Quotulatiousness

June 8, 2026

“Friedrich Nietzsche predicted our culture more than a century ago”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Creative Deduction give Nietzsche credit for predicting how western cultures would change to the state we find ourselves in today:

Friedrich Nietzsche predicted our culture more than a century ago.

A society where victimhood confers status; where weakness is celebrated as virtue; where grievance brings moral authority; and where the highest aspiration is not greatness, but comfort.

He regarded it as a symptom of civilisational decline. In place of the old aristocratic values of strength, courage and self-overcoming, Nietzsche saw the rise of what he called “slave morality” — a worldview that elevates weakness, suffering and resentment into virtues. The modern celebration of victimhood, where people compete to present themselves as the most oppressed, is this mentality. Rather than striving to overcome hardship, many now seek status and moral authority through claims of injury and grievance.

Nietzsche was deeply contemptuous of those who pursue safety and comfort above all else. He mocked the “last man”, the small-souled creature who wants nothing more than a warm bed, entertainment and protection from anything difficult or dangerous. For Nietzsche, struggle was not an unfortunate condition to be eliminated, but the very source of meaning, growth and greatness. Without resistance, there is no self-creation.

The modern welfare state would have horrified Nietzsche. By shielding people from the consequences of their actions and removing the necessity of struggle, it does not liberate — it enfeebles. It creates populations that are materially secure but existentially empty, dependent on the state rather than on their own strength and initiative. Nietzsche believed that genuine human flourishing requires the willingness to endure hardship and take responsibility for one’s life. A society that makes comfort its highest value and victimhood its highest status inevitably produces weak, resentful people who have forgotten how to live.

QotD: Re-use, recycle, and contaminate

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

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

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

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

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

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

June 7, 2026

QotD: Undergrad writing

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

The other problem undergrads typically have is a concern with “style”. That’s almost harder to break than any other habit, because the fix sounds so robotic: Subject-verb-object; five sentences per paragraph; five paragraphs per paper. Back when I first started teaching, I had a lot of students just back from the Sandbox, giving college a try on the GI Bill. I enjoyed having them in class for lots of reasons, but a big one was that the military at that time still taught the basic five-paragraph essay (maybe they still do). Your basic After Action Report ain’t great literature, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, efficiently.

I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?

But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:

    This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.

Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.

Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …

Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.

In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.

June 6, 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of that might be true.

But it doesn’t matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil forfeiture is legalized theft where the process is part of the punishment

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

J.D. Tuccille points out that most victims of civil forfeiture actions in the United States never get a day in court to fight against the theft:

Two years ago, the Netflix film Rebel Ridge turned a common law enforcement tactic into a cinematic study of injustice. In fictionalized form, the movie brought home to audiences the reality that civil asset forfeiture is nothing more than legalized theft. Unfortunately, as documented in a recent Institute for Justice (I.J.) report, while several states have sought to reform the use of civil forfeiture, it remains a source of profit for many law enforcement agencies and a cause of grief to unlucky victims who rarely get to argue their cases in a courtroom.

Forfeiture “Clearly Has Been Abused”

Civil asset forfeiture is “a legal process enabling law enforcement agencies to seize property which is suspected of having connections to criminal activity,” Northeastern University criminology professor Nikos Passas explained when Rebel Ridge spurred Americans to wonder whether cops could really take money and property without convicting anybody of a crime. “The difference between criminal and civil forfeiture is that the criminal one requires a conviction. A civil forfeiture targets the property itself, and often it is done without charging the owner with wrongdoing.”

The problem, he added, “is that by giving a profit motive, a financial motive, to law enforcement it introduces a bias. … It clearly has been abused.”

I.J. has long tracked and battled those abuses. In the fourth edition of Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture, authors Lisa Knepper, Jason Tiezzi, Matthew P. West, Elyse Pohl, and Mindy Menjou document legal changes that have reformed or even abolished civil asset forfeiture in some states, and the work that remains to rein in abuses. Change has been slow because stealing under color of law is a huge moneymaker for government agencies against which people have little recourse.

Seizures by Default, With No Courtroom Proceedings

“Most forfeitures never reach a courtroom, available data show. For example, in a large sample of Indiana cases, just 4% were decided by a judge. Instead, forfeiture typically happens by default,” the recent report notes.

Why is that? It’s often because in their seizures, police departments take enough money or property to be lucrative, but not at a value that would justify a legal fight.

“Very few owners who contest forfeiture have legal representation — just 6% in Arizona and 7% in Oregon — likely because it is prohibitively expensive,” according to the report. “A straightforward state-court forfeiture case costs an estimated $3,300, nearly twice the median cash forfeiture of $1,678 across 24 states.”

Since it’s a civil process and not a criminal one, people on the receiving end of civil forfeiture aren’t entitled to public defenders. Many find the cost of hiring attorneys to be much higher than the value of what is stolen from them by authorities. The money winds up in government coffers without a fight. Those who do fight end up running a gauntlet.

“Even owners who successfully reach a judge typically wait months. Adding together statutory deadlines, the median forfeiture process takes more than six months on paper just to reach a courtroom. … In practice, cases frequently take far longer. In Virginia, for example, half of successful challenges lasted more than nine months, and a quarter stretched beyond 16 months.”

QotD: Richard Nixon – more sinned against than sinning?

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

Fifty yards from Richard Nixon’s grave, which sits not quite in the shadow of the modest home where he was born, a series of exhibits at his presidential library describe him as a psychologically unbalanced fool.

The Nixon White House, museum display panels announce, was consumed by “a climate of deep suspicion”. The infamous Plumbers took action against “perceived political opponents within the Federal Government”. A video display allows visitors to choose clips on the theme of Nixon’s “Conspiracy Thinking”. Paranoid, the president mindlessly lashed out at enemies that he hallucinated. This is still the official history, in museum exhibits curated by the National Archives and Records Administration.

On Friday morning, the consistently pro-Nixon docents hadn’t heard about the important Feb. 8 story in The New York Times that describes a plot within the government to spy on the Nixon White House, with Navy Yeoman Charles Radford stealing documents and sending them to the Pentagon as insurance against budget and policy meddling from the person serving as the president of the United States.

The revelation from a newly declassified document, longtime journalist James Rosen concluded, “bears directly on allegations by President Trump and his supporters about the existence of what was once called the permanent bureaucracy, better known today as the ‘deep state’. … Nixon proved to a team of federal prosecutors and grand jurors not only that such a beast existed but also that he, guilty as he was in Watergate, had been its victim.”

Chris Bray, “The Nixon Library Is Wrong About Nixon And The Deep State”, The Federalist, 2026-02-13.

June 4, 2026

Sci-Fi and the WWII Mythos Part II : The Political Element

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 16 Jan 2026

Last time I was focused on cultural aspects, but what about the direct political manifestations today? Is there a resurgence of neo-nazi attitudes or is just an artifact of the ubiquity of digital media preserving everything? Why might those ideas resonate with the young, and how does it fit with my argument that the old myths are breaking down?

00:00 Intro
01:42 Right, Left, and Gen-Z
02:56 Patterns of Force
04:25 Rambling about Economics
05:48 Efficient? No.
06:39 Bifurcation
08:00 Loss of Perspective

This one is a direct result of a conversation on the Talking History program on KSMU (I’ll link the episode when goes up) and covers something that came up but wasn’t really addressed well.
(more…)

June 3, 2026

“… basically it’s a plan to make power more expensive while campaigning on affordability”

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

John Robson examines a few of the ways the Ontario government (and other provincial and state governments) frames what they call “affordability”, yet somehow it always seems to cost more afterwards and nobody is ever held responsible:

In many areas of life, the devil is famously in the details. And it presents both an opportunity and a frustration because there is so much out there deserving readers’ attention that you can’t even follow it all let alone cram it into a newsletter. Including former banking executive Parker Gallant‘s vigilance about the absurdities of the power system in the Canadian province of Ontario that the aspiring Conservative premier Doug Ford promised to fix in the 2018 campaign and then has smugly done nothing about. These things might seem uninteresting if you do not live in Ontario … until you realize it’s just as bad wherever you live. And when we say bad we mean both the cost and the deviousness with which it is presented to, or hidden from, the public. On this very point we like to quote the late great P.J. O’Rourke that “Beyond a certain point complexity is fraud … when someone creates a system in which you can’t tell whether or not you’re being fooled, you’re being fooled.” Which brings us to the shiny new buzzword “affordability” which refers to policies that make everything more expensive and the beneficiaries hide the fraud in tangles of complex bureaucracy.

If you want to get a headache, stay with us while we explain what it is that Gallant tracks. Ontario has what they call the “Independent Electricity System Operator” so politicians can claim whatever disaster is unfolding isn’t their fault. Sure, they make the laws and oversee the creation of the regulations. But heck, these things are “arms’ length” and “impartial” and independent and expert and wise and wonderful so shut up.

Including this nutty system where the province buys power we don’t need at grossly inflated rates from wind and solar virtue-signallers and then sells the surplus at deep losses to the neighbouring province of Quebec and some American states including New York and Michigan. So he looked in depth (we promised a headache) at just half a day, May 19, 2026, because a post by another of the people who keeps an eye on this stuff for the benefit of an indifferent or baffled populace alerted him to something fishy in the IESO forecast of generation by Industrial Wind Turbine operators. But it seems to be hard to find out exactly how much the taxpayers, via this wonderful “Independent” system with its hand in their pockets via the arm of the state, actually paid these IWTs not to produce power.

Paid them what? Yup. It’s how it works. And the idea is that if they didn’t produce the original forecast rather than the revised one we’d have had to pay them even more for what they didn’t do. Weird even by the standards of government. And expensive. As Gallant sums it up:

    The net result is that those IWT cost us Ontario ratepayers almost $2.6 million for NOTHING over just the first 12 hours but we should rest assured the IWT owners loved it!

You read that right. The citizens of Ontario paid $2.6 million to the energy producers of the future not to produce energy in the present in just half of one day. If it were typical, it would be over $5 million a day times 365 days in the year so yes indeedy folks nearly $2 billion a year.

[…]

He then looks at various efforts to try to figure out the cost to consumers, including one by “my friend Roger Caiazza (the Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York)” based on the auction price of “allowances” in March 2025:

    Roger’s conclusion at that time was that the RGGI auctions were adding about $8-11/MWh to the wholesale cost of electricity, for electricity produced by natural gas. That would mean an addition of about 1 cent/kWh on a consumer’s bill. A penny may not seem like much, except when you realize that the average price in the country is less than 18 cents/kWh, so the penny is about 6%.

Imagine if people knew. As he concludes:

    remember that the structure of the program is that the amount of allowances goes down every year and the price is intentionally driven up. And data centers are going in all over the place. And the Northeastern states have refused to build new power plants for a couple of decades now in the midst of the climate hysteria. So the 10-15% extra cost being experienced now is only the beginning of much worse to come. The worst part of the RGGI ‘cap and invest’ scheme is that the consumers get absolutely nothing for the increased cost. It is just a gratuitously inflicted injury brought about by completely artificial scarcity. Keep this in mid when you hear a politician from an RGGI state talking about how they care about energy ‘affordability’.

Or, we add, transparency. Or accountability.

The Korean War Week 102 – American Bioweapons on Korean Soil? – June 2, 1952

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 2 Jun 2026

The Chinese continue their campaign of accusing the US of practicing germ warfare in North Korea and Manchuria. Meanwhile in South Korea, Syngman Rhee has declared martial law in Pusan as part of his campaign to remain in power.

00:00 Intro
00:50 Recap
01:23 Germ Warfare Charges
11:17 Bull Boatner
15:34 Holding POWs
17:58 Summary
18:13 Conclusion
19:21 Call to Action

Brits and Americans mispronounce foreign words differently, film at 11

Filed under: Britain, Food, Italy, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

ESR explains why American mispronunciations of Spanish or Italian words tend to be less offensive to those cultures than equivalent British linguistic manglings:

Ah, yet another round of the great pasta-pronunciation debate.

My credentials to speak on this: I am American. I have lived in Great Britain. I have lived in Italy. I pay attention to descriptive phonology. And I was at one time bilingual in English and Spanish.

These facts make me an expert witness on this issue.

Yes, Brits do in fact systematically mispronounce words like “pasta” and “taco” in a way Americans find amusing. But the interesting part of this story is the reason *why* Americans pronounce these words in a way much closer to the Italian and Spanish originals.

It isn’t superior virtue or worldly sophistication or anything like that. It’s the result of an important feature of the American linguistic environment that it doesn’t share with the British one, and which Americans themselves seldom even notice.

Many Americans have heavy exposure to the phonology of Spanish. Brits do not. The result is even that even those of us who are completely monolingual (which is most of us) tend to have models for two phonological systems in our heads rather than one; the second one being Spanish.

There’s a video about this somewhere on YouTube by a linguist, an English one as it happens, who explains that Americans attempting to reproduce the vowel sounds of a foreign language often bend it to try and fit it into the five-vowel system of Spanish. And this is true even when they don’t actually speak Spanish themselves.

One consequence is that even Americans who don’t know Spanish pronounce it tolerably well. Intelligibly, at least. Same goes for Italian, the phonology is slightly different but similar enough.

We crash-land on languages that have vowel systems quite unlike either English or Spanish. There are good reasons that when an American says “pasta” or “taco” his pronunciation is quite unlikely to make a native wince or laugh, but there is no such guarantee about French. Or German. Or Russian. Or just about anything else.

We’re just as lost as the Brits are trying to pronounce those languages. The difference is that, unlike a Brit, we may not mispronounce the local language in a way that makes it sound like a mangled version of English. Americans are likely to make it sound like a mangled version of Spanish instead.

June 2, 2026

Low IQ, mens rea, and actus reus

Filed under: Britain, India, Law, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For those like me whose legal Latin isn’t great, “mens rea” is “the mental state of a defendant who is accused of committing a crime”, while actus reus is a “guilty act” (from Wikipedia). On his Substack, William M. Briggs discusses how legal systems decide when an accused person’s IQ is so low that they lack the ability to understand that their action is illegal:

A gang of gypsies in England gang raped a young girl (and another previously) at knifepoint while filming the deeds, laughing all the while and even posted one of the rapes on social media. At their trial, Judge Nicholas Rowland excused their crimes because he said the criminals were “‘very young’, had low intelligence, a ‘limited understanding of consent’ and were susceptible to ‘peer pressure'”.

    [Rowland] said that the second boy fell into the bottom one per cent in IQ for his age, and he had been diagnosed with ADHD, while the third boy had ‘low intellectual capacity’ and he had a ‘limited understanding of consent’.

Iryna Zarutska, 23, was riding a train in Charlotte, when Decarlos Dejuan Brown Jr rose up, slit her throat, and as he was exiting the train gleefully declared he “got” his white woman. Brown had been arrested some 14 times before he murdered Zarutska, for crimes including armed robbery. He was freed each time. For the murder, he was found by Experts to be “incompetent to stand trial”.

Brown and the gypsies were not alone. Recently, there were these cases:

Many states have humane destruction laws that apply when animals (usually dogs) have attacked or killed humans. Florida, for instance, confiscates vicious dogs and puts them down. When any animal kills and eats a man it is usually put down, and most think it wise and prudent to do so. But some curiously argue the animals cannot help themselves, that it is their nature to attack and kill and even eat people, and who are we to judge?

In any case, it is clear that dogs, nor any animal, are not as intelligent as man. Just as it is clear obvious truth that some men are not as intelligent as others. Yet this fact does meet resistance from Equalitarians and Universalists, both forgiving every sin except the sin of claiming sin exists.

[…]

The Eighth Amendment reads: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted“.

Since 2002, executing a dumb criminal is “cruel”, yet executing an intelligent criminal is not cruel nor unusual. This is odd because, as any dog owner can attest, even dogs can know right from wrong, and even stupid men know murder is wrong.

Scalia wrote in his dissent that an Expert (a psychologist) on one of the appeals testified Smith had “an IQ of 59”. Smith also, and in this case, really had “16 prior felony convictions for robbery, attempted robbery, abduction, use of a firearm, and maiming”. He noted previous courts ruled only the profoundly retarded, those “idiots” who “had an IQ of 25 or below”, had a “‘deficiency in will’ rendering them unable to tell right from wrong”.

On the general topic of IQ, but not directly related to violent crime, ESR discusses the relationship between IQ and the caste system of India:

The caste system as a layered varna system with five classes and numerous integrated jati communities.
Razib Khan

That feeling when your knowledge about how average IQ varies with caste rank in India stops being peculiar arcana and suddenly becomes deeply relevant to US domestic politics …

Anybody who has studied the matter knows that castes in India have been maintaining almost perfect endogamy for thousands of years. About the only significant category of exceptions is that if you have an exceptionally beautiful daughter you *might* succeed in getting her taken as a concubine by a higher-caste man, so their offspring might jump a rank.

With no significant gene flow between jatis, divergences in important traits like IQ and time preference not only don’t smooth out, but actually amplify due to genetic drift and differing selective pressures.

Highest-caste Indians have an IQ distribution a lot like Europeans. Low-caste Indians … don’t. They’re not quite as genetically handicapped as the dimmest populations in sub-Saharan Africa, thankfully, but the spread is wide.

This doesn’t mean all low-caste Indians are stupid; Gaussian distributions don’t work that way. It does mean that importing 10,000 low-caste Indians has very different implications for the host society then importing 10,000 Brahmins.

Segue to the recent news stories about American families getting killed by illiterate Indian truck drivers doing crazy stupid things on the roadways. Those truck drivers are not Brahmins.

This is a recent phenomenon because, until one of our political parties decided to import the entire Third World for vote-farming purposes, we were cream-skimming India. Now we’re not, and this makes a serious difference.

Update: Fixed broken link to ESR’s X post.

June 1, 2026

America before the Constitution

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

In The Critic, Clement Knox discusses how the newly independent United States of America were governed — or not governed — under the pre-Constitution arrangements:

Declaration of Independence by John Turnbull (1756-1843), showing the Committee of Five (Adams, Livingston, Sherman, Jefferson, and Franklin) presenting their draft of the Declaration of Independence to the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia on 28 June, 1776.
Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons.

The historian James Breck Perkins once observed that the Declaration of Independence was French and the Constitution was English. One was a coup de folie — all Gallic bombast and improvisation — the other a coolly logical exercise in state construction.

Often overlooked is that these documents came into effect thirteen years apart. And the story of how the Americans went from the Declaration to the Constitution, from France to England, over the course of those years is filled with lessons for the present.

This year is the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, signed in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776. It is also the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Articles of Confederation, which were commissioned at the same time as the Declaration but enjoy none of its renown. This is odd, as the Articles were the founding governmental structure of the United States, the system intended to effectuate the high-flown principles of the Declaration, and did so for over a decade until they were replaced by the Constitution in 1789.

The reason nobody talks about the Articles is because they were disastrous. Under them the United States government had a single legislative branch, congress, whose presiding officer was also the head of the executive branch. There was no federal judiciary. Neither congress nor its president had any real powers. Congress could not actually raise money. It could only “request” funds from the states — requests which were typically ignored. Congress also had no power over the regulation of commerce which meant that states could and did broker trade deals with foreign powers and impose taxes on the trade of their neighbouring states. Moreover, this hapless system could not be reformed as the articles required unanimity among the states to make even minor changes to them.

The regime imposed by the articles brought the nation to its knees. “The existing Confederacy is tottering to its foundation,” James Madison said in 1787, and few would mourn its passing as it “neither has nor deserves advocates.” “No money is paid into the public treasury,” he continued, “No respect is paid to the federal authority … It is not possible that a government can last long under these circumstances.” His pessimism was shared by George Washington who feared that “without some alteration in our political creed, the superstructure we have been seven years raising … must fall. We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion.”

Not prepared to allow the legacy of 1776 to be national ruin, Madison did something extraordinary: he moved to replace a failing regime with a functioning one. In 1786 he organised a convention in Philadelphia with the loosely-defined purpose of “revising” certain elements of the Articles. Once the convention was in session Madison revealed his true purpose. He did not want to revise the Articles but replace it with a constitution of his own composition.

The story of Madison’s high-stakes political gambit and how it played out in the years between the Philadelphia convention and the adoption of the constitution in 1789 is told in The Framers’ Coup by Michael J. Klarman. A professor at Harvard Law School, Klarman has written not just the seminal account of America’s founding but a classic account of how peaceful regime change can occur.

QotD: The progressive concept of an “American”

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

… the Left’s version, which insists that an “American” is a CisHetPatWhite gun nut. And rayciss, obviously, which somehow encompasses all that, but is distinct from it. Like the famous filioque controversy, the true relationship between them probably can’t be determined on this plane of existence, but it doesn’t really matter. But the terms are worth a little “unpacking”, as the grad school term d’art was back in the days:

“Cis” is “cisgender”, the radical notion that your “gender expression” has some systematic relationship to your chromosomal sex. In other words, an “idea” so uncontroversial that it has to be in quotation marks, because try explaining what “gender expression” means to even the most brilliant mind of, say, fifty years ago. He’d laugh right in your danger-haired, tattooed, multi-pierced face.

“Heterosexual” ties in with “cisgender”, in that it means “the observed sexual behavior of 99% of humanity in all times and places, because it is a biological necessity for the species to thrive”.

“Pat” means “patriarchal”, and see above, it’s the observed behavior of 100% of all human societies that have ever existed heretofore. As I like to quip to obnoxious atheists, I’m the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. Ever seen monkeys in the wild? I have. No society is more based than a chimpanzee troop. They’re so patriarchal, Iceberg Slim weeps salty tears of joy at the thought. It’s hardwired.

“White” of course means “chromosomally Caucasian”, and it’s very important to note that of the earth’s teeming billions, White folks are only a small fraction.

“Rayciss” is worth exploring, if only because they never get around to defining it. Do I believe other human subpopulations are inferior to mine? Heavens no. But see above, about being the only guy I know who really believes in evolution. It’s simply a fact that subpopulations evolve in response to environmental pressures. So are some subpopulations better adapted to their environment than others? Hell yes. Not only do I believe this, it’s a stone cold fact, one so trite that they don’t even bother putting it in the biology textbooks anymore.

Severian, “What’s an American?”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-04.

May 31, 2026

How Sports Illustrated devolved into AI slop

Filed under: Business, Media, Sports, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia generously pulls an article out from behind the paywall for the benefit of cheapskates like me. It’s on the deliberate destruction of Sports Illustrated:

Imagine if sports journalism were like an actual sporting competition — and the best team wins.

In that kind of contest, could any periodical in history surpass this lineup:

  • William Faulkner reports on a hockey game.
  • Robert Frost covers baseball.
  • Carl Sandburg offers golfing tips.
  • John Steinbeck contributes a story about fishing.
  • Ernest Hemingway writes on bullfighting.

This sounds like an editor’s fantasy. But these are actual stories and bylines from Sports Illustrated.

For a period of fifty years, this magazine set the gold standard for sports journalism. Nobel and Pulitzer winners wrote for them. Sports Illustrated even convinced John F. Kennedy to write a freelance article. In fact, that was one of the first things JFK did after getting elected president.

How do you kill a brand as powerful as Sports Illustrated?

It’s easy, you can do it in one just one move. You just need to embrace the most exciting, futuristic technology of the 21st century.

That’s what Sports Illustrated did. The world’s most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this — they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.

When a journalist from Futurism asked them about this, they quickly deleted everything.

But the damage was already done. The magazine’s reputation was on the mat, like those bloodied boxers it had covered over the decades.

Just 55 days later, Sports Illustrated announced that it was laying off most of its workforce. The media reported that Sports Illustrated would stop operations completely.

A few months later, a new publisher stepped in as savior. But there wasn’t much to save — at least as a journalism business.

The latest move happened yesterday. The new owner laid off 12% of its workforce, including several of the remaining skilled journalists from the pre-AI era. Some of them are in desperate shape.

Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports”.

It’s now a brand name, he insists, with nothing behind it.

    That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn.

May 30, 2026

“Bullying”

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

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

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

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

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

Examples:

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

The positive effect was often:

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

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

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

Because nobody ever stood them down in their formative years.

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

Let me spank the kids while you do the dishes.

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