Quotulatiousness

September 25, 2025

“Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial”

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

In Aporia, Spaceman Spiff explains the function and value of what are called “dead man’s switches” both for railway locomotives and societies:

Image from Aporia

A dead man’s brake is a safety feature found in dangerous machines such as lifts or trains. With this mechanism, a brake is always on, preventing action or movement. A conscious choice or effort must be made to override it.

On a train, a human driver must be present to depress a foot pedal that disengages the brake so the train can move at all. If he is absent the train cannot move. If he withdraws his foot while the train is in motion — if he dies, for instance — the train stops. Hence the name.

The key feature of a dead man’s brake is that it requires energy to operate. Its default zero-energy position is OFF; only with energy can it go to ON.

Wariness of strangers, xenophobia, is the default position for most human beings. This is a hardwired evolutionary response to protect us. It served us well. It requires no energy to operate. Children quickly point out people who seem different.

Intentionally elevating strangers above ourselves, xenophilia, is artificial. We must be educated to make it happen, and explicitly taught to overlook differences. It must be reinforced to remain in operation as our instincts typically push against it.

This requires energy. In parts of the world not subject to Western educational norms, they do not teach it to children. Consequently, they do not usually adopt policies like mass immigration or asymmetric multiculturalism.

It is worth noting that xenophobia denotes a wariness of strangers, not hatred or disdain of them. In practice, our working assumption is people different from us may be a threat, and our actions should reflect this until proven otherwise.

Xenophobia is not the racial animosity the propaganda wishes us to believe, such as harming others based on visible differences like skin colour. Such extreme views are in fact rare. The underlying drive of xenophobia is caution, not aggression. Xenophilia attempts to ignore this sensible restraint, which is why it often fails without external pressure.

These instincts are deeply embedded within us because a cautious approach is a strong foundation upon which to preserve our lives and our cultures. It is the reason we have a nation and a culture in the first place.

Xenophilia, then, is a dead man’s brake. It requires energy applied to something that would not typically occur in nature. It makes us ignore differences in order to get along. Or so the theory goes.

Update, 26 September: 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.

Streaming subscriptions rising far faster than official inflation rate

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

I haven’t been a regular TV watcher for a long time, but I still watch the Minnesota Vikings meaning that I need to pay for a streaming service … which has definitely been going up every year at a significantly higher-than-inflation rate. At The Honest Broker, Ted Gioia shows that this is now a very common thing indeed:

It’s not every day that I get an email from Apple. But yesterday the Cupertino leviathan reached out to me.

Can you guess why? Do they have some cool new gadget that will make my life better? Are they opening an Apple Store in my neighborhood? Does Tim Cook want to take me out to dinner?

None of the above. Apple is raising my subscription price for Apple TV by a whopping 30%.

Apple is not alone. The very next day, Disney announced a similar move.

This is the fourth straight year that Disney+ has forced a price increase on viewers. The ad-free subscription price has almost tripled in just six years. During that same period, Disney’s movies have gone from bad to worse — but you pay more to stream them.

The company is truly tapping into its inner Scrooge McDuck. Inflation is just 3% now (according to official, if somewhat dubious, sources). But the ad-free subscription to Disney+ was jacked up 14% last year and is now getting another 19% boost.

Take a look at the larger picture, via this chart from Daniel Parris of Stat Significant (a friend of The Honest Broker). This stuff is reaching greed-is-good levels of abuse.

Meanwhile, the number of scripted shows commissioned by these streamers has dropped significantly. So the audience is asked to pay more for less.

David Friedman on markets, governments and whether we need either?

Filed under: Economics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adam Smith Institute
Published 16 May 2025

​When markets go awry, who is to blame? Some blame greedy profiteers, whilst others blame governments for tinkering with incentives and supply chains. Where does the truth lie? And what role should the government play when markets go wrong?

​​​Professor David Friedman is a physicist, leading free-market economist and Professor Emeritus of law at Santa Clara University. The son of Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, David has authored many textbooks on free-market and libertarian theory. In 1973, he published The Machinery of Freedom, which has been ranked by Liberty magazine as one of the “Top Ten Best Libertarian Books” of all time.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 – Intro
1:00 – What is a market failure?
2:44 – Restaurant analogy
4:15 – Negative externalities
5:00 – Positive externalities
5:50 – Malls
6:55 – Radio
7:40 – Price System
8:48 – Why most economists aren’t libertarians?
9:26 – Government action is a political market
12:30 – Secure property rights for future benefits
15:27 – Stalin
16:15 – Military examples
18:20 – Teaching
19:47 – Desert example
20:55 – Conclusion
22:19 – End

QotD: The Clinton years

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

… in a weird way I feel bad for the young folks who never got a chance to experience life under Bill Clinton. Back then, we — as a society — still acknowledged that there was such a thing as “the truth”. You know, statements about the world that actually correspond to the world in a meaningful and systematic way. Watching Bill Clinton lie was great practice. You young folks are used to everyone, everywhere, in power being an utter sociopath, but it was a novelty back then.

Bill Clinton, some wag observed, would rather climb to the top of Mt. Everest to lie to you than stand still and tell you the truth. He lied when it was to his advantage, and he lied when it was to his very obvious disadvantage. He lied when there was absolutely no point to lying — indeed, like climbing Mt. Everest, when it took enormous effort and real planning to lie. He lied just for the fun of it, and if you saw him do it enough, you realized what that little smirk on his greasy, chicken-fried mug actually was: Orgasm. Bill Clinton got off on lying. That’s why he did it. Every press conference the man ever did was frottage.

Severian, “Party like it’s 1999”, First Questions, 2022-01-13.

September 24, 2025

The Korean War Week 66: The Hell of Heartbreak Ridge – September 23, 1951

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

The Korean War by Indy Neidell
Published 23 Sep 2025

The Korean War reaches one of its bloodiest battles as UN forces clash with North Korean defenders on Heartbreak Ridge. The US 2nd Division suffers heavy losses, with entire companies wiped out to the last man. At the same time, the Marines introduce a revolutionary new tactic in modern warfare — transporting troops via helicopter right to the front lines during battle. Meanwhile, UN Commander Matt Ridgway refuses to resume peace talks in Kaesong, sparking further tension with the Communist side. As the battle rages, the question remains: can there be peace in Korea, or only more heartbreak?

Chapters
00:00 Hook
00:43 Recap
01:14 Heartbreak Ridge
04:02 To The Last Man
06:06 What Ridgway Wants
08:00 Effects of the Treaty
10:13 New Strategy
11:29 Supply by Helicopter
12:31 Summary
12:45 Conclusion
15:34 Call to Action
(more…)

It won’t work – the minister responsible knows it, but they’re going ahead with it anyway

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The “it” in the headline is the federal government’s gun confiscation program, which they claim will reduce crime but they already know it won’t do any such thing. What it will do is take away from literally the most law-abiding, responsible citizens their legally purchased property and leave illegal guns in the hands of criminals … at an ever-increasing estimated cost to the taxpayer. In The Line, Matt Gurney covers the details:

The federal gun confiscation program […] is illogical. It won’t save lives or make the public safer. The federal government doesn’t really even expect it to work, and is only going ahead with it because they’ve been stuck with a dumb proposal the Trudeau government made almost five years ago. If they could do it all over again, they wouldn’t, but they feel like they’ve blocked themselves in and have no choice but to proceed so that they don’t anger part of their electoral coalition, mainly voters in Quebec.

That might sound like a blistering criticism of the program, the kind of thing you’ve read in any number of my columns before. It’s actually what the public safety minister thinks about it. He just didn’t know he was being tape recorded when he said so. In a 20-minute conversation Gary Anandasangaree had with a firearms owner he rents a home to, which was recorded and then leaked, the minister says all of the above things. (He has also confirmed the recording is legitimate.)

Awkward for the minister, clearly, but I actually give him credit. The minister’s comments on tape are a confession, and an admission of defeat. They’re also, hands down, the most honest thing a Liberal government official has said on the gun control file in five years. Given that the minister responsible is freely telling people the program is a bad idea he’s stuck with and that won’t work, a sensible government would probably take this opportunity to walk away from the program.

Unfortunately, that’s not what this PM has chosen. It’s full speed ahead with an idea so bad Anandasangaree wishes he’d never been saddled with it.

Let’s talk about what this program is for a second. And forgive me, there’s quite a bit of history here. During Justin Trudeau’s first term, his only majority, his government had proposed a series of fairly moderate changes to the gun control laws they had inherited from Stephen Harper. As I’ve written often since, the proposals were a mixed bag. Some were okay. Some were bad. But they more or less left the well-functioning Canadian gun control system intact. They nibbled around the edges enough so that they could tell their voters that they had gotten tougher. But they generally didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken.

But then politics got in the way, as it always does. Trudeau lost his majority in 2019 and became ever-more dependent on voter efficiency and wedge issues. And then in 2020, there was a horrible massacre in Nova Scotia. That catastrophe had nothing to do with our gun control laws; the weapons used were brought in illegally from the United States, as is typical of guns used in gun crime. But the Trudeau government seized on the opportunity — never waste a crisis, right? — to announce that they were “banning” “assault rifles”.

A lot of quotes above. So let me explain. First of all, there really wasn’t much of a ban. Anyone who owned one of the newly banned rifles was allowed to keep them. And as for assault rifles, actual assault rifles — rifle-calibre weapons that use high-capacity detachable magazines and can fire in fully automatic mode — have been banned in Canada for decades. This isn’t a problem that we actually had. And the government tacitly admitted as much when they began fudging the words they used to describe them. In acknowledgement that there were no actual assault weapons to ban, they started talking about assault-style weapons.

“Style” is a tell. You wouldn’t take medicine-style pills, or munch on a food-style snack. Because you’d know better. Trudeau et al knew better. It didn’t stop them. They needed something to announce, and by God, they were going to announce it!

And as we’ve noted several times, the Trudeau government got addicted to the media high of making big showy announcements. So they started doing repeat announcements over a period of time, and thanks to the spinelessness of Canadian legacy media even before Trudeau started directly subsidizing them, the media sugar high got repeated as well. It didn’t take long for the lesson to be learned that making an announcement was cheaper than doing the thing that was announced, and we quickly transitioned to a world where it was the announcement that mattered, not the thing.

At Junk Economics, Bryan Moir sums up the stupidity:

You want blunt? Fine. Here it is:

Listen: politics is kabuki theater and promises are props. Here we have a government rolling out a nationwide confiscation-style buyback and calling it “voluntary” — which is like calling income tax “optional” if you want to be arrested. The minister tells citizens, in public, “it’s voluntary”, then admits in private he’ll criminalize non-compliance, will “bail you out” if it goes that far, and says the whole exercise exists because the party must keep the promise and because the Quebec caucus wants to show muscle. That’s not statesmanship. That’s PR with a warrant.

They lecture you about being “tough on guns” while refusing to be tough on the people who actually bring violence into our streets. The minister himself says if he could do it over he’d target illegal guns and put criminals in jail — not law-abiding owners. Translation: the policy is ideologically driven and politically performative, not strategically intelligent. You don’t cure gang violence — which the cops tell you comes from illegal trafficking and cross-border smuggling — by borrowing billions to buy back legally purchased rifles. That’s like throwing sandbags into a burning house and patting yourself on the back for “doing something”.

And then there’s the logistics and the cost — the ugly part they don’t want on camera. The federal pot is capped at about $742 million and the program is rolled out in fits and starts. Major police forces are already saying “no thanks”, which means the feds must either stand down, contract a patchwork of municipal services, or try to outsource enforcement. Any of those choices blows up the promise in different ways: it becomes toothless, it becomes wildly more expensive, or it becomes a federal-provincial fight that will make the Notwithstanding clause dust-ups look like backyard squabbles. Pick your disaster.

Remember the math: a capped pool of cash plus a growing list of banned models (hundreds, then thousands) equals many owners getting nothing while the bureaucracy eats up the rest on administration, contracts, security, staffing, and political “bribes” (a nicer word for handouts to get agencies to play ball). If the fund runs out — and the minister openly says “it’s capped; when it’s gone, it’s gone” — you’ll have a bunch of people stripped of legal property, out of pocket, and the state triumphant only in optics. That’s confiscation without fair market compensation; it reads like policy designed by accountants and sold by televangelists.

Worst of all: while Ottawa gamely auctions off the idea of virtue, or was that “Canadian values”, real problems pile up. Fire seasons rage, hospitals are full, kids wait for surgeries, food banks are overwhelmed and the cost of living keeps rising— and Mark and Gary are borrowing money to offer coupons for now-illegal guns. If you wanted a textbook case of political misallocation, this is it: symbolic policy delivered with symbolic money so the party can say it kept a promise, while the public pays the bill and crime networks keep smuggling.

On the gun confiscation program in particular, thank goodness you can always depend on social media to find the funny side of any issue:

Zardoz: A Technocratic Parody

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 30 Jun 2023

After another viewing, I now think of Zardoz as an unintentional parody of the technocratic mindset that was congealing in the 1970s. It’s a strange film, a sometimes tedious film, but it’s worth a look if only because there’s nothing else quite like Zardoz.

I keep saying “Immortals” when I mean “Eternals” and I had to recut this one a bit due to some semi-random copyright issues so I apologize for any perceptible jank.

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QotD: The political divisions of humanity

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Liberty, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the various divisions between human beings — communists vs. fascists vs. loyal American patriots — we have lived with all our lives are less important, less fundamental, than the basic one that Heinlein identified: “The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire”. Call the first group authoritarians or feudalists and the second, generic libertarians.

The first time, in the history of Western Civilization, that this became an issue, was the Renaissance/Reformation. Information suddenly came flooding, unbidden, into Europe, from North Africa, through Galileo’s telescope, out of Gutenberg’s printing press, and a dozen other undesirable, unlicensed, and deplorable sources. It must have been a nightmare for the aristocrats who considered themselves to be in charge, the kings and barons and bishops and bullies. They struggled in vain to get it back under control. They got the Church to condemn it. They intimidated and tortured its emissaries when they could. They invented universities to get a handle on it, a collar around its neck, but it was a lost cause. In just a couple of centuries (compared to the previous 500 generations), people — ordinary people; who the hell did they think they were? — came to know too much for the good of Authority.

And they soon proved it, in the American Revolution, which told 10,000 years of kings to go to hell, and the French Revolution, which cut to the chase and removed their overly-pampered heads. I have actually seen the blade. Many other revolutions followed, worldwide, and people began to learn, slowly and awkwardly, to live their own lives. The one good thing to come out of the brutal and deceitful Russian Revolution was the ultimately individualistic philosophy of refugee Ayn Rand.

Otherwise, it was a naked attempt by the authoritarians, the feudalists, to regain control of the masses that the Czar had clumsily let slip through his overly-manicured fingers. Whenever human beings have clashed over whether their lives should be controlled by others or not, it has almost certainly been a matter of who gets to be the next king, baron, bishop, commissar, etc., a battle between liberated entities and those who would restore feudalism.

L. Neil Smith, “The Deep State”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-04-14.

September 23, 2025

Voters didn’t have to pay attention, but now they really, really should

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Tristin Hopper posted the best explanations I’ve seen for why Canada is in the state it’s in:

Canadians took it for granted that, no matter which party was in government, the country would continue to be stable, predictable, and competent. That’s clearly wrong today, yet the voters haven’t really accepted the new situation yet. Until they start paying attention, things may not improve.

It’s not just Canada, of course, but Canada is further down the road to ruin and thanks to the governments’ conscious actions, it will probably take longer to recover (and I don’t see a Canadian Javier Milei on the horizon, more’s the pity).

At The Freeman, Will Ogilvie Vega de Seoane discusses a related issue with most forms of representative government:

We are stupid. There, I said it. I feel much better now — like I’ve finally opened up in group therapy. PhDs won’t fix it, nor will subscriptions to all the best outlets. As individuals, we simply do not have the capacity to decide what is best in public life. As voters, we don’t usually care what our representatives are up to, nor do we have the faintest idea what the best policy on agriculture, artificial intelligence, or healthcare should look like — and that’s on a good day. But we do think we know. Deep down we think we are sovereign, that democracy is “all of us”, as though the government were some noble embodiment of “the people” rather than just another collection of organized persons with private agendas.

“Aristeides and the citizens” from Plutarch’s lives for boys and girls (1900).

Plutarch tells a story that I have always found marvelous. It’s about Aristeides “the Just”, one of Athens’s heroes in the Persian Wars. The Athenians, weary of kings and tyrants, invented ostracism — a mechanism to expel for ten years any citizen who got too powerful. Each voter would scratch a name onto a shard of pottery, and if more than 6,000 shards had the same name on them, the man was politely asked to take a decade-long sabbatical. Today we’d probably call it “a career break for the common good”.

Anyway, one day a farmer approached Aristeides himself — without realizing who he was — and asked him to write the name “Aristeides” on his shard. Surprised, Aristeides asked if he had ever harmed him. “No,” said the farmer, “nor do I know him by sight. But I am tired of always hearing him called ‘the Just’.” Aristeides, being annoyingly noble, wrote down his own name and handed the shard back. Later, as he left the city in exile, he prayed the opposite prayer of Achilles: that no crisis should come which would force the Athenians to remember him. On LinkedIn, Aristeides might have written: “Currently on a ten-year sabbatical generously sponsored by the people of Athens. Seeking new challenges outside the Attic peninsula #OpenToWork.”

This, in miniature, is how people vote. Not with knowledge, or vision, or even vague coherence — but out of envy, spite, boredom, or some other glorious irrationality. The Athenians had shards; we have hashtags. Instead of ostracism by pottery, we have ostracism by X: one bad joke, one leaked email, and the digital mob sends you packing. Today in Britain, people can even be jailed for their comments on social media. So much for parrhêsia, that old Athenian virtue of speaking frankly to power. We’ve managed to turn it into a crime — and worse, the canceling mob thinks it’s “speaking truth to power” when in fact it is obedience dressed as rebellion.

Modern voters aren’t any better. Some vote because the candidate owns a cute dog. Others because the candidate is endorsed by Taylor Swift. Entire campaigns have been won on promises of free cable, or by a politician smiling the right way on TikTok. In Spain, we even coined a term for it: the Charo. A Charo is usually an old lady with pink hair who parrots whatever our president says. Charos cannot resist the presidential smile. Even when the president contradicts himself, as he normally does, doing the exact opposite of what he promised, they just blush and blink as if to say: “Oh, Pedro, always misbehaving — we love you all the more for it.” They pamper their charming president and dismiss any criticism as fascist slander. Welcome to the Charocracy.

That’s a pitch-perfect description of the typical Liberal voter in Canada. Mark Carney’s Canada is clearly a maple-flavoured Charocracy.

Learn EVERYTHING from Home Depot wood

Filed under: Tools, Woodworking — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Rex Krueger
Published 22 Sept 2025

“[A]nyone who tries to tell you ‘Antifa is just an idea’ is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR uses the methods of counter-terror analysis:

None of Antifa’s public propaganda channels have attempted to deny that they were behind the assassination of Charlie Kirk. This is a fact of considerable significance, which I will now use the methods of counter-terror analysis to examine.

Antifa’s distributed structure makes it impossible for any one chapter or cell to know what another subgroup didn’t do.

It is quite possible that Tyler Robinson is a true stochastic terrorist, inspired and motivated by Antifa propaganda and considering himself part of Antifa but without planning or logistical support from others in the organization. I give this about 60% probability.

The fact that Robinson had peers on Discord with apparent foreknowledge of the assassination attempt does not falsify this possibility. Even if they did assist with the assassination, their connections to Antifa might be equally deniable, equally just a matter of their states of mind.

The assassination was in complete accordance with Antifa doctrine and propaganda. Direct action against “fascist” targets, ranging from low level intimidation up to political killings and organized attacks on government facilities, is exactly what Antifa is organized to do.

Thus, with over 90% probability, other members and aboveground allies of Antifa regard the operation as a (tactically) successful Antifa op, whether or not they had any foreknowledge of it and whether or not Robinson was stochastic.

The ones who aren’t fanatics or idiots have probably figured out by now that the assassination was a serious strategic blunder. You might expect that they would be scrambling to deny that Antifa had anything to do with Kirk’s death.

Some of Antifa’s aboveground allies [are] in fact doing this; the dominant form of denial by Democratic politicians and activists is to deny that Antifa even exists as more than an idea.

But Antifa itself has not done this, and I predict very confidently (95%) that it will not. The real reason it won’t has nothing to do with its structural inability to know that no member of Antifa was involved.

To understand why this is, you need to grasp what Antifa is for. Not its ultimate purpose, which is to foment a violent revolution that will enable Communists or Left-Anarchists to seize power, but the way it operationalizes that goal in practice.

The purpose of Antifa direct action is to shape the political environment through terror. Its goal is to intimidate its opponents into paralysis — to raise the costs of their speech and public action by predictably opposing it with violence.

I am not speculating about this, because if you read Antifa’s propaganda and organizing materials it will tell you exactly this.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is perfectly accordant with Antifa doctrine. Antifa cannot deny this, nor disown Tyler Robinson even in the likely event that he is only stochastically connected to the organization, because … what use is a terror network that disavows intimidation of its opponents?

Antifa’s goals require it to be a credible threat to “fascists”. If it denied that it had anything to do with killing Charlie Kirk, it would demotivate its own foot soldiers and decrease its usefulness to its aboveground allies.

Antifa needs to exist in a kind of mixed state — simultaneously deeply threatening to its enemies but deniable by many of its allies in the Democratic Party, journalism, and academia.

It is also, however, important that none of its aboveground allies can actually believe their own denials. Otherwise Antifa, perceived as useless, would risk losing the funding and political cover that has until now allowed it to operate with some degree of impunity.

You may therefore safely assume that anyone who tries to tell you “Antifa is just an idea” is not merely deluded, but consciously and deliberately lying.

At Woke Watch Canada, C.C. Harvey discusses the “red thread of Antifa subversion” over the last ten or so years:

Establishment leaders now even cuddle up with extremists who do not hide their violently subversive orientation. When the ENTIRE establishment took a knee for for the (self-identified) queer, Marxist, violently revolutionary group BLM during the 2020 riots, the subjugation of the professional classes was complete. We stopped being allowed to object to our institutions becoming vehicles for communist revolution. We were called racists and far right extremists and conspiracy theorists for even thinking bad thoughts about BLM and the woke communist revolution, and could be punished for talking to friends about it in group chats. We all became ideological captives of neoMarxist revolutionaries.

The DEI industry exploded, and although it is losing steam in the USA, it still functions as a modern Red Guard policing Canadian discourse and behaviour. If we’re being honest, we will admit that even most conservative politicians here were cowed. The entire establishment worked together to erect a new politburo and stasi throughout Canada and the USA, and far beyond.

Republicans are dismantling the neoMarxist structures that have been erected in America, and this is of course being disingenuously characterized by leftists as proof that Trump is fascist and authoritarian. BLM has largely imploded with corruption and infighting, but Antifa appears to have grown even stronger, especially its queer contingent, and their membership is agitating heavily as they see the Trump administration tearing down what they built.

Antifa is not just a gang of idealistic rabble-rousers in black hoodies rebelling against authority. It is the heir of a century-long Marxist project seeking massive, sweeping revolution, and advancing their goals via inversions: turning truth into lies, sin into virtue, desecration into liberation. From the beginning, Antifascist communists were passionately committed to revolution in all areas of human life and society.

It is not by coincidence that antifa and the LGBTQIA+ are entwined. Antifa have always been committed to sexual revolution — crossing sexual boundaries, normalizing deviance, dissolving the family.

Even in earliest iterations, the antifascists were dangerously radical in sexual ideology and policy: the historical record shows they handed children to paraphilic predators in the name of antifascist sexual liberation as early as postwar Germany. That anti-family, fetishistic spirit runs straight through antifascist history and is on full display in today’s TQ+ movement. TQ+ is conjoined with Antifa (Trantifa, if you will) to actively promote hypersexualization, the destabilizing of sex identity and family, and the mainstreaming of disorder and perversion.

Marx and Engels attacked the family as a “bourgeois prison”. Later Marxists carried this out through radical experiments in sex and pedagogy, all under the banner of liberation. Today’s gender and queer theorists are majority Marxists.

Marxists deal in inversions, so indoctrination presented as education, perversion rebranded as liberation, abuse disguised as compassion, self-mutilation celebrated as authentic selfhood. Today, Antifa-aligned “Queer Resistance” brigades advance sexual inversions and corruptions that are just as damaging as antifascists of bygone eras: in postwar Germany, the antifascist Kentler experiment assigned orphan boys to be raised by wealthy pedophiles. Today, an uncomfortable number of LGBTQIA+ activists have been caught adopting babies and toddlers to abuse, raping their own children, or sexually assaulting minors. As a result of our establishment embracing the far left revolutionary zeitgeist and sacralizing “marginalized” identities, safeguarding has been sacrificed on the altar of LGBTQIA+ identitarianism.

Update, 25 September: 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.

Beretta Model 1934: Italy’s Unassuming Workhorse Service Pistol

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

Forgotten Weapons
Published 16 May 2025

The Beretta Model 34 was basically the final iteration of a design by Tullio Marengoni that began all the way back in 1915. That pistol was updated in the early 1920s, and that one was updated in 1931. The Model 1931 was converted to .380 ACP (aka 9mm Short) as the Model 1932, which became the Model 1934 with the addition of a hammer half-cock notch and steel grip panel backing. Police and military contracts began in 1935, with the Italian Army formally adopting it in 1936 and purchasing nearly 400,000 of them by 1940. It would ultimately see service with basically all the armed elements of the Italian military and civil security services as well as foreign nations including Germany, Romania, and Finland. As a souvenir for British or American troops, the Model 1934 was also a prized piece.

Essentially, the Model 1934 is compact, simple, durable, and reliable. It is an excellent military pistol; easy to carry unobtrusively but dependable when called upon. After World War Two it stayed in production until 1980, despite introduction of many other more modern options by Beretta. Today a bunch of the pistols have become available on the US collector’s market. Thanks to Royal Tiger Imports for sending this example for me to film!

Beretta Model 1934 serial numbers and dates (source: “1915-1985 Settant’ Anni di Pistole Beretta“):
1934 – 1942 – from about 500073 to 999996
1934 – 1942 – from 1 to about 40000
1943 – 1945 – from F00001 to F99997
1943 – 1945 – from G00001 to G57486
1943 – 1945 – from 0001AA to 9997AA
1943 – 1945 – from 0001BB to 9971BB
1946 – 1949 – from C00001 to C99998
1949 – 1954 – from D00001 to D99999
1954 – 1967 – from E00001 to E95760
1967 – 1973 – from F50001 to F61693
1970 – 1975 – from G00007 to G49620
1972 – 1974 – from H00001 to H25000
1971 – 1980 – from T 1 to T 10217

Other pistols in the Beretta development series:
Modle 1915: • Beretta 1915: the First of the Berett…
Model 1923: • Beretta Model 1923
Model 1931: • Beretta Model 1931
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QotD: “Bye, Phoenicia”

Filed under: Africa, Books, History, Middle East, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And now, as I promised, I’ll return to the Phoenicians, who are among Cline’s “winners” of the post-Collapse world. When things fell apart, their city-states — Sidon, Tyre, Byblos and all the rest — were just another motley collection of Canaanite settlements along the coast of what is now Lebanon. Two hundred years later, they were the centers of an enormous commercial and information network that spread across the entire Mediterranean world (and perhaps beyond). This makes them more than just resilient, Cline argues: they were actually antifragile, thriving in the chaos that followed the destruction of many of their powerful neighbors. (Can you even imagine how happy this chapter makes Nassim Taleb? Of course he blurbed the book.)

The long-distance trade of the Bronze Age had been dominated by large state actors. The ships were probably built and crewed by men from the Levantine coast, but the cargo was purchased and shipped by local representatives of the Great (and lesser) Powers of the age: luxury goods were an integral part of high-level diplomacy, so most trade was a virtual monopoly centrally directed from the palaces. When these polities were weakened (or in some dramatic cases like Ugarit completely destroyed) in the Collapse, they left behind a vacuum that independent Phoenician traders, operating without centralized control and serving only profit rather than the demands of empire, rapidly filled.

By the tenth century BC, the Phoenicians were importing silver from Spain, copper from Cyprus and Sardinia, and cinnamon from southeast Asia. They exported timber (the much-vaunted “Cedars of Lebanon”)1 and the valuable purple dye extracted from the murex sea snail, as well as a wide variety of finished luxury and quotidian goods they produced at home from raw materials obtained abroad. They founded colonies throughout the Mediterranean. And perhaps most importantly for the future of “the West”, they introduced the alphabet,2 which enabled the return of literacy to Greece and its far wider adoption than had ever been possible with Linear B.3

By the time the ascendant Neo-Assyrians began to encroach on their territory, the Phoenician city-states were so rich and economically well-connected that they were more valuable as semi-autonomous tributaries and middlemen than as conquered subjects. In fact, it was the Assyrian demands for metal (especially silver) that drove Phoenician colonization in the western Mediterranean: they founded Cadiz (Phoenician Gadir) to access the rich silver mines in the Spanish interior, as well as dozens of other smaller entrepôts along the sailing routes to and from the Levantine coast. Eventually they removed so much silver from Spanish mountains that its value in Assyria collapsed, inflated away by oversupply, just like Peruvian silver would destabilize the Spanish economy two thousand years later — but with the roles flipped. I enjoy these echoes.

It’s worth pointing out here that Phoenicians never called themselves Phoenicians: it’s a Greek word, deriving from a Mycenaean era (e.g., pre-Collapse) term for purple dye. In fact, they didn’t even have a term that clearly limned what the Greeks meant by “Phoenician” (essentially, “Levantine traders with really good ships who speak a related set of Semitic languages”). Instead, they sometimes referred to themselves more narrowly by reference to their native cities (Sidonian, Tyrian, Byblian, etc.) and other times more broadly as “Canaanite”, because of the cultural heritage they shared with the other survivors of Bronze Age Canaan. But even if they never employed it themselves, “Phoenician” is a terribly useful word, because these particular city-states had a lot in common with one another but diverged sharply from their Canaanite kin to both north and south.

Bronze Age Canaan had been relatively culturally homogenous, though the cities in the north came into the Hittites’ sphere of influence and those in the south the Egyptians’. After the Collapse, though, the city-states of northern Canaan (modern Syria), like their Neo-Hittite neighbors, seem to have continued more or less as they had been. Those in southern Canaan were not so lucky: weakened by the invading Sea Peoples and the withdrawal of Egyptian hegemony, the southern Canaanites were displaced by (or assimilated to) the new Semitic kingdoms in the region, including Israel, Judah, Edom, and Ammon. And the central Canaanites became the Phoenicians: master sailors and traders, they had seized their opportunity and so thoroughly transformed themselves that we join the Greeks in identifying them by a new name.

Most of the larger cities of the central Levant are buried beneath their modern equivalents, and Lebanon has not been a particularly salubrious place to excavate for the last few decades, so it’s hard to say a great deal about Phoenician continuity with their Bronze Age ancestors. There was obviously some, certainly genealogically but also linguistically and in terms of material culture. However, we also know that their lifestyles changed dramatically as their economic reach expanded and their cities became centers not only of exchange but of manufacturing. We know their commercial firms were organized around extended families, and that they began to settle foreign lands both as colonists in their own new cities and elsewhere as resident merchants with their own dedicated enclaves. And we know that as their city-states grew more powerful, they increasingly directed worship away from the traditional Canaanite pantheon, led by El, and towards the tutelary deity of each individual city. (The story that King Hiram of Tyre actually tore down the temples of El and Baal to make room for a magnificent new temple of his patron, Melqart,4 is probably an exaggeration, but points to the scale of the break with the past.)5

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: After 1177 B.C., by Eric H. Cline”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-07-08.

  1. For a very funny story about an Iron Age Egyptian attempt to buy some, which I simply could not fit into this review, see the “Story of Wenamun“. Bonus points for imagining how it would have played out under the New Kingdom.
  2. Okay, the Phoenician “alphabet” is actually an abjad — it contains no symbols for vowels — but the Greeks quickly added those.
  3. It is much, much easier to learn to write with an alphabet than with a logosyllabic system like Linear B or cuneiform.
  4. Melqart is also the patron of the Tyrian colony of Carthage, and his name contributes one element to that of Hamilcar Barca. The –bal in Hannibal, Hasdrubal, etc., is of course from Baal.
  5. Cline doesn’t give a ton of detail on Phoenician culture; in this section I am also drawing heavily on the opening chapter of Richard Miles’s Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilization, which sentiment I fully endorse even though I haven’t finished the book yet.

September 22, 2025

Materially well-off but downwardly mobile

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

Rob Henderson considers the plight of an entire generation of kids raised in privilege, but economically incapable of improving or even barely maintaining their material condition … the downwardly mobile children of wealthy parents:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.

According to The Pew Charitable Trusts, fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.

Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke, argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem — the petty disappointments of a small slice of America — but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.

To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.

Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages — or perhaps the right word is privileges — it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.

Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory”. The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.

Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same — raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.

What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long recognized this dynamic: Satisfaction depends less on objective conditions than on whether outcomes match or exceed expectations. And today, those expectations are far from being met.

Two years before Girls ended, sociologist Lauren Rivera, in her book Pedigree, found that graduates of lesser-ranked colleges who landed jobs at elite firms were far happier than Harvard and Stanford graduates who landed the same jobs. The reason was simple: Those jobs exceeded the expectations of the former, while for the latter they fell short. The higher the expectation, the sharper the disappointment. The harsh reality, then, is that privilege itself can encourage feelings of decline. When you’re born to — and surrounded by — overachievers, even respectable achievements can feel second-rate.

In a 2018 study, Duke sociologist Jessi Streib explored why many middle-class kids falter in school and work. Her finding was counterintuitive: Entitlement often dragged them down.

It’s not too hard to see why. Success in school requires showing up, meeting deadlines, and tolerating authority. Success at work requires completing projects on time, absorbing criticism, and cooperating with colleagues. Yet the downwardly mobile, Streib found, were often convinced such requirements were beneath them. Their grandiosity and defiance hastened their slide.

Elite overproduction is real, and has real world ramifications …

Dien Bien Phu: The Battle that Ended French Indochina – W2W 45

Filed under: Asia, France, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 21 Sept 2025

The First Indochina War reaches its climax at Dien Bien Phu. In late 1953 the French parachute into the valley, build a fortress under Christian de Castries, and plan to smash the Viet Minh with artillery and air power. Võ Nguyên Giáp answers with a siege: anti-air guns on the surrounding hills, trenches creeping forward, and relentless assaults on strongpoints Beatrice, Gabrielle, and Isabelle.

After weeks of bombardment and failed resupply, the fortress collapses in May 1954. At Geneva, the great powers draw the ceasefire lines: Vietnam is divided (North–South), and the Indochina War ends.

#DienBienPhu #IndochinaWar #Vietnam #ColdWar #Geneva1954 #VoNguyenGiap #FrenchIndochina
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