Quotulatiousness

September 7, 2026

An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?

The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.

Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?

But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.

Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.

September 6, 2026

Scientific American used to be a respected science publication

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

A few years ago, it became clear that Scientific American had been captured by the woke gender warriors, but as ESR points out, the publication had been somewhat in the hands of propagandists for much longer than that:

I was once a Scientific American subscriber. I loved that magazine; reading it was one of the highlights of my month. I canceled, and wept for what the magazine was becoming, when they published a theme issue that was a transparent political hit job.

Sounds like current news? No. That was 40 years ago. The hit job was on the Strategic Defense Initiative. Reagan was in the White House.

And I … I couldn’t figure out why nobody was saying the obvious in public. That SciAm had been sock-puppeted by a Soviet influence operation desperate to keep the US from exploiting its technological advantage.

Ideological capture of the scientific establishment is not a new problem. As much as I hate the Communists behind it, I’m even angrier with all the scientists who averted their eyes and never pushed back while the capture was going on. Our civilization gave them a position of high status, privilege, and trust. A priori I don’t think we were wrong to do that — until they failed in the duty that went with that trust.

It’s difficult for me to express how personally painful I found this. I revered research scientists as a child and young man — I could not imagine any higher calling than to be one myself. Until they betrayed civilization, and in the process betrayed me.

So, this isn’t a new problem. What’s new is that the post-2014 woke insanity has made it too obvious to miss.

It’s time for a dissolution of the monasteries. The culture of science, to the extent it is transmitted forward, must learn a harsh and terrible lesson about the consequences of allowing scientific neutrality to be abandoned for a mess of politics.

September 5, 2026

The high-water mark of Cancel Culture

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

This Noahpinion piece is from last year, but I hadn’t seen it before and I think it outlines fairly accurately why “we” allowed Cancel Culture to temporarily take over social media and cause so much personal damage to disfavoured individuals. It gave the mob the power to identify their own Emmanuel Goldsteins and drive them from the public sphere:

The Arrest of Robespierre, The Night of the 9th to 10th Thermidor, Year II, 27th July 1794
Colour engraving by Jean-Joseph-François Tassaert (1765 – ca.1835) via Wikimedia Commons.

I think about this when I think about cancel culture.

Back in 2018, Bari Weiss got dogpiled on Twitter for an anodyne liberal tweet. Weiss congratulated Olympic skater Mirai Nagasu on pulling off a difficult move, quoting a line from the musical Hamilton about immigrants being great:

Weiss was viciously attacked for this tweet by thousands of people who called her racist over the course of several days. Why? Because Mirai Nagasu isn’t actually an immigrant — she was born in the U.S. According to Weiss’ many attackers, Weiss’ statement implied that nonwhite people are perpetual foreigners.

That was, of course, complete hogwash. Nagasu’s parents are immigrants; the use of the term “second-generation immigrants” to describe the children of immigrants is utterly standard terminology in academic sociology. And by quoting a line from Hamilton in praise of a second-generation immigrant athlete competing on behalf of the U.S., Weiss was clearly advocating in favor of (nonwhite) immigration as something that makes America stronger — a very standard liberal viewpoint.

Whether this particular pile-on had long-term negative consequences for Weiss’ life isn’t clear, but she encountered an increasingly hostile climate at the New York Times, the paper where she worked, and eventually was forced to quit. It would have been reasonable for people observing that pile-on — and similar attacks directed at Weiss over the years — to conclude that speaking up is dangerous and that Twitter mobs hold a lot of real power.

The perception that cancel culture was the progressive H-bomb — an invincible weapon that could be fired any time at anyone who didn’t conform perfectly to a set of progressive mores that had only emerged a few years ago — reshaped much of American society in the 2010s. Every organization in the country, from knitting circles to romance novelist associations to sci-fi conventions, had its internal hierarchy disrupted by the fear that disgruntled or opportunistic subordinates would take their grievances online and summon the dreaded cancel-mob against their superiors.

Why was cancel culture both so powerful and so popular for those few years? The most obvious reason is that it worked. If you were a progressive in 2018 who really believed that calling a second-generation American an “immigrant” was racist, then you could often effectively strike at that person by raising a hue and cry about them on Twitter. Companies were afraid of boycotts, of course. But beyond that, the Gen Xers who ran those companies came from an age when having a thousand people yelling in your face meant that you were in grave danger; corporate managers would often cave out of pure fear of online negativity.

Another reason was that cancel culture was a quick route to online clout. As Eugene Wei wrote in his famous blog post “Status as a Service (StaaS)“, social media offers most people the opportunity to get much more social status than they have any hope of getting in their daily lives, if they happen to get lucky and go viral and become an influencer.

But to get that clout, you have to stand out. Attacking the same old progressive targets — Donald Trump, Republican senators, conservative influencers — is a low-yield activity, because the field is too competitive. Everyone attacks those people. But finding more novel targets for mob attack — like an NYT writer who calls a second-generation American an “immigrant” — can be a high-yield activity. It’s basically outrage entrepreneurship.

Of course, this means that there was an incentive for progressive purity spirals and tent-shrinking. If you’re a progressive looking for new people to denounce, the most tempting targets are probably center-left liberals who have heretofore been safe from cancellation. Hating Donald Trump is old news. But hating Matt Yglesias? That could get you some real attention!

And so the ranks of the online cancel-mobs were probably also swollen by people who participated in the mobs out of fear that if they didn’t, they too would be canceled. This gave rise to a phenomenon I call ponzi screaming — berating the person immediately to your right on the political spectrum, out of fear that if you don’t berate them, people further to your left will berate you. You have people like the progressive online shouter and failed Congressional candidate Will Stancil berating Nate Silver even as he gets frequently dogpiled and berated by leftists.

Between outrage entrepreneurship, purity contests, and ponzi screaming, late-2010s progressive cancel culture started to look like a farcical imitation of the French Terror or the Chinese Cultural Revolution. The stakes were obviously much lower — losing your job is a lot less bad than losing your head — but many of the social dynamics and behavior patterns were recognizably similar.

September 4, 2026

Never discount the political muscle of “King Coal”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Ringo remembers when a friend of his accidentally discovered that “King Coal” is still a behind-the-scenes political factor that cannot be ignored:

Soooo, guy I knew in of all places National Guard in Florida.

He was taking a master’s in Optics at University of Central Florida. He had to do a paper. Just one of the random “do a paper” assignments you do in a master’s program. He’d heard that tailings from coal mines could be a bit suspect in terms of radiation. Not in his direct field but in “physics”. Good enough.

There’s a coal plant about 20 miles from Orlando. Goes out, goes to the big pile of tailings, sticks a Geiger counter probe in it, expecting a bit above background.

HOLY MOTHER OF ROENTGEN! THAT’S FREAKING HOT!

There’s a thin layer of ash over the tailings that isn’t and blocks most of the release. So, a Geiger counter casually waved over it, all good.

Stick a probe in and it’s a different story. It’s hot as the hinges of hell radioactively. (And quite a bit of that material is released by coal plants. Much more likely to cause lung cancer than smoking, btw.)

So, he writes up the paper and submits it.

Couple of weeks later, he’s called into his thesis advisor who sadly and shamefacedly tells him he’s being dropped from the master’s program.

“WTF?”

Enter the late and VERY unlamented Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd’s people had noses in every department everywhere and ANYTHING that MIGHT harm King Coal MUST be nipped in the bud.

Even a guy getting an Optics master’s who just happened to stick his probe in the wrong mound.

Ask me why the 1000 Nukes program was scrapped right after Nixon left office and why Byrd might just have been behind Watergate and performed essentially a coup d’état. (Or why Nixon pushed the Thousand Nukes Program for that matter.) Or why it’s taken so long for Small Modular Reactors to have any chance of getting off the ground. (“Technological advancements” is not the answer. We’ve been doing them for the Navy for 70 years.)

Biden’s “War on Coal” really pissed me off but along with natural gas it MIGHT have finally killed King Coal for good and all and that is something to heave a sigh of relief.

And following up to a question down-thread:

Absurdus – @AdAltum

How did a senator hear about a random paper from some random master’s student? How did he get him expelled from a program he was in?

“The Senator” probably never even heard about it. It was handled at a much lower level.

How did his people hear about it?

Byrd was Chairman of the Budget Committee and the Rules Committee as well as Chairman Pro Tem any time the Dems held the Senate (which was constantly up until Newt Gingrich.)

He was also “Chairman Emeritus” of the Energy Committee. He was on the committee despite being a previous chairman. (Because he was only allowed to chair two and Rules and Budget were more important.)

Energy provides funds to colleges for research. Budget approves it. That meant he had ears all over every college and research facility in the United States.

Say one bad thing about Coal and your days were numbered if you were some minor master’s candidate. Hell, adjunct professor.

You probably aren’t old enough or didn’t follow politics back then to know just how ruthless, corrupt and evil Byrd and his people were.

BTW: Probably also why Freeman Dyson lost his funding for bottle fusion in 1974.

Loyalist Canada to Liberal Canada, a political devolution

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

On Substack Notes, John Carter discusses the old, stable Canada that the Liberals have spent sixty years trying to destroy, with great success, sadly.

For all intents and purposes, post-1965 Liberal Canada is a completely different country from the Loyalist Canada that it erased. Different flag, different basis for moral legitimacy, different constitution even.

Liberal Canada loves to wear poppies on Remembrance Day, but this is stolen valour. Liberal Canada has never won a single war. Loyalist Canada won every war it fought in.

Liberal Canada built no great works. Most of the infrastructure of Canada was constructed before Liberal Canada. The Trans Canada Highway, the Trans Canada Railroad, the Pickering Nuclear Power Plant, the Toronto subway, the Montreal Metro — all were built or initiated by Loyalist Canada. Liberal Canada completed the projects that began under Loyalist Canada, but initiated none of its own, and at best can be said to maintain the infrastructure it inherited … badly. Liberal Canada cannot even build a pipeline to bring its oil to market. Liberal Canada cannot even refine its own oil.

Loyalist Canada built out an organizational infrastructure of Crown Corporations which were once the envy of the world. Liberal Canada dismantled them, giving us toll roads owned by foreigners.

Loyalist Canada built all of this infrastructure, and won all of those wars, without incurring a national debt. The national debt was accrued entirely by Liberal Canada, and is entirely a function of social welfare programs it uses to turn Canadians into domesticated clients of Liberal Party patronage, and indentured servants of the banks.

Then of course there are the demographics. Loyalist Canada was a white Canada, a British and French Canada, and a fecund Canada, with one of the world’s highest birth rates. Liberal Canada is a barren Canada, with one of the world’s lowest birth rates, and it has presided over the systematic replacement of the Canadian people with Indians, Chinese, Africans, and Muslims, to whom it moreover extends preference for social services, university admissions, and employment. Liberal Canada makes Canadians second class citizens in the land their ancestors built.

Liberal Canada is a parasitic entity that is rapidly killing its host. It is an exhausted Brezhnevian sclerocracy that destroys ambition because even the most modest of ambitions are a threat to the soft men, the mild bureaucrats and glassy-eyed ideologues who subsist on the arbitrage of national decline. Liberal Canada is weak, and so it demands that its subjects be even weaker, as this is the only way for weak men to rule.

Liberal Canada is not the real Canada, and Canadians are beginning to wake up from this long nightmare of mismanagement and institutionalized treason, and to remember who they are.

September 3, 2026

That problematic arch-conservative New-Dealer … Norman Rockwell?

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Chris Bray was in Stockbridge Massachusetts recently and discovered that the notorious arch-conservative artist Norman Rockwell … supported the New Deal and FDR … which is unquestionably extreme-right, yet somehow “got woke” in the 1960s:

Stockbridge is in the (astonishingly pretty) Berkshires, where you can’t sell a latte or a $14 egg and cheese sandwich without a trans pride flag and a sticker in the window boldly supporting a woman’s right to choose and a “No Kings in America” sign and on and and on and on.

I’m an outsider, so they won’t show me the manual. But it’s a lot of virtue, signaled with a great deal of self-consciousness, and also there are a ton of German SUVs with New York license plates. Status status status. We stand with immigrants / new Mercedes.

Rockwell lived and painted in Stockbridge, and that’s … that’s … (ambiguous facial expression). He painted images that demonstrated a bone-deep fondness for America and Americans, especially small-town Americans, so he was a huge far-right figure, OBVIOUSLY, and also a major white supremacist, but maybe kind of accidentally a big Klan figure?

You can find this stuff everywhere: Rockwell’s name was “a symbol of an idealized, conservative, white American past”. Click on that link: It’s an essay that says Rockwell is known for an idealized conservative past, and it’s illustrated with a 1943 painting that celebrated FDR’s declaration that Freedom From Want is a basic freedom that that all Americans should enjoy. So, to wrap a bow around this amazing cultural artifact, Rockwell’s idealized conservative past was a celebration of the New Deal president’s declaration that government should assure material comfort for everyone. See, huge right-winger.

[…]

But Rockwell painted a massive quantity of routine shitlibbery alongside his depictions of small-town America as a place he didn’t despise, and, I’m repeating myself, several of his most famous paintings express his affection for that huge far-right figure Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was a registered Republican who painted Democrats and Democrat political themes with great warmth, and also liked Ike, and then went on to paint important depictions of the Civil Rights Movement. So he’s … he’s … a huge Trumper who didn’t hate black people? Which lawn sign should we display about this? The past has to be sorted into the categories of right now, in ways that should feel comfortable to an NPR personality: This Thucydides person, was he a Trumper?

The just absolutely amazing leftist discourse about Rockwell is that he changed: He used to be a brutal Republican Nazi like ORANGE MAN, but then he turned into a good person. These essays tend to have the subtlety of a claw hammer to the face. Go read this example at the reliably boneheaded Vox, which describes Rockwell’s “late-life political transformation” and says that the “tumultuous ’60s would convert Rockwell into an overt social liberal”. He turned from right to left! He became good! See, he had an “awakening!”

The reason all of this confuses them is that Rockwell was a social type that no longer exists: a liberal Republican who thought that America had flaws that needed fixing, but who also at the same time loved the country and loved its people. He was sort of center-left on some stuff and center-right on some stuff, and culturally attuned to a nation that he viewed fondly. He liked FDR and the Four Freedoms and he personally liked Eisenhower, who had him over for dinner.

John Carter reports on “the largest gathering of Canadian nationalists in generations”

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

Canadian Red Ensign 1921-1957

Having been peripherally involved in party politics in Canada since the mid 1970s, I hope you’ll forgive my occasional bout of cynicism about getting political change in this country through peaceful means … the long comfortable decades under the US nuclear umbrella has allowed Canadian political parties to get ever more unserious and willing to pretend that taking a two-and-a-half generations-long vacation from the world of realpolitik has been somehow our birthright. I love my adopted homeland and it is distressing to see how easily the Liberal propagandists (supported by the state-funded relic media) can get elbow-flapping choruses of Canadian boomers to chant the slogans and blandly accept the grand theft from their children and grandchildren without a blush of shame.

John Carter says there may still be hope that enough Canadians have recognized the awful situation we’re in and are willing to do what’s necessary to change our collective ways and get back onto a path of constructive nationalism rather than the tame opposition of the current Conservative Party:

I don’t want to overstate things, but I think this was an historic moment.

It was also a hell of a ride.

The Dominion Society was founded barely over a year ago, and rapidly exploded to over three thousand members across the country. It is a peaceful and explicitly non-partisan political advocacy group dedicated to advancing the cause of remigration within Canadian civil society. So far its activities have consisted mainly of selling branded merchandise, putting up posters, cleaning up parks, rallies to oppose Canadian towns from tearing down statues of Sir John A MacDonald and Samuel de Champlain, and a whole lot of social media campaigns.

To anyone in possession of some shred of sanity, all of this would seem to be entirely unobjectionable and non-threatening. To the Canadian government, which long ago released its hold on the last tenuous threads of sanity, this is a five-alarm political fire. They are, it seems, terrified of the Dominion Society to the point of hysteria.

Until recently the Canadian media – which by virtue of a generous state funding apparatus is de facto state media – has for the most part done its best to ignore the Dominion Society, treating it as an irrelevant collection of disgruntled kids who aren’t worth reporting on. That isn’t to say that the political class was not aware of DomSoc. Their founder, Daniel Tyrie, showed up at the Conservative Party conference several months ago with a number of supporters, trolling the Conservative Party of Canada with a big “Conserve What?” sign outside the front door of the venue, showing a picture of CPC leader Pierre Poillievre wearing a Sikh temple hat during one of his many ethnic pandering junkets. The CPC very much noticed this, and were not impressed.

Since then Tyrie and his supporters have sparred with various CPC politicians on X, ratioing them on a fairly regular basis. On February 15th, the Flag Day that marks the 1965 transition from the original Canadian flag to the Maple Leaf, the House of Commons account got thoroughly ensignmogged by a swarm of Canadian nationalists declaring that the Red Ensign was their real flag.

Seriously, just look at the replies and quote tweets. An unending sea of red ensigns.

The flag day ensignmogging was a remarkable eruption of nationalist energy, and it’s very difficult to imagine that the Canadian government has not noticed the sudden popularity of the Red Ensign and the Canadian shield as symbols of Canadian nationalism. This use of these discarded symbols makes Canadian politicians palpably anxious. They have spent many decades patiently erasing Canada’s past in order to socially engineer the wild colonials into the universal economic subject, and the revival of ethnically particular medieval heraldry signals something stirring within the deep recesses of the mass psyche. The natives are restless. Old and terrible gods are awakening.

The question of course is what they can do about that. So far the answer has been “not much that matters”. It would be one thing if the Dominion Society was a bad optics skinhead cult called the White Reich Front or something, brandishing sonnenrads on their shield walls as they formed up for street battle with Trantifa. This would be easily dealt with as something obviously frightening and foreign. But the Dominion Society is none of these things. It is named the Dominion Society, as in the Dominion of Canada – Canada’s official, full name, being a Dominion of the British Crown. Its symbolism draws upon Canada’s own traditional symbolism, symbols that are indeed still quietly used by the Canadian government itself, and it is therefore quite impossible for the regime to characterize DomSoc as something frightening and foreign on aesthetic grounds alone. Worse still, DomSoc is very smart about how it operates. They don’t march through the streets shouting and getting in fights: they’re polite and friendly, focusing on media activism and political pressure campaigns. Their messaging stays strictly within legal boundaries. Their over-arching goal is direct and simple: to popularize the concept of remigration, normalizing it as a topic in the national conversation, such that voters will begin spontaneously raising the issue with politicians: “If we can bring people in, why can’t we send them back? Planes fly in any direction.”

September 2, 2026

Jeremy Clarkson is “the worst tax dodger in British history”

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, Food, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been watching episodes of Clarkson’s Farm and thoroughly enjoying them. I’m doing the opposite of binge-ing them, limiting myself to one episode at a time, and not every night. I’m part-way through Season 3 at the moment. The unrelenting hostility of the local government is a thing to behold … it really does seem as if they think that their role is to prevent any sort of economic activity from taking place in their jurisdiction.

Sama Hoole outlines the steps Jeremy Clarkson has taken over the time since he purchased one thousand acres of farmland:

A timeline of one man’s cunning inheritance tax scheme.

2008: Buy a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Tell The Times that dodging inheritance tax is the critical thing. Scheme live.

2009 to 2018: Do absolutely nothing. A villager farms it on contract. Flawless.

2019: The villager retires. Rather than hire another one, decide to farm a thousand acres yourself, having never grown anything.

Also 2019: Invite a film crew.

2020: Rain for nine weeks. Profit on a thousand acres: £144.

2021: Broadcast the £144 to the largest streaming platform on earth, thereby informing the entire planet that farmland makes nothing.

2021: Open a farm shop. Acquire a queue down a lane and the undivided attention of West Oxfordshire District Council.

2022: Restaurant refused. Enforcement notice. Six weeks to take a barn apart.

2023: Lose the appeal. Lose it again.

May 2024: Accidentally get English planning law rewritten. Lawyers name it Clarkson’s Clause.

August 2024: Open a pub selling only British food. Sell your own sausage at 74p against 18p imported, and eat the difference on every plate.

October 2024: The Chancellor caps agricultural property relief at a million. Scheme dead.

November 2024: Stand on a platform in Westminster in front of thirteen thousand farmers, drawing maximum national attention to the exact tax break you were supposedly hiding behind.

July 2025: Go down with TB. First calf ever born on the farm destroyed, pregnant with twins. Gate padlocked.

23 December 2025: Government retreats. The threshold goes from one million to two and a half. Five million for a couple.

March 2026: Farm declared clear.

July 2026: Drive four hundred miles to Scotland and buy more cows.

Eighteen years.

Planning law changed. Agricultural degree applications climbing. Cited in the Commons more times than most ministers manage. Half the estates that were going to be caught by the tax are no longer caught by it.

He was accused of buying a farm to dodge inheritance tax, and then spent eighteen months getting the relief raised for everybody else’s.

Worst tax dodger in British history.

Best thing to happen to British farming in fifty years.

September 1, 2026

Despite police efforts, the Dominion Society successfully holds their conference

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

The Dominion Society of Canada had planned to hold their conference at a venue in Hamilton, but Hamilton police took it upon themselves to harass the owners of rental facilities to ensure that the conference could not take place. Despite active police intervention, the organizers found an appropriate site in Burlington and the event went ahead after all:

It’s always a good look when the local police are trying to intimidate businesses to prevent a peaceful legal gathering from taking place.

On August 29th, the Dominion Society of Canada (DSC) hosted a sold-out conference bringing together domestic and international speakers.Taking place in Burlington, the event was originally announced for Hamilton and was elevated to the status of international incident by legally dubious political policing, the likely unconstitutional interference of federal agencies, and numerous violations of political neutrality by local municipalities and charitable organizations.

Launched in 2025 and swelling to several thousand members by 2026, the DSC exists to advocate for immigration restriction and Canadian nationalism. Controversially, this includes a ten-year halt to immigration and the deportation of millions of non-citizen residents.

DSC’s first conference, this was a deciding moment for the increasingly notorious organization and was strongly opposed by left-wing and anti-nationalist groups, including local civic and social planning organizations, the Jewish rights and advocacy group B’nai Brith, Hope Not Hate, and the state-backed Canadian Anti Hate Network.

The event nearly passed with little notice. But moderates and liberals across the country were alarmed at a chilling assault on free assembly and expression mobilized against DSC at all levels of power.

Ahead of the event, the Hamilton Police Service urged venues “to consider the impact this event and its messaging may have on the broader community when making decisions about hosting it” and claimed “the messaging associated with DomCon is divisive and exclusionary and can negatively impact the sense of safety and belonging within our community”.

Dominion Society founder Daniel Tyrie condemned the move to use police resources to dissuade venues from hosting the conference: “Today we learn that they are going venue-by-venue to pressure businesses into canceling on us or refuse our booking. Is this an appropriate use of police resources in a city as dysfunctional as Hamilton?”

In a call with Wire Tap Media, Inspector Darren Murphy denied that Hamilton Police Service (HPS) were engaged in political intimidation, and confirmed the steps taken by HPS to keep DSC out of Hamilton.

“Under Communism, everyone has a job”

Filed under: Economics, History, Politics, Russia — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sandy Petersen responds to the “Under Communism, everyone has a job” claim that has been circulating recently thanks to the rising popularity of useful idiots:

“Under Communism, everyone has a job”. This is absolutely true.

Here’s what else was true.

1) You were ASSIGNED your job AND the region for that job by the state (i.e., a bureaucrat). You were required to stay in your job at least 3 years.

2) After 3 years, if you wanted to switch jobs, you needed the approval of both your labor board AND your employer. If you switched too often (for example: every 3 years), there were legal penalties, up to imprisonment.

3) Promotions were based on party membership, loyalty, and sucking up. I’ve talked to a lot of former Soviet citizens, and zero of them thought merit was of use. Also many nice jobs were only for party members.

4) Wages were pretty even across the board. A factory worker, engineer, and factory manager had similar salaries, so it was indeed egalitarian, but didn’t have a lot of incentive. The higher-rank workers did get perks to make up for it. They might get a vacation dacha on the Black Sea. Or a “company” car with a chauffeur. That sort of thing. The higher-ups had better stuff.

5) You needed a passport to travel inside your own country. You couldn’t just move to Leningrad and look for work. Or even go on vacation without permission.

6) You had a union. It was state-controlled. You could not go on strike. If you criticized your factory manager, you would be arrested. Yay unions.

If you look at the above, they are an evil capitalist’s wet dream. Think of a movie with a foul imaginary super-corporation so beloved of science fiction movies — they would support every one of those initiatives.

Because that’s what the Soviet Union was — the biggest, most evil corporation that ever existed.

August 31, 2026

David Friedman on the racial IQ controversy

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

David Friedman responds to a question from one of his readers:

Lynn’s national IQ estimates (source)

    It is never too much to remember how much ethnic cleansing was made in the past based on “scientific evidence” that some races were “not as intelligent as ours” … (Comment on my blog)

Claims of this sort, about genocide, slavery, or ethnic cleansing, are offered as a reason not to talk about group differences. The implicit argument is that even if the average IQ of Africans is lower than that of Europeans or fewer women than men are talented at mathematics it is better not to say so, better to pretend it isn’t true. People making the argument rarely put it that way but it is pretty clearly what they believe.

This raises three questions. One is whether group differences exist. My view is that they almost certainly do. Darwinian evolution implies that humans are “as if designed” for reproductive success. Male and female differ in their role in reproduction so it would be surprising if the same distribution of talents were optimal for both. Africans are optimized against different environments than Europeans; that is the reason for the differences in appearance by which we distinguish them. It would again be surprising if the same distribution of abilities were optimal for both. That does not tell us what the differences are but it makes me skeptical of claims that they do not exist.

That is not, however, the subject of this post.

A second question is whether, if the claim is true, it is a valid argument for concealing true facts about group differences. It might be. If something is true and the consequences of it being known are sufficiently bad that is a reason to conceal it. Consider, for example, accurate instructions for creating a plague virus.

Whether that is the case for the existence of group differences depends on the consequences of concealing or not concealing it; my guess is that if significant group differences exist the consequences of pretending they don’t are worse than of admitting that they do1 but that is also not the subject of this post.

The third question is whether the claim is true, whether the belief that some groups were less intelligent was the cause of terrible things in the past. As far as I can tell it was not. There were terrible things done in the past and the perpetrators often expressed a low opinion of the victims but I have found no case in which supposedly scientific evidence of their inferior intelligence was the cause. In the most plausible cases, mass killing of Jews, Slavs and Romani by the Nazis, prejudice and conflict long predated the purported scientific evidence.

Consider some examples of terrible things.

Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia, so far as I can tell, had nothing to do with scientific evidence, real or bogus, about the relative intelligence of races. In some cases the cleansers and their victims differed only in whether their ancestors had or had not converted to Islam in the distant past. In others, the justification offered for the cleansing was “it’s historically our land, and they have taken it over by immigrating and having more babies than we did”.

The largest race killing in the post-war period may have been the Hutu/Tutsi conflicts in southern Africa.2 The victims were mostly Tutsi, an ethnic minority that before independence been the dominant group.3 It is hard to believe that any significant amount of it was motivated by evidence of their inferior IQ.

What about the Holocaust? Some Nazis made claims about Jewish inferiority of one sort or another but the basis for their antisemitism was the idea that Jews were race enemies, in which case the more intelligent they were, the more dangerous. One can see that pretty clearly in Henry Ford’s less malevolent version of antisemitism. The Nazis claimed that Slavs were an inferior race but their motive for killing or deporting them was to seize their land, a conflict that had been running, off and on, since medieval times. The Romani, the other major target of racial killing, were viewed as inferior but principally as criminals and vagabonds, again an issue that long predated the Nazis.

  1. Nathan Cofnas argues that the confident denial of group differences is responsible for the popularity of woke beliefs. If you know for certain that Africans and Europeans, men and women, have the same distribution of abilities it follows that any difference in group outcomes must be due to one group having a less favorable environment; if you cannot find evidence of racism, sexism, or something similar you must not be looking hard enough.
  2. The Nigerian Civil War may have killed more people but although the sides were racially different the conflict was over the attempt of the Ibo minority to secede from Nigeria.
  3. I somewhat oversimplify.

August 30, 2026

Why Machiavelli Matters Now by Stephen Bowd and Alexander Lee

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

In The Critic, Tom Jones reviews a new work on Niccolo Machiavelli by Stephen Bowd and Alexander Lee:

Machiavellian is rather a dirty idea in politics, conjuring tired images of scheming Wormtongues, smoke and mirrors, nights of long knives, Peter Mandelson.

But a new book hopes to change that, by offering us a more rounded view of this important figure, who has been sadly lost — like Sun Tzu and Marcus Aurelius, but thankfully not Edward Gibbon or Carl von Clausewitz — to business bros who buy their books in branches of TG Jones in regional airports.

The first chapter of Why Machiavelli Matters Now is dedicated to the closest thing to methodology the Italian ever laid out. Halfway through The Prince, he writes that “it has seemed only proper to go straight to the effectual truth of the matter [alla verità effettuale della cosa], rather than to how it is imagined”. This, authors Stephen Bowd and Alexander Lee claim, “is perhaps the most crucial sentence in the whole of Machiavelli’s writings”.

But it might be best summarised as wanting to understand things not as they were, but as they came to be — or, more precisely, what caused them to change. That wasn’t all; since he used the concept in relation to a prince’s relations to “his subjects and friends”, it means the specifics of how human behaviour produces political change. This, as the authors note, “was genuinely revolutionary. No one until then had thought of politics in such overtly dynamic terms.”

This, at least, was Strauss’ reading. But as with most of Machiavelli’s work, the thing is more subtle than it first appears. Informed by both Aristotle and Lucretius (it should be obvious at this point how heavily I am cribbing from this interesting, short and consumable book), it was:

    a truth that had to be decided pragmatically, through experience, on the basis of what felt right, rather than what could be rigorously verified – and all too often shaded off into mere verisimilitude. It sought to explain changes of all kinds but was preoccupied above all with the causes of civil unrest and factional struggles, which undermined rulers and republican regimes more than anything else

Understanding the effectual truth was, for Machiavelli, essential if princes were to avoid being either baffled or frightened by political developments. Alas, were our own princes aiming for such lofty ideals of governance.

August 29, 2026

On the scenic shores of “Lake America”

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

One thing Trump does better than any other politician is finding ways to send his opponents crazy. It’s not a skill I’d want to have myself, but it’s amazing how Trump can do or say something outrageous … and pretty much every time his opponents take the bait and make themselves even more ridiculous in trying to react to his provocations. Like randomly renaming Lake Ontario by executive order:

I don’t think Carney has Trump Derangement Syndrome, the citizens who vote for him do. Carney knows this, he counted on it to win the election. Elbows up was about preparing Canadians for a breakdown in relations with the U.S. – A breakdown that Carney and the other Laurentian elites who run things in Canada saw as inevitable. To anyone paying close enough attention, Carney is the de facto new leader of the globalists (the WEF mob). He ascended to that position at the moment he became the Canadian prime minister. Trump and the MAGA movement, on the other hand, are the singular force in the world effectively opposing globalism as it has emerged in the post-WWII “rules based order”.

This effectively places Canada at the center of an existential global struggle. However, we are not only at the center, but oppositionally set against the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, locked in a “trade war” with the largest economy in the history of humanity. Pardon my use of acronymic French as I blurt out an unruly “WTF!”

I am sure Carney has read The Art Of The Deal and knows how to win diplomatically with Trump – which is all one needs to read to gain the key insights prerequisite to mutually successful negotiations with the orange one. But Carney is not interested in mutually beneficial trade relations with the U.S. because that would mean tacit support for the American led reset of global political economy (which of course follows from America’s new economic policy, because yes absolutely America is that powerful), or put another way, it would mean Carney supporting the thing which is opposing the thing that he actually supports.

Elbows up Canadians have been manipulated by the most cynical government in the history of Canada. Carney is a smooth operator but a cunning wirepuller. He has essentially pulled the wool over the eyes of a malinformed citizenry who have been fed an endless diet of state-sponsored anti-American, Anti-Trump, and Anti-Poilievre propaganda since at least the final scenes of the Trudeau premiership set the stage for Carney the globalist show closer.

[…]

And at last we come unceremoniously to the supreme troller who has cast his line in the newly anointed Lake America. He is fishing for a major catch of Canadian TDS, and he is bound to fill his nets. Indeed, Trump has signed an executive order officially changing the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Canadians are of course triggered and are whining insufferably. I think it is funny, and I like that for once an Indian name is being changed to a European one. Trump is the greatest troller in the history of trolling. However, the move is a serious one, in twenty years the world will be flooded with maps and globes that label the former Lake Ontario as Lake America, in spite of the impotent protestations of butt hurt Canadians. America has vastly more power in this world, if they want our lake known as Lake America it will be so. Canadians who have a hard time accepting this simply have no clue about the dynamics of power.

Carney’s response to Trump’s redesignation of the lake was replete with a self-own only one as invested in a globalist “new world order”, and oblivious to actual domestic concerns could muster. He posted the following to X:

    The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.

    The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.

    We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.

    Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

A hilarious response to this which appeared on X was posted by Miranda Veracruz de la Jolla Cardinal, which I am assuming is a parody account since Miranda was a recurring character in the 1980s sitcom Married With Children. MVdlJC wrote:

    “How dare Trump rename Lake Ontario!”

    “Anyways, here I am at Sankofa Square …”

If that is not the cat’s pajamas then I have no idea what type of a response to Carney’s boundless smugness would adequately compliment a feline’s slumber. Carney says that Canadians know about “naming reality”, yet how many unpronounceable aboriginal terms have been grafted over the real names of Canadian places in the past decade or so.

Amnesty International

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

Frederick Alexander wonders “what the hell happened to Amnesty International”?

I’m firmly in middle age, and the signs are all there. I can’t have a lie-in any more; I just wake up early, feeling unrested, and have to mainline caffeine for the first hour before I can get anything done. My lower back aches constantly and now works like a barometer, the pain increasing with an approaching cold front. And I’m old enough to remember when Amnesty International was an admirable organisation that defended the oppressed – back when that word described people suffering in the real world rather than grievances the sociology department workshopped into existence. Such are some of the complaints of a middle-aged Englishman, but it’s the third that vexes me most today.

Amnesty really was something special once. It stood for dissidents and prisoners of conscience: the Chinese journalist tortured for saying something that embarrassed the CCP; writers like Václav Havel, imprisoned by communist Czechoslovakia before later becoming the country’s president. I loved The Secret Policeman’s Ball, the Amnesty benefit shows associated with John Cleese. My record collection was full of Peter Gabriel, Tracy Chapman and the like, who helped carry the cause into stadiums around the world. Who could not admire an organisation devoted to freedom – that most contested of political ideals, and the one closest to my heart?

Today Amnesty International is a case study in everything that has gone wrong with our institutions.

Consider the latest episode, one entry in a long and growing list of absurdities. In July, Amnesty International UK published a list of organisations it said belonged to an “anti-rights ecosystem”, including Beira’s Place, the female-only support service for victims of sexual violence founded by JK Rowling. Other names among the 117 supposedly malign bodies were For Women Scotland and Sex Matters – whose great offence is essentially to insist that women exist as a biological category.

Compiling lists of ideological offenders is a bit … what’s the word? Totalitarian? Fascistic? The organisation that once existed to defend prisoners of conscience decided it would be a good idea to draw up a register of thought-criminals, a rape-crisis centre among them. I can’t imagine Tracy Chapman strumming a guitar for that. I don’t know what Peter Gabriel makes of it either. If either of them is still sane (I’m too afraid to check), they’ll likely frown on the direction of travel.

Rowling, who once worked for Amnesty back when it defended people with the “wrong” beliefs rather than compiling lists of them, threatened legal action and offered to help other organisations on the list do the same. Amnesty first expressed regret – the standard move while they work out how much trouble they’re in – and then issued an apology when they realised she was not mucking about, saying the briefing should never have been published.

Amnesty said, “We regret that this briefing was uploaded to our website without going through the established internal review processes”, which is the institutional equivalent of “the dog ate the homework”. But I’ve worked in this kind of outfit. Things like this don’t go up by accident. This wasn’t a pocket tweet. Reports go through layer after layer of review before sign-off – after which everyone holds a little drinks party to congratulate themselves on a job well done, and someone gives a small speech while another has a bit of a cry.

August 28, 2026

“Single mother households produce the worst results for children”

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

Spaceman Spiff does that thing with data where you point out the most unpalatable results from a given set of statistics and place it front and centre:

Any mention of Cofnas by academics or the media comes with an obligatory dismissal of his work as “controversial” or “far-right”. It is often labelled as “pseudo-science”.

Yet if critics were confident in their position, that the research is incorrect, they would not react as they do.

This is easy to illustrate with a fake example. Imagine research into another sensitive area, female behaviour.

We can draw conclusions based on the research that will anger feminists in much the same way research into the heritability of intelligence and behavioural patterns within distinct groups angers most of academia.

One stark observation dominates our view, in everything we can measure, from mental health to life success, single mother households produce the worst results for children.

The literature is crystal clear.

With a wide variety of measurable outcomes, including life quality, criminality and recidivism, adjustment to society, academic achievement, material success, and mental health issues, the best results are produced by two-parent households closely followed by single-father households.

Single-mother households trail far behind on virtually everything we value. Being raised by a single mother is detrimental to the wellbeing of children compared to other options.

This is reflected in the historical record too. Females gaining custody of children after divorce is a recent novelty. In the Victorian era the father usually retained custody. Women were seen as too emotionally unstable to raise children alone. They needed the strong presence of a father.

One really damning factoid to emerge from crime statistics is most infanticide is committed by women, not men. Of children killed by their parents it is almost unheard of for the father to murder his own children. In some 98 percent of cases it is the mother.

We can use these observations to reach a sensible conclusion.

Single mothers should not be allowed to raise their own children.

Trashing the research not the researchers

Our conclusion is not very good. Academics would find it easy to challenge. This process follows a predictable course.

The first stage is to examine the papers and point out their flaws. What studies show these outcomes? What variables were measured? How were they measured?

Then there are the definitions. What do we really mean by life outcomes? Success is a subjective concept at best. Even something nominally objective like incarceration rates are complex with many variables of which the childhood environment is only one.

What other factors were measured? Were there control groups? What about sample sizes? How many people did they track? Many papers reach bold conclusions with small sample sizes. Which leads to the next question, has anyone replicated this finding? The replication scandal is well documented in multiple academic disciplines; one-off studies no one can reproduce, even quite famous experiments that have entered popular culture.

The quality of the studies is often assessed first because if they are flawed this inevitably damages the credibility of any conclusions drawn.

As for our conclusion, that children should always be taken from single mothers, even widowed women, this is not supported even with the evidence outlined above. Studies would need to demonstrate fostered or adopted children did better than those raised by a widowed mother, an unlikely proposition and just one alternative view possible from the evidence.

Importantly, serious critics would generally avoid motive except as a last resort. Sexism, misogyny and hatred of women may be there in a hypothesis that paints women in a negative light, but compared to challenging the research and its foundations, speculating about motive is weak and too easy to dismiss.

Jumping straight to perceived hate or bigotry, particularly when it makes the accusers look morally superior, is a tell.

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