Before we dive into the evidence, I want to speak briefly to the nature of the evidence for these topics. “Historian” is often an odd sort of field because while there is a core discipline and skill set that basically all historians are going to have (focused on reading texts critically and assessing arguments and evidence), beyond this almost all historians end up acquiring other skill sets, often from other fields, depending on what they are investigating. I, for instance, work on military history and so I need to have some mastery of military theory, whereas an intellectual historian might instead have some training in philosophy.
It is thus relevant that over the past half-century or so, it has so happened that effectively all ancient historians have had to develop a strong grasp of archaeological data; we don’t all necessarily learn to do the excavation work, of course (that’s what archaeologists do), but pretty much all ancient historians at this point are going to have to be able to read a site or artifact report as well as have a good theoretical grasp of what kinds of questions archaeology can be used to answer and how it can be used to answer those questions. This happened in ancient history in particular for two reasons: first, archaeology was a field effectively invented to better understand the classical past (which is now of course also used to understand the past in other periods and places) so it has been at work the longest there, but also because the sources for ancient history are so few. As I like to say, the problem for the modern historian is taking a sip of meaning from the fire-hose of evidence they have; but the challenge of an ancient historian is finding water in the desert. Archaeological data was a sudden, working well in that desert and much of the last two decades of ancient history has been built around it. Other fields of history are still processing their much larger quantity of texts; why dig so deep a well when you live next to a running river?
The result, in ancient history, has been what I tend to refer to as “the revenge of the archaeologists”. Not, mind you, revenge on medievalists, but in fact revenge on a very specific ancient historian and classicist, Moses Finley. Moses Finley was, from the 1950s to the 1980s, one of the most prominent classicists and his work touched on many fields, including the study of the ancient economy. Finley, writing in the 1960s was generally skeptical of the ability of archaeology to provide useful answers about the ancient economy (he preferred to understand the question by probing the mentalities of the Greek and Roman elite). Archaeology, Finley thought, was frequently over-interpreted and could never give a representative sample anyway; as he quipped in his 1965 article “Technical Innovation and Economic Progress in the Ancient World”, “we are too often victims of that great curse of archaeology, the indestructibility of pots”, a line for which, as far as I can tell, he is still quite unforgiven by some archaeologists.
As if in response, the archaeologists have spent the subsequent almost-six-decades proving again and again the tremendous value of their discipline by, among other things, utterly burying Finley’s The Ancient Economy (1973) under a mountain of archaeological data. It turns out the mentalités of aristocrats who largely hated merchants were not a good barometer of the activities of those merchants.
But you may now guess how this is going to play out in the discussion of Late Antiquity. The ancient historians come to the question ready to think in archaeological terms and ask what archaeological data can do to clear up these questions. Scholars of Late Antiquity trained as medievalists on the other hand, may or may not be well versed in archaeological methods or data (to be clear, some medievalists very much are versed, including prominent voices on the “change and continuity” side of this debate! But it is also very possible to be a “pure text” medievalist in a way that I don’t think I know a “pure text” ancient historian younger than sixty) because their field has not been forced, by dint of the paucity of sources, to revolve so heavily around archaeological data and because the archaeological data on the Middle Ages is not yet as voluminous as that on Classical Antiquity.
As I noted in the first post, beginning in the 1970s, what James O’Donnell calls the “reformation in Late Antique studies” launched a long overdue reassessment of Late Antiquity and the impact of the Fall of Rome – what we’ve called the “change and continuity” argument. I bring up all of this to note that the “counter-reformation” – what we’re calling the “decline and fall” argument – that really emerges beginning in the 90s is in many ways an extension of the “revenge of the archaeologists” in Classical studies (and especially the ancient economy) into the field of Late Antiquity. Indeed some of the scholars are the same (e.g. Willem Jongman) and many of them enter the debate on Late Antiquity as an extension of the debate about the Roman economy (in part demanding that “change and continuity” Late Antique scholars acknowledge things now generally considered “proved” by ancient historians about the earlier Roman economy).
In my own experience, particularly in more informal conversations, the methodological difference that interaction creates between ancient historians – for whom it has long been almost entirely settled that in a “fight” between archaeological evidence and effectively any other kind, the archaeological evidence “wins” – and medievalists for whom archaeology is a much less central part of their method (in part because their textual sources are more extensive) can lead to situations where the two sides of the debate talk past each other.
But when it comes to questions of demographics, economics and the conditions of life for the sort of people who rarely figure in our sources, archaeological evidence – although it is often incomplete and hard to interpret – offers the possibility of decisive answers to questions that otherwise would have to live entirely within the realm of speculation.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-02-11.
March 30, 2026
QotD: The Revenge of the Archaeologists
March 29, 2026
Women’s highly specific expectations for males showing emotion
An older post from Rohan Ghostwind but still fully relevant:
… or, why they have such a hard time sharing their feelings, the same way that women do.
Biological reasons aside, for most men, the answer to this is obvious: They’ve attempted to open up to someone in the past, and had it backfire so spectacularly that they realized they should probably never do it again.
Specifically, a lot of young men realize that in order to be a functional participant in society, it requires them to regularly stuff down their emotions and carry on with the tasks of their daily lives.
Much of the rhetoric around wanting more emotionally vulnerable men therefore comes across as vacuous, because many men subconsciously realize that people (both men and women) only want these emotions at specific times, and in specific contexts.
Women want to see the man who cries at the end of the Disney movie, not the man who’s so depressed that he’s in bed for 18 hours a day. Obviously this is an extreme case, but it’s something that pretty much every man has experienced to some degree or another.
But this hides the fact that women themselves are just as responsible for creating this incentive structure, if not more. For as much as women want a guy who opens up and shares his feelings, this usually comes after the man has developed some degree of competency in all the other relevant domains of life — education, career, finances, looks, etc.
Again, many men have to learn this lesson the hard way; they have indeed attempted to open up, only to find that it hurt their relationship prospects, or otherwise made them less attractive to women. As such, he realizes he has to “win” the game of the patriarchy before he’s given the opportunity of subverting the rules of the game.
In other words, emotions are reserved for the elite — for the rest of us low human capital™, we need to shut the fuck up and get good at tensorflow and B2B sales before we even think about having a hard time.
March 28, 2026
Noelia Castillo Ramos, RIP
Celina provides the background information you certainly won’t get from skimming the mainstream media’s coverage of the death of twenty-five year old Noelia Castillo Ramos:
This is how broken the West has become. On Thursday, March 26, 2026, in a clinically sterile room within an assisted living facility in Barcelona, Spain, the government executed a twenty five year old paralysed rape victim. Her name was Noelia Castillo Ramos.1 Noelia did not die of a terminal illness, nor did she pass away from natural causes. Rather, she was administered a lethal injection by the Spanish state that had dismantled her family, forced her into a hostile and horribly dangerous environment, ignored her horrific violation, and ultimately deemed her broken existence too inconvenient to maintain.2
A still from Noelia Castillo’s Antena 3 interview on March 24.
While Noelia Castillo’s heart was stopped by a cocktail of state-sponsored chemicals, the unvetted migrant men who gang-raped her, shattered her mind, and drove her to fling herself from a fifth-floor window continue to walk the streets of Europe, entirely shielded from justice. They faced zero consequences. She faced the death penalty.
These were the last words that her grandmother said to Noelia: “I love you, my girl; someday we will be together again”.
The fate of Noelia Castillo stands as a single almost perfect, undeniable illustration of everything that is broken, evil, and actively suicidal about modern Western society under progressive, woke, open-border, and secular-left governance. Progressive Europe has functionally and legally decided that native European women and girls are a disposable commodity, just collateral damage in the grand suicidal project of multiculturalism.
March 22, 2026
“In 1800, most people worked the land. By 1900, most didn’t. … That’s a psychological earthquake”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison points out just how vast the disruption of normal, traditional lives over less than a century has torn most of us from our historical moorings:
Image generated with AI
The Great Collision: When Reality Stopped Making Sense
For most of human history, life wasn’t confusing. It was hard, yes. Brutal, often. But simple.
You were born into a pattern. You followed it. You died in it.
Then the 20th century showed up like a wrecking ball.
What people call “progress” was really a mass psychological dislocation. We didn’t just move from farms to cities. We lost the structure that told us who we were.
We solved survival. Then immediately created a meaning crisis.
That’s the trade nobody advertises.
1. The Shock: When Life Broke Its Own Pattern
People think industrialization was about better tools. It wasn’t. It was about ripping people out of identity.
In 1800, most people worked the land. By 1900, most didn’t. That’s not a statistic. That’s a psychological earthquake.
Tradition vanished faster than people could adapt. So the state stepped in and did what states always do. Standardize. Educate. Normalize.
Mass schooling didn’t just teach reading. It replaced lost culture with manufactured culture.
Useful? Yes.
Neutral? Not even close.
You don’t remove a thousand-year identity system and expect people to just “figure it out”.
They don’t. They drift.
2. The Lie We Tell Ourselves: “People Want the Truth”
No, they don’t. They want to feel right.
Semmelweis proved it. Doctors were killing women by not washing their hands. When he showed them, they didn’t thank him. They rejected him. Destroyed him.
Why?
Because truth wasn’t the problem. Identity was.
If the facts say “you’re causing harm”, and your identity says “I’m a healer”, most people will reject the facts. Not update the identity.
That’s the Is vs Ought gap in plain terms:
The world is what it is
You believe what should be
When they collide, you protect the beliefNot truth. Belief.
That’s not stupidity. That’s self-preservation.
3. The Split: Are You a Person or a Machine?
Here’s the quiet tension nobody resolves.
You experience yourself as a decision-maker. You choose. You judge. You act.
But science describes you as chemistry and electrical signals.
Both are true. And they don’t fit together cleanly.
The old world said: you are a moral agent.
The modern world says: you are a biological system.
So which one is responsible when something goes wrong?
If you lean too far into “machine”, responsibility disappears.
If you lean too far into “agent”, you ignore constraints.
Most people bounce between the two depending on what excuses them fastest.
4. The Dangerous Shortcut: Let Someone Else Decide
Freedom sounds nice until it demands something from you.
Dostoevsky nailed this. People don’t just want freedom. They want relief from it.
So they trade it. Quietly.
Security, comfort, certainty. Those become the new gods.
And then comes the predictable move. Someone steps in and says:
“I’ll decide what’s good for everyone.”
History has a word for those people. It’s not flattering.
Once you remove any higher standard, the only thing left is preference backed by power.
That’s when things get ugly fast.
5. When “Good Intentions” Go Off the Rails
This is where it usually collapses.
When there’s no fixed standard, people start building their own. Then enforcing it.
George Bernard Shaw is a perfect example. Smart. Influential. Completely untethered.
Once you decide some people are “in the way”, the logic gets dark very quickly.
Not because people are monsters.
Because they think they’re right.
That’s always the justification.
Final Reframe: You Don’t Get Meaning for Free
Here’s the uncomfortable truth.
The old systems that gave people meaning are gone or weakened. They’re not coming back in their original form.
So now you’re left with a choice most people avoid:
Drift and absorb whatever narrative is loudest
Or build your own framework and take responsibility for itThere is no neutral ground.
You’re either shaping your values, or inheriting someone else’s without noticing.
Most people think they’re thinking.
They’re not. They’re echoing.
Simple Stoic Move
Strip it down.
Ask one question:
“What do I actually control here?”
Then act there. Only there.
Everything else is noise.
And right now, there’s a lot of noise.
[NR] – minor formatting added.
QotD: The treason of the scientists
Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.
One of those people is me.
I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.
I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.
But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.
And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.
Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.
Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.
Update, 23 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
March 12, 2026
Homelessness can’t be solved by just throwing more money at the problem
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison responds to someone explaining their family’s tragic problem of a homeless relative:
The post hits a nerve because it exposes the part of the homelessness debate people prefer not to talk about.
A lot of the public story says homelessness is mainly about housing and compassion. If we build more units and remove stigma, the problem fades. That sounds humane. The trouble is that it ignores what families dealing with severe addiction and psychosis actually face.
Emily Baroz describes the reality many relatives know too well. The person on the street is often not just poor. They are deeply mentally ill, addicted, paranoid, sometimes violent, and frequently refusing help. Families try everything. Housing. Money. Treatment. Support. The illness itself destroys the ability to cooperate. Meanwhile the legal system often blocks intervention until someone gets hurt.
So the public debate becomes strange theatre. Compassion is defined as leaving the person alone. Authority is treated as cruelty.
That brings us closer to home. Manitoba’s NDP government is now moving toward supervised consumption sites. The argument is harm reduction. The idea is that if people are going to use drugs anyway, the state should at least make it safer.
The problem is that the evidence across Canada is far from comforting. Vancouver, Toronto, and other cities expanded harm-reduction sites over the last decade. Yet overdoses, street disorder, and visible addiction kept rising. Recovery rates did not suddenly surge. In many neighbourhoods the result was more normalization of drug use without a clear path back to stability.
If a policy is supposed to reduce harm, the basic question is simple: are fewer people addicted, dying, or trapped in the street?
If the answer is no, the policy deserves scrutiny.
Safe consumption sites may prevent some immediate overdoses. But they also risk locking people into a long-term cycle where the system manages addiction instead of helping people escape it. Families who are begging for treatment beds, detox spaces, psychiatric care, and recovery programs often watch governments invest more energy in enabling use than in ending it.
That’s the tension people feel but rarely say out loud.
A compassionate society does not abandon people to addiction while calling it care. Compassion sometimes means structured treatment, involuntary intervention when someone is clearly incapable of making rational choices, and serious investment in recovery infrastructure.
Otherwise we are simply managing decline.
And families like the one in that post already know it.
Update, 14 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
Update, the second: Devon Eriksen had a relevant-to-this-topic aside on a longer post –
One of the most common sources of confusion is “using the wrong word”.
For example, if you have a drug zombie problem, and you call it a “homeless” problem, then you spend a lot of tax money giving houses to drug zombies, who turn them into rat-infested drug dens.
The wrong word implies the wrong understanding.
March 9, 2026
A lot of real problems could be fixed with $16 trillion
On his Substack, John Robson observes that there are huge numbers of problems — real, measurable problems — that could be ameliorated or completely solved by the application of $16 trillion dollars. But instead, the governments of the western world have pissed that up against the wall on unsuccessful efforts to address climate change:
In the Epoch Times Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation writes “Environmental scholar Bjorn Lomborg recently calculated that across the globe, governments have spent at least $16 trillion feeding the climate change industrial complex. And for what?” A splendid question. Of course some people would say “Well, to keep the sky from catching fire, duh”. But since the reduction in emissions has been trivial, it wasn’t a great bargain. Plus, Moore being an actual economist, he drills in on the key point: “But it’s much worse than that. In economics, there is a concept called opportunity cost: What could we have done with $16 trillion to make the world better off?” So, after carving “Opportunity cost” over the entrance to our academy, we ask anyone who enters to suppose that you are a do-gooder, and a green one at that. And suppose that someone had offered you sixteen trillion bucks back in 1995 to do good with. Whatever you wanted. Malnutrition in Africa. Plastic in the oceans. Loss of habitat. Safe drinking water for people in South Asia or even on Canadian aboriginal reserves. Literally anything. What could you have accomplished, or at least attempted? This question was long ago posed by Lomborg, albeit only with $75 billion imaginary dollars, to a panel of experts who concluded climate change was far down the list of spending targets. And yet governments said no thanks and spend all $16 trillion fighting “carbon pollution”. And for what?
In their defence those same governments might be tempted to point to the lack of warming and say something like “See, it worked! Sure, $16 trillion is a lot but we saved Earth from runaway heating so be grateful.” However they are also the ones who lament that the planet continues to warm, heat, bake and boil. So even if they’re right, they’re wrong. And either way, the money really was all wasted.
Of course they might say no, see, it would have been way worse without that spending. And as we’ve noted before, one of the many slippery things about climate alarmism is just how fast they think changes in CO2 produces changes in temperature and via changes in temperature, changes in weather. It’s very difficult to pin them down on just when the really troubling impacts began to be palpable, not least because they generally say we’re already in a climate crisis that’s about to hit. But even the models, and here we include hysterical ones like RCP8.5, do not generally suggest that the temperature today would be a whole lot higher if we’d stayed on the emissions track from 1995 instead of, well, staying on it, with Western nations declining due to increasing energy efficiency not political grandstanding and China, India and others more than taking up the slack.
To be fair, it would not be illogical for such persons to say, or shriek, that it proves $16 trillion was just peanuts, we should have spent $160 trillion or $48 quadrillion or 4 Triganic Pus or something of that sort. And they did.
For instance, just over two years ago Bloomberg actually ran a column saying “$266 Trillion in Climate Spending is a No-Brainer”. And we agreed, sardonically, since the whole world GDP seems to be around $96 trillion as nearly as anyone can estimate it. (We are not convinced most alarmists who toss such numbers around, like former Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna who wanted “trillions in infrastructure investments from both governments and the private sector”, can tell you off the cuff to within an order of magnitude what, say, the current US or Canadian GDP is.)
February 28, 2026
Just when you think Canada can’t get worse … it gets worse
Unlike most other Anglosphere countries, Canada does not have a resurgent right wing in domestic politics — we barely have a right wing at all — and the governing Liberal Party is constantly trying to steal sitting opposition MPs to achieve a majority of seats in Parliament. It’s no wonder that Alberta’s separatist movement has been active the last few years. In case you still have an optimistic view of Canada’s present and future, here’s a long “state of Canada” post from John Carter that will probably increase the numbers signing up for free euthanasia (“MAID” in Canadian):
The US is now leading Canada 3-0 in international hockey. If you count the Stanley Cup as an occasional international match, a Canadian team hasn’t won since 1993. For a country that has long practically defined itself as the Hockey Nation, this is especially humiliating. Given the continual year-round repetition of the Elbows Up mantra, this is the kind of thing a Roman augur would have interpreted as a portent of divine disfavour.
Months, you say? Oh dear.
Consistent with that interpretation, Canada’s recent humiliations have not been limited to sportspuck losses. What follows is a snapshot in time, headlines from a country beset by interlocking economic, demographic, spiritual, and political crises, a country which has not had good news in so long that it has forgotten what optimism even looks like.
Item: Canada recently watched the worst school shooting in Canadian history, and the second-worse mass shooting after the infamous 1989 Montreal Massacre in which “Mark Lepine”1 shot 14 female engineering students. The shooting took place in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, a small rural village in the country’s north, and claimed the lives of 10 people including the shooter, his mother, his brother, and several students. Dozens of others were injured. It soon turned out that the murderer was a trannie whose brain had been twisted into a psychotic pretzel by psychedelics, legal weed, SSRIs, and the gender woo he was force-fed at school, at home, and on Reddit. This has led to it being referred to as the Tumblr Shooting. Naturally, both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian media went out of their way to respect the shooter’s pronouns in all reporting and official communications. The media even made sure to give the shooter an AI filter glow-up, so that he could be remembered as the pretty girl we all know he really was deep down inside.
After a desultory and hilariously unsuccessful attempt at scolding the public that the problem wasn’t trannies, but guns or whiteness or something (blessedly, they couldn’t say “men” this time), the Canadian media just dropped it, though not before the government flew the flag at half mast.
Which is how this happened.
Item: A former school board trustee in Chilliwack, British Columbia, was fined $750,000 for failure to respect pronouns. Shooting up a school is bad, but misgendering is unforgivable.
[…]
Item: A xeet went viral in which a leaflib tried to fact check an American poster making fun of 18-month MRI wait times by pointing out that she’d only had to wait six months, prompting widespread mockery from incredulous Yanks.
Pennsylvania, which has about 1/3 of Canada’s population, has more MRIs than all of Canada put together. The Canadian mind cannot comprehend, etc.
Item: Euthanasia via Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program now accounts for 1 death in 20 in Canada. The overwhelming majority, around 96%, of MAiD recipients are white, despite white Canadians comprising 86% of Canadians in the elderly demographic that dominates assisted suicide participants.
Since 2016 over 76,000 Canadians have been killed by MAiD. Moreover, the program is accelerating: the death toll in 2024 was the highest on record at 16,499. Annual death tolls have risen by around a few thousand every year since the program started, with no sign of stopping. Canada is expected to hit 100,000 MAiD deaths by summer.
Item: While most MAiD victims are elderly and infirm, this is not true in every case. Recently it came out that a 26-year-old man was euthanized, simply because he was depressed over his diabetes-induced blindness. His family allege that he doctor-shopped until he found one who would kill him (she has apparently killed several hundred others).
MAiD was originally billed as an easy, painless out for people with terminal illnesses, a dignified death that would spare them a few months of pointless agony. It’s now being extended to people whose imminent death is not reasonably foreseeable. Several Canadian Armed Forces veterans have been offered MAiD in lieu of treatment for injuries sustained in the course of their service.
The primary goal of MAiD is almost certainly to reduce pressure on Canada’s overstretched public health care system whilst simultaneously reducing the fiscal burden of pensioners on the federal budget. Someone looked at the financials, and concluded that unfunded liabilities were going to bankrupt the country when the boomers reached their 80s. Therefore the government is talking them into killing themselves. However, while they’re at it, they might as well expand the program to hasten demographic replacement within the younger sectors of the population pyramid.
- Née Gamil Gharbi, a detail the Canadian media successfully kept from us for decades as it didn’t fit their narrative that “men” are the problem, rather than men from … certain places.
February 27, 2026
Footfall and Cultural Blindspots
Feral Historian
Published 24 Oct 2025Niven and Pournelle’s tale is one of the classics of the alien invasion genre and is deserving of more attention these days than it gets. Space elephants, asteroid strikes, and Orion battleships. Let’s get to it.
This one has been sitting in the WiP folder since early spring. There’s not much Footfall art out there and for whatever reason … I can’t seem to draw elephants.
00:00 Intro
03:25 The Herd(s)
07:13 The Foot and Michael
10:13 Flushing the Story
12:33 Launch and Negotiations
15:50 Takeaways
18:06 Rounding Corners
(more…)
February 25, 2026
Sensitive scientists skulk off to the “I❤️Science” clubhouse of Bluesky to lick their wounds
Since the social media site formerly known as Twitter stopped being a purely leftist echo chamger — although some now claim it’s gone all the way to being a rightist echo chamber — a large number of scientists have chosen to relocate their social media participation to a site much more along the lines of pre-Elon Twitter:
Image from Science Is Not The Answer
Ressentiment and hurt feelings over lose of prestige has hit many academic scientists hard. The ebbing away of respect and deference was not something they prepared for. They were taught, all through life, that these things would be theirs in abundance, got free by flashing their degree. Only now there is often laughter instead of applause.
They should have seen it coming. Decades of predicting every single thing, with no exceptions, would worsen because of “climate change”, the idea that treating delusions by making all agree with the delusions, and by chemically and surgically altering the delusional, the hersterical overblown false cries of “Follow the Science!” in the covid panic, and the endless stream of nonsense of every stripe passed off in the name of science, all of which were funded by you, has whittled down to next to nothing the goodwill scientists earned over the years by inventing such modern miracles as chemical, biological and nuclear weapons and multiverses.
That’s my little joke. But it’s clear many scientists are running away from criticism, which is hurtful. Few enjoy being questioned, and almost none take well the abuse hurled on social media. Scientists want a return of the reflexive polite submissiveness (“Back off, man, I’m a scientist”), and many are coming to realize they aren’t going to get it. Not online, anyway.
Which is a long-winded introduction to the peer-reviewed paper — whose existence proves our thesis — “Scientists no Longer Find Twitter Professionally Useful, and have Switched to Bluesky” by DS Shiffman and J Wester in Integrative and Comparative Biology, a journal whose name would have you guess is about integrative and comparative biology, and not tittle tattle gathered, in the manner of cheap journalism, using surveys answered by those who can’t find an excuse not to answer. But the name lies. For that is exactly what this paper is.
The Synopsis, with my emphasis:
Social media has become widely used by the scientific community for a variety of professional uses, including networking and public outreach. For the past decade, Twitter has been a primary home of scientists on social media. In recent years, new leadership at Twitter has made substantive changes that have resulted in increases in the prevalence of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory, and harassment on the platform, causing many scientists to seek alternatives. Bluesky has been suggested as a good alternative to Twitter, but the phenomenon of academics switching social media platforms has not previously been studied. Here we report on the results of a survey distributed to scientists on Twitter and Bluesky (n = 813). Results overwhelmingly confirm that changes to Twitter have made the social media platform no longer professionally useful or pleasant, and that many scientists have abandoned it in favor of Bluesky. Results show that for every reported professional benefit that scientists once gained from Twitter, scientists can now gain that benefit more effectively on Bluesky than on Twitter.
The reason this topic has not been “studied” is because, as is obvious, it is not worth studying. Asking why a handful of scientists (willing to answer) which social media platform they prefer barely counts as news. What is interesting, though, is that academic scientists have joined the Cult of the Victim.
Huh. Who knew that calculating degrees of butthurt was now an academic speciality?
February 24, 2026
Canada’s climate follies, a brief update
On Substack, John Robson looks at the Canadian federal government’s lofty climate goals and their pathetic strategies to achieve those goals and the vast chasm between the two:
Chinese electric vehicles are likely coming to Canadian roads, like these BYD models.
Forgive us for being fixated on Canada’s climate follies just because we live here. But they are revealing, including the U-turn on EVs that we mentioned last week where the government yanked the steering wheel so hard they did a 360 from banning gasoline vehicles by law to banning them by regulation. Raising the question whether they actually know what they’re doing and, if so, whether they regard themselves as commendably devious or just way smarter than everyone else. We hope not the latter because the policy is going to fail big-time. As Randall Denley just warned in the National Post, “To summarize, the Carney plan relies on electric vehicles (EVs) that Ontario plants don’t produce, a sudden and dramatic new appetite for buying EVs and an imagined export market that doesn’t exist. To top it off, the federal government will provide $2.3 billion in EV rebates that will encourage Canadians to buy cars made elsewhere.” Apart from that, a stroke of genius of the sort that, through decades of diligent effort, has made the nation tragically poorer without hitting any of our targets including the one where they get more humble.
As a Globe & Mail news story blurted out:
A new study published Friday by the Canadian Climate Institute says Canada is not on track to meet any of its climate targets – not the 2026 interim emissions reduction target, the 2030 Paris Agreement commitment, or even the long-term goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050.
Oh. Pretty hard to make that one sound like an achievement, isn’t it? Or to sound as if the people who pulled it off should be trusted with the next one.
Now as we’ve complained before, the “Canadian Climate Institute” bills itself as some sort of dispassionate neutral observer when in fact it’s a creature of the state. And, worse, one of those lavishly-funded outfits (we deniers may have all the money, but they got $30 million from the Canadian government and we did not … uh no, that was just one grant, the total’s higher) that exists to push the government to do things it wants to do anyway but needs the appearance of “civil society” support to pull off.
Thus, the Globe sonorously informs us, the problem isn’t that the targets were impractical or the politicians and bureaucrats inept. Heck no. As usual with Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision” of public policy, all you need is love:
The report suggests Canada has moved away from its climate goals thanks to “a slackening of policy effort over the past year, marked by the removal or weakening of climate policies across the country”.
Which gives the impression they had been on track to meet their goals up until some recent backsliding, whereas in reality they have never shown any sign of meeting them. After all, what policies have actually changed since Carney took over as Prime Minister in ways that could possibly affect long-term trends? And how close was Canada to meeting “its climate goals” before this disastrous swerve into the camp of the deniers?
It’s not even true that “Canada” as a collective has collective “climate goals”. The government has climate goals, and they come bundled with a host of other policies at election time, especially since even our “Conservative” party is terrified of challenging climate orthodoxy. Public support for those goals is weak, sporadic and prone to vanish when real costs hove into view. But ignoring that piece of typical collectivist prose, Mark Carney has spent most of his prime ministership flying around virtue-signaling in the presence of others doing the same. (No, really. It’s been less than a year and he’s taken almost three dozen flights.) He hasn’t been in the office shredding this and demolishing that.
February 22, 2026
“[T]he trans cult … attracted many mentally ill people [offering] instant visibility, attention, and status”
In the visible-to-cheapskates portion of his Weekly Dish post, Andrew Sullivan tries to point out how the Democrats can salvage something from their decade-long, all-in approach to all things trans (warning, contains Andrew Sullivan):
I had dinner this week with a young gay man who was castrated and had his endocrine system permanently wrecked as a result of “gender-affirming care” for minors. He was super girly as a kid and had an undiagnosed testosterone deficiency which delayed his male development. He liked playing with girls, seemed to act like one, and when he socially transitioned as a teen, he passed easily. Suddenly all the sneers of “faggot” he’d endured as a boy went away. In today’s “gender-affirming care” environment, that was enough.
“Compassion” and “science” took a gay boy, flooded his young male body with estrogen, and removed his genitals — because the docs and the shrinks determined he was too effeminate to be a “real man”. Only when he personally figured this out as an adult and got himself off estrogen and onto testosterone did everything change. He felt energy and mental clarity for the first time. And his life as a man could finally begin — although his body will never be fully repaired.
Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic (I can hear your groans now). I’m obsessed, you say, and this is a trivial (boring) matter. I’ve lost some good friends who feel very much that way, and my social life has shrunk. But then I meet someone like Mike (a pseudonym) — and I’ve met many others, gay and lesbian — and realize not a single gay group or resource is on his side. In fact, the “LGBTQIA+” lobby all but denies he exists, or dismisses him as transphobic — a dreaded “detransitioner”.
I was thinking about Mike as I read the latest polling — out this week in a liberal online mag, The Argument. The poll shows what we well know: 63 percent of Americans want to protect trans people from discrimination. This isn’t a transphobic country. But, equally, 62 percent oppose transing minors (50 percent strongly), 60 percent support banning transwomen competing against women in sports, and 53 percent want to ban gender ideology in elementary schools. These numbers have gone up the more the debate has raged. The backlash is so intense it has even reversed the public’s previous opposition to bathroom bills.
Now check out the liberal response. Bluesky erupted in fury that the poll was published at all. “Please help us,” one X member tweeted with direct appeals to Tim Cook and McKenzie Scott, who have bankrolled this campaign. Jill Filipovic complained that the “Dems … should have focused on things like ending discrimination in housing and employment”, rather than sports and kids, unaware that the Bostock decision already did that with employment. Most liberals have literally no idea that trans people already have civil rights. Off-message.
In this air-tight ideological bubble, where Bostock is unknown, the Dems flounder. “This isn’t happening” was the first gambit. Good try. Then: “this has all been ginned up by the far right, and Dems did nothing”. Did they miss the Obama and Biden Title IX diktats, Admiral Levine’s removal of lower age limits for transing kids, Biden’s “nonbinary” official Sam Brinton stealing dresses, or other embarrassments like the White House invite to Dylan Mulvaney? Then they say it’s a tiny issue. But it helped Trump massively in 2024. And if it’s tiny, why not compromise? After that, it’s just MLK-envy all the way down, the desire to be the next Rosa Parks. But it’s odd to campaign for “civil rights” when you already have them.
After trying to debate, you come to realize it’s pointless. The woke mind is not really a mind; it’s more like a bunch of synapses. Presented with an actual argument, they snap shut. This is part of what Eric Kaufmann calls the “sacralization” of minorities. For the woke, the “oppressed” are sacred. And in the social justice hierarchy, no minority is as oppressed and thereby as sacred as trans.
And so what sacred trans people say they want — or rather, what a tiny group of trans activists say they want — is all that matters. Anything else is illegitimate or “hate”. And any opponent is a bigot. Try arguing your way out of that dogmatic thicket. It’s like trying to disprove the Holy Trinity. I’ve given up.
But the real world keeps intervening. We just saw a ground-breaking lawsuit that won a $2 million judgment for a double mastectomy at 15. And this month saw two awful mass shootings by mentally unwell men caught up in the trans craze. Between Tumbler Ridge, Canada, and a Rhode Island hockey match, 12 people are now dead, including 6 children. And this is no longer a shock. Ask yourself what the 2023 Nashville Covenant School shooting, the 2025 Annunciation Catholic Church shooting, and even the 2024 attempted assassination of Trump, have in common.
Yes, it’s categorically wrong to link trans people to mass killings. That’s false and dangerous. But you’d be dumb not to worry that the trans cult of the last decade may have attracted many mentally ill people into a space where they have instant visibility, attention, and status. We have set up an open-ended subjective category — anyone who says they’re trans is trans, period — almost designed to attract delusional narcissists, and, with every safeguard thrown away, there’s no way to distinguish the nutters from the genuinely in need.
February 20, 2026
QotD: The burden of “emotional labour”
Researchers at Stanford have finally given a name to something many women have been dealing with for years. It’s called mankeeping. And it’s helping explain why so many women are stepping away from dating altogether.
Yes, from the pages of Vice, it’s a men-are-the-problem-and-therefore-unnecessary article. Because we haven’t had one of those in weeks.
Mankeeping describes the emotional labour women end up doing in heterosexual relationships.
Lesbian relationships being entirely free of aggravation and disappointment, you see. With rates of failure and divorce twice that of heterosexuals, more than double that of gay male couples, and with high rates of alcoholism and spousal abuse. What one might infer from that, I leave to others.
[Mankeeping] goes beyond remembering birthdays or coordinating social plans. It means being your partner’s one-man support system. Managing his stress.
And,
Interpreting his moods.
At which point, readers may wish to share their favourite joke about female indirectness and the two dozen possible meanings of the words “I’m fine” when uttered by a woman, depending on the precise intonation and the current alignment of the planets.
Readers may also note the replacement of a once common but now seemingly unfashionable grievance – “Men don’t express their feelings” – with one of a much more modish kind – “Men are expressing their feelings and it’s exhausting and unfair”.
Holding his hand through feelings he won’t share with anyone else. All of it unpaid, unacknowledged, and often unreciprocated.
One more time:
All of it unpaid,
It occurs to me that there’s something a little dissonant about the framing of affection and basic consideration – say, remembering your partner’s birthday – as “unpaid”. As “emotional labour”. As if being in a relationship or having any concern for those you supposedly care about were some onerous, crushing chore. As if you should be applauded – and financially compensated – for the thirty-second task of adding a birthday to the calendar on your phone.
The attitude implied by the above would, I think, explain many failures on the progressive partner-finding front and the consequent “stepping away from dating altogether”. Though possibly not in ways the author intended.
Before we go further, it’s perhaps worth pondering how the conceit of “emotional labour” is typically deployed by a certain type of woman. Say, the kind who complains, in print and at great length, about the “emotional labour” of hiring a servant to clean her multiple bathrooms. Or writing a shopping list. Or brushing her daughter’s hair.
And for whom explaining to her husband the concept of “emotional labour” is itself bemoaned as “emotional labour”. The final indignity.
The kind of woman who bitches in tremendous detail about her husband and his shortcomings – among which, an inability to receive instructions sent via telepathy – in the pages of a national magazine, where friends and colleagues of said husband, and perhaps his own children, can read on with amusement. The kind of woman who tells the world about how hiring servants is just so “exhausting”, while professing some heroic reluctance to complain.
As I said, worth pondering.
But back to the pages of Vice, where Ms Ashley Fike is telling us how it is:
According to Pew Research, only 38 percent of single women in the US are currently looking for a relationship. Among single men, that number jumps to 61 percent. The gap says a lot. Women aren’t opting out of love. They’re opting out of being someone’s therapist with benefits.
Stoic, heroic women burdened by needy, emotional men. It’s a bold take.
And I can’t help but wonder what all of those single women, cited above, are doing instead of finding a suitable mate and building a happy life, perhaps even a family. Are they searching for a sense of purpose in causes, protests and political fashion, fuelled at least in part by envy and resentment? Just speculation, of course. But it would, I think, explain the tone and emotional convulsions of so many single, progressive women.
The Guardian calls mankeeping a modern extension of emotional labour, one that turns a partner into a life coach. This isn’t about avoiding vulnerability. It’s about refusing to carry someone else’s emotional weight while getting little to nothing in return. And there’s nothing wrong with feeling that way.
Again, the term “emotional labour” and its connotations of calculation, antagonism, and something vaguely inhuman. As if the concept of wanting to care, to help, to remember those birthdays, were somehow alien or offensive.
The reliance on this conceit – as the basis for an article, perhaps an entire worldview – doesn’t strike me as an obvious recipe for contentment, or indeed love. What with the endless cataloguing of shortcomings. All those reasons to resent.
Some men have started opening up more, which is good.
Ah, a glimmer of hope.
But too often, that openness lands in the lap of the person they’re sleeping with instead of a friend or a therapist. Vulnerability without boundaries can feel more like a burden than a breakthrough.
So, don’t bore your wife with your troubles, gentlemen. No, search out a therapist. Or, “Be vulnerable, like we asked, but somewhere else”.
David Thompson, “Let’s Be Alone And Unhappy”, Thompson, blog, 2025-11-16.
February 18, 2026
It’s not just Britain that gives asylum-seekers better care than citizens – Canada does too
We had a look at how well the British government looks after asylum-seekers yesterday, but other nations are probably doing similarly inequitable things to give money and services to non-citizens than they ever would for the people who pay the taxes for these over-generous programs. In the National Post, Tristin Hopper outlines the findings of a recent analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office on the costs of supporting huge numbers of foreign nationals in Canada:
An asylum seeker, crossing the US-Canadian border illegally from the end of Roxham Road in Champlain, NY, is directed to the nearby processing center by a Mountie on 14 August, 2017.
Photo by Daniel Case via Wikimedia Commons.
Paying the health-care premiums of refugee claimants will cost Canadians a record $1 billion this year, with some of the beneficiaries continuing to receive free health care despite their claims having already been rejected.
That’s according to a new analysis by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and it’s just one of several ballooning costs wrought by the unprecedented number of foreign nationals currently living in Canada by virtue of a claim of refugee status.
The Interim Federal Health Program, which offers premium health benefits to asylum claimants, is soon set to hit $1 billion in annual costs for the first time, according to an analysis last Thursday by the Office of the Parliamentary Budget Officer.
This is a five-fold increase from just six years ago, when the program was costing $211 million per year. The analysis also projects that costs are expected to surge for the foreseeable future, with the annual budget likely to hit $1.5 billion as early as 2029.
All told, between now and 2030, Canadians are on track to spend $6.2 billion on health care for refugees or refugee claimants.
“The rising volume of asylum claims, along with the longer duration of eligibility caused by extended determination times, has been an important growth driver in recent years,” reads the PBO report.
The report was commissioned following a Conservative-led request made at the House of Commons standing committee on health. In a Thursday statement, the Conservative party noted that the Interim Federal Health Program can be accessed even by asylum claimants who have had their case rejected.
It also offers a higher level of care than that enjoyed by the average Canadian citizen. In addition to hospital care and surgical care, the IFHP also covers dental care, vision care, pharmacare and other services not typically covered by public health plans.
“Rejected asylum claimants are now receiving better health care than many Canadians who have paid into a system their entire life,” read a joint statement by Dan Mazier and Michelle Rempel Garner, the shadow ministers of health and immigration, respectively.
It added, “at a time when six million Canadians cannot find a family doctor and are waiting for care, it’s unacceptable that bogus asylum seekers are receiving better health benefits than Canadians”.
February 17, 2026
QotD: Britain treats asylum seekers significantly better than their own citizens
The page continues: “You’ll get extra money to buy healthy food if you’re pregnant or a mother of a child aged three or under”. The payment is £5.25 per week for pregnancy, £9.50 for a baby under one, £5.25 for children aged one to three, plus a one-off £300 maternity grant for anyone expecting a child or with a baby under six months. Even when asylum is refused, support continues: “You’ll be given somewhere to live and £49.18 per person on a payment card for food, clothing and toiletries”. Only those who decline the accommodation lose the card.
Medical care is covered in full. “You may get free National Health Service healthcare,” the Government states, including “free prescriptions for medicine, free dental care, free eyesight tests and help paying for glasses”. Children are guaranteed a place in a state school and “may be able to get free school meals”. The terms are so generous that the NHS issues a dedicated HC2 certificate for people on asylum support, giving them automatic exemption from all prescription and dental charges, free eye tests and optical vouchers, and even help with wigs and fabric supports.
Compare this to the treatment of the people who pay for it. A British worker who loses his job must apply for Universal Credit, then wait at least five weeks before receiving a payment. Any advance must be repaid out of later instalments. He must show that he is seeking work, accept appointments and interviews, and risk sanctions if he misses them. He is scrutinised as a potential cheat. An asylum claimant is treated as a recipient of moral debt, requiring no proof of worthiness.
When the native taxpayer falls ill, he must pay £9.90 per prescription unless he qualifies for a limited exemption. He may buy a “pre-payment certificate” to spread the cost, but the charge remains. Dental treatment on the NHS costs £27.40 for a check-up, £75.30 for a filling, £326.70 for a crown or denture, and many cannot find an NHS dentist at all. Asylum seekers, by contrast, present their HC2 certificate and pay nothing. If the citizen asks the council for housing, he is told that the waiting list is full, that he is not a “priority case”, and that the private rental market is his problem. The asylum applicant, by the State’s own words, is “given somewhere to live if you need it”.
None of this is accidental. The cost of asylum support in 2023–24 was about £4.7 billion, according to the Home Office’s own figures, of which £3 billion went on hotel accommodation. In 2024–25, the bill fell slightly to £4 billion, but £2.1 billion of this was still for hotels — an average of £5.7 million every day. The National Audit Office has found that the ten-year accommodation contracts, first priced at £4.5 billion, are now projected to cost £15.3 billion. Between April and October 2024 alone, £1.7 billion was spent on housing and managing asylum seekers. The Financial Times has estimated the total annual cost of the asylum system at roughly £4.8 billion. The number of people receiving asylum support — housing, cash or both — now stands at over 100,000.
The figures expose a transfer of resources on a colossal scale. What is presented as “humanitarian duty” has become a domestic welfare state for foreigners, sustained by British workers who receive less support in return for greater taxation. The British State can house every migrant but not every nurse, find free dental care for the undocumented but not for the elderly, provide optical help for those who have just arrived but not for those who have paid into the system all their lives.
Marian Halcombe, “Britain’s Welfare Empire: A State that Feeds Strangers and Starves Its Own”, The Libertarian Alliance, 2025-11-05.
