Quotulatiousness

December 19, 2025

“2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life”

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

In Compact, Jacob Savage talks about the “Lost Generation” … not a reference to the group before the “Greatest Generation” who fought and died in their millions in the trenches of World War One … but a much more recent group who are still becoming living casualties of a war fought without weapons and uniforms, but just as bitter and unnecessary:

In retrospect, 2014 was the hinge, the year DEI became institutionalized across American life.

In industry after industry, gatekeepers promised extra consideration to anyone who wasn’t a white man — and then provided just that. “With every announcement of promotions, there was a desire to put extra emphasis on gender [or race],” a former management consultant recalled. “And when you don’t fall into those groups, that message gets louder and louder, and gains more and more emphasis. On the one hand, you want to celebrate people who have been at a disadvantage. On the other hand, you look and you say, wow, the world is not rooting for you — in fact, it’s deliberately rooting against you.”

As the Trump Administration takes a chainsaw to the diversity, equity, and inclusion apparatus, there’s a tendency to portray DEI as a series of well-meaning but ineffectual HR modules. “Undoubtedly, there has been ham-fisted DEI programming that is intrusive or even alienating,” explained Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in The New Yorker. “But, for the most part, it is a relatively benign practice meant to increase diversity, while also sending a message that workplaces should be fair and open to everyone.”

This may be how Boomer and Gen-X white men experienced DEI. But for white male millennials, DEI wasn’t a gentle rebalancing — it was a profound shift in how power and prestige were distributed. Yet practically none of the thousands of articles and think-pieces about diversity have considered the issue by cohort.

This isn’t a story about all white men. It’s a story about white male millennials in professional America, about those who stayed, and who (mostly) stayed quiet. The same identity, a decade apart, meant entirely different professional fates. If you were forty in 2014 — born in 1974, beginning your career in the late-90s — you were already established. If you were thirty in 2014, you hit the wall.

Because the mandates to diversify didn’t fall on older white men, who in many cases still wield enormous power: They landed on us.

[…]

Institutions pursuing diversity decided that there would be no backsliding. If a position was vacated by a woman or person of color, the expectation was it would be filled by another woman or person of color. “The hope was always that you were going to hire a diverse candidate,” a senior hiring editor at a major outlet told me. “If there was a black woman at the beginning of her career you wanted to hire, you could find someone … but if she was any good you knew she would get accelerated to The New York Times or The Washington Post in short order.”

The truth is, after years of concerted effort, most news outlets had already reached and quietly surpassed gender parity. By 2019, the newsrooms of ProPublica, The Washington Post, and The New York Times were majority female, as were New Media upstarts Vice, Vox, Buzzfeed, and The Huffington Post.

And then 2020 happened, and the wheels came off.

[…]

There are many stories we tell ourselves about race and gender, especially in academia. But the one thing everyone I spoke to seemed to agree on is it’s best not to talk about it, at least not in public, at least not with your name attached. “The humanities are so small,” a millennial professor nervously explained. “There’s a difference between thinking something and making common knowledge that you think it,” said another.

So it came as a bit of a shock when David Austin Walsh, a Yale postdoc and left-wing Twitter personality, decided to detonate any chance he had at a career with a single tweet.

“I’m 35 years old, I’m 4+ years post-Ph.D, and — quite frankly — I’m also a white dude,” he wrote on X. “Combine those factors together and I’m for all intents and purposes unemployable as a 20th-century American historian.”

The pile-on was swift and vicious. “You are all just laughable,” wrote The New York Times‘ Nikole Hannah-Jones. “Have you seen the data on professorships?” “White males are 30 percent of the US population but nearly 40 percent of faculty,” tweeted a tenured professor at GWU. “Hard to make the case for systemic discrimination.”

It didn’t matter that as far back as 2012 women were more likely to be tenure-track across the humanities than men, or that a 2015 peer-reviewed study suggested that STEM hiring favored women, or even that CUPAHR, an association of academic DEI professionals, found that “assistant professors of color (35 percent) and female assistant professors (52 percent) are overrepresented in comparison to US doctoral degree recipients (32 percent and 44 percent respectively).”

As in other industries, what mattered were the optics. When people looked at academia, they still saw old white men. Lots of them.

“A big part of why it’s hard to diversify is the turnover is really slow,” a tenured millennial professor explained. “And that’s become worse now, because Boomers live a long time.” Many elite universities once had mandatory retirement at 70. But in 1994, Congress sunsetted the academic exemption for age discrimination, locking in the demographics of the largely white male professoriate for a generation.

White men may still be 55 percent of Harvard’s Arts & Sciences faculty (down from 63 percent a decade ago), but this is a legacy of Boomer and Gen-X employment patterns. For tenure-track positions — the pipeline for future faculty — white men have gone from 49 percent in 2014 to 27 percent in 2024 (in the humanities, they’ve gone from 39 percent to 21 percent).

QotD: “1998 was the official start of the Girlboss Era”

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

    Paltrow seemed to arrive on the scene having everything and wanting for nothing.

Funny, that’s also the most accurate description of an AWFL ever penned. Who the hell are they, and where did they come from? How do they have the free time and endless disposable cash to do literally every single thing they do?

    In 2001, she promoted Shallow Hal — in which she played Rosemary, an obese woman whose “inner beauty” is only visible to Hal (Jack Black) — by talking about doing practice runs in her character’s fat suit. “I got a real sense of what it would be like to be that overweight, and every pretty girl should be forced to do that.”

Wait, this is supposed to be a hit piece? Because that might be the most sensible thing I have ever heard a woman say. Yes, definitely they should be forced to do that, if not the full Norah Vincent. If you’re halfway presentable, ladies — hell, if you’re not grossly deformed — you’re playing life on “God mode”. Look at all the simps in your social media feeds, and tell me I’m wrong. Being forced to go around in a fat suit for a week or two is a necessary corrective.

    Paltrow’s first big trip on the Hollywood hater-go-round was 1998, the year she won the Best Actress Oscar for Shakespeare in Love and gave a memorably messy, genuinely emotional acceptance speech. (Days after her win, Salon was among many outlets eviscerating her.) What viewers didn’t see, Odell notes, is the amount of effort by Miramax head Harvey Weinstein to make Shakespeare a winner, raise the profile of his still-independent studio, and solidify his belief that Paltrow belonged to him.

I’m going to stop here, because there’s really no point. I just wanted everyone to remember Shakespeare in Love. You do remember Shakespeare in Love, don’t you?

Of course you don’t; it was silly and forgettable at the time, and now is remembered, if at all, as a bizarre footnote — it’s the movie that won Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. From the perspective of 2025, then, it sure looks like 1998 was the official start of the Girlboss Era.

Severian, “Kvetching Up With Karen: DC Edition”, Founding Questions, 2025-08-14.

December 17, 2025

“The ‘liberal international order’ – a technocratic oligarchy sustained by tightly interlocked institutions”

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

Last week, Len D. Pozeram wrote about how the real (but mostly unacknowledged) American empire is facing unprecedented challenges and may indeed be in serious decline:

“The Empire’s Mask is Slipping”, The Libertarian Alliance

For generations, Americans were sold a saccharine myth: that our nation’s vast global presence — its military bases on every continent, its endless wars, its economic interventions — was all done in the name of “freedom” and “human rights”. This was the sales pitch. Washington, we were told, was the benevolent policeman of a dangerous world, upholding a Pax Americana designed to uplift humanity.

But for those willing to look beyond the rhetoric, the truth was never hidden — only ignored. This narrative was never more than a sophisticated marketing campaign, engineered to pacify a domestic public and legitimize imperial conquest abroad. From the very beginning, the post-WWII global order was not about freedom, but about power — and who would control it after the collapse of the old European empires.

With the fall of the British Empire, America did not merely “step up” to defend the West — it seized control of the imperial machinery and rebranded it. The British financial aristocracy gave way to a new though related American elite, its nucleus formed around Wall Street banks, the military-industrial complex, Big Oil cartels, and, increasingly, a rising Zionist lobby with ambitions stretching far beyond Tel Aviv.

Under the guise of “containing communism” or “defending democracy”, this new managerial class waged a quiet war against genuine national independence movements across the globe. Countries seeking to control their own resources, chart their own destinies, or resist Western financial domination were systematically targeted for destabilization or outright annihilation.

Guatemala in 1954. Iran in 1953. Indonesia in 1965. The Congo. Chile. Nicaragua. Greece. Even Australia, whose 1975 constitutional crisis remains a textbook case of covert Anglo-American regime change. The public, of course, was kept in the dark. History books were rewritten. Journalists who strayed from the script were destroyed or silenced. CIA fingerprints are now visible in dozens of these cases — operations sanctioned not to spread freedom, but to preserve a system of elite extraction and control.

This system — often referred to in polite company as the “liberal international order” — is, in fact, a technocratic oligarchy. It is sustained by tightly interlocked institutions: the Federal Reserve, the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and a sprawling Intelligence Community whose true loyalties lie not with the American public, but with transnational networks of finance, energy, and geopolitical strategy. To the extent that ideology plays a role, it is the convergence of evangelical apocalypticism and messianic Zionism — two religious currents that have dangerously informed U.S. foreign policy since the Reagan era.

Yet today, this system is beginning to eat itself. The ideology of endless war, and top-down control has run up against hard limits: financial, and political. The de-dollarization trend in the Global South, the rise of multipolar alliances like BRICS, and the exposure of elite criminality — from Epstein to the endless intelligence scandals — are all symptoms of imperial overstretch and rot.

We are watching the slow collapse of an empire built not on democratic values but on lies, coercion, and institutionalized greed.

From a slightly different viewpoint, Spaceman Spiff maintains that the narratives that have been used to direct and control political thought in the west are in the process of collapsing:

Image from Postcards from the Abyss

As reality intrudes the naivety behind many sacred cows is exposed. The emperor is naked and his supporters look equally naked. The narratives driving their fantasies are failing.

The big three issues common in the West illustrate why people are noticing.

Diversity and immigration

The promotion of diversity as a strength is a consequence of blank slate thinking, a belief disparate populations are substantially the same with most observable differences due to environment only.

This is at odds with what we observe, the significant range in ability and proficiency between distinct groups that becomes apparent when we interact. So artificial variety is sold as a positive in an attempt to downplay the homogeneity that gets better results.

The consequence of this is quotas, where arbitrary rules are enforced to ensure a diverse outcome.

This destroys competency even if we ignore the potential for conflict when foreigners are imported in large numbers.

The main effect of pushing this absurd policy seems to be the rise of ethnic awareness among those who must step aside to accommodate it. How could it not? When people are excluded because of their ethnicity it becomes important to them.

This is not what advocates of diversity intended but is already happening.

Climate

Climate and energy policy is based on anti-scientific magical thinking. With the current emphasis on carbon dioxide we are told a tiny portion of our atmosphere is responsible for most of the future changes that will cause widespread harm. There is no evidence for such claims.

The reality of climate is different from the narrative. It is resilient, as many things are. Our obsession is arrogance. A belief we matter more than we do.

Intellectuals are prone to get lost in their theories of how the world ought to work. Activists then latch on to their utopian ideas to gain some sense of meaning in their lives.

Society also has people lacking conscience who will profit from anything no matter how much damage it causes. Combining these two, dreamers with schemers, is often lethal. Seemingly opposing forces, left-wing activists and capitalist profiteers, can cooperate even if they embrace distinct beliefs.

As many memes remind us, if you have corporate sponsorship you are not the resistance. This is precisely what we see.

Narratives begin to collapse as we witness ruthless corporations promote feelgood nonsense about climate while fleecing taxpayers in the background. Many are noticing.

And the effects of suicidal climate goals are difficult to hide. Every closed factory or power station kills another element of credibility.

Socialism

Socialism is based on the idea an educated elite can make decisions for us all while simultaneously conditioning us to be better versions of ourselves. It ignores all of history and everything we have learned of human psychology to embrace a literal fantasy utopia that no one has even come close to realizing.

Nothing sums up the bankruptcy of our intellectuals more than their inability to reject this failed ideology.

But it also shows us the Anglo-Saxon instinct to restrict others’ control over us is the only way to counter it.

It teaches us of the wisdom of documents like Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, designed to constrain the powerful regardless of their motives, ambitions or mental state. Rare moments of historical sanity that remind us what effective countermeasures can look like.

It would seem this lesson must be relearned every few generations. But we are learning it. Real life is reminding us why we must limit government and its agents no matter how inconvenient.

Bad ideas are inevitable. It is the ability of activists and the powerful to enact them many are now waking up to as narratives visibly fail.

The Korean War Week 78: Communists See 100% Success in the Skies! – December 16, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 16 Dec 2025

The Communist forces’ air power grows and grows, to the point where the UN wonders if they will lose aerial supremacy. This colors the Peace Talks, because should infrastructure be allowed to be rebuilt and rehabilitated during an eventual armistice, what airfields might the Communist side soon have in North Korea? Not just as a threat should an armistice fail, but to Japan as well.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:49 Recap
01:23 General Hsieh Probes
06:22 Communist Air Power
12:06 POW Issues
14:54 Summary
15:14 Conclusion
15:51 Call to Action
(more…)

“The core hypocrisy of modern Western governance”

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Cancon, Europe, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tom Marazzo discusses the extremely weird experience we’ve all lived through since 9/11 in almost every major western nation:

For more than 20 years, Western governments told their citizens that Islamist extremism posed an existential threat. Entire generations were sent to fight the Global War on Terror. Soldiers were killed, families were broken, civil liberties were curtailed, and trillions were spent, all justified by the claim that terrorism had to be stopped over there so it would not reach us here.

Then something strange happened.

The same governments that built their legitimacy on that fear now insist that even discussing the cultural, security, or integration risks associated with mass immigration from unstable regions is immoral. Raise concerns and you are no longer a citizen asking questions, but a bigot, an extremist, or a threat yourself. In some countries, speech alone now draws police attention, while violent acts are reframed as isolated incidents or stripped of ideological context.

The irony deepens when you look at the timeline.

During the first years of Covid, terrorism all but vanished from news coverage, just as Covid seemed to erase the common cold, cancer, and every other cause of death from public discourse. Nothing had disappeared. The narrative had simply changed. Attention was redirected. Fear was reassigned.

Now, as governments pursue aggressive mass immigration policies, the public is told that questioning outcomes is unacceptable, even as the very threats once used to justify war reappear domestically. The message is clear and profoundly cynical: the danger was real when it justified foreign wars, but discussion becomes forbidden when it complicates domestic policy.

This is not tolerance. It is coercion.

And now comes the final insult.

The same political class that demands silence at home is preparing to demand sacrifice abroad. The same citizens who are told to accept social breakdown, rising crime, collapsing services, and cultural fragmentation are being told they may soon be required to fight Russia to “defend our way of life”.

What way of life, exactly?

The one being systematically dismantled by the very governments issuing the call. The one they are actively transforming into something unrecognizable through reckless policy, moral intimidation, and managed decline. They are asking people to die for values they no longer practice and for societies they are actively degrading.

This is the core hypocrisy of modern Western governance.

We were told to fight, bleed, and die to defend liberal democratic values. Now we are told those same values require silence, compliance, and obedience, while our countries are reshaped without consent and against the will of the people who built them.

A government that suppresses debate at home while demanding loyalty abroad is not defending democracy. It is consuming it.

And history is not kind to regimes that ask their people to die for a future they are busy destroying.

December 15, 2025

“America has always been a racist country”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to an agent provocateur on the topic of racism:

    Lance Cooper @lmauricecpr
    A white woman called a Somali couple niggers and raised $153k in five days. America has proven again that it is a racist country. They don’t even bother to hide it anymore.

America has always been a racist country in a racist world.

Indigenous Tribals were racist.
Whites were racist.
Blacks were racist.
Orientals were racist.
Arabs were racist.
Jews were racist.
Hispanics were racist.

After being shocked by the excesses of the Third Reich, Whites stopped being racist for a while, and suffered for it.

Everyone else stayed racist, and prospered by it at White people’s expense.

Now White people are sick of it, and they’re becoming racist again, because the only other solution is for everybody else to stop being racist, and there’s no way to make them do that.

So the future is racist. Doesn’t particularly matter if you think that’s good or bad, or if I think that’s good or bad, or if anyone thinks it’s good or bad. It is what’s going to happen.

There was a time when it might have been possible to for everyone to simultaneously stop being racist. But it didn’t happen, because only White people were being told to stop, only White people listened, and only White people stopped.

Everyone else was told that, in the abstract, racism was bad, but they were never called out, lectured, or confronted about their own racism. In fact, that racism was tacitly encouraged, for profit and ego gratification.

Someone even invented rationalizations that only White people even could be racist, because only White people had Power™, which was different from power, because white people somehow had Power™ even if they had no power, and everyone else had no Power™ even if they were billionaires or the King of Sumatra.

So Power™ was just another word for Whiteness.

Around the time when some people started openly calling for the elimination of Whiteness from the nation, the globe, and the human race, White people’s common sense finally started winning out over our desire to be nice and and cooperative and have everyone like us.

We realized it was impossible for everyone else to like us.

Because they didn’t hate us for not being nice. Hell, the nicer we got, the more they hated us. No, they hated us for being White. They hated us for not being like them. They hated us for being successful. They hated us for thriving. They hated us for building civilization. And they wanted us to just hand it over to them, despite the clearly evident fact that a great many of them lacked the skills and temperament to even to maintain it, much less to build more.

(Hint: that desire to be nice and cooperative and have people like us is what enabled us to build all that stuff and get rich in the first place.)

So we’re just going to have to settle for liking each other, preferring each other’s company, and not particularly worrying about whether other races like us or not.

Because that’s the only remaining alternative to suicide.

And, yeah, sure, whatever, you can call me delusional or a liar. You can say White people never stopped being racist, or that we just didn’t anti-racist hard enough.

But, even if that were true, so what? The rest of y’all never stopped being racist. And you never did the anti-racist thing at all. Y’all just kept telling us to do it.

Well, no thanks. Juice isn’t worth the squeeze, because there is no juice, and we’re the ones who were getting squeezed.

And yeah, sure, that’ll keep happening for a while, because some White people haven’t figured it out yet.

And yeah, sure, you can continue to lecture me about how racism is evil, as if you weren’t super-racist yourself, every goddamn day.

But I no longer believe that moral lectures about racism from non-Whites are anything but an attempt to make Whites drop loot.

So I’m not listening.

A lot of people are about to learn the meaning of the term “preference cascade”, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

ESR responded:

I am deeply unhappy about Devon’s conclusion here. But I fear he is probably correct.

There is an alternative, which is to be explicitly high-IQist and mostly ignore skin color. But I admit that such an attempt would probably be sabotaged by the same people who insisted that anti-white racism should be government policy everywhere.

The wrong way to address the credit card debt issue

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

Daniel Mitchell says that US politicians seem to have identified a real problem and they’re proposing solutions. Unfortunately, the biggest proposal not only won’t solve the problem … it’ll make it worse for the most vulnerable credit card debtors:

“Credit Cards” by Sean MacEntee is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

According to a new report from the New York Federal Reserve, Americans have accumulated over one trillion in credit card debt, an all-time high. It’s a record that would make financial advisor Dave Ramsey lose the remaining hair on his head, but even worse, the share of balances in serious delinquency climbed to a nearly financial-crash level of 7.1%. In other words, Americans are borrowing more and paying back less.

This alarming trend has naturally drawn the attention of politicians eager to offer a quick fix.

Unfortunately, the solution gaining bipartisan traction is a blanket cap on credit card interest rates. Like most political quick fixes, it is an economic prescription guaranteed to harm the very individuals it claims to protect.

The impulse to cap rates is rooted in a fundamental economic misunderstanding. It treats the interest rate as an arbitrary fee levied by greedy banks rather than the essential economic mechanism it is: the price of risk. This misguided philosophy is embodied in the legislation introduced by the populist duo of Senators Josh Hawley (R-MO) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which seeks to impose a nationwide cap on Annual Percentage Rates (APRs), sometimes as low as 10%.

Make no mistake: two politicians don’t know better than the marketplace and the law of supply and demand that governs it. The consequences of imposing a price ceiling on credit are not debatable. They are historically certain. Interest rates on credit cards are higher than on mortgages, for instance, because credit cards are unsecured debt. If a borrower defaults, the bank cannot seize collateral to cover the loss. The interest rate must therefore be high enough to reflect the expected default rate across the entire high-risk pool.

It’s wrongheaded. Faced with the possibility of a government-imposed price cap, credit card companies would of course respond as any company would. They will stop extending credit to those who will possibly not pay them back. Studies show that even a cap as high as 18% would put nearly 80% of subprime borrowers at risk of losing access to credit. In other words, the 10% cap proposed by the Hawley–Sanders alliance would have truly devastating effects for credit access, potentially eliminating millions of accounts.

The victims of this policy will not be the wealthy, who already qualify for prime rates; nor will they be the financially literate, who pay their balances in full. The victims will be the economically vulnerable, the working-class single mother needing a short-term buffer, the recent immigrant attempting to build a credit score, or the young person trying to establish his or her financial footing. For these individuals, the Hawley–Sanders policy will deliver not cheap credit, but no credit at all.

December 14, 2025

Andrea Dworkin – feminism’s anti-sex evangelist

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

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo examines the life and work of Andrea Dworkin, whose influence on modern feminism is still quite strong, twenty years after her death:

A friend wrote a couple of days ago to say that he had seen shiny new copies of works by feminist author Andrea Dworkin (1946-2005) in Munro’s Books, one of Canada’s premier independent bookstores. One of the books was positioned on a shelf with the cover facing out to indicate that it was being showcased.

It is both shocking and unsurprising that Picador Books decided to reprint three of Dworkin’s texts in the past year, calling her a “prescient and visionary writer” who was “ahead of her time”. Anti-male paranoia is a sanctioned, cultivated taste more popular now, perhaps, than ever before, and Andrea Dworkin is its most notorious propagandist.

Known for her physical bulk, impassioned rhetoric, unkempt hair, and lesbian-identified overalls, Dworkin was a feminist icon in the 1980s and 90s, loved and hated in equal measure. No one did more to outline and consolidate the modern feminist understanding of sex than she, writing on the subject obsessively and with unparalleled fervor in books with titles such as Woman Hating (1974) and Pornography: Men Possessing Women (1981). The MeToo movement is almost unimaginable without the influence of Dworkin’s pronouncements.

Like other radical feminists, Dworkin wrote about rape, pornography, and prostitution, but her special focus was the degradation for women of sex itself: regular sex, the commonly accepted, normalized indignity that men allegedly inflict on women every day. Tempering her words in the white-heat of her revulsion, Dworkin became feminism’s anti-sex evangelist.

Sex, Dworkin believed, embodied nothing less than men’s hatred of everything female: “Intercourse is the pure, sterile, formal expression of men’s contempt for women” (p. 175). This is the thesis of her most representative book, Intercourse, which was first published in 1987 when Dworkin was 41 years old. Dworkin’s characterization of heterosexual sex as the ultimate enactment of misogyny has had an enduring impact on North American culture.

Intercourse set out to illuminate, through select readings of literary texts, what Dworkin believed to be a constant of male culture: the “hatred of women, unexplained, undiagnosed, mostly unacknowledged, that pervades sexual practice and sexual passion” (pp. 175-76). The phrase she most often used in the book to refer to intercourse was “the fuck”, which was meant to signify the raw dehumanization that supposedly characterized it.

Dworkin nominated herself the expert on male contempt for women because she had been its victim. “Specifically, am I saying that I know more than men about fucking?” she asked defiantly in the book’s preface, and answered, “Yes, I am […] the way anyone used knows the user” (p. xxxi).

While she also claimed in the preface that the book “does not say that all men are rapists or that all intercourse is rape” (p. xxxii), she does essentially say that, if not in quite those words. As she asserted only a page after the denial, “Intercourse conveys […] what it means that men — and now boys — feel entitled to come into the privacy of a woman’s body in a context of inequality” (p. xxxiv).

In another segment, she clarified that most, even the vast majority, of men were sexually abusive. She charged that men object to feminist criticism of pornography and prostitution because “So many men use these ignoble routes of access and domination to get laid,” that “without them the number of fucks would so significantly decrease that men might nearly be chaste” (p. 61). The implication was that men who objected to her arguments about the omnipresence of sexual exploitation were themselves sexual abusers who didn’t like the thought of their exploitation being curtailed.

This was the Dworkin who made feminists swoon with admiration: bombastic, hyperbolic, and incandescent with accusatory rage.

December 12, 2025

Re-orient your map to understand China’s view of the world

Filed under: China, History, Japan, Military, Pacific, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

CDR Salamander provides a helpful guide to seeing the world, specifically their Pacific front, by turning your map sideways. I hope you won’t look back on this from a slightly later date when the maps get all flaggy and arrow-y:

I first saw this map three years ago, and it recently resurfaced in my thoughts.

I remain convinced that a lot of the problem with trying to get everyone to fully understand the challenge in the Western Pacific is that to a large part, we think in a “north-up” orientation.

I don’t think that is all that helpful.

Just a few days ago, we had another Pearl Harbor Day anniversary and we’ve all seen the maps, usually centered on Hawaii, where the Imperial Japanese Navy’s Kidō Butai comes at the Pacific Fleet from stage left off the map. Then we fought battles in the Coral Sea, Midway, and so on.

To the lay eye — or to those who don’t have time to dig into the reasons — a traditional north-up map looks disjointed; things seem all over the place.

No, not really. Let’s bring back that first map.

[Click to embiggenate]

For both Imperial Japan in the early-mid 20th century and Communist China today, the most important part of this map is the access to the resources in or going through the bottom-right hand corner.

Today’s greatest bone of contention — not unrelated to the most important part of the map mentioned above — is Taiwan, right at the mouth of the funnel.

If we need to bring a fight there, that is one hell of a fight to get there if the People’s Republic of China (PRC) wants to prepare a proper welcome for us.

For the PRC, the primary military threat to plan for comes across the Pacific into a funnel that terminates at its most important SLOC. It’s the United States of America, and the US has a series of islands leading right into the heart of the PRC’s. It starts in Hawaii — Midway, Wake, Guam — and then to U.S. allies: the Philippines, Japan, and Australia.

They’re planning a layered defensive fight. Their actions make that clear.

Make no mistake, we may say we are going to “defend Taiwan”, but to do that we will have to fight an aggressive war across the Pacific, into the enemy’s prepared funnel.

Update, 13 December: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do 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.

December 11, 2025

US Democrats, like Canadian Liberals, love performative gestures but ghost on delivery

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

I’ve remarked many times that Canada’s federal Liberals love themselves some photo ops, sound bites, ribbon-cuttings, and making announcements in front of temporary stages … they can’t help themselves, they’re what happens to theatre kids who don’t have to grow up. The American Democrats seem to be falling into the same pattern of “putting on a show” rather than implementing policies that address whatever the declared problem really is:

In 2015, the City of Los Angeles announced an ambitious plan (led by the person we then referred to as Mayor Yogapants) to completely eliminate traffic deaths by 2025. It was a vision: Vision Zero, they called it. Ten years later, traffic deaths in Los Angeles have doubled. A wonderfully progressive local government announced a plan to eliminate something, so we got much more of that thing. A community group, @peoplesvisionzero, is now trying to carry out some version of the failed plan with guerilla traffic engineering, sneaking new safety infrastructure into place without city permission. Recent result:

In similar fashion, Gavin Newsom announced his ten-year plan to end California homelessness in 2008. I struggle with the math, but there’s a possibility that we’ve passed the ten-year mark since then. […]

Theater-kid governance is the empty-to-the-point-of-ruin declaration of a symbol-desire, a performance about what we want and don’t want. It doesn’t do anything; it’s a posture, not an action. To the extent that it does do any actual thing in physical reality, it creates pots of money to be looted by NGOs and metastasizing government bureaucracies.

Infamously, when California audited $24 billion in state homelessness spending last year, auditors couldn’t track where a bunch of the spending went, or figure out what it had paid for. See also the growing scandal over Somalian immigrant social services fraud in Minnesota. Facial expressions are made. Symbols are invoked. Money goes … somewhere. It’s a show, with a rich loot bucket, not an actionable set of policies that produce positive trends toward declared goals. By the way, it’s been fifteen years since the Obama administration and a Democratic-majority Congress made healthcare affordable.

California infrastructure is a persistent disaster, because the California legislature and our sociopathic idiot governor are deeply invested in signaling about warm and wonderful trans kids and standing up to Mean Orange Hitler. They don’t stoop to highways and bridges — they’re much too progressive. Related, the increasingly sharp near-term projected decline of fuel production in California is becoming a national security problem in a state that needs to gas up a lot of military traffic. The state performs constantly against Big Oil and its mean climate change agenda, and somehow keeps losing refineries. The endless symbol-gestures cause the loss of real things.

Lines of Fire: Operation Market Garden Part 2 of 2 – WW2 in Animated Maps

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost Cartographic
Published 10 Dec 2025

September 17, 1944. A slight morning fog over Britain gives way to clear skies, as the first of hundreds of Allied aircraft leave the ground to execute the largest airborne operation ever attempted. Will Montgomery’s gamble pay off? Or are the Germans in the Netherlands far less beaten than he believes? Last time out we covered the planning, rationale, and logistics of the idea. Now, watch it unfold from beginning to end, map by map.
(more…)

Your words are violence to an astounding 91% of US college students surveyed

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

J.D. Tuccille presents some depressing poll results from American college students who have massively bought into the illogical position that words can be the same as actual violence:

Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former. After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.

Most Believe Words Can Be Violence

“Ninety one percent of undergraduate students believe that words can be violence, according to a new poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression [FIRE] and College Pulse”, FIRE announced last week. “The survey’s findings are especially startling coming in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — an extreme and tragic example of the sharp difference between words and violence.”

The survey posed questions about speech and political violence to undergraduate students at Utah Valley University, where Kirk was murdered, and at colleges elsewhere — 2,028 students overall. FIRE and College Pulse compared the student responses to those of members of the general public who were separately polled.

Specifically, one question asked how much “words can be violence” described respondents’ thoughts. Twenty-two percent of college undergraduates answered that the sentiment “describes my thoughts completely”, 25 percent said it “mostly” described their thoughts, 28 percent put it at “somewhat”, and 15 percent answered “slightly”. Only 9 percent answered that the “words can be violence” sentiment “does not describe my thoughts at all”.

It’s difficult to get too worked up about those who “slightly” believe words can be violence, but that still leaves us at 75 percent of the student population. And almost half of students “completely” or “mostly” see words and violence as essentially the same thing. That’s a lot of young people who struggle to distinguish between an unwelcome expression and a punch to the nose.

Depressingly, 34 percent of the general public “completely” or “mostly” agree. Fifty-nine percent at least “somewhat” believe words can be violence.

In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that “growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers” and that the rise in mental health issues “is better understood as a crisis of resilience”.

Conflating Words and Violence Encourages Violence

Telling young people who haven’t been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding “in kind” is justified.

“At a time of rapidly rising political polarization in America, it helps a small subset of that generation justify political violence,” Haidt and Lukianoff added.

December 10, 2025

The Korean War Week 77: The Korean Winter Bites Hard – December 9, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 9 Dec 2025

Now that they’ve agreed on a Demarcation Line, the talk this week at the Panmunjom peace talks has turned to whether there will be restrictions or not after the signing of an armistice. Also, how would inspections work to make sure the other side is complying with the armistice terms? Perhaps a group of representatives from neutral nations? Meanwhile the troops are digging in to their winter defenses, as the frozen Korean winter descends upon them.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
00:48 Recap
01:16 Two New Points
08:42 Korean Winter
11:47 Communist Defenses
13:20 Summary
13:33 Conclusion
14:28 Call to Action
(more…)

QotD: The “rules” of Gonzo journalism

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

Thompson now had the recipe for his journalism career, and it involved three conceptual breakthroughs.

  1. The story behind the story is the real story.
  2. The writer is now the hero of each episode.
  3. All this gets written in the style of a personal communication to the reader of the real, dirty inside stuff — straight, with no holds barred.

Why couldn’t you write journalism like this? In fact, a whole generation learned to do just that, mostly by imitating Hunter S. Thompson.

But it grows tired and predictable in the hands of today’s imitators — and the Gonzo King never invited either of those modifiers. Yes, blogs and Substacks are part of his legacy, formats that blur the line between diary, confession, and journalism. But he did it before all the rest, not as a desktop publisher — instead putting his life at risk on the road with total fear and loathing.

So if Substack is the grandchild of Hunter Thompson and New Journalism, it is a tame, well-behaved descendant — and nothing like its brave forebear, who kept going full speed without a helmet until the end.

Even the reader has to run to keep up.

Ted Gioia, “The Rise and Fall of Hunter Thompson (Part 2 of 3)”, The Honest Broker, 2025-09-08.

December 9, 2025

The age of Trump – “America has ‘walked away’ from its allies”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney talks about last month’s annual Halifax International Security Forum, where the biggest change from previous events was the official absence of US government representation:

Late last month, attending the Halifax International Security Forum, I was having the damndest feeling. Can you have déja vu for something that you only experienced via fiction? Because it was kind of like that.

The fiction in question was a novel by an Australian, published during the Second Iraq War. Anti-American sentiment was running rampant all over the world. The premise of the novel is out there in the realm of sci-fi — America disappears. Specifically, Americans disappear — some mysterious wave of energy scours most of North America clean of life. Virtually all of the U.S. is wiped out; most of Canada and Mexico, too. Somewhat to the surprise of the anti-Americans, this does not result in an improvement in life on Planet Earth.

Standing around at the forum, eating the delicious snacks and drinking the good coffee and chatting with friends old and new, that was what I kept thinking about. Where are the Americans? And what the hell are we going to do without them?

And, in case you’re wondering what’s up with that headline, here’s another question — what will we do if they one day try and come back?

The forum is an annual gathering of senior military officers, defence and intelligence officials from across the free world, and representatives from the media, think tanks, large companies and civil society organizations whose work relates to defence and security issues or in some way seeks to promote and preserve a healthy democratic world. Funded by NATO, the Canadian government and private-sector sponsors, the event is a major part of Canada’s “soft power” offering to our allies — we host the big party and show everybody a good time. The actual schedule is split between on-the-record panel talks or presentations, off-the-record sessions, and informal time for mingling and schmoozing. I am grateful to have been invited to participate again this year.

Especially this year. I’ve been going to the forum for years, and the event always had a strongly American flavour.

Not anymore! Yankee went home.

Like, literally. He was ordered to go home, or stay there. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered the Pentagon to avoid a series of high-profile annual defence summits. That includes Halifax, and others in places like Munich and Singapore, and even inside the United States itself. The reason, according to the Pentagon’s press apparatus, was that, and I swear to God this is the actual quote, such events promote “the evil of globalism, disdain for our great country and hatred for the president of the United States”.

Oh. Well, then.

That’s what made the forum so fascinating this year. As I told my colleague Jen Gerson while I was in Halifax, the entire event felt a little bit like the first Thanksgiving after a divorce. It’s great to see everyone, but there’re some notable absences, is the thing.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress