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.
September 6, 2025
QotD: Leadership training for Persian nobles
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.
July 20, 2025
QotD: Above all else, helicopter parents hate … helicopter parenting
If the kid gets anything less than an A-triple-plus in Zoom School, Karen is immediately on the horn to the teacher … and since all schools these days, even the rare physical ones, are all wired up with “classroom management software”, they can bombard their kids’ teachers with emails and text messages 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Helmets, knee pads … kids these days wear more safety gear than a mountain climber just to ride their bikes, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them kitted out like hockey goalies if recess ever becomes a thing again. Can the day be far off when every kid is trailed by xzheyr own personal injury lawyer, and parents are forced to sign waivers to let their kids use the bathroom?
Everyone knows how bad this is for childhood development, but if I told some kid with a scraped knee to rub some dirt on it, you’ll be fine, I’d probably get hauled up on child endangerment charges.
How can kids advance past age twelve, mentally and emotionally, if they’re never allowed to get hurt? To fail? To suffer the consequences of their own bad decisions?
I’m no developmental psychologist, but it seems obvious that such learning is time-limited. If you haven’t learned that X brings pain — and WHY — by the time you hit twelve years old, then on some fundamental level you’re never going to learn it.
Severian, “On Being Bad”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-12.
July 16, 2025
Offensensitivity over a 12 year-old wearing a Union Jack dress to school
I’m not in the least bit surprised to hear that a 12 year-old girl has triggered the sensitive souls at her school for choosing to wear a Spice Girls style Union Jack dress to her school’s Cultural Diversity Day:
Photo from The Daily Sceptic
Another month, another glaring example of toxic activism sweeping through the British workplace, and this time, it’s no less than shocking.
On July 11th, 12 year-old Courtney Wright was sent home from Bilton School in Rugby, Warwickshire, simply for wearing a Union Flag dress and hat for the school’s Cultural Diversity Day. She had put effort into her costume, even writing a speech celebrating British culture: Shakespeare, fish and chips, tea, the Royal Family. Yet for what was a harmless celebration of her national culture, she was excluded.
The school’s response? A sanctimonious head of year, presumably with the support of management and colleagues, told her: “You get to celebrate your culture every day. This is for everyone else.” Then ordered her to remove her outfit and wear a second-hand uniform or go home. So she, rightly, called her father, who came to collect her.
Stuart Field, her father, a 47 year-old Marine Engineer, alleges she was not alone. A boy was reportedly sent home for wearing a farmer’s costume, illustrating a broader, troubling trend: the suppression of British symbols and pride in the name of “diversity”.
[…]
The aftermath saw the usual potted response from the school’s governing trust, the Stowe Valley Trust about how it values “diversity”, “respect” and so forth, yet its words ring hollow. It claims to regret “upset caused”, note, not the exclusion itself – only the distress that followed. It says it will “reflect on how this could have been handled better”. It then goes on to assure parents that it will be looking at the policies and training.
But what does that really mean? The trust refuses to admit that sending a girl home for celebrating her country was an appalling and divisive breach of common sense and, arguably, of law. Their language suggests an attempt to dodge accountability, to spin it as a mere mishandling rather than a fundamental failure.
At Spiked, Hugo Timms points out that this is merely a slightly more visible version of what British children learn in school … that there’s nothing at all to be proud about if you’re British:
British schoolkids have long been encouraged to be ashamed of their nationality and history. They’re taught “anti-racism” lessons and to constantly check their privilege as Brits. They study “decolonised” curricula, shorn of “triggering” British authors. Now, it seems, even dressing up as a Spice Girl and praising Shakespeare are being treated as beyond the pale.
[…]
You might say Courtney’s outfit was not exactly “traditional”, inspired by Geri Halliwel’s famous Union Jack dress from the 1997 Brit Awards. But that was clearly not the issue. What the school’s instructions really meant was that she should dress as any nationality or heritage, so long as it’s not British. According to Courtney’s father, Stuart Field, the school also turned several other pupils away at the gates on Culture Day, including a boy with a St George’s flag, a boy with a Welsh flag and a boy dressed as a farmer with a checked shirt and a traditional flat cap.
Courtney’s school also stopped her from giving a speech about what being British meant to her. “In Britain”, she would have said, “we have lots of traditions including drinking tea, our love for talking about the weather and we have the Royal Family”. “We have amazing history, like kings and queens, castles, and writers like Shakespeare.” It also praised British humour, “our values of fairness and politeness”, and fish and chips. Not exactly Enoch’s “Rivers of Blood“, is it?
July 10, 2025
Mandatory online age verification
Michael Geist discusses the rush of the Canadian and other governments in the west to try to impose one-size-fits-all age verification schemes on the internet:
The Day I Knew I Was Old 😉 by artistmac CC BY-SA 2.0
When the intersection of law and technology presents seemingly intractable new challenges, policy makers often bet on technology itself to solve the problem. Whether countering copyright infringement with digital locks, limiting access to unregulated services with website blocking, or deploying artificial intelligence to facilitate content moderation, there is a recurring hope the answer to the policy dilemma lies in better technology. While technology frequently does play a role, experience suggests that the reality is far more complicated as new technologies also create new risks and bring unforeseen consequences. So too with the emphasis on age verification technologies as a magical solution to limiting under-age access to adult content online. These technologies offer some promise, but the significant privacy and accuracy risks that could inhibit freedom of expression are too great to ignore.
The Hub runs a debate today on the mandated use of age verification technologies. I argue against it in a slightly shorter version of this post. Daniel Zekveld of the Association for Reformed Political Action (ARPA) Canada makes the case for it in this post.
The Canadian debate over age verification technologies – which has now expanded to include both age verification and age estimation systems – requires an assessment of both the proposed legislative frameworks and the technologies themselves. The last Parliament featured debate over several contentious Internet-related bills, notably streaming and news laws (Bills C-11 and C-18), online harms (Bill C-63) and Internet age verification and website blocking (Bill S-210). Bill S-210 fell below the radar screen for many months as it started in the Senate and received only cursory review in the House of Commons. The bill faced only a final vote in the House but it died with the election call. Once Parliament resumed, the bill’s sponsor, Senator Julie Miville-Dechêne, wasted no time in bringing it back as Bill S-209.
The bill would create an offence for any organization making available pornographic material to anyone under the age of 18 for commercial purposes. The penalty for doing so is $250,000 for the first offence and up to $500,000 for any subsequent offences. Organizations can rely on three potential defences:
- The organization instituted a government-approved “prescribed age-verification or age estimation method” to limit access. There is a major global business of vendors that sell these technologies and who are vocal proponents of this kind of legislation.
- The organization can make the case that there is “legitimate purpose related to science, medicine, education or the arts”.
- The organization took steps required to limit access after having received a notification from the enforcement agency (likely the CRTC).
Note that Bill S-209 has expanded the scope of available technologies for implementation: while S-210 only included age verification, S-209 adds age estimation technologies. Age estimation may benefit from limiting the amount of data that needs to be collected from an individual, but it also suffers from inaccuracies. For example, using estimation to distinguish between a 17 and 18 year old is difficult for both humans and computers, yet the law depends upon it. Given the standard for highly effective technologies, age estimation technologies may not receive government approvals, leaving only age verification in place.
July 6, 2025
The purpose of primary and secondary schools in the west
About a week ago, I linked to a parent’s review of “Alpha School” at Astral Codex Ten. Perhaps as an unintended counter-point, here’s another anonymous essay discussing existing public school systems in the West:
Democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. – Winston Churchill
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it. – G.K. Chesterton
What Do Schools Do?
Imagine for a moment that you visit 100 random classrooms in 100 random schools across the country. You’ll be impressed by some teachers; you won’t think much of others. You will see a handful of substitute teachers struggling to manage their classrooms. You’ll see some schools where the energy is positive and students seem excited to learn, and others where it feels like pulling teeth. Two commonalities you might notice are that first, in the vast majority of classrooms, the students are grouped by age and taught the same content. And second, you might notice that the learning isn’t particularly efficient. Many students already know what is being taught. Others are struggling and would benefit from a much slower pace. You will see plenty of sitting around waiting for the next thing to happen, or activities that seem designed to take up time and not to maximize learning.
What do schools do? Your first thought might be that schools exist to maximize learning. Observing 100 random classrooms may disabuse you of that notion. It sure doesn’t seem like school is doing a good job of maximizing learning. So what are schools doing?
Context
This essay is a review of school as an institution. It is an attempt to write something that is true and insightful about how school is designed and why the structure of school has proven so durable. In particular, I’m trying to describe why those two commonalities – age-graded classrooms and inefficient learning – are so widespread. I’m not trying to provide solutions. Everyone seems to have a pet idea for how schools could be better. I do think that most people who think they have the prescription for schools’ problems don’t understand those problems as well as they should. For context, I am a teacher. I have taught in public, private, and charter schools for 13 years. I have also had the chance to visit and observe at a few dozen schools of all types. I’m writing based on my experience teaching and observing, and also drawing on some education history and research. My experience and knowledge are mostly limited to the United States, so that’s what I’ll focus on and where I think my argument generalizes. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to think about how these ideas apply to other countries.
Thesis
Here’s the thesis, the point of this essay. School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.
This might seem like a silly thing to say. During those 100 classroom visits you might have seen a lot of classrooms with a lot of students who don’t look very motivated. The core design of our schools – age-graded classrooms where all students are expected to learn more or less the same curriculum – are the worst form of motivation we could invent … except for all the others. While school is not particularly effective at motivating students, every other approach we’ve tried manages to be worse. School is a giant bundle of compromises, and many things that you might intuitively think would work better simply don’t.
The important thing to remember is that, when I talk about school, I’m talking about tens of millions of students and a few million teachers in the US. You might say to yourself, “I wasn’t very motivated in school”. Sure, I believe you. The goal isn’t to motivate you, it’s to motivate as many students as possible, and to do it at scale. If you have a boutique solution that works for your kid in your living room, that’s nice, but that isn’t likely to scale to the size at which we ask our education system to operate.
Motivation for What?
So school is designed to motivate kids. But motivate them to do what? Do kids learn anything in school?
There are plenty of depressing statistics out there about what people don’t learn in school, but they do learn things. You can look at longitudinal studies where on average students make academic progress. For a broader sample size, the NWEA assessment is given at thousands of schools across the country each year. You can see from the average scores they publish that the average student does improve at math and reading – especially through the end of middle school. We also had a natural experiment a few years ago. The pandemic closed schools across the country, shifting to online or part-time learning for anywhere from three months to a year and a half. The result is now well-known as “learning loss”. The nationally-sampled NAEP assessment is the most objective measure, though learning loss shows up across various assessments. There’s some variability between states, subjects, and ages. For one example, 8th grade math scores declined by about 0.2 standard deviations. This is a relatively small but significant decline. It’s a good example of the broader principle: students learn less in school than we would like, but students do learn things.
It’s useful to pick a few specific examples. Do you know the meaning of the word “relevant?” Do you know what photosynthesis is? Where do you think you learned those facts? I’m sure some readers learned them by being avid readers and curious humans, outside of the school curriculum. But many kids learn stuff like that in school. If you’re skeptical, stop by a middle school classroom when they’re learning photosynthesis, or when they’re working on identifying relevant evidence in their writing. You’ll see plenty of kids who already know both, but plenty more who know neither. A lot of learning is this kind of gradual, incidental knowledge that we often take for granted.
So students can read and do arithmetic and maybe they learn about photosynthesis, but isn’t that all learned in elementary school? A number of studies suggest that additional years of education lead to IQ gains of 1-5 IQ points per year of schooling. These studies often use a change in compulsory education laws or age discontinuities as quasi-experiments. In particular, changes in compulsory education laws are typically at upper middle school or high school levels. Those are the places where we might be most skeptical of the value of education. Sure, schools teach kids how to read, but once students know how to read do schools really add any value? Kids don’t remember how to factor quadratics, yet they gain IQ points from the time they spent in school not learning how to factor quadratics, at least on average.
That gain in IQ points is worth lingering on. This might seem hard to believe for people who are skeptical of the value of school. And to be clear, the fact that school raises IQ doesn’t mean that school is designed optimally. Maybe there’s a better way to design school that would raise IQ even more? But I think that, if we all imagine a world where we give up on education and the average person had a significantly lower IQ, is that a world you want to live in? We don’t have good experiments on IQ, but higher IQs are correlated with all sorts of things that we might want – lower probability of committing crime, higher career earnings, and better physical and mental health. It’s tough to pin down exactly what students learn in school that sticks, particularly for the higher grades. During those visits to 100 classrooms you would’ve seen a lot of classrooms where not much learning was happening. Yet despite all those bad optics, school still raises IQ. Before we tear down the fence, we should think carefully about the purpose this particular fence serves.
I don’t want to overstate the case here. We should be skeptical of school learning. Kids don’t learn as much as we might hope. They forget all sorts of stuff you would think they’d remember if school was operating well. But at a basic level, most students learn to read and do arithmetic, some learn much more than that, and on average school seems to add to IQ. Revisiting Chesterton’s fence, those are the benefits of school we need to understand before we tear anything apart.
