Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 22 Apr 2025Ground beef in a delicious tomato-based sauce on a hamburger bun, part of a classic 90s American school lunch
City/Region: United States of America
Time Period: 1988Today we know sloppy joes as a saucy ground beef sandwich, but the term sloppy joe has referred to many things over the years. A sloppy joe could be other kinds of sandwiches, a nickname for a messy friend, or women’s fashion from the 1940s and 50s that included pants and looser fitting styles.
For me, though, it is this style of sandwich. Really, it is this version of this sandwich. Sloppy joes were a larger part of my adolescent diet than was healthy, and these taste exactly like the ones I remember from middle school.
Be sure to get the cheapest hamburger buns possible to authentically recreate this nostalgic lunchtime favorite.
Sloppy Joe on a Roll (50 servings)
Raw ground beef (no more than 24% fat) … 17 lb 4 oz
Dehydrated onions … 2 1/4 oz … 2/3 cup
OR Fresh onions, chopped … 1 lb 2 oz … 3 cups
Garlic powder … 2 Tbsp
Tomato paste … 3 lb 8 oz … 1/2 No. 10 can
Catsup … 3 lb 9 oz … 1/2 No. 10 can
Water … 2 qt 3 1/2 cups
Vinegar … 2 1/4 cups
Dry mustard … 1/4 cup
Black pepper … 2 tsp
Brown sugar, packed … 5 1/2 oz … 3/4 cup
Hamburger rolls…100
— Quantity Recipes for School Food Service by the United States Department of Agriculture, 1988
September 26, 2025
School Cafeteria Sloppy Joe from the 1980s & ’90s
September 18, 2025
Stop calling it “Turtle Island”
At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky strenuously objects to calling North America “Turtle Island” and all the other woke shibboleths of the modern progressive cant:
As another school year rolls out, we can hope a more honest and realistic portrait of Canadian history will start to take shape in our schools. Students have been brainwashed into believing that Canada was a racist state bent on the extermination of Indigenous people, who were peaceful and wise, living in harmony with nature and each other. But reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is only possible if we base policy and action on the truth, not fairy tales, hearsay, anecdotes, or ideologies. We need facts, evidence, and reasoned debate. A good start would be for people to stop referring to North America as “Turtle Island”.
Calling it that is essentially to call the current geopolitical organization of the world invalid. If Canada, the United States, and other Western countries are in fact illegitimate, then that means national and international laws are also null and void. So, unless you are the direct descendent of an aboriginal person who was alive before first contact with Europeans, you are just a guest here — a second-class citizen at best. Non-Indigenous Canadians will simply never accept that. Nor should they.
In any case, “Turtle Island” is a nonsensical name on several levels. Firstly, North America is a continent, not an island. It is connected to South America by the Isthmus of Panama, which means it is not even surrounded by water. In any case an island is defined as a land mass surrounded by water that is part of a tectonic plate such as Greenland which is part of the North American Plate, thus is not a continent.
Then there is the fact that Indigenous North Americans were oblivious to the geography of the vast continent on which they lived. Like people everywhere in the distant past, they only knew the area they lived in, which could be substantial in the case of nomads, but was still a tiny fraction of North America’s 20+ million square kilometers. Of course, they knew nothing about the geography of the world with its 7 continents and 5 oceans.
Most importantly, the Turtle Island creation story is a myth believed by a particular cultural group. There is nothing wrong with believing in myths: I personally believe in the myth of human rights, as most Canadians do (pre-contact Indigenous people certainly did not). Myths are powerful: Our common belief in human rights has helped to make the Western world contain the safest and most prosperous societies ever. But when our institutions subscribe to myths not shared by the majority of Canadians, they are choosing to elevate one culture’s belief system above all others.
In the past, the Christian religion was regarded as the one true religion in Canada by most people, and the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people were often denigrated as primitive superstition. But elevating Indigenous spirituality in our secularized 21st century world by treating it as a knowledge acquisition system equivalent to (or superior to) the scientific method is an attempt to correct for that past ethnocentrism. This is Critical Theory in action: It always strives to alleviate past wrongs with present wrongs, a formula for social disaster if ever there was one.
September 11, 2025
The Archbishop of York misunderstands a recent child poverty report
Tim Worstall knows that it’s unrealistic to expect a prelate of the Church of England to believe in anything, but in this case His Grace Stephen Cottrell, the Most Reverend and Right Honourable Archbishop of York appears to believe that child poverty in Britain is a very serious problem:
His Grace Stephen Cottrell, Archbishop of York since July, 2020.
Photo 2014 via Wikipedia Commons.
So we’ve the Archbishop of York here telling us all how it should be. Of course, given that that prelacy is Church of England he doesn’t actually believe anything, of course not. But he does roll out what he considers to be facts. Which, sadly, are not.
With all children across the UK back in school as of this week, I am reminded that almost one in three are in poverty. That statistic is shocking enough – but behind every number is a child, and what this statistic means is children arriving at school hungry, living in insecure housing, and missing out on the activities that help them thrive.
Well, no. His near one in three comes from this JRF report. Which is not measuring poverty at all. It’s measuring inequality — the number of people living in a household on less than 60% of median household income. Which is not, in fact, poverty.
No, think on it. If we doubled the — real — income of everyone in the country then clearly we’d have less poverty. But by this measure, the one of inequality of incomes, the number in poverty would change by not one single person nor child. Equally, if we halved everyone’s incomes — real incomes that it — there would be a lot more poverty. But by this measure there would be no change at all.
There’s also this:
I visited a school in the north-east of England a couple of years ago where many of the pupils turned up with empty lunchboxes. There was a breakfast club that fed them on arrival. They were eligible for free school meals, so got a hot lunch. After school, trestle tables were set up in the playground laden with food donated from the local food bank. As they went home, they filled up their lunchboxes so that they could have some tea.
I have rarely been so shocked. This is the reality of child poverty.
Kids are packed to the gunwales with food and this is a sign of poverty? Eh? Sure, sure, I know consubstantiation is pretty heady stuff but really, a little contact with reality please? Kids get two full meals and tuck to take home. This is all free. So, logically, their parents send them to school with empty tuck boxes so that they get two free meals and stuff to take home. I mean, free stuff, who wouldn’t?
Who goes to the pub to pay £7 a pint when booze is flowing free from the town fountain?
Update, 12 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.
September 10, 2025
The hard limits of education
On his substack, Freddie deBoer argues that “education doesn’t work”, in that you can’t educate someone beyond their innate abilities no matter how much money you throw at the problem:
For some time now, I’ve been arguing for a perspective on the value of education that does not map cleanly onto any major contemporary ideological position, political party, or school of educational philosophy. My overall thoughts on education1 are as follows:
- In any given population, the ability to excel academically (whether or not you call it “intelligence”) is, like almost all other human abilities, plottable as a normal distribution: that is, a few people will be really bad at it, a few people will be really good, and the majority will be somewhere near the middle.
- Because some people are simply better at school than other people, any pedagogical strategy, practice, or method that improves the performance of the worst students will also improve the performance of the best students; this means that “closing the performance gap” between the worst and best students will only be possible if you use the best strategies for the worst students and the worst strategies for the best ones — and even then the most talented students will probably adapt pretty well, because that’s what being a talented student means. Another way to put it: if every student in America were equally well funded and every student equally well taught, point 1 above would still be true.
- Resistance to these two points is pervasive because we collectively participate in a “cult of smart” that overvalues academic performance vis-à-vis other human excellences. That is, because we value “intelligence” as a unique excellence, necessary to our approval, we cannot admit that some people simply aren’t smart. (By contrast, we have no trouble admitting that some people can’t run very fast or lift heavy weights, because those traits are not intrinsic to social approval.)
In so many human domains, we’re willing to accept that some people are naturally advantaged, bound by some inherent trait to be better than others, whether it’s physical attractiveness, the visual arts, musical performance, athletics, memory, sense of direction, language learning, charisma … We are, generally, perfectly willing to accept that different human beings have profoundly different strengths and abilities. But with education and intelligence, we’re unwilling to countenance the simple reality that some people are better equipped to succeed and some worse. It wasn’t always this way. For much of human history, that some people were simply smarter than others was accepted as a matter of course. In particular, and unfortunately, inherent group differences have historically been asserted in cognitive ability, and education was typically walled away from those who weren’t of the right class, gender, race, or station; this, obviously, was unjust and a terrible waste of human talent. In the last 50 years, however, a combination of forces2 has led us to overcorrect and embrace the opposite conclusion, that all individual people have equal ability to excel academically. This has led to all manner of ugly consequences, including blaming those who lack academic talent for their own immiseration and unfairly pinning educational failures on schools and teachers that they are not responsible for.
Our educational debates are largely useless because most people engaged in those debates assume out of hand that, absent unusual circumstances like severe neglect or abuse or the presence of developmental or cognitive disabilities, any student can be taught to any level of academic success, and any failure to induce academic success in students is the result of some sort of unfortunate error. Some tend to ascribe the failure to reach academic excellence as the result of exogenous social variables (like poverty and racial inequality) while others insist that students who have failed to learn to standard are evidence of failing schools and feckless, untalented teachers. My own perspective insists instead that as with any other kind of human ability, academic ability is unequally distributed across the population, with some destined to excel, some destined to struggle, and many destined to meet various levels of mediocrity. My belief is that this tendency is the result of some sort of intrinsic or inherent academic potential, that just as in natural talent for playing a musical instrument or playing a sport, there is such a thing as talent in school, and like all other talents, this one is not distributed equally to all people and is thus not fair.
I in particular hold these three beliefs with descending levels of confidence – the first is an empirical truth that is not debatable, the second is an obvious conclusion to draw that’s difficult to avoid given the first, the third is speculative but appears to be the most likely reason for the first two:
- At scale, the relative academic performance hierarchy is remarkably static, with very few students significantly moving to higher or lower positions of educational success over the course of academic life.
- The remarkably consistency in student performance over time, even in the face of immense investment and relentless pedagogical and policy efforts to alter student performance, strongly suggests some individual attribute that constitutes an inherent or innate academic potential, predilection, or tendency.
- The most direct and parsimonious explanation for this attribute is genes.
What I’m here to demonstrate today is the core empirical point that makes up the first belief: despite the widespread assumption that any student can be educated to any level of performance, in reality students demonstrate a certain level of overall academic ability and gravitate to that level of ability throughout their academic lives, with remarkable fidelity at the population level. Decades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement.3 We can reliably teach some (but never all) students certain knowledge, skills, competencies, and concepts that they did not possess before being taught, which we might call absolute or criterion-referenced learning. But all of these can also be assessed on a relative basis; whether students can read or do algebra or apply the scientific method are all questions that have polychotomous rather than binary answers. That is to say, students can be better or worse at the various cognitive and academic tasks learned in school, and we can assess these abilities and then assign them ranks in a relative distribution, which if our instruments are sound will almost always be normal or Gaussian – some kids will be excellent, some will be terrible, some will be in-between, and they number in each percentile will follow a predictable curve.
- Helpfully summarized by my friend Alan Jacobs here.
- On the well-meaning side, you have a cheery kind of simplistic egalitarianism, which is emotionally defensible but which ultimately hurts people who lack natural talent, as The Cult of Smart describes; on the less salutary side, the rise of educational blank slate thinking can be traced to the neoliberal turn in American economics, where the dismantling of the labor movement and the steady erosion of the social safety net left ordinary people with no path to basic economic security other than through the college-to-white-collar-work pipeline – which only works for everyone if everyone is equipped to handle that kind of school and work.
- Absolute performance = teaching students to do/understand something they couldn’t do/understand before. Taking a student who couldn’t do long division before and teaching them how to do long division is absolute learning; teaching a student the steps in the Krebs cycle such that they can describe them after not knowing anything about them previously is absolute learning; helping a toddler to memorize the alphabet is absolute learning. Tests that are concerned only with the demonstration of the ability to perform a given academic competency or skill (AKA criterion referenced tests) are fundamentally tests of absolute learning. Relative learning = helping any individual students or group of students improve relative to peers/the performance spectrum. One student outperforming other students on a test of long division is an expression of differences in relative learning; observed performance gaps like racial or gender gaps are reflections of relative learning; competitive admissions processes are evaluations of relative ability/learning. Aptitude and achievement tests (AKA norm referenced tests) are fundamentally tests of relative learning.
September 6, 2025
QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
Anyway, young Cyrus […] and his classmates spend practically every waking moment being little Tai-Pans. They study in classrooms, receive military training,1 and shadow the magistrates in their official duties; but all of these official lessons are just the backdrop against which the real lessons are taking place. The boys have missions to accomplish, missions which they cannot possibly accomplish individually. So they have to learn to put together a team, to apportion responsibilities, and to judge merit in the aftermath. Anytime one of the boys commits an infraction,2 the adults ensure that he is judged by the others. All of this is carefully monitored, and boys who show partiality or favoritism, or who simply judge poorly, are savagely punished.3
The most common sort of mission is a hunt, the boys are constantly going on hunts, because: “it seems to them that hunting is the truest of the exercises that pertain to war”. This is obvious at the level of basic physical skills: while hunting they run, they ride, they follow tracks, they shoot, and they stab. But the military lessons imparted by hunting are not just physical, they’re also mental. They learn to “deceive wild boars with nets and trenches, and … deer with traps and snares”. To battle a lion, a bear, or a leopard on an equal footing would be suicide, and so by necessity the boys learn to surprise them, or exhaust them, or to terrify them with psychological warfare, doing everything in their power to find an unfair advantage or to create one from circumstances.4 As Cyrus’s father tells him years later: “We educated you to deceive and take advantage not among human beings but with wild animals, so that you not harm your friends in these matters either; yet, if ever a war should arise, so that you might not be unpracticed in them.”
There’s another reason that the boys constantly hunt wild animals, which is that it habituates them to hunger, sleep-deprivation, and extremes of heat and cold. When they depart on a hunt the boys are deliberately given too little food, and what they have is simple and bland (though that’s hardly an issue for those who “regularly use hunger as others use sauce”). Some of this is ascesis in the original Ancient Greek meaning of the word (ἄσκησις – “training”); by getting used to being tired and hungry and cold under controlled circumstances, they will be better at shrugging off these disadvantages when the stakes are higher.
But the real core of it lies in the phrase: “He did not think it was fitting for anyone to rule who was not better than his subjects.” Later, when they’ve reached manhood, the boys will oftentimes be called upon to share physical hardship with those they have been set over, and in that moment it is vital to this social order that they not be soft. “We must of necessity share with our slaves heat and cold, food and drink, and labor and sleep. In this sharing, however, we need first to try to appear better than they in regard to such.” Better in the sense of physically tougher, but also better in the sense of having achieved the absolute mastery of the will over any and all desires.5
Constant exposure to deprivation and hardship isn’t just supposed to improve their endurance, it’s also supposed to make them better at sneering at comforts.6 This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”7 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Education of Cyrus, by Xenophon”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-08.
1. If you’ve ever been a little boy, or the parent of a little boy, you know how true this is:
“Now the mode of battle that has been shown to us is one that I see all human beings understand by nature, just as also the various other animals each know a certain mode of battle that they learn not from another but from nature. For example, the ox strikes with his horn, the horse with his hoof, the dog with his mouth, the boar with his tusk … Even when I was a boy, I used to seize a sword wherever I saw one, even though I did not learn how one must take hold of it from anywhere else, as I say, than from nature. I used to do this not because I was taught but even though I was opposed, just as there were also other things I was compelled to do by nature, though I was opposed by both my mother and father. And, yes, by Zeus, I used to strike with the sword everything I was able to without getting caught, for it was not only natural, like walking and running, but it also seemed to me to be pleasant in addition to being natural.”
2. Not just explicit violations of the rules though: “they also judge cases of ingratitude, an accusation for which human beings hate each other very much but very rarely adjudicate; and they punish severely whomever they judge not to have repaid a favor he was able to repay”.
3. “In one case, I was beaten because I did not judge correctly. The case was like this: A big boy with a little tunic took off the big tunic of a little boy, and he dressed him in his own tunic, while he himself put on that of the other. Now I, in judging it for them, recognized that it was better for both that each have the fitting tunic. Upon this the teacher beat me, saying that whenever I should be appointed judge of the fitting, I must do as I did; but when one must judge to whom the tunic belongs, then one must examine, he said, what is just possession.”
4. Players of old-school tabletop role-playing games might be reminded of the distinction between “combat as sport” and “combat as war” or the parable of Tucker’s Kobolds.
5. Years later one of Cyrus’s classmates gives a long speech about how falling in love is optional — a real man can make himself love any woman he chooses, and conversely can restrain himself from loving any woman, no matter how desirable. All poetic references to being made a prisoner by love, or forced by love to do certain things, are excuses made by weaklings who wish to give into their desires. This is a message right in line with the most inhuman aspects of Greek philosophy, and to his credit Xenophon immediately subverts it by having the guy who delivers it immediately fall madly in love with his beautiful female captive.
6. One of the highest compliments ever paid to Cyrus is when an older mentor remarks of his posse that:
“I saw them bearing labors and risks with enthusiasm, but now I see them bearing good things moderately. It seems to me, Cyrus, to be more difficult to find a man who bears good things nobly than one who bears evil things nobly, for the former infuse insolence in the many, but the latter infuse moderation in all.”
7. Compare this to the American ruling class, which is also weirdly Spartan in its own way. The wealthiest Americans on average work a crazy number of hours, lead highly regimented lives, and avoid drugs. The difference is that whereas the Persian aristocracy does this as an example for the lower classes, the American aristocracy actively encourages the lower classes to consume themselves in cheap luxury and sensual dissipation.
August 28, 2025
A civil society can’t allow young Scottish hellions to brandish weapons at immigrants harassing them
At least, the headline expresses how the sky people probably frame the situation where a young girl felt she needed to scare off a threat to herself and her friend. This is from an X post which claims to be describing what actually happened rather than what the media has been reporting:
One of many, many images posted to X on this incident.
I spoke with the mom of one of the girls (Mayah) and got the entire story that the media is covering up and lying about.
So first of all, the reporting got the names of the girls mixed up. There were 3 girls who were there who were accosted and attacked by the migrants.
Lola – Lola is the hero from the video. She’s the one with the axe defending her sister from the migrant attackers
Ruby – Lola’s older sister who was attacked and hospitalized
Mayah – Ruby’s best friend who was with them and went to call the police after Ruby was attacked by the migrants
Here’s the summary of what happened from Mayah’s mother:
“Yes. So what happened was the girls where out just walking and the man in the picture made comments to lola(the younger girl) calling her sexy and other sexual remarks then the girls started to tell this man to leave them alone and stop following them and making sexual remarks to them. After that the man’s sister (also in the picture) came around the corner and physically attacked ruby(the older sister) she grabbed her hair dragged her to the floor started to punch her then both the man and woman where kicking her in head while she was on the floor. At this point my daughter (mayah) called the police so my daughters account after that is all abit blurry. But that is when lola had the weapons she pulled them out to protect ruby. After that the man came back at lola recording her making sure she showed the weapons to the camera and antagonising her. Ruby was hospitalised after the attack with a severe concussion a tennis ball sized lump to the back of her head aswell as lots of bruises.”
John Carter reacts to the original image, also on X:
This should be a turning point, but god knows how many such the British elites have ignored so far. Another graphic from X expresses what may happen if this is also ignored:
Even the Brits can be pushed too far and we can’t be very far from that point now. And the way the British media is handling this and pretty much every other confrontation is not helping:
You can’t have missed her, if you’re on social media at all, the dual-wielding 14-year-old Scottish lass raising two blades in defiance of the “migrant” seemingly intent on assaulting her and her 12-year-old friend.
The name of this hero won’t be released due to her age, and police were right on the scene to arrest the violent attacker.
That’s right: the little girl is in jail, charged with possession of a bladed weapon. Two weapons, actually — what appear to be a large santoku-style blade and a small hatchet.
In the widely-circulated clip, her would-be attacker (with the non-British accent) can be heard taunting her to show the blades on camera. Why? The answer is obvious: he’s well aware that self-defense is illegal in Britain, and he also knows she’ll be the one the cops take away.
And he was correct on both counts.
[…]
Culturally, things are so crazy that the BBC didn’t just blur out our heroine’s face, they even blurred out her blades. And now you understand the screencap at the top of this column. Mustn’t ruffle any feathers, you see.
How about pepper spray and the like? Sorry, mate, but pepper spray was banned as a “prohibited weapon” (!!!) in 1968.
In Britain, the only legal defense against rape is a whistle — which is to say, no defense at all.
That 14-year-old girl found it necessary to possibly defend herself and her friend against two possible assailants: would-be rapists and the British criminal justice system. The day came, and she proved herself a hero.
She warded off the former, but God only knows what indignities she’ll suffer at the hands of the latter.
What’s the next little British girl’s defense against that?
August 12, 2025
Britain warns online platforms about “overzealous” interpretation of online safety law
“Ben the Layabout” posted a note over at Founding Questions linking to a Telegraph article [archive.ph link] that seems to indicate the British government is demanding that online services both enforce the letter of the law and the spirit … whatever that might mean at any given moment in time:
“Palace of Westminster”by michaelhenley is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Social media giants face huge fines for curbing free speech by “overzealous” enforcement of online safety laws.
Ministers have told platforms including Facebook, X, Instagram and TikTok they must not restrict access to posts that express lawfully held views.
The warning, in an apparent change of tone from ministers, comes amid a backlash over websites blocking users from viewing material, including parliamentary debates about grooming gangs.
Campaigners have said that free speech is threatened by the Government’s application of the Online Safety Act, which is meant to protect children from harmful content.
JD Vance, the US vice-president, used a visit to the UK this week to warn ministers against going down the “dark path” of censorship.
Whitehall sources have expressed concern that social media firms, some of which have criticised the law, “have been overzealous” in enforcing it and must be “mindful” of the right to freedom of expression.
The Science Department, which oversees the legislation, told companies they could face fines if they failed to uphold free speech rules.
A spokesman said:
As well as legal duties to keep children safe, the very same law places clear and unequivocal duties on platforms to protect freedom of expression.
Failure to meet either obligation can lead to severe penalties, including fines of up to 10 per cent of global revenue or £18m, whichever is greater.
The Act is not designed to censor political debate and does not require platforms to age gate any content other than those which present the most serious risks to children such as pornography or suicide and self-harm content.
Platforms have had several months to prepare for this law. It is a disservice to their users to hide behind deadlines as an excuse for failing to properly implement it.
So online sites big and small are required to obey the British law, but only as and how the British government wants it enforced or they’ll levy massive punishment. Too lax? Punishment. Too strict? Also punishment. It’s almost as if Britain wants to be cut off from the rest of the internet …
August 1, 2025
Australia saw Britain’s awful Online Safety Act and said “hold my beer”
In The Freeman, Nicole James discusses how Australia’s attempt to protect young, innocent eyes from the terrors of the internet seems to be having all kinds of unforeseen impacts on adults:
Commonwealth Coat of Arms of Australia (1912).
Quarterly of six, the first quarter Argent a Cross Gules charged with a Lion passant guardant between on each limb a Mullet of eight points Or; the second Azure five Mullets, one of eight, two of seven, one of six and one of five points of the first (representing the Constellation of the Southern Cross) ensigned with an Imperial Crown proper; the third of the first a Maltese Cross of the fourth, surmounted by a like Imperial Crown; the fourth of the third, on a Perch wreathed Vert and Gules an Australian Piping Shrike displayed also proper; the fifth also Or a Swan naiant to the sinister Sable; the last of the first, a Lion passant of the second, the whole within a Bordure Ermine; for the Crest on a Wreath Or and Azure A Seven-pointed Star Or, and for Supporters dexter a Kangaroo, sinister an Emu, both proper.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, children roamed freely through the pixelated wilderness of the Internet, posting dog memes, finding kindred spirits in weird little corners of Tumblr, and learning how to contour like Kylie Jenner. It was all chaotic, noisy, and entirely normal.
Now? Well, welcome to Australia in 2025, where the new Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill has galloped through Parliament like a runaway Shetland pony, banning under-16s from social media. This is a full-blown digital eviction. And the ban isn’t limited just to TikTok and Snapchat. It also extends to YouTube (yes, YouTube), where apparently autoplay is now considered a gateway drug.
And how will they enforce this sweeping national grounding? Age verification, of course. Potentially through facial recognition. Not for the kids, mind you; they’ll simply be locked out. It’s everyone else who’ll need to prove they’re not children. Because nothing says “welcome to adulthood” like having to scan your actual face just to post a birthday shoutout or watch a slow-cooker recipe reel. All to reassure a tech platform that you’re not a rogue 14-year-old with strong opinions and a ring light.
The bill’s spiritual mother, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, who, fun fact, once interviewed for a job at the CIA to analyze serial killers, gave a passionate speech at the National Press Club called “Swimming Between the Digital Flags”. It sounded very beachy and breezy until you realized she meant regulatory flags, and not the ones you’d use at Bondi. Her point was clear: the online world is full of rips and sharks and emotional jellyfish, and children must be protected from being dragged under.
Which is noble. Obviously. But somewhere between “protect the kids” and “build a biometric panopticon”, the line got a little smeared.
And where, you might ask, were parents in all this? Sitting quietly in the back, apparently, while Canberra (Australia’s Washington, DC) appointed itself Mum, Dad, the school principal, and possibly even the family dog. Because this isn’t just about safety; it’s about who decides what kids can see, say, share, and, in the case of a few bold young TikTokers, lip-sync while delivering motivational speeches to two mildly traumatized budgies.
The idea behind the project is that children are being harmed online, and honestly, yes, some are. The Internet is not all kittens and cake recipes. But rather than investing in education or digital literacy, the government has opted for a full blackout. It’s like banning scissors because one kid snipped their fringe into a reverse mullet.
And here’s the kicker. The bill had a consultation period of just 24 hours. That’s less time than it takes to read the terms and conditions you just agreed to without reading. (Don’t lie, we’ve all done it.)
In that tight little window, more than 15,000 submissions were made, and while some were supportive, the vast majority sounded the alarm. LGBTQIA+ organizations warned of disconnected teens losing safe spaces. Indigenous advocates pointed out the risks of further digital exclusion. Psychologists, educators, digital rights groups, and even a Community Soccer Club raised concerns.
July 31, 2025
“You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is”
Chris Bray looks north to the Dysfunctional Dominion and our governments’ inability to deal with the narrative of the Residential Schools and the lack of actual evidence to support that narrative:
Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.
Frances Widdowson is a cantankerous career academic, an evidence-first Canadian scholar who doesn’t suffer fools. Her personal disregard for sanctimonious performativity has gotten her in some trouble, and now she’s a former professor, though her termination was found to be improper. A few months ago, the CBC interviewed her for a story about how mean she is, because Widdowson has questioned the much-chanted sacred story about the dead children at Kamloops.
If you don’t know the Kamloops story, an anthropologist used ground-penetrating radar to supposedly identify the location of a secret burial ground for 215 dead children near the site of the long-defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School, uncovering evidence of what has been constantly called a hidden genocide. But no human remains have ever been recovered at the site, and the radar evidence of disturbed earth aligns well with the path of an old septic trench. More detailed background here.
Widdowson recorded the entire interview, so we can hear the inner workings of the sausage factory.
Throughout the discussion, CBC reporter Jordan Tucker, speaking with the obligatory vocal fry and upspeak, keeps warning Widdowson to stop shouting at her, which Widdowson obviously isn’t doing, and to watch her tone. She’s presumptively pre-outraged by the existence of a Very Bad Person, conducting an outrage-performance in the form of asking questions.
But then Widdowson flips the script. You can hear this excerpted two-minute high point here. Tucker argues that government officials say there are bodies buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops, so is Widdowson somehow making the outrageous claim that government officials might be wrong? “Are all those different governments lying? Are all those different people just not telling the truth, or they’re going along with these stories imagined by people, by indigenous people?”
Government says, but still Widdowson doesn’t concede. You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is. “How is it that all these government officials have been so connived?” Tucker asks, obviously flabbergasted.
Widdowson responds with an argument about evidence, and about the standards of evidence for the claim. What do we know? What have we seen? What would we need to see to prove a claim of this type? Who has the burden of proof?
And then: “As a journalist, are you satisfied with the evidence?”
The response to this question — just past the 1:30 mark in the excerpted video linked above — is remarkably telling. It produces, first, a short silence, and then a long burst of stammering and high-pitched incredulity: “I am. Of course I am.”
Widdowson, sharpening the direct question: “You think there’s 215 children buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops?”
Listen to Tucker’s shaking voice. This question is a threat. It makes her extremely nervous. “I think that, at this point, there has been enough documentation, there have been enough — there’s enough social and archaeological consensus to say that, to say that, we can just believe indigenous people, and move on with trying to do our best by them as a society.”
So two people are arguing about truth. What is true? How can we know what is true? One person keeps asking what is the evidence. The other person keeps deflecting to identity, authority, and social status. The government says so, there is social consensus, “believe indigenous people”. No human remains have been found, but there are human remains, because government officials and indigenous people say so, and other people with the status to matter say that they agree. Truth is consensus. Defaulting to evidence is cruel. Why would you do such a horrible thing?
- What’s the evidence?
- Are you refusing to submit to the narrative consensus?
- Yes, what’s the evidence?
- (shocked gasping and trembling voice)
This is the mechanism of woke narrative control: It has been said that this is true. The people who say it possess authority — they are officials — or they possess privileged identities. It is now disinformation to say that government plus indigenous people might not be correct, and an act of dangerous extremism to mention questions of evidence.
The intent of Britain’s Online Safety Act … and the actual implementation
In The Conservative Woman, Dr. Frederick Attenborough discusses the gap between what the Online Safety Act was intended to do and how it’s actually being enforced now that it’s the law of the land:
X posts like this may not be visible to uses in the UK under the age verification rules of the Online Safety Act.
At the heart of the regime is a requirement to implement “highly effective” age checks. If a platform cannot establish with high confidence that a user is over 18, it must restrict access to a wide category of “sensitive” content, even when that content is entirely lawful. This has major implications for platforms where news footage and political commentary appear in real time.
Ofcom’s guidance makes clear that simple box-ticking exercises, such as declaring your age or agreeing to terms of service, will no longer suffice. Instead, platforms are expected to use tools such as facial age estimation, ID scans, open banking credentials and digital identity wallets.
The Act also pushes companies to filter harmful material before it appears in users’ feeds. Ofcom’s broader regulatory guidance warns that recommender systems can steer young users toward material they didn’t ask for. In response, platforms may now be expected to reconfigure their algorithms to filter out entire categories of lawful expression before it reaches underage or unverified users.
One platform already moving in this direction is X. Its approach offers a revealing – and potentially sobering – glimpse of where things may be heading. The company uses internal signals, including when an account was created, any prior verification, and behavioural data, to estimate a user’s age. If that process fails to confirm the user is over 18, he or she is automatically placed into a sensitive content filtering mode. As the platform’s Help Center explains: “Until we are able to determine if a user is 18 or over, they may be defaulted into sensitive media settings, and may not be able to access sensitive media”.
This system runs without user opt-in and applies at scale. Depending on how X classifies it, filtered material may include adult humour, graphic imagery, political commentary or footage of violence. Already there are signs that lawful content is quietly being screened out.
One example came on July 25, the day the Act’s age-verification duties took effect, during a protest outside the Britannia Hotel in Seacroft, Leeds, where asylum seekers are being housed. A video showing police officers restraining and arresting a protester was posted on X, but quickly became inaccessible to many UK-based users. Instead, viewers saw the message: “Due to local laws, we are temporarily restricting access to this content until X estimates your age”.
West Yorkshire Police denied any involvement in blocking the footage. X declined to comment, but its AI chatbot, Grok, indicated that the clip had been restricted under the Online Safety Act due to violent content. Though lawful and clearly newsworthy, the footage was likely flagged by automated systems intended to shield children from real-world violence.
In The Critic, Christopher Snowdon explains the breakdown of trust between the British public and their government that the implementation of the Online Safety Act only exacerbates:
People are right to be concerned about this slippery slope and yet it cannot be denied that it is pornography enthusiasts who have been hardest hit by the Online Safety Act in the short term. They must now verify themselves in one of three ways, each less appealing than the last. They can submit their credit card details, they can scan in proof of ID, such as a passport, or they can take a photo of their face and allow AI to judge how old they are. If they want to maximise their chances of being the victim of blackmail and identity theft, they could do all three.
While we might not think twice about submitting our credit card details to Amazon or posting our photos on Instagram, there is an understandable reluctance to hand over private data in order to access dubious websites for the purposes of sordid acts of self-pollution. The government assures us that the data will be kept confidential but it is only two weeks since we learned about a data breach that led to the names of 19,000 Afghans who wanted to flee the Taliban being given to the Taliban and it is less than two months since the names and addresses of 6.5 million Co-op customers were stolen in a cyber-attack. Rightly or wrongly, millions of British plank-spankers and rug-tuggers do not wish to identify themselves to anybody.
The result is a surge in interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) which allow internet users to access websites as if they were in a less censorious country. Half of the top ten free apps in Apple’s app download charts yesterday were for VPNs. Google Trends data show that searches for “VPN” have gone through the roof since Friday. Readers can draw their own conclusions from the fact that these searches have been peaking between midnight and 2am.
Downloading random VPNs comes with risks of its own and opens up a whole new world of illicit online activity from free Premier League football to the Dark Web. But there is a deeper reason to feel uneasy about this unintended, albeit predictable, consequence of paternalistic regulation. By driving another wedge between the state and the individual, it further normalises rule-breaking in a country where casual lawlessness is becoming part of daily life. A law-abiding society cannot long endure if the median citizen thinks that the law is an ass.
The breakdown of trust can be seen most clearly when the ordinary man or woman does not share the moral certainties of the governing class. Among smokers, a collapse in tax morale — the intrinsic motivation to pay taxes — has led to a huge rise in the consumption of illegal tobacco in recent years. Smokers no longer feel any obligation to pay taxes that are designed to impoverish them to a government that vilifies them. Cannabis smokers learn from an early age to be suspicious of a police force that they might otherwise respect. Motorists who are faced with 20mph speed limits that were introduced by people who hate private transport have no scruples about flouting the law.
July 30, 2025
“The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skilfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended”
On Substack, Johann Kurtz provides a great example of Bastiat’s insight (quoted in the title), as debaters ineptly defend the whole notion of masculinity, particularly how boys are victimized for being boys:
“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
We’re failing our boys.
Two-thirds of young men feel that “no one really knows” them. Their real wages have been falling since the 1970s. They’re dropping out of education and the workforce in growing numbers. They die deaths of despair at almost three times the rate of women. Even their physical strength is collapsing.
Terrible solutions are proposed. No matter how much traditional masculinity is undermined, powerful voices continue to insist that the real problem is that it hasn’t been destroyed altogether. “Only then will boys be happy”.
My thesis for this series is that there is a need to defend true masculinity on its own terms, not on the implicit terms of progressives who either don’t understand it or actively hate it.
Take, for example, this debate at the Oxford Union on traditional masculinity. The opening argument of the opposition — who are supposed to be defending traditional masculinity — starts with asserting the need for a “contemporary and inclusive” masculinity which is accessible to anyone “of any race, sexuality, or other identity“.
The best defence that this speaker can mount on this anaemic foundation is an argument that masculinity is useful for activism and community building like the “Movember Foundation”. After this slightly pathetic case she goes back to conceding “being forced to conform to a set of expectations is uncomfortable and even dangerous. We should allow people to access the gender expressions that make them feel like their truest self.”
The next speaker for the defence of traditional masculinity continues the grovelling: “In 2019, you know, we should not be honouring and obeying men — those times have gone.” This talk is a little better — you get the sense that he actually likes men, and notes that it’s overwhelmingly men who die in wars and dangerous jobs — before collapsing back at the end: “We should look at new ways of being a man. I would love to get more men involved in teaching, in nursing — make it ‘cool to care’. I’ve been around Scandinavia talking to stay-at-home dads … These are progressive, beautiful men.”
The final speaker — who, again, is supposed to be defending traditional masculinity — takes the stage and begins: “Some of the most beautiful moments I’ve watched in young men’s lives are when we’re alone in a room — and maybe a brother who’s been struggling with his sexuality comes out in front of a hundred other brothers, and he’s crying, and his other brothers are crying with him“. You can imagine the rest.
None of this has anything to do with traditional masculinity. In this series I will advocate for the cultivation in boys of all of the aspects of masculinity that these “advocates” were afraid to defend: strength, aggression, dominance, stoicism, and risk-taking.
July 29, 2025
“The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK”
Britain, like Canada, has been moving toward a less free internet experience for ordinary users, the key bit of legislation in the UK being the Online Safety Act, which like Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act, provides tools to the government to clamp down on online activities they deem “unsafe”:
The free and open internet has now ceased to exist in the UK. Since Friday, anyone in Britain logging on to social media will have been presented with a censored, restricted version – a “safe” internet, to borrow the UK government’s language. Vast swathes of even anodyne posts are now blocked for the overwhelming majority of users.
The Online Safety Act was passed by the last Conservative government and backed enthusiastically by Labour. Both parties insisted it is necessary to protect children. Supposedly, its aim is to shield them from pornography, violence, terrorist material and content promoting self-harm. Age-verification checks, we were assured, would ensure that children would not be exposed to inappropriate content, but adults could continue using the internet as they please. Yet as we have seen over the past few days, on many major tech platforms, UK-based adults are being treated as children by default, with supposedly “sensitive” content filtered from everyone’s view.
Predictably, what is deemed “sensitive” and therefore censored goes well beyond pornography and obviously illegal or adult material. Already UK users of X have been blocked from viewing footage of an anti-asylum protest, a tweet calling for single-sex spaces and a video of a speech in parliament on the grooming-gangs scandal. Historical trivia, such as a thread on Richard the Lionheart, and classic artworks like Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son have been shielded by the tech censors. A thread on X of examples of what has been censored under the Online Safety Act, collated by Benjamin Jones of the Free Speech Union, has itself been partially censored due to the Online Safety Act. Open, political debate online is now a thing of the past.
When the Online Safety Act was first put before parliament, supporters from all parties insisted that fears about its impact on free speech were overblown. “The worst misrepresentation I’ve heard is that the [Online Safety Act] will force tech companies to censor legal social-media posts”, insisted Chris Philp, the then minister for tech and digital economy, now the shadow home secretary, back in 2022. Anyone who warned that this vast new architecture of online speech regulation was obviously going to curtail free speech was presented as a friend of paedophiles, terrorists or the far right. This gaslighting was kept up right until the point the age filters were implemented. “The UK’s online safety regime is here. Will anybody notice?”, asked Politico the day before much of the internet disappeared. The Guardian, on the same day, pondered whether the new rules would be censorious enough.
Despite my financial plight, I’d been considering getting a VPN subscription in advance of the Canadian government getting some version of the Online Harms Act onto the books. Clearly many Brits had already gone that route, and the British government reacts with the care and subtlety one would expect:
July 25, 2025
Autism, then and now
At Psychobabble, Hannah Spier traces the rise of autism from its first formal definition to something that 1 in 36 kids is diagnosed with:
When Leo Kanner first defined autism in 1943, it was estimated that 4 to 5 children per 10,000 were affected. Today, the CDC puts that number at 1 in 36, almost one child in every classroom. If any other medical condition, blindness, epilepsy or paralysis showed a spike like this, it would trigger a pandemic-level outcry. But with autism, we see at best a curious murmuring as to what this is, and at worst, a growing chorus of people insisting, they too, belong in the group.
From experts, instead of raised alarms or calls for serious public health investigation (as would be expected for any other childhood disorder) we get calls for inclusivity and a self-congratulatory attitude toward their advancement in diagnostic understanding and tools. Another example of ideological capture of psychiatry by cultural sentiment.
Characters like Sheldon Cooper and Sherlock Holmes have helped turn the image of autism into a badge of honour. It means you’re socially odd, intellectually superior, and emotionally detached in an edgy and endearing way. For many, especially mothers with narcissistic tendencies hungry for a narrative of exceptionalism, this offered a seductive reframing of their child’s misbehaviour and non-conformity as evidence of giftedness. She could thus become the one who gave birth to the quirky but special genius. She alone saw the hidden brilliance beneath the “weird” behaviour. She became the martyr and the insider to an elite subculture. It’s Munchausen by proxy, 2025 edition.
People with narcissism and psychopathic traits exploit wherever they can, we know this. And yet again, psychiatry, the ones who should be the best at recognizing these, made it easy pickings by flinging the diagnostic gates wide open. Longtime readers will recognize the pattern: I’ve written before about the diagnostic creep in trauma, expanding definitions that blur the line between disorder and ordinary variation. The same diagnostic creep has unfolded here. Autism, once narrowly defined, was steadily loosened through each revision of the DSM.
The Great Diagnostic Expansion
Originally, Kanner’s autism was unmistakable: nonverbal children, socially disconnected, cognitively impaired, often with seizures. These were not quirky introverts. These were children who required full-time care and specialized schooling. In the DSM-III of the 1980s, it was called infantile autism. The criteria required clear onset before 30 months, marked language delays, gross deficits in social interaction, and repetitive behaviours. These were developmental dysfunctions, not misunderstood personalities. And neither clinicians nor parents had a problem naming them as such.
Then came the DSM-III-R in 1987, which introduced pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) and broadened the field significantly. Suddenly, language delay and intellectual disability were no longer central. Subclinical cases were included. Asperger’s Syndrome followed in the DSM-IV in 1994, adding high-IQ individuals with no language delays but poor social functioning. A child who spoke on time but didn’t understand jokes, had poor eye contact, and rigid routines was now also autistic.
But the most dramatic change came with DSM-5 in 2013. The subtypes were eliminated. Autism became one spectrum. The criteria were thinned down to two domains: social communication difficulties and restrictive, repetitive behaviours. A person needed to meet just six out of twelve traits, spread across these two clusters. Language and cognitive delay? Optional. Even the requirement for early onset was removed. A diagnosis could now be given based on historical symptoms. Questionnaires like the Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) are so broad and subjective they can be easily gamed. This made it possible for 30-year-olds to recall feeling “socially overwhelmed” in school and not liking itchy clothing to receive the same diagnosis as a nonverbal child requiring lifelong care.
The diagnostic category has become a black hole, pulling in people with no clinical resemblance, collapsing distinction into sameness. From what I’ve observed, three distinct autism “patients” now account for much of the increased prevalence, none of whom would have qualified under the original criteria.
July 22, 2025
Age verification schemes are just another attempt to control everyone’s internet usage
Marian Halcombe is specifically discussing the British age verification provisions of their Online Safety Act, but similar schemes are popping up all over the west, and they’re only pretending to be about protecting young people from online content:
The British State, in its infinite filth and hypocrisy, would like you to believe that it is deeply concerned about what you do with your penis. Or more precisely, what you look at while your hand is on it. The latest wheeze — part of the Online Safety Act — is mandatory age verification for all pornographic websites. We’re told it’s to stop children from seeing naughty videos. In reality, it’s a spyware regime disguised as child protection, devised by a ruling class that snorts coke with one hand while signing surveillance warrants with the other.
Let’s start with the pretence. No one in Westminster cares what children watch online. These are the same people who presided over the industrial-scale rape of working-class girls in Rotherham, Telford, Rochdale, and elsewhere — refusing to intervene for fear of “racism”. The idea that they now lie awake worrying about a Year Eight boy glimpsing a MILF thumbnail on Pornhub is an insult to the intelligence. They don’t care about children. They care about you.
The age-verification scheme isn’t just about proving you’re eighteen. It’s about linking your name and your age, and your IP address to your viewing habits. Whether it’s ID upload or facial recognition or some third-party database, the outcome is the same: a digital file that knows what you watch and when you watch it.
In a normal country, this would be recognised as deeply perverse. In ours, it’s dressed up as safety. The State that can’t fix the trains, that can’t keep the hospitals clean, now wants the power to log whether you’re big-enders or little-enders. And all under the banner of protecting the kiddies.
Yes, of course it’s technically possible to anonymise verification. But only if you believe that governments, regulators, and their corporate collaborators are incapable of abuse. That’s a belief I do not share. This is the same British government that let GCHQ harvest your webcam feeds and your phone calls under the TEMPORA programme. You didn’t vote for that. You weren’t told about it. You found out because Edward Snowden blew the whistle.
Do you really think the same regime won’t take an interest in which adult videos you watch? Anyone with an ounce of memory knows how this goes. Every intrusive policy begins with “think of the children”. The Video Recordings Act. The Dangerous Dogs Act. The Terrorism Act. And now the Online Safety Act. Once the infrastructure is in place, it never stays limited to its original purpose.
The definition of “harmful content” is vague for a reason. It can grow. It can stretch. Today it’s Pornhub. Tomorrow it’s Twitter. Then it’s dissident blogs, pro-life websites, or even a dodgy meme about immigration statistics. In the end, the target isn’t porn — it’s dissent.
July 21, 2025
QotD: The parasitic classes
A parallel case may be found in the “civil” services, regulating authorities, non-profits, &c. Jobs in these areas, which command high salaries and pensions, and present delicious opportunities for graft, are outwardly the opposite of productive. They parasitically consume, on a colossal scale, the resources of the productive.
Look into almost any kind of “charitable” activity, such as social work, and one will find that only a tiny proportion of the cash “trickles down” to the characteristically desperate “clients”. And when it does, they use it to buy not only drugs and licker, but truly useless things, such as lottery tickets.
“Education” systems, in the modern West, exist chiefly to enrich semi-literate, unionized schoolteachers. In many parts of Ontario, for instance, a teacher will make at least double what the average parents make, and therefore feel justified in sneering. The teachers naturally consider that the little ones belong to them, for they are the necessary source of their income. What rights should parents have to interfere in their upbringing?
My best argument for the parasite class (always granting that some may be sincere), is that they protect society from gathering excessive wealth, or living lives of too much ease. Without them, we might easily suffer from the vices associated with too much freedom.
How I preferred the deadbeat, layabout, very English London of the Labour Party, when I lived there in the ‘seventies — to the cosmopolitan, rich, over-swept London of the Thatcher years. There are some advantages to socialism.
And there are other arguments, too, for putting depraved Leftists in power, though on examination they reveal special pleading. For instance, teachers may claim to offer child-minding services, so that mothers, especially, can go to work. But it is because heavy taxation requires the dual income, or women to do horrible and demeaning paid work when their husbands run away, that these services were ever made necessary.
The government does, arguably, “create” employment. Among the most farcical examples are the tax lawyers and consultants. Taxpayers need these to navigate incredibly elaborate tax codes, for their own protection. Only a professional can find the loopholes. Whereas, a comprehensible, flat tax system would put all these “experts” out of business. It would shrink revenue departments spectacularly, and by extension, threaten to shrink taxes. To a professional politician, this would never do. It would shrink his power.
David Warren, “Answering to a ‘need'”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-06-18.
