’s legitimate … and therefore too important to be left up to those of us in the cheap seats. This is the paradox, you see; no issue that independent media concerns itself with can be considered truly serious, and no issue that they (eventually) deign to be truly serious is something that they trust the independent media to engage with responsibly. Quite a little trap, there. And when the grownups in the room walk in, we’re meant to feel blessed by their presence, happy to have our pet issues taken seriously. Everyone else who’s been in the trenches for years is supposed to be grateful for their newfound recognition.

October 4, 2025

Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)

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

At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky tells the story of “Jane and John”, a distressing tale of rapid onset gender dysphoria:

Image via the Boston Medical Center

In Ontario elementary schools, students are taught that whether you’re a boy or a girl is not determined by your physical body. Kids are encouraged to “explore their identity”. You may have a girl’s body. But how do you feel about it?

These kinds of discussions are going on because schools have accepted what rational people call “gender ideology”, but I prefer the term “gender mythology” because an ideology usually has to do with political systems. In my view the idea that a person’s sex is unrelated to their physical body, that they have a kind of soul sex, if you will, is clearly a myth.

[…]

Jane and John

This is a true story. The names have been changed to protect the privacy of this person.

Jane was a happy, clever, talented, and expressive girl who always wanted to help others. She displayed precocious empathy and enjoyed teaching younger kids various skills. Jane became socially conscious at an early age and was bothered by the fact that she enjoyed a middle-class, Western quality of life while so many others were clearly struggling. As an elementary student, she canvassed her neighbourhood collecting donations for disadvantaged kids. She came to identify with groups she saw as persecuted or oppressed.

Her school was very racially diverse, but she did not observe much racial discrimination. What she did notice was a fair bit of homophobia. She quickly took every opportunity to be an ally to the LGBT cause. In her middle school, there was an LGBT club, which she joined. Jane would often arrive home from school in an angry state because another student had said something that upset her, like, “being gay is a sin”, for example.

Jane’s parents were progressives who made it clear that she would be loved and accepted if she were a lesbian. Jane laughed at that and replied that she “dreamed about boys”.

Jane was a high achiever who was active in athletics and music. At 16, she became a vegan. She was in most ways a typical high school student, but her allyship with LGBT people gradually moved towards activism.

At university she quickly gravitated towards Indigenous and Gender Studies. Her close friends were all LGBT people. Her best friend was a transwoman (a man who identified as a woman). Jane came out as “bisexual” but her main romantic relationship was with a man.

Then, abruptly at the age of 20, she announced to her parents that she was to be called “John” and that she was going to transition to male.

By her own admission, Jane had been perfectly happy as a girl/woman for 20 years- “until I wasn’t”. This does not fit the Gender Mythology narrative. There is simply no way you can reasonably argue that she had, at this late age, suddenly realized what she truly was. She herself did not even claim that. So, what happened?

[…]

It was pretty obvious to me that Jane’s “transition”, like [trans-race activist Rachel] Dolezal, was the result of a combination of personal qualities and social influences. All the stars aligned to point her in that direction. She desperately wanted to be part of the community she had connected with and was tired of just being an ally. Claiming to be bisexual did not really cement her position as an insider. But becoming trans was her ticket.

Due to the extreme nature of taking on that identity — lifelong drug regimens and a number of surgeries, all of which presented serious health risks, going down that road reflected a true commitment and not only made her a part of the LGBT tribe but catapulted her to the top of the hierarchy.

What Jane experienced is known as Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD) and was first identified by the physician/researcher Lisa Littman. Learn more about it here. If you want to get a 2SLGBTQ++ (plus whatever other letters and numbers they’re using now — I can’t keep up) activist spitting mad mention ROGD. The phenomenon proves beyond a reasonable doubt that gender dysphoria can be induced in vulnerable people by social circumstances and aligns well with the research and clinical practice of Dr. Kenneth Zucker from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto.

Zucker ran the clinic for some 20 years and was pushed out due to his refusal to accept “affirmative care” as the only acceptable treatment for gender dysphoria. Zucker found that about 80% of kids would eventually grow out of their dysphoria and thus did not believe in affirming kids’ identities but rather focused on helping them cope with their condition.

Since affirmative care (an oxymoron!) has been adopted, we thus know that 80% of the kids who have been put on the road to gender transitions (and most carry through to the end) would have seen their gender dysphoria dissipate naturally over time. But once the first step — puberty blocking drugs, is taken, kids almost always go on to cross sex hormones and many continue with various surgeries.

Gender clinics do not do follow up nor do they support de-transitioning, but it is clear that the number of young people out there who have seriously harmed themselves through “affirmation” treatments is significant, and more harm is being done day by day as long as affirmative care remains the standard treatment for gender dysphoria.

What did poor Liverpool do to deserve “the worst speech in modern British political history”?

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

In The Conservative Woman, Sean Walsh wonders why his home city of Liverpool was chosen to be the site of a modern political crime-against-humanity in the form of a Two-Tier Keir speech to the Labour faithful:

LIVERPOOL happens to be my city of birth, and my family is generational CIA (Catholic, Irish, Alcoholic). I get back there when I can, usually for funerals family reunions. I can confirm that if you don’t mention Thatcher, the Sun, any Manchester band, the Wirral, or ask a native to pronounce the word “chicken”, you will be made to feel more than welcome as a visitor there. Scousers are rightly celebrated for a quick, if chippy, wit and unique sense of humour. Not least by ourselves.

Hopefully that last quality will help the city survive this week’s invasion by activist lawyers, Islington familiars, boilerplate career MPs, lanyard fetishists, lobbyists, and the process algorithm who was slush-funded to the Labour leadership.

For years Liverpool dodged hosting the Labour conference and was probably resentful at the snub. Now its rejuvenated docklands are the go-to venue for this annual festival of enforced fun/confected joyfulness. It’s probably resentful at that as well.

I’m not sure British politics has seen a speech as bad as the one the Prime Minister gave to this year’s wake gathering. And before you mention Enoch Powell and “rivers of blood”, that speech was “bad” only in the minds of those who never read it or were unable or unwilling to appreciate the deep truths Powell was advancing behind the veil of metaphor.

The Prime Minister was vindictive and politically maladroit in equal measure. Powell, a genuine member of the British working class, was a trained classicist who thought, spoke and wrote in the languages and metaphors of the ancient world. Powell’s lack of condescension and unwillingness to dumb down created room for bad faith and mischievous interpretation.

Starmer, who thinks and speaks the language of the petty bureaucrat, has no such defence. Where Powell made his predictions in poetry (which have proven correct, let’s not forget), Starmer rams home his malevolence in bullet points and crass soundbites.

I make this unhappy comparison partly to draw attention to the decades-long decline in the culture of political speechcraft, which TCW recently wrote about, and to affirm that even by the standards of today Starmer was awful.

We expect our political speeches to be unlovely now. Starmer’s went beyond that and managed to be offensive and yet boring all at once. As I said, the Prime Minister is an algorithm, and there are three things you can say about algorithms: they lack memory, have no sense of humour, and are unaware that they are, well, an algorithm.

On his Substack, Christopher Gage offers “A forward-thinking manifesto to deliver change for stakeholders”. That’s just the sort of bafflegab progressive thinkers think the general public wants to hear, apparently:

Alice in Wonderland by Oskar Kokoschka (1942)

This year’s Labour Party conference kicked off in the idiosyncratic style befitting its more excitable, green-haired cohort: confusion, contradiction, and faux contrition.

On Sunday, Sir Keir Starmer, our accidental prime minister, condemned Reform’s plan to deport migrants as “racist and immoral”. By Tuesday, it was Labour policy.

Politicians will say anything to keep suckling on the erect nipples of eternal power. And Labour politicians, despite their holier-than-thou affectations, are no different. They’ve seen the polls. Reform has led with room to spare in the last one hundred.

Labour has changed its spots. Starmer’s new Home Secretary, the combative and admirable Shabana Mahmood, is one foot on planet earth, at least.

At the conference, Mahmood warned the Guardian-reading element that they “won’t like the things I do”. She duly unveiled plans to ensure migrants “earn the right” to stay here: speak English, pay their way, and don’t expect their family to follow.

These once radioactive proposals are now common sense — two-thirds support immigration restrictions, whilst one-half wants not only the door welded shut but for many recent arrivals to be ushered politely through it. If Labour wants to win another election, they’d better listen to Wetherspoon Man over Performative Male.

As the week spluttered on, Starmer opted in to opting out to opting in to opting out. But Labour is listening. Nigel Farage, the Wetherspoon Man high priest, must feel his pockets lightened this week. Just glance at the swathes of Labour members waving the Union Jack, faces stretched incredulously like those masks from The Purge.

One impression emerges from this blancmange of bodily fluids: Farage has won the argument. Labour loves Britain, mate. Britain, big tits, Stella Artois, and XL Bullies.

Starmer even took it to Boris Johnson, onetime prime minister and two-time shagger of the year. The epithet “Boriswave” leapt from Starmer’s tongue with pace-sticked regularity. According to the prime minister, letting in four million people in two years — the Boriswave in Twitter slang — is an affliction so terrible that to reverse it would be, erm, even worse.

To be fair, such logic is not so much witless as it is anti-sense. And anti-sense has defined the Labour Party since I was spermatozoa.

One thing is clear. The Labour party, which presides over the sputtering, worn-out appendage known as Great Britain, needs some dire advice.

Here are a few proposals, the wholesale adoption of which would solve every problem befalling broken Britain.

October 3, 2025

Women and credit card access … another “just so” story

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

Janice Fiamengo debunks a common “just so” story about women only gaining the right to hold a credit card in the 1970s:

A few years ago, I started hearing that women, before feminism, couldn’t have their own credit cards. Or they couldn’t get one without a man’s signature. Or married women couldn’t have one in their own name. Divorced women, apparently, couldn’t get credit at all. Men conspired to keep women powerless and dependent.

THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!

Just last June, on the podcast Diary of a CEO (in an episode viewed by nearly two million people), three feminists debating feminism agreed that, in the words of one of the panelists, “None of us could get a credit card a few decades ago … We couldn’t have anything …” (see 1:50:37).

Before correcting herself, in fact, the panelist had started to say, “None of us could get a credit card a couple of decades ago …”

The statement struck me with the full force of the ludicrous. I started school in 1970. My teachers were nearly all women, at least half of them unmarried. They certainly seemed to live full, normal lives in obeisance to no man. They were paid a salary; they had bank accounts; they owned cars; they bought things and went on vacations.

My mother had worked in an insurance office for years both before and after she married my father in 1956. She had purchased appliances and paid her own rent, helped my father buy his first commercial fishing boat, and handled all the household expenses when my dad was away fishing for months every summer.

My friends’ mothers were similarly active and self-determining. Were all these women actually hobbled by the patriarchy, cut off from the economy?

Received knowledge would have us believe so. Last year, The Globe and Mail published a paid advertisement for Women’s History Month titled “50 Years Ago: Women Got the Right to Have Credit Cards”. Written by a financial services company seeking to drum up business, the article repeated the popular story that women in North America could not get their own credit cards until 1974.

Credit cards were one of the growth areas for banks and other financial service companies in the 1960s and 70s … from something only relatively wealthy travellers and business executives used, they expanded to become widely used by ordinary consumers for all kinds of purchases. Consumers benefitted from access to useful financial tools, while banks enjoyed the profits from the widespread use of credit cards. So where did the idea that they were male-only come from?

The reality is that from the 1950s on, credit cards were a new invention being aggressively marketed to both men and women. Advertising from the era shows how keen credit card companies were to target female customers, how eager to tap into women’s spending power.

Originally introduced as a convenience for travelers on business, credit cards began to expand their purview in the late 1950s. Bank Americard (later Visa) became the first consumer credit card in 1958. A network of banks formed the Interbank Card Association, originally named Master Charge (later Mastercard), in 1966.

Yet we are somehow to believe that half the population was deliberately excluded from this new consumer venture for no other reason than that they were female?

“It wasn’t until 1974 that women were allowed to open a credit card under their own name,” the Globe article states emphatically. “Before 1974, if women wanted to open a credit card, they would be asked a bunch of intrusive questions, like if they were married or whether they planned to have children. If a woman was married, she could (hopefully) get a credit card with her husband. But single, divorced, or widowed women weren’t allowed to get a credit card of their own — they had to have a man cosign for the credit application.”

The explanation is dramatic and incoherent, undoing its own logic from the beginning. It backtracks to allege that women were in fact “allowed” to have a credit card so long as they answered “a bunch of intrusive questions” or found a co-signer. Even this lesser claim is false, but it is rather different from the prior assertion about women “not having the right” to a card.

At a time when many married women either did not work outside the home or worked only part-time and on a temporary basis, there would have been nothing unreasonable about a woman’s husband co-signing her credit card application. Many married women were happy to purchase what they wanted on the assurance that their husbands would pay the bill when it came in, and credit card issuers saw joint accounts as a way of ensuring payment.

Update, 4 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please 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.

October 2, 2025

The signature politics of the unaccountable classes

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

On his substack, Lorenzo Warby considers the origins of what we now call “woke” politics and how they became the predominant set of beliefs of the people who can’t be held accountable:

Western civilisation, over the last two centuries, has gone through the Emancipation Sequence whereby — taking the Anglosphere pattern — free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. We live in free societies of mass prosperity, yet we have highly motivated political networks that think nothing of casting our societies as marked by layers of oppression.

Yes, this is based on a monstrous (and self-serving) inflation of the concept of oppression. It also functions to channel the rage of downwardly mobile children of Western elites.

More important still, it is the signature politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up — as distinct from the accountable classes whose income depends directly on their performance. The dominant politics of the unaccountable classes has acquired a name: it is woke politics, the politics of wokery or of being woke.

The technical name for wokery is Critical Constructivism. It is the popularisation of Critical Theory. I have labelled it Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, as it rests on critiques of The Enlightenment, and rejection of Enlightenment values, while orienting itself towards an imagined future — one where it is no longer true, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), that society is based:

    on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

That is, of oppression as they define it.

Wokery is the currently dominant form of left-progressivism. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann defines “wokery” as:

    making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities.

That is how the Oppressor/Oppressed template that Critical Theory takes from Marxism is popularised in a post civil rights world, using any differences in outcomes between groups as markers of oppression. The Oppressor/Oppressed template requires oppression to be pervasive in contemporary societies, hence psychologist Steven Pinker’s observation about progressives hating progress.1

What wokery also is, is lazy self-righteousness. The self-righteousness is obvious and pervasive. These folk really do act as if they own morality; as if they can withhold the moral grace of their presence from the wicked, from wrongthinkers; as if wrongthinkers are purveyors of moral pollution. This has much to do with the dwindling of the culture of public debate.

But it is also lazy, in that it massively economises on the use of information and intellectual effort. Much of the appeal of “wokery” comes from how remarkably little accurate knowledge it demands. All one has to do is to master the lingo, the linguistic signalling, involved; the pre-set talking points; which terms of moral abuse apply and when; and be willing to engage in any required level of rationalisation and mental gymnastics. Once you do so, the moralised status game of lazy self-righteousness is open for you, with approved positions lined up for one to adopt, all based on semblances of knowing.

This dynamic has much to do with why one side of US politics is far more conformist in its political opinions than the other.

The underlying blank slate views about humans means you don’t have to accept any constraints from evolutionary biology. If we are all blank slates, if there are no inherent differences between groups, then all inequalities between groups can be classed as malicious — as signs of oppression — so you do not have to bother exploring differences in traits, cultures, life-strategies, etc.

Lazy self-righteousness does not require any thinking about successful and unsuccessful life strategies, about what makes things work, or not work. It does not require much in the way of statistical or mathematical understanding. The most mathematical it gets is whether social outcomes are proportional to a group’s population share or not.

If a group is doing better than average, they are oppressors. If they are doing worse, they are oppressed. Viewing society through the oppressed/oppressor mindset always ends up looking for (and finding) kulaks.

It is a simple metric to adopt, with the self-righteous status game built-in of opposing oppression and supporting the marginalised. No further intellectual effort is required.

  1. Pinker’s observation that populism is a phenomenon of older voters has not worn well. Also, it is a sign how reflexive future-orientated judgements have become, that the voters with the most experience of the EU were most likely to vote against it in the 2016 Brexit referendum passes people by.

UNshittifying the internet

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

In The Line, Matt Gurney asks if we can go back to when the internet (and by extension, all the other tech toys and gadgets we see everywhere) was … good?

Have you heard about enshittification? It’s not just a potty word. It’s actually a pretty fascinating concept, and you read about it mostly in tech circles. Enshittification is the process by which something becomes worse over time, instead of better, normally as people try to squeeze more efficiency and revenue value out of it. Through that process of squeezing, the thing becomes enshittified.

If you want a proper definition …

    Enshittification: The gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.

There are lots of examples. My favourite example? My video doorbell has an annual service fee. Another great example? Cars that now require payments to access certain features, like heated seats. You own the device. But you need to pay a recurring fee to use it. That’s enshittification.

It’s everywhere. And it’s getting worse, especially online. And, perversely, maybe this is a good thing. Maybe it’s going to force us to stop, rethink how we use the digital realm, and, basically, try again. Start over. And get it right this time.

Noah Smith is an American economics writer whose work I enjoy. Smith noted on Twitter recently that we are rapidly getting to the point where we should declare social media a failure. It’s passé to criticize social media on social media, but Smith wasn’t making the usual warmed-over moral argument. He wasn’t saying that it was bad because people are mean there or that they fall down dark rabbit holes and end up believing insane things. Those are problems! But Smith’s concern was the extent to which AI-generated content and bots have simply flooded all the social media channels. Even a responsible user trying to use these platforms for the good is going to find it increasingly difficult to derive any value from them. They’re being rapidly enshittified.

I share his view of the trajectory. I don’t really know anyone who doesn’t. But Smith’s comment led me to ponder what value I actually derive from them — what I would miss if they were gone. I came up with four broad use cases.

QotD: The gap between the author and the reader

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

I’ve thought about this uncrossable gap from the reader’s side as well. A few years back, I read a book written by an eleventh-century Byzantine bureaucrat and historian, Michael Psellus, chronicling his turbulent times. (That the title was Fourteen Byzantine Rulers but only covered a century is a clue to just how turbulent.) It was, of course, originally handwritten, “publication” consisting of the manuscript being hand-copied by scribes, and distributed to a tiny audience of like-minded men. I read it in English translation, in an e-edition instantly available worldwide in unlimited quantities, on my tablet computer. Psellus could not possibly have pictured me as his reader, living a thousand years later on a continent he didn’t know was even there, speaking a language that hadn’t come into existence yet, in a technological future he could not have imagined. (That I’m female, to boot, might be less of an issue — there were plenty of literate Byzantine women, at least in the upper classes of his assumed readership.) And yet his words and thoughts were handed to me as freshly as if they’d been penned (though not typed) yesterday. I could see him; he couldn’t see me.

The Psellus book was a memoir, and so its author was presenting himself fairly directly to his audience, if in a self-edited fashion. Fiction adds a layer of veiling between creator and reader, ranging from a thin gauze to a thick stage curtain. People are naturally curious about anything hidden by a curtain, and always want to peek. (When thinking about this as a shy writer, I always channel that famous line from the Wizard at the climax of the movie The Wizard of Oz — “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!”) But if readers can’t get an actual look, they will make up the writer in their heads, constructed from their own knowledge and expectations much as they mentally construct the fictional characters they’re reading about.

I got an accidental peek at this process many years ago at a science fiction convention, where I fell into a conversation in the booksellers’ room with a (male) reader who was very surprised to discover I was a woman — by whatever assumptions, he had not processed my name on the cover as female. (This, I later discovered, is not uncommon in my foreign-language translations, where the genders of English names are less recognizable.) Quickly, before his mental image was overwritten by our encounter, I got him to describe the author whom he had imagined had written the books he’d enjoyed (Vorkosigan Saga science fiction stories, at the time.) It included some odd details — male, mid-thirties, dark-haired, East Coast upper class — rather like my fictional character Ivan Vorpatril, really. Nothing at all like the beleaguered (if also mid-thirties) Midwestern housewife and mother I actually was. Yay curtain.

Lois McMaster Bujold, introduction to the Taiwanese edition of The Curse of Chalion by Fantasy Foundation/Cite Publishing, 2020-03-25.

September 30, 2025

When your prime minister is addicted to photo ops

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

You might think, from my headline, that I’m referring to former prime minister Justin Trudeau — who really, really did love him some gushing media coverage accompanied by advertising-agency-quality visual effects. But it’s actually our current prime minister who has somehow managed to show even more love for the photogenic backdrop and the appealing props in media coverage:

Twice in four days, Prime Minister Mark Carney scheduled official photo ops in front of environments that weren’t entirely real.

During a Sept. 19 visit to Mexico, Carney led cameras through a railyard stocked with pallets of artfully arranged sacks decorated with a maple leaf and the words “product of Canada”.

The site was the Canadian Pacific Kansas City Ferrovalle train yard, located outside Mexico City.

The yard is indeed equipped to process incoming railcars of Canadian wheat, but that’s all done in bulk. Hopper cars are positioned over large tanks to disgorge their loads, multiple tonnes at a time.

If any sacks ever enter into the equation, it’s long after Canadian producers have exited the process.

“Canadian grain farmers haven’t shipped wheat in sacks for over a century!” read a reaction by Chris Warkentin, Conservative MP for the heavily wheat-growing riding of Grande Prairie, Alta.

Sylvain Charlebois, a food scientist at Dalhousie University, wrote in a column this week that “bagged wheat is a relic of less mechanized economies”.

“We are among the most efficient bulk grain exporters in the world, shipping millions of tonnes through rail networks and ocean vessels designed for efficiency, safety, and traceability,” he wrote.

But it was a housing announcement just outside Ottawa where Carney would run into more direct accusations of being deliberately deceptive with his photo backdrop.

On Sept. 14, just before the opening of the fall session of Parliament, Carney stood in front of two under-construction homes in the Ottawa area and announced the official launch of Build Canada Homes, a new federal agency tasked with developing subdivisions of manufactured homes on federal land.

“The two sets of homes behind me were manufactured in two days, assembled on site in one,” Carney said to applause.

“We wanted to keep the townhouses open; we held back the workers from finishing it so you could see how things fit together,” he said, adding that one of the homes was being shipped “to Nunavut”.

Once the press conference was over, both homes were dismantled, and the site returned to what it had been before: A patch of fallow government land located near the Ottawa airport.

The land is a right-of-way for high-voltage power lines, which is why it currently doesn’t contain any development.

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies congratulates Brian Passifume for being one of the only legacy media reporters to look past the literal Potemkin Village structure Carney had assembled for his photo op:

Our Orwellian theme continues but, this time, it’s to credit Brian Passifume of the Toronto Sun for his work digging into how our prime minister and his staff work to create fantasy settings for their announcements. Canadian Press and others were happy to play government propagandist by captioning a photo taken at Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Canada Builds launch by stating “Workers from Caivan Homes look on from a modular home under construction in Ottawa during Prime Minister Carney’s announcement for the new agency.”

Near as I can tell, most other media were happy to play along. Except Passifume who broke from the pack and pointed out the whole scene was, essentially, a movie set.

After one X user pointed out that the entire scene was fake, Passifume jumped in with “Dude I was there, that’s exactly what happened. It was a freshly-graded gravel lot with no utilities or services run. I was discussing this very topic with other reporters covering it — they didn’t even move the crane or remove the lifting apparatus, they just repurposed it to hold a gigantic Canadian flag.”

I expect some in the trade will say “hey, everyone does it” and no doubt that is true. But when people with power and those who crave it misrepresent reality, journalists are obliged to point that out. It doesn’t even have to be aggressive, just “Carney said in front of a set created for the announcement”.

Journalism isn’t actually that complicated. You just have to subscribe to its principles.

September 29, 2025

Powderkeg Britain

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

The ever-expanding anti-immigration protests in Britain are an unmissable flashing red alert to the British government … which seems determined to ignore it and continue to plough ahead with their MOAR immigrants policies despite the anger of the public. Spaceman Spiff characterizes it as a revolt:

Multi-ethnic and multicultural societies do not function in the way homogenous nations do. People of radically different origins, culture and beliefs often trigger conflict as incompatible aptitudes, temperaments and worldviews operate within a shared territory.

Artificial situations like this do not naturally harmonize, despite the rhetoric. Instead, competition for resources emerges. Power sharing between rival groups is fantasy. Life is winner takes all.

This can be disconcerting as reality asserts itself and the cost of large-scale migration becomes obvious.

Some in Britain already understand the dangers we now face at home. Others are waking up and looking for answers as their world declines. They are the ones who will grasp at anything to reset society.

Racists and hatemongers

Critics of mass immigration in Britain are often branded as racists and hatemongers.

We see blanket condemnation from establishment figures for even mild observations about the effects of this deeply unpopular policy.

The noticers of reality are derided as far-right extremists even when they are evidently normal people exhausted with unwanted demographic change.

The approved media and political spokespersons insist those who make observations have become radicalized by extremist writers and thinkers. Little more needs to be added. The labels do much of the work; Nazi, fascist, racist.

It doesn’t matter that many who are critical of mass immigration are not extremists calling for violence. They are just normal people who notice what is happening.

One of the unfortunate things the noticers recognize is mixing distinct cultures inside a single geographical area might be dangerous. They sometimes read material based on government statistics that tells them mass immigration infers almost no benefits on the host nation while extracting potentially catastrophic costs.

To ordinary people that sounds like something worth discussing to determine if it is true.

Normal people are revolting

Western countries have endured unexpected demographic shifts in recent years.

The only acceptable view is this is always a net positive. We are told group differences do not exist except in the minds of racists. Foreigners are already very like us and any deviation from our norms are superficial or unworthy of comment.

It is therefore all the more shocking when this is proven wrong. From dress and manners to dietary habits, to the treatment of women and children, the world beyond our borders is quite alien when seen up close.

London’s vibrantly diverse bus riders

All this alienness was once elsewhere with oceans to protect us. Now it is here in our midst.

This is becoming obvious and is at odds with all we have been told. What we see does not match the harmonious melting pot we were sold.

Inevitably this encourages people to seek out information.

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