Quotulatiousness

May 20, 2026

Canadian politics can be bad for your mental health

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

As a rule of thumb, the more you pay attention to Canada’s political circus, the worse your state of mental health becomes, IMO anyway. On a more serious note, David Clinton got curious about a recent Manhattan Institute project tracing American mental health trends:

Image from The Audit

The Manhattan Institute’s research into the confluence of mental health trends and political leanings in the U.S. generated buzz a while back. Among other things, they discovered that, as of the 2021-22 school year, liberal students were 13-17 percent more likely to seek mental health treatment than their conservative peers. That’s a frightening gap.

I was curious to know if there’s anything like that going on here in Canada. And it turns out that there’s excellent public-facing data waiting for us to drop by and help ourselves. The most recent published version of the Canadian Election Study (CES) dates back to the period around the 2021 federal election — the full dataset from 2025 isn’t yet available.

There were 20,968 respondents in total in the CES survey data from 2021. Having now spent a couple of happy hours with the results, this looks like an excellent representation of Canadian society. The questions go both deep and wide.1

I was able to directly address the political angle to all this using responses to one core question. Participants were asked to situate themselves on a political “scale where 0 means the left and 10 means the right”.

I classified anyone who responded with a number higher than 6 as “far right”, and responses less than 4 were tagged “far left”. The far left cohort had 4,927 members, while there were just 3,891 people in the far right. Those numbers are easily large enough to make distinctions potentially statistically meaningful.

Anxiety

I explored both far right and far left cohorts for how accurately the words “anxious” and “easily upset” applied to them. A response of seven indicates a self-assessment of extreme anxiety, while zero would be Big-Lebowski-level calm.

The average for the right-coded group was 3.47, while those on the left rated themselves 3.88.

Overall Mental Health

Respondents were asked to rate their mental health in relation to their peers where “1” indicates excellent mental health and “5” indicates poor mental health. A total of 3,878 from the far right responded and 3,263 from the far left. The average of all responses on the right was 2.02 (standard deviation: 0.876859) and from the left, 2.32 (0.926268).

  1. In fact, the average survey took two hours and twenty five minutes to complete! I’m definitely glad they didn’t ask me.

I mentioned the other day that the US was fully justified in “pausing” their participation in the Permanent Joint Board on Defence due to the Canadian government’s continued delinquence on military matters (and Prime Minister Carney’s blatant desire to tweak American noses while neglecting joint interests with the United States. At The Line, Matt Gurney says this won’t be the only tangible sign of American impatience with our ongoing fecklessness:

As I posted on social media when sharing this: “This is another gentle reminder to the f*ckwits in the Canadian government that they are playing with existential fire when they work to actively piss off our American allies.”

First of all, and this will annoy the Elbows Uppers to no end, the undersecretary’s comments are, fundamentally, accurate. Canada has indeed massively underinvested in defence and has also prioritized rhetoric over reality. I completely understand why Canadians hate admitting this — I hate admitting this. Having your flaws pointed out to you by someone you dislike is always a mortifying experience. But I’ve spent almost two decades writing about the very things Colby is pointing out — Canada has allowed its military capability to atrophy to a point, as I noted just a week ago in an episode of On The Line, where we’ll need many years and untold billions of dollars just to rehabilitate the armed forces. Expanding them and adding capabilities will be a whole other level of investment. This is why Canada’s recent major announcements on defence, though good and welcome, are also not enough — it will take a long time and even more money to actually repair what we have allowed to rot.

The other half of what Colby identified is also, alas, accurate. While we were massively underfunding defence and allowing core capabilities to wither and die, or while just totally missing the bus on transformational military developments (hello, drones!), Canada did indeed talk a lot about the rules-based international order and the role of middle powers and punching above our weight and all the rest. Canada focusing on rhetoric instead of reality is, alas, a fair criticism.

Many U.S. administrations called us out on this. We ignored them. Donald Trump is unique in how viciously he is prepared to exploit our weakness, but he’s hardly the first to have noticed it and called us out on it. I carry no water for MAGA or Trump, but they’ve got us dead to rights on this one. The bad orange man didn’t let the navy rust out, repeatedly defer the fighter jet replacement and hobble the army with non-serviceable equipment and recruiting and procurement systems that were actually quite awful at both those things.

We did those things. We did it to ourselves. Colby is simply possessed of the gall to bluntly call us out on our failures, in a way that Canadians aren’t accustomed to and aren’t going to enjoy.

So that’s part of it. But it’s also worth asking why the U.S. is doing this, and especially why they’re doing it now.

Part of it, probably, is just sincere frustration with us. As noted above, Colby’s remarks are accurate. But the timing is interesting. The CUSMA renegotiation deadline looms in early July And in Colby’s remarks, do I detect a whiff of the art of the deal?

The Carney government has made, and continues to make, plenty of announcements about plans, and potential deals, and future capabilities, and so on … but the Americans can’t help but notice that little is actually being done despite all the sound and fury on the PR side. Canada belatedly reached the long-agreed-upon 2% of GDP target for military spending, but most of it was a bookkeeping exercise of moving existing costs onto the Department of National Defence budget (the Canadian Coast Guard and parts of Veterans Affairs) but not much improved in Canada’s actual defence capabilities.

May 12, 2026

First One Nation party MP elected in Australian by-election

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

After the surge in support for populist Reform Party candidates in the British local elections, Australia’s populist One Nation party achieved their first member of the House of Representatives in a by-election in Farrer, with David Farley receiving 57% of the votes:

Australia’s One Nation party has won its first lower-house seat in a moment that’s been described as a political earthquake. As with Reform’s success in the council elections here, its significance is already being argued over.

The fact remains that One Nation candidate David Farley won over 57 per cent of the tally in Farrer, a vast regional constituency in New South Wales, a weathervane election that was triggered by the resignation of Sussan Ley after she was ousted as leader of the opposition conservative Liberal Party.

Saturday’s poll was the first federal test of One Nation’s support after the party recorded the second-highest number of votes out of any political party in the South Australian state election in March and, importantly, since the change of leadership of the Liberal Coalition opposition. With it, as I predicted a week or two ago, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party broke through Australia’s political glass ceiling.

Why and how? Well, for one significant reason. In response to her rise in the Australian polls, for the first time Ms Hanson and her party were endorsed by the opposition Liberal and Country (National) Party coalition. Blessed with two new leaders – two men prepared to defy the woke establishment and media – they “preferenced” the One Party candidate ensuring One Nation won the seat. Don’t forget Pauline Hanson has been far more of a persona non grata to the Australian establishment elite than Nigel Farage has to ours. I can’t see him having the chutzpah to turn up to Parliament wearing a full burqa!

Far better than anything I can write to capture the significance of the moment is David Flint’s account in Spectator Australia, titled “The Farrer earthquake: how the commentariat got it wrong“.

It is so good that I feel sure that Editor Rowan Dean will forgive me for quoting big chunks from it:

    The political establishment is in a state of shock … When Sky News Australia took the unprecedented step of calling the Farrer by-election for One Nation at an extraordinarily early hour, it wasn’t just calling a seat; it was announcing the end of an era. For the first time in Australian history, One Nation has captured a House of Representatives seat at an election, and if the current opinion polls are any indication, it is merely the first of many.

And that is the point. He goes on:

    The “commentariat” – that insulated class of pundits and pollsters – has spent years repeating the tired myth that One Nation is a party of complaint but not of policy …

    Farrer has proven that the commentariat’s “no-policies” narrative was a delusion. Australians are not merely “protesting”; they are voting for a platform of common sense, consistently put forward by Pauline Hanson and Senator Malcolm Roberts – one that the major parties have long since abandoned.

Flint argues that it presages the death of the major party monopoly: “The result reflects a deep-seated exhaustion with the status quo. Labor is no longer the party of the worker; it has become the party of the inner-city elite. The Greens, far from being environmentalists, seem content to see our landscape ruined by industrial ‘renewables’ to enrich foreign interests – propping up what Donald Trump rightly called the ‘world’s biggest fraud’. In contrast, voters have responded to a leader who tells the simple truth.”

May 9, 2026

Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell, by Simon Heffer

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

I think it’s fair to say that Enoch Powell is having a moment, nearly sixty years after he shocked the establishment with his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech. He became a pariah even in his own party, and his political career never recovered … but his warnings have more than been fulfilled over the intervening decades. In The Critic, Jeremy Black reviews the recently reprinted 1998 biography of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer:

Enoch Powell in a 1987 portrait by Allan Warren.
Wikimedia Commons.

The new imprint of this important biography provides an opportunity to reread one of the most skilful works on British political history published over the last half century. As with Heffer’s other books, it is also very well written — although might I offer a plea for leaving aside sentences such as “He still saw no reason to lay off Heath”?

Before turning to the substance, it is worth considering the Foreword. Written this January, it underlines Powell’s significance to many issues, notably: “His deep scepticism about the confluence of America’s interest with those of Britain”. I am, however, dubious about the proposition that “Powell was, quite simply, one of the foremost Conservative thinkers in living memory, possibly the greatest since Burke”. Leaving aside the question of whether Burke can be described as Conservative or even, prior to the 1790s, as conservative, and, separately, the implicit dig at claims for Disraeli whom Heffer is on the record as describing as a Charlatan, I myself would make the case for Salisbury, while agreeing that Macmillan, Hailsham and MacLeod did not measure up to Powell. He returned the damage done him by Macmillan with “bilious” reviews of his Memoirs.

While I am sceptical of the claim that Powell was a great Conservative thinker in the cosmic sense, he was an impressive critic of many of the shibboleths of establishment Conservatism from the 1960s to the 1980s, including on immigration, the nuclear deterrent, the Common Market, the American alliance, Northern Ireland, and economic policy.

A significant aspect of the intellectual character of Powell was the return of this one-time atheist to the Church in the late 1940s, the subject of the “Interlude” “Powell and God” in the book. There is, as Salisbury and Cowling among others underlined, a significant link between Conservatism and the Church of England, and Powell, like Thatcher, can be profitably discussed in these terms, with Thatcher far less convincing.

The discussion of Powell’s elision from public debate is also interesting. Published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 1998, the biography was kept on print-on-demand until cancelled in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter movement. Heffer compares the treatment of Powell to that of Orwell in facing difficulties in publishing Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. For several years, Heffer found it impossible to persuade a publisher to republish the book and suggests that this was due to a craven fear of public opinion “real or perceived”, one about which Orwell had warned not least when referring to “intellectual cowardice”. The publisher he has found, it has to be said, is another instance of the very valuable work being done by non-metropolitan concerns.

May 2, 2026

Cancelled chancellor?

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

The German Chancellor’s future looks unhappy, and eugyppius notes that even the lapdog mainstream media outlets who praised him last year are now publishing calls for his ouster:

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, 5 May 2025.
Photo by Sandro Halank for Wikimedia Commons.

Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

April 26, 2026

Rightists think leftists are stupid and leftists think rightists are evil

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

Lorenzo Warby discusses political categories and explains why they aren’t the same as moral categories:

A lot of people who class themselves as being on the Left clearly feel that there is some automatic moral kudos from being on the Left. As a direct implication of this sense of moral kudos, they also clearly think that there is some moral deficiency from being on the Right.

Yes, there are difficulties in defining Left and Right. Nevertheless, even without that difficulty, any such claim of moral kudos is ridiculous. The Left includes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim il-Sung, Pol Pot, Mengistu … Indeed, by far the most important historical impact of Left politics on world history is precisely the actions of this succession of mass-murdering tyrants and their regimes.

If you think that somehow the Left does not include said mass-murdering tyrants, you are simply wrong. It is very revealing that there are clearly many folk on the Left who somehow edit out this history. They are not looking at the Left as it is in history, but as some set of noble aspirations that morally ennoble themselves.

Folk not of the Left absolutely associate the Left with those mass-murdering tyrants. Moreover, if you edit out that history, you are editing out how the political tradition you identify with can go horribly wrong. That is not a reassuring pattern. On the contrary, it is a deeply worrying pattern.

Of course, if you are happy to be associated with some or all of those mass-murdering tyrants, that is even more of a worry.

Clearly, Left is not a moral category. It is a political category, not a moral one.

The same point applies, of course, about the Right. After all, the Right includes Hitler.

Thus, neither Left nor Right are moral categories. They are political categories, and political categories that people can get very tribal about. But they are not moral categories.

This point applies to other political categories: Socialist, for example. Hitler was a socialist. He called himself a socialist, he did socialist things, intended to do more socialist things after the war. In his writings, he argued in socialist ways.

The aforementioned mass-murdering tyrants were all socialists. They were implementing socialism on the way to communism, except for Hitler, who was using socialism as a tool to forge an Aryan super race worthy and able to dominate others. So, Socialist is not a moral category.

If you stop regarding broad political categories as also being moral categories, a lot of silly arguments go away. Such as, for example, whether Hitler was a socialist. Or, whether Hitler was of the Right. Yes, Hitler was a both a socialist and of the Right—which points to how diverse a range of political traditions Right applies to.

Even when there are grounds to attaching moral valence to political categories, that is something to be done carefully and sparingly, otherwise it can seriously get in the way of understanding.

Thus, using Fascist as a boo! word but Communist as a neutral, or even hurrah! word, is ridiculous. It is even more so when Fascist is used to obscure Nazis being National Socialists.

April 21, 2026

Hungary in the news

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

Theodore Dalrymple considers the recent change in government as Victor Orbán was replaced by Péter Magyar, who had been an Orbán supporter until the last few years:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It is perfectly normal and healthy that in an electoral democracy a government should be voted out of office after 16 years in power. One of the complaints often heard in such democracies is that “they are all the same”, they being members of the political class of whatever political party.

But there is benefit in a change of government personnel irrespective of all else, for those who remain too long in power come to think of that power as their right, and the citizenry as their servants rather than of themselves as servants of the citizenry.

The recent removal from power by election of Viktor Orbán in Hungary after so long as prime minister (and his full acceptance of the defeat, despite accusations that he was like an authoritarian dictator) was perfectly normal. He had been replaced by a man who is no fire-eating radical, Péter Magyar, a young man who was, until comparatively recently, a supporter of the leader he has replaced.

The electorate, according to polls, was concerned about the state of the economy and the level of corruption in the country. Governments that come into power promising to eradicate corruption often reveal themselves to be no different in this respect from the last: the fruits of corruption are distributed to different people, that is all.

The new prime minister differs greatly from the old in two attitudes: firstly, to the war in Ukraine and secondly to the European Union. Unlike Mr. Orbán, he is no friend of Vladimir Putin’s; and unlike Mr. Orbán, he is more likely to do the Union’s bidding in order to gain access to the latter’s funds. One important question is whether he will be forced to change Hungary’s attitude to mass immigration, opposition to which was a source not only of Mr. Orbán’s conflict with the Union, but of his long domestic popularity.

His policy was regarded as xenophobic, but this was an unjustified slur. Xenophobia is a hatred or fear of foreigners as such, ex officio, and on my visits to Hungary I found none of this. I met, for example, a Kurdish physiotherapist well integrated into Hungary, and a Moroccan academic likewise, who did not complain of personal antagonism to them. Other foreign residents whom I met did not complain of it either. A desire to protect a small country from the effects of mass immigration that have been seen in Sweden (a country of similar size of population), for example, is not xenophobia: it might on the contrary be regarded as both prudent and as a manifestation of love of one’s country. It is part of the malign legacy of Hitler and the Nazis that love of one’s country is now felt by many European intellectuals to be inherently vicious and aggressive. But love of one’s country is not the same as hatred of everyone else’s, though it is true that patriotism can sometimes degenerate into such hatred.

The European Union’s attitude to mass immigration is contradictory. It regards ethnic and cultural diversity as good in themselves, as if what existed before was lacking some important ingredient that such diversity will automatically bring.

April 17, 2026

Hungary in the news

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

The way the mainstream media reacted to the recent Hungarian election results, you’d think it was the 2020s equivalent to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Outgoing leader Viktor Orbán has been portrayed as Hungary’s Trump when he hasn’t been discussed as Hungary’s Mussolini. His successor, Péter Magyar is largely unknown outside Hungary where he had been a member of Orbán’s Fidesz party before leaving to join his current party, Tisza. In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith provides some useful background on the state of politics in Hungary today:

Hungarian Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar, on 15 March 2026 during a national day demonstration at Heroes’ Square in Budapest. Magyar is wearing a traditional bocskai jacket and a national cockade.
Photo by Norbert Banhalmi and released under CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Tisza — the name being a portmanteau of the Hungarian words tisztelet (respect) and szabadság (freedom), and a reference to the nation’s second largest river — was founded in 2020 and registered in 2022. It was a very marginal conservative party with policies like “raise the minimum pension” and “stop migration”.

In the 2022 parliamentary elections, the party fielded no candidates at all.

Tisza became a major force in Hungarian elections when Péter Magyar joined the party. Magyar, who has a legal background, had been a member of Viktor Orbán’s party Fidesz. More significantly, he had been married to the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Judit Varga, from 2006 to 2023.

In 2024, Varga resigned, along with Hungarian president Katalin Novák, after both were exposed as having signed a pardon for a convicted paedophile who had been a director of a state-run children’s home. Magyar resigned from Fidesz, accusing Orbán of “hiding behind women’s skirts”.

“For a long time I believed in an idea, a national, sovereign, civic Hungary,” wrote Magyar in a much-quoted statement, “But in recent years, I have slowly and finally realized that all of this is really just a political product.”

Magyar became a ferocious critic of alleged government corruption. His ex-wife responded to his anti-Orbán activities by accusing him of domestic abuse. Magyar denied this. Undaunted, he led various anti-government demonstrations, which attracted tens of thousands of Hungarians. He was also chosen to lead Tisza.

Magyar has profited from good timing. He is also a photogenic man who has performed well on social media. His politics are more mysterious. He has called himself a “critical pro-European and a conservative liberal”.

He is not the sort of liberal that anti-Orbán Westerners might want him to be. While he has said that he will “move away from the current, uncritically friendly approach towards Russia”, he has also said that it will take time to stop buying Russian fuel, and he has criticised the Ukrainian approach to Hungarian minorities. He has sometimes tried to outflank Orbán on sovereignty, saying that Fidesz have brought in too many guest workers, and even questionably saying that migrants have been stealing ducks from Hungarian ponds. Still, it remains to be seen if the pro-EU Magyar will maintain his more right-wing opinions or be swept along by European orthodoxy — not least when he has emphasised the importance of unlocking EU funds.

At The Sceptic, James Alexander says that the situation is more complicated than a split between Orbán and what he terms “the Roral Response”:

President Donald Trump and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban pose for a photo in the Oval Office, Friday, November 7, 2025.
Official White House photo by Daniel Torok via Wikimedia Commons.

What is the Orbán-Roral Divide? It is the Manichaean yin-yang binary of the simplistic political imagination, which supposes that, on one side, we have Orbán, Putin, Trump etc., and that, on the other side, we have von der Leyen, Merz, Starmer, Carney, Zelensky and of course the man after whom I name the category: Rory Stewart.

It has some truth in it, but it is bewildering when we see the binary exalted as if it is the only truth of politics. The downfall of Orbán illustrates this almost perfectly.

The subject today is Orbán Developments. And the Roral Response.

News.

As you all know, Orbán, after 16 years of power, fell in the recent election.

  • Viktor Orbán = Fidezs = 37.8% = 55 seats
  • Peter Magyar = Tisza = 53.6% = 138 seats

“Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out,” quoth King Lear.

Orbán lost.

Now, I like Orbán, symbolically. I don’t know about actually: never studied him. I read one of his speeches once, and it read as more intelligent than any equivalent political speech. I have one thing in common with him, which is that he was present at the funeral of Norman Stone. Anyhow, like him or loathe him, we have to be philosophical. And we have to respect him, even if he is an Oxford man.

  • Oxford: Obsessed with power. Corrupt. Cecil Rhodes, Lord Milner, Tony Blair, David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Dominic Cummings, Viktor Orbán etc.
  • Cambridge: Lord Acton: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

So let us look at what people say. The amusing thing is that people immediately editorialise. Twitter, X, Whatyouwill.com, turns everyone into William Rees-Mogg. Look at all these Editors.

Here is Ferenc Horcher, a very important Hungarian scholar:

    Time to face reality: the Hungarian electorate ousted the ruling power. The electoral system Fidesz introduced gave its opponent a two-thirds majority. Orbán established a one-man rule, tailored the campaign to himself, he is responsible for the defeat, he has to resign.

That’s grim talk from a conservative. So here on the jolly side is Sam Moyn, a very important Yale Law School professor:

    Yay for Hungary. What if the answer to illiberalism is democracy?

Ho hum. I sigh a bit over the innocence of making a contrast between illiberalism and democracy, as if liberalism = democracy.

(more…)

April 9, 2026

Carney gets another MP to defect, drawing ever closer to a Parliamentary majority

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

I’m not a Parliamentary history buff, but it strikes me that the number of Canadian Members of Parliament switching parties (always in the direction of the government) over the last year must be close to its historical high-water mark. On Wednesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney welcomed yet another “Conservative” MP to the Liberal caucus in Ottawa:

Call me a cynic if you like, but something is fishy about Carney’s talent for drawing turncoats over to his side. It would not surprise me to find that many more MPs have been offered all sorts of incentives to discover that they were really Liberals all along. Once upon a time I’d have been unbothered by this, but I’m coming to believe that an MP elected under a party banner may choose to leave that party but if they switch to a different party (that also ran a candidate in that MP’s riding), a byelection should be called. If the voters in North Bumbleford-Moosehip-Bongwater are happy with the MP’s decision, they’ll re-elect him/her/them. If not, well, shoulda thought longer before turning traitor.

Along with many others on the social media site formerly known as Twitter, J.J. McCullough clearly feels the same way: “This floor crossing BS is out of control. If MPs in this country can just change parties whenever they want, then voters truly have no control over who becomes prime minister and runs our government. The whole Canadian system is based on the premise that parties MATTER.”

At least one opposition MP did go public about Liberal approaches to switch sides — it’s my belief that he’s one of perhaps dozens:

Ian Runkle (“Runkle of the Bailey”) responds to a typical middle-of-the-Canadian-road take by Spencer Fernando:

L. Wayne Mathison is viscerally against such backroom shenanigans when it comes to Parliament:

I am disgusted, and I am not going to dress it up with polite Ottawa language.

Marilyn Gladu crossed from the Conservatives to Mark Carney’s Liberals on April 8, 2026, saying constituents want “serious leadership” and “a real plan to build a stronger and more independent Canadian economy”. Her move gives the Liberals 171 seats, one short of the 172 needed for a majority.

That is exactly why people do not buy the noble script.

This is how Ottawa usually works. The speech is about conscience.

The reality is about power.

Suddenly the language gets soft, patriotic, and lofty right when the political math gets useful. We are asked to believe an MP was hit by a lightning bolt of principle at the exact moment her switch strengthens the governing party and brings it within one seat of majority control. Convenient does not begin to cover it.

Gladu says this is about leadership and collaboration. Fine. Then let voters decide whether they agree. That is the part these people always skip. They act as if a personal change of heart magically rewrites the contract with the public. It does not. People did not vote only for Marilyn Gladu the individual. They voted for a Conservative MP, a Conservative platform, and a Conservative opposition role. Crossing the floor without first seeking a new mandate may be legal, but it feels like a bait-and-switch because that is exactly what it is.

And spare me the line about “doing the best thing” for the riding. Every floor crosser says some version of that. It is the oldest detergent in the political cupboard. It is meant to wash ambition into service. What it really signals is this: I think my judgment now matters more than the basis on which you elected me.

That is where the anger comes from.

Voters are already drowning in managed language, staged sincerity, and plastic promises. Trust in politics is weak because people keep seeing the same pattern. Politicians campaign one way, govern another, then call the switch “leadership”. They wrap self-interest in national purpose and hope the flag covers the fingerprints.

What makes this worse is the timing. Carney publicly welcomed Gladu into Liberal caucus the same day, and the result is not symbolic. It materially strengthens the government’s position in the House. This is not some minor personal journey. It changes parliamentary leverage. It changes committee numbers, confidence calculations, and the balance of power.

So yes, I’m pissed.

I am pissed because voters are treated like props in a story written after the fact. I am pissed because party labels suddenly matter a great deal during elections and apparently not at all when power is on offer. I am pissed because people who were sent to oppose Liberal policy can simply walk across the aisle and help entrench it, then expect applause for being “constructive.”

And there is another detail that makes this smell even worse. Local reporting says that in January, Gladu had advocated for byelections when MPs switch parties. If that report is accurate, then this is not just opportunism. It is opportunism with a side order of hypocrisy.

That is the real issue here. Not whether floor crossing is technically allowed. Not whether Ottawa insiders can invent a respectable sentence for it. The real issue is whether voters still mean anything once the election is over.

My view is simple. If you want to switch parties, resign and run again. Go back to the people. Make your case honestly. Ask for a fresh mandate under the new banner. Anything less might be lawful, but it is not clean. It tells voters their consent is temporary, conditional, and easily bypassed once the machinery of power starts humming.

That is why this disgusts me.

Because democracy is not only about counting seats. It is about keeping faith with the people who gave you one.

March 24, 2026

More political and philosophical illusions, left and right

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

Tom Kratman continues his discussion of the illusions that distort how people on the left and people on the right view reality:

There is an illusion – yes, on both sides – of guilt by association. This is related to, but not exactly the same as, the illusion of indistinguishability. How many nail-bomb-building moral sons of Bill Ayers are over on the modern American left? Can’t be too many, I think, based on the serious dearth of Earth-shattering kabooms we hear, or rather don’t hear, lately. How many hair-shirted and sandwich board clad – with said boards reading, “Repent! The end is near!” – folks are there on the religious right? Based on how the typical Christian lives, and those being by no means a particularly bad set of men and women, there aren’t all that many. How many Christians do you really think, given a button that would make the Westboro Baptist Church and all its members go poof, wouldn’t push that button twice, the first time slowly, for the emotional satisfaction (well, that and to savor the screaming1), and the second time, quickly, to make sure. How many leftists and liberals are dead set against gun control? More than a few.

Then there’s the illusion brought on by willful blindness. For example, “No enemies to the left!” said Alexander Kerenski, Prime Minister of Russia, in 1917. Pity Kerenski wasn’t able to see that the people to his left were largely intellectual idiots and dogmatic homicidal maniacs, and that there may have been people to his right who were considerably more reasonable and sane. He said that not too long before being tossed out on his ear by the Bolsheviks, who, interestingly enough, were to his left.

You don’t see as much of this – the notion that there are no enemies to the right – on the conservative side, by the way, though there is some. Still, the next time I see an actual conservative lining up with the American National Socialist Party,2 the KKK, or Stormfront will be the first.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that we take something – civilization, actually – so much for granted that we forget how hard it is to build or to hold onto, and so forget that we have something important in common with our more moderate political opponents. Thus, taking it for granted, we forget that common ground, see the opposition, and so line up with those more extreme sorts for whom civilization is probably just a burden they’d as soon be done with.

  1. Okay, maybe some would just push it the once.
  2. Which seems to have many trivial manifestations. You can find your own links, but why bother?

March 9, 2026

Political and philosophical illusions, left and right

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

Tom Kratman discusses how illusions distort how people on the left and on the right view reality:

There are a number of these. I am by no means certain that I’ve identified all there are, either, nor even all the important ones. Still, let’s work with what we have, shall we, concentrating especially on the ones that are obviously paired, existing on both left and right, in some form or other?

Here are the first five. Next week we’ll cover the rest of the important ones, such as I’ve been able to identify. Why bother? Because if some people on both sides could see the illusions to which they’re subject, it is just possible they could strain and maybe even converse, which may push off or make less likely the breakup of my country or descent into a really nasty civil war, which is the whole purpose of this series of columns.

One illusion, not universal but very common, is, “I am in the reasonable political center.” Sorry, but this is rarely true. It is not true of me and it is probably not true of you. Where you probably are is in the center of your group of friends and acquaintances; that’s why they’re your group of friends and acquaintances. Indeed most people seem to exist in a hermetically sealed echo chamber, where no contrary thoughts are allowed entrance. This is how we get inane statements like Pauline Kael’s, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.”1

A second illusion has to do with distance. The reader may recall that one of the defenses I gave last week for the left-right spectrum is that it enables one to get a clearer idea of where one really is based on what can or cannot be seen, and how clearly. Imagine yourself standing somewhere near the base line for the left right spectrum. A little up or down won’t matter. (A lot up or down may mean you’re a loon, but we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now.) Look left. Look right. Can you see the difference between a run of the mill conservative and a Nazi? No? If not, that means you’re so far left, even if you think you’re in the reasonable center, that they’re all blending together. Can you see the difference between a Leninist and a Stalinist? Yes? That also means you are pretty far to the left. Conversely, can you not see the difference between a Leninist and a Stalinist? You are probably then somewhat to the right end. Can you see the difference between Hitler and George W. Bush? Same deal.

Oh, and if you can’t see the difference between Hitler and W, that means that not only are you pretty far left, you’re also an idiot.2

Yet a third optical illusion – well, a more or less auditory phenomenon that translates into an optical illusion – concerns vociferousness. Imagine the most moderate man or women in the country. He (or she) is the exact middle of the road. Indeed, he is so middle of the road that he makes his living renting himself out as a guide to the folks who paint the stripes on highways and byways. Imagine also that he (let’s just skip the PC bullshit, from now on, shall we? He includes she.) is quite vociferous in his political moderation, detesting everyone on the right third of the spectrum and everyone on the left third separately but equally, and voicing his disgust and contempt loudly, as often as he can find an audience. How does that man look to a leftist? How does he look to David Duke?

Easy; the lefty sees a conservative whom, for reasons mentioned above he cannot distinguish from a Nazi, while Duke sees at best, a communist. How does that happen? I think what takes place, in effect, is that both lefty and (pretty extreme to the point of disgusting) righty take that vociferousness, and add it as a height above the spectrum, then lay that elevation down in the opposite direction from themselves.

That happens to me all the time, by the way. I am – as far as I can tell, both by where I place on surveys and by what I can distinguish when looking left or right – about one third of the way from true center to the right, or, in other words, just on the right edge, the cusp, between the middle third and the right third. And I am vociferous to and past the point of being obnoxious about it, too. This is why much of the extreme right – the right so far from them that lefties cannot even distinguish it from conservatives – detests me as a liberal, while liberals see pure and unrepentant Nazi.3

  1. http://www.newyorker.com/the-front-row/my-oscar-picks#ixzz1FCt1d1Mw
  2. No, I’m not a huge fan of W, but you’re still an idiot. And ignorant.
  3. Nazi is a toughie for me, being an eclectic mix of various kinds of Celt, but also Ashkenazi Jew, which includes a small percentage of sub-Saharan African – oh, yes it does — Gyspy, Russian, Pole, and God alone alone knows what else. True story: whatever genes I have, I can tan like you wouldn’t believe. In 1998 I came back from about six weeks in the Kuwaiti desert. My eldest daughter took one look and screamed, “Mommy! Mommy! Daddy turned black.” She was exaggerating. A little.

Update, 10 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! 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.

February 19, 2026

Too many “conservatives” today are just slower-speed liberals

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

Most self-described conservatives in politics are not particularly inclined to “conserve” anything, as Spaceman Spiff points out, they’re pretty much onboard with the liberal vision they just want it to be fractionally slower or infinitesimally not-quite-as-liberal as the liberals. They are the ineffectual, neutered, tame opposition:

Modern conservatism is not conserving our world. Mainstream conservatives seem to have no interest in the real issues affecting us.

At best they merely wish to slow down our decline. At worst, they are fully on board with the destruction.

When they do act or speak they often pick a safe version of a sensitive issue.

In Britain there is lots of talk of illegal immigration and how the state mishandles it. None about ruinous volumes of legal immigration, almost one million per year, and what it is doing to the country.

Pushback against climate policy falters on the speed of changes, not the underlying fraud of climate science itself.

No conservative will honestly discuss the plummeting happiness of women recorded across the West and yet there it is, writ large in antidepressant prescriptions and social media videos. It may have multiple causes, but feminism cannot be challenged so they say nothing lest they are reprimanded by the sisterhood.

Everything real is forbidden. It is all an act.

Like the left, those on the right are increasingly unable to face reality which means they can never course correct. They are trapped within a self-referencing culdesac designed to maintain their position in someone else’s hierarchy. That is why they have become so ineffective and appear to do very little except moan about the pace of change while they say nothing about the changes themselves.

We sense the conservatives do wish to conserve things but they are inexplicably mesmerized by the opinion of their enemies. They seek reassurance and applause from people who view them as evil.

This makes no sense to ordinary people.

Thinking like the enemy

The problem with modern conservatives is they are animated by underlying drives that cannot create a conservative or traditional society. They have adopted the thinking patterns associated with the progressive left while still using the language of conservatism.

The left is traditionally defined by a series of interrelated traits that manifest in much of what they agitate for.

  1. A desire for centralization;
  2. A notable external locus of control;
  3. Seeking approval from the group.

Central control systems feature prominently in all left-wing schemes. From local councils to national governments, those who gravitate to the left often want to create centralized decision-making bodies to manage society. Institutions, government departments, NGOs and even charities all feature, but only when they act as the controlling authority in some field of interest.

Related to this is a clear external locus of control visible in individuals and their decisions. There is a relief others make the key decisions, so people actively seek out direction from an established authority. This ensures minimal resistance to the many centralized schemes we see emerge.

Acting solo creates discomfort. An older formulation understood this as the rejection of responsibility. Today it often manifests as an obsession with experts making key decisions for us all, partly to mask individual cowardice. People making their own decisions in life are derided as naive or dangerous.

During Covid decision makers became hysterical at the very idea we would reject the advice of experts and perform our own research despite the issue being medical and therefore dangerous.

A related phenomenon characteristic of many leftists is the need for approval, often from a group. Not just others making decisions but a dependency on confirmation and endorsement to ensure thinking and behaviour follows an established norm. This is the antithesis of original thinking or bold action; it is how adolescents often behave.

In today’s world this deep urge is reflected most in the social media landscape of harvesting attention and likes. Every fledgling narcissistic applause-seeking trait is given full expression in the endless search for approval from strangers. Whole sections of society seem lost to impulses we once understood as immature and dysfunctional.

Update: Not long after I queued this item for publication, a Canadian example popped up in the news, as yet another rock-ribbed “conservative” suddenly realized that electing a Liberal was what his constituents actually wanted when they inexplicably voted for him as a Conservative candidate in the last federal election.

Edmonton Conservative MP Matt Jeneroux has crossed the floor to the governing Liberals.

“I am honoured to welcome Matt Jeneroux to our caucus as the newest member of Canada’s new government,” said Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a post on X.

“I am grateful to Matt and his family that he will continue his service as a strong voice for Edmonton Riverbend in Parliament.”

Carney said Jeneroux, who has represented the riding of Edmonton Riverbend since 2015, will take on a new role as special advisor on economic and security partnership for the Liberals.

Jeneroux is the third Conservative to join the Liberals, after colleagues Michael Ma and Chris d’Entremont crossed the floor late last year.

A Liberal source says Jeneroux first met Carney back in November, which was the first of at least two conversations, with talks between Carney’s office and Jeneroux continuing since. That source added that it has been a “long journey” to Wednesday’s announcement.

d’Entremont crossed the floor to join the Liberals in November, which unleashed a wave of speculation as to who might be next, with Jeneroux’s name heavily floated. Jeneroux then announced his plans to resign from the Conservative caucus, citing family reasons. Since then, he has not voted with the Conservatives and did not attend the party’s recent convention in Calgary in late January.

After Carney’s announcement, the prime minister updated his daily itinerary, adding a stop in Edmonton to meet with Jeneroux before attending events in British Columbia.

“Matt brings a wealth of experience in Parliament, despite his young demeanor,” said Carney, while sitting next to Jeneroux.

The MP from Edmonton welcomed the prime minister and laid out the reasons for why he had reversed his decision to resign.

“I had announced my resignation back in November, largely due to family reasons, but quite simply, couldn’t sit on the sidelines after seeing what the prime minister’s ambitious agenda he was undertaking across the country and across the world,” he said.

“Quite honestly, it was the speech in Davos where you took everything head on,” he added.

Jeneroux said it felt disingenuous and “quite simply wrong” to sit on the sidelines.

February 7, 2026

Liberal horror at a Conservative MP going to Washington to talk trade

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

Jamil Jivani, Conservative Member of Parliament for the riding of Bowmanville-Oshawa North, is being called all sorts of names by Liberals and their creatures in the mainstream media for his temerity in actually going to Washington DC to try to encourage trade talks between Canada and the United States:

Image from Melanie in Saskatchewan

Mark Carney, I want to speak to you directly for a moment, because this whole episode has your fingerprints all over it.

You have spent months telling Canadians we live in a more dangerous and divided world. You have warned us that this is not a transition but a rupture. You have explained, repeatedly, that Canada must adapt, that middle powers must act differently, that old assumptions no longer apply. It is very serious language. Big language. The kind you deliver slowly, as if the room should be taking notes.

So imagine my surprise when a Conservative MP behaved exactly the way your speeches suggest Canada must behave, and Ottawa promptly short-circuited.

Jamil Jivani went to Washington to try to open a door you and your government have been telling Canadians does not exist. He used a personal relationship with JD Vance, not for applause, not for theatrics, but for the radical act of actually talking to someone who matters. And suddenly, Mark, this was not adaptive diplomacy. It was alarming. Inappropriate. A problem.

This is the part where your credibility starts to wobble.

Because let’s be honest. When people asked you about engaging Donald Trump directly, your response boiled down to “Who cares?” Either because it bored you or because you preferred not to acknowledge that door at all. So when a Conservative tries anyway, the issue is not that the door was touched. It is that someone proved it was never locked in the first place.

Jivani did not freelance. He did not sneak off. He offered this connection to your government first. Openly. Calmly. And it was dismissed. Brushed aside. Not interested. And when he went anyway, your side did not react with curiosity or even grudging respect. It reacted with outrage.

The kind of outrage you see when someone fixes a problem you have been holding meetings about for weeks without ever intending to solve it. Like an office that has spent months discussing a flickering lightbulb, only to panic when someone quietly screws in a new one and sits back down before the chair can call the meeting to order.

And then, almost on cue, came the shiny object.

I am not accusing you of anything, Mark. I am simply asking whether it is coincidence that the outrage over Jivani going to Washington was followed almost immediately by a dramatic announcement about dropping the EV mandate. Was that timing accidental, or was it a convenient way to make Canadians look over there while a Conservative threatened to come back with something measurable. I am not saying it was a distraction. I am just saying the choreography was impressive.

Now, let’s talk about cooperation, because you and your allies invoke that word constantly.

When generalized liberals complain that Conservatives will not “play ball”, what they seem to mean is that Conservatives are not being obedient. Cooperation, in practice, appears to mean standing aside politely while you govern unchallenged. It does not mean Conservatives doing something useful that might work. Especially not if it works where you did not.

And this is where your rhetoric corners you.

February 6, 2026

This is the right way to sell Western separatism to Eastern Liberal voters

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Paul Mitchell explains to Ontario and Quebec Liberals why they should be fully supportive of kicking Alberta (and maybe Saskatchewan) out of Confederation to ensure a 100% Liberal-dominated Canada in perpetuity:

Please share this for progressive Canadians back East …

Greetings progressive Easterners. I have noticed that some of you are quite upset and even enraged by the current quest of many Albertans to have Alberta leave Canada.

Now hear me out.

If you consider it, you’re taking this all wrong. Consider the progressive utopian paradise that Canada could be if “polluting”, “knuckle-dragging”, “bigoted”, “backward” conservative Alberta was gone! I mean, that is what you think about us, right? I see those descriptions of us every day on social media, so imagine how great it’ll be for y’all once we’re no longer holding back your progressive goals and dreams!

With Alberta gone (maybe with Saskatchewan too if you’re lucky) there will be no stopping your heart’s most desired policies from coming true. Without us there could be:

✅ unlimited diversity and immigration
✅ true Net Zero with heavy taxes for CO2 emissions
✅ collective rights over individual rights
✅ severe hate speech laws
✅ gun confiscation
✅ almost no more conservative politicians

All this and much more can be yours for the low price of zero dollars. Just let us Albertans ride off into the sunset and your dreams will become reality.

So, turn that frown upside down!

Contemplate your amazing future without Albertans bumming you out constantly. There’s no need to be upset about Alberta’s independence petition. You’re going to get what you said you always wanted: a country where progressives will be in charge, forever.

That is what you want, right?

Thanks for your kind attention, and future support for Alberta’s independence from Canada.

Fortunately for me, I have relatives in Alberta so I’d have a chance of being accepted as a refugee from remnant Canada …

February 2, 2026

Pierre Poilievre barely squeaks by leadership review with a mere 87.4% approval

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

If the Canadian media were clamouring for Poilievre to be drummed out of the Conservative leadership in shame and disgrace (and they were), the leadership vote results were … disappointing. At Small Dead Animals, Kate helpfully edits the CBC’s report to more accurately reflect the corporation’s inner feelings:

Pierre and Ana Poilievre at a Conservative leadership rally, 21 April, 2022.
Photo by Wikipageedittor099 via Wikimedia Commons.

Poilievre waltzed into that redneck rodeo town and the whole room of racist trucker-hat-wearing western deplorables lost their minds cheering like he just invented beer or something. He crushed that leadership review with 87% or whatever the hell it was, the party faithful slobbering all over him, screaming like it’s the second coming. Pathetic.

That was the easy part. But the rest of Canada? Please. These un-Canadian clowns don’t speak for the country—they’re just the loudmouth Maple MAGA fringe who love Donald Trump and think affordability means more oil subsidies. He still hasn’t convinced normal people he’s fit to run anything bigger than a backyard BBQ. Hammered the same tired lines about prices and taxes, sure, but dodged anything real that might scare off his adoring hicks.

They say more details are coming, he’s gonna tour and talk. Yeah, sure he is. If he wants anyone outside that echo chamber to take him seriously as PM material, he better start sounding like he wants pandas from Beijing instead of pandering to those yahoos. God, it makes me sick—he was supposed to crash and burn, and instead these idiots propped him right back up.

As I wrote in a mostly US discussion group:

Pro tip: Never let your national government directly subsidize the media that reports on them. Canada did this, and the media reward the party that did it with the kind of fawning coverage that North Korean media might envy. A recent example is the opposition Conservative party leader won a record level of support at the party conference this week. It was reported as if he’d just barely survived roving packs of feral Conservative opponents wandering the convention floor with pitchforks and burning torches. To cap it off, one of the main networks, CTV, reported on record Conservative fundraising numbers … and included a direct link to the Liberal Party’s donations page.

We can’t hate the bought-and-paid-for Canadian media enough.

December 24, 2025

Welcome to Bland World

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

Ted Gioia yearns for the return of the weirdo, the eccentric, and the non-conformist to spice up our bland, smooth, grey world:

“People are less weird than they used to be,” claims psychologist Adam Mastroianni. He describes this as “an epidemic of the mundane”.

The strangest thing, he believes, is absence of strangeness. Nobody wants to make waves — or even trickles. Conformity is the flavor of the month, and it tastes the same every month.

We live in a “smoothness society”, explains philosopher Byung-Chul Han. He points to the smooth, rounded contours of the iPhone as a symbol of society’s desire to remove friction. Our phone apps demonstrate the exact same thing. We scroll and swipe with such ease, and anything with complexity, nuance, or resistance is eliminated from consideration.

“The smooth is the signature of the present time”, he claims. Everything from the Brazilian wax job applied to human bodies to the wax coating put on fruits and vegetables aims at the same ideal.

Resistance is futile. Everything must be smooth. Paradise now really is that paved parking lot.

In a world without complexity or resistance, nothing ever changes. Most movies, music, books feel like stagnant rehashes of the same formulas. And that’s intentional.

For the first time in history, fashions don’t change. We don’t change.

Others have noticed this avoidance of anything new or different. Things are designed to blend in, not stand out. Jessica Stillman, writing in Inc., complains about a “blandness epidemic“. Brian Klaas calls it the “surefire mediocre“.

Everywhere you look, the system is serving up more of the same.

It’s not just in our imagination — the “world really is getting grayer“. A researcher recently studied photos of household items going back two centuries. An analysis of the pixels showed a scary collapse in color.

Even the Victorians — often considered as conformists — lived a more color-filled life. We have almost completely abandoned red and yellow and other bright hues in favor a boring black-and-white spectrum.

But what’s most striking is how this descent into grayness has accelerated during the last few years. The most popular color is now charcoal — and at the current rate it will soon account for half of the marketplace.

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