Quotulatiousness

August 26, 2026

“Women who see in Clancy something not just sympathetic, but martyr-esque”

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

David Dennison clearly views-with-alarmhorror the phenomenon of women publicly demonstrating their support and claiming understanding for a woman who murdered her three children:

Pink-clad supporters of Lindsay Clancy
Photo from Aged Well

A disclaimer first: NOT ALL.

The Lindsay Clancy verdict could come as early as this week. If you have no idea what that sentence meant, honestly, just stop reading and go do something else. This case is not one you want in your head if it isn’t already. Trust me.

There really aren’t many things that are more distressing than what actually happened here. My complaining about other aspects of the Clancy saga is a bit like if somebody you loved died in a terrible car wreck and I said, “It’s a shame there was so much damage to the paint”. Still, that’s what I’m going to do.

The Lindsay Clancy trial has sparked an on and offline movement of women who see in Clancy something not just sympathetic, but martyr-esque. These women get her. They see themselves in her. They feel what they know she felt, and regard her as an avatar of the unsung stress of motherhood, and the woeful lack of attention paid to women’s struggles.

You may–especially if you are among the penis-havers – be asking yourself several things about now. Perhaps things like:

  • The stress of motherhood is unsung?
  • Women’s struggles receive insufficient attention?
  • Other moms see themselves in a woman who shooed her husband out of the house so she could wrap exercise bands around the necks of her three children and slowly choke the life out of them one by one while they stared into the deranged eyes of the person who brought them into this world in the first place? Really? That’s relatable?

Yes to all three, apparently.

These women are organized too. They are showing up. Clancy has pleaded not guilty by reason of lack of criminal responsibility – or in layman’s terms, not guilty by reason of insanity. Clancy was suffering from severe postpartum psychosis, was on enough meds to stock a pharmacy, and was, per her own reports, hearing voices.

[…]

Wrong Side

What is wrong with these women defending Lindsay Clancy? I can understand a sincere belief that postpartum depression and psychosis aren’t taken seriously enough (I don’t actually think that’s true, but I can understand somebody thinking it is). But I actually cannot understand somebody looking at Clancy’s actions and thinking, “Same, girl.”

I’m not alone. We may be seeing the beginnings of a backlash to a backlash. The first backlash is the intense, unreturned dislike young women are experiencing these days for the coarser sex. A manifestation of that, I submit, is blaming the supposed inattentiveness of a man for his wife throttling his children to death.

Survey of British women done for The New Statesman.

This backlash though is one of men asking themselves, just as I did, what the fuck? Where is this tribalism coming from? What causes a person to look at Patrick Clancy, who returned home from a drug store after picking up his wife’s meds to find her sprawled on the yard, his three children strangled inside, and think, “I don’t like the look of him …?”

August 24, 2026

It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions

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

Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):

We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.

There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.

Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.

But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.

The use and abuse of moral mascots

The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.

The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.

The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.

In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.

History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.

The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.

Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.

The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.

The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.

Trade negotiations degrade into full-on trade war

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

As I mentioned the other day, I don’t believe Prime Minister Mark Carney ever intended to reach a trade agreement with the United States, because it was far better for his domestic political situation to have the US — and especially Donald Trump — as a focal point for retired Canadian boomers to trigger a two-minute hate. Every time the name Trump appeared in a state-sponsored newspaper or TV story, Carney’s popularity went up. After a decade of economic stasis and relative decline under Justin Trudeau, Carney’s more staid persona told the boomers that “the adults were back in charge”, yet Carney’s policies have been largely the same as Trudeau’s with a bit less hamming it up for the cameras.

On his Substack, Brian Lilley considers the potential economic damage of the increased tariffs:

“You’re at war when you get attacked, we got attacked.”

That’s what Prime Minister Mark Carney said when he was asked why it sounded like was going to war after his Saturday morning speech.

Carney used references to war multiple times in his speech and during his Q & A with reporters.

“We’re stronger now than when the United States started this trade war. More unified, more determined, more ambitious,” he said in his speech.

Not sure that I believe that to be the case, though we could be if we take the right steps, something I was writing about in my latest column for the Sun.

Previously, I have questioned whether we should consider this a trade war between Canada and the United States. The Americans say they don’t see it that way, they see it a change in trade policy, an attempt to rebalance trade.

My thinking that perhaps the Americans were right was that calling it a trade war put us in the wrong mindset. Canadians were looking for a fight with the Americans, many still are and are happy that Carney walked away from this deal.

Of course, for the devoted “Elbows Up” crowd, no deal was always the best deal. They foolishly believe we can and should walk away from the United States.

After this latest round of tariffs though, I’m fine calling it a trade war.

Melanie in Saskatchewan calls it “the most convenient failed trade deal in Canada”:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Imagine, if you will, a prime minister first installed and then elected, because Canadians believed he was uniquely equipped to deal with Donald Trump. Our hypothetical prime minister has impeccable credentials, international connections, central banking experience, serious suits, and the reassuring manner of a man who appears to know exactly which fork to use while the dining room burns down around him.

Most importantly, his political identity rests on one enormously useful proposition: Only he can handle Trump.

Now imagine the negotiations aren’t going particularly well. Not outright disastrous, at least not yet. Just difficult. Canada makes concessions. Ottawa drops the Digital Services Tax, removes most retaliatory tariffs, and American alcohol and supply management are on the table.

Still, negotiations continue, but then something changes.

On August 18, Trump postpones the new 50 per cent tariffs for three days after the two sides report “substantial progress”. By August 20, Canada’s trade minister says they’re “very close” to a deal. Reporting suggests the agreement under discussion could halve steel and aluminum tariffs and reduce tariffs on Canadian-built vehicles from 25 to 15 per cent.

And then … poof!

No deal. Do not pass go, consider this farce terminated.

The 50 per cent tariffs take effect. Carney suspends negotiations, the Canadian negotiators come home, and Ottawa announces retaliation. Washington says Canada backed away from commitments while Ottawa resolutely asserts Washington changed the terms at the last minute.

Well, that’s pretty fricking interesting, isn’t it?

So naturally our hypothetical prime minister takes to the airwaves and explains exactly what happened. Except he doesn’t, not with any actual clarity.

He speaks for more than twenty minutes, probably moistly, wandering from storms and changing climates to sovereignty and resilience, then through infrastructure, LNG, nuclear power, housing, defence, diversification and investment. By the time he finishes, we’ve practically navigated the entire federal government, several industries and the weather forecast.

Canada, we learn, is “master in our own home”. Well, isn’t that just terrific! What happened to the bloody trade deal?! Carney says the Americans introduced new terms that were “uneconomic” and “unfair”. They “asked too much and offered too little”. Who is going to draw the short straw and tell Carney those are adjectives and conclusions, and not terms?

Then comes a particularly curious bit. Carney says Washington also sought restrictions affecting Canada’s future trade relationships with other countries.

Other … countries.

But he never actually tells us which countries Washington was talking about, exactly what restrictions were being demanded, or which “certain sectors” he meant when he admitted the Americans wanted Canada to coordinate tariffs against other countries. Stranger still, Carney conceded that Canada could actually see merit in some of it as part of the right deal.

So which countries? Which sectors? And which parts of this supposedly unacceptable assault on Canadian sovereignty did you actually find reasonable? Suddenly the man who just spent twenty minutes talking develops an acute shortage of proper nouns.

August 23, 2026

It is indeed a great curse to get everything you wished for

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

I have no idea how authentic these are, but even if they were dreamed up in the 1940s by a chain-smoking ad guy trying to sell pre-printed matchbooks to Chinese restaurants, they have a distinct ring of truth to them:

  1. May you live in interesting times
  2. May you be recognized by powerful people
  3. May you get what you wish for

John C. Wright suggests that the third curse adequately explains why womens’ organizations are always so angry:

Photo from John C. Wright

Here is a comment from Twitter from a writer with the persican but cutting name of Peachy Keenan:

    Why are so many women sooo angry? They won. They got everything they wanted.

    Men have never been doing this badly, and women have never been doing this well.

    They make more, they have the majority of jobs, they are the majority of college graduates, (UCLA undergrad is 60% female), they make more money, have much lower rates of suicide, addiction, and alcoholism, and live longer.

    They won: they took over all men-only spaces, they took over the Boy Scouts, they ended men’s bathrooms, they can fly fighter planes and be in combat.

    Marriage is optional, divorce is no-fault, they win 99% of the custody battles, they can control fertility at will, and they can’t get drafted. We are all living in the female future they promised.

So many women are so angry precisely because they won.

Women are naturally submissive and self sacrificial, loving and supportive. Feminine.

The lone wolf quality of being one’s own man is lonely, self supportive, selfish and domineering. Masculine.

But the sole reward for being a lone wolf, a pioneer, a masterless man, is the promise that one day, after proving yourself, you will win the love of wife and child, and she will turn your cave or hut into a home. The reward of being an independent man, a lonely man, a rebel who plays by his own rules, is finding a wife who will love, honor, and obey.

Woman obviously cannot have that reward. Women are attracted to rebels, bad boys, wolves, winners. They do not want to be them.

Women do not want to win wives.

Woman naturally want to turn huts into homes, and make their man happy. They do not want to live in the hut, run in the rat race, fight in the war.

Women do not want to crush their enemies and drive their enemies before them and hear the lamentation of their women. That is Conan.

Women, by and large, far prefer character assassination, whisper campaigns, false friendships, as the means to undermine enemies: alive but humiliated, and forced to recant and apologize.

A womanly way to win a debate is not through facts and logic, obeying the rules of debate. That is the behavior of a sportsman, a knight in a joust. A womanly way to win a debate is by humiliating the opponent into silence, by threat, by backstabbing. Cancel culture is the perfect tool for the feminine approach.

Women as well as men would rather live in a world run by men. Men aspire to run a world with rules, with honor, with chivalry, where confrontations are direct, juries rule on evidence rather than feelings or group-loyalty, innocence is rewarded and virtue punished. Women, and womanly men, aspire to run a world as a welfare state, a nanny state, where good intentions matter more than good results, and you never get a change to confront the accuser nor answer the whispered accusations. No arguments, no debate, no discussion is allowed, because that would produce conflict, disharmony, and someone might get his feelings hurt.

We have seen in countless cases how a feminized world works: if a mother strangles her children to death, the female world defends her. If a notorious academic fraud is awarded a position far beyond his competence to serve, and commits suicide rather than face the shame of exposure, the female world defends him. Cowardly assassins shooting bankers or public speakers, third-world rape gangs, cross-dressers in woman’s sports or prisons, Mohammedan child-molesters, spotted owls, endangered whales, or anything or anyone who is or who can be shoehorned into being a victim, a sad sack, a crybaby … the female world leads the otherwise healthy and normal maternal instinct to comfort crying babies into comforting any and every monster and madness imaginable, and female fear of social disapproval does not allow her, even in her own mind, to question her master.

Trade deal? What trade deal? Best we can do is more tariffs

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

My sense has always been that the Carney government didn’t really want to get a deal done with Trump, because it was far more politically useful to keep the eLbOzOs all angry and posturing than to negotiate in good faith. Canada’s premiers, taken as a group, have been a never-ending stream of clown car antics, political gamesmanship, and schoolyard baiting. Yes, Trump is infuriating, inconsistent, obnoxious, and even more performative than Justin Trudeau but he’s the current American president and we needed to send sensible politicians and diplomats to work with him.

The presstitutes in the Canadian relic media have been eagerly fanning the flames of Trump Derangement Syndrome across the country, so when the latest episode of The Line podcast popped up yesterday, I had to provide a helpful edit to their episode title:

They’re going to do everything they can to deflect blame from their beloved paymaster, Dear Leader, and point accusingly at Pierre Emmanuel Goldstein and his band of anti-Canadian wreckers and looters in the Conservative party.

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @jaycurrie discussed this when the news broke of the breakdown in talks:

The last minute collapse of trade negotiations between Canada and the US demonstrates a fecklessness on the Canadian side which is astonishing. The walking resume — in the very good suits — could not get’er done.

Apparently those damn Yankees had unacceptable last minute changes. No shit. You are dealing with serious negotiators who will squeeze hard. It is said of Trump that he regarded signed contracts as the beginning of the negotiation.

Brutal, unscrupulous, nasty. Orange man very, very, bad. But you play the hand you’re dealt. Had Canada sent serious negotiators a year ago rather than posturing and dumbly sticking the official elbows in the air, we’d have a deal.

Or, had we had negotiators who did not take Dudley Doright as a model, we would have signed a “bad deal” and gone right back to the table to get a better deal. I’d love to know what the show stopper American last minute “demands” were.

Trade is a constant series of negotiations. A deal in place would have avoided the BS 50% tariffs and set the stage for the next deal. This collapse just puts us in a deep hole smarter people will have to climb out of.

“That’s my final offer” is a tactic. Is it an offer you like? No. Is it an offer you can live with? Probably. Again, the devil is in the details. But unless the offer required Canada to cede territory (which Eby is already more than willing to do) it was workable.

“A bad deal is worse than no deal at all” when there are 50% tariffs looming as a consequence of “no deal” is a very dumb position to take. Brace for “defense of Canadian Sovereignty” in a matter of minutes.

These trade talks have been bungled from the beginning simply because a combination of the political advantages of TDS and an inflated view of Canada’s relative bargaining strength created a reality free bubble.

The sheer arrogance and vile political opportunism of the Carney Liberals has been on full display for a year. Trump and his people called BS. Carney was euchred. Canada is, frankly, boned.

Maxime Bernier:

New 50-per-cent levies will hit around $28-billion worth of Canadian goods, which is roughly 5 per cent of Canada’s exports to the United States.

Carney has said it will respond with retaliatory tariffs on $28-billion worth of U.S. products.

Escalation is a very bad idea! Tariff retaliation has just triggered an escalatory trade war we cannot win. The U.S. economy is 10 times larger than ours.

A study released last week by the Canadian American Business Council concluded that the end of USMCA would have a surprisingly small impact on the Canadian economy.

It estimates that, even with high and long-lasting tariffs, Canada’s economy would only be about 1.6 per cent smaller in 2035 than if the USMCA were renewed and respected, and tariffs fell to near zero.

We are further damaging our economy with these “dollar-for-dollar” counter-tariffs.

Retaliatory tariffs are NOT a weapon. They are a tax on Canadians.

Who do you think absorbs that cost?
Canadian consumers, businesses, and workers.

Let’s be brutally honest: the Canadian government is worsening the situation. Canadian families will pay the price at the checkout counter.

The National Roast gets it:

QotD: “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store”

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

It’s one of those numbers that sings so easily you’d have to be a total idiot to louse it up. I’ve always loved it because it’s pure Americana, a song that no other culture could have produced. As I mentioned last week, I’m often asked how I started writing, what got me interested, who were my influences, all the usual questions. And I don’t really have a ready answer. But, if I were to be semi-serious about it, it was songs like this that tickled my curiosity about language – not just the words and phrases and images, but the way the ideas were expressed so neatly. Compression is the essence of songwriting, and if you had to come up with a couplet that defines the genre, that encompasses a whole world and a whole point of view and an entire musical tradition, “I found a million dollar baby in a five and ten cent store” comes as close as any.

I once asked a friend in the French music biz how the song went over there. I hummed him the tune and he sang me the French lyrics and, although I can’t recall any of them, I remember they were entirely different from the English words. It’s not just the five-and-ten that’s hard to translate or the million dollar baby. But the concept of finding the latter inside the former is also very American. There are a ton of Mitteleuropean operettas in which the prince or duke or count wanders into the streets in disguise and falls in love with a serving wench, but the serving wench usually turns out to be a Countess or Margravine or some such also wandering around in disguise. Even the British are prone to this syndrome (Spring In Park Lane, etc). But in an American song the shop girl is a genuine shop girl, and she’s still a million dollar baby. That’s what makes it American.

In the Sixties, by the way, you could have found a future billion dollar baby in a five and ten cent store: Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, got his start in retail as a franchisee at a Ben Franklin’s, founded in 1920 by the Butler brothers, who’d been in the five-and-dime business since the 1870s. I’m not saying “I Found a Million Dollar Greeter in the Big Box Store at the Strip Mall on the Edge of Town” would be as big a hit, but there is an historical continuity from the Butlers to Wal-Mart.

Mark Steyn, “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (in a Five and Ten Cent Store)”, Steyn Online, 2020-10-25.

August 22, 2026

The WEF – first up against the wall come the revolution

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski considers just how the lizard people of the World Economic Forum came to be “The People Who Decided They Should Run Everything”:

Every year in January, the most important people in the world travel to Davos, Switzerland — a ski resort — to discuss the problems facing humanity. They arrive on private jets. They stay in five-star hotels. They are protected by five thousand soldiers and police. They eat very well. They talk about inequality, climate change, and the need for ordinary people to consume less. Then they fly home on private jets.

This is not satire. This is the schedule.

1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.

2. The Young Global Leaders program is the masterpiece. Founded in 2004, with its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow, running since 1993. Together the programs have formed: Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and the health ministers who designed most of the Western world’s COVID response. The pipeline runs continuously. The list is published on the WEF website. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an alumni directory.

3. The program works because it operates before power, not after. By the time a Young Global Leader becomes a prime minister or finance minister, they have already spent years in the same rooms, sharing the same assumptions, networking with the same people. They don’t need to be told what to do. They already know – because they were formed together, in Davos, before anyone gave them the job. The Fabian Society permeates institutions over generations. The WEF does it in a long weekend, with better catering.

4. The Great Reset — announced in 2020 with timing that should give everyone pause — is the program stated plainly. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Build Back Better. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The language is always the language of inevitability: this is happening, the question is only how to manage it. The managed future, designed by the people in the ski resort, for the people who were not invited.

5. The irony is structural. The people most loudly “concerned about inequality” meet in one of the most expensive places on earth. Those most “concerned about climate change” arrive by private jet. Those most “concerned about democracy” design systems insulating them from democratic accountability. The gap between the speech and the life is visible from orbit. They don’t notice it. Or they notice and calculate, correctly, that nobody who matters will say so.

6. What Davos actually produces is “consensus” – the consensus of people who have implicitly agreed before arriving, because people who disagree don’t get invited. Climate policy, AI regulation, tax harmonization, digital currency – these are not debated at Davos. They are shaped there. The debate happens later, when implementation is already underway.

7. The Young Global Leaders are the tell. A program that identifies, selects, and forms the next generation of leaders before they become leaders is not a networking event. It is a formation pipeline. The Jesuits understood that if you form a person before they have power, you own what they do with the power. The WEF understood the same thing and built it into a global institution.

The question is simple:

Who decided Klaus Schwab should select the world’s next generation of leaders?

Nobody.

He just started doing it.

And the people who run things let him – because increasingly, the people who run things were people he had already formed.

Did you choose them?

August 21, 2026

This is something we genuinely need today

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Plus, as Kate at Small Dead Animals often points out “Mischief is important“:

In one of the only three management books anyone should bother to read — and everyone should read the three — Robert Townsend says that a CEO should, while on the road, try phoning his own company. Try the helpline and see how far he gets. Try calling his own office. Sure, you should end up with the Executive Secretary who then directs it to the right person but sometimes that correct person is going to be you. Say, Warren Buffett calling to make you rich by buying the company and thus crystallising all your stock options and RSUs.

This is a lesson that has been forgotten. From a Guardian list of things government should pass laws to make happen:

    Force companies to put a phone number on their homepage

    You’ve got a problem with a company and you want to get it sorted – and then you realise you cannot find a number for it anywhere. There are communications companies that have no “contact us” link anywhere to be seen, and energy companies that send you all round the houses looking for a way to get in touch.

    One of the recurring themes of Guardian Money readers’ problems is the struggle to find someone to help when something goes wrong. Clearly, once you have published a phone number, you need staff at the other end answering the phone and offering some joined-up thinking, so this is only the start of the solution – but at least customers would not feel like companies were trying to hide from them.

This does not work as there is no guarantee that anyone will answer the call.

We’ve also that basic point that Burke and his Little Platoons can — and often do — solve problems better than government. So, here’s the pitch for that private sector service.

We set up a database of the home and work and mobile phone numbers — emails too — of the management of companies. Most importantly, the board of directors. If the company is owned by private equity — say — then the General Partners of the PE company.

Obviously, if a company has a helpline, which people answer, then all of that information stays private to us. If a company does not then we publish it as a page saying these are the contact numbers for that company. Say, Evri, the delivery people. The board members get their numbers and email publicly revealed. As I recall it they’re PE as well so some number of GPs over in the US also start getting aggrieved calls from Lesser Wallop about non-delivery. Not that any Septic would be able to understand Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop but it’s the instance of the call that matters. Evri is used as an example for a bit of looking around a few months back seemed to reveal that they had no UK phone number at all. Thus the directors it will be.

The top management of companies that do not provide a helpline — nor answer the one they claim to have — will have the customer complaints calls directed toward them. This will, of course, rapidly mean the opening of a useful customer complaint line that people actually answer. Those making that £250k a year as the board member of whatever do not want to be talking to Ms. Aggrieved of Lesser Wallop. Therefore phone calls from Ms. Aggrieved will lead to the creation of a useful customer services department.

At which point, of course, we take the board members’ phone numbers down and job done. But, clearly, we keep monitoring to ensure that those service times don’t then decline.

Make the bastards who make the decisions suffer the consequences of those decisions. Works this does, really, it works.

Now, there will be some who say that government can do that. Why use the Little Platoons when a law can simply be passed?

Which is to miss a basic philosophic point, which is that we should only use government when we, ourselves, cannot do it. Government is for when the Little Platoons cannot achieve it. Letters of Marque are lovely things but biffing the Frenchies is better done with a Royal Navy. Assuming we still had one of course. RNLI, on the other hand, works better without government than it would with.

But much more than that. For who are the worst at providing a contact number that works? Why, that would be government, wouldn’t it? Anyone ever tried to ‘phone HMRC? Quite.

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male”

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

A few weeks back, John C. Wright contemplated how he initially understood what Rudyard Kipling was saying in his poem “The Female of the Species” and how he realized he’d been mistaken:

    So it comes that Man, the coward,
    when he gathers to confer
    With his fellow-braves in council,
    dare not leave a place for her
    Where, at war with Life and Conscience,
    he uplifts his erring hands
    To some God of Abstract Justice –
    which no woman understands.

    And Man knows it! Knows, moreover,
    that the Woman that God gave him
    Must command but may not govern –
    shall enthrall but not enslave him.
    And She knows, because She warns him,
    and Her instincts never fail,
    That the Female of Her Species is more
    deadly than the Male.

The argument runs that woman’s nature, by its nature, requires her to be uncompromising and ferocious to defend her children. Hence the political logic of compromise, half-measures and horse-trading (universally required for masculine teamwork with friends or détente with enemies) ought to be and is alien to the female instinct.

The poet here, with tongue in cheek, calls these masculine traits of professionalism toward allies and military courtesy toward enemies as prompted by folly or fear. The woman is described as if she were a battleship “armed and engined” and launched for one sole purpose.

The poet then cautions that this maternal instinct, so right and necessary for the survival of the race (“lest the generations fail”), becomes fanatical and destructive when used to support political policies, which become, in effect, to her, her children.

In law school, I was told that a prisoner on death row, after all other souls on earth were convinced he was a murderer, would still have his mother writing letters to the governor petitioning for a pardon. The maternal instinct never parlays, never ceases, never surrenders, never listens to reason.

Hence, or so Kipling warns, the female of the species must be kept away from the seats of power, that is, the ballot box and public office (“when he gathers to confer with his fellow-braves in council”) and he ends by warning that she herself knows this and warns of it.

One jest in particular that flew over my head was the line about femme and baron. In law, man and mate are treated as one person by coverture, and in heraldry her coat of arms and his are two halves of one: here, the poet is implying that she is usurping his rights without surrendering any of her own (As when a female can vote for war but is immune from the draft.)

Yesterday, I linked to a Lorenzo Warby essay that considered some of the same aspects in a non-poetic context.

Update: I’m told it’s helpful to include the URL to the original post.

Ted Gioia’s objections to Effective Altruism

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

I’ve only encountered discussions of Effective Altruism in the comments at Scott Alexander’s blog, so I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other. On Substack Notes, Ted Gioia explains his why he’s not a fan:

After my article on the Phoebe Gates scandal yesterday, some readers have asked for more analytical detail of my objections to Effective Altruism. I provide that below — but, be forewarned, this is more philosophy than journalism. If you’re not interested in analytic philosophy, you should just skip this. Even so, some of you will find this interesting, so I share it here.

TED ON EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM

    Effective Altruism is a consequentialist ethical system, unlike deontological approaches which are primarily rule-driven. You may assume that judging a moral action by its consequences is obviously the right thing to do, but the reality is that no religion, government, or community has ever made ethical decisions in this way.

    If you commit murder, the judge pronounces sentence on your violation of the law, but the judge NEVER says: “Let’s wait ten years and determine the consequences of the murder you committed — maybe it was okay”. This never happens and never will, and for a very good reason. Chaos would ensue if actions could be justified by long-term consequences.

    But that is precisely the kind of chaos that Effective Altruism allows, and willingly embraces. Its practitioners are extreme in this way — they focus on the most long-term and geographically distant consequences. This is dangerous, much like driving without looking at the road in front of you, but instead imagining what’s happening on the road a mile ahead.

    This inevitably results in crashes. That’s why I can accurately predict that Effective Altruists will be recognized by the chaotic short-term impact of their efforts. And this is precisely what happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, Catherine Ellison, Leopold Aschenbrenner, and now Phoebe Gates. None of this is coincidence. The chaos is hard-baked into their philosophical assumptions.

    So I can safely predict that the same thing will happen again in the future. Effective Altrusim, if it continues to retain its influence, will lead to more fiascos, meltdowns, and criminal actions. That’s why I describe it as a moral philosophy for Bond villains.

    And even if we did attempt to justify actions by consequences, how can you begin to implement such a methodology? Do we need to wait a year to measure consequences? Or ten years? Or a lifetime? Or several generations? And how can you even begin to separate the impact of other factors or counterfactuals? If you kill a baby because you know it will grow up to be Hitler, how can you ever prove that fact? The only certainty is that you just killed a baby.

    So this adds a second problem to Effective Altruism — not only does it embrace chaos, but it operates in a perpetual mist of vagueness. This, too, is exactly what we see in the public statements of Sam Bankman-Fried and others. Here, too, the connection between their philosophy and their malfeasance is evident at every step. Just look and see the many grand (but ambiguous) pronouncements that come out of their lips. It’s almost a trademark of the cult.

    The next problem of consequentialist ethics is that the bad things its practioners do are REALITIES — happening immediately — while any positive consequences of their actions are merely POSSIBILITIES. So from a chronological perspective, the chaos precedes benefits. From an ontological perspective, the negatives have total existence while the positives merely possess possible existence. And because chronology can’t be reversed, the perpetrators can’t undo actions if the positive consequences never ensue. These are significant problems with Effective Altruism.

    I won’t even go into the psychological make-up of people who act this way — who tend to display a narcissistic savior complex that runs counter to everything we know about the character of ethical people. I’m dealing here with philosophy, not psychology. But you could write an entire book on the psychological profile of Effective Altruism — and it would be a devastating takedown of the cult.

    So you can cite names like Peter Singer, but that doesn’t change any of this. At best, Singer can say that he is so super smart he can understand consequences better than any of us. But that’s exactly what Sam Bankman-Fried thought, and Leopold Aschenbrenner, and all the others. (By the way, Stalin, Mao and other mass killers would inevitably make this same kind of Effective Altruist argument to justify their murders — because crimes on that magnitude inevitably demand consequentialist justifications. They were super-smart people too.)

    After you consider this, you start to understand why the most powerful ethical systems are built on something stronger than possible longterm consequences. Take your pick — Kant’s categorical imperative, Thomistic natural law, Aristotelian virtue ethics, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule, the Code of Hammurabi, Rawlsian justice, or whatever. They are all superior to Effective Altruism, and it’s not even close.

Batman as a modern Sisyphus

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

I don’t normally post much about comic book characters, because my interest in comic books lasted from about 1965 to 1975 … a very different era than most of the comic books of today (I’m sure it’s considered tantamount to a hate crime to refer to them as “comic books” by a significant number of long-time fans). Here, Devon Eriksen explains why the Batman character is a modern rendition of the Greek hero Sisyphus and his eternal punishment in the underworld:

Batman, the fictional character, does not embrace the Batman Fallacy because he is written as stupid. He’s obviously intended to be very intelligent.

But the many, many authors of this character have always agreed that he must have this one critical blind spot.

Why?

So the story can continue.

See, if Batman kills the Joker, or turns him over for execution, the story, or at least a popular villain, is over. No more Joker stories.

So the character of Batman must be created in the image of Sisyphus… always struggling against the manifestation of the problem, but never able to address the root cause.

All of Batman’s victories must be against the Joker’s latest scheme, not the Joker himself. He must forever be playing defense, making heroic efforts merely to maintain things as they are, like the Red Queen running as fast as she can just to stand still.

This is how the Joker, a man of no special resources or talents, whose sole advantage is utter disregard for law, empathy, or human life, can be a challenging foe for a billionaire genius superathlete with an endless array of technologies and skills.

He can simply generate schemes forever. He doesn’t have to win always, or even often. Because every one of his victories is real and has permanent consequences, and every one of his defeats is temporary, pending a rematch.

Batman, by his very nature, can never stop the Joker, only slow him down.

If Batman were a different character, if he were willing to, say, throw the Joker out of a helicopter over a vast body of water, then the story would eventually end, because pretty soon the setting would no longer need Batman.

And no doubt on that day, there would be a great deal of whinging over whether throwing the Joker out of a helicopter was a “human rights abuse”, as if the Joker himself were not a walking, talking human rights abuse to begin with.

But Batman can never win, and never stop fighting, because he refuses to go on the offensive and remove his enemies from play.

This post is not about Batman.

August 20, 2026

“It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle discusses the fine art of writing libellous things about someone without quite giving enough legally actionable material for the victim to have a chance to retaliate successfully:

Simon Edge on GB News.
Screencap from Andrew Doyle

How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a “racist” for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.

It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.

It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.

Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as “Britain’s only centre-right bookshop”, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.

    Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.

This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?

QotD: George Bernard Shaw’s role as Stalin’s useful idiot

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

George Bernard Shaw stood in Stalin’s USSR in 1931, watching millions starve to death, and declared there was no famine at all. The Nobel Prize-winning playwright didn’t just stay silent about the horror unfolding around him. He actively promoted the lie that would help Stalin cover up one of history’s greatest atrocities.

Shaw toured Ukraine during the height of the Holodomor, when Soviet grain requisitions had stripped peasants of every scrap of food. Conservative estimates put the death toll at 3.5 million Ukrainians. Shaw saw the empty villages, the skeletal survivors, the mass graves. Then he signed a public letter praising Stalin’s “remarkable progress” and told Western journalists that reports of famine were capitalist propaganda.

Why would an intelligent man become Stalin’s useful idiot? Shaw believed in central planning with religious fervor. He thought brilliant intellectuals like himself could design society better than millions of individuals making their own choices. When confronted with central planning’s inevitable result (mass death), he chose to lie rather than admit his ideology killed people. Shaw preferred beautiful theory to ugly facts.

Shaw deliberately used his celebrity status to give Stalin cover while Ukrainian children died of starvation. He returned to Britain and spent years defending Soviet policies, even as refugee testimonies and photographic evidence exposed the genocide. The man who wrote about moral awakening in Pygmalion had abandoned his own moral compass entirely.

Free market economists warned that socialist calculation was impossible, that without prices and property rights, economies would collapse into chaos and death. Shaw dismissed these warnings as bourgeois nonsense while standing ankle-deep in their vindication.

Handre, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-13.

Update, 21 August: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

August 18, 2026

QotD: A quick heuristic for evaluating public figures

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

    InfantryDort @infantrydort

    The amount of trust I have in a person is directly proportional to how many legacy media hit pieces they attract.

My first thought was: good heuristic for evaluating public figures!

My second thought was: No, wait. Sometimes the legacy media attacks genuinely bad people.

My third thought was: … but this happens surprisingly seldom. Why is that? A few seconds of thought reveal the answer.

When you’re policing an orthodoxy (and the legacy media definitely sees its job as policing an orthodoxy) the most dangerous person isn’t the one whose beliefs are radically different from the orthodoxy, but the deviant whose position is just close enough to attract converts from within the orthodox mass.

Heretics get burned more often than do unbelievers.

So yes, InfantryDort is right. Probabilistically, trusting public figures that the media constantly does hit pieces on is unlikely to tangle you up with the genuinely evil and crazy, and much more likely to point you at truth-seekers.

ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-15.

August 17, 2026

Peacemaker and the Red Skull’s Ghost: Breaking The Post-WWII Mythos

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 10 Apr 2026

I expect half the viewers to think I sound like a Leftist and the other half to think I’m turning into their Right-wing uncle with a little dash of conspiracy theorizing on this one. But there’s a point here that I think is worth stating. Or maybe it’s just a silly video about superheroes and a war we can’t seem to get over.

00:00 Intro
03:18 Pennyworth
04:40 Political Sabotage
11:08 Contending with the Ghost
(more…)

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