Quotulatiousness

October 6, 2026

Humour and the British Green Party

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In the Daily Sceptic, Steven Tucker discusses the state of comedy in Britain today, in the light of the recent Green Party internal report on what members are supposed to deem funny or not funny. Not joking:

In the very same week these letters were publicised, the UK Green Party did actually launch its own internal in-depth report on what was and was not funny, with party activists receiving training informing them they should maintain detailed records of any jokes fellow members had told to them, “including dates, times [and] locations”, in case anyone later found them to be offensive – particularly if they touched upon sensitive issues like race, religion, sexuality or class. Even if the particular big fat black lesbian affected made a joke about themselves, this was still to be noted down and eliminated, as it nonetheless created “an environment in this space where derogatory jokes are allowed to happen”.

To prevent such jocular genocide occurring again in future, Greens were advised to perform an “audit” of their friendship groups to ensure they were diverse enough so that this simply would not happen: an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman all walk into a pub, and nobody says anything even remotely untoward whatsoever, as diversity is clearly our strength.

Official Green Party advice on what to do if you happen to hear a joke one day. Nowhere does the option “laugh” appear

For a preview of what a future Green-led Ministry of Laughter might one day look like, we should look towards a current controversy involving the quasi-state-run BBC (Bowdlerising British Comedy), which in September decided to mark 20 years since the first broadcast of award-winning sketch-show That Mitchell and Webb Look – by cutting out several sketches, and deeming the show to be “racist”. The now samizdat sketches involved scenarios like English Civil War re-enactors getting bored and deciding to black up and recreate modern-day conflicts in the Democratic Republic of Congo, a brownface Amazonian tribe found secretly living behind flower-pots in a garden centre and a woman wearing a burka being an unsuccessful participant in a TV makeover programme.

Even more primly, the BBC also wiped or butchered entire episodes of popular children’s comedy history series Horrible Histories, as they featured jokes about sensitive topics like slavery – despite the fact they pretty obviously were not of a “Let’s bring it back!”-type perspective, but attempting to satirise the practice’s brutality.

One horrified reaction came from Graham Linehan, the cancelled Anglo-Irish comedy writer who today lives in exile in America, as nobody in the UK industry will now touch his work with a bargepole. Not only does it commit the cardinal post-2010s sin of actually being funny, Linehan’s writing is also deemed to be “transphobic”; Channel 4 refuses to re-show an old episode of his sitcom the IT Crowd, as it features a joke about a cross-dresser (see my review of his 2023 autobiography).

Writing in the Telegraph, Linehan observes that most British comedians who get their back-catalogues politically ruined these days, like Mitchell and Webb, either keep silent and go along with it for an easy life, or else actively denounce themselves in classic Soviet show-trial fashion, so as to keep raking in the cash on the panel-show circuit. Because of this cowardice, he says, “somewhere out there, the next generation of comedy writers and performers, the ones who might have pushed the form further, taken bigger risks, made the joke nobody else would touch, will quietly decide it isn’t worth it, and nobody will have to ban anything ever again”. Sounds a bit like how Islam operates in such matters, too …

The Great Exhibition shows Victorians were anything but “stuffy”

Filed under: Books, Britain, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

That’s not to say they didn’t like accumulating “stuff”, however, as the Great Exhibition was in many ways a celebration of “stuff”:

The Crystal Palace from the northeast during the Great Exhibition of 1851.
Image from the 1852 book Dickinsons’ comprehensive pictures of the Great Exhibition of 1851 via Wikimedia Commons.

One wonders whether enough time will ever elapse for our Victorian ancestors to break free from the prevailing stereotype that they were demure, dull, prudish, obsessed with death and weirdly repressed. Still, a full 125 years after the death of the eponymous Queen, “Victorian” remains a word synonymous with “stuffy”, “insular”, “puritanical” and “sanctimonious”.

Despite many attempts at historiographical rehabilitation, the popular conceptualisation of the Victorians sadly remains the same. The truth, however, as A.N. Wilson proves yet again with The Wise and Their Works — his latest foray into the age of Empire and top hats — is far more colourful.

Wilson’s subject is the Great Exhibition of 1851, which famously brought the whole world to Britain’s door for one giddy summer, to see the accumulated ingenuity of 19th-century manufacturers crammed under the vast glass roof of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. The east half of the building was given over to foreign exhibits, the west to British curiosities. That this was a quite coherent and acceptable division of spoils tells us something about Britain’s status as technological and political hegemon at the time.

The Exhibition was an epic testament to Victorian production and scientific experimentation. Within and without the exhibition hall, visitors could gawk at giant lumps of coal, pearls from Aberdeenshire and china clay from Cornwall. Glittering above all this raw material was the most valuable gem ever dug from the earth, the now controversial Koh-i-Noor diamond. Apparently, it wasn’t shiny enough or big enough for our supercilious Victorian brethren. Such valuable nuggets give us an insight into what eventually did for the Victorians: they were always wanting more.

Part of the point of the Great Exhibition was that the human ingenuity on display outdazzled even the wonders of the natural world. There were innumerable clocks, cameras and barometers, a printing machine capable of churning out five thousand copies of the Illustrated London News an hour, a steam hammer that could crack an egg on its lightest setting or forge a warship’s bearings on its heaviest, alongside such delightful curiosities as a collapsible piano built for yacht cabins.

Even Queen Victoria found the siamese piano with two players at each end a step too far, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing that would go viral overnight on TikTok today. It is perhaps by focusing on their obsession with the weird that we can learn that the Victorians were not so different to us after all.

There can be no better guide to the Exhibition and broader era than Wilson — a veritable time traveller and arch-Victorian himself, whose acclaimed biographies of Victoria, Albert and Dickens, as well as his more contentious life of Charles Darwin and his superb general histories, all point to a man for whom the 19th century remains a never-ending source of inspiration. This lively narrator is a boon in a history that can feel acute in scope at times.

And Wilson doesn’t beat around the bush: the Exhibition was in his words, “a monument to consumerism”. And 19th-century consumerism was not without its dark underbelly. On display, in a detail that wreaks havoc upon cosy nostalgia, were shackles and leg irons manufactured in Birmingham for export to the slave-owning American South.

As much fun as this time-travelling escapade proves to be, wandering the stalls, marvelling at taxidermied frogs, Wilson’s deeper concern lies in the bureaucratic machinery that made the whole enterprise possible. It’s easy to glaze over the grant values, leases, committee votes and acreage negotiations, but it is essential to show exactly how a project of this magnitude could ever come into being.

As Wilson puts it, in one of the book’s loveliest lines, “It is from small things … that some of the most remarkable achievements have grown”. Forget the history buffs, it’s today’s civil servants, project managers and bureaucratic naysayers who have most to learn from the Great Exhibition of 1851.

The insanity of the Kamloops Residential School allegations

Filed under: Cancon, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

For whatever reason, the Canadian government decided to not challenge the claims that 215 First Nations children had been buried in unmarked graves (media often changed that detail to a “mass grave”) at the former Kamloops Residential School in BC. On X, Tristin Hopper outlines the story as it was relayed to the public:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

I still don’t think Canadians appreciate just how crazy the unmarked grave allegations at Kamloops were. So I tried to sum it up as best as I could …

The unmarked graves at Indian residential schools mentioned by the Truth and Reconciliation predominantly refer to students who died of disease, usually tuberculosis and usually before 1930. They were then buried in onsite cemeteries with wooden markers, with the result that the grave location was lost when the marker rotted away. When you hear about graves being excavated at IRS sites, it’s usually something like this.

The Kamloops 215, from the start, was an entirely different thing. It purported to provide evidence of an insane blood libel that the Catholic Church was secretly murdering Indigenous children en masse as late as the 1960s. The specific “knowing” was that staff were disappearing Kamloops Indian Residential School students and burying them in the school’s apple orchard in the middle of the night. This was despite the fact that nobody could actually name a specific student that had been disappeared in this fashion.

What Kamloops did was equivalent to claiming that we finally had physical evidence of the Satanic ritual abuse panic. So, think of it like a Canadian hospital publicly claiming that they’d found an onsite mass grave filled with babies murdered by Satanists in the 1980s.

Actual residential school deaths were employed as cover for an utterly bananas urban legend. And that’s why, in 2021, Canada was thrown into a profoundly destructive cultural revolution from which we may never recover.

The World Economic Forum

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre looks at the amazing — and sinister — success of the World Economic Forum:

The World Economic Forum.

Every January, roughly 2,800 executives, finance ministers, and central bankers fly private jets into Davos, Switzerland, to discuss how you should use less fossil fuel, practice sustainability, and pursue “equitable growth”.

Klaus Schwab founded the Forum in 1971, and for 55 years it has perfected a singular trick: dressing up cartelization as collaboration. When BlackRock’s Larry Fink sits across from Christine Lagarde and three heads of state, the outcome is never deregulation. It is always managed markets, stakeholder capitalism, and what the Forum itself calls “public-private partnership”, which is the polite term for incumbent firms writing the rules their competitors must follow.

The 2030 Agenda the Forum relentlessly pushes centralizes energy allocation, monetary policy, and food production under supranational bodies that nobody elected and nobody can remove. Prices no longer signal actual scarcity; they rather reflect political priorities. Farmers in the Netherlands lost land to nitrogen regulations lobbied into existence by parties with no skin in Dutch agriculture. You absorbed that cost through food prices, quietly, with no vote cast.

The Forum redistributes access to governments, and access to governments is worth more than genuine productivity when regulations make genuine productivity nearly illegal. Regulatory capture operating at a global scale.

Hayek identified the fatal conceit in 1988: the belief that a committee of sufficiently credentialed people can allocate resources better than dispersed price signals. Davos proves him right annually, producing white papers while the people funding those flights, through taxes and inflation, get poorer.

Sako M92S: Finland’s Last Civilian AK (now being imported to the US)

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 5 Jun 2026

The M92S is the semiautomatic civilian version of the Finnish military rk95 rifle. The rk95 was intended to be a modernization of the Finnish AK platform, but it fell victim to military funding cuts as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Only a small number were procured by the Finnish Defense Forces, and Sako only made about 2500 of the semiautomatic model for civilian and reservist use.

The M92 uses a brand new milled receiver design and includes a reinforced dust cover with rear aperture sight, a gas cutoff for rifle grenades (albeit never used), and mounting points for an optics siderail. The military rk95s all had side-folding stocks, but the civilian model got a fixed stock as the folder would have made it much harder to register and own in Finland at the time.

These rifles, along with all the other Valmet factory semiauto rifles, just recently became importable thanks to the efforts of Postrock, of Garden City Kansas.

Military rk95 video: • RK95: Finland’s Ultimate AK

QotD: The decline of academic standards over the years

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

… while I was on the road, I went to visit a buddy who’s still deep cover in academia. He teaches at a really SPLAC-y SPLAC, the kind that bills itself as “Minnesota’s answer to Princeton”. He’s part of a team running this course that, back in my undergrad days thirty years ago, would’ve been called “Paideia” or something similarly pretentious, taught to the “honors college” (or equivalent). Twenty years before that, it would’ve been called “Western Civ I” and required of all incoming freshmen, regardless of major.

Twenty years before that, and it would’ve been called “basic cultural literacy”; the kind of thing any college man — indeed, any graduate of a remotely decent high school — would know cold. I’ve written many times that the not-elite-but-certainly-very-respectable school which awarded my PhD wouldn’t have admitted me as an undergrad as late as 1960; they would’ve been sticking me in some serious remedial classes as late as 1980. Watching my buddy struggling mightily — and failing miserably — to get even the ridiculously watered-down, extremely fake and utterly gay version of this stuff across to the brown-nosing test-acers of the Current Year sent me sobbing into the arms of Jack Daniel.

Not because I would’ve done better, mind you, but because I would’ve done so much worse. The only way I got through my last few semesters in academia was to regard it as acting. The University is paying me to stand on stage and say my lines, so I’ll stand there and say them. Aside from that, all they want to do is check the appropriate box: Students have attended thus-and-such class, taught by someone with a PhD (crucial for those “best college” rankings!), and … there it is.

What actual knowledge am I supposed to be conveying? What skill set? What world view?

Category error. If it doesn’t fit on the standardized test, which is the only thing that matters to the bottom line, then it’s useless.

Severian, “On the Absurdity of Life”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-12.

October 5, 2026

Communism and the DSA

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

The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.

Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter

Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.

With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.

Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.

All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?

The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.

Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.

First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.

When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.

Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.

If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.

There’s never any good news on the climate front

Filed under: Environment, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John Robson calls out the extreme rhetoric employed by environmentalists and their journalist flappers to try to keep climate anxieties as high as possible, especially if there haven’t been any new alarming climate-related events to build on:

The New York Times engages in some classic yellow journalism with “Climate: Disaster Survivors Sticking Together” teasing to a column by David Gelles that starts “Extreme weather is hitting more people with each passing year”. But it’s not, even though there are more people for it to hit with each passing year as the climate crisis coincides strangely with unprecedented human material flourishing and a 99 percent drop in climate-related fatalities. We accept that there is room for intelligent and well-meaning debate about facts as well as their meaning. But the drumbeat of assertions by climate fanatics that the weather is getting worse when it’s just not crosses the line into bad-faith bellowing ignorance.

Another Times story titillates with a “CALCULATOR” of:

    Is Your City Prepared for Climate Disaster? A new report ranks the world’s large cities on how well they have adapted to face climate risk.

What exactly “climate risk” is, unless they mean bad weather, is not explained. Why the Times thinks bad weather is new is also not explained. What the Times thinks of the fact that even as global population soars, the number of people killed every year by bad weather has plummeted, not the proportion but the absolute number, is apparently nothing. Instead they lead off:

    When it comes to the effects of hostile climates – flood, fire and more – what matters isn’t just inherent risk, but rather the ability of a place to withstand that risk.

Well, duh. And clearly wealthier societies are far better able to withstand that risk, so even if you believe that fossil fuels make the weather a bit worse, the tradeoff is well worth making. But so is the effort to see if the weather is getting worse.

Now we don’t deny that “fire” is a hostile climate. But if it’s an “effect” of hostile climate, then the climate has always been hostile since what evidence we have says there were a lot more wildfires two and three hundred years ago than there are now. Don’t wait for them to credit CO2 with the decrease though … since they didn’t bother looking it up.

That story also blathers about how things from “early warning systems” to “governance” can “significantly mitigate the effects of climate change” although climate change is not a causal force it’s a statistical description of how the weather has altered in some place over at least 30 years. And it says Chicago is the most resilient city with “low hurricane risk” due, we point out, not to them building a big windbreak or something but it not being in the path of the hurricanes that regularly sweep through other parts of the US and have for as long as there have been observers to flee them shouting “Whoa Nelly a twister!” Moreover:

    Many of the least resilient places were South Asian cities with extreme exposure to floods and monsoons to which they were poorly adapted.

And if the Times seriously thinks monsoons are a new and horrible consequence of the gasoline-powered automobile you should cancel your subscription before it puts some other nonsense in your head. Like that floods and mudslides in rural Nepal and Tibet are relevant to urban resilience.

Media outlets have always had a strong bias toward reporting bad news, “If it bleeds, it leads!” but on the climate beat, there’s never any good news to report because everything — warming, cooling, precipitation, seasonal change — has to be presented in a negative light.

“The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a post about the need for middle class couples to budget excessive amounts of money before starting a family:

It’s not about the money.

Money has an effect, yes, but it’s a part of something bigger.

Women are genetically programmed to mate up. Not down. And not even across. Up. If she doesn’t regard a man as superior to her, she generally doesn’t want to have his babies.

What this means is that there is an extremely simple control dial on fertility.

More male power and status = more babies.
More female power and status = less babies.

Yes, it really is that simple.

Why? Because every species has a mating ritual, and can only breed if they can carry it out. That’s why you can breed rats and chickens in cages, but not pandas. Different mating ritual.

And a critical element of the human mating ritual is “male impresses female”.

Not charms. Not bribes. Definitely not respects.

Impresses.

So, if you take power, wealth, and status away from men, and give it to women, you are just plain reaching for the controls and turning down the fertility dial.

If you let men keep power, wealth and status — you don’t have to give it to them because they’re the ones who create it — fertility goes up.

The fertility crisis is really the equality crisis.

This idea might horrify you. You might have been taught all your life that everyone is equal, or must be, and anything else is unfair.

Well, have you looked around you at universe? Unfairness is baked into the life cycle of every living organism, not mention the food chain. Evolutionary processes don’t care about fairness. They care what works.

Perhaps someday, we will be able to code DNA as easily as we code C++, and can decide what we want our instincts to be. But until that day, we are faced with a choice.

1. Stop using the political, legal, and mass media processes to force female equality, if not outright female supremacy, on the first world.

Or

2. Die out and be replaced by third world retards, who will stay on this planet fighting wars with increasingly rusty AK47s and then spears, until the next asteroid comes along.

Tom Holland Explains the Entire History of Wine in 72 Minutes

Filed under: Europe, France, Greece, History, Italy, Wine — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Rest Is History
Published 5 May 2026

What does The Odyssey teach us about the history of wine in the ancient world? How did Julius Caesar use wine to conquer the world? And why was The Judgement of Paris – when America took on France – the most controversial incident in the history of wine?

Join Dominic and Tom as they discuss the long history of wine; from ancient Jordan, to Bronze Age Greece, to the Vikings, and beyond …

00:00 The complete history of wine in 8,000 years
00:41 Lloyds
02:14 Pliny the Elder and the first wine snob
06:02 Why wine is such a rich subject for history
09:27 Noah, Mount Ararat and the biblical origins of wine
11:31 Georgia, Armenia and the world’s first wineries
13:15 The Canaanites and the invention of the wine trade
16:19 The Phoenicians, Greeks and wine culture across the Mediterranean
18:32 How Rome created the first international wine culture
20:32 Wine, slavery and the Roman conquest of Gaul
23:12 Italy becomes the heartland of Roman wine
24:40 How Christianity preserved wine after Rome’s fall
27:22 Why Islam transformed the history of wine
30:09 Wine drinking, loopholes and the caliphs
33:41 Rumi, Sufism and wine as a metaphor for divine love
37:29 England and the invention of the modern wine bottle
40:08 Kenelm Digby and the rise of English bottles
43:22 Cork, port and the Methuen Treaty
45:12 The English invention of the corkscrew
47:10 How French became the language of wine
50:07 Samuel Pepys discovers Haut-Brion
52:33 First growths, Bordeaux and the hierarchy of wine
56:09 Why wine was once an elite English obsession
57:49 Terroir and the spiritual language of French wine
1:00:59 The Judgment of Paris
1:03:57 Prohibition and the collapse of Californian wine
1:06:19 The blind tasting that humiliated France
1:08:08 Stag’s Leap and California’s victory
1:09:11 How New World wine changed the industry
1:10:44 Wine, competition and partnership
1:11:46 Henry Jeff, the bonus episode and the Mona Lisa

Video Editor: Jack Meek, Adam Thornton & Harry Swan
Social Producer: Harry Balden
Producers: Aaliyah Akude & Tabby Syrett
Senior Producer: Callum Hill
Executive Producer: Dom Johnson
Head of Digital & Social: Sam Oakley

QotD: Socialism and the world wars

Filed under: China, Economics, Government, History, Quotations, Russia, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What gave socialism a shot was that the hypertrophic nationalism of the first half of the twentieth century plunged the world into not just one but two world wars. Without these catastrophes, it is inconceivable that so many devotees of Marx would have come to power in the seventy years after 1917. The world wars made the case for socialism in multiple ways. First, they seemed to confirm the destructive tendencies of “imperialism, the highest form of capitalism”, in Vladimir Lenin’s words. Second, they greatly expanded the role of the state, which became the principal purchaser of goods and services in most combatant countries, creating precisely the kind of state-controlled economy that socialist theory claimed would perform better than free markets. Third, the wars acted as a great leveler, imposing very high marginal rates of taxation, wage controls, and price controls in ways that tended to reduce wealth and income disparities. Fourth, in 1917 the German government financed the Bolshevik coup in Russia that brought Lenin to power.

The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.

The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.

Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.

Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.

October 4, 2026

Mark Carney’s … complicated … relationship with America

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

On her Substack, Melanie in Saskatchewan wonders what is going on in Mark Carney’s world whenever the United States comes up. At times, you would assume he hates the US, yet the vast majority of his personal wealth is invested there. His family members live there. It’s a paradox:

AI-generated image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

I’m starting to think Mark Carney has a passionate, personal hatred of America.

And I don’t mean Donald Trump. Plenty of people hate Donald Trump. I mean America itself, or at least the enormous role America has played in Canada’s economy for generations. Because the longer I listen to Carney talk about where he wants Canada to go, the more I wonder whether Trump caused this economic divorce at all … or whether he was simply the spectacular act of infidelity Carney needed to finally file the papers.

Maybe hate is too strong. Maybe geopolitical jealousy has stages too: irritation, resentment, righteous indignation and finally whatever stage comes after, “I’d love to go out sometime, but unfortunately I’ll be washing my hair indefinitely”. Whatever stage Carney has reached, I’m increasingly convinced this is about considerably more than Donald Trump.

Because we can document Carney publicly talking about a changing world order more than fifteen years ago. How long he had been developing those ideas before putting them into speeches, I have no idea. We don’t need to invent an origin story. The public record is interesting enough.

I can’t prove Carney hates America. Maybe he loves it. Maybe there’s a Louisville Slugger sticking out of a Davos swag bag somewhere between six conference lanyards, a King Charles commemorative tea towel and a couple of those luxury Normandy butter cups that apparently require their own travel arrangements. But if Mark Carney loves America, somebody should probably tell America the relationship is still on.

He certainly never seemed troubled by American money. His disclosed investments included hundreds of companies, many of them American. And I don’t begrudge him that. If American companies offered a good return, invest away. What makes it interesting is that while his money was quite comfortable in America, Carney had already spent years publicly describing a world becoming considerably less centred on American economic power. Donald Trump didn’t inspire that. He came crashing through the front door years later, apparently oblivious to the fact that Carney had already furnished the room.

Canadians have since been handed a wonderfully tidy explanation for everything happening now. Trump returned. Trump threatened tariffs. Trump called Canada the 51st state. Trump made governor jokes. CBC, our publicly funded national broadcaster, and a Canadian media industry operating alongside various government support programs amplified every provocation until everybody knew exactly which Trumpism could send Canada through the ceiling.

He said “51st state”. Canada erupted, so he said it again. Trump noticed. The media noticed. And I have a very hard time believing Liberal strategists somehow failed to notice the political value of an issue resonating that powerfully with Canadians.

But heaven forbid an opposition MP or ordinary Canadian asks to see where our money went. Suddenly negotiations, contracts and records disappear behind confidentiality, redactions and “national security”. Apparently telling Canadians what our own government is doing requires security clearance, but advertising precisely which Trump taunts are working required something closer to a neon sign: YES, DONALD. RIGHT THERE. THAT BUTTON!

Why not circle the red button, write DO NOT PRESS across it and explain exactly what happens when he does? Because if humanity has established anything about a big red button labelled DO NOT PRESS, it’s that nobody has ever wanted to press that bastard more.

From MG 34 to MG 42: Building Hitler’s Buzzsaw – Nazi Rearmament 08

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

World War Two
Published 3 Oct 2026

The MG 34 pioneered the modern general-purpose machine gun. The MG 42 preserved that battlefield versatility while cutting manufacturing labor roughly in half and producing the terrifying sound remembered as “Hitler’s Buzzsaw”.

In this Nazi Rearmament episode, Spartacus traces the development of the MG 34 and MG 42 from clandestine German weapons programs during the 1930s through mass production and combat in World War II.

We examine how one basic weapon could accompany an infantry squad, deliver sustained long-range fire, engage low-flying aircraft, and serve inside tanks and fortifications. We also explore why the beautifully machined MG 34 became an industrial problem, and how stamped steel, roller locking, rapid barrel changes, and a cyclic rate reaching 1,500 rounds per minute transformed its successor.

But this is more than the story of two famous German machine guns. It is also a study of Nazi Germany’s war economy: technically ambitious and capable of remarkable innovation, yet ultimately unable to overcome the manpower and industrial resources of the coalition it chose to fight.

Finally, we follow the weapons beyond 1945, from the continued foreign service of the MG 34 to the MG 42’s postwar descendants, the MG 1, MG 2, and MG 3.

Which small arm should we cover next: the MP 40, FG 42, or StG 44?

Jaguar – a case study in brand suicide

Filed under: Britain, Business, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Jaguar E-type was, in my opinion, the best-looking car of the 20th century. It was all downhill from that point, sadly:

Jaguar killed itself. No villain required, no recession to blame, no supply chain disruption to hide behind. Tata Motors bought a fading but salvageable brand in 2008 for $2.3 billion and spent the next fifteen years turning it into a case study in how to destroy capital.

The rebranding campaign of late 2024 was the public execution. Jaguar dropped its leaping cat logo, fired its entire existing customer demographic via press release, and replaced a century of racing heritage with a pastel-colored advertisement featuring zero cars. The marketing team apparently decided the path to profitability ran directly through alienating the people who actually bought Jaguars. Brilliant.

The rebrand was just the visible wound. The rot started earlier. Jaguar spent years producing vehicles with reliability ratings that made Land Rover look like a Swiss watch, while charging Mercedes money for the privilege. The F-Pace, the E-Pace, the I-Pace: each one a beautiful object that dealers apologized for in advance. You bought the badge and got a subscription to your mechanic’s vacation fund.

The pivot to an all-electric lineup, announced with great fanfare in 2021, then delayed, then sort-of-delayed-again, captured everything wrong with a company led by government subsidy chasers rather than engineers. Jaguar chased EV tax credits and green virtue points instead of fixing the fundamental problem. Nobody trusted the cars.

Markets are merciless precisely because they are honest. Customers stopped buying, and no amount of rebranding or regulatory coddling reversed that verdict. Capital allocated to a brand that cannot hold a customer is capital destroyed. Tata learned this lesson expensively. You, having never bought the car, learned it for free.

The ad campaign is just a sign on the door that reads, “This company is woke trash”. The real rot lies beneath the surface. Firing the marketing agency won’t change that.

Why the Allies Lost the Battle of Gallipoli 1915

Filed under: Australia, Britain, France, History, Military, WW1 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Great War
Published 8 May 2026

On April 25, 1915 Australian, British, New Zealand and French forces landed at the mouth of the Dardanelles to capture the Gallipoli peninsular and march on Constantinople. But the Ottoman defenders, including legendary officer Mustafa Kemal, held firm and the Battle of Gallipoli would last for 7 bloody months.
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