One ideology where it’s as true as it is for libertarianism is feminism. Feminism was led by (and greatly improved the life chances of) women like me. It was great for smart, disagreeable, career-focussed women who don’t like or want kids. And yes, just like getting banged up for a bit of weed while harming precisely no-one seriously annoys the kind of smart, self-controlled person who can formulate a (libertarian) policy response to the War on Drugs, so too with women who were uninterested in home and family (or who were same-sex attracted) and found that being circumscribed professionally and romantically really, really rankled.
However, just as most people aren’t members of Heath’s self-control aristocracy, most women do not combine high intellect with disagreeableness and conscientiousness. Some feminists have realised this — albeit in an ad hoc way — and because feminism as a wider movement was/is wedded to blank-slatism, they believed they could shift the dial on what was then called “female socialisation”. That is, they thought it would be possible to make women as a group more closely resemble the able, disagreeable women who were by the 70s and 80s entering the professions, politics, academia, lobbying outfits, and think-tanks.
Or, of course, men. Men more often combine high trait disagreeableness with high trait conscientiousness (although even among males, the combination is rare). This is despite the fact that there are more agreeable women than agreeable men, and more conscientious women than conscientious men.
No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction.
“A Dialogue with Simone de Beauvoir”, in Betty Friedan, It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement, Random House, 1976, p. 397.
de Beauvoir’s suggestion is both authoritarian and hilarious, and represents a panicked response — not unlike the howls from Marxists when it became clear the proletariat was uninterested in revolution — to women unlike her. While it’s true (at least historically) that there were a number of strands to feminism — including a pro-motherhood one — careerist feminism finished up dominating all the others. I’m old enough to remember campaigns for wages for housework. If some old school wonks got hold of this idea, it could form part of a suite of policies directed to increasing the fertility rate.
You don’t see those feminist campaigns any more, though. They’ve been submarined. As I say, I’m old.
Women throughout the developed world — notoriously — tell pollsters they want more children than they have. Usually three is the preferred number, as opposed to two or one. The so-called “gender wage gap” exists because women have children.
Economists often decry this finding as a case of stated versus revealed preferences: what people do is more salient than what they say, something known since Roman times. Hence the Stoic quip acta non verba (“deeds not words”). However, even if fully half the “I want more kids than I have” response served up to pollsters is nothing more than windy stated preferences, that still leaves a lot of unborn but wanted children. Feminism, as Louise Perry is fond of pointing out, has simply dropped the ball on this one.
This insight is, I recognise, a genuine example of ad hominem. It suggests that people plump for ideologies that will give them a leg-up, and do so deliberately. That said, political ideology is, like conscientiousness, heritable. Henderson’s and Heath’s insight reminds us that everything social is emergent from the biological (the basis of Lorenzo Warby’s essays on this Substack). That’s why libertarianism is the way it is, and feminism is, and probably other ideologies too.
Helen Dale, “People Unlike Me”, Not On Your Team, But Always Fair, 2024-05-29.
October 25, 2026
QotD: Feminism as a luxury belief
October 23, 2026
Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”
It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:
The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.
A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.
And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.
For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.
They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.
And now the machinery is encountering resistance.
Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.
The kids kept playing.
Fucking beautiful.
There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.
And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.
The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.
The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.
They tried to rewrite normalcy.
Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.
October 17, 2026
British disability programs may extend to 25% of the population under current criteria
In the above-the-paywall portion of his latest post, eugyppius makes the case that the British social state, along with most other western countries, has metastasized to the point that it is uncontrollable:
Production line for the VW Beetle – symbol of a happier age, when our politicians forged a new democratic social state in Germany that today can no longer be financed or reformed.
Photo from eugyppius: a plague chronicle
On Sunday the Wall Street Journal published a long article headlined “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain“. It focusses on but one aspect of the UK social system, namely disability and sickness benefits, and its details are equal measures depressing, familiar, predictable and alarming.
Like other European redistributionist schemes, British disability payouts have steadily ballooned in the postwar period – expanding from a niche benefit for those unable to work due to serious illness and on-the-job injuries to a morass of programmes that showers millions of people with billions in pointless, self-defeating subsidies.
A 2024 government survey found that fully 25% of the entire British population might be considered disabled under present inflationary criteria, which adds perspective to the eye-watering figure of 10% presently drawing benefits. The fastest growth in disability claims occurs among working-age demographics, where compensation, once granted, soon becomes a powerful disincentive to work. In this way the British disability system actively cannibalises its own tax base. The total bill for sickness and disability benefits this year will exceed £100 billion, which comes on top of the £280 billion the British taxpayer presently spends on healthcare and which substantially outstrips the £68 billion British defence budget. Disability spending has jumped 25% over the last four years, and without reforms it will rise another 30% over the next four. Fuzzy psychiatric disability claims, from depression to ADHD, drive much of the expansion, as a whole universe of charities and AI-powered chatbots advise ever more able-bodied people on how they might opt in to this wonderful system of free money. Among many crazy details, we learn that those on disability can trade some of their cash benefits for new car leases every three years. This programme now accounts for one in seven automobile sales in Britain and has elevated the company handling these deals (Motability) to the largest automobile leasing concern in the country. The debt required to fund this and the rest of the British social system has driven borrowing costs to rates not seen since the 2008 financial crisis, while high taxes continue to encourage the emigration of the wealthy and productive.
These are the mere symptoms of a sickness that extends well beyond the United Kingdom. We are looking here at a fiscal and also a political crisis afflicting the entire postwar European model. Below the fold I want to explain the nature of this crisis and why our political systems seem powerless to address its fundamental causes – indeed, why many of our politicians seem determined to make it worse. With little chance of reform, we face a future of economic decay and declining living standards, culminating in sovereign debt crises and perhaps even political collapse. The postwar order is slowly dying, in its eighty-first year, of old age. There are no answers and nobody knows what will come next.
John Carter commented on Substack Notes:
The neglect of schools in order to pay for pensions is a particularly poignant phenomenon, a direct illustration of the old devouring the futures of the young. Eugyppius is correct that there’s no electoral solution to this mess. No one will vote to reduce their own benefits, and tax-eaters now comprise such a substantial electorate that any serious discussion of reform is political suicide.
State bankruptcy and economic collapse are real possibilities. Maybe “and then a dictator ends democracy” happens, but maybe not. For the young the all-devouring social state is increasingly unbearable. Polities that make themselves attractive to the young rather than the old could suck in such a large fraction of the youth that by the time collapse arrives, the social states are effectively retirement communities, and it just looks like a humanitarian crisis of starving geriatrics dying in their own unwashed bodily fluids.
October 13, 2026
The Un-Coupling of Gen Z
One of the most obvious demographic shifts in recent years has been the ongoing decline in the birth rate in pretty much the entire western world. But it isn’t surprising in one respect: Gen Z people aren’t forming relationships at the rate of earlier generations and have fewer (if any) sexual partners:
Why are so many Americans not getting married — or not even dating, in the first place?
The share of 40-year-olds who have never been hitched has quadrupled since 1980, as Americans get married later, or not at all.
It’s not just marriage that’s declining but rather all forms of cohabitation. An analysis by John Burn-Murdoch found that “coupling” has declined steadily in both the UK and the U.S., especially for those without a college degree. The declining popularity of dating apps suggests that these trends are likely to continue.
I care about the decline of coupling and marriage not because I consider myself a strict evangelist of matrimony — I think people should do what they can to enjoy themselves without hurting others — but rather because I think it bears on two of the most important questions about the future: (1) How many people exist, and (2) how happy are they? The relationship between romance and births is practically linear. Since 1990, Burn-Murdoch has shown, the decline of births traces the decline of relationship formation across many countries. Fewer relationships mean fewer people, and accelerating population declines around the world are, somewhat like climate change, a slowly accumulating phenomenon that will almost certainly shape the future of economics, technology, and the texture of human existence.
Then, there’s the mushy yet momentous question of whether people actually enjoy their existence. Self-reported happiness is declining in the west, and particularly in the U.S. Reviewing several decades of General Social Survey data, the economist Sam Peltzman came to the conclusion that “most of the overall downturn [in life satisfaction] is attributable to decline in marriage post-2000”. Reviewing Peltzman’s work, The Atlantic‘s Olga Khazan provided some useful context:
One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.
If the decline of coupling is upstream of both falling births and falling happiness, then the most important question is what’s happening at the source. In his new book Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox, a public opinion researcher and director of the Survey Center on American Life, considers a range of causes that span technology, culture, media, economics, and politics.
October 10, 2026
Tim Worstall argues that the BC drug decision was correct
I don’t always agree with Tim Worstall‘s takes, but he’s quite convinced that the recent decision in British Columbia to create a new human right to buy and sell drugs is correct and will lead to better outcomes than the existing law:
Image courtesy of Meme Generator
Drug dealing — branded drug dealing — is now legal. Or it will be once the 6 month stay expires or the Canadian Parliament changes the law.
The change in the law that should — won’t, but should — is that branded drug dealing should be legal.
That humans like to get blitzed is true. That humans like to get blitzed so much that every time anywhere tries to stop it — short of immediate execution for users and dealers — means that whatever the law says there’s always that market in ways to get blitzed. There are two arguments for making it legal to get blitzed. One is the simple liberal point that it’s our own life to waste and we each get to chart our own path — whether sooner or later — to the inevitable grave. The other is that for most drugs the consumption of the pure stuff doesn’t do much harm.
Sure, sure, cocaine turns people into obnoxious wankers but decent heroin has few physical problems and users tend to spend their time contemplating the joys of an enhanced reality. Not my thing but, you know, Meh.
The illegal stuff kills at least tens of thousands to get to us and then tens, if not hundreds, of thousands more through being stepped upon, cut, polluted and then the basic public health problems of AIDS ridden whores — of both, or any, sex — tricking to pay for the next dirty needle full.
We have a solution to this. A known solution. Capitalism. Capitalism in the full light of day and under the rule of law. We don’t just want we positively lust after corporations to make pure junk. Branded, pure, junk. Their brand dependent upon how good the highs are at the price of how few deaths. Their profit depends upon maintaining the value of that brand.
That is, turn that always present human greed into our purity guarantee. Same thing that keeps the rats out of our bread supply — WonderLoaf finding that rat bits in the sandwich reduce their sales.
So, Marlboro branded heroin, that’s the thing. And, yes, Marlboro, they’ve already got that association with horse, haven’t they?
October 5, 2026
“The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a post about the need for middle class couples to budget excessive amounts of money before starting a family:
It’s not about the money.
Money has an effect, yes, but it’s a part of something bigger.
Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn’t regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn’t want to have his babies.
What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility.
More male power and status = more babies.
More female power and status = less babies.Yes, it really is that simple.
Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That’s why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual.
And a critical element of the human mating ritual is “male impresses female”.
Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects.
Impresses.
So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial.
If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don’t have to give it to them because they’re the ones who create it — fertility goes up.
The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis.
This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair.
Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don’t care about fairness. They care what works.
Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice.
1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world.
Or
2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.
October 3, 2026
Singapore’s “Social Development Unit”
We don’t tend to hear very much about Singapore, so I hadn’t heard of the “Social Development Unit” that they set up (appropriately, in 1984):
Haha this reminds me of when Singapore had this thing called the Social Development Unit which my American sociology professor told me was “basically government-sponsored eugenics”.
Back in the 80s, Lee Kuan Yew observed that female university graduates were not getting married, and that smart people weren’t breeding enough which he treated as a national emergency.
This led to the birth of the Social Development Unit in 1984 — government-sponsored parties, dinners, trips and even “love boat” cruises so that clever people could meet each other and, ideally, produce more clever babies. Locals immediately nicknamed it Single, Desperate and Ugly
There were other politically incorrect fertility policies of the era: the Graduate Mothers’ Scheme (kids of degree moms got priority school places), and higher tax breaks for those who were more educated with more kids. Meanwhile, cash grants were given to the lower educated and lower income parents who got sterilized after one or two kids.
To which Carl Benjamin responded:
Lee Kuan Yew is what happens when an autistic map gamer becomes president.
September 28, 2026
“… if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison discusses the need for ceremonies or rites to signify the end of childhood and the entry into adult life … things that have almost completely disappeared in western culture over the last few decades:
I think modern society made a mistake when it assumed that getting rid of sacred rites would make people purely rational.
It didn’t.
Human beings still need thresholds, tests, stories, symbols and some clear sense that childhood has ended and adulthood has begun. We may no longer send young people into the wilderness for an initiation ordeal, but the psychological need to prove yourself, belong somewhere and become someone has not disappeared.
Traditional initiation rites were often harsh, sometimes brutally so, but they carried a clear message: your childhood identity is finished. You are now expected to accept duty, restraint, courage and responsibility.
Modern society is much less clear about that transition.
You can become legally adult at 18 while remaining psychologically dependent for years. There is often no agreed moment when society says: you are responsible now. Stop waiting to be rescued. Carry your own weight. Become useful to other people.
The danger is that the need for initiation does not disappear just because formal rituals disappear.
Young people invent substitutes.
Sometimes that becomes fraternity hazing, gangs, reckless behaviour, extreme risk-taking or ideological movements that offer belonging, enemies, heroes, rituals and moral certainty. Popular culture does something similar in a safer form. Star Wars, superhero stories, horror films and countless other myths repeat the ancient pattern: leave safety, enter chaos, face the monster, sacrifice something, return changed.
We keep telling these stories because they describe something real about human development.
The part I find most useful is that modern adulthood probably has to become more voluntary.
Nobody is going to drag most of us through a ceremonial rite and announce that childhood is over.
We have to do it ourselves.
Take responsibility before you feel completely ready. Accept obligations. Learn to tolerate discomfort. Become financially and emotionally useful. Care for somebody besides yourself. Face failure without retreating into nihilism. Test your beliefs against reality. Give up childish expectations that life should always be fair, comfortable or safe.
That is initiation stripped of superstition.
You enter difficulty voluntarily and come out carrying more responsibility than you carried before.
A mature society should probably find better ways of teaching that lesson, because if we provide no healthy path into adulthood, people will invent their own.
And some of those substitutes will be far worse than the rituals we thought we had outgrown.
September 26, 2026
Devon Eriksen stakes out the anti-Feminist position
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
When did employee humiliation become part of the mission?
I’ve been out of the working world for some time now, but I still remember the stomach-clenching realization that my employer was going to be “doing some fun activities” at an upcoming company event/meeting/recognitions/celebrations It was always just like the meme about the extrovert “persuading” the introvert to come out:
I’m told it’s even worse in the non-productive sector of the economy, as Fortissax explains:
If you’ve only worked trades, or unskilled labour your whole life you’d be inclined to thinking that humiliation rituals and childish games are unique to retail jobs like Walmart, where in morning huddles they make their minimum wage employees dance in place to celebrate how well their team did in last week’s sales, or survey results. I want you to know that in Very Serious Jobs™️ like NGOs, government, finance, and banking, white collar salary workers who work for some of the biggest and oldest corporations in Canada have to play stupid little games, and all the men have to fake enthusiasm for getting to know employees they don’t give a shit about outside of work, mostly to appease women in their 30s and 40s. They all have annual or bi-annual celebrations they’ll call “balls” or “galas” where the corporation spends an exorbitant amount of money on a semi formal event and a three and a half star deal, usually at some mid-high tier hotel. They do this so they can justify low balling you and not raising your salary. The women in particular are completely mesmerized as they dress up to relive prom night one more time, every year, where they can win fake little awards for being good little cogs scoring their arbitrary KPIs and survey goals, getting to strut up onto a stage in a dress and claim up a plastic trophy or framed certificate to be mounted on a wall, a gold star for whose it and who cares metric that nobody knows or gives a fuck about. You can make six figures or just under it and you’re still subject to participatory humiliation rituals.
September 24, 2026
Small rift in time brings 2021 dramarama to 2026
I still occasionally see people going about their business wearing WuFlu masks. I try not to overtly point and laugh, because I’m still pretending to be polite and civilized. Obviously, people should be free to wear or not wear whatever they like so long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. A bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts has apparently been requiring masks for all their patrons since the pandemic but recently decided to ease up the restriction for one night per week, making the masks optional for one day per week. As you might imagine, this move hasn’t gone down well with their customers:
Image via Not the Bee
Crybullying is a way of controlling other people. Predators and psychopaths pose: They deliberately put on sad face or hurt face when they want suckers to lower their guard so they can get what they want.
If you’ve been online today, you’ve probably seen discussion of the mindblowing Boston Globe story about the lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that recently decided to start having weekly mask-optional nights, after many years of requiring KN-95 masks or better from patrons. If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, let me just say that no, you haven’t accidentally clicked on an article from 2021. This is happening now.
After the Last Ditch Bar posted their new mask rules on social media, they were immediately buried in rage-inflected comments from people who were in absolute agony over the way the place was just absolutely murdering them.
Sample comment: “You have shattered what I believed your values to be, and you should be ashamed to use the word radical to describe your venue in the same post where you’re announcing a decision to deliberately spread disabling diseases, that we know disproportionately impact marginalized populations, one night each week.”
Did you know that Covid-19 is medically much worse if you’re a politically radical lesbian? Second sample comment: “This is such a stab in the heart to those of us who have no choice but to protect our health. Esp when l0ng c0vid disproportionally affects queer folk.” That’s an interesting observation.
All of the bar’s efforts to calm the storm made it worse, and a community forum hosted by trained facilitators crashed and burned. I’m not going to describe that event or summarize it, because you should read every incredible detail yourself. Here’s the link again, in an archived form that gets you around the paywall and probably requires you to scroll down a bit to get through some blank space at the top. As a preview, though, one of the facilitators was white, which devastated the terrified attendees and made them feel that they were in extreme danger.
The mandatory mask-wearing somehow became a totem of belonging to the patrons of the bar and after so long, they are now reacting very strongly to any attempt to dilute their shared community with non-mask-wearing heathens.
QotD: The perpetual progressive underdogs
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 22, 2026
QotD: Organized activities for children versus informal play
I didn’t ask why. I wish I had, because I’m sincerely curious — these were busy, active kids, actually in the process of racing around the playground with their buddies while the adults chatted, so it’s not as though they needed organized sports to keep them from merging with the couch cushions — but at the time it seemed rude and pushy so I changed the subject. Now, obviously not everyone is like this mom: some people, including Tim Carney, really do love sports and delight in sharing that love. But the truth is, people are obsessed with signing their kids up for stuff. Carney calls it the Travel Team Trap, and it’s probably most evident in youth sports culture, but it shows up everywhere. Your kid likes to write? Find a creative writing class! Having fun with chess? Quick, hire a tutor! My local rec center even offers courses in Dungeons & Dragons, taught by a real live professional nerd, because apparently eating Doritos in your mom’s basement while your friends mock you for touching the Sphere of Annihilation isn’t good enough any more.
And it’s a vicious cycle, because all these official activities crowd out informal play. If the artsy kids in your neighborhood are taking a musical theater class half an hour away, there’s no one to join your kids in pulling out the dress-ups and staging a drama of their own. If everyone is off at soccer practice, you can’t meet up at the park to kick the ball around. Sorry, Zerubbabel can’t come over and play Legos this week, he’s got his STEM Makers class on Wednesday and then Thursday afternoon is junior robotics team … Soon even the families who want a more relaxed, unprogrammed life are signing their kids up for things because it’s the only way they’ll ever see their friends.
There’s nothing wrong with formal instruction in its place, especially for things where technique really matters: the world needs basketball coaches and piano teachers, too. And sometimes it’s just fun! A big stage with lights and music and real costumes scratches an itch that Mom’s old prom dress and a dinosaur mask (“Velociraptorella”, currently in previews off-off-off-Broadway) just can’t touch. But when we regard these things as potentially interesting and entertaining, rather than absolutely vital to our children’s well-being, we can make sane tradeoffs about them. A day-trip to the awesome museum in a neighboring city is also potentially interesting and entertaining, but nobody thinks you’re a bad mom if you spend the weekend doing something else.
And what’s more, the push for legible achievement over experience, without regard for what’s good for your family — or even, apparently, whether your kids like it — robs them of the opportunity to motivate and direct their own lives. Basketball practice three times a week surely does more for your jump shot than a pickup game at the local park, but in the long term the ability to take ownership of your time, make and keep plans with your friends, sort out interpersonal disagreements, etc. are going to be a lot more useful. (And, sorry, I’m still stuck on this D&D thing: the threat of your friends losing interest and wandering off to play foosball instead is a much greater incentive to become a good DM than anything you could learn in a class.)
But it’s not actually surprising that people parent like this, because it’s how they grew up: today’s moms and dads are yesterday’s Organization Kids.1 Their image of the good life is tallying up achievement points on some great celestial board. And no wonder they’re desperate to tally up points for their kids, too: they think their futures depend on it! In fact, every time I bring this up, someone tells me that Harvard is full of kids whose parents drove themselves crazy coordinating travel sports schedules and private school dropoffs and chess tutors — all of which is true, and some of which is probably even causal. (Nobody appreciates achievement points tallied up on a great celestial board like a college admissions office.) But a lot of it is also because that’s how smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class parents are expected to raise their kids, and the best way to get into Harvard is to be the offspring of smart, conscientious, upper-middle-class people. (It also helps if they’re neither white nor Asian.)
Jane and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Family Unfriendly, by Timothy P. Carney”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-10-14.
- I hadn’t reread the article since I was in college, but revisiting it now it’s an amazing artifact. “No one is political, no one protests.” Things change!
September 12, 2026
Berlin after 1918 … the decadence the Nazis fought
The period after the First World War in Weimar Germany was a huge break with the Wilhelmine past, especially in Berlin and some other large cities. Hitler wasn’t wrong about the moral decadence of the 1920s and the reaction helped build his movement. At The Grim Historian, Carlyn Beccia illustrates what life was like in Berlin for those who fully indulged in the excesses of the new liberalized society that so outraged Hitler and his supporters:
Metropolis by Otto Dix, 1927–1928,
Kunstmuseum Stuttgart
It’s 1929, and Berlin is having the kind of night respectable people will later insist never happened.
Neon bleeds across wet pavement. A taxi hisses past, throwing gutter water onto a woman whose dress has misplaced most of its back. Somewhere below street level, a trumpet murders a respectable German melody while a girl in a tuxedo leans in to kiss another girl.
Berlin, 1929: Haus Vaterland, where Berliners could drink, dance, dine around the world, and enjoy an hourly fake thunderstorm over the Rhine because subtlety had apparently taken the night off. The pleasure palace could accommodate as many as 8,000 people.
CC BY 4.0She goes in. Another comes out laughing. The door swings.
They call these women the Neue Frau — “new woman”. Hair bobbed to the jawline as though she took a knife to the nineteenth century. Hemline at the knee, one stocking laddered at the ankle.
The new woman works behind a counter at a department store. When the doorman holds out his hand, she pays him with her own wages from her own bank account. Today, we would call these progressive women “girlbosses” while silently hating ourselves for not having a less cringy word.
Berlin, 1929: Two women dance at the Eldorado, where lipstick, tuxedos, and heterosexual expectations were all optional. Four years later, the Nazis shut it down.
Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz, via United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Holocaust EncyclopediaOther young women belonged to a more slippery category Berliners called the Halbseidenen — the “half-silks”. Half-silk was fabric woven partly from real silk and partly from cheaper thread. The fabric was glossy enough to pass at a distance, suspect once you got close.
The nickname landed on women who were equally difficult to classify — shopgirls, dancers, sexually independent working women, occasional prostitutes, girls dressed just a little better than their wages should have allowed.
These women do not dance politely. Anita Berber, Berlin’s cocaine-addicted queen of nude dance, had made Dances of Vice, Horror and Ecstasy infamous. Grosz and Otto Dix paint Lustmord — sex murder — as a genre, and sell it.
Otto Dix – Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber, 1925
Public DomainInside the club, smoke curls from red-stained lips like a genie escaping its lamp. Champagne sweats in silver buckets and sloshes in chipped glasses. A folded banknote, a razor’s quick flash, two white lines cut across a mirror while dancers stamp and spin inches away.
Women arrive as men, men arrive as women, and bankers disappear into back rooms with people their bankers’ wives would not have invited to luncheon.
This particular den of iniquity has competition. Weimar Berlin supports somewhere between 65 and 80 gay bars and another fifty lesbian ones.
And the sexual revolution does not stop at closing time. It is sitting on the newsstands. By the end of the decade, more than twenty publications cater to gay, lesbian and gender-nonconforming readers — romance serials, political essays, personal ads, and club listings. A lonely girl in Leipzig can get Die Freundin without ever setting foot in a dancehall.
Berlin, 1929: Die Freundin, Germany’s lesbian weekly, advertises two women’s clubs at the Amerikanischer Tanzpalast. The fine print reads: “Men are not admitted.” I added the flowers. Weimar Berlin did not. | Forum Queeres Archiv München.
Across town, Magnus Hirschfeld has spent years trying to drag sex out of whispers and into science. The physicians in his Institute for Sexual Science would soon help pioneer some of the first gender-affirming surgeries. The institute also offers birth control and counseling, and works with Berlin police on “transvestite passes” — documents that let trans people walk the city without being arrested for their clothes.
Berlin has somehow managed to give gender nonconformity paperwork.
Not everybody finds this charming. Berlin has been hearing the opposite sermon since the republic was born. Ten years earlier, in the political convulsions after World War I, a poster showed a crowned Berlin locked in a waltz with a skeleton, “Berlin, halt ein! Besinne dich. Dein Tänzer ist der Tod” — Berlin, stop. Come to your senses. Your dance partner is Death.
The poster was not about lesbians in tuxedos. It came from the political chaos of 1919. But the accusation is already there.
Berlin is losing itself. It must return to the past and what once made it great.
Of course, by the late 1920s, the people making that nostalgic argument have begun pointing at sex. In 1927, Wilhelm Frick warns that homosexuality will lead to the “disintegration of the German people”. Large numbers of Germans describe Weimar’s new sexual visibility as decadent, immoral, and evidence of national degeneration. Right-leaning religious organizations and parties preach family, restraint, and traditional German culture.
Looking back on the inflation era, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig remembered the city transforming into “the Babel of the world”, with gay bars multiplying like mushrooms and transvestite balls so extravagant he thought ancient Rome had been outdone.
Berlin read the room. Berlin went on dancing, spending, and fucking.
Berlin, 1919: Ten years before Fritz stands outside our nightclub, Berlin is already being warned about its dance partner. “Stop! Come to your senses! Your dancer is Death.” | Van Santen, Berlin, Stop! 1919.
Lithograph. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public DomainBerlin’s own tourist bureau was advertising Jeder einmal in Berlin! — everyone should visit Berlin at least once. In 1929, nearly 1.7 million guests did.
But not everyone enjoyed watching Berlin turn its private vice into a tourist attraction.
Because while people inside experienced liberation, and the moral right experienced decadence and national decline, young men experienced something else.
Exclusion.
QotD: The spiritual immune system
But first, keeping them totally away from anything is doing them a disservice. I think Escriva would strongly agree with this — we are commanded, after all, to be IN the world, not OF it. It’s a two-part command. The Poz is a disease, yes, and diseases can kill, but look at the aftermath of covid. Who are the unhealthiest people in society right now? The folks who got vaxxed and triple-boosted and spent two years hiding under their beds in a hazmat suit. Every minor sniffle hits them like a sledgehammer now, because they spent two years screwing up their own immune systems.
Second, and closely related, the fight is in the small things. People see you avoiding everything and you look like a wimp. Where I grew up, every high school had the Bible Camp Kids. They were their own little clique. They went everywhere together and tried to live as Amish-ly as possible. And everybody knew what happened to the Bible Camp Kids when they went off to college. You could set your watch by it: Two semesters in, and she’d have a tattoo and a face piercing and would either be knocked up or out of the closet.
They had no spiritual immune system.
Fighting and failing in the small things builds up your defenses for the big things. Not only that, people respect fighters. You failed, but you fought — you can hold your head high. As opposed to “You didn’t fail, but only because you tucked tail and ran”. Nobody respects those guys. It sucks to lose. But it’s far worse to “win” by never trying. Worst of all is to wallow in your defeat. Get up! Fight!
Severian, “The Way Ch. 10: Scruples”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-10.
