Quotulatiousness

October 10, 2025

The federal government’s gun “buyback” program pilot in Nova Scotia

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tim Thurley responds to a report about the gun “buyback” pilot program:

This reads like a government flailing for a message. We know this is incorrect, the Minister knows it is incorrect, and we know the Minister knows it is incorrect, and yet.

(The “Ensure…” section is also painful to read, but that’s another matter.)

https://www.saltwire.com/cape-breton/federal-minister-denies-political-motivation-in-choosing-cape-breton-to-pilot-gun-buyback-program

He’s suggesting the risk is posed by stolen firearms. Not only do we know this is a small portion of risk — and easily substituted by other sources — but to say we must confiscate your property because someone else might misuse it sounds an awful lot like victim blaming.

Nobody bought an AR-15 under the assumption it was legal when they bought it (unless FRT banned, then it gets complex).

If a licensed user bought and registered it pre-OIC (or just bought if non-restricted) then it was legal when they bought it, period. No assumptions needed.

A rebate is also incorrect. A rebate is something a customer gets back after purchase.

They get to keep both the rebate and the product.

The part about only getting some money back is at least accurate.

The government is not offering full compensation for many users based on the list prices, and has reiterated that it does not plan to offer further compensation once the initial pot runs out.

October 9, 2025

Freedom Convoy 2022 – “… proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce”

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

In the National Post, Michael Higgins states the obvious fact that Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, and the rest of the Freedom Convoy protesters were never insurrectionists. Trudeau had decided in advance that the convoy was a maple-flavoured January 6th attempt to overthrow the government — if not an attempt to re-stage the storming of the Winter Palace — and merely waited for the violence to break out and/or the Parliament buildings to be stormed. But nobody other than a few particularly glowy federal provocateurs was interested … because they were there to protest government policy not to start a revolution:

Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister of the day, portrayed them as extremists intent on overthrowing the government.

“This so-called ‘freedom convoy’ called for the overthrow of the government. They called for the Governor General to unilaterally remove the Prime Minister from office,” Mendicino told a Commons parliamentary committee.

Indeed, the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General was inundated with calls and emails by protesters demanding then prime minister Justin Trudeau be fired.

But since the Governor General can’t just decide to sack a prime minister, these email-writing anarchists were particularly inept as well as being constitutionally illiterate.

It was Shakespearean farce, but Liberals like Mendicino were happy to play politics and paint the convoy protesters as lawless subversives bent on destroying democracy.

Although, to be fair, Trudeau only said they were a “small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” — more retrogrades than revolutionaries.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s Keystone Kops had all the laws, rules and regulations needed to disband the convoy, they just lacked the leadership.

Days into the occupation, Ottawa Police Services chief, Peter Sloly, appeared to have thrown up his hands in resignation, stating, “There may not be a policing solution” to the crisis. Two weeks later, he quit.

In his report, the public inquiry commissioner Paul Rouleau would later criticize the “serious dysfunction within the OPS’s leadership”.

The government theatrics escalated with the imposition of the Emergencies Act, proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce. Within days, police had cleared the convoy and several other blockades without incident.

This was less the power of the Emergencies Act and more to do with getting the police to just act.

Enoch Powell: The Father of Brexit?

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

The Rest Is History
Published 6 Oct 2025

Who was Enoch Powell, the deeply controversial British conservative politician? Why is he the father of Brexit, and possibly even Reform? And, how did he come to make his inflammatory “Rivers of Blood speech”, in 1968?

00:00 Intro
00:23 Hive
01:46 Introducing Enoch Powell
07:41 A very peculiar childhood
09:19 The least clubbable man in Cambridge
13:30 War years
14:48 An imperial dream thwarted
17:02 An eccentric MP
23:26 The anti-American
24:53 Immigration in post-war Britain
31:09 Smethwick 1964: campaign, slogan, shock result
33:34 Uber
34:14 Mid-60s Britain
35:59 Powell pivots to immigration
41:44 English identity in Powell’s mind (“united people in an island home”)
44:12 Politics & ambition: differentiating from Heath
45:03 The role of US race riots in Powell’s evolving opinions
46:24 Kenyan Asians crisis; Labour’s response
49:47 Race Relations Bill setup: Powell prepares the speech
50:59 The “Rivers of Blood” speech
56:07 Immediate fallout: sacking, friends’ reactions
57:42 Public opinion divides
1:00:04 His legacy
1:04:02 Was Powell racist?
1:08:12 Long-term legacy: why politicians avoided the topic

Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss Enoch Powell — one of the most incendiary and contentious figures in all of British political history — and his enduring shadow today.
(more…)

Britain is only a few steps further than Canada in the war on free speech

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

In The Line, Peter Menzies looks at the worsening situation for freedom of speech and freedom of expression in Britain, noting that what’s happening over in Blighty is our immediate future with current Liberal bills before Parliament to give government bureaucrats more power to silence us:

Everyone may know, for instance, that Kimmel got suspended by ABC for a week following statements made in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. But not a lot of people consuming Canadian media know that in the U.K., comedians weren’t just getting one-week suspensions. Nope. Last month they were getting arrested.

Right-wing icon Katie Hopkins, best known for her Batshit Bonkers Britain clips and Silly Cow tour, hadn’t been charged at the time of writing, but was arrested and, as they say in Blighty, “interviewed under caution”. Previously, Graham Linehan was arrested upon his return from the United States by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport. At issue were posts he had made on X in April.

“If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,” one Linehan post declared, “he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene, call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the balls.”

Currently on bail, Linehan returns to court on Oct. 29. The charges are harassment, criminal damage and suspicion of inciting hatred.

The merits of the cases can be debated, but my point today is that when it comes to digital policy and policing you, and the internet, Canadians and their media should be paying a lot more attention to the U.K.

Because it is there that the true illiberalism of modern Western so-called liberalism is most menacingly embraced. Even prior to the U.K.’s Online Safety Act coming into effect, pre-existing British legislation had been used to, for instance, convict six retired police officers for making comments “deemed to be offensive” within their private WhatsApp chat group. Following the Southport mass stabbing murders of little girls, at least two women with no prior history with police were given prison sentences — one for 15 months for a Facebook post calling for a mosque to be blown up, another 31 months for a tweet calling for hotels full of migrants to be burned. While their comments were certainly worthy of vigorous condemnation, the intervention of the state into private, closed conversations and the involvement of police, courts and the penal system has taken matters in the U.K. to a level inconsistent with liberal traditions.

Now that the Online Safety Act has supplemented those laws, hundreds of people have been arrested and dozens so far convicted for social media posts. The government calls the act a “new set of laws that protect children and adults online” in much the same way Justin Trudeau explained Canada’s own Online Harms Act. It’s all about “safety”.

Online Harms may have died when Parliament was prorogued last winter, but a successor is anticipated and, given Prime Minister Mark Carney’s obvious Anglophilia, it’s easy to speculate — fear is a better word — that he is taking inspiration from the Brits. After all, up until a few months ago, he was one of them.

Fighting back in the U.K. is, among others, Lord Toby Young, the Conservative peer, associate editor of The Spectator and founder of the Free Speech Union, which now has a Canadian branch featuring, among others, journalist Jonathan Kay. Young has protested that criminalizing disinformation hands governments the power to determine truth. Nevertheless, while Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has muttered that maybe the police have more important things to do, he shows — despite the meteoric rise in the polls of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party — no inclination to order a digital retreat.

In fact, Starmer just doubled down with the introduction of legislation imposing mandatory digital IDs. A petition opposing it and the potential to enable mass surveillance and state control has already gathered close to three million signatures.

There’s a good chance the Canadian Free Speech Union will be similarly engaged in the years ahead. The Trudeau government’s instincts when it came to digital legislation were not as extreme as Britain’s. And there are very real differences in the legal structure of free-speech rights in Canada and the U.K. — we have the Charter, and the British don’t. So our laws would be enacted and enforced differently here than they can be the the U.K.

October 8, 2025

Sentenced for their role in the largest peaceful demonstration in Canadian history

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

The longest “mischief” trial in Canadian history finally concluded on Tuesday with Chris Barber and Tamara Lich receiving much lighter sentences than the crown had asked for, but in my opinion, far harsher than justice demanded:

One of the readers at Small Dead Animals got a clanker to summarize this: “Regarding the convictions of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, compare their trials and sentences to leftwing protesters who have openly and violently broken laws in Canada.”

In comparison, left-wing protesters in Canada involved in violent or disruptive actions — such as anti-pipeline blockades (often tied to environmental and Indigenous rights causes) or Black Lives Matter (BLM) demonstrations against racism and police violence — have typically faced shorter trials and lighter sentences for similar or more destructive offenses. These cases often involve civil disobedience escalating to property damage, blockades, or clashes with police, but convictions emphasize non-violent intent or police misconduct, leading to minimal incarceration.

Overall, Lich and Barber’s cases drew unusually aggressive prosecution (e.g., multi-year sentences sought) despite no violence, contrasting with lighter outcomes for left-wing actions involving property destruction or direct confrontations. This disparity has fueled debates on selective enforcement, though courts in both contexts prioritize deterrence while considering protest motivations.

Unlike a lot of clanker slop, that is pretty fair. More reactions on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

In the Toronto Sun, Joe Warmington accurately calls it a “show trial of sorts”:

Even though this is far better than making these two go to prison or jail, these are still stiff sentencing considering neither were violent during the Convoy and both worked with police to tone things down during the three week protest that came to an end when the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act.

But this was a show trial of sorts, and Lich and Barber were political prisoners. Remember, both of these people have had the hardship of waiting 1,328 days through the longest mischief trial in Canadian history to get to this point. They had their bank accounts frozen during the convoy, Lich lost her job and Barber’s business is at risk of going under. A hearing is scheduled for next month in an effort to seize his famous “Big Red” truck.

It’s also lost on few that so many criminals with far more serious crimes have received far less in terms of length of trial, effort of the Crown and sentencing.

These are certainly stiffer sentences than some parliamentarians have received. For example, in 2021, Former Liberal Kitchener South-Hespeler MP Marwan Tabbara was handed a conditional discharge and put on probation for three years after his guilty plea was entered for two charges of assault on a man and a woman in Guelph. He also pleaded guilty to the amended charge of “unlawfully” being “in a dwelling” or home.

Conservative Sen. Patrick Brazeau was given an absolute discharge in 2015 on his guilty plea to assault and narcotics counts, which allowed him not to serve time or gain a criminal record. But while they did avoid jail time, Lich and Barber did get the book thrown at them harder than most.

Update, 9 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 7, 2025

Antifa and the “propaganda of the deed”

Filed under: Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:30

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR examines the irrational behaviour of Antifa as an inheritance from their chosen historical models:

“antifa 8973ag” by cantfightthetendies is licensed under CC BY 2.0

An important concept for understanding why the behavior of Antifa is not strategically rational is “propaganda of the deed”.

This is a concept with a long pedigree in left-anarchist theory, transmitted to Antifa via its minority “black flag” left anarchist faction

19th-century romantic anarchists viewed the state and capitalism as powerful illusions that could be shattered by bold, exemplary acts, thereby proving their vulnerability and offering hope to the oppressed. These deeds were intended to ignite the spirit of revolt by alerting the masses to the possibility of revolution, much like a spark that could set off a larger fire — thus, the emphasis on symbolic targets over objectively effective ones.

This kind of political communication could be effective if a majority of society, or at least a critical minority, are seething cauldrons of resentment just begging to be triggered against their oppressors. It also assumes that the revolutionary rage of the masses can, once unleashed, be effectively directed against Antifa’s enemies.

Both assumptions are highly questionable, but the important thing to understand for purposes of predicting Antifa’s behavior is that (a) Antifa behaves as though it still believes them, and (b) Antifa’s aboveground allies don’t have the capacity to restrain its behavior in detail.

The Gramscian infiltrators in the U.S.’s institutions need to keep their links to overt terrorism deniable, so they manage it mostly by raising or lowering the temperature of public propaganda. For example, when a Democratic politician says “Abolish ICE”, describes government actions as “fascism”, or wishes death on the children of a political opponent, this is raising the temperature. The effect, the intended effect, is to license increased propaganda of the deed by Antifa.

Reminder: unceasing damnation of conservatives as fascists and Nazis constituted instructions to stochastic terrorists like Tyler Robinson that the time had come to do something like shooting Charlie Kirk through the neck.

One problem with this is that because of Antifa’s psychology and doctrine, raising the temperature is easy, but lowering it is hard. Thus, it’s not a process the Gramscians want to start unless they believe either that they have escalation dominance over their opponents, or their political position is deteriorating so rapidly that they’ll never get a better chance to induce a legitimacy collapse.

It is out of scope for this essay to analyze to what extent those conditions are true. The point is, we are in a situation where the limited control Antifa’s aboveground allies can exert is all directed towards escalation, and Antifa’s belief in “propaganda of the deed” makes this very difficult to reverse.

Antifa has probably lost sight of the fact that escalating to insurrectionary violence is premature — it doesn’t have an army or a sufficiently powerful and nearby state sponsor for that.

Thus, absent serious degradation of Antifa’s capacity by law enforcement, expect increasing violence. Including, but not limited to, the deliberate murders of law enforcement personnel and opposing politicians.

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

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

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

Last week was the Red Wedding for Cracker Barrel.

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

QotD: “That wasn’t real communism …”

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

Leftism has always been a ridiculously reductive creed, but the One Thing all Leftism reduces to has undergone a radical shift. For Marx, of course, the One Thing was that thesis-antithesis-synthesis Hegelian schmear. Hegel’s ontology claims that the universe is talking to itself. Literally. That thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, summarized by the untranslatable German word Aufheben (“self-transcendence”; something like that), is literally a debate the World Spirit (or whatever) is having with itself.

All Karl Marx did was bring that down to the material level — it’s not the world spirit having a debate with itself, it’s the world, the material object. Both the debate and its conclusion are made manifest in History, capital-H, which is why Marx was one of a long line of gurus who claimed to make History into a hard science. That “wrong side of History” stuff the Left is always going on about? That’s why they use that phrase so much, and why it has such emotional resonance for them. If you’re a Dialectical Materialist, being against Socialism is like being against gravity. What could possibly be the point? You’re just being perverse, comrade, and on some level you must know that …

Alas, History isn’t a hard science. There are patterns, of course, any fool can see that, but those patterns are the intersection of human nature and emergent behavior. The proof is in the writings of Karl Marx himself — every prediction the man ever made was not just wrong, but ludicrously so, and after getting burned a few times he admitted in his letters to writing in such a way that he could never be “proven” wrong. See also: The complete history of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, and as a side note, you can tell the intellectual caliber of Socialism’s defenders by the fact that they trot out the excuse “That wasn’t real Communism; real Communism has never been tried.” Ah, so Lenin — he of Marxism-Leninism — wasn’t a true Communist. They’ll shoot you for saying that in, say, China, but do please go on …

Severian, “Power”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-02.

Update, 8 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 6, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how is he doing?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update, 7 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

QotD: Britain’s immigration crisis

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

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

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

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

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

And yet here we are.

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

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

But hey, maybe that’s just me.

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

October 5, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 4, 2025

Rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD)

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

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

Image via the Boston Medical Center

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

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

[…]

Jane and John

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[…]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alice in Wonderland by Oskar Kokoschka (1942)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 3, 2025

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

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

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

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

THANK THE GODDESS FOR FEMINISM!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update, 4 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

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