Quotulatiousness

July 9, 2026

Here’s why “free range children” went away

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Health, History, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

As a child in England and then in Canada, I had a pretty wide range for unsupervised activities and I generally took advantage of that. On foot or riding my bicycle, it was completely normal for me to be several miles from home on any given day. I’ve posted this image a few times, showing the “free range” diminishing generation by generation for an English family, and it’s mostly true here in Canada and in the United States as well:

Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

At Classical Ideals, Megha Lillywhite discusses the “political extremism” involved today in trying to raise your children:

One of the most fundamental things that children require in order to grow up healthy, strong, wise and good, is a lot of time outdoors and in public spaces. Yet what we see from more traditional families in the west, as well as from extremely wealthy families, is that they are holding their children closer than ever, and enclosing them in increasingly smaller and more carefully selected bubbles of protection.

This is because “the outdoors” and “public life” is territory that has increasingly been ceded by western society to violent criminals, the mentally ill, and drug addicts. Parenting, for those who are vigilant to the threats, can no longer be “laissez-faire” and it has become less about choosing the ideal, and more about choosing the least damaging option.

But what has been lost? And what must be reclaimed for those of us with power and spirit to have any kind of meaningful victory in this world?

Most leftists see politics through the framework of wanting to be “a good person” as it is defined by their peer group and ideology. The ordinary person, on the other hand, views politics through the set of decisions that would best protect their children and give them the best chance at a good life.

Why is this? Leftists either don’t have children, or they have children but live in gilded cages and are therefore untouched (yet) by the consequences of their ideological beliefs.

Children must exist as part of a broader community in order to develop healthily. They must be able to go to a public library, the local shop, ride their bikes to the park, take the city bus or walk to their grandmother’s house on their own. They must be able to play outside unsupervised for hours on end in their neighbourhoods.

[…]

But some measure of freedom is also necessary for children to develop a healthy psyche. A child who can go to the shop and pay for milk on his own and bring it home will develop not only a sense of responsibility, but will feel confident in his ability to do useful things. A child who can visit his friends and relatives on his own will develop social skills and a sense of belonging. A child who can go to the library on his own can begin the lifelong journey of guiding his own learning.

[…]

In a 2007 study done in Sheffield, UK by Dr. William Bird, he found that children in 1926 were allowed to roam up to six miles away from home unsupervised and by 2000, that number dropped to 300 metres. The major drop off happened around 1979 which is coincidentally the time when mass migration began in the United Kingdom and demographics of towns like Sheffield began to seriously shift. In the recent “Rape Gang Inquiry” released by the Restore Party of Britain, the report which details three decades of kidnap, rape and murder of a quarter of a million British girls which would have began around this time. So English parents restricting their children’s freedoms around this time period was not something hysterical or unfounded.

We must be politically courageous in order to admit what is required to maintain that kind of a world. Stated simply, a safe, healthy and good childhood requires a fundamental rejection of leftist “empathy” politics. There is one incident in particular that can help to describe how this system functions today.

Link from John Carter on Substack Notes, who commented:

The same shift towards a confined, highly monitored childhood took place in the US, corresponding to the great suburbanization. The suburbs grew due to white flight from the cities, following their colonization by blacks and the de facto ban on community defence enforced by the civil rights act.

Suburban municipal architecture is largely comprised of informal defensive barriers that prevent undesirable elements from penetrating the neighborhoods undetected.

This enables middle class parents to deniably insulate their children from the worst consequences of diversity, but at the cost of raising their children in open air prisons, in a stifling social atmosphere characterized primarily by a brittle insistence upon euphemistic avoidance of direct acknowledgement of the real issues. “Racism is simply terrible! We just wanted to live somewhere with good schools.”

Children brought up amidst the tedious fakery of the suburbs naturally become attuned to the pervasive hypocrisy of suburban white culture. They have to: simply navigating this culture requires the ability to understand the unsaid, while pretending that one has not understood it. Combined with the open air prison environment inhibiting emotional development, this is a powerful recipe for induced neurosis.

There are only a few possible outcomes: 1) they become cowardly hypocrites themselves; 2) they reject the hypocrisy and become fanatical anti-white race communists; 3) they reject the hypocrisy and become fascists.

July 3, 2026

1977 – when the French intelligentsia rallied to protect pedophiles

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Brivael Le Pogam poinpoints the formal attempt to turn criminal pedophilia into academically supported individuals with “Minor Attraction” (translated from the original French by X):

In 1977, a petition appeared in Le Monde and Libération. It called for the decriminalization of sexual relations between adults and children aged thirteen. Look at the signatures. Foucault. Derrida. Sartre. Beauvoir. Barthes. Deleuze. Guattari. Lyotard. Sollers. The entirety of the French intellectual aristocracy, the very same that would go on to colonize Yale and Berkeley, gathered under a text that pedantically explains that the child is capable of consenting.

This is not an anecdote. It is the proof.

A few days ago, I wrote that French Theory rested on a single thesis: there is no truth, there are only relations of power. I was told I was caricaturing, that these men were too subtle to be reduced to a slogan. Very well. Then let us observe what subtlety produces when pushed to its extreme.

If every norm is merely domination in disguise, then the prohibition protecting childhood is a form of domination like any other. If every truth is a construction, then innocence is a construction. If every desire is worth every other because no law is legitimate, then there is no longer any reason to defend the most elementary boundary that a civilization has ever established. They did not sign this petition despite their philosophy. They signed it because of it. It was the logical conclusion of the system. They simply had the imprudence to write it down in black and white, before their American heirs learned to wrap the same logic in more cautious vocabulary.

This is the man still taught in undergraduate courses. This is the thinker still cited with reverence at conferences. The one who, in 1977, thought the law protected children a little too much.

A thought is judged by what it makes possible. A thought that, when it reaches its term, no longer knows how to say why one does not touch children is not a subtle thought. It is a dead thought. And a civilization that continues to teach it with deference is not subtle either. It is complicit.

One does not deconstruct innocence. One protects it. It is even more or less the only thing one has no right to fail at.

June 26, 2026

To address social media toxicity, you have to change the algorithm

Filed under: Health, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

If you’ve been on social media platforms at all, you’ll have encountered aggressively obnoxious behaviour, possibly rising to actual abuse. Some people revel in it, putting on their “online tough guy” personas, but others (the majority) are disturbed and repelled by it. Unfortunately, the way the system is set up is to keep you engaged and inciting anger is one of the best ways to boost engagement.

Slide from cyberghostvpn.com

Andrej Karpathy is the man who taught Tesla’s cars to see the road and drive themselves. Before that, he was one of the founding researchers at OpenAI. In the world of artificial intelligence, he’s royalty.

A few days ago, he posted a simple, excited message. He’d been using Claude, an AI assistant, and it was blowing his mind. “It works like a real teammate”, he wrote. He was genuinely thrilled.

The replies tore him apart.

Strangers called him a shill. People who’d never built anything mocked him. The pile-on grew and grew and grew.

Then Karpathy went quiet for a moment. And when he came back, he didn’t defend his original post. He said something bigger.

“After 20 years on this platform, X has never been this toxic. The algorithm actively pushes rage, insults, and pile-ons because they get engagement. That’s why even I post and visit less now.”

Twenty years. This man watched Twitter grow from a tiny blog tool into the global town square. He survived every era of the platform. And now, for the first time, he was saying: I don’t want to be here anymore.

Elon Musk read those words and replied within minutes.

“We need a complete overhaul of the algorithm.”

Not a patch. Not “we’ll look into it”. A complete overhaul.

Think about what that means. Right now, the machine that decides what you see on X has one job: keep you engaged. And the fastest way to keep you engaged is to make you angry. Outrage gets clicks. Insults get replies. Pile-ons get retweets. The algorithm learned this on its own, and now it feeds you rage all day long because rage works.

The result: the smartest, most interesting people slowly stop posting. Why would they? Every time they share an idea, a mob shows up. So they go quiet. And what fills the void is screaming.

Musk just said he wants to tear that entire machine out and build a new one from scratch. One where the most useful, most interesting, most original posts rise to the top. Where sharing a genuine thought doesn’t get you punished.

One of the greatest minds in AI came home excited, like a kid showing off a new discovery. X beat him down for it.

That’s exactly the disease Elon is now trying to cut out.

If he actually does it, you’ll feel it in your timeline before anyone announces it.

June 23, 2026

Modern children as human hothouse plants, needing constant care and protection

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

At Becoming Noble, Johann Kurtz discusses how parents today treat their children in ways they largely never experienced, failing to provide them with enough freedom to allow them to develop personal autonomy as most western children have done for generations:

Giving children the freedom they need to develop agency is now a luxury good. The number of neighborhoods in which it is normal for children to leave the house and roam all day has collapsed. This collapse has come for a variety of reasons relating to security, trust, law, norms, and infrastructure.

Allowing children the privilege of freedom depends on conditions that most families no longer have access to: safe streets — yes — but also neighbors who are known and trusted, and a settled local agreement about what children are and what they are for. These conditions have not vanished, but they have concentrated, and are now a guarded secret, found only in private, privileged, and intentional communities.

This is a curious inversion of an older pattern. For most of history the peasant’s son had the run of the village while the noble’s son was kept under tutors. Now it is the wealthy child who is sent out to enjoy the freedom and adventure of camps and screenless schools, while working and underclass children are kept indoors and screened up.

Photo from Becoming Noble

It is worth being clear about the factors which underlie this transition. Otherwise, parents seeking the nostalgic “free roaming” experience are directed to explanations which are emphasized because they are unproblematic and suggest that a broad solution is available if we just move policy in a sensible direction. This includes discussions of “walkable development” and a rejection of “helicopter parenting”.

This polite framing avoids the reality that the prudent decisions available to parents are mostly made for them by the place they can afford to live, the people they live among, and how radical they are willing to be.

Children develop “agency” — the self-belief that they can independently and effectively manipulate and shape the world in creative ways — through constant experimentation and positive reinforcement.

The “independent” aspect of this formula involves developing internal psychological permission to break from prosaic norms and routines. Developing this is helped by play outside the control of authorities and interacting with the real world in settings unmediated by parents.

The closed systems that now fill children’s hours provide some feeling of agency (open world games, sprawling social media platforms, private chat rooms) without its substance. A child scrolling or playing through the programmatic logic of games is making choices, but they are only the choices that limited systems can accommodate.

Closed-system childhoods teach that there are inviolable hidden structures underneath reality and that the smoothest and most rewarding experiences are to be found when you conform with them. Experiences from boxes teach you to think within boxes. And the vice available online can be as controlling as any parent.

A few years ago, I linked to an article that graphically illustrated how the generations of an English family near Sheffield had experienced continuously diminished “range” for the children to explore:

Graphic showing the diminishing “free ranges” of each generation of an English family.

QotD: Addiction

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

Why is stigmatization in the case of drug addicts so wrong, according to Dr. Volkow? Because addiction is a disease, and nothing else. According to Dr. Volkow people resist this idea, and falsely believe “that willpower should be sufficient to stop drug abuse”. After all, if you give drugs to rats until they are addicted, they will pursue them to the exclusion of all else, to their own detriment and even to the point of death. Moreover, you can show that there are changes in their brains by comparison with non-addicted rats.

Thus an addict has roughly the same metaphysical status as an addicted rat. He does what he does because, like Luther, he cannot do otherwise. He is a slave of his biochemistry, he is a Zombie whose master is his habit. To blame him for his behaviour is like blaming a leper for his leprosy.

This is all the most lamentable bilge, of course. When you consider what heroin addicts actually have to do to become heroin addicts it is clear that, at least to begin with, they want to be heroin addicts, it is not something that just happens to them or creeps up on them unawares. For example, they have to learn where to get their heroin, how to prepare it, and how to inject it (most people have an aversion to sticking needles into themselves and have to overcome it). They have to learn to disregard or overcome such side-effects as nausea, which is normally extremely aversive. Most of us would go a long way to avoid nausea. As a matter of fact, most addicts take heroin intermittently for some time before taking it regularly. The expression “hooked” is implicitly a lie; the addict has hooked heroin, not the other way round.

Still, it might be argued that, having become addicted, the addict loses all powers of control, but this too is not so. The experience (among many others) of American soldiers returning from Vietnam, who addicted themselves to heroin while there, proves it. They swiftly ceased to be addicts on their return to the US, notwithstanding all of Dr. Volkow’s neurocircuitous and neurochemical blather.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

June 21, 2026

QotD: Wishful thinking

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

The wish is often father to the belief, never more so when our interests are in play. But even without material interests, we are often so attached to our ideas or theories that wishful thinking easily overcomes evidence that casts, or at any rate ought to cast, doubt on them. No one is immune from wishful thinking, and therefore from special pleading. Not surprisingly, the latter is easier to spot in others than in oneself.

There is a déformation professionelle that is very common among practitioners of the human sciences, namely the tendency to treat the human beings who are the objects of their study as if they were no different in principle from sticks or stones or stars. A striking example of this tendency was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April this year, in an article titled “Stigma and the Toll of Addiction” by Dr. Nora Volkow, Director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

The first thing one might have looked for in an article by the director of the Institute was a certain modesty. After all, the Institute has been witness to a vast increase in the abuse of drugs, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths, without having been able — notwithstanding claims to advance in the scientific understanding of addiction — to effect improvement in any significant way whatever. No mea culpa is required, but a tone of hectoring evangelism is not very seemly in the circumstances.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Stigma and Sympathy”, The Iconoclast, 2020-09-23.

June 18, 2026

Rules for you young plebs, but not rules for us

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

The generation that defined itself as “the youth generation”, “the hippies”, etc., are now nailing down every possible way to have fun so that youngsters can’t do what they loudly and proudly did at the same age:

Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.

We’re banning raves, because we don’t want you having fun where we can’t watch you. By the way let me tell you about Woodstock.

We’re cracking down on underage drinking. It’s bad for you. Yeah of course we hit up the pubs at your age it was great.

We’re banning smoking, but just for you — the smoking age will go up one year every year. Oh yes of course, we used to be able to smoke inside everywhere, it was great really.

We’re banning flavored vapes. We don’t have any evidence they’re bad for you, you just like them too much.

We’re banning dodgeball during recess, someone might get hurt. Yeah we really enjoyed dodgeball too.

We’re banning flirting, because it might make the girls uncomfortable.

We’re locking you in your room for the next two years. Yes we know you’re in no danger from the virus, but we’re worried that you’ll get us sick. By the way you have to take this needle if you want to leave your room again. Yes, twice. Well there will be boosters too. No, we aren’t worried about side effects, that doesn’t effect us at all.

We’re closing the frat houses, because we don’t want you having fun without our permission. Please join these officially sanctioned university clubs instead.

We’re bringing in labor from the third world to work the service jobs, so you can’t have a summer job.

You need to go to university to get a good job. By the way we’re raising the price of tuition. Oh look we’re raising it again. Don’t worry there are loans. At interest.

Actually we’re giving the good jobs to the foreigners we just imported, to make up for our racist past. We are very good people. No of course we aren’t sacrificing anything. You just have to take one for the team.

Also, we’re giving the foreigners the houses. We needed to increase real estate prices. For our pensions, you see. Sadly no, you’ll probably never be able to afford one yourself. By the way don’t forget to pay your taxes. Need to support those pensions somehow! Eh? No, we’re giving ourselves tax breaks of course. Seniors discount you know.

Oh by the way, that one thing you still have, now that we’ve banned joy and kicked every ladder out from under you? That social media stuff you kids like? You guessed it! We’re banning that too! Just for you though, we’re still going to watch AI videos on Facebook. It’s for your safety, you see. We’ve noticed that you’re all getting rather irate, and we think it would be better for your mental health if you shut up for a while. Why don’t you just go outside?

Eh? No of course we aren’t going to stop Ahmed and his twelve illiterate cousins from raping your sister, that would be culturally insensitive, which would make us feel very bad, and we can’t have that.

Update: Added missing URL.

June 8, 2026

QotD: Re-use, recycle, and contaminate

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

At the start of the twentieth century, American consumers were still living in what today’s greens would consider a state of grace. They carried their own baskets and cotton bags to the grocery store and brought home food wrapped in biodegradable paper. They didn’t use disposable towels in public bathrooms, which provided cloth towels attached to rollers. There were no Styrofoam cups for coffee and no plastic bottles of water. When people wanted water in a public place, they’d get it from the spigot of a drinking fountain by filling a tin cup chained to the fountain.

This “common cup” was the ultimate reusable product — much to the horror of public-health experts, who blamed it for spreading tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, meningitis, and other diseases. Alvin Davison, a biologist at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, analyzed cups from public schools and reported in 1908 that a single sip from a student left a residue of 100 dead skin cells and 75,000 bacteria. He used the scrapings from one school cup to induce fatal cases of pneumonia and tuberculosis in guinea pigs.

His article “Death in School Drinking Cups” provided support to “Ban the Cup” campaigns around the country. The first successful one was led in Kansas by Samuel Crumbine, a colorful doctor who had started his career in Dodge City (he was the model for Doc Adams in the long-running Gunsmoke television series) and went on to lead various public-hygiene crusades. The term “flyswatter” comes from a slogan he popularized, “Swat the fly” (which came to him while listening to the crowd at a baseball game urging a hitter to swat a sacrifice fly ball). After watching train passengers with tuberculosis and other diseases drinking water from a common cup, Crumbine got so upset that he threw the cup out the train’s window, and proceeded to persuade his colleagues on the state board of health to ban the common cup in trains, schools, and other public places in Kansas in 1909.

The ban left Kansans with a new problem: What were they supposed to use at a public fountain? Fortunately, as Crumbine later recalled, “Necessity proved to be the mother of invention.” Shortly after banning the cup, Crumbine was visited by a former Kansan named Hugh Moore, who brought with him samples of a product that his brother-in-law had invented: round paper cups that could be stacked in a dispenser next to a fountain. Crumbine’s endorsement provided crucial help to Moore in selling his product, originally called Health Kups and later renamed Dixie Cups.

John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.

June 7, 2026

Morality and humour

Filed under: Health, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen suggests that there’s a correlation between a person’s morality and their sense of humour (or lack thereof):

There is probably a correlation between morality and sense of humor.

Larry Niven once theorized that humor is associated with an interrupted defense mechanism.

The idea is that you have a situation presented to you which would normally trigger a defensive response, but when you realize it is actually harmless, the response that you experience as laughter or amusement is your brain’s way of derailing that inappropriate defense mechanism.

Because it isn’t appropriate to fight or run away from harmless things.

This mechanism become easy to see when you look at very simple or developing senses of humor. To a baby, unexpected + safe = comedy gold.

And my cat Dante’s favorite joke is “I BITE your toes! … but actually, I don’t bite them! I just lick them by surprise, watch you jump, then run away mewing and looking pleased with myself!”

Humor can become quite sophisticated, but I’ve never yet seen anything funny that couldn’t be understood this way.

But there’s a certain type of evil person who is evil precisely because they don’t interrupt defense mechanisms.

They fight harmless things. Even beneficial ones. And they give you long lectures about how the harmless or even the wonderful thing is ackshually super-problematic.

This is the visible symptom of a form of neurotic hypervigilance which can, and often does, progress to the point of simply lashing out, figuratively or even literally, at random parts of the environment, because the brain has constructed some narrative whereby it’s a threat.

The humor response is our natural way of not doing this.

June 6, 2026

Lies “in a good cause” are still frickin’ lies

Filed under: Business, Food, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

This was posted in late May, but only came to my attention today, so apologies if you’ve already waded through the details here:

The problem with this meme is … well, just read the article.

This meme keeps entering my feed and it bugs me every time I see it. For search engines and the visually impaired: it shows, on the left, a large McDonald’s French fry priced at $1.99. On the right, it shows a delectable fruit cup, including mixed berries, cubed melon, and prominent slices of starfruit priced at $5.99. The caption above both declares, “The Problem With Our Food System”.

Invariably, this meme is met with earnest rejoinders, often in thread 🧵 form, explaining the complexities of food distribution. One particularly clever one that I just saw introduces the concept of “Malicious Design” as a sort of secular creationism where the limitations imposed by nature are imagined as human systems intentionally engineered to harm the masses. Threads like these usually go on to describe how potatoes are cheap, hardy, and practically preserve themselves, while berries are delicate, seasonal, and expensive to ship. They argue that the price difference is simply the natural consequence of supply chains, not the machinations of a capitalist oligarchy trying to keep the proletariat down.

All of that might be true.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because the entire discussion rests on a premise that is demonstrably false.

Not the stuff about potatoes or berries or supply chains. Not even the stuff about the oligarchs insofar as, if they are trying to poison us, they are doing a middling job at best. The problem is that everyone accepts the meme’s starting point as if it were genuine. They never check the most basic fact: the prices themselves!!!

Let’s start with the French fries, because they are on the left and because I have the McDonald’s app on my phone. I can tell you without looking that $1.99 is the wrong price for a large fry because I am a fast-food proletarian myself.

Behold: in my market — Omaha — the price is $4.39. According to the Interwebs, this is a pretty representative price nationwide outside of larger cities. The reason we are considering a large fry instead of a small, which still comes in at a whopping $3.99, is because the meme uses a picture of a large.

Already, the price of the fruit cup and the French fries are much more comparable. Ah, but those crafty capitalists know that the stupid masses will steer toward the cheaper option, regardless of the health risks, even if it is only to save a penny. That’s how the fast-food-to-pharma pipeline gets you! By tricking you into passing on the much healthier and obviously more delicious fruit cup. (Never mind last week’s newsletter about all the poisonous chemicals they’re spraying on the fruit.)

So, I will check on the fruit cup now. The first wrinkle is that the image of the fruit cup does not come from the McDonald’s app. That’s because McDonald’s doesn’t sell a fruit cup in most — if any — markets. If they did, it would arrive to the store frozen and the kid who was supposed to move it from the freezer to the refrigerator last night will have forgotten to do so, meaning that what you will receive is a cup of brightly colored ice cubes that you can pretend to enjoy in a couple of hours. (source: 5+ years personally serving in the McTrenches coinciding with the deployment of the Fruit ‘n Yogurt Parfait™.) In other word, you will not see these two items side-by-side on the menu.

And this is where it gets tricky. Because I can’t actually find that particular fruit cup. Reverse image search turns up a big fat nada. Not on any fast food site, online grocery store, stock photo outlet, food blog, or news page.

Read the whole thing, I believe is the term d’art for this. H/T to Kim du Toit for the link.

June 5, 2026

The Lord of the Flies was just a novel

Filed under: Books, Health, Pacific — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

We often use The Lord of the Flies as a shorthand way to illustrate the darkness in the hearts of men, and that, absent civilizations, men descend into a hellscape of violence, hatred, and all-against-all destructive competition. Yet the real-life case of a group of boys isolated for an extended time didn’t go at all the way the novel did:

More and more I’m learning that the nihilistic claptrap we were all told was genius was just Leftist demoralization propaganda.

Situations like this have occurred, and the children didn’t turn into little monsters. In fact they survived quite well.

In June 1965, six boys named, aged 13 to 16 “borrowed” a fisherman’s boat hoping to reach Fiji or New Zealand. After a storm damaged the sail and rudder, they drifted for eight days surviving on fish and rainwater collected in coconut shells, before washing up on the rocky uninhabited island of ‘Ata.

Rather than descending into chaos during their months there the boys created a mini society. They planted vegetables, collected and stored rainwater, and maintained a permanent fire. They even built a gymnasium with homemade weights, a badminton court, and chicken pens.

They divided daily chores using rosters, resolved conflicts with time-outs instead of fighting, began and ended each day with songs and prayers. One boy, Gilligan’s Isle style, constructed a guitar from driftwood and coconut shell to boost morale. When one of the children broke his leg falling off a cliff the others set it with sticks and leaves and took over his work. They ate fish, coconuts, eggs, wild taro, bananas, and later chickens they had discovered in an ancient volcanic crater.

They endured this for for fifteen months, and never once turned into murderous thugs. A far cry from what we were told would happen.

It wasn’t just William Golding manufacturing dark stories, of course:

QotD: Modern men and the need for male spaces

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

Many internet men have pointed out the dwindling of male spaces, while internet women cheer for their disappearance.

Internet men believe that some kind of man-space is essential. A place for men to be men, mentor other men, and tell younger men the secret wisdom to get their lives on track. That if only we had these spaces, everything would be great for men because we’d all know the secret wisdom that doesn’t actually exist.

Internet women believe that male spaces are dens of misogyny. Places where trollish men want to gather, away from the eyes and ears of right-thinking people, so they can poison other men with hate and bigotry.

Which is silly. Men don’t hate women because other men told them to. They see women being women, and that does the trick just fine. In fact, if a man is getting hourly blowjobs from every woman whose path he crosses, then some group of troll men try to tell him women suck, he’d be confused at how uninformed these men are when women are clearly awesome.

Women’s behavior is the number-one driver of misogyny. Not men telling other men women suck.

And that’s the point of male spaces. Not secret manly-man wisdom, not chattering about woman-hate. A space where men can just be. Without women there.

Women are … a certain way.

This is especially true of middle-class and richer women, and even a little more true of white women than other kinds. But true of all women to some extent.

Women have this way about them — everything they do, say, everything about how they behave — that just subtly communicates that they do not have a lot of experience with consequences. That they are just not that used to considering consequences seriously before doing something.

I’m usually hesitant to use political buzz-words in a non-ironic way, but I think the term “privileged” is pretty perfect for this situation.

A woman’s reality — her experience — is a world where consequences just aren’t quite as big of a deal for her as they are for others. She’s never really had to consider consequences with quite the same intensity.

It’s important to note that this isn’t some kind of overt, intentional flaunting as women stride around, consequence-free, thumbing their noses at us. Women don’t even know this is a thing. They’ll deny it fiercely if you tell them. They don’t feel privileged, and their feelings are always real. They’ll even tell you that you’re the privileged one, not them. Because that feels right to them.

It’s not something they do on purpose, and it’s not even that frontal and pronounced. It’s very subtle. Just this subtle way that women are. When they talk, act, make decisions.

This makes them very irritating. Even women find each other irritating.

Archwinger, “Male spaces are because women are irritating”, Archwinger’s Substack, 2026-02-25.

May 30, 2026

“Bullying”

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

I was bullied as a kid. I hated it. Most kids experience it, and either hate it or embrace it as “how things are done” (most likely both). This is basic human nature across all cultures. It’s how we learn how to conform, or appear to conform, to cultural expectations. In a pre-urban environment, the community could only handle so many non-conformists — that is: close to zero — so nipping it in the bud with the children was a pro-survival/pro-communitarian mechanism. In modern urban environments, bullying still happens because it’s part of human nature rather than being how children learn how to cope with social situations.

We’ve even migrated the notion of suppressing “bullying” to the military, as InfantryDort explains:

Any man who thinks bullying is ubiquitously inappropriate has the survival instincts of a deer gazing longingly at headlights.

For most of human history, communities had weak formal institutions. Public ridicule, shaming, and ostracism were used to enforce norms.

Examples:

> Villages mocking chronic thieves.
> Military units humiliating cowards.
> Tradesmen ridiculing apprentices who refused to learn.

The positive effect was often:

> Greater conformity to community standards.
> Faster correction of disruptive behavior.
> Stronger group cohesion.

It hardens individuals to harsh environments when properly applied. And enforces societal norms we want and dissuades the ones we don’t.

The lack of bullying is how people grow up to adulthood and say things like “I’m gonna kill you and your whole family” at some political protest. And have it come out of their mouth as normal as breathing.

Because nobody ever stood them down in their formative years.

You’re a JAG. You think every problem has a legal solution. It doesn’t. You don’t understand the way the world works outside of the one the law has carefully curated for you. Made possible by people who’ve been using strength to coerce others for all of human history.

Let me spank the kids while you do the dishes.

May 26, 2026

Canadian parents are increasingly adopting the “helicopter” or “bulldozer” model

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

Eva Chipiuk on concerning trends in Canadian parenting styles and the long-term impact on children:

Not many people have really turned their minds to the psychology of Canadians. Most are too busy reacting to the latest outrage, headline, or political controversy.

However, David Redman has cautioned about what he has identified as a trend in Canada: “helicopter” and “bulldozer” parenting, where children are either constantly hovered over or where every obstacle is removed before they ever have to face it themselves.

Over time, that kind of environment can produce people who become uncomfortable with uncertainty, overly dependent on authority, fearful of risk, and hesitant to think independently or challenge difficult ideas. As this article put it:

    Children, the authors observed, are now deliberately shielded from any sense of risk or uncertainty. How can anyone — young boys most of all — learn about the world around them when school principals announce at the onset of every snowfall that “all snow must stay on the ground”. The ideal of adventure and resilience has been replaced by a debilitating sense of fragility and risk-avoidance …

    Adventure should properly be considered a spirit, not a place. It is driven by a powerful mixture of curiosity, necessity, and an openness to experiencing new things. And it can be found wherever uncertainty reigns. Today, that might entail travelling to strange lands, meeting new people, or even engaging in uncomfortable discussions about whether Alberta should remain part of Canada forever.

    Wherever the unknown lies, adventure can be found.

That mindset does not just affect childhood. It shapes entire societies. It affects how citizens respond to disagreement, political debate, uncertainty, criticism, and even new ideas.

Somewhere along the way, many Canadians lost their sense of adventure, resilience, curiosity, and willingness to engage with uncomfortable conversations or difficult questions.

Where did that spirit go? What happened to the mindset that encouraged people to explore, question authority, take risks, debate ideas openly, and build something better even when the outcome was uncertain? Somewhere along the way, discomfort itself seems to have become something to avoid rather than something people grow through.

Because if we stop exploring, questioning, debating, and taking risks, we lose something essential about what it means to live freely and think independently. A society that becomes afraid of uncertainty eventually becomes dependent on being told what is safe, acceptable, and permitted.

If we are going to move forward in any meaningful way, we need to rediscover the spirit of curiosity, resilience, and adventure that pushes people to test ideas, challenge assumptions, and engage with the unknown instead of fearing it.

Perhaps one of the most important conversations we should be having is this: what does it actually mean to be Canadian today?

Because for many, it increasingly feels like the answer is becoming less about courage, resilience, curiosity, and self-determination, and more about compliance, comfort, and avoiding difficult conversations.

May 21, 2026

Explaining why more men are “opting out”

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

On Substack, Bettina Arndt shows some of the reasons why men are less and less willing to commit — not just to relationships, but to huge swathes of what we used to call “adult life”:

The warning signs have been there for decades. Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic — inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture, and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible, and less than a real man.

Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame, and the yoke comes off.

Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.

The trend is not confined to America. Australian men’s workforce participation has fallen from around 79% in 1978 to approximately 71% today (see below), while similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK and Canada.

[…]

If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The modern woman: a prospectus.

  • They are the most miserable, anxious, and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.
  • Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.
  • Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.
  • They’ve gone full throttle left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.
  • They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.
  • Yet their hypergamy (desire to marry up) is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.
  • The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.
  • They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?

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