Quotulatiousness

April 9, 2026

“Trump … scared us into doing the right thing”

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

Canada got into the incredibly bad habit of freeloading on national defence under Pierre Trudeau, and from 1968 onward, we’ve been leaning ever more heavily on US military power to fill in the gaps we’ve chosen not to invest in ourselves. At the same time, we’ve almost dislocated our arm in patting ourselves on the back for our “soft power” on the international diplomatic scene. The Americans, for reasons known only to themselves, rarely pushed back or called us out for our perpetual slacking … until Donald Trump came along. Now, as Matt Gurney regretfully points out, Trump seems to be the only accountability mechanism on the Canadian government:

Coming soon to a Jewish daycare centre near you, sadly.
Image from The Line

Every well-functioning society needs effective accountability mechanisms. It needs something that can reliably deter bad guys from doing bad things, or at least catch them and stop them when they try. Hell, it also needs some sort of immune system that simply prevents the good ones from getting flaky and lazy, and to prune out the soft corruption that can easily settle in in comfortable and generally affluent societies.

“Accountability mechanism” is a broad term, but it has to be. It can be many things. It can be as basic as a strict moral or religious code, enforced by a priestly caste or even simple scolds. Or, ahem, a thriving press, with reporters and columnists poring over all the information they can find for examples of bad things that need fixing and then making a lot of noise about them. In democracies, effective opposition parties are a key part of this; so are government accountability officers, like auditors and ombudsmen. In a pinch, even just a healthy sense of personal honour and shame can work.

In a perfect world, you’ll have many or all of these, and they’ll be mutually reinforcing. Does Canada have any? Or, as I’m increasingly worried, have we basically outsourced this key democratic function entirely to the United States, and specifically, Donald Trump?

This bleak thought occurred to me after I watched, with equal parts horror and relief, a recent video put out by the Toronto Police Service. You can see it for yourself here, but, in short, it’s a promotional video for the new public order mission that is putting heavily armed and armoured officers onto the streets of Toronto to secure sites at risk of attack. The video has an intensely martial vibe; the deployment looks much more like a military operation than a police patrol. Though the video doesn’t say so directly, the intended purpose is clearly stopping the sustained attacks we’ve seen on Jewish religious, commercial and cultural sites in Toronto since Oct. 7, 2023.

[…]

There was also border security and fentanyl. I’m fully aware that the White House exaggerated both issues so they could use them against us. But I’m equally aware that Canada tends to ignore issues even slightly related to national security. A few tweets from Trump changed that. Some of our initial responses, like a czar and a pair of leased Blackhawks, were symbolic, clearly intended for Trump’s consumption. But Mark Carney has continued to ramp up our border security, and make a point of saying so. Again, we did this to avoid Trump’s wrath.

The biggest example, though, is clearly defence spending and rearming the Canadian military. Canada had long pledged to hit the NATO target, but never did; indeed, the former PM reportedly told our allies he had no plans to even try, as it wasn’t a domestic priority. But then Trump comes along and scares the crap out of us and, voilà, we’re hitting the target. Some of that is creative accounting, but not all of it.

Again, Trump did this. He scared us into doing the right thing.

Aly & Kaufman AKB-23: Better Than the SA80 / L85

Filed under: Britain, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 19 Nov 2025

The Aly & Kaufman AKB-23 is a set of parts that allows one to use a Brownells BRN-180 upper to create an SA80 / L85 lookalike. It’s a very clever adaptation, based on the fact that the original British L85A1 was essentially copied from the AR-180 design. By creating a new bullpup lower for Brownells’ modernized AR-180 (the BRN-180), the basic mechanics of the SA80 are used, but in a form that is well tested and reliable.

The parts include, of course, the new lower (which is legally a firearm, and requires FFL transfer). The lower is milled aluminum, and uses standard AR fire control parts. It also includes iron sights that mount onto the BRN-180 picatinny rail and a high quality 3D-printed cheek rest and front handguard.

This is a really fun rifle, and a very clever way to create an L85 analog that is affordable and accessible.
(more…)

April 8, 2026

The Korean War Week 94: Mines, Marines, and Mayhem – April 7, 1952

Filed under: China, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 7 Apr 2026

In order to try and make some progress on the thorny issue of POW repatriation, the UN offers to screen all the POWs they hold to get an exact number of who refuses to be sent back. The Communists agree and the plans are put in motion. Plans in the field are finishing up, with the US 1st Marine Division having moved to new positions in the west, but they now have to deal with the unforeseen issue of thousands of landmines. They did not see that coming.

00:00 Intro
00:47 Recap
01:27 POW Issues
05:58 New Operations
07:18 Marine Defenses
10:53 Landmines
14:18 Summary
15:01 Conclusion

April 7, 2026

NATO’s sudden-onset existential crisis

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Konrad explains that the sudden crisis facing the European NATO allies has been building un-noticed for decades:

NATO is in far bigger danger than anyone realizes. And the reason has nothing to do with defense budgets.

The real danger is psychological. It’s cultural.

Europeans didn’t just free-ride on American security for 80 years. They built an entire identity around the idea that they evolved past the Americans protecting them.

That identity is now the single biggest obstacle to Western survival. And the darkest irony is: we helped build it. After World War II, Europe wasn’t just economically shattered. Its culture was in ruins. The cities, the universities, the concert halls, the museums. Rubble.

The Marshall Plan rebuilt the economy. But culture wasn’t a priority. Not at first. Then the Iron Curtain dropped. And suddenly culture became a weapon.

American diplomats, academics, artists & scholars flooded Western Europe. We funded their universities. Supported their orchestras. Rebuilt their museums. Promoted their intellectual life.
Not because European culture needed saving for its own sake.

Because Eastern Europeans were struggling for Maslow’s mist basic needs.

We needed the view from the other side of that Wall to be intoxicating.

So America built Western Europe into a showcase of self-actualization. Art. Philosophy. Cafe culture. Long vacations. Universities where people studied literature instead of surviving. We were manufacturing jealousy.

And it worked. The Wall came down.

But here’s what no one accounted for.

When you give a society self-actualization on someone else’s tab long enough, they forget it was a gift. They start believing it was organically theirs.

And when they look at the country that funded it all, a country busy building aircraft carriers and semiconductor fabs and shale fields instead of reaching the Maslow’s pinnacle.

An overweight American in a ball cap who can’t tell Monet from Pissarro. Who eats fast food. Who drives a truck. Who builds strip malls instead of piazzas.

And to a culture trained in aesthetics but stripped of strategic awareness, that American looks uncivilized.

So the arrogance takes root. And once a culture decides another is beneath them, they stop listening.

Americans say wars are sometimes necessary: crude.

Oil is the backbone of prosperity: unsophisticated.

Kids build companies in garages that reshape the planet: crass.

Wall Street finances the global economy: vulgar.

Europe has no world-class technology sector. No military capable of strong defense. No energy independence. No AI capacity.

What Europe has is culture. The culture we paid for at the expense of us reaching Maslow’s pinnacle.

For decades that was fine. We funded the museums, protected the sea lanes, and tolerated the sneering because the arrangement worked.

Then Europeans stopped keeping the contempt private. They started saying it to our faces. In their media. In their parliaments. At every international forum. “Americans are stupid. Americans are violent. Americans are a threat to democracy.”

We could have moved the Louvre to NY. We could have built a Venice here. We could have stolen your best artists, designers, philosophers and more … like your conquering armies did for centuries.

Instead we funded them. And all we asked for in return was to let us visit.

You don’t have the military to defend your borders. You don’t have the technology to compete. You don’t have the energy to heat your homes without begging dictators.

What you have is an 80-year superiority complex FUNDED BY AMERICANS, protected by American soldiers, and built on the false belief that self-actualization is civilization.

It isn’t. Civilization is the ability to sustain itself. By that measure, Europe isn’t a civilization at all. It’s a dependency with better wine.

That’s not a threat. It’s a weather report.

Build a Navy. Or don’t. But stop lecturing the people who made you “better than us”

Our “crudeness” our “stunted liberal education” our “ugly strip malls” are because we sacrificed our culture to support yours.

From the comments on that post:

Larry Correia chimes in:

Update, 8 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

QotD: Advice for foreign leaders trying to deal with Donald Trump

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

If you want to understand Trump, you have to understand that he’s not a politician.

I do not say this as meaningless praise, just to say, oh, he’s not a corrupt scumbag. I say it with a very specific meaning.

To understand Trump, you must purge yourself of all expectations you have learned from watching politicians, include the assumptions you are not even aware you are making.

Trump is a completely different animal.

Trump is a businessman, and while there are many sorts of businessman, he is of a very specific type. He rose to wealth and prominence by doing two things very well:

1. Brand reputation building.
2. Negotiation.

#1 forms the basis of how he deals with voters.

#2 forms the basis of how he deals with other power blocs within the US, and with other nations.

You see, the true love of Donald Trump’s life is bargaining. He is a business deal sperg. And he’s very, very good at it, because the actual process is his idea of fun, and winning at it is definition of pure satisfaction and joy.

He’s never made uncomfortable by the play of offer and counteroffer, or by butting heads and seeing who blinks first. That is, instead, his happy place. This means that not only is he totally at peace in the moment, he’s also practiced a lot.

When he called his book The Art of the Deal, it wasn’t just because he wants to think he’s good at this, it’s because this is the meaning of his life. The man finds meaning in haggling the way Musk finds meaning in building technologies, or the way I find meaning in explaining things to an audience.

So when Trump is dealing with others, from political office, he’s negotiating as if it were his money. Because that’s just how he ticks.

Now, the ground rule of global politics for the past 100+ years is that no matter who you are, you are allowed to rob American taxpayers and voters, so long as you pay American politicians for the privilege of doing so.

All of us, even democrat voters who don’t want to think about it, know what 10 percent for the big guy meant, and who the particular big guy was.

For all that time, global politics amounted to treating America as a giant cash pinata, and the deals had only two guardrails on them.

1. You must pay American politicians a large enough sum, in a subtle enough manner.
2. You can’t buy anything that your paid-off politicians won’t be able to hide their personal connection to.

That’s it.

Everything else was on the table.

Trump isn’t like that. He can’t be bought.

Not because he’s some kind of saint, which he isn’t, nor because corrupt-politician money is loose change compared to Donald Trump money, which it is.

But because Trump can’t stand to deliberately lose a negotiation for a bribe, any more than Floyd Mayweather wants to throw a match to get paid off by bookies.

And this is how Trump became involved in politics in the first place. He was a standard New York City rich moderate democrat. Believed in the Postwar Dream, bought into the raceblind thing, was all in favor of exporting democracy, and taxed capitalism paying for a moderate amount of welfare state. But as he realized the political machines were selling out America, he got personally offended.

Not because he was principled and deeply cared about middle America. Perhaps a little because selling out America was hurting his real estate interests.

But mostly because bad business deals give Donald Trump the ick.

Trump seems like a loose cannon to a lot of people, because they don’t what he’ll do next. And they don’t know that because they don’t understand what motivates him.

Trump wants America to make better deals and stop being taken advantage of. And to make those better deals, he has to demonstrate to the people who are used to buying American politicians that the rules in play have changed.

So what’s the deal with Venezuela and Maduro?

Simple. If you ride the NYC subway enough, it’s pretty likely that eventually a bum will come up to you, whip out his dick, and piss on your shoes.

Why? Because he wants to feel powerful. Because his day isn’t going well, and so he wants to ruin yours. Because he’s crazy. Because who the fuck cares?

But most of all, because he can. Because NYC is run by out of touch commie liberals, and he knows that if he is arrested, he’ll be fed and let out in the morning, but if you punch him in the teeth, your life will be ruined.

So when things change, people need to be put on notice. The bums aren’t going to read a sign that says “this subway now functions under Tennessee rules”, and if they do read it, they aren’t going to believe it. They’ve heard it all before as a bluff.

You have to actually punch someone in mouth and knock some teeth out. And then have the Tennessee cops show up and say, so what, you shouldn’t have pissed on his shoes, dumbass.

It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that Maduro was offered plenty of gentle offramps which would have preserved his dignity, lifestyle, etc, if not his pride.

But he didn’t take them, because everything is a bluff … until it isn’t.

Maduro is a head on a spike. A signal that the ground truth of how to deal with America has changed.

A signal that both violence, and personal consequences, are no longer off the table.

Because the whole reason for the existence of governments is to wield organized violence instead of the disorganized kind.

Other nations will now be coming to the negotiating table with this example in mind.

America is tired of being your ATM.

Devon Eriksen, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-01-06.

Update, 8 April: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

April 6, 2026

NATO without the United States?

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

At The Conservative Woman, Jonathan Riley considers the sudden existential crisis facing the NATO alliance with President Trump openly musing about pulling the United States out of their current commitment to joint European defence:

PRESIDENT Trump’s warning that the US could pull out of Nato should shock even the most complacent and anti-American elements on the political left. Mr Trump has raised the issue in private discussions with White House aides in recent days, and on Wednesday confirmed that he was “absolutely” reviewing membership.

I have underlined several times in these pages why this is so – the global reach and sheer size of US military power and the fact that the USA brings capabilities to Nato that no other country has, or is ever likely to have. With American backing, Nato has credibility in its deterrent posture – deterrence being built on capability and will to use those capabilities. Without the US, credibility remains only in the nuclear sphere because of the independent British and French arsenals, but not in the conventional sphere. An aggressor could well, therefore, be tempted to take actions that fell short of the use, or riposte, of weapons of mass destruction. A Russian incursion into a non-Nato state, for example, Bosnia and Herzegovina or Moldova; or even a limited incursion in the Baltic, either on land or at sea.

The President’s threat came as the latest in a sequence of angry responses to the failure of traditional allies to give their support, as he sees it, to the US/Israeli war on Iran. Not least was his disappointment with Starmer, first over his refusal to give the US use of Diego Garcia and RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire for strikes on Iran, second over Starmer’s reluctance to deploy the Royal Navy and then his refusal to take the lead on re-opening the Strait of Hormuz. France’s preference for diplomacy has irked him too. Austria, not a Nato member, has become the latest EU country to deny US military use of its airspace.

Whether or not this outburst was more than a mark of his frustration with unappreciative allies – more wake-up call than genuine warning – it still suggests an alarming failure on his part to understand what Nato is and is not; why a US pull-out would be a lose/lose situation for Europe and the US.

Nato is an alliance founded in the Treaty of 1949 and is about mutual defence. Article Five affirms that an attack on one member state is an attack on all and obliges all other states to come to the aid of whoever has been attacked. During the Cold War, there was no discussion about resources, or caveats, or vetoes – what mattered was survival. Once the Cold War was over, nations did have a choice about what they committed – and in the case of every European country, it was less.

The water was muddied by the Nato-led expeditions to Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. These were carried out using coalitions built on the Alliance and in some cases, simultaneously, coalitions built within the Alliance. For example, in Afghanistan, there were really two International Assistance Forces (ISAFs): one was a coalition of the willing confronting insurgency and terrorism; the other was a non-kinetic coalition based on the Bonn Agreement, concerned with nation-building. Some people and member states may therefore believe that Nato is a vehicle for Allies to climb aboard and support US (or French, or British) expeditionary operations. It is not.

Cross-country booze woes

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

On his Substack, Brian Lilley discussed the frustrations of Canadian drinkers thanks to our odd and often illogical regulations around the sale of alcohol:

How Canadian Premiers think they’d have to operate if they let private enterprise into the alcohol trade.
New York City Deputy Police Commissioner John A. Leach, right, watching agents pour liquor into sewer following a raid, 1921.
Wikimedia Commons.

I landed in Saskatoon after a late in the evening flight from Toronto on Thursday. As we headed to a family gathering south of the city, we stopped to pick up some refreshments to add to the festivities.

First off, I’ll say private liquor stores in Sask, like the ones run by Sobey’s or Co-Op are generally quite nice. It’s proof that you can have private liquor stores, the province won’t fall apart and consumers can get their products in a nice, clean, friendly environment.

This is in reference to the silly Canadian abhorrence of private liquor sales … most of our provincial governments are deeply involved in the booze trade, and regularly imply that letting any more of that business go into private hands will instantly create a maple-flavoured version of Al Capone’s empire during Prohibition.

You can also buy booze here that is forbidden in Ontario.

But holy crap is beer expensive here!

[…]

The combined federal and provincial tax rate for Quebec is about 31.5%, Ontario’s is 43% and Sakatchewan’s are the highest in the country at 49.4%.

While beer is more expensive in Sask, Ontario made liquor is cheaper here…
Why is it that in Saskatoon I can buy a bottle of Wiser’s whiskey, made in Windsor, Ontario, for about $10 cheaper than I can at the LCBO, Ontario’s government run liquor stores?

[…]

In Saskatchewan, consumers can choose what to buy…

Ontario has had a ban on the sale of American alcohol products via the LCBO since March 2025. In Saskatchewan, as in Alberta, you can choose whether to buy your Kentucky bourbon or California wine.

That’s a lot of sweet, sweet bourbon for sale at a Sobey’s store in Saskatoon.

If you want to buy some California wine in Saskatoon, you can.
So far, Alberta and Saskatchewan are alone in allowing the regular sale of American alcohol. Consumers who want to boycott here can and I’m sure many do. I hear plenty of anti-Trump/anti-American attittudes here so sales are likely lower than they were pre-tariff.

That said, you are an adult and can buy Yankee hooch if you want to.

That won’t be happening in Ontario anytime soon.

Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election … it just happened to him”

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

While I wouldn’t agree with the statement in the title of this post, it has been a common enough reading of the US 1924 presidential election — that it wasn’t an endorsement of Coolidge and his policies but merely a reflection of voters’ overall satisfaction with the economy. The editors of the Coolidge Review would beg to differ:

From the distance of more than a century, a political scientist has taken a fresh look at the 1924 presidential election.

In an article published last year in Presidential Studies Quarterly, Christopher Devine questions the conventional wisdom about how and why the incumbent, Calvin Coolidge, won that election in a landslide. Coolidge had assumed the presidency little more than a year earlier, after the unexpected death of Warren Harding. In 1924’s three-way race, he received more votes than the other two candidates combined and carried thirty-five of the forty-eight states.

As Devine points out, most historians say that a robust economy was by far the biggest reason Coolidge won. Strong economic conditions did work in the president’s favor. But Devine notes that many historians adopt a form of economic “determinism”. In this very common view, Coolidge “does not deserve credit for winning the 1924 election”. Rather, “thanks mostly to the economy, it just happened to him”.

That argument is too simplistic, Devine suggests. He presents both qualitative and quantitative evidence to challenge the standard narrative of the 1924 campaign.

Old Assumptions, New Data

For his empirical analysis, Devine examines “county-level political, economic, and demographic data” alongside county-by-county voting results. Using these data, he tests three common explanations for the election’s outcome:

Did Coolidge win primarily because of the economy? Scraping the data, Devine concludes that the answer is largely yes. And he shows it’s misleading to claim that — as one history textbook put it — Coolidge merely rode “the crest of a wave of economic prosperity for which he was given undeserved credit”. Devine demonstrates that from behind the scenes, Coolidge “took an active role in coordinating campaign messaging” that showcased the administration’s and Republicans’ achievements. For example, Coolidge worked closely with his running mate, Charles Dawes, to keep the famously free-range vice-presidential candidate focused on the economic message. “In the matter of economy and tax reduction”, Dawes declared, “the Federal Government is headed in the right direction”. Moreover, as Devine reports, Dawes argued that the administration’s work to stabilize Europe via the Dawes Plan spared America from “the depths of an inevitable and great depression” while also ensuring that “the whole world enters upon a period of peace and prosperity”.

Did third-party candidate Robert M. La Follette hurt Democratic nominee John W. Davis more than Coolidge? Devine concludes that this effect appeared only in the Great Plains and the Mountain West. It probably wasn’t large enough to change the election’s outcome.

Did internal divisions cost the Democratic Party votes in 1924? The Democrats were so fractured that they needed 103 ballots to choose a nominee at their convention. Devine says it would be hard to imagine that such disarray did not hurt Democrats in the election. Yet he notes that quantitative evidence on the reasons for Democratic losses in 1924 is hard to find because “scientific polling did not exist in the 1920s”.

Seeking an alternative approach, Devine looks at patterns of defection from the Democratic Party by state. He finds that northern states that voted to defeat the anti-Ku-Klux-Klan plank at that year’s Democratic National Convention — in other words, states whose delegations supported the Klan — saw heavier defections in the general election. From that, Devine extrapolates to suggest that Coolidge “benefited from the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan — or, perhaps one might say, Democrats lost ground because of it”.

T20 Family: Springfield Makes the Garand a Grenade Launching Sniper Machine Gun

Filed under: History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 17 Nov 2025

Late in 1944 the Ordnance Committee recommended adoption of a magazine-fed, select-fire version of the M1 Garand as a new standard US infantry rifle. Both Springfield and Remington developed rifles to meet the requirement, with Springfield’s being the T20 and Remington’s the T22.

The Springfield design went through several iterations from the original T20 to the T20E1 and T20E2, with the capability to launch rifle grenades, mount optical sights, and fire in either semiautomatic or full auto. The first examples of the final T20E2 design were ready in June 1945, but the program lost momentum in August when Japan surrendered. It did continue slowly until 1949, providing some of the basis for the eventual M14 rifle.
(more…)

April 5, 2026

When military requirements conflict with national policies

Filed under: China, Government, Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On Substack, Holly MathNerd explains why the US military hasn’t ramped up production of drones in light of the experiences of other current conflicts:

Most people who have opinions about the war in Iran are not also reading the Federal Acquisition Regulations. I am, unfortunately for my social life, one of the people who does both.

And when you hold those two things in your head at the same time — what’s happening over the Strait of Hormuz and what’s happening in federal procurement policy — a contradiction emerges that is so glaring, and so consequential, that I could not write about anything else this week.

Here is the contradiction, in full, before I show you the data.

The United States is fighting a war where drones are the decisive tactical weapon. We are spending $2 to $4 million per intercept to stop Iranian drones that cost $50,000 each. Our own offensive drone program shipped what it had into an active war because full-rate production hadn’t started yet. Ukraine, which does not have this problem, produced two million drones in 2024 by building a distributed ecosystem of small manufacturers who iterate their designs every two weeks and sell units for $300 to $5,000 each.

We cannot do what Ukraine does, because Congress — correctly, for legitimate national security reasons — spent five consecutive National Defense Authorization Acts closing the door on Chinese drone hardware. DJI, the dominant global manufacturer, is now restricted by four separate federal authorities. There is no waiver for convenience. The wall is complete.

Which means the only path to drone dominance runs through a domestic industrial base capable of producing drones at volume, at low cost, with rapid iteration.

That base exists. Partially. Precariously. And it is built on exactly the kind of small, specialized, distributed manufacturers that the 8(a) federal contracting program was designed to bring into the market.

April 4, 2026

If we think that “ordinary criticism and disagreement are bullying, then we have an infantilized and feminized culture”

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

Chris Bray finds a highly accurate label for the pearl-clutching “elites” who — to a persyn — believe that your words are violence, but their violence (delivered through third parties, of course) is merely emphatic communication to the distasteful lower orders:

Donald Trump is a mean man. He’s a bully!

Oh no SCARY, he’s trying to BULLY the Supreme Court! I wrote at the Federalist this week about the stupidity of this argument — what is he implying he can do to the life-tenured justices, for crying out loud? — but I suspect I undersold the underlying sickness. Adults don’t use the word “bully” to talk about other adults, arguably outside of a few very narrow spaces involving things like domestic violence. It’s a preschool word. The easy recourse to toddler language at the New York Times is a sign of cultural regression. But it’s also a sign of habitual and persistent dishonesty. They’re pretending. I suspect they’ve pretended so much that they’ve forgotten they’re pretending, and the mask has become the face, but at root, they’re pretending.

We have fictional characters like Willie Stark and Frank Underwood because no one on the planet is dumb enough to think that politics is nice. The federal government spends $7 trillion a year, and the lure of that bucket of money brings out a bunch of throatcutters. This is possibly one of the most obvious realities of human existence. Politics is a knife fight. […]

Quite famously, members of Congress who suggested that they would oppose the legislative priorities of President Lyndon Johnson would get phone calls in the middle night from the man himself, waking them up and letting them know that they were dead men. He’s supposed to have said things like, “I’m gonna cut your balls off, you cocksucker”, though it’s not like anyone had a stenographer on the calls to nail the quotes. He was threatening and nasty on all days ending in -y, and got bills passed by, among other things, actually, physically intimidating people who didn’t roll over. He was a leaner. He got in faces, constantly and openly.

You gonna pass my bill [insert string of highly personal threats and profanity], or is your political career over? Pressure, threats, and horsetrading are the default behaviors, the normal stuff. Andrew Jackson got the Indian Removal Act through Congress by handing out government sinecures. The premise that I can take care of you or I can go to war with you, and it’s your choice which one happens is … politics. The make-believe story about Mean Donald Trump bullying the Supreme Court by tweeting at them or sitting in a chair where they could see him is playtime, clutching at Fisher-Price pearls. Somewhat remarkably, Trump appears to bully institutional opponents quite a bit less than the historical norm, and Lisa Murkowski can do whatever she wants without consequence. I am personally calling for Donald Trump to start actually bullying some people who have it coming, but be sure to have a fainting couch ready in the newsroom at Times Square.

Update, 6 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.

Be on the lookout for “toxic confidence”

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

Freddie deBoer disagrees with a recent New York Times piece which proclaims that “toxic confidence” is the current psychological tic of choice:

[…] But then, the whole theatrical embrace of imposter syndrome wasn’t really about a sincere belief that they didn’t belong in the program, that they had gotten in through some mistake. It was, instead, an expression of a very weird element of Millennial culture, which is the embrace of insecurity as a means of belonging.

Which brings me to Savannah Sobrevilla and her recent trend piece, destined to be a New York Times classic, “Toxic Confidence Has Taken Over”. You can already guess the argument here, but I’ll give you the nut anyway:

    … it used to be that “impostor syndrome” dominated conversations, the anxious stance of millennials with adult responsibilities and women leading corporate workplaces trying not to rankle. Even if you felt deserving of accolades, the social graces of the time required the expression of modesty.

    Now, in an era of aggressively handsome incels and macho political posturing, cultivated humility feels trite. A younger generation, coming out of high school and college in Covid lockdown, feels less beholden to dampening their light. Who has time for affected meekness when playing the braggart not only tickles the soul, but has the potential to convince others of one’s own greatness?

The phrase itself, “toxic confidence”, is doing a lot of work in this essay, and I can just imagine an NYT editor reading the pitch, seeing that phrase, and salivating. But there’s not a lot there, really. Strip away the arch tone and the carefully curated examples (reality-television grifters, Trump-administration blusterers) and what you’re left with is a fairly straightforward complaint: some people believe in themselves too much, and it’s making a certain kind of person uncomfortable. Of course, there’s always been braggarts and narcissists and perennially self-impressed people around us, in any era, and that they’re annoying is not generally considered newsworthy. What makes this a classic NYT trend piece is that it makes an observation that’s comprehensible only to a certain strata of reader — middle aged or younger, culturally savvy, educated, urban in ethos if not necessarily in geography, too online. These people aren’t experiencing the age-old frustration with the conventionally overconfident, but are facing (if Sobrevilla is to be believed) the demise of a recent generational embrace of performative insecurity, which makes them uncomfortable. That discomfort is worth examining, because it reveals less about a cultural pathology than about whose neuroses we’ve decided to normalize.

As usual, I blame my own generation. For roughly fifteen years, Millennial culture ran a remarkable experiment: it rebranded anxiety, self-doubt, and chronic insecurity as virtues. This is certainly connected to the phenomenon of illness as identity and disorder as fashion I’m always complaining about […] but is, I think, a distinct phenomenon, the rearrangement of healthy confidence into pathology and pathological self-doubt into virtue. The weird affordances of social media gave certain culturally and socially influential people the ability to imprint their own neuroses onto the wider culture, recasting that neuroses as a sort of down-to-earth norm. In that context, impostor syndrome ceased to be something to overcome and became a membership card. Everybody started bragging about their social anxiety; people gleefully declared their FOGO; “I’m the worst”, said with the right ironic lilt, became fodder for bonding. Vulnerability, performed on cue, was currency. The implicit agreement was powerful and, when you examine it, fairly cruel: if you seemed too assured, too unbothered by your own inadequacy, you were either deluded or dangerous. The rules had been rewritten by indoor kids, the chronic overthinkers, the people who had built entire identities around their relationship with self-doubt, and the rules said confidence was suspect.

What Sobrevilla calls “toxic confidence” is largely just the renegotiation of those rules, an attempt to cast an incipient reclamation of basic, uncomplicated self-assurance as some sort of aggressive masculinist cult. A couple of examples that Sobrevilla calls out specifically include Olympic free skier Eileen Gu and actor Timothée Chalamet; I’m afraid these examples just make Sobrevilla seem afraid of excellence. When Gu — an Olympic gold medalist, a celebrity, a Stanford student, and a burgeoning entrepreneur — says that being inside her own head is “not a bad place to be”, that isn’t pathology; it’s the statement of a young woman who has done the work and is honest about it. (And wouldn’t we prefer for everyone to feel like insider their own head is a nice place to be?) Maybe Gu is a genuinely awful human being, I don’t know, but nothing Sobrevilla references rises to the level of narcissism or whatever other pseudo-medical accusation we’re throwing around these days. I find Chalamet a little aggravating, but when he says that he aspires to be considered among the great actors of his time, when all is said and done, that’s not a statement of Trumpian bellicosity but instead a reflection of honest, healthy ambition. We’ve been so conditioned to expect performative self-deprecation that accurate self-assessment reads as arrogance.

Artemis II – later than hoped, but better now than never

Filed under: Cancon, Space, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander goes fullbore (because it’s Friday, and that’s what he normally does on a Friday):

Official crew portrait for Artemis II, from left: NASA Astronauts Christina Koch, Victor Glover, Reid Wiseman, Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen.
Photo by Josh Valcarcel for NASA

I grew up with the Apollo Program and some of my earliest memories were watching astronauts during the lunar landings. You could see the Saturn V launches from my backyard.

Just as I was getting old enough to really enjoy it, it all stopped.

The 1970s.

The worst people for the worst reasons killed the space program as it became part of the national malaise of the 1970s, the core of which was defined by the period from the last person on the moon in 1972 through the fall of Saigon three years later, and bookended by the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80.

For those who received the promise of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as to what the future in space would be never fulfilled, we tried to get excited by partial measures — Skylab; the Space Shuttle and its disasters; the downgrading of Reagan’s Space Station Freedom into the “Model UN in space”, the International Space Station; and the lingering malaise and distraction that we endured during the Clinton and Obama administrations.

Here we are 53 years later, and at last we are reaching for the moon again. We never should have left.

[…]

And so North America—three Americans and a Canadian—is heading to the moon.

Back at last.

The Commander Reid Wiseman, is a U.S. Navy Captain and former F-14 driver. The Pilot is another U.S. Navy Captain, Victor Glover, though he was a F/A-18 bubba.

Navy wins again!

Mission Specialist Christina Koch comes from a great ACC school, and for comic relief, we have our Canadian Mission Specialist, Jeremy Hansen, the only one who is on their first space flight.

Somewhere there are plenty of young men and women who, I hope, are watching as my generation did, the best of mankind again reaching out.

Let’s not let the momentum stop this time. Keep pushing out. It is what our species does best, and it brings the best out of us.

April 3, 2026

“Rocket launches are America at its best”

Filed under: Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Jen Gerson on the Artemis II launch on April 1st:

Artemis II launch, 1 April, 2026
NASA image

I’m not The Line‘s resident space dork; and, yet, I, like everyone likely reading this piece, watched the launch of Artemis II last night, enraptured and hopeful for a successful slingshot around the moon.

My son watched with me, he counted down from 10, and he jumped up when the rockets lit up, throwing four astronauts in a tin can into space.

This stuff is cool on its own merit, but it hits us all somewhere a little deeper than mere wonder at the extraordinary mechanics.

Watching a manned rocket launch is the barest little window-crack opening into a distant future. It’s a monumental effort to throw a fine fishing line into the darkness, hoping against hope that some great destiny is on the other side just waiting for us to tug at it.

By all rational accounts space travel is dumb. It’s an extraordinarily expensive use of human capital and time and resources to reach into nothingness and expanse. We all love pictures of stars and planets and nebulae, but we may never glean much of real material value from these investments in our own lifetimes. Or our great-grandchildren’s lifetimes.

There may be nothing but lifeless rock and death beyond our own ecosystem; no other place we will ever call home.

In fact, from where we sit today, that’s probably true.

Yet we do this stupid thing anyway. We must do the stupid thing anyway.

[…]

Rocket launches are America at its best, and perhaps now more than usual, we need to remind ourselves that this best still exists. Perhaps especially on the same night we sat fearing the President would announce that NATO was over and the world was breaking. (He didn’t, and I guess it’s not for now.)

And regardless of what nation we belong to, whether we’re accountants, butlers, or mothers, every single one of us carries that thin thread of life forward. We all take part in the project. We all have a place. Some of the big roles may be assigned to individual players, but the destiny of humanity is shared. (Whether we like it or not.)

So, we can all be moved together in these moments. We can all imagine what great-great-great grandchildren who have long forgotten our own names might think while watching archival footage of the Artemis II launch. What even greater world might they achieve. What more fanciful ambitions might be open to them. Maybe they will say that this was the moment we started to get our priorities right and our acts together. Maybe things will get better.

Maybe Artemis II, absurd and wasteful, is neither. Who knows how my son will metabolize the video stream of this really cool rocket; I cannot say who he may come to be for witnessing it.

Our craziest aspirations are the way we send our love to the children too far distant for us to see or know.

For my own part, I caught the space bug very early through science fiction of the 1950s and 60s, especially from the writings of Robert Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. Earth is just our starting point, and one planet isn’t enough to ensure the survival of our species, so exploring space is an evolutionary necessity.

April 2, 2026

Modern-day serial killers are called “Doctor”

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

At Science is not the answer, William M. Briggs explains why these are the long-foretold “hard times”:

Poor John Wayne Gacy. Reports are that the infamous mass murderer was looking up from his perch in Hell, musing about the more than thirty people he raped, tortured, then butchered and said “I was born too early”.

He was right.

If he had only waited a few short years to begin his horror spree, not only would he not have been arrested and executed, he would have received glowing tributes, warm praise from his colleagues, and he would have been paid by the state for every person he killed. And he would have had a much, much higher score than a mere 33 (official count).

Tale the case of modern-day born-on-time serial killer Dr — doctor, doctor — Ellen Wiebe. She beats Gacy’s score by more than ten times. She is credited with slaughtering over 500 people in Canada’s MAiD program. As impressive as that tally is, it is incomplete. It doesn’t count the lives inside would-be mothers she ended, for she is also an abortionist. And she is still going strong, cheered on by the Canadian government. By the time she is done, Mao himself will be envious of her feats.

That its own government joyfully starts killing off its own people proves Canadian civilization has exhausted itself. It, and a great many other civilizations, are experiencing the last phase of the ancient cycle: hard men make good times, good times make soft men, soft men make hard times. The hard times are just coming upon them, and us, created by the good times the remarkable lives of our predecessors created for us.

There are small cycles and large. Small versions of this litany are always playing out: in individual lives, in select localities, in nations. These are easy to see. But there are also larger waves, harder to spot because they are so encompassing. They are global in scope and span eras. This is why even when riding down a Great Wave toward an abyss, it can seem, and be, for a time and in a place things are improving.

Our lives are short, we see most things only with immediacy; we extrapolate too easily, and we expect matters will play out in Hollywood time, as it were. The fault is expected because when history is presented it is foreshortened. Events which took centuries are completed in pages. It is almost impossible to put ourselves in the position of a man who lived in the latter stages of the Roman empire, who lived his entire life in reasonable enough times, and who didn’t see the end coming.

It is a great mistake to view the litany wholly, or even largely, in material terms. Certainly cushy living makes for sloth and fat men. But we are also spiritual (rational) creatures. When the bulk of our ideas are given to us in packaged “education”, and we don’t have to work from them, we are cursed by easy thinking, intellectual malaise. It’s true the West has largely given up Christianity, its ideas stale and uninspiring to most. But in the East it is the same. The great hope of Science has paled. Our customary motivating forces are no longer motivating, the great old visions no longer forceful as they once were. Largely. There are many local exceptions. But they are just that: exceptions.

We recall Emil Cioran, who said, “Every exhausted civilization awaits its barbarian, and every barbarian awaits his demon”. Our barbarians are no longer awaited (we are their demons). Rulers in the West are inviting them in. And making it a crime, in many places, to oppose the inflow. Such is their ardor to have strangers among us, it is hard not to argue that these rulers want to be put out of their misery.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress