Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2025

Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”

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

Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:

Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.

So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.

That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.

Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.

But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.

He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.

We ignore his warnings at great risk.

(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […]

(2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […]

(3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […]

(4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […]

(5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […]

(6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […]

(7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […]

(8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]

The Galactic Empire and a (Revised) Generic Model of “Fascism”

Filed under: Economics, Germany, History, Italy, Media, Military, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 29 Sept 2023

While we can classify significantly different regimes as “communist” based on their key similarities, we don’t have the same taxonomy for “fascism” as a political category. The term is either used so broadly it becomes meaningless, or defined so narrowly that it’s only relevant to Mussolini’s Italian Fascism.

But we can identify three key factors that, when all are present together, result in a system we can define as “fascist” in a sense that’s both historically based and general enough to be useful for analysis. In addition to laying out a simple model defining fascism, this video also dives into some history of Fascism and National Socialism, mixed with the kind of sci-fi analysis you’ve come to expect here.

00:00 Intro
00:35 Palp, Dolf, and Communists
04:05 Old Republic vs Weimar Republic
04:55 Party and State
08:57 Three-Point “Fascist Minimum”
09:24 “Third Way” Economics
15:12 Totalitarianism
19:19 Unifying Myth
22:53 Umberto Eco
24:46 Franco
26:25 Closing Miscellany

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QotD: Mal Reynolds in Serenity

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

I’m not trying to make a polemic and it’s definitely not a partisan film in the sense that Mal is, if not a Republican, certainly a libertarian, he’s certainly a less-government kinda guy. He’s the opposite of me in many ways.

Joss Whedon, quoted by Malene Arpe in “Just don’t call Joss Whedon a genius”, Toronto Star, 2005-09-24.

September 28, 2025

The beginning woodworker … an easy mark

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

On his Substack, Christopher Schwarz posts a weekly “earlywood” article pulled from his extensive back-catalogue of woodworking books and magazine articles. This week, he addresses the plight of the beginner in the woodworking hobby just before the internet became ubiquitous:

When people begin woodworking, most go through a phase (I did) in which they are willing to soak up every single piece of information they can find. Many will subscribe to multiple woodworking magazines, buy astonishing numbers of woodworking books, seek out catalogs and advertisements for woodworking tools, and buy anything they can afford that looks remotely useful.

This is when people are vulnerable. They need guidance. Unfortunately, woodworking is a mostly solitary pursuit. And so we spend incredible, astonishing and shocking amounts of money on equipment, books and instruction. And most of it is of questionable worth.

Because of this phenomenon:

  1. The woodworking magazine business had a glut of magazines. When we ran the numbers in the 1990s, we surmised that there should be three magazines serving woodworkers. Instead, there were more: Fine Woodworking, WOOD, American Woodworker, Woodsmith, Shopnotes, Workbench, Popular Woodworking, Woodworker’s Journal, Woodshop News, Woodcraft, Weekend Woodcrafts, Woodwork and a host of specialized magazines. What propped up these magazines? Beginners. Eventually, most woodworkers winnow their subscriptions down to one or two magazines. But the spendthrift beginner made it possible for many magazines to survive.1
  2. The woodworking book industry produced a glut of books. In the 1990s, my mailbox was stuffed with new woodworking books every week. It wasn’t unusual to see seven or eight new woodworking titles in a month. That’s coo-coo. Why did this work? New woodworkers wanted the latest information. New books are better than old books (duh!). And so publishers churned out books that had an 18-month life cycle before disappearing forever.2
  3. The woodworking tool industry thrives on new SKUs. After covering woodworking tool manufacturers for nearly three decades, it’s obvious that they introduce new products every year to goose sales. That’s why you have a new crop of cordless drill/drivers every year. And it’s also why you have a rash of odd products that seem (on the surface) to be innovative – silicone glue brushes, painter’s pyramids, many router table jigs, marrying a chisel with a rasp, aluminum squares, putting a laser on everything, oddball and worthless sanders (the Black & Decker Mouse; Porter-Cable Profile Sanders), and battery-powered clamps and tape measures. The list is endless, and it’s not a modern phenomenon. When my grandfather was woodworking in the 1970s, he was charmed by a jig that let you cut dovetails with a corded drill. The only people who are dumb enough to fall for these products are beginners and woodworking journalists. Beginners don’t know better, and journalists need copy to fill the empty space between the covers.3

Some of you might be thinking I’m exaggerating my experiences. I’m not. The good news is that the Internet did a Half-Nelson on most of these stupid business practices. When people now go through their “indiscriminate sponge” phase, they do it on YouTube and soak up as much ridiculousness as they wish.

For free. Mostly.

Eventually, they will be able to ignore the tool-chugging nincompoops and focus on what’s important: Building basic skills using simple and robust tools (and maybe a few well-built machines).

Honestly, it’s a good thing to be a bit jaded about the woodworking tool and publishing industries. It makes you a better consumer and encourages us to do better. So please, for the sake of the future of the craft, don’t buy the Bench Cookies.

  1. Some modern context follows. Many of these magazines have disappeared or have been consolidated. But you know what? I still think we have too many woodworking magazines these days. Or not enough. I forget which is right.
  2. More modern context follows. Most of these publishers have gone tits up. And good riddance. We don’t need a new book every year on advanced router techniques.
  3. Modern context follows. Nothing has changed here.

I matched this profile of the “indiscriminate sponge” beginner and I had huge numbers of woodworking books and magazines … until I finally noticed that the magazine articles in the latest issue were basically the same as the ones I’d first seen three years earlier, just with more gee-gaws and doo-dads added (microadjusters-for-everything were flavour of the month when I finally exited my sponge phase).

September 27, 2025

Dislike of Trump prompts the CBC to spread faulty medical advice

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

It’s a long-running joke that US progressives — and the legacy media, BIRM — are programmed to respond to anything Donald Trump says by doing the exact opposite of what he says:

The CBC apparently felt the need to do the meme:

It was not controversial for news outlets like CBC to report in 2016, and later 2021, on new medical research raising concerns about the impact of Tylenol use on pregnancy and fetal development. But in 2025, those studies (among others) have become the basis for a new cautionary approach by the U.S. government that critics and media are trying to debunk.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that, as part of a bigger strategy in quelling autism, it would be issuing a “physician notice and begin the process to initiate a safety label change for acetaminophen”.

President Donald Trump relayed this to the press, stating the medication “can be associated with a very increased risk of autism”.

“So taking Tylenol is not good, all right? I’ll say it; it’s not good. For this reason, they are strongly recommending that women limit Tylenol use during pregnancy unless medically necessary. That’s, for instance, in cases of extremely high fever that you feel you can’t tough it out.”

[…]

The statement was reported in the mainstream news — including CBC, which found Canadian doctors who seemed to support the cautionary approach. The impression from these experts was that this wasn’t cause for panic and that more evidence was needed, but it was an occasion for discussion. The advice back then? Take the smallest amount for the shortest period of time, and don’t use it as a first resort to managing pain, which is consistent with the U.S. guidance.

Indeed, no major figure in this story is advocating for total avoidance because unmitigated pain and fever are bad for pregnancy, and in small amounts, Tylenol seems to be fine. That said, the manufacturer doesn’t recommend it for pregnant women (which they can’t really do without extensive testing, even if doctors generally consider it safe for mothers in minimized amounts when medically indicated).

More recently, a review of other studies by a team including Harvard University’s public health dean found similar “evidence of an association” between the drug and neurodevelopmental conditions. The dean released a statement saying that the “association is strongest when acetaminophen is taken for four weeks or longer”. That should be uncontroversial, because nobody is supposed to take Tylenol for that long, pregnant or not.

But perhaps, as the Babylon Bee suggests, it’s all Trumpian 4D Chess:

September 26, 2025

John Carter revisits the cancellation debate

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

As part of a much longer essay, covering a lot more ground, John Carter considers the pro and con arguments for the much-cancelled right to fully indulge in cancelling figures on the left in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination and the widespread celebration of the murder by leftists:

Talking heads on network television are whining that it’s getting out of hand, while abruptly unemployed leftists take to GoFundMe to beg for support.

The purge has started, and yes, thank you, I’m feeling quite vindicated right now.

Repeating myself is boring, so I’m not going to rehash the arguments in favour of turning cancellation against the left. Suffice to say, they have it coming. It’s also worth pointing out that there’s an important distinction to be made between getting a labourer fired because he made the OK sign, and removing a medical professional who openly celebrates the death of a man for having opinions shared by half the country. Can a bloody-minded leftist doctor be trusted to give medical care to a Trump voter, when he’s on the record as advocating the execution of Trump voters? The doctor should certainly be allowed to say what he pleases, and he should have the same right to use a social media account as anyone else, but he probably shouldn’t be allowed to practice medicine.

But I don’t want to rehash that. Instead, I want to focus back in on human water fountain women as an exemplar of that choir of liars suddenly singing hymns to the sacred practice of freedom of speech. People would be shocked by this self-serving mendacity if long experience had not accustomed them to it.

We aren’t shocked because we’ve seen this before, repeatedly. The left screamed about the spontaneous unguided tour of the capitol on J6 as an insurrection and an unforgivable attack on our democracy, conveniently forgetting that the Weather Underground were bombing federal facilities, including the Capitol, back in the 70s, or that the state capitol of Wisconsin was occupied by protesters in 2011 … or that they’d attacked the White House in 2020 … to say nothing of the nation-wide Burning Looting and Murdering they committed in the wake of Floyd’s fentanyl overdose.

The curious phenomenon of leftist narrative blindness was repeatedly demonstrated during the COVID years, in which the entire professional-managerial caste would switch from one narrative to its opposite like a school of fish, confidently proclaiming on one day what they had denounced as anti-scientific misinformation just the day before.

Sure enough, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, with his blood still on the ground and their gleeful cries ringing in the world’s ears, the left went on an immediate disinformation counter-offensive. They adopted the narrative that Tyler Robinson was a right-wing groyper – an online follower of Nick Fuentes – who had assassinated Kirk for not being based enough, or for supporting Israel, or something. It was for lying about this that Kimmel was pulled off the air. The evidence for Robinson’s right-wing sympathies were that he’d been raised in a conservative Mormon household by a police officer father, and that he’d dressed up as a gopnik once or something. Robinson’s live-in relationship with a troon, the Antifa slogans he’d carved into the bullet casings, and his friends and family attesting to his left-wing radicalization were waved away. This is what abusive narcissists do: “I didn’t do the thing you just saw me do to you, and anyhow you deserved it”. Sure enough, as I wrote this, another leftist sniper attacked an ICE facility in Dallas; sure enough, leftists immediately began insisting that he couldn’t possibly have been a leftist, this time on the grounds that the shooter inscribed “Anti-ICE” rather than “Fuck ICE” on his bullets.

The left also tried to change the conversation to the supposed problem of right-wing violence. Professional-looking infographics flooded onto social media, pushed by Alex Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, Ilhan Omar, and the Economist.

Ilhan Omar (note that the data are from the ADL).

The infographics make it look like there’s an epidemic of right-wing political violence being waged against a peaceful, tolerant, and defenceless left. This is of course nonsense. Every time someone dug into their data, it turned out that they were basically doing this:

It isn’t even necessary to subject the datasets to close scrutiny. Look at the Economist graphic. See that little black rectangle in 2020? The Economist would have you believe that there was practically no left-wing political violence at all in 2020, which as everyone remembers was a fiery but mostly peaceful year. The Economist dataset turns out to have been curated by an Antifa activist, by the way, which I suppose makes the Economist an affiliate of an international terrorist organization, now.

Now, you can say “they’re just lying”, and yes, quite a few of them know exactly what they’re doing.

[…]

In a lot of cases, however, calling them “liars” isn’t quite accurate. Lying implies conscious deception. If you’ve talked to these people, which I know you have to the point where you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you know that they seem to really believe the things they say. It does not matter in the slightest if they contradict the thing they said yesterday. They apparently have no memory of their previous statements. Their present belief is always entirely sincere. It does not matter if observable reality is in stark contradiction to their belief. They have lost the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction, with the result that they routinely mistake their own pop culture propaganda for reality.

That they do not even seem to notice when they contradict themselves suggests a void of self-awareness. This is the origin of the NPC meme, which depicts leftists as Non-Player Characters, effectively no more than computer programs that emulate human behaviour. When the meme first began to spread a few years ago, there was a purge of Twitter accounts that posted it. The NPC meme cut leftists to the quick because they instinctively recognized – as everyone did – the truth in it. Leftists complained that the NPC meme was dehumanizing, which is actually perfectly correct. An NPC is not really human.

We see evidence for this NPC absence of self-awareness everywhere. A self-aware person who had spent a decade viciously persecuting anyone who publicly contradicted leftist orthodoxy would understand that an appeal to freedom of speech once they themselves were persecuted for their words would garner mockery rather than sympathy. A clever Machiavellian would therefore preface their entreaties with expressions of contrition for their past behaviour, however insincere. Not one of them has done this, which makes it less likely that their attempt to appeal to freedom of speech is mere calculated cynicism. It is instead as though they themselves are not aware of their own previous actions.

A ministry for “Heritage” should not be funding hate publications

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

I’m with Dan Knight that the government shouldn’t be funding any private networks, magazines, or newspapers, but since it does provide a lot of funds through various programs, it should at the very least strive to avoid funding open hatred toward ordinary Canadians:

Steven Guilbeault at a happier stage of his life, before joining the Liberal cabinet.

In a fiery exchange at the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage (CHPC), Conservative MP Rachel Thomas dismantled Liberal Minister Hon. Steven Guilbeault, P.C., M.P., Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture and Minister responsible for Official Languages, over taxpayer money funneled into groups publishing hate-laced screeds and smearing everyday Canadians.

Thomas zeroed in on Cult MTL, a publication receiving federal heritage funds. She read into the record a headline published the very day after reports of Charlie Kirk’s assassination attempt: “To Hell with Charlie Kirk”.

“Minister, do you think that is wrong? Taxpayer dollars are funding this group. Will you revoke their funding?” Thomas demanded.

Guilbeault looked blindsided. He admitted he had no idea the government was bankrolling a tabloid openly celebrating political violence. His answer:

    I have not been made aware of this. I will verify with the department and report back to you. Obviously, spreading hate has no place in Canada, and if this is the case, we will make the necessary verifications and take the necessary steps.

Thomas didn’t stop there. She turned to the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, which she said has already pocketed about $1 million from Guilbeault’s department. Documents show the group paid an “investigative journalist” to hunt down so-called “far-right” targets — defining the term so broadly it included Catholics and pro-life Canadians — before seeding the stories into mainstream news outlets.

[…]

Conservative MP Rachel Thomas quoted former CBC anchor Travis Dhanraj, who launched a human rights complaint this summer […]

    To be honest, this has been the hardest period of my life. What happened at CBC really broke me.

Then she put it directly to Guilbeault:

    Have you reached out to the CEO of the CBC regarding this situation and the toxic work environment that is being accused there?

Guilbeault’s answer? Bureaucratic shrugging:

    The government role is not to get mixed into the daily operations and management of the organization. That is the purview of the organization, in this case, the public broadcaster.

Translation: $1.4 billion of your money flows into CBC every year, but the minister says he can’t pick up the phone when staff say they’re being harassed.

“Create no-go zones for federal forces”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR responds to a comment about his three possible futures after the Charlie Kirk assassination (linked here):

    Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber

    Antifa websites totally open to the public explicitly call to so utterly terrorize ICE that federal agents are physically afraid to enter a city. If the Proud Boys wrote this about the FBI how fast would every single person around that website be indicted by Merrick Garland.

“Create no-go zones for federal forces.’

In one of my previous analysis postings, I outlined three possible scenarios for the future after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

This corresponds to scenario 3, the one where insurrection edges into a simmering civil war a la Bosnia. I caught some flak in my replies at the time from people who thought an insurrection based in urban areas isn’t practical under modern conditions.

Antifa thinks it is. It’s what they’re planning for.

One of the things I have to remind myself of occasionally is that most people know essentially nothing about Communist theory and Communist revolutionary tactics.

Antifa is running the classic Communist playbook. Make the enemy fight you where you are strong and they are weak — where you have support among the people and (when possible) cover from sympathetic local officials.

Historically that has usually meant fighting from rural areas where the reach of the government is weak. But the Russian Revolution was an exception, and the revolution Antifa is trying to fight is another. Their natural home ground is large coastal cities run by left-wing Democrats.

September 25, 2025

An unanticipated danger of AI – “classified” videos for decision-makers

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

Until fairly recently, even the least tech-savvy among us could distinguish AI-generated videos from the real thing … but most of the leaders and decision-makers in western governments aren’t very tech-savvy and put into high-pressure environments may be uniquely susceptible to AI manipulation:

What If I Told You … One of the biggest applications of AI for misinformation hasn’t been online but in the halls of power.

Aging boomer politicians, generals, and major figures are manipulated by showing them AI videos they can’t tell, can’t pause to look at, and certainly can’t digitally examine or geolocate …

“And as you saw Mr President.”

Pay attention. All of them reference seeing “videos” that you aren’t allowed to see, of events which they claim are public record, but appear no-where and no reporting supports …

Sean Hannity was interviewing a world leader and even said “You should show the public the video you showed me it’d really change everyone’s opinion. it changed mine” LIVE ON AIR. And the world leader said some non-committal maybe, then released nothing.

These aging politicians, media figures, corporate personalities, etc. all casually reference seeing insane videos that would CHANGE EVERYTHING and would have been immediately released to sway public opinion if they existed or would have been leaked if it would have been in poor taste to be seen directly releasing them (like gore films)

But of course they aren’t released because they’re faked and the internet would immediately piece together that they’re faked with AI, video game, and archival footage from old conflicts … But the aging 60- and 80-year-olds who run the world can’t tell.

There was a case where they challenged Greta Thunberg “Would you watch this video it’d change your mind” and she refused telling them to just release it … Then they didn’t and attacked her for not being willing to view evidence contrary to her views … in a controlled environment where she couldn’t scrutinize it or check its authenticity against anything else …

It sounds insane! But if you pay attention all of these politicians, media figures, and even influencers … People who often have ZERO security clearance or any official attachment of real trust or allegiance to the governments showing them this “classified” or “controlled” footage … Regularly reference seeing footage which does not exist in the public domain, for events which are viciously contested in which any of the footage they claim to have seen would be WORLD CHANGING news … Yet all these figures are just left out in the wind repeating “Trust me bro”s for some of the most important occurrences of the past decade.

“Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial”

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

In Aporia, Spaceman Spiff explains the function and value of what are called “dead man’s switches” both for railway locomotives and societies:

Image from Aporia

A dead man’s brake is a safety feature found in dangerous machines such as lifts or trains. With this mechanism, a brake is always on, preventing action or movement. A conscious choice or effort must be made to override it.

On a train, a human driver must be present to depress a foot pedal that disengages the brake so the train can move at all. If he is absent the train cannot move. If he withdraws his foot while the train is in motion — if he dies, for instance — the train stops. Hence the name.

The key feature of a dead man’s brake is that it requires energy to operate. Its default zero-energy position is OFF; only with energy can it go to ON.

Wariness of strangers, xenophobia, is the default position for most human beings. This is a hardwired evolutionary response to protect us. It served us well. It requires no energy to operate. Children quickly point out people who seem different.

Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial. We must be educated to make it happen, and explicitly taught to overlook differences. It must be reinforced to remain in operation as our instincts typically push against it.

This requires energy. In parts of the world not subject to Western educational norms, they do not teach it to children. Consequently, they do not usually adopt policies like mass immigration or asymmetric multiculturalism.

It is worth noting that xenophobia denotes a wariness of strangers, not hatred or disdain of them. In practice, our working assumption is people different from us may be a threat, and our actions should reflect this until proven otherwise.

Xenophobia is not the racial animosity the propaganda wishes us to believe, such as harming others based on visible differences like skin colour. Such extreme views are in fact rare. The underlying drive of xenophobia is caution, not aggression. Xenophilia attempts to ignore this sensible restraint, which is why it often fails without external pressure.

These instincts are deeply embedded within us because a cautious approach is a strong foundation upon which to preserve our lives and our cultures. It is the reason we have a nation and a culture in the first place.

Xenophilia, then, is a dead man’s brake. It requires energy applied to something that would not typically occur in nature. It makes us ignore differences in order to get along. Or so the theory goes.

Update, 26 September: 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.

Streaming subscriptions rising far faster than official inflation rate

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

I haven’t been a regular TV watcher for a long time, but I still watch the Minnesota Vikings meaning that I need to pay for a streaming service … which has definitely been going up every year at a significantly higher-than-inflation rate. At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia shows that this is now a very common thing indeed:

It’s not every day that I get an email from Apple. But yesterday the Cupertino leviathan reached out to me.

Can you guess why? Do they have some cool new gadget that will make my life better? Are they opening an Apple Store in my neighborhood? Does Tim Cook want to take me out to dinner?

None of the above. Apple is raising my subscription price for Apple TV by a whopping 30%.

Apple is not alone. The very next day, Disney announced a similar move.

This is the fourth straight year that Disney+ has forced a price increase on viewers. The ad-free subscription price has almost tripled in just six years. During that same period, Disney’s movies have gone from bad to worse — but you pay more to stream them.

The company is truly tapping into its inner Scrooge McDuck. Inflation is just 3% now (according to official, if somewhat dubious, sources). But the ad-free subscription to Disney+ was jacked up 14% last year and is now getting another 19% boost.

Take a look at the larger picture, via this chart from Daniel Parris of Stat Significant (a friend of The Honest Broker). This stuff is reaching greed-is-good levels of abuse.

Meanwhile, the number of scripted shows commissioned by these streamers has dropped significantly. So the audience is asked to pay more for less.

September 24, 2025

Zardoz: A Technocratic Parody

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

Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2023

After another viewing, I now think of Zardoz as an unintentional parody of the technocratic mindset that was congealing in the 1970s. It’s a strange film, a sometimes tedious film, but it’s worth a look if only because there’s nothing else quite like Zardoz.

I keep saying “Immortals” when I mean “Eternals” and I had to recut this one a bit due to some semi-random copyright issues so I apologize for any perceptible jank.

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September 23, 2025

Voters didn’t have to pay attention, but now they really, really should

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tristin Hopper posted the best explanations I’ve seen for why Canada is in the state it’s in:

Canadians took it for granted that, no matter which party was in government, the country would continue to be stable, predictable, and competent. That’s clearly wrong today, yet the voters haven’t really accepted the new situation yet. Until they start paying attention, things may not improve.

It’s not just Canada, of course, but Canada is further down the road to ruin and thanks to the governments’ conscious actions, it will probably take longer to recover (and I don’t see a Canadian Javier Milei on the horizon, more’s the pity).

At The Freeman, Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane discusses a related issue with most forms of representative government:

We are stupid. There, I said it. I feel much better now — like I’ve finally opened up in group therapy. PhDs won’t fix it, nor will subscriptions to all the best outlets. As individuals, we simply do not have the capacity to decide what is best in public life. As voters, we don’t usually care what our representatives are up to, nor do we have the faintest idea what the best policy on agriculture, artificial intelligence, or healthcare should look like — and that’s on a good day. But we do think we know. Deep down we think we are sovereign, that democracy is “all of us”, as though the government were some noble embodiment of “the people” rather than just another collection of organized persons with private agendas.

“Aristeides and the citizens” from Plutarch’s lives for boys and girls (1900).

Plutarch tells a story that I have always found marvelous. It’s about Aristeides “the Just”, one of Athens’s heroes in the Persian Wars. The Athenians, weary of kings and tyrants, invented ostracism — a mechanism to expel for ten years any citizen who got too powerful. Each voter would scratch a name onto a shard of pottery, and if more than 6,000 shards had the same name on them, the man was politely asked to take a decade-long sabbatical. Today we’d probably call it “a career break for the common good”.

Anyway, one day a farmer approached Aristeides himself — without realizing who he was — and asked him to write the name “Aristeides” on his shard. Surprised, Aristeides asked if he had ever harmed him. “No,” said the farmer, “nor do I know him by sight. But I am tired of always hearing him called ‘the Just’.” Aristeides, being annoyingly noble, wrote down his own name and handed the shard back. Later, as he left the city in exile, he prayed the opposite prayer of Achilles: that no crisis should come which would force the Athenians to remember him. On LinkedIn, Aristeides might have written: “Currently on a ten-year sabbatical generously sponsored by the people of Athens. Seeking new challenges outside the Attic peninsula #OpenToWork.”

This, in miniature, is how people vote. Not with knowledge, or vision, or even vague coherence — but out of envy, spite, boredom, or some other glorious irrationality. The Athenians had shards; we have hashtags. Instead of ostracism by pottery, we have ostracism by X: one bad joke, one leaked email, and the digital mob sends you packing. Today in Britain, people can even be jailed for their comments on social media. So much for parrhêsia, that old Athenian virtue of speaking frankly to power. We’ve managed to turn it into a crime — and worse, the canceling mob thinks it’s “speaking truth to power” when in fact it is obedience dressed as rebellion.

Modern voters aren’t any better. Some vote because the candidate owns a cute dog. Others because the candidate is endorsed by Taylor Swift. Entire campaigns have been won on promises of free cable, or by a politician smiling the right way on TikTok. In Spain, we even coined a term for it: the Charo. A Charo is usually an old lady with pink hair who parrots whatever our president says. Charos cannot resist the presidential smile. Even when the president contradicts himself, as he normally does, doing the exact opposite of what he promised, they just blush and blink as if to say: “Oh, Pedro, always misbehaving — we love you all the more for it.” They pamper their charming president and dismiss any criticism as fascist slander. Welcome to the Charocracy.

That’s a pitch-perfect description of the typical Liberal voter in Canada. Mark Carney’s Canada is clearly a maple-flavoured Charocracy.

“[A]nyone who tries to tell you ‘Antifa is just an idea’ is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR uses the methods of counter-terror analysis:

None of Antifa’s public propaganda channels have attempted to deny that they were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is a fact of considerable significance, which I will now use the methods of counter-terror analysis to examine.

Antifa’s distributed structure makes it impossible for any one chapter or cell to know what another subgroup didn’t do.

It is quite possible that Tyler Robinson is a true stochastic terrorist, inspired and motivated by Antifa propaganda and considering himself part of Antifa but without planning or logistical support from others in the organization. I give this about 60% probability.

The fact that Robinson had peers on Discord with apparent foreknowledge of the assassination attempt does not falsify this possibility. Even if they did assist with the assassination, their connections to Antifa might be equally deniable, equally just a matter of their states of mind.

The assassination was in complete accordance with Antifa doctrine and propaganda. Direct action against “fascist” targets, ranging from low level intimidation up to political killings and organized attacks on government facilities, is exactly what Antifa is organized to do.

Thus, with over 90% probability, other members and aboveground allies of Antifa regard the operation as a (tactically) successful Antifa op, whether or not they had any foreknowledge of it and whether or not Robinson was stochastic.

The ones who aren’t fanatics or idiots have probably figured out by now that the assassination was a serious strategic blunder. You might expect that they would be scrambling to deny that Antifa had anything to do with Kirk’s death.

Some of Antifa’s aboveground allies [are] in fact doing this; the dominant form of denial by Democratic politicians and activists is to deny that Antifa even exists as more than an idea.

But Antifa itself has not done this, and I predict very confidently (95%) that it will not. The real reason it won’t has nothing to do with its structural inability to know that no member of Antifa was involved.

To understand why this is, you need to grasp what Antifa is for. Not its ultimate purpose, which is to foment a violent revolution that will enable Communists or Left-Anarchists to seize power, but the way it operationalizes that goal in practice.

The purpose of Antifa direct action is to shape the political environment through terror. Its goal is to intimidate its opponents into paralysis — to raise the costs of their speech and public action by predictably opposing it with violence.

I am not speculating about this, because if you read Antifa’s propaganda and organizing materials it will tell you exactly this.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is perfectly accordant with Antifa doctrine. Antifa cannot deny this, nor disown Tyler Robinson even in the likely event that he is only stochastically connected to the organization, because … what use is a terror network that disavows intimidation of its opponents?

Antifa’s goals require it to be a credible threat to “fascists”. If it denied that it had anything to do with killing Charlie Kirk, it would demotivate its own foot soldiers and decrease its usefulness to its aboveground allies.

Antifa needs to exist in a kind of mixed state — simultaneously deeply threatening to its enemies but deniable by many of its allies in the Democratic Party, journalism, and academia.

It is also, however, important that none of its aboveground allies can actually believe their own denials. Otherwise Antifa, perceived as useless, would risk losing the funding and political cover that has until now allowed it to operate with some degree of impunity.

You may therefore safely assume that anyone who tries to tell you “Antifa is just an idea” is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying.

At Woke Watch Canada, C.C. Harvey discusses the “red thread of Antifa subversion” over the last ten or so years:

Establishment leaders now even cuddle up with extremists who do not hide their violently subversive orientation. When the ENTIRE establishment took a knee for for the (self-identified) queer, Marxist, violently revolutionary group BLM during the 2020 riots, the subjugation of the professional classes was complete. We stopped being allowed to object to our institutions becoming vehicles for communist revolution. We were called racists and far right extremists and conspiracy theorists for even thinking bad thoughts about BLM and the woke communist revolution, and could be punished for talking to friends about it in group chats. We all became ideological captives of neoMarxist revolutionaries.

The DEI industry exploded, and although it is losing steam in the USA, it still functions as a modern Red Guard policing Canadian discourse and behaviour. If we’re being honest, we will admit that even most conservative politicians here were cowed. The entire establishment worked together to erect a new politburo and stasi throughout Canada and the USA, and far beyond.

Republicans are dismantling the neoMarxist structures that have been erected in America, and this is of course being disingenuously characterized by leftists as proof that Trump is fascist and authoritarian. BLM has largely imploded with corruption and infighting, but Antifa appears to have grown even stronger, especially its queer contingent, and their membership is agitating heavily as they see the Trump administration tearing down what they built.

Antifa is not just a gang of idealistic rabble-rousers in black hoodies rebelling against authority. It is the heir of a century-long Marxist project seeking massive, sweeping revolution, and advancing their goals via inversions: turning truth into lies, sin into virtue, desecration into liberation. From the beginning, Antifascist communists were passionately committed to revolution in all areas of human life and society.

It is not by coincidence that antifa and the LGBTQIA+ are entwined. Antifa have always been committed to sexual revolution — crossing sexual boundaries, normalizing deviance, dissolving the family.

Even in earliest iterations, the antifascists were dangerously radical in sexual ideology and policy: the historical record shows they handed children to paraphilic predators in the name of antifascist sexual liberation as early as postwar Germany. That anti-family, fetishistic spirit runs straight through antifascist history and is on full display in today’s TQ+ movement. TQ+ is conjoined with Antifa (Trantifa, if you will) to actively promote hypersexualization, the destabilizing of sex identity and family, and the mainstreaming of disorder and perversion.

Marx and Engels attacked the family as a “bourgeois prison”. Later Marxists carried this out through radical experiments in sex and pedagogy, all under the banner of liberation. Today’s gender and queer theorists are majority Marxists.

Marxists deal in inversions, so indoctrination presented as education, perversion rebranded as liberation, abuse disguised as compassion, self-mutilation celebrated as authentic selfhood. Today, Antifa-aligned “Queer Resistance” brigades advance sexual inversions and corruptions that are just as damaging as antifascists of bygone eras: in postwar Germany, the antifascist Kentler experiment assigned orphan boys to be raised by wealthy pedophiles. Today, an uncomfortable number of LGBTQIA+ activists have been caught adopting babies and toddlers to abuse, raping their own children, or sexually assaulting minors. As a result of our establishment embracing the far left revolutionary zeitgeist and sacralizing “marginalized” identities, safeguarding has been sacrificed on the altar of LGBTQIA+ identitarianism.

Update, 25 September: 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.

September 22, 2025

Materially well-off but downwardly mobile

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

Rob Henderson considers the plight of an entire generation of kids raised in privilege, but economically incapable of improving or even barely maintaining their material condition … the downwardly mobile children of wealthy parents:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.

According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem — the petty disappointments of a small slice of America — but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.

To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.

Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages — or perhaps the right word is privileges — it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.

Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory”. The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.

Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same — raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.

What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long recognized this dynamic: Satisfaction depends less on objective conditions than on whether outcomes match or exceed expectations. And today, those expectations are far from being met.

Two years before Girls ended, sociologist Lauren Rivera, in her book Pedigree, found that graduates of lesser-ranked colleges who landed jobs at elite firms were far happier than Harvard and Stanford graduates who landed the same jobs. The reason was simple: Those jobs exceeded the expectations of the former, while for the latter they fell short. The higher the expectation, the sharper the disappointment. The harsh reality, then, is that privilege itself can encourage feelings of decline. When you’re born to — and surrounded by — overachievers, even respectable achievements can feel second-rate.

In a 2018 study, Duke sociologist Jessi Streib explored why many middle-class kids falter in school and work. Her finding was counterintuitive: Entitlement often dragged them down.

It’s not too hard to see why. Success in school requires showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority. Success at work requires completing projects on time, absorbing criticism, and cooperating with colleagues. Yet the downwardly mobile, Streib found, were often convinced such requirements were beneath them. Their grandiosity and defiance hastened their slide.

Elite overproduction is real, and has real world ramifications …

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