Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2026

Carney’s Trump card – deploy the BOM to panic the Elbozos

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

I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that Mark Carney wouldn’t be Prime Minister without the active connivance of Donald Trump. Using the Bad Orange Man to whip up the thoroughly propagandized Boomer Elbozos has been Carney’s most successful play since arriving in Ottawa. With the enthusaistic support of the presstitutes of the Canadian relic media, all Carney needs to do to deflect any bad news is to mention the name and the elbows start flapping in unison:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Dear Prime Minister Carney,

Enough the crap already. Just stop it and tell your caucus MPs to knock it off too. Canadians deserve better. I, along with most Canadians I talk to, are genuinely disgusted by what Canadian politics has become.

Let me start with something that apparently now requires a disclaimer before common sense is permitted into the room: yes, the Canadian government should prepare for catastrophes, whether that’s war, cyberattacks, pandemics, natural disasters, terrorism, economic shocks, asteroids and comets or, hell, even an alien invasion. Governments are supposed to think about things the rest of us would reasonably file under “probably never going to happen”, including scenarios so unlikely that everybody involved hopes the planning exercise ends up gathering dust forever. That is called governing.

But there is an enormous difference between quietly preparing for an extreme possibility and irresponsibly putting that possibility in front of Canadians until people start wondering whether they should be watching the southern horizon for tanks.

And apparently we are doing the latter now.

You called the possibility of American military action against Canada an “extreme tail risk”. In other words, something considered extraordinarily unlikely but potentially catastrophic.

Fine, plan for it then. War-game it if you like. Put it in a binder thick enough to stop a bullet and lock it in whatever filing cabinet governments use for scenarios involving asteroid strikes, alien invasions and somebody successfully explaining the federal tax code.

But why are ordinary Canadians being invited into this particular nightmare? Especially now?

Because while everybody is staring south waiting for Donald Trump’s army to parachute into Canada, something considerably less hypothetical is happening right here.

The Canadian economy isn’t exactly bounding through the meadow with a ribbon in its hair like you touted, now, is it And guess what’s actually more interesting?

On June 3, you stood in the House of Commons defending Canada’s economic performance and told Pierre Poilievre that if he wanted an answer, he could “ask the OECD”, which was forecasting Canada to have the second-strongest G7 economy that year and the next.

Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne invoked the OECD forecasts too. The OECD had become something of an international report card pinned proudly to the Liberal refrigerator. You touted it as proof “the plan is working!”

Then September arrived.

I’ve been saying for quite some time that Carney genuinely doesn’t want and wouldn’t accept a trade deal with the Trump administration, no matter how much it will cost Canadians (and since his family and personal wealth is more than 90% in the United States, it’ll cost him nothing at all personally). Even so, this seems to be a position from which there is no eventual “victory”, no chance to recoup the lost economic opportunities, there is nothing to “win” here. So, aside from theorized anti-Trump animus, why has Carney chosen this path? In a long essay, Upper Canadian Cavalier suggests some fascinating yet unsettling reasons that aren’t at all tied to Canadian interests:

AI-generated image from Upper Canadian Cavalier

To ask who Mark Carney is working for, you first have to be willing to look at the real nature of the Canada-US relationship, the one that no one in a position of power above would dare articulate.

Set aside the picture of the United States as the friendly giant next door, the trading partner, the ally with the shared border and the shared anthem at the hockey game. That picture is a courtesy. What sits below us is an empire, in the oldest and most exact sense of the word, and it does not rule the way the older empires ruled. Rome ruled through legions, garrisons, roads, and the physical occupation of ground. The American empire rules through the things that move without an army. It is an empire of covert softpower most of whose subjects are blissfully unaware of their subordinate position. That empire maintains control through the currency the world prices its oil in. The payment rails every bank on earth must touch. The studios and platforms that manufacture what a hundred nations find funny and frightening and true. The defence umbrella that quietly turns an independent foreign policy into a luxury most of its members decline. The foundations and the NGOs that decide which causes are respectable and which are fringe. The universities whose faculties set the terms of every argument before a single voter ever hears it. It lets its provinces keep their flags. It lets them keep their anthems and their parliaments and their little ceremonies of self-government, because none of that costs the metropole a thing, and a province that believes it is a country is far easier to manage than one that knows it is a province.

On that map, Canada is not a neighbour. Canada is the richest province in the entire system. Wealthier than nearly all of them, wired more directly into the centre than any of them, sharing the longest border, the deepest supply chains, and the most complete cultural merger of any territory the empire holds. Most provinces of an empire sit at a distance from it. We are plugged straight into the board. Southern Ontario is closer to the beating heart of that system than West Virginia is, and it has been for fifty years.

I recall hearing the term “branch plant economy” from when I first started paying attention to the news: it was a standard refrain in any discussion of Canadian industry from at least the 1960s and probably going back much further than that … because a lot of US companies did set up small manufacturing operations in Canada to avoid paying duty and taxes for shipping products across the US-Canadian border.

But the same was at least as true about cultural issues:

Once you see the country this way, something that has nagged at you for years finally has a name. You have noticed, surely, that our politics feels like a rerun. That the arguments arrive already formed, six months late, dubbed into Canadian. The slogans on the placards, the list of what counts as controversial, the shape of every fight, all of it seems to come pre-packaged from somewhere south of here, keyed to institutions and a history that are not ours. The Canadian left takes its vocabulary and its enemies from the American left. The Canadian right does the same in the other direction. To argue about any of it from outside the imported frame, to counter-signal the entire American script, is treated in this country as something close to blasphemy. That is what it is to be a province. The metropole ships the politics, and the province stages the show.

One of the claimed advantages of the negotiations leading up to the first general free-trade agreement between Canada and the United States was to eliminate as much as possible of the cross-border friction in trade: those duties and taxes that initially encouraged branch plant expansion. Free trade meant, at least in theory, that companies could produce their output where it made the most economic sense and serve the entire North American market more efficiently. Some of the old branch plants disappeared, while others expanded and grew to become much larger facilities. Later, as emphasis on manufacturing shifted from domestic to (cheaper) international sources, the jobs and the money moved steadily away from making things and toward providing services. This seemed to make sense in the economic calculations, but it wasn’t all sweetness and light and following Adam Smith’s philosophy:

Over forty years the American economy (and Canada’s) was reorganized so that the money flowed away from the people who make things and toward the people who arrange things. Factories went abroad. Finance stopped being a utility that funded industry and became the industry. A whole class came up in the gap between those two facts: the asset managers, the consultancies, the compliance shops, the climate-finance desks, the private equity partners. Men whose income arrives not from building anything but from standing between someone’s labour and someone’s capital and charging a toll on the traffic.

Intermediation, in the polite register. Skimming, if you want the shorter word.

It is very good money. It also has requirements. Open borders for goods and capital. A regulatory thicket dense enough that only the largest players can afford the guides through it. And a political class that treats all of it as weather rather than policy.

Then 2016, and worse, 2024.

Trump is a realignment. Tariffs, reshoring, open contempt for the managerial professions and the international bodies, a stated preference for the man who pours concrete over the man who writes the memo about pouring concrete. Say what you like about how he does it. The direction is unmistakable. He is dragging the American state back toward the people who work with their hands, and away from the people who take the percentage.

So that is the larger economic and political picture. Here at home, Canada has had a decade of Justin Trudeau’s clown prince act and has finally grown tired of it:

January 2025. The Liberal brand is radioactive. Ten years of Trudeau have curdled, the party is twenty-odd points down, the cycle is running hard against it and every professional in Ottawa can read the polling. A liberal man who wants a political career in Canadian politics would wait. He would let someone else absorb the defeat, sits out a term, and comes back clean in 2029 as the saviour of a rebuilt party. That is the obvious play and any political operator in town knows it.

Carney jumped in anyway.

When somebody takes a deal that looks bad, don’t ask him what it cost. Ask him what he is buying instead. Because Carney was not making a shrewd pivot towards a political career. On the arithmetic available in January 2025 he was buying a short ugly premiership, taking a run at Kim Campbell’s record and he went for it anyway.

What the office did offer, immediately and uniquely, was a seat at the table opposite Donald Trump. Not commentary. Not a column in the Financial Times. A state. Tariff authority, a negotiating team, a G7 chair, standing with Brussels, and control of one of the few economies wired deep enough into the American one to actually hurt it.

[…]

[Carney] is not governing this country. He is occupying it.

When Caesar took Rome, Pompey and the Senate did not surrender. They crossed to Greece, and there they raised what he could and kept the war going from the provinces, because their faction lost the capital but did not want to stop fighting and submit to reforms that would permanently alter the lucrativeness of their rent seeking ways. So they relocated their base of operations to continue the war abroad instead.

They lost Washington. So they reorganized the resistance in the most valuable province they had, the one already theirs, and they garrisoned it with a man of their own class who needed no persuading at all. Nobody had to recruit him. He was already one of them, and the province came with the office.

Pompey’s people in Greece were not a band of exiles, and this is the part worth understanding. They were the Senate. The lawful government of Rome, in their own account, operating in exile with its own command and its own coinage, entirely convinced that they were Rome and that the man sitting in the city was a usurper. They were also, by any honest reading, a rich and deeply corrupt class defending its own holdings, and they could hold both of those things in their heads at once without difficulty.

That is the mind of Carney’s class exactly. They are not insurgents. They think of themselves as the rightful order who have temporarily been displaced by a vulgar interloper, waiting it out in the provinces and administering what is still theirs in the meantime.

The parallel runs the other way too, and it is not flattering to the Senate. Caesar’s support was real and it was popular. The opposition to him was a wealthy class protecting its rents and calling that protection a defence of the republic. There was no cabal in that Senate either. There were hundreds of men, each convinced of his own righteousness, each guarding his own standing, arriving at the same posture without a single meeting required. Which is why it could never be exposed, only defeated.

They also treated him as a mortal threat to the constitution before he had become one, went all in on the civil war framing, and the measures they took to stop him are what forced his hand. Prophecies of that kind have a way of fulfilling themselves.

Long time readers will know that I couldn’t possibly pass up a reference to the parallels to the late Roman Republican struggle between Caesar and Pompey.

War drums echo again in Britain

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

Mark Steyn on the renewed interest in going to war against Russia by the British establishment (let’s not point out just how Britain’s existing armed forces are being required to skip “non-essential” training to save money):

“British Army working during the Field Training Exercise” by U.S. Army Europe is marked with Public Domain Mark 1.0 .

On the other hand, the Iran war has, apparently effortlessly, brought Britain to economic ruin, which may be why the UK’s hitherto all-powerful iron-fisted caudillo has not been seen since late July, even by his favourite Ukrainian rent boys.

Still, the good news is that every day Russia inches closer to that 2022 collapse:

    The Novoshakhtinsk refinery in the southern Russian region of Rostov was hit by drones and had to be taken offline, regional governor Yury Slyusar said in a post on Telegram early on Friday.

    As a result of the drone attacks, the Novoshakhtinsk refinery, which has the capacity to process 110,000 barrels of crude oil per day, was damaged and halted operations, the official said …

    Ukraine continues its campaign to cripple Russian refining capacity, fuel supply, and export revenues. Due to the low refinery production, Russia has been forced to ban diesel exports for months and is likely to extend the ban beyond September 30. The ban was initially introduced in July as Ukraine has continuously taken Russian refineries offline.

That’s great news, isn’t it?

Whoops, my mistake: in another exciting plot twist, bringing the Russian economy to its knees is now a bad thing. Because the, er, Houthis have done a Lindsey Graham and put their flip-flops on the ground:

    The Houthis’ capture of Mocha has transformed the war in Yemen – and the geopolitics of the Red Sea

Are you a renowned geopolitical expert? Are you free for a quick Zoom hit on what happens if the Iran-backed Iraqi militias bomb the strategically vital Saudi port of Macchiato? Ha! Gotcha!

Notwithstanding these distractions, what rank-and-file voters want to know is who’s two points up in Iowa. After all, we live in a golden age of popular self-government where Abdul el-Sayed is “America’s next Obama” and Elif Eralp is “Germany’s Zohran Mamdani” and Sadiq Khan is the next Sadiq Khan. Iowa-wise, Republican control of the Senate is all down to Nicki Minaj.

As you’ll have gathered from all the foregoing, news is bollocks. And yet, to return to where we came in, the strange persistence of certain recurring themes is itself newsworthy. It is curious, for example, that every western European leader insists on alerting his citizenry that “war with Russia could begin at any moment“.

Why? It’s fairly obvious that Moscow has determined to conclude the Ukraine war on the battlefield and to hold what it has taken: to the victor the spoils, as President Trump remarked at the UN General Assembly. In the course of an agreeable week or so in Odessa, it took me a day or two to notice that seventy per cent of the locals speak Russian and that the preferred items I painstakingly learned from the breakfast menu were not in fact in Ukrainian. So I can see why the Kremlin might jib at letting Nato turn it into the Lindsey Graham Memorial Headquarters for the new forward operating bases that used to be in the Gulf. In the weeks since my pre-coma vacation, Putin has destroyed the town’s port and reduced Ukraine to a de facto landlocked country.

Tough for the Ukrainians. So the European political class has volunteered you — yes, you, Clive Higginbotham of Rotherham, and you, Jean-Marie Durand of Clichy-sous Bois, and you, Stig Karlsson of Malmö — to go and fight the Russian bear. The Pakistani minicab-driver will take care of your wife and daughters while you’re away. When the Donbass is in peril, what fainthearted ninny worries about his own territorial integrity? In London the government’s busy giving away Northern Ireland, Gibraltar, the British Indian Ocean Territory and the English South Coast to, respectively, Brussels, Madrid, Port Louis and every sex-fiend in Somalia, so your sovereign territory is hardly at issue, is it, you whiny loser?

Even so, you’d think impending nuclear armageddon would be a wee bit politically controversial. Au contraire, it’s impeccably non-partisan. Here, for example, is a discussion about next month’s blitzkrieg against Russia between the Rt Hon Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, former Lord President of Her late Majesty’s Privy Council and a “conservative”, and Mr Paul Richards, former chair of the Fabian Society and a “socialist”:

Got that? If you oppose war with Russia, the “conservative” wants to throw you in gaol because Britain suspended habeas corpus during the Napoleonic Wars and the “socialist” wants to throw you in gaol under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act.

Because that’s all the choice anyone needs in a functioning democracy. So good luck findng a Neither Of The Above candidate who’ll be permitted to take power. After all, the winning party in this month’s German elections is, per the intelligence agencies, a “Russian sleeper cell”.

But but but, splutter my correspondents, aren’t you worried that Iran is two weeks away from a nuclear weapon? Actually, I assume the deceased ayatollahs have used the seven months since February 28th to acquire nukes. Wouldn’t you?

September 28, 2026

The Blairite world of “policy based evidence making”

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

Just when you think the world is safe from Tony Blair’s machinations, he pops up yet again with more ideas for cultural enshittification:

Tony Blair photographed for the New Statesman by Tom Jamieson.
Photo via Fainting in Coils

Tony Blair has a gift for sentences that sound like policy and dissolve on contact. His Institute’s new paper contains one worth framing. “The right answer should always come first and the politics should follow.” It is the creed of a man who has never knocked on a door in Mansfield, and it explains everything else in the document. It is also called “policy based evidence making“.

The proposal is that Andy Burnham should use his November ten-year plan to put EU membership back on the agenda, with a target of rejoining a “significantly reformed” Union within a decade. Three years ago Blair told a group of European news agencies that whether and how Britain rejoins would be for a future generation. The future generation has arrived early, and it looks remarkably like Tony.

Nowhere does the paper define “significantly reformed“. It cannot. Name the reforms and you hand twenty-seven capitals a list of British demands, which is Cameron’s 2016 renegotiation with the humiliation pre-installed. Leave them unnamed and the target is air. It is equally coy on the currency, insisting it is not making an argument about the eurozone. Brussels will be happy to make that argument on its behalf.

What the friends of Europe concede

The most damaging witnesses against Blair are his own side. The Institute for Government, no nest of Eurosceptics, notes that new members are required to join the euro and Schengen, and that any fresh opt-outs or rebate would almost certainly need the approval of every member state and a majority in the European Parliament. An analysis on the LSE’s Brexit blog went further. It argued that the EU would expect Britain back as a more normal member state, with the rebate, the euro and Schengen opt-outs and the special justice and home affairs arrangements all off the table. The same piece warned that Brussels would look for significant, stable and long-lasting majority public opinion in favour of rejoining before it took an application seriously. A ten-year target announced by one party, and opposed by the party leading the polls, is the opposite of that.

A Queen’s University Belfast academic, writing before the referendum, saw the trap clearly. He judged it extremely unlikely that the EU would readmit Britain on its old terms, because a vote to leave would itself have been a democratic rejection of those terms. And unanimity means every capital holds a veto, including Madrid, which would have Gibraltar in view when any British arrangement came before it.

What the Leavers add

Anyone who imagines accession is a negotiation should read Hannes Gissurarson on Iceland, which voted last month against even resuming talks. He points out that accession talks are no bargain between equals but a process of adopting the Union’s legal framework wholesale, with room only for temporary exemptions to ease adjustment. Iceland’s Yes camp campaigned on a slogan meaning roughly “vote yes to find out what the EU would offer”, which Gissurarson reads as a confession that the deal was poor. Blair’s ten-year target is the same slogan with a longer run-up.

Gissurarson also recounts an unnamed EU official musing to Politico that rich Iceland could join alongside Montenegro and pay for its membership. Britain, rejoining behind a queue of Balkan and eastern candidates, would be cast as the wealthy uncle who picks up everyone’s bar tab.

Update, 29 September: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

September 26, 2026

Jacob Rees-Mogg says the quiet part out loud

Filed under: Britain, History, Media, Politics, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Despite British news popping up here fairly regularly, I don’t closely follow individual politicians, so I didn’t have strong opinions about Jacob Rees-Mogg. I guess I had mild positive feelings about him based on what he’d said on various issues several years ago. I’d rather assumed he’d be out of politics by now with the collapse of the “Conservatives” after the Boriswave, but no, he still thinks of himself as a voice worth listening to … unfortunately.

Thoughts from the Shire suggests that we not blame Rees-Mogg too much, as he merely said out loud what they all think:

Don’t be too hard on old Jacob Rees-Mogg.

His recent call for the return of duty and the stiff upper lip, along with his warning that some of us may once again have to fight and die for our country, has predictably, and rightly so been met with howls of derision.

But here’s the thing, Mogg isn’t entirely wrong.

Duty does matter, courage matters, and sacrifice matters. A people incapable of defending themselves will eventually find themselves at the mercy of people who can, this is the story of world history. The problem is not the principle, the problem is the state of the nation, and perhaps more importantly, the relationship between those asking for the sacrifice and those expected to make it. People have rightly been pointing out that Millionaire Mogg, and his progeny are not likely to be the ones enlisted for the frontline, and that too often in our history the likes of Jacob have led many millions of good men to war. It is great that many have seen through Moggs BS rhetoric, and are telling him where he can stick his future war.

However we should not think that the masses of working class men that fought in past conflicts all did so out of patriotism, or because they listened to their betters, or were too stupid to see through the propaganda. Most knew their leaders were full of shit, most despised the upper crust types like Mogg.

It’s rather amusing that both the British and Canadian powers-that-be have spent a long time doing things to diminish the patriotism of their people — not least by mass immigration against the will of the voters — and denigrating the patriotic feelings they haven’t managed to fully suppress. Both ostentatiously treat immigrants, especially illegal immigrants better than they treat their own citizens, both with public support and judicial slight-of-hand to minimize or eliminate punishments when they do find themselves in court.

Now, British elites want the downtrodden young white males to ready themselves to go die for Ukraine, while Canadian elites want their downtrodden young white males to become, as John Carter put it, the Hoser Taliban and fight against the Yankee hordes of the Bad Orange Man. As if everyone will just magically forget that they spent the last decade and more actively trying to erase our history and blacken the reputations of the men who built our nation.

Sorry for the interruption, I’ll get off my hobby horse and let’s get back to Thoughts From the Shire:

Canadian troops going “over the top”

In the Past, the Upper Crust also Paid a Great Price in War

Nor, incidentally, did the upper classes always remain safely at home like old Mogg, and his ilk today. In the Great War, aristocratic families lost sons in extraordinary numbers. In 1919 the House of Lords recorded 160 sons of peers dead, “in many cases the hopes and heirs of their line”. Prime Minister Asquith lost his son Raymond. Bonar Law lost two sons. Public-school boys died in the same mud as miners and millworkers, and actually in a higher proportion. Go further back and the connection between leadership, and physical danger becomes even clearer. Kings fought, Chieftains fought, aristocrats fought. Martial ability was not the only qualification for leadership, but for much of history its obvious absence could certainly be a disqualification. It would have been unthinkable for a Celtic chief not to have been a great warrior, in fact the greatest warrior was often made chief precisely because he was the best warrior. Put the above into the context of today, the weak effeminate excuses for leaders we have in the West, not one of them would have the backbone to stand and fight for anything, let alone for you or me.

Contrary to common belief, in the past the man saying “Lets go to war” was frequently going with you, and on WWI the junior officer was actually going in front of you.

That matters.

Because the great change in our own age is not that ordinary men have suddenly become cowards (although it’s no doubt many are) and the upper classes armchair generals. It is that the bond between sacrifice, and belonging has weakened. My ancestors lived in mill-owned houses. They knew perfectly well where they stood in the social order, right at the bottom. Yet they fought in both world wars, remember there was no conscription in Ireland so they volunteered.

The thing is they were not fighting for an amorphous administrative machine called “the state”. They were fighting, in however complicated a fashion, for home, hearth, wives, weans, neighbours, streets, churches, towns, regiments, and the men beside them. They knew what was behind them, and beside them, they knew what they were trying to preserve, and that is where Mogg has the problem a bit backwards.

You cannot spend decades hollowing out common identity, weakening attachment to place, treating inherited loyalties as embarrassing, and reducing citizenship increasingly to an administrative relationship, then suddenly reach into the cupboard when war threatens and pull out words such as duty, honour, country, and sacrifice. You cannot look down your nose at the oiks and their gammon like ways, and then suddenly point out that they may have to die with honour and dignity.

Virtues like duty, honour, and sacrifice require roots, common beliefs and identities, a people!!!

So perhaps Mogg is right, we do need to toughen up. Perhaps we have become too comfortable, too passive, and too frightened of hardship. But the courage required of us may not be the courage to march obediently towards the next foreign battlefield for the virtue signalling elite, and their banker friends. It may be the courage to ask our own rulers some very uncomfortable questions first.

On Substack Notes, John Carter links to a Morgoth post on the topic, saying:

Jacob Rees-Mogg has been lecturing Brits about their “duty” to the nation, in particular their duty to die in Ukraine, while at the very same time he denies that the English people even exist as a nation at all. A “nation of mongrels”, he calls them.

He adopts the mannerisms of a grand old lord of times gone by, one of the landed gentry who bled and died en masse when they threw themselves into the trenches of the Great War, answering the very same call of duty to God, king, and country that Rees-Mogg cynically invokes. Will Rees-Mogg die in a slit trench in the Donbass? Will any of his four sons? Peter is 19 — old enough to fight. Will he? To ask the question is to answer it.

Rees-Mogg speaks of duty to fight for a country he will not fight for. He speaks of duty as he smiles upon the invasion of that country by the hordes of third world primitives he and his class continue to invite in. He speaks of duty, as the regime he supports bends itself to persecuting the men and women doing their duty to their country by attempting to fight back against the invasion.

Devon Eriksen stakes out the anti-Feminist position

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, science fiction author Devon Eriksen discusses the “worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman”:

The worst and most prolonged psychological torture you can inflict on a woman is to convince her she’s as good as any man.

This torture is lifelong, unendurable, and once you set up the initial conditions, the pain becomes self-inflicted.

You see, women are genetically programmed for two things. First, to raise children. Second, to select a man who is superior to her to bear those children for.

Not equal.

Certainly not lesser.

Superior.

There is no point in arguing about this. It is obviously true to anyone who looks around himself without blinders made of wishful thinking.

There is no point in becoming angry at me or anyone else about this. It is true whether I wish it to be or not, and whether you wish it to be or not.

There is no point in trying to talk women out of this. It is not a part of their culture or education. It is not an individual character flaw in them. It is part of their genetic recipe.

Therefore, if you convince a woman she is equal to most men, she will only be willing to bear children to a small percentage of exceptional men.

If you convince her that she is the equal of any man, she will be unwilling to start a family with anyone.

And she will remain genetically programmed to do so.

When I was a child, and again when I was a young man, in high school and college, I noticed that the older adults who staffed the education system seemed to think “girls’ self-esteem” was our most precious resource, perhaps because it’s good for stable nuclear fusion containment, or as a growth medium for cancer-curing fruit trees.

Well, I sure hope they’re making good progress on that nuclear fusion thing, because it sure is hard on the women they grow up into.

Perhaps they thought having a high self-esteem is the same as feeling good.

Perhaps they thought half of humanity’s potential Newtons, Einsteins, and Da Vincis were hidden among the ranks of the fair sex, waiting to be unlocked by “Project Self Esteem”, and no, I did not make that name up.

Perhaps they were retarded.

They did, after all, work for the government.

Self-esteem is not being happy. Self-esteem is not even feeling good. Self-esteem is how awesome you think you are.

And if you think you’re awesome, when you’re mediocre, then you’re miserable, because everyone around you treats you a whole lot worse than you think you deserve.

High self-esteem is great for young men. It makes them take risks. And to thrive men need to take risks, and achieve things, for many reasons, one of which is that women only mate up.

High self-esteem is not so good for young women. It doesn’t get them anything they wouldn’t have already had. It just makes them less happy with it.

Sure, there’s such a thing as self-esteem too low, but if a woman can look you in the eye, instead of in the shoes, when she talks to you, she’s pretty much good to go.

Anything more than that is superfluous at best, and at worst … well, eyeball the video for a moment and you’ll see what I mean.

But the misery isn’t just personal.

This is the fertility crisis in a nutshell. We, Western civilization, have spent the past five or six decades telling little boys that they are worthless sacks of protoplasm, and telling little girls that the sun shines out of their collective girl parts.

And look what’s happened.

The fertility crisis is stupidly simple. When you elevate the status of women by giving them a greater share of respect, and of society’s wealth, which is created by men, they refuse to have children.

You can reverse this by allowing men to keep the wealth they create, instead of giving it to women.

Then they will give it to women themselves, but the women will look up to them, and there will be children again.

During the Trump administration so far, 94% of new job went to women. This is not natural or organic. This doesn’t happen on its own. This is not happening because women are “crushing it”.

Women are the same women they have always been, risk averse, clustered around average intelligence, prone to wait for others to lead.

This is not an accident. This is spin on the ball. Women vote. And pandering is an easy way to get those votes.

But give a moderately pretty one a single email job at a Silicon Valley startup, and pretty soon she thinks that the father of her children should be a “post-economic” jet-setter with the body of a professional athlete who ticks all the boxes her therapist thinks are important.

And she thinks she can pick him off a shelf at age 35.

This is a vote, conscious or not, willing or not, for the extinction of humanity.

Throughout the genetic history of humanity, approximately 80% of women had children, as opposed to 37% of men. Those numbers don’t lie. Most men either weren’t exceptional enough to breed, or died trying to become exceptional enough to breed.

Women just had to not be in the bottom quintile. Not to be horrible, or horribly unlucky.

This bears out what we already know.

And this is why Western civilization told women they were the weaker sex, the dumber sex, the more fragile sex. Why Eve was said to made to serve Adam.

Because this preserved civilization and the species.

Women were actually happier that way, because women don’t want to win. They want a winner.

But even if it didn’t, what choice would we have?

The only nations and tribes in the world which are still breeding are the ones where women are still of low status. And if you try to replace Westerners with them, try to make them into Westerners, not only will you fail, but even if you succeed, they’ll stop breeding, too.

And we know now why there are no matriarchies. Its not because men have superior strength, and enslaved women with violence. It’s because matriarchies don’t breed.

Humans are an animal, like any other animal. Every animal has mating rituals, and if those rituals can’t be conducted, there will be no next generation. This is why some animals can be bred in zoos, and others cannot.

We know what’s wrong.

We just lack the political will to fix it.

Because it’s “not fair”.

Well, of course it’s not fair. But look around you. Look at the universe. Look at history.

Whatever made you expect that things would be fair?

Or, as someone posted in the replies to this:

September 25, 2026

Shock! Horror! Civil servant says SAS troopers are “feral” and “nasty”

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

If you’ve ever met a regular soldier, you’ll have noticed that some of them are not comfortable in ordinary civilian settings for quite some time after they get back from active service … they have to re-adapt and that takes time and effort. Out in the field, the niceties of civil society are contra-survival in many cases. Special forces soldiers, who are much more likely to see the colour of blood (their own, their mates’, or much more likely, the enemy’s) find it even harder to be “nice” around dainty civilians like Monica Grenfell:

EXCLUSIVE: Special forces soldiers believe they are “untouchable” and not all of them are the heroes they think they are, according to a former female civil servant who worked alongside them.

Monica Grenfell, who was employed at the Special Air Service (SAS) headquarters in Credenhill, near Hereford, for three years, said some of the elite troops were “feral” and it was “the nasty characters who really ruled the roost”.

She has given evidence under oath to the Afghan Inquiry and has now been interviewed by @thetimes

During a security briefing, Grenfell claimed that an officer joked about the deaths of three SAS reservists in the Brecon Beacons, saying that “dying on selection is nature’s way of saying you have failed”, to which others laughed

Grenfell described how she was told that soldiers dropped detainees in Afghanistan from forklift trucks “for fun”. She said she asked someone what they did in their spare time in the country and they said they got forklift trucks and “drove really fast then slammed on the brakes so they fell from a height”.

The comments certainly trend a certain way:

Hector Drummond @hector_drummond
·
She should never have been allowed to be around them.

Integral Views @Integral_Views
·
Swearing and ‘being feral’ is actually just normal male behavior in groups, including friendships. All workplaces used to be like this.

Women find this atmosphere to be threatening and have gone about changing every working environment to suit their preferences without a single thought that men might find those new female coded, HR dominated safe space environments uncomfortable.

We do, by the way. We hate them.

Men retreated into gaming and now that’s also been infiltrated by woke game developers. Masculinity is simply no longer acceptable.

I’m sick of what women prefer being the unchallenged yardstick for what’s apparently morally virtuous.

Shine Like Marble @MoscowIn2008
·
The “female civil servant” rather sums up modern Britain. A feminised state obsessed with risk, HR and safeguarding, passing judgement on institutions like the SAS.

Cedric CiphercloΔk @Cycario
·
Which one didn’t text her back the night after the squadron function?

Bea Johanssen @bea_johanssen
·
Grenfell worked as a kitchen assistant and storekeeper between 2015-2018 — why would she be attending security briefings?

The Officers’ Mess @officersmess
.
Cool. Let Monica pass selection & do the grimy shit that affords her the freedom to have opinions.
Opinion she would be denied if not for the folks at the pointy end of the spear who have been protecting it.
If its too much for the Monica’s of the world: Find a new line of work.

QotD: The whole point of imposing tariffs is to raise prices

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

So why would we impose tariffs on an import or three? No, leave aside whether it’s a good idea or not, why would we do so? To increase the price of that item inside those tariff barriers. That’s it, that’s the point, to increase the price.

Think on it. So, those dastardly foreigners are better, or cheaper, or subsidised, or just plain swarthy johnnies who are selling to us and thereby stealing the crust from the mouths of the more expensive (or less good etc) proper British producers. So, we now impose a tax at the border. This makes those products from swarthy johnnies more expensive. So, people will buy fewer swarthy and more good and honest British.

This also enables the good British to raise their prices and so make a profit.

So, what actually happens is that the British consumer gets screwed for the benefit of British capitalists. Not quite what I’d recommend as a policy but that’s the point and the intention. Tariffs raise the domestic price of the thing, that’s the reason why.

Tim Worstall, “But Increasing Prices Is The Very Point Of Tariffs”, It’s all obvious or trivial except …, 2026-06-18.

September 24, 2026

More than you ever wanted to know about the Teapot Dome scandal

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

At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia has a long, long post about the scandal that (probably) killed President Harding: the Teapot Dome scandal.

“The Teapot Dome scandal” by Clifford Berryman, 1924
Granger Collection

Washington, 1922. Somewhere around H Street, a piano is still playing after midnight. The car turns off the avenue and slows outside a townhouse with the shades already drawn.

Warren Harding steps onto the sidewalk. Presidential seal on the door he just closed. Another beautiful woman on his arm, history declined to name. He doesn’t look around. He doesn’t have to.

Warren Harding is handsome. Everybody always says so. He was a notorious ladies’ man, carried on a fifteen-year affair with one married woman, fathered a child with another, and left historians enough love letters that we know far too many bawdy details about “Jerry”. (Jerry was the nickname he gave his penis.)

[…]

Either way, Harding’s genial personality probably helped. Harding liked people, people liked Harding. He had what the kids call the rizz. (Or so Jerry claimed.) And he must have had some charisma because 1920 voters handed him one of the biggest landslide victories in American history.

Now, Harding liked bringing his buddies along for the ride. Men seeking government jobs drifted through the rooms alongside men who already had them.

Attorney General Harry Daugherty is here. Daugherty is Harding’s longtime political manager and friend. Daugherty would soon become engulfed in investigations involving influence peddling and government property, and would refuse to surrender records to Senate investigators. Calvin Coolidge eventually forced him out. He later stood trial twice on charges of defrauding the government. Neither trial produced a conviction.

Harding’s unofficial fixer, Jess Smith, was there too. He technically held no federal office but nevertheless had a desk and room inside the Justice Department, used official stationery, dictated to department secretaries, carried government files, and gave orders people obeyed. Jess Smith died by suicide in 1923 while corruption allegations were swirling around the Justice Department.

The cluster of men who swarmed around Harding became known as the Ohio Gang?—?old political friends, poker companions, fixers and assorted hangers-on who had followed him to Washington and discovered that federal office came with considerably better party favors.

Harding’s cabinet, 1921. A few members of the Ohio Gang are hiding among the respectable people. They look very serious here. After hours was another story.

[…]

For years, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists had worried that private companies would simply gobble up America’s petroleum reserves. So Roosevelt ordered federal geologists to identify oil deposits worth protecting. Taft then withdrew millions of acres from private development and established naval petroleum reserves in California. Woodrow Wilson added another in Wyoming. In 1920, Congress gave the Navy power to manage and lease all three.

The reason was not complicated. American battleships were switching from coal to oil. If another war came along, perhaps it would be prudent for the United States Navy to own some oil.

Wild concept.

So the government had locked away huge underground deposits in California and Wyoming as an emergency stockpile. Together, the three reserves were believed to contain roughly 435 million barrels?—?about as much oil as the entire United States produced in a year.

There were two big California fields, Elk Hills and Buena Vista, and one Wyoming reserve called Teapot Dome.

Teapot Dome was not even the great petroleum monster of the group. Elk Hills would eventually become one of the country’s most productive oil fields and produce its billionth barrel in 1992. Teapot Dome, by contrast, occupied just 9,481 acres and produced about 22 million barrels during its later decades of federal operation.

Teapot Dome simply had better branding. It was named for a nearby sandstone formation that allegedly resembled a teapot.

Teapot Rock on an old postcard from around 1922
Public Domain

Yes, that’s a teapot. Apparently, Wyoming whiskey was excellent.

So Fall wanted control of all three reserves, and Harding gave it to him. On May 31, 1921, the president signed an executive order transferring administrative authority from the Navy to Fall’s Interior Department.

Shortly thereafter, Fall undergoes a miraculous financial renaissance. Remember Fall’s ranch with ten years of unpaid taxes and the general Grapes of Wrath ambiance?

Yeah, so by June 2022, Fall pays those taxes. He buys neighboring property. He makes substantial improvements to Three Rivers. The formerly cash-starved rancher suddenly throws money around like he’s discovered oil under the sofa cushions.

He had not. He had discovered oilmen. Two of them, specifically.

[…]

Meanwhile, President Harding was having a truly shitty year. In the spring of 1923, Jess Smith was dead, Charles Forbes had resigned from the Veterans Bureau in disgrace, and Fall had quietly resigned from Interior to work for none other than Harry Sinclair.

For once, it wasn’t Jerry keeping Harding up at night.

So that summer, Harding left on a cross-country speaking tour. During this time, Harding reportedly told a journalist: “I have no trouble with my enemies … But my goddamn friends … they’re the ones who keep me walking the floors nights!”

Those friends would drive him to an early death. On August 2, 1923, Warren Harding died in a San Francisco hotel room, probably of a sudden heart attack. He was only 57 years old.

Then Calvin Coolidge became President, and he wasn’t into playing footsy with poker players.

The benefits to US national security from the Greenland agreement

Filed under: Europe, Government, Media, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’m sure some in the Canadian relic media will try to spin the US-Greenland-Denmark agreement as somehow threatening to Canadian sovereignty, but if it does in some way it’s clearly not the main focus from the US viewpoint:

US President Donald Trump diplays the Greenland security deal with Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen and Greenland Prime Minister Jens-Frederik Nielsen.

Photo via CDR Salamander

We’ve kept up reasonably steady reporting the last couple of years on Greenland. I was never quite sure where it would come out, but I was confident that it would be — non-inclusive — in between the two extremes we heard coming out of the overly excitable and narrowly sourced commentariat of the U.S. invading or the U.S. being kicked out … and it did.

I have to give a nod to our Australian friend Liz Buchanan who gave some great observations on the issue on the Midrats Podcast back in September of 2025 and January of this year.

The full text of the agreement can be found here if you want to read it in detail, but let’s stick to the big pixels, as it is really a good news story for everyone … especially NATO.

Rod Martin created a great executive summary … I’m just going to steal it.

Bravo Zulu to the team that kept working this issue. From a national security point of view, everyone got the most important things they wanted — that’s what matters.

As we like to do here, let’s go to the chartroom.

We should start with something I posted five days ago over on X.

QotD: The perpetual progressive underdogs

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

[Commenter] Zorost proposes two axes, “empathy” and “abstraction” (or “symbol”). The Leftist is low on both, but for our purposes the “abstraction” part is the most relevant. An autistic, apparently, has trouble abstracting individual items into groups. They over-focus, such that you see lots of OCD-type behaviors. Zorost gives the example of a person being hit by a moving car in a parking lot because he can’t shift his attention away from all the parked cars.

To the autist, each car must be inspected in detail, with full attention … and while the autistic’s attention is laser-focused on one particular parked car – “1998 Ford Taurus, midnight blue, left front tire is a little low, right taillight out, bumper sticker near muffler”, etc. — he fails to notice the moving car that hits him.

As opposed to the non-autistic, who is capable of “abstracting” that situation into a realistic threat assessment. He can’t even give you a ballpark guess of how many parked cars are in the lot, much less any details about any of them, because he has abstracted them out: “a bunch of parked cars” = no threat, so his attention is free to roam around looking for moving cars.

I instinctively want to argue against this, because it appears to me that Leftists are nothing but abstraction. They don’t see individuals; they see huge identity groups. That’s why they see an anti-feminist woman or a conservative homosexual or whatever as not really X. It makes sense to them, somehow, to say that Amy Coney Barrett isn’t really a woman, Clarence Thomas isn’t really black, and so on.

[…]

The non-autistic sees [a child’s drawing of a train as] a rectangle, two wheels, some lines underneath, and thinks “train,” because he’s boiled it down to the essentials — a train is a wheeled vehicle that moves on tracks. That’s good enough to cover pretty much all “train” situations; we can add or subtract details as needed to get to this or that particular train (e.g. electric vs. steam), or a wheeled vehicle which moves on tracks that’s not a train (e.g. a rollercoaster).

So, applied to people: I see a black man walking towards me on the street and I have one set of assumptions in my head. First I see just “person”; then I realize it’s a man; then I realize it’s a black man; then I realize it’s an elderly black man; then I realize it’s Clarence Thomas. All the while I’m dialing in both my perceptions and my behavior — I’m not at much physical risk from an elderly man, and I’m at nearly zero risk from Clarence Thomas, specifically, so I modify my behavior. When I was still just at the “black male” stage of the recognition process, I behaved very differently.

If I’m reading Zorost correctly, the autistic would do something like the reverse. He wouldn’t be able to make any judgments until he’d fully inspected the individual man in front of him at close range and verified that yes, this is Clarence Thomas. And then the confusion kicks in, because he — the autistic — has memorized the rule “black man = Liberal” and here’s Clarence Thomas. Error 404.

Severian, “Why Are They Always Underdogs?”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-07.

September 23, 2026

Friedrich Merz’s rapidly fading political future

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

On Substack, eugyppius discusses the electoral chasm at Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s feet after terrible showings in recent state elections for his party and the continued rise of the extremely extreme extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD):

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Within months of becoming Chancellor, Friedrich Merz promised an “Autumn of reforms”, which never materialised because the political will to fix Germany’s economic and fiscal problems does not exist within his coalition. Having failed to fix anything and driven support for the once-mighty CDU to historic lows, Merz has instead been served an Autumn of Reckoning. It is unclear whether he will survive it.

The state elections in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin that for months have inspired fear and trembling within the German political establishment have come and gone. Each of them has realised our rulers’ worst fears in different ways.

1) In Sachsen-Anhalt, the CDU underperformed polls by more than 20%, while Alternative für Deutschland achieved the highest vote share any party has ever won in that state. The AfD are already in talks with the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, and everyone expects an AfD government under Ulrich Siegmund to take power in the coming months.

2) In Berlin, the CDU managed to squander the clear polling dominance it enjoyed throughout 2025 to finish in second place with just 18.8% of the vote – nearly seven points behind Die Linke. That is what a series of extremely stupid and unnecessary local scandals alongside association with the most unpopular Chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic can do to a party.

Zohran Mamdani’s advisers and campaign strategists assisted Die Linke in their left-populist Berlin campaign, which enjoyed particularly strong appeal among young voters. Assuming some late-breaking turbulence caused by the corruption and indiscipline that are typical of Die Linke do not derail things, they will form a government with the Greens and the Social Democrats.

3) In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the CDU managed to underperform every last poll, logging their worst electoral result in all of history. With just 4.9% of the vote, they failed for the first time ever to scrape across the 5% hurdle for representation in the Landtag – an outcome I have predicted for weeks. Whereas in Sachsen-Anhalt voters overcame the firewall by making the AfD too powerful to wall off, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they abolished it entirely by kicking the party that invented and maintains the firewall straight out of parliament.

Alternative für Deutschland won the largest vote share, but the result will be another coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Die Linke under the long-serving Minister President Manuela Schwesig. Schwesig enjoys especially strong popularity among women and pensioners, and she will be helped into power by a smattering of leftist students and climate-obsessed urbanites. The AfD will stand alone in opposition to the tepid foolishness of the coming legislature, and the citizens of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will develop new ways of thinking about the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler party, which probably cannot be all that evil or fascist or Nazi or Hitler, given that there is no longer any alternative to the left here in the northeast.

Without massive contradictions, would Canada even have a federal government?

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

As John Carter notes, the current federal government is committed whole-heartedly to a wide range of initiatives and programs, many of which are directly in contradiction of other initiatives and programs that the goverment is also whole-heartedly committed to:

Setting aside the absurd spectacle of this sheer economic illiteracy spilling forth from the mouth of a man who is supposedly some kind of economic prodigy (please do not look at the state of the British economy btw), pause to savour the conspicuous irony of a government trying to revitalize the Canadian economy while crippling its access to energy (in the middle of a war-driven oil shock no less) in the name of hallucinated climate nonsense no one even believes in anymore.

This is the same government that wants to turn Canada into a research superpower while miring the universities in DEI.

It’s the same government that’s trying to rebuild the military for “warfighting” (it has another purpose?) while going full speed ahead on vaginal maximalism in uniform.

It’s the same government announcing itself as an AI superpower, without a single frontier lab within its borders, while its brains drain south in search of the money, opportunity, and regulatory freedom the government itself ensures that Canada cannot provide.

None of this is real. It’s all press releases and press conferences meant to create the illusion of forward motion towards the achievement of contradictory aims, when no such reconciliation is possible, and no actual movement is taking place.

Corporatism and Fake Mussolini

Filed under: History, Italy, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 22 May 2026

No direct sci-fi angle here, just a clarification of a widely-held misconception about what Fascists believed, exemplified by an oft-repeated fake quote with some tangents on Eco, Gramsci, and others. Since the subject of Fascism and mythologizing of WWII comes up a lot here, it seems appropriate to address this one.

And here’s a link to Umberto Eco’s essay for those who are interested. https://ia802906.us.archive.org/31/it…

Back to the usual science fiction as cultural artifact essays next week.
(more…)

September 22, 2026

Trumpian economics – making Mercantilism great again

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

President Donald Trump is remarkably inconsistent on a lot of issues, but one thing that keeps coming back is his apparent allegiance to protectionism and mercantilism:

Politics is an industry in which ideas demonstrated to be ineffective and morally reprehensible live on long after they should have died. That’s the case with President Donald Trump’s fondness for mercantilism, as he espouses hoary old nostrums about the alleged benefits of hoarding money and preventing Americans from using their capital to purchase desired goods from other countries. Like a throwback to the 18th century, the president mistakes accumulating the means of exchange for building actual prosperity, as if we’d all be better off with overstuffed wallets than with the things our funds can purchase.

“Losing” Money on Voluntary Transactions?

Last week, when asked about the eternal political bogeyman of “trade deficits”, Trump responded, “If we lose $50 billion a year with a country, and we say, ‘we’re not going to trade with you anymore’, we don’t lose $50 billion a year. It’s very simple. Right?”

The president’s comments continued a theme he’d expounded on Truth Social, where he wrote, “If we stopped Trading with every country that we have a Deficit with, which is most of them, we would make, at least, 1.5 Trillion Dollars a year.”

Earlier this month, the president threatened to entirely stop Americans from trading with businesses in countries with which the Unted States runs a trade deficit — that is, from which we overall buy more than its residents purchase from Americans. His position seems to be that we’re better off hoarding cash than we would be using (or losing, from his perspective) our money to purchase things that we want.

But as the late economist Milton Friedman commented during an earlier incarnation of the eternal debate over the “fairness” or lack thereof of international trade, “the goods and services we import, they provide us with TV sets we can watch, automobiles we can drive, with all sorts of nice things for us to use. The gain from foreign trade is what we import. What we export is the cost of getting those imports. And the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible, for as small a volume of exports as possible.”

[…]

Everybody Benefits From Free Trade

“Nothing, however, can be more absurd than this whole doctrine of the balance of trade”, Smith warned in An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776. “When two places trade with one another, this doctrine supposes that, if the balance be even, neither of them either loses or gains; but if it leans in any degree to one side, that one of them loses, and the other gains, in proportion to its declension from the exact equilibrium. Both suppositions are false.” In fact, he pointed out, “trade which, without force or constraint, is naturally and regularly carried on between any two places, is always advantageous, though not always equally so, to both”.

As Smith’s criticism makes clear, the ideas of “balance of trade” and “trade deficits” are archaic throwbacks to mercantilism, even though they’re still popular among politicians playing to ill-informed voters. Smith’s points prevail among economists even in cases where one country burdens its population with trade barriers while allowing relatively unhindered exports.

The future of online free speech for Canadians

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

The Liberals in Ottawa prefer not to hear uppity citizens yapping about Liberal policies, and having a majority in the House of Commons means that there’s very little chance that they won’t be able to ram through a bill to curtail the ability of Canadians to speak freely online — that’s why I put a “warrant canary” in my daily Substack summary of blog posts. On X, John Carter has some advice that may be helpful to Canadians who don’t agree with the government:

Carney is essentially trying to implement Yookay style online speech controls. With his stolen majority government, there’s no way to stop him, and so no reason to expect that he won’t succeed.

Canadian nationalists therefore need to start being smart. Use coded language. Avoid overt “hate speech”. Don’t advocate violence. Use positive messaging, love of country rather than hatred of other. Make their job as difficult as possible.

This is nothing the right hasn’t seen before. The bad old days of Twitter censorship are not so far behind us. Britain and Europe already have very similar laws. That hasn’t stopped their nationalist communities. Censorship doesn’t change the underlying social conditions. At worst it prevents people from being too direct. Furthermore, by forcing dissidents to be clever, it exerts a selective pressure that raises the intellectual level of dissidents, while making the censors themselves increasingly ridiculous.

Censors themselves are usually very stupid people. Coded language tends to go right over their tiny heads. They don’t handle satire well. It’s also very easy to mock a regime like this by parroting its own vocabulary. Elbows up, everyone. Diversity is our greatest strength.

State capacity is another factor. How many censors do they actually have? How competent are they? (diversity is our greatest strength!) How many people can they actually enforce these laws on? Every time someone gets dragged into court the state is burning a significant quantity of time, energy, and attention. The cost-benefit of tasking bureaucrats, police officers, lawyers, and judges to punish random shitposts is math that doesn’t math very well. The entire strategy relies on making an example of a few to cow the many. If the many aren’t cowed, because for instance despite the censorship they can see with their own eyes what’s actually happening to their country on the street, all censorship does is piss people off and further undermine the legitimacy of a regime that would not be resorting to censorship in the first place if its legitimacy was beyond reproach.

This is bad. I’m not looking forward to it. But panic won’t help. Keep your wits about you, stay calm, be smart.

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