Quotulatiousness

October 16, 2026

Worried you might commit an accidental Islamophobia? Britain’s Greens can help!

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

The British Green Party has been getting a lot of media attention lately, but not for their former environmental concerns: now they’ve effectively converted themselves into the primary political vehicle for British Muslims, as Heydon Prowse explains:

You know you’re in People’s Front of Judea territory when the GEWs (Greens of England and Wales) decree that the majority of JEWs (Jews Everywhere in the World) are “racist“. Meanwhile, the party’s Muslim Greens grouping recently published a handy guide to what is and isn’t “Islamophobic”.

It turns out, pretty much everything is! Including, but not limited to, the following:

1) Criticising the Koran

The guidance warns against saying that the teachings of the Koran are backwards, because nothing says forward-thinking like a pre-Enlightenment ban on questioning religion.

2) Speaking up against Islam’s treatment of women

Koran 2:223 says wives are like farmland that husbands can cultivate as they please. Which, to be fair, is closer than the Green Party has come to discussing agriculture all year.

3) Saying that Islam isn’t a massive fan of the gays

Not a single Muslim country in the world permits or recognises same-sex marriage or lets gay couples adopt. But according to the Muslim Greens, this is all the fault of the Brits.

The guidance says: “Queerphobic legislation in many Muslim-majority countries is deeply tied to colonialism”. Apparently, the British Empire made them do it and has forced them to continue doing it enthusiastically ever since.

4) Going to the pub

Yes, apparently having too many Green Party meetings and social events in venues with alcohol present is racist. Given that Wetherspoons is the closest thing Britain has to a place of worship, I find this one deeply offensive.

Confused? You’re not alone. The Greens seem to have abandoned saving the planet in favour of a much more achievable pastime: making everything racist. It’s a bit like that game show, Is It Cake?, except instead of cutting open a handbag to reveal layers of sponge and jam, you dissect every political opinion to unveil a hidden hate crime.

Almost anything could be racist and you wouldn’t even know it. The guidance encourages Muslims to join the Greens because they “speak out on oppression everywhere”. But careful! It also says that if you assume a Muslim is oppressed, you might be being Islamophobic. Is it solidarity? Is it prejudice? Gotcha! It was cake all along! And now you’ve been referred to a disciplinary committee.

October 15, 2026

Nearly half of Cornell students report being “harassed”

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

William M Briggs discusses the most recent sexual harassment survey results from Cornell, where — if you take the numbers at face value — the situation is dire:

You may have heard of the depressing contretemps at Cornell of late (written in the lady’s (a hotelie) own words here, but I cannot recommended reading it). It is not a coincidence that Cornell recently asked all students about how much sexual assault and harassment they enjoyed. It is that survey which interests us, because it so closely matches the breed and we need to understand their shortcomings.

Don’t put too much blame on Cornell. New York has a law that makes them give this survey every two years. This allows bureaucrats and rulers to think that they have done something good, which is the main reason for their existence, regardless how silly the results are.

Cornell gave the “instrument” — toot, toot — to 6,000 students, but only had “757 full completions”, which is a return rate of just over 12%.

How would the missing 88% have answered? This is a key question. The assumption sociologists make is: exactly the same. Yet, as we’ll see, it is far from impossible that those who blew off the survey would have responded differently than those who did answer, especially on the questions I’ll highlight.

Naturally, a lot more ladies than men answered, because women like to “play quiz” more than men. They also had a handful of students who, it seems, were unable to identify their sex; non-science majors, one supposes. All the extra ladies would have been fine if Cornell had broken the results out by sex, which they always didn’t. It will make a difference.

Cornell reported 49% of the students claimed that they “experienced any form of harassment”. My guess, since I am an arch sexist, is that the great bulk of that 49% were female reports. We never learn, but never mind. Let’s take the number as given.

If we extrapolate the survey results, as all good sociologists and rulers do, we would announce that half of all students were harassed. Half. Half, my dear readers, is an enormous number. Half would suggest that a small army of mouth-breathing harassers, likely from the Poetry Department, skulk around campus hiding behind bushes waiting for their chance to harass. Who could tolerate such an environment where half of all students are so abused?

I’ll tell you who: students. They can tolerate it. Because similar numbers of harassed were also reported in 2021 and 2023. Which can only mean one of two things. One: students come, they get harassed, then they come back for more of that rousing hands-on experience. They must be loving them some harassment to stick around when half get the business.

Or two: the survey and its results are, to use a technical word, bullshit.

I favor the second explanation, though I don’t entirely dismiss the first.

1980s gun myths from TV shows

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

On Substack, John Van Stry discusses one of the myths about guns that were commonplace in 1980s cop shows on TV:

Okay, so he’s talking handguns, but this is still kinda on-topic.

Decades ago, and I do mean decades, on one of the many police drama TV shows that existed in the 70’s, there was one about cops (of course there was!) where they followed a different set of officers (not detectives, street cops — kinda1) each week.

So in that particular episode we had these guys (I think it was two? It was more than one) going around and robbing banks and they were shooting (and of course killing) people at the banks. They were using “HIGH POWERED WEAPONS” (emphasis theirs) of some sort. I don’t remember if it was rifles (AR-15’s weren’t the boogie man back then) or pistols. I think it was pistols though, Magnums perhaps?

Anyway, cutting to the chase, we’ve got two officers “staking out” the bank that they believe is going to be next and all they’ve got are their wimpy-wimpy-wimpy (emphasis theirs) .38 revolvers. Because everyone knows being shot by a .38 is no more dangerous than being shot by a B-B gun!2

So, before the “big shootout” one officer comes up to the other and offers him a Special Bullet.3 He tells the other “I thought maybe we should have a little something to even the odds”.4

The other officer is of course duly horrified because this is NOT “regulation ammo”!

So what was this “special ammo”? Were they .357 magnum rounds? (which you might be able to shoot from some .38’s back then, if you could get them to fit, just once). Were they +P’s?5 Oh no no no no no! They were (Dun dun DAAAA!)

HOLLOW POINTS!!!!

Yup, their first bullet in their revolver was a .38 hollow point.

When the robbers attack, oh the things that happen! One officer blows one of the robber’s heads Clean OFF!! Yes, that’s right! The dreaded hollow point is so powerful it took off the guy’s head! Completely!!! I don’t recall exactly what the other robber had happen, but I think it was a hole blown throw him you could see through.6

But wait! There’s More!7

  1. I forget the details exactly, it was a long long time ago.
  2. In this episode at least — consistency from the anti-gun lefties who wrote this dreck in the 70’s was not to be expected.
  3. I ain’t making this part up.
  4. Or words that effect. Again, 50 years ago, I don’t remember the exact line.
  5. A lot of .38 ammo was ‘+P’ back then, because they hadn’t created the designation yet, look up the specs in the old reloading manuals if you don’t believe me.
  6. Props to these officers however for their first shots in each case being killing ones!
  7. Of course there is!

When your political establishment is controlled by globalists

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

On Substack Notes, Spiff responds to someone decrying the British media’s concerted efforts to ignore the political protests across the channel:

Britain’s traditional media have long since chosen their side on the culture wars. They have embraced the establishment and their disgust at patriotism and national loyalty. They are globalists.

That is why they are becoming more extreme over time. They have to. They are a crucial part of the establishment narrative machine along with nudge units, elaborately funded NGOs and charities, and the civil service.

A Nuremberg-style trial would likely convict them of treason given how anti-immigration the British public is. We may not know the details but all these institutions point in only one direction; more immigrants, more diversity, the managed decline of the country, the condemnation of its people.

We often have to step back and look at screenshots like the one below to remind ourselves the media class are making a series of conscious decisions to damage and diminish Britain and the British people. It is not an accident. They know what is happening in France and their choice has been to downplay the enormous social changes that were avoidable and are not working in favour of the French people. Mass immigration of North Africans is destroying France. These riots reflect the alliance between immigrant groups and the hard-left who hate the West.

A similar process is now destroying the UK. They have to keep that observation away from the public for as long as they can. But time is now running out.

Prime Minister Burnham will probably follow Mark Carney’s example and start subsidizing the non-state media to ensure that the propaganda is more closely co-ordinated to the establishment’s preferred narrative. After all, it’s working quite well to keep malinformed Canadian elbows up.

October 14, 2026

He really is the model of a modern Major-General

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

InfantryDort reacts to a retired US general’s opinions on public executions on X (that is, the post is on X, not the executions … but now that I think on it …)

Why does it consistently appear that the criteria to be a General officer is historical illiteracy, suicidal empathy, and being toxically egalitarian? How did we get here?

This one thinks its “fundamentally unamerican” to publicly execute people. Well I guess George Washington is unamerican too. Or Abraham Lincoln.

You know what’s “fundamentally unamerican”, General? Simping for terrorists.

I hear this guy talk and I can’t help but think: no wonder GWOT didn’t end the way we wanted it to. The militarily crucial act of killing people disgusts this type of leader.

No wonder why it was so easy for guys like him and Stan McChrystal to make us practice “courageous restraint” on the battlefield. Letting the enemy gain the upper hand in every engagement, on purpose.

Out of what? Some wayward sense of nobility? That we’re the “good guys”?

No, General. Being the good guys doesn’t mean allowing our enemies to have a monopoly on violence. WE MUST HAVE THE MONOPOLY ON VIOLENCE.

Why am I constantly explaining this to Generals? Especially of the retired variety? Why am I having to explain that killing people is not only important to our profession, but for protecting western civilization itself?

The bar for General officer has been so low it’s practically in the basement. And no matter what institutional changes we make, these types always choose themselves to replace…. themselves.

So it’s more of the same. Same bad experience, same bad channel. Same feckless worldview. Incapable of victory. Incapable of common sense. Incapable of doing their jobs. But completely capable of making Instagram videos about how mean and cruel we’ve become.

BEING MEAN AND CRUEL TO OUR EVIL ENEMIES IS THE ENTIRE POINT!

Pathetic filth.

To which Tom Kratman responds:

Did I ever … hmmm … maybe not. Wait a sec …

Not only will you be rated or senior rated by about 100 people, in 30 years in the Army, but you can never have pissed one of them off. These men, however, will range from the bright to the ignorant, the moral to the immoral, and will have vastly diverging experiences which will drive their judgment. And you cannot disagree with them if you want stars. It would be one thing if they were all the same and you learned to echo just one theme. But when they are all different, and you still agree with every trivial thought they ever had, it can only be because you lack any center of your own, any moral compass whatsoever, since everything in the military has a moral aspect to it. In other words — with only very rare exceptions; I thought well of Foss, LeMoyne, and Petraeus, for example — the man who rises to stars usually has nothing, no values of worth, inside him.

Which is worse than contemptible; it’s absolutely pathetic, given how useless it is to become a general.

True story: Some people thought there were stars in my future. There came a day, early 1988, I was on my second company command, of three, and I was shooting the crap with the brigade commander in his office. I’d been ambivalent about stars for some time by then, but it was a very amorphous thing. I couldn’t have told you why. Eventually, I realized that my brigade commander (Annapolis, oddly enough) was trying to mentor me into stars. “You need to do this, Tom, then you need to do that. Then you need to …”

And it all came clear, an epiphany, a blinding flash of the obvious, and I said, “Sir, I don’t want to be a general.”

“Wha … what … WHAT?”

So I stood up, walked across the office to his LCE tree, and took his helmet in hands.

“Sir, do you remember General Meyer?”

“Shy Meyer? Chief of Staff?”

“Yes, sir, him.”

“Sure.”

“Sir, Meyer was a reformer. He had a bag full of good ideas for improving the Army. I counted thirty-seven once, about half and half trivial and important. I may have missed some.”

“Yes, so?”

Then I turned the helmet around to point at him the two silly bits of glow in the dark tape on the camouflage band around the helmet. “Sir, of all that, this is all that’s left of Meyer. Everything else is gone. In a matter of a few years it’s as if he never existed. So what, sir, would be the point of becoming a general, if, even if I rose to be Chief of Staff of the Army, I could not possibly have a good and lasting effect?”

Which is, in any case, why I turned to writing. My brigade commander didn’t get it; he still tried to stick me as the incoming CG’s Aide, but I wanted nothing to do with that.

There’s nothing preventing the Canadian government from using propaganda

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

And now that the majority of the relic media are addicted to government subsidies, the propaganda efforts are that much more effective:

Here’s something that not many Canadians both know and understand in Canada. There are currently zero laws in place regarding our Government’s ability to use propaganda against it’s citizens.
Not only can they do it, but they have teams of behavioral scientists & psychologists figuring out how to do it effectively.

In 2016 there were only 6 federal employees in the role. Since 2021 there are now over 70

In the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) there are over 16

Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada there are over 5

Treasury Board Secretariat over 3

Environment and Climate Change Canada over 2

And there are more working in the Privy Council Office

During Covid they admitted to using these individuals to push COVID-19 compliance up amongst the population, They ran research surveys & experiments to test messaging and interventions, and designed choice architecture or communications to drive desired behaviours.

These ghouls manufactured consent amongst the population & nudged people to make decisions they didn’t want to.

Fast forward to today and what we are witnessing in regard to the U.S. and Europe. They are using the same tactics to convince people that the U.S. is our enemy & the EU is our savior. Stop falling for their propaganda, step back and think for a moment, why are they bombarding you daily with anti-U.S. rhetoric, climate fear, pro EU messaging. Are you being manipulated to accept their plan’s & decisions.

QotD: The rise of the Reform Party of Canada

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

A rejection of the new Canada, especially the largesse and overreach of the federal government into economic matters, was the perfect match for importing the new kind of libertarian-infused conservatism that became dominant in the 1980s with figures like Reagan and Thatcher. “Small government” conservatism provided a solid ideological foundation on which to build a new kind of conservatism to oppose aspects of the new regime, and it was also one that didn’t require nostalgizing for the old Dominion.

This small government conservatism wasn’t a homegrown ideology, it was adopted and imported from elsewhere. America especially. The dominant paradigm in postwar American conservatism became the fusionism that was associated with publications like National Review, and eventually became a dominant political force in Ronald Reagan. The success of this fusionism also made it appealing, and ready-made, to be imported to Canada and fused with this rejection of big government Liberal nationalism. In the process, Canadian conservatism begins to sound more American.

I’m not using this pejoratively and I don’t see this so much as a form of cultural imperialism. The adoption of this kind of conservatism made sense in response to the new Liberal nationalism. But it does present some serious problems for Canadian conservatism. This anti-nationalism and small government conservatism will appeal to some, especially in the West, but it’s not something that a national movement could be forged around.

This is what I mean when I say lots of conservatives don’t like Canada all that much. In adopting small government American conservatism, this kind of conservatism sounds like an American critique of Canada. Canadian healthcare looks “socialist” to American conservatives, and small government ideologues in America look at Canada and see big government “Soviet Canuckistan.” This is what Canadian conservatives adopting this kind of ideology sometimes sound like, and you can see why this has limited electoral appeal.

Ben Woodfinden, “True North Patriotism and a Distinctly Canadian Conservatism”, The Dominion, 2020-10-20.

October 13, 2026

No wonder the wokies hate J.K. Rowling

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

The Harry Potter books used to be sacred lore to the woke generation until the author committed the unforgivable crime of defending the rights of women against the encroachment of trans-women. Yet, it doesn’t take a very close reading of the texts to discover so many things that appear to have slipped under the notice of the progressives and form the core beliefs of the fictional world she created:

Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang seems much more appropriate than it might have in the past

    Potential is largely hereditary, family is most important, the media are lying parasites, the state can’t be trusted with education, and children should be taught armed self-defense.

These are not subversive readings. These are the plot.

The Harry Potter series was the most successful publishing phenomenon of the late twentieth century. It sold half a billion copies. Progressive parents handed it to their children as a parable about tolerance and the courage to stand against prejudice. The movies grossed eight billion dollars. The author became an icon of liberal cultural production and then, by a process that remains opaque to the people who made her famous, a figure of political villainy for holding positions indistinguishable from mainstream liberal feminism circa 2005.

Set aside the author. The books exist independently of whatever J.K. Rowling believes or is believed to believe. Read them for what they actually say. The worldview encoded in the narrative structure, the plot logic, and the moral arc is not the worldview the books were marketed as containing. It is considerably more interesting.

Blood Will Tell

Magic is inherited. This is the foundational premise of the entire fictional world and the premise from which everything else follows.

You are either born a witch or wizard, or you are not. No amount of study, effort, practice, or desire will make a Muggle magical. The reverse is also true: Squibs, born to magical families but lacking the gift, cannot acquire it. They are defective members of magical lineages, pitied and often hidden. Argus Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, is a Squib. His bitterness and cruelty toward the students is the bitterness of a man who can see the gift in others but will never have it himself.

[…]

Family Carries Everything

Harry survives Voldemort’s killing curse because his mother died to protect him. Not a metaphor. A literal magical mechanism. Lily Potter’s sacrificial love created a protection charm encoded in Harry’s blood that made him impossible for Voldemort to kill directly.

[…]

The Press Are the Enemy

The Daily Prophet is introduced early and is corrupt throughout.

[…]

The State Cannot Be Trusted to Educate Your Children

Dolores Umbridge is a government administrator appointed by the Ministry of Magic to reform Hogwarts.

Her arrival at Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix is the politicization of education made literal. The Ministry does not trust Dumbledore. The Ministry does not want students to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts. A student body trained in combat magic is a student body that might resist. Umbridge’s curriculum is therefore purely theoretical: no spellcasting, no practical application, only reading approved texts about defensive magic that the students are forbidden to practice.

[…]

The books contain other lessons that the progressive readership tended not to discuss.

House-elves are slaves. They are hereditary servants bound to magical families, forbidden to disobey direct orders, and conditioned to punish themselves for disloyalty. Dobby is freed and becomes a hero. But Dobby is the exception. Most house-elves, including the Hogwarts house-elves, do not want freedom. Hermione’s Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare is played for laughs. The elves reject her knitted hats. They are offended by the offer of liberation. Dobby is a weirdo.

The narrative does not resolve this. The house-elves are not freed after Voldemort falls. The epilogue does not mention them. The implication is that hereditary servitude is acceptable if the servants are happy, and these servants are happy. Whatever else this is, it is not an abolitionist text.

[…]

What The Books Actually Taught

The Harry Potter series is a fundamentally reactionary conservative text dressed in the aesthetic of liberal tolerance.

It teaches that ability is inherited and the argument is only about whether pedigree or demonstrated ability should determine status. It teaches that family is the highest loyalty and the source of the most powerful magic. It teaches that the press serves power and the only response is to route around it. It teaches that the state will capture education to produce compliant subjects and that the answer is to arm the children. It teaches that some people are born for greatness and others are born for service, and the main thing is to get the sorting right.

None of this requires reading against the grain. It requires only reading.

QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre

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

He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a “noble savage”, never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached.

1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.

2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.

3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.

4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.

5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.

6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.

7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)

October 12, 2026

QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers

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

I’ve written many times that the real culprits here aren’t the Boomers, but the Silents. Pick any obnoxious “Boomer” who did whatever in The Sixties™, and it’s Build Back Brandon to one that the “Boomer” in question was born in the 1930s. Which makes sense for a lot of historical reasons, but simple chronology will do: If we take as read that The Sixties™ started with the Port Huron Statement, then The Sixties™ started in 1962. The Baby Boom started in 1945, meaning that the very oldest Boomers were still in high school in 1962. They might’ve enthusiastically embraced every word — then again, they might not — but they surely didn’t write one letter of it.

Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.

… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?

As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.

October 11, 2026

Britain – “… one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reflects on the sage words of Adam Smith during that eighteenth century unpleasantness with some of the North American colonies:

In 1777, Britain lost the battle of Saratoga — a decisive defeat that would spell the end of its rule over the 13 Colonies. A young John Sinclair declared that the nation would soon be ruined. An older and wiser Adam Smith replied that “there is a great deal of ruin in a nation”.

Smith would be vindicated. Despite losing 60 per cent of its North American territories, Great Britain would go on to become the leading economic and military power of the 19th century. But history does not necessarily repeat itself. Today, as the mistakes and catastrophes pile up one on another, one starts to wonder if a nation can run out of ruin.

Consider the news of the past week. The most dramatic scene played out late Sunday night in Gosport, as illegal immigrants were ferried onto shore by the coast guard. Overlooked by the remaining might of the Royal Navy, in sight of HMNB Portsmouth which two thirds of the surface fleet call home, illegal migrants were delivered to tax-payer funded accommodation by the British state. The full coercive power of that state was on display, but it was not directed towards the young men seeking to invade English waters, but against the people of Gosport. The entire town was locked down, and the right of assembly suspended, using a law usually deployed against vagrants and vandals. Legions of high-vis jacked police were deployed across the town, clashing with protestors in the streets of a once-sleepy seaside community.

This is bad enough, but consider what else is going on across the country. Prisoners were being released early, not because of their exemplary behaviour or reformed characters, but simply because we had run out of room to safely house them. The parole services openly admit they cannot cope, and parolees could wait weeks before they are fitted with electronic tags.

The economic situation is no happier. There is a global surge in bond yields, meaning higher costs of borrowing and straitened circumstances for our government as it prepares for the autumn budget later this month. War in the Gulf and the Arabian peninsula looks set to cause a surge in fuel prices over the coming winter, hitting consumers and business alike. Far from being prepared to weather this storm, Britain has some of the lowest diesel reserves in the developed world. Our domestic supplies of oil and gas, already squeezed by reckless environmental policies, could now face strike action that could see a third of production shut down.

If you have faith in British civil society and public life to respond with stoicism and solidarity, one can think again. The country recently had a hysterical and ugly debate over whether Rishi Sunak was a real Englishman, in which a number of right wing ethnic minority figures claimed not to be, and a number of progressives suggested that there is no ethnic English identity at all. In the latest horrific chapter of our coming apart as a culture, the Green Party passed a motion at its conference declaring that Zionism is “racist” and that Israel should be entirely annexed by a Palestinian state. During the same vote, they rejected a proposal promising not to engage in disciplinary proceedings against Jewish party members for affiliation with synagogues or Jewish organisations that support Israel. Given that the majority of British synagogues could be described as Zionist by some definition, this was effectively a declaration that observant Jews were no longer welcome in the party. Nothing like this has been seen in British society for a century.

As a country, we are running up against hard limits to how far we can manage decline and stifle unrest. The patience of the public, the confidence of markets and the state’s own capacity to enforce order are all reaching breaking point. Britain is indeed on the brink of ruin.

But what does ruin look like? Writing three years ago, and looking ahead to a likely Labour government, I warned that temporary disasters can become long term realities: “Argentina, a country economically competitive with the USA in 1900, proceeded to politically wreck itself for over a hundred years, with cyclical economic crises destroying hard-won prosperity. In Argentina, the situation of the ‘precariat’ is all that most of today’s middle-class families have ever known.”

“Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking”

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

L. Wayne Mathison on the social media site formerly known as Twitter:

I watched this video about Indigenous education and reconciliation in BC schools. It raises some questions we should be asking across Canada.

Schools should teach history, including residential schools, treaties, colonization and the treatment of Indigenous people. But history should be taught honestly, with evidence, context and room for disagreement.

When students hear slogans like “Indigenous brilliance” and “land back”, are they being encouraged to examine what those terms mean, or simply expected to agree?

Orwell warned us about political language that substitutes slogans for clear thinking. Sowell taught us to judge policies by their results rather than their intentions. Hayek warned against assuming anyone possesses all the necessary knowledge. Bastiat reminded us to consider the costs nobody bothers to mention.

Those principles belong in every classroom.

Reconciliation should never mean suspending critical thinking. Historical injustices deserve examination, but so do competing historical accounts, modern treaty obligations, property rights, individual responsibility and the consequences of government policy.

Students should be free to question every claim, including those made by teachers, politicians and Indigenous leaders.

If a historical claim is true, it should withstand scrutiny. If a political proposal is sound, it should withstand debate.

Education should produce independent thinkers, not obedient political activists.

We owe young Canadians an honest education, not a preferred political narrative dressed up as unquestionable truth.

QotD: The history of New Harmony, Indiana

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

Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.

Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.

In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.

It collapsed almost immediately.

The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?

Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.

American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country’s earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: “The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity”. The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.

When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.

Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality”.

Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different.

Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse.

His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall”. He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.

Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons.

Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-09.

October 10, 2026

Denouncing great art of the past as “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”

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

Not content with reading history backwards to find fault with historic figures based on the most progressive views of the modern world, the same approach is now taken with fine art:

For a discipline devoted to art, contemporary art history can seem remarkably contemptuous about the object of its study. In the 1970s “new art history” began to revolutionise a discipline that was hitherto focused on the connoisseurship of the Western canon.

It became instead a subject that used artworks as artefacts for social and political critique. John Berger, the pioneer of the new approach, questioned the very permissibility of having a “love of art”, dismissing it as “a useful concept to the European ruling classes”.

New art historians have since continued this crusade, with different “lenses”, each now well known, encompassing such topics as the “feminist turn”, the “de-colonialist turn”, the “LGBTQ+ turn”, and so on.

As critics such as Lola Salem and Pierre d’Alancaisez have argued in this magazine, this tendency now extends beyond academic fashion: the assumptions through which art is studied have migrated into museums, funding bodies and cultural institutions, where they shape what is exhibited, how it should be interpreted, and what socioeconomic purposes art is expected to serve.

The old question, “Is this good art, and what does it tell us about the civilisation that made it?” has acquired a formidable set of competitors: “What makes this work and its creator suspect, what depravity does is its supposed beauty trying to hide?”

In Depraved: The Story of Dangerous Art, Daisy Dixon’s sense of contempt is made plain in the very first line: “When I was a teenager, I hated the painter Paul Gauguin.” As assistant professor of Philosophy at Cardiff, Dr Dixon has built a social media platform as an outspoken critic of historical and contemporary visual media. Not even Miriam Margolyes is spared her rancour.

In a world now dominated by AI, Dixon tackled the very real issue of deepfake pornography, where this new technology was abused by perverts to create pornographic images of victims (mostly women) without their consent. Whilst Dixon’s criticism of this sinister practice was laudable and justified, the extension of her criticism to art is misguided and regrettable.

The indignant chapter titles of her book — Obscenity, Criminality, Oppression, Malevolence, Cruelty, Iconoclasm, Reparation — read more like the call-to-arms of the culture wars than a work of fair and rigorous academic analysis. At the heart of her book lies the accusation that art with an erotic element by the likes of Titian, Velázquez or Giulio Romano should be considered “high-class pornography” and “hate speech”.

To support her argument, Dixon begins outside the confines of art with a work of literature: Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom. Using the indisputable “depravity” of De Sade, she aims to justify her accusation that those paintings were motivated by the same male and depraved roots in Western culture.

Her greatest ire however is reserved for Titian’s Rape of Europa, which she considers “just a portrayal of an immoral act”. The failure to consider any alternative meaning to the picture is indicative of the reductive and misleading nature of her approach.

Titian’s The Rape of Europa, c. 1560-62.

Wikimedia Commons.

Without delving further into the many other readings of the Rape of Europa, suffice it to say that the reductive conclusions drawn by Dixon impede us from a deeper understanding that might call her assumptions into question.

Although I read Art History at one of the most renowned institutes in Britain, I can confirm that students are taught this superficial understanding and contempt. I remember a senior lecturer singling out the experience of finding a group of Oxford postgrads discussing Titian’s Diana and Actaeon as a scene worthy of ridicule. “I was shocked,” the lecturer opined, “how they were so busily discussing which translation of Ovid that Titian consulted, when they completely ignored that there was a black slave girl in the picture.”

The girl depicted was one of the handmaidens of Diana, something the lecturer would have known had she even the most elementary knowledge of the story. More distressing was the sight of a senior academic masquerading assumptions as fact.

“The Catholic Church has always struggled with its relationship to nation-states”

Filed under: Europe, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In the New English Review, Bruce Gilley wonders when — or even whether — Pope Leo XIV will realize his pastoral duties extend to defending western civilization:

Pope Leo XIV in the library of the Vatican, 13 October, 2025.
Photo by Ricardo Stuckert via Wikimedia Commons.

    In the Middle Ages, they would have kicked a few cardinals in the ass, elected a new pope, and declared this one an anti-pope.

So says the French president in Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, in which a fleet of 100 ships carrying 1 million illegal migrants from Calcutta disgorges its wretched cargo onto the beaches of the Côte d’Azur.

The outburst is occasioned by the insistence of the pope in the novel that Europe should open its borders to all Third-World migrants in the name of charity and solidarity, beginning with this Calcutta fleet. In the novel, His Holiness has sold off all the Vatican art and treasures to raise funds for the migrants, and he is badgering the French president to similarly raise funds to pay for needs of this influx.

“What else can you expect from a Brazilian pope?” the president asks an aide. “The cardinals wanted an innovator as pope, in the name of the universal church, and they certainly got one.”

This fictional scene has obvious parallels to real-life events we’re all experiencing under the current and previous pope, both drawn from service in Latin America, in weakening rather than strengthening the defenses of Europe against a migrant invasion and other anti-Western ills.

During a day trip to the Italian island of Lampedusa in July, Pope Leo took a page out of The Camp of the Saints in requesting European governments create a “a long-term strategic plan capable of receiving, protecting, supporting and integrating migrants”. He also praised the locals “for the solidarity that so many of you have shown”. The United States, he said, should likewise be “welcoming, protecting, and assisting immigrants” as “an act of charity”.

In 2025, before he was chosen as pope, then-Cardinal Prevost had taken up a similar cudgel by openly rejecting U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s invocation of St. Augustine’s concept of ordo amoris (the ordering of love) which allows that human limits mean we must prioritize those closest to us first and those afar second. To be frank, the hillbilly has a better grasp of Augustine than the man who became pope.

Leo’s predecessor Pope Francis was even more radical, calling for “open humanitarian corridors” for all and sundry who felt they had a right to waltz into the West. People should be “free to choose whether to migrate or stay” and national borders should be transformed into “privileged places of encounter”. Anyone who resisted, according to that logic, was a racist.

In 2023, the former editor of a Vatican newsletter insert, Lucetta Scaraffia, said that Francis “hates the values of the West” and was more interested in climate change than he was in condemning anti-Semitism or defending Christians from persecution around the globe. “He forgets that the West is the lone part of the world that’s tried, even in limited and insufficient ways, to realize the values of the Church”, she said.

The uncanny similarities between this outlook of Francis, an Argentinian, and that of Leo, whose career was spent in Peru, to the fictional Latin American pope in The Camp of the Saints is tragedy more than farce. Because if the Catholic Church cannot understand the problem that mass Third-World migration poses for Christendom, then the game — for Europe, at least — is surely up.

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