Quotulatiousness

April 27, 2026

Tolerance

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, InfantryDort explains why tolerating people who want to kill you is a fatal mistake:

There is no such thing as coexistence in a scenario where people want to murder you.

The side that is the least tolerant of the other, wins. Every time.

Intolerance is the mindset of the victor.

Therefore the leftist ideologue will win in this scenario, barring some renewed resolve.

You see the signs every day.

> Their “politicians” dog whistle for murder and jail
> Their “media” dog whistles for murder and jail
> Their “protestors” will scream DEATH TO TYRANTS at you while you’re fleeing an active assassination attempt against you

You forget, we all seem to forget, that THIS ideology during the Spanish Civil War in 1936, caused people to dig up the bodies of dead nuns for very public desecration.

You can’t comprehend the level of hate that it takes to do something like that. None of us can. But they can.

So they will win, because we tolerate it.

And tolerance is a poisonous virtue when intolerance is pointing a gun at your head.

Tolerance is a noble thing among the civilized. Against the butcher, it is only a prettier name for death. When violence enters the room, tolerance becomes surrender.

We get what we tolerate. And we tolerate everything.

He’s quite right about the exhumation and desecration of the bodies of nuns during the Red Terror in Spain:

Pillaging and desecration of Catholic church institutions by supporters of the Republicans; the corpses of nuns from a monastery in Barcelona were ripped out of graves and displayed on a wall.

Celina wrote about the Red Terror recently.

April 26, 2026

Rightists think leftists are stupid and leftists think rightists are evil

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

Lorenzo Warby discusses political categories and explains why they aren’t the same as moral categories:

A lot of people who class themselves as being on the Left clearly feel that there is some automatic moral kudos from being on the Left. As a direct implication of this sense of moral kudos, they also clearly think that there is some moral deficiency from being on the Right.

Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

April 25, 2026

“… as the review of USMCA approaches. Dairy is once again at the center of the storm”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Food, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dr. Sylvain Charlebois on the strong hints the US government has been dropping that Canada’s stance on our restrictive dairy cartel — euphemistically referred to as “supply management” — is going to be a key negotiating point in the upcoming USMCA trade negotiations:

The warning came quietly, but it was unmistakable. According to a Reuters report carried by The Western Producer, U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer made it clear: Canada’s dairy dispute will be resolved one of two ways, through negotiation or through enforcement.

That is not diplomatic nuance. That is a choice.

And it comes at a delicate moment, as the review of USMCA approaches. Dairy is once again at the center of the storm. It always is. Canada’s supply management system, long defended domestically, continues to frustrate U.S. officials over limited market access. As reported by Reuters, tensions remain high around how Canada administers its tariff-rate quotas.

None of this is new. What is new is the tone.

Recent commentary out of the United States, including sharp criticisms aimed at Mark Carney, reflects a growing impatience. Some of it is political theatre. But some of it signals something more consequential, a willingness to move from negotiation to enforcement if progress stalls.

In food trade, that shift matters.

Canada’s agri-food economy is deeply integrated with the United States. This is not a casual trading relationship. It is structural. Supply chains cross the border multiple times before products reach consumers. Roughly three-quarters of Canadian agri-food exports still head south. You do not casually antagonize the market that anchors your value chain.

The critique coming from voices like Brian Switzer, however undiplomatic, boils down to a familiar expectation. Canada should act like a predictable partner. Not subordinate, but steady. When that perception erodes, the consequences are rarely immediate. They emerge later, in tighter border controls, procurement shifts, or dispute panels.

And eventually, in prices.

April 24, 2026

Britain’s Green Party … not your weird cousin’s old Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Green Party have been more of a punchline than a party for decades in British politics, but the Green Party of today shares only a name with its earlier incarnations (the old UK party is now split into three separate Green Parties for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland). Now, it’s become a significant threat to the Labour Party thanks to its unlikely fusion of socialist and green policies with strong support from Britain’s growing Muslim community:

The Green Party is a growing force in British politics. In February, they gained the Parliamentary constituency of Gorton and Denton in a by-election — a supposedly “safe” seat for the Labour Party. Local elections in May see them set to make big gains — perhaps sweeping to power in several town halls in London, perhaps including Camden, where Sir Keir Starmer is one of the local MPs. Opinion polls often show them roughly level with Labour and the Conservatives.

This is quite a change from previous decades when they were indulged as eccentrics on the political fringe. The Green Party (or the Ecology Party, as it was earlier named) were the sandal-wearing, muesli-munching environmentalists who wanted to go back to nature. They opposed economic growth — but their supporters tended to be affluent enough that they could afford to do so. Its leader was the aristocrat Sir Jonathon Porritt.

They were the breed George Orwell was thinking of when he wrote: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England”.

Great fun. But there was a darker side to the quackery then and now. A totalitarian mentality which, as Orwell also vividly described, proves horrific when it prevails.

Increasingly, the Green Party has shifted its focus away from the environment. In the few towns and cities where it has gained power locally, such as in Bristol and Brighton, it has proved ineffective at practical work in this respect. Typical behaviour would be to pass a motion declaring a “climate emergency” but then perform lamentably when it comes to recycling or tree planting or any of the relevant matters they have the power to deal with.

There was always a distortion in its supposed concern for sustainability in that it was really an excuse to denounce capitalism. The Property and Environment Research Center, a US think tank which champions free-market environmentalism, has shown a more enlightened approach. Their work has included a comparison of privately-owned and state-owned forests. Another applies property rights to marine assets. But the role of property rights as a means of good stewardship of our planet is dismissed by the Green Party out of hand.

In any case, much of the campaigning by the Green Party now is on non-green issues. Its leadership talks a lot about foreign policy and a broader economic pitch focusing on class war rhetoric and an extreme programme of state control. Taxing the rich is always seen as the panacea, despite the reality that many entrepreneurs are already fleeing the United Kingdom due to its hostile fiscal environment.

Its Manifesto for the last election two years ago proposed a Wealth Tax, a pensions tax, and a big increase in Capital Gains Tax. A £90 billion carbon tax would have closed down much of British industry, which was probably the idea.

The Mailbox Test

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a thread about the ethics of setting up a trap that will only be effective if someone attempts to destroy it:

The Mailbox Test, like the breakfast test, is an excellent way to tell who you can allow to wield power in your society.

Goes like this:

    If someone is hurt trying to destroy someone else’s stuff in order to take pleasure from their pain, do you sympathize with …

    The aggressor because he got hurt?

    Or with the guy who owns the stuff, because he wasn’t the aggressor?

You can have people in your society who fail the Mailbox Test. That’s okay … they can work at hospices, or shelters for orphaned kittens, or something.

But you cannot allow them to vote, or otherwise wield political power. Because if you do, they will open the gates of the city to the enemy.

I am personally tired of everyone pretending that people who enjoy ruining things for random strangers are just kewt smol beans who are only aggressive because of all the complex socioeconomic factors and lack of resources.

They knew someone would be hurt by what they did. They knew that someone had done literally nothing harmful to them. And those two ideas, in combination made them feel pleasure. And they went and did it.

That is the sign of a rotten soul.

Defending ourselves and our property is not just a right, it’s a moral obligation. Otherwise, we just kick the can down the road for someone else to deal with, someone who may not be able to defend herself.

I don’t care if a vandal breaks his arms trying to destroy my stuff. Because I value my stuff more than a vandal’s arms. And the fact that he tried to destroy somebody else’s stuff shows that he, too, values his arms less than the opportunity to hurt somebody.

We cannot allow such people inside the city, and we cannot give the keys to those who would open the gates for them.

Another response to the original post from Kit Sun Cheah:

Sure, this adheres to a strict interpretation of Just War Theory.

However … we’re talking about a mailbox.

A mailbox is not a weapon. It does not serve any military purpose. Its existence is entirely inoffensive.

That is why it is an easy target.

A reinforced mailbox is purely defensive. Do not meddle with it and it will leave you alone. Strike it, and Newton’s Third Law kicks in.

Poke it and nothing will happen to you. Try to smash it and you risk smashing your own arm. It does not amplify an incoming force, it merely resists and returns it. Thus it is inherently proportionate.

No law or theory of war requires that you advertise your capabilities. Concealment may feel wrong to a certain type of personality, but openness is not always a social good.

Yes, you can fortify the mailbox in a blatantly obvious fashion. Some ne’er do well will notice it, then decide to pick another easier mark.

You have deterred an attack on your own property by redirecting attention to someone else’s.

Now suppose the mailbox were covertly fortified. A vandal strikes it and is injured. He passes along word to his friends, and their friends. Then they will start to wonder: are all the mailboxes reinforced?

They can’t tell, so they must assume every mailbox is fortified.

Thus, covert reinforcement does more to deter aggression than overt reinforcement. And ultimately, we want to see an end to mailbox destruction.

This post is not about just war theory or mailboxes.

Update, 25 April: 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.

QotD: Cant

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

How does one distinguish cant from real concern or real emotion? The authors rightly say that there is no fool-proof test. Some people are more sensitive than others to the wrongs of the world: as Mrs. Gummidge puts it, “I feel it more”. But if I were to say with a pained expression, “I am so concerned about the situation in the Southern Sudan that I cannot sleep at night”, and you knew perfectly well that I slept like a log the night before after dining well, and furthermore that I had no connections whatever with the Southern Sudan, you would know that I was canting.

As the authors point out, canting has an inherent positive feedback mechanism. For example, in the game of more-compassionate-than-thou it is always possible to be outflanked by someone who claims an even wider circle of concern, a deeper fellow-feeling with the downtrodden, than any that you have expressed, so that you feel obliged, in order to come out top in this competition, to go another step beyond your original claim, which was bogus to start with. Once you start canting, it is difficult to stop, at least in the short term.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Expanding Tyranny of Cant”, The Iconoclast, 2020-08-26.

April 23, 2026

The SPLC in the news

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

The Southern Poverty Law Centre (SPLC) is in the news this week for unusual reasons — not SPLC lawyers levelling accusations against individuals, elected officials, or corporate leaders, but the SPLC itself being hit with very serious charges from the US DoJ:

For nearly a decade, the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville has been portrayed as a defining moral crisis of the Trump era. Across the media and in political speeches, Charlottesville became shorthand for “Trump-era” hate. In his 2019 campaign launch, Joe Biden called Charlottesville “a defining moment for this nation”, describing how “Klansmen and white supremacists and neo-Nazis” marched bearing “the fangs of racism”.1

He condemned President Trump’s “very fine people on both sides” comment. In Biden’s words, the president’s equivocation “assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it”, and thus signalled a threat “unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime”.2 Polling at the time showed the public broadly agreed, nearly 60% of voters said Trump had “encouraged” white supremacists by his response, and a majority disapproved of how he handled Charlottesville.3 In short, Democrats and sympathetic media used Charlottesville as a concrete proof-point that Trump had unleashed a racial crisis, and that the country was in “a battle for the soul of this nation”.4 This narrative was presented earnestly by them: far-right violence in Charlottesville would be a national wake-up call about racial hatred that, in their telling, demanded urgent political action.

The Indictment: SPLC Charged

Last week, a new development has upended that narrative. On April 21, 2026, the Department of Justice announced that an Alabama grand jury returned an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), the prominent civil-rights nonprofit best known for its “hate group” lists, charging it with wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.5 The indictment alleges that from 2014 to 2023 the SPLC secretly funnelled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals in violent extremist groups.6 For example, DOJ spokesmen say SPLC paid large sums to figures associated with the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazi National Socialist Movement, the Aryan Nations and others. Crucially, prosecutors claim SPLC used covert methods: it opened bank accounts in the names of “fictitious entities” (with names like “Center Investigative Agency”, “Fox Photography”, and “Rare Books Warehouse”) to disguise payments to its paid informants. By routing donations through these shell accounts, SPLC allegedly hid the true destination of the funds. In effect, donors were told their money was helping to “dismantle” hate groups, but a portion of it was instead being diverted back to the leaders and organisers of those very groups, all while SPLC publicly denounced them.7

The indictment lays out telling examples. One SPLC “field source” reportedly received over $1 million between 2014 and 2023 while affiliated with the neo-Nazi National Alliance.8 Another informant was actually in the inner online circle that planned the Charlottesville rally itself: prosecutors say he “made racist postings” in that chat group and even “helped coordinate transportation” to the August 2017 march, all while being paid by SPLC.9 The DOJ press release quotes FBI Director Kash Patel, who bluntly said SPLC “lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups” while “paying the leaders of these very extremist groups”.10 Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche similarly charged that “the SPLC is manufacturing extremism to justify its existence”, using donor money not to combat but to “stoke racial hatred”.11 DOJ officials argue that, if proven, SPLC’s actions amounted to an elaborate fraud: donors were intentionally misled, and false statements were made to banks to conceal the program. In sum, the indictment portrays SPLC as doing “the exact opposite” of its claimed mission, funding racial hate rather than fighting it. All of these details are, of course, allegations. The legal question at this stage is whether prosecutors can prove intent to defraud, but the charges alone lay bare a startling claim: that an organisation central to defining and fighting extremism may have been materially involved with it.

  1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/25/joe-biden-charlottesville-defines-trump-presidency/
  2. Ibid
  3. Ibid
  4. https://www.jta.org/2019/04/25/politics/biden-makes-trumps-charlottesville-reaction-the-center-of-his-campaign-launch/
  5. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  6. https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/g-s1-118275/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  7. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/
  8. https://www.wunc.org/2026-04-21/southern-poverty-law-center-indicted-on-federal-fraud-charges/
  9. Ibid
  10. https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-grand-jury-charges-southern-poverty-law-center-wire-fraud-false-statements-and/
  11. https://abcnews.com/US/southern-poverty-law-center-facing-justice-department-probe/story/

On a lighter note, The Babylon Bee asks you to donate to the SPLC today to support a needy racist in your community.

April 21, 2026

Hungary in the news

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

Theodore Dalrymple considers the recent change in government as Victor Orbán was replaced by Péter Magyar, who had been an Orbán supporter until the last few years:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is perfectly normal and healthy that in an electoral democracy a government should be voted out of office after 16 years in power. One of the complaints often heard in such democracies is that “they are all the same”, they being members of the political class of whatever political party.

But there is benefit in a change of government personnel irrespective of all else, for those who remain too long in power come to think of that power as their right, and the citizenry as their servants rather than of themselves as servants of the citizenry.

The recent removal from power by election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary after so long as prime minister (and his full acceptance of the defeat, despite accusations that he was like an authoritarian dictator) was perfectly normal. He had been replaced by a man who is no fire-eating radical, Péter Magyar, a young man who was, until comparatively recently, a supporter of the leader he has replaced.

The electorate, according to polls, was concerned about the state of the economy and the level of corruption in the country. Governments that come into power promising to eradicate corruption often reveal themselves to be no different in this respect from the last: the fruits of corruption are distributed to different people, that is all.

The new prime minister differs greatly from the old in two attitudes: firstly, to the war in Ukraine and secondly to the European Union. Unlike Mr. Orbán, he is no friend of Vladimir Putin’s; and unlike Mr. Orbán, he is more likely to do the Union’s bidding in order to gain access to the latter’s funds. One important question is whether he will be forced to change Hungary’s attitude to mass immigration, opposition to which was a source not only of Mr. Orbán’s conflict with the Union, but of his long domestic popularity.

His policy was regarded as xenophobic, but this was an unjustified slur. Xenophobia is a hatred or fear of foreigners as such, ex officio, and on my visits to Hungary I found none of this. I met, for example, a Kurdish physiotherapist well integrated into Hungary, and a Moroccan academic likewise, who did not complain of personal antagonism to them. Other foreign residents whom I met did not complain of it either. A desire to protect a small country from the effects of mass immigration that have been seen in Sweden (a country of similar size of population), for example, is not xenophobia: it might on the contrary be regarded as both prudent and as a manifestation of love of one’s country. It is part of the malign legacy of Hitler and the Nazis that love of one’s country is now felt by many European intellectuals to be inherently vicious and aggressive. But love of one’s country is not the same as hatred of everyone else’s, though it is true that patriotism can sometimes degenerate into such hatred.

The European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is contradictory. It regards ethnic and cultural diversity as good in themselves, as if what existed before was lacking some important ingredient that such diversity will automatically bring.

April 20, 2026

“Hail, Caesar!” oops we meant “Hail, Carney!”

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

At The Rewrite, Peter Menzies discusses the unseemly media adulation1 for Caesar Prime Minister Mark Carney after more than a year in power:

Grok illustration of PM Carney as Caesar
Image from The Rewrite.

Thirteen months into his reign as prime minister, we still don’t know who Mark Carney is or how he engineered the removal of Justin Trudeau from office.

Nor do we know what really happened behind the scenes to convince five Members of Parliament to betray their constituents’ democratic decisions and, for the first time in the nation’s history, give Canadians a majority government they didn’t elect.

What we do know is that none of that seems of great interest to most of our media or, as they like to describe themselves when seeking federal subsidies, “defenders of democracy”.

As The Rewrite noted a year ago, the moves behind the scenes to effect the abrupt ouster of Trudeau remain a mystery. And, unlike with other PMs, there have been no Carney family magazine profiles. (Who can forget Justin and Sophie Trudeau‘s sexy Vogue cover?) Yes, there are the books, Values and The Hinge. We have learned he likes hockey, runs, won’t criticize China and is ruthless. But there is a tangible paucity of efforts within MSM to get beyond what is permitted to be known. We don’t even know if he watches Heated Rivalry or why the Brits called him “the unreliable boyfriend”. And yet, as Stephen Maher wrote for Time magazine last week, Canadians adore him.

As for how he has seized power in excess of that granted by the electorate 11 months ago, there wasn’t a hint of concern on the part of CTV News anchor Omar Sachedina when Carney’s majority was confirmed in a couple of “gimme” by-election victories.

The leading voice on Canada’s most-watched newscast, Sachedina appeared awestruck by the “historic” moment and “what the Liberals have been able to achieve in the past year”. When his sidekick, Vassy Kapelos, noted Carney was now out of excuses for not fulfilling the promises that won him a minority government in 2025, Sachedina suggested soothingly that Canadians remember “sometimes ambition does take time, sometimes several election cycles”.

Screencap of CTV News from The Rewrite

The message to Canadians? The Liberals have accomplished great things in the past year, the greatest of which was to do what no one in the nation’s history had ever done before — manufacture a majority without the public’s consent. Oh, and be patient. PMMC’s agenda could take a few more elections. Sit tight and trust.

The next morning, questions were not, as one might expect from defenders of democracy, about whether the PM felt a tad greasy for the way in which he had won unfettered power. Like, in some countries — many actually — that might be considered kind of scary. Here? If you watch the news, it’s dreamy.

The preferred line of inquiry was to ask Carney whether, if he was the Opposition Leader, Pierre Poilievre, he would quit. And so it went for the rest of the week. PMMC wasn’t asked if he worried that his majority would undermine the public’s faith in its institutions. Nor did the press corps pursue their sources to discover what inducements may have been offered to create his Judas Gang of Five.

  1. Yes, I know … the presstitutes will “love him long time” as long as the government subsidies keep rolling in.

April 19, 2026

Simple rules for judging commentary on the Iran situation

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

You’ve probably noticed that I don’t include a lot of content on Iran or Ukraine these days. That’s largely because the fog of war propaganda is too dense for much reliable information to come to us and be subject to any kind of fair analysis. Lorenzo Warby has a few rules to suggest to those of you trying to sift real information out of the noise — both specifically on the Iran conflict and also more generally for these kinds of low-signal/high-noise conflicts:

There is a lot of poor quality commentary about on the current Iran War — or, as the Chinese call it, the War in West Asia. Fortunately, there are two simple tests that winnows out much of the noise so you can focus on signal.

Locations struck by:
– United States and Israel (blue)
– Iran, Hezbollah, Houthis, and PMF (red)

First Easy Test

Would this commentator ever admit that Trump had done something positive?

If the answer is no, ignore them. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump. They are just providing anti-Trump talking points for this particular issue.

Second Easy Test

Does this commentator pay any attention to the record of the Islamic Regime? Its record of domestic repression, including various mass executions and mass killings of protesters? Its record in supporting and constructing proxies: in Lebanon, in Gaza, in Yemen, in Iraq, in Syria, in …? The record of those proxies and how they disrupt and degrade those countries? Its record in promoting terrorism across the globe? Its record in massive economic and environmental dysfunction …?

If the answer is no, ignore them. This is especially so if what they do comment on is Israel. They are not commenting on the War, they are commenting on Trump and on Israel. They are just providing anti-Trump, anti-Israel talking points for this particular issue.

The more of a regime of internal exploitation the Islamic Regime has become, the more it has built up its proxy forces. The more it built up its proxy forces, the more disruptive and destructive it has become.

[…]

Third, More Subtle, Test

The third test is about how wars work. Does the commentator understand that good strategy in war is a decision-tree? If you do X and Y happens, then follow up with Z. If you do X and A happens, follow up with B.

If they do not understand that, if they treat successful war strategy as being able to operate according to some plan so what the opponent does in response to it does not matter, then they do not understand war, and you can ignore them.

A classic way to fail in military affairs, is to not treat military action as a decision-tree, but to continue with the previous plan of action despite some crucial change in circumstances.

QotD: The (only?) man who didn’t fear Margaret Thatcher

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

The late John Hoskyns, head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit from 1979-1982, was the last person on earth to be afraid of the Iron Lady. In the summer of 1981, he sent her a memo entitled “Your political survival”, which addressed her in terms other men would have flinched from. “You lack management competence,” he wrote, tearing into her style of leadership. “You break every rule of good man-management … you bully your weaker colleagues … You criticise colleagues in front of each other … You give little praise or credit, and you are too ready to blame others when things go wrong.”

Thatcher reacted with cold fury, but Hoskyns was unabashed. Another story tells of his arriving for a meeting with the PM only to be intercepted by Ian Gow, her personal secretary. “Our girl is tired,” said Gow, trying to bar his path. “I’m tired too,” muttered Hoskyns. “It goes with the bloody job. I’m going in.”

Such irreverence to the “Great She-Elephant”, “She who must be obeyed”, “Attila the Hen” is rare enough, but this isn’t the main thing to remember Hoskyns for. Far more interesting – and relevant to now – is the work he did with fellow conservative Norman Strauss in the mid-1970s to diagnose the exact sources of Britain’s economic malaise, and come up with clear policies about how the country could haul itself out of it.

Robin Ashenden, “Thatcher’s ‘Wiring Diagram’ and why we need it once again”, The Critic, 2020-08-25.

April 18, 2026

“The whole thing was one giant attempt to gaslight both young men and the public at large”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens responds to a cover story in The New Statesman:

We were subjected to years of “young men are becoming radicalized, what’s driving this and how do we stop it?” discourse when in reality the typical young man saw practically zero change in his political outlook over the last 30 years.

The whole thing was one giant attempt to gaslight both young men and the public at large that they had suddenly moved well outside the Overton window and were either self-radicalizing or falling for extremist propaganda.

In reality, the problem was that young men were staying put rather than adopting increasingly radical progressive views. The real issue was that young women were flying off the rails, espousing views that would lead to the complete dissolution of civilization itself while acting like these were basic normal positions that completely sane people should hold.

That disconnect between what was being said and what was being done became so off kilter with reality that something finally began to break after 2020.

The problem isn’t with young men. The problem is that young women have gone certifiably insane. They’ve made radical progressivism their religion. They’re acting out on the perfectly healthy female tendency to act to uphold and preserve the existing social order.

Young women are trying to conserve an ideology they see as the stable bedrock of society, even if it’s actually an acidic collection of delusions that will inevitably destroy society itself. And they’re upset that young men aren’t doing what they see as their role to uphold that order as well.

In short, women are natural conservatives. They’re trying to conserve progressivism because it’s the reigning social order and theological governing system of Western civilization. And they’re upset and confused as to why young men aren’t stepping up to uphold it as well.

On Substack Notes, John Carter commented on the same New Republic The New Statesman cover story:

Women have never had it better than they do in modern Western countries. They are affluent, thanks to being given every advantage in education and employment; young women now hold more degrees, and make more money, than young men. They can marry whoever they want, from anywhere in the world, or they can marry no one at all. They can sleep with whoever they want, with however many people they want, with no risk of pregnancy, and if they get the ick later they can decide that it was rape and their abuser will be punished. Any opposition to their cultural or political preferences is automatically classified as hate, and every institution acts to denounce and punish this unacceptable hatred on their behalf … in no small part because they have taken over these institutions.

Women have never had it better, and they are absolutely incandescent with fury about that.

QotD: Democratic versus Republican Senators

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

A few years ago, Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema provoked the rage of progressive activists by occasionally having an independent thought, voting with her caucus on “party unity votes” only 96% of the time. Senator Joe Manchin caused comparable disgust by joining his party in those votes only 92% of the time. Sinema and Manchin were EVIL MONSTERS, and progressive activists showed up at their public events to scream at them.

Sinema eventually left the Democratic Party, declaring herself an independent, because a disgusting heretic couldn’t remain in a party that she only agreed with 96% of the time. Burn the witch, Democrats explained.

The descent of the Democratic Party into a state of increasingly obvious group psychosis is a product of the absence of internal debate, and of the degree to which Democratic legislators wholeheartedly believe that their job is to hold up their hands in unison whenever their party leaders tell them to. They can’t talk themselves out of their madness — they don’t know how. They don’t have the cultural habit of thought. Watch someone like Chris Murphy speak, and ask yourself if there’s a person inside there. I find myself unable to say yes to that question. He will read anything that is put on that teleprompter, and I mean an-y-th-ing.

By comparison, the Republican legislative habit of wandering around like the residents of a feline daycare center is a strength, and the presence of independent thought in the GOP’s legislative caucuses makes the party relatively sane. The presence of a Rand Paul, refusing to get on board, is more a good thing than a bad thing. The culture of debate is healthier than the behavior of the North Korean legislature or Tina Smith, soulless human robots.

Chris Bray, “The Greatest Republican Strength is the Greatest Republican Weakness, Again”, Tell Me How This Ends, 2026-01-15.

April 17, 2026

Hungary in the news

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

The way the mainstream media reacted to the recent Hungarian election results, you’d think it was the 2020s equivalent to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Outgoing leader Viktor Orbán has been portrayed as Hungary’s Trump when he hasn’t been discussed as Hungary’s Mussolini. His successor, Péter Magyar is largely unknown outside Hungary where he had been a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party before leaving to join his current party, Tisza. In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith provides some useful background on the state of politics in Hungary today:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Tisza — the name being a portmanteau of the Hungarian words tisztelet (respect) and szabadság (freedom), and a reference to the nation’s second largest river — was founded in 2020 and registered in 2022. It was a very marginal conservative party with policies like “raise the minimum pension” and “stop migration”.

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, the party fielded no candidates at all.

Tisza became a major force in Hungarian elections when Péter Magyar joined the party. Magyar, who has a legal background, had been a member of Viktor Orbán’s party Fidesz. More significantly, he had been married to the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, from 2006 to 2023.

In 2024, Varga resigned, along with Hungarian president Katalin Novák, after both were exposed as having signed a pardon for a convicted paedophile who had been a director of a state-run children’s home. Magyar resigned from Fidesz, accusing Orbán of “hiding behind women’s skirts”.

“For a long time I believed in an idea, a national, sovereign, civic Hungary,” wrote Magyar in a much-quoted statement, “But in recent years, I have slowly and finally realized that all of this is really just a political product.”

Magyar became a ferocious critic of alleged government corruption. His ex-wife responded to his anti-Orbán activities by accusing him of domestic abuse. Magyar denied this. Undaunted, he led various anti-government demonstrations, which attracted tens of thousands of Hungarians. He was also chosen to lead Tisza.

Magyar has profited from good timing. He is also a photogenic man who has performed well on social media. His politics are more mysterious. He has called himself a “critical pro-European and a conservative liberal”.

He is not the sort of liberal that anti-Orbán Westerners might want him to be. While he has said that he will “move away from the current, uncritically friendly approach towards Russia”, he has also said that it will take time to stop buying Russian fuel, and he has criticised the Ukrainian approach to Hungarian minorities. He has sometimes tried to outflank Orbán on sovereignty, saying that Fidesz have brought in too many guest workers, and even questionably saying that migrants have been stealing ducks from Hungarian ponds. Still, it remains to be seen if the pro-EU Magyar will maintain his more right-wing opinions or be swept along by European orthodoxy — not least when he has emphasised the importance of unlocking EU funds.

At The Sceptic, James Alexander says that the situation is more complicated than a split between Orbán and what he terms “the Roral Response”:

President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025.
Official White House photo by Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons.

What is the Orbán-Roral Divide? It is the Manichaean yin-yang binary of the simplistic political imagination, which supposes that, on one side, we have Orbán, Putin, Trump etc., and that, on the other side, we have von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer, Carney, Zelensky and of course the man after whom I name the category: Rory Stewart.

It has some truth in it, but it is bewildering when we see the binary exalted as if it is the only truth of politics. The downfall of Orbán illustrates this almost perfectly.

The subject today is Orbán Developments. And the Roral Response.

News.

As you all know, Orbán, after 16 years of power, fell in the recent election.

  • Viktor Orbán = Fidezs = 37.8% = 55 seats
  • Peter Magyar = Tisza = 53.6% = 138 seats

“Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,” quoth King Lear.

Orbán lost.

Now, I like Orbán, symbolically. I don’t know about actually: never studied him. I read one of his speeches once, and it read as more intelligent than any equivalent political speech. I have one thing in common with him, which is that he was present at the funeral of Norman Stone. Anyhow, like him or loathe him, we have to be philosophical. And we have to respect him, even if he is an Oxford man.

  • Oxford: Obsessed with power. Corrupt. Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Viktor Orbán etc.
  • Cambridge: Lord Acton: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So let us look at what people say. The amusing thing is that people immediately editorialise. Twitter, X, Whatyouwill.com, turns everyone into William Rees-Mogg. Look at all these Editors.

Here is Ferenc Horcher, a very important Hungarian scholar:

    Time to face reality: the Hungarian electorate ousted the ruling power. The electoral system Fidesz introduced gave its opponent a two-thirds majority. Orbán established a one-man rule, tailored the campaign to himself, he is responsible for the defeat, he has to resign.

That’s grim talk from a conservative. So here on the jolly side is Sam Moyn, a very important Yale Law School professor:

    Yay for Hungary. What if the answer to illiberalism is democracy?

Ho hum. I sigh a bit over the innocence of making a contrast between illiberalism and democracy, as if liberalism = democracy.

(more…)

Canada joining the EU is a terrible idea

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Dean Allison explains a few of the reasons Canada should not be attempting to join the European Union, despite Prime Minister Carney’s obvious love for the idea:

One of the dumbest ideas floating around right now: Canada joining the European Union.

This isn’t a trade deal. This is a surrender.

You don’t “partner” with the EU. You hand power to unelected technocrats in Brussels who dictate policy across 27 countries.

Let’s be clear what that means for Canada:

  • You lose control of monetary policy. Goodbye independent Bank of Canada.
  • Your federal budget gets reviewed and constrained by foreign bureaucrats.
  • Regulations get imposed from overseas with zero accountability to Canadians.

And if you think Ottawa is slow now, wait until every decision requires EU-level consensus. Nothing gets done without layers of approvals, committees, and political trade-offs across continents.

Then there’s censorship.

The EU is aggressively regulating online speech, platforms, and content. Handing them influence over Canada means more control over what you see, say, and share.

This isn’t sovereignty. It’s outsourcing it.

As Brian Lilley points out, we’d be giving up more control than in any U.S. trade deal.

Rejecting becoming the 51st state of the U.S. only to become the 28th state of Europe isn’t strategy, it’s pure stupidity!

And Canadians will pay the price.

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