Quotulatiousness

March 16, 2025

Female sexual predators

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

Every civilized person rejects the notion that male sexual predators should be tolerated, yet few are willing to accept the notion that female sexual predators might even exist. They absolutely do exist and they do commit terrible crimes against their — often very young — victims, as Janice Fiamengo shows:

Even when we are aware that women prey on children, many of us can’t really believe it. When Florida Congresswoman Anna Luna, a Republican elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, proposed three new bills last year that would impose harsh penalties, “including the death penalty”, for various forms of sexual abuse, child pornography, and child sexual exploitation, it is impossible to believe that Luna thought any number of women would be executed for child rape, and nor will they be given the leniency that is shown to women in the criminal justice system (see Sonja Starr’s research).

Yet similar crimes to Ma’s are easily discovered. In the same month that Ma pled guilty, a Martinsville, Indiana teacher was charged with three counts of sexual misconduct against a minor, a 15-year-old boy who has alleged that as many as ten other students were raped by the same woman. The month before that, a New Jersey primary school teacher was charged with aggravated sexual assault against a boy who was 13 years old when she bore his child; it is alleged that she began raping the boy when he was 11. The month before that, a Tipton County, Tennessee teacher [pictured below] pled guilty to a dozen sex crimes against children ranging in age from 12-17 years old. It is thought that she victimized a total of 21 children.

In the same month, a Montgomery, New York teacher pled guilty to criminal sexual assault of a 13 year old boy in her class, whom she assaulted over a period of months. In the previous month, a San Fernando Valley teacher was charged with sexual assault of a 13 year old male student; police believe she victimized others also. Earlier in the year, a substitute teacher in Decatur, Illinois was charged with raping an 11 year old boy. These are just a few recent cases, and only those involving female schoolteachers. Female predators are also to be found amongst social workers, juvenile detention officers, and sports coaches.

The feminist position on male sexual abuse of women and girls has for a long time been that it is about power. Men rape and abuse, according to Susan Brownmiller [quoted above] and others, because they believe it their right as men to keep women subordinate. Rape compensates for male inadequacy and allows for the expression of men’s hostility toward women: it is not about lust but about men’s need to humiliate and degrade. As Paul Elam once noted in a Regarding Men episode, the theory is fatally weakened if even a single woman does the same thing. Feminists have responded by saying that female sexual abuse is fundamentally different from male, less dangerous to society, less hurtful to its victims.

While I was doing research for this essay, I happened upon a recent podcast discussion between Louise Perry, British author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, and Meghan Murphy, Canadian Substack author and editor of Feminist Current. The podcast was called “What Happened to Feminism?” and I tuned in because I have enjoyed their perspectives on other issues.

Perry and Murphy are both critics of feminism who remain, as their conversation confirmed, staunchly feminist and anti-male. At one point in the podcast (at about 50:00), the conversation turned to #MeToo, and especially to allegations against teachers. Having already agreed that 95% of MeToo allegations were true, or at least based on something real, the pundits went on to agree, with disconcerting laughter, that there was no comparison between a “crazy” woman who “had sex” with a male student in her class, and a “dangerous” man, a “predatory rapist”, who went after under-age girls in his power.

Murphy even trotted out the old chestnut that abused boys were “stoked about the situation” in getting with “the hot teacher”. After all, she chuckled, “Men are gross predators. Men are perverts. They can’t keep it in their pants.” Perry, seeming taken aback by Murphy’s vulgarity, nonetheless agreed that the sexual abuse of boys is in an entirely different category from that of girls: “It is so annoying to me,” she said, “when people will go around claiming that these are exactly the same”.

Indifference to the victimization of boys, and lack of shame in admitting it, could hardly have been more stark. I mention the podcast not because it was singularly outrageous but because the attitudes expressed in it are still so much the norm, even amongst women who claim to have rethought other feminist beliefs.

March 3, 2025

Is DOGE merely uncovering what used to be called “honest” graft?

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, History, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jon Miltimore explains where the expression “honest graft” came from and gives examples of what the DOGE investigations have turned up so far:

In 1905, George Washington Plunkitt made arguably the most famous defense of political graft in American history.

“Everybody is talkin’ these days about Tammany men growin’ rich on graft,” the New York state senator and Tammany Hall member wrote, “but nobody thinks of drawin’ the distinction between honest graft and dishonest graft”.

Plunkitt was responding to The Shame of the Cities, a book by journalist Lincoln Steffens that exposed sweeping political corruption in U.S. cities.

The ward boss’s shameless defense of “honest graft”, which is still assigned to undergraduates a century after Plunkitt’s death, comes to mind when looking at the fraud, waste, and abuse Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and others are uncovering.

To take but one example, consider the billions of dollars in taxpayer funds the Environmental Protection Agency awarded last year to Power Forward Communities. If you’ve never heard of the nonprofit group, you’re forgiven. Almost nobody has — because it didn’t exist until late 2023.

Power Forward Communities had no footprint, online or otherwise, until October 2023, when it was announced as part of the Rewiring America program, an organization linked to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, which says its mission is “all about Rewiring America’s values, people, and culture.”

Less than a year after its creation, Power Forward Communities was awarded $2 billion via the EPA’s National Clean Investment Fund — even though it reported just $100 in revenue during its first three months of operation.

The payment, which is slated to continue through June 2031, caught the attention of Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator.

“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” Zeldin said.

Indeed. It’s graft on a scale the Tammany Hall charlatans couldn’t have imagined.

Historical sources say 19th-century politician Boss Tweed and his ring of cronies took in at least $50 million in corrupt money in backroom deals, kickbacks, and skimming before Tweed was convicted of larceny and forgery in 1873 and fled to Cuba, and later Spain. In 2025 dollars, that’s about $1.3 billion — considerably less than the single payoff former President Joe Biden’s EPA awarded Power Forward Communities.

February 27, 2025

Reining in the ATF

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

J.D. Tuccille on the ATF’s immediate future with FBI director Kash Patel as the newly appointed acting head of the bureau:

Kash Patel, 9th Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

… it’s impossible to credibly argue that the ATF doesn’t need a shakeup. After all, this is a federal agency that ran guns to criminal gangs in Mexico as part of a bizarre and failed “investigation”, manipulated mentally disabled people into participating in sting operations — and then arrested them, lost thousands of guns and gun parts, killed people over paperwork violations, and unilaterally reinterpreted laws to create new felonies out of thin air (which means more cause for sketchy investigations and stings). The federal police agency obsessively focused on firearms has long seemed determined to guarantee itself work by finding ever more things to police.

But what about putting the same person in charge of both the ATF and the FBI? How does that make sense?

Well, there’s a lot of overlap in the responsibilities of federal agencies. During the ATF’s “Operation Fast and Furious” gunrunning escapade in Mexico, it coordinated — badly — with the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). During its 2012 investigation of that fiasco, the Justice Department Inspector General “conducted interviews with more than 130 persons currently or previously employed by the Department, ATF, the DEA, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)” on its way to identifying “a series of misguided strategies, tactics, errors in judgment, and management failures that permeated ATF Headquarters and the Phoenix Field Division”.

[…]

Done right, you wouldn’t need as many agents for the combined agency, and you would have lower overhead. But — and this is a big concern — done wrong, you’d end up with a supercharged federal enforcement agency with all the hostility to civil liberties its old components embodied when separate, but now with lots more clout.

When he took charge of the FBI, Patel became the leader of an agency that has long served as a sort of political police. Its abuses date back decades and never seem to go away, just to morph into new ways of targeting anybody who criticizes whoever is currently in power.

“The FBI entraps hapless people all the time, arrests them, charges them with domestic terrorism offenses or other serious felonies, claims victory in the ‘war on domestic terrorism’, and then asks Congress for more money to entrap more people,” John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer and whistleblower, wrote in 2021.

That means there’s already a problem that needs to be addressed, or it could infect a combined agency rather than taking the sharp edges off the ATF.

Also troubling is that before his nomination to head the FBI, Patel made comments suggesting he wants to target his own political enemies. He’s backed off those threats, telling the Senate Judiciary Committee he’s committed to “a de-weaponized, de-politicized system of law enforcement completely devoted to rigorous obedience to the Constitution and a singular standard of justice”. But it’s worth watching what he does with his roles at the separate FBI and ATF before combining the two agencies into something more dangerous.

Or maybe the Trump administration won’t take the next step of formally integrating the ATF and the FBI. Self defense advocates have long called for ATF leadership that isn’t actively hostile to gun owners. If all Patel does is rein in the ATF so that Americans get a few years of relief from that agency’s abuses, that’s a victory itself. But eliminating a much-loathed federal agency would be even better.

February 26, 2025

QotD: The banality of crime

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

When I was still in grad school, there was a big pot bust in College Town. Big enough to merit statewide notice, anyway — a couple hundred pounds, something like that, obviously not El Chapo level but enough to where some kind of actual, organized smuggling was involved.

Cynical bastard that I am, I immediately wondered just how they’d managed this feat of law enforcement. College Town being, well, a college town, it had a surprisingly large police force, but the cops dealt overwhelmingly with quality-of-life stuff. I doubt they had more than one or two full time detectives (if that) chasing burglars; I don’t recall College Town ever having a homicide. They certainly didn’t have narcs on the force, is what I’m getting at, so how on earth did they disrupt this small-time, amateurish, yet still legit (on volume alone) drug smuggling operation?

I forget the details, but as you’d surmise from this story taking place in Clown World, they were fake and gay. I’m slightly fictionalizing, and slightly exaggerating, but it really was on the level of “A prowl car saw a guy driving erratically and pulled him over, at which point smoke started billowing out of the windows. The cop looked in and found a felony amount of pot sitting in a garbage bag on the front seat, and the driver copped a plea — he ratted out his supplier, and when the cops showed up with a warrant, that knucklehead, too, had his bales of marijuana sitting out in plain view on the living room couch.”

Most crime works like that, as it turns out. Even in the big cities, where police departments have bigger budgets and more combat power than a lot of European armies. Homicides, for instance, are 99% paperwork, I’m told. Everyone knows that Peanut shot Ray Ray over a pair of sneakers, not least because Peanut is walking around in the damn things, and probably still has the gun shoved in the waistband of his track suit, too. “Solving” the homicide is just a matter of putting the paperwork through. Stone cold whodunits, like big sophisticated undercover narcotics operations, are vanishingly rare, because the cost of enforcement, let’s call it, is extremely high.

I know, I know, The Wire was a tv show, but people I know who really do work in law enforcement say it’s close enough to the real thing for our purposes. Drug dealers down in the ‘hood aren’t nearly as smart and sophisticated and above all self-disciplined as the Barksdale Crew, but the basic principle is the same: Since the low-level people are inevitably going to get busted, make sure that the low-level people don’t have anything on the guys one level higher, and your drug dealing operation is more or less safe. Just as Peanut could probably get away with blasting Ray Ray in broad daylight if he were smart enough not to wear the shoes around, so the pot dealers in College Town could’ve gotten away with their operation more or less forever, provided they weren’t stupid enough to be driving around high on their own supply, with said supply in plain view in the passenger seat.

Severian, “The Cost of Enforcement”, Founding Questions, 2021-09-29.

February 12, 2025

QotD: Jacob Zuma – South Africa’s answer to Donald Trump

Filed under: Africa, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[Thabo] Mbeki’s presidency ended in disaster and humiliation, but it paved the way for one of the most colorful politicians alive today: Jacob Zuma. The most important thing for Americans to understand is that Zuma is basically a left-wing and South African version of Donald Trump. He is colorful, bombastic, and over-the-top. He has a tendency to break into song at political rallies and church services. He says outrageous and inappropriate things. He is beloved by the far left and grudgingly admired by the far right and fanatically hated by all the bien-pensants in the center. He was viciously persecuted by the South African deep state, and his accession to the presidency caused a bitter #NeverZuma faction to break off the ANC and start another party (incredibly this party is called “COPE”). Finally, he is an out and proud polygamist and brags openly about his corruption, and people love this because they know every politician is doing it, he’s just honest about it.

The ANC bosses did not like Zuma. For decades the ANC had been dominated by elite, western-educated, communist Xhosas, but Zuma was none of those things. Zuma came from nothing — his mother was a janitor and his father died when he was 3. Zuma was so illiterate and uncultured that Mbeki tapped him to be deputy president on the theory that it would keep his own position secure, since nobody would ever let Zuma be president (yeah this backfired spectacularly). Most shocking of all, Zuma was a Zulu. He danced in a loincloth and leopard skin with the Zulu king at the Shaka festival. The idea of this savage wildman becoming president was just beyond the pale. Something had to be done to stop him.

The last chance to stop Zuma was a credible-seeming rape accusation from a family friend. The ANC pounced on this, and initiated a high-profile criminal trial. This incensed Zuma’s supporters, who insisted that the prosecution was politically motivated (given that over the past decade the ANC had all but stopped prosecuting rape cases in society more broadly, they may have had a point). The trial was a total debacle. Countless thousands of young activists showed up outside the courtroom wearing t-shirts with slogans like “One hundred percent Zuluboy”, “Burn the bitch”, and “Zuma was raped”. When summoned to the witness stand, the president-to-be performed war dances and led the crowds in song. The prosecution collapsed after the accuser’s story was found to be inconsistent on numerous points, and a triumphant Zuma rode the backlash all the way to the presidency.

There’s another way Jacob Zuma is like Donald Trump: the corrupt and failed ruling classes of both South Africa and the United States find it convenient to blame these men for everything that has gone wrong in their countries ever since. In fact in Zuma’s case, history has begun to be rewritten so that he can be blamed for things that happened before he became president. Many of the South Africans I’ve spoken to will confidently assert that some problem (say, the power outages) is all due to Zuma. When I gently point out that those outages began in 1998 and innocently ask who was president then, they shut down entirely. Zuma is the scapegoat for the failings of an entire country, and making him the sole source of all evil plays the important social role of allowing everybody to pretend that things were great until he showed up (things were not great). In a similar vein, I will not be shocked if decades from now, Donald Trump is blamed for starting the fentanyl epidemic.

John Psmith, “REVIEW: South Africa’s Brave New World, by R.W. Johnson”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-03-20.

February 3, 2025

Rational response to Trumpish provocations? Don’t be silly, we must run in circles with our hair on fire!

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

My first entry in the “Trump tariff diary” on social media perhaps takes the situation too flippantly:

President Trump trolled Justin Trudeau about Canada becoming the 51st state.

Trump tariff diary, day 1: Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada struck back at the Big Orange Meany by wearing particularly fashionable socks to his press conference. Ontario will remove all bottles of Jack Daniels from the government liquor monopoly distribution system. The American national anthem will be formally booed at all NHL games played in Canada from now on.

At the National Post, Tristin Hopper offers much more substantive and serious suggestions:

Order Ryan Reynolds to defame American directors until free trade is restored.

Spend 10 years relentlessly kneecapping the Canadian economy for no reason to show Trump we’re not scared of him.

Politely suggest that the U.S. may have confused us with China. Say that although both countries start with the letter C, China is the one seeking to destroy American hegemony via economic means, and we’re just an obsequious neighbour who sells them raw materials.

As a gesture of fealty to American continental supremacy, immediately adopt the U.S. Constitution as Canadian law. Uphold it about as loosely as our existing constitution so there’s no material change.

Volunteer an honour guard of Mounties to serve alongside the Secret Service. Force them to wear red serge if Trump asks.

Offer to pillory a Trudeau at Mar-a-Lago if the tariff threats stop, but don’t specify which one.

Put sugar in the crude oil so all the U.S. refineries seize up.

Instead of shutting off Canadian electricity exports, export too much electricity so that their toast burns and the coffee is too hot.

Send Trump a bentwood box filled with smoked salmon as a gesture of goodwill. When he opens it, it’s just filled with bees.

On a rather more serious note, PPC leader Maxime Bernier posted this on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter:

It’s important to understand that the 25% tariffs announced by President Trump today are NOT imposed on Canada — they will be paid by American consumers and businesses who buy goods imported from Canada. Tariffs are a tax, and Americans who will have to pay more or go without our products will be the first to suffer.

Of course, Canadian exporters of these goods will as a consequence lose clients, contracts and sales, and will be forced to cut down on production and lay off workers. Or they will lower their prices to keep market shares and will see their profits diminish.

Because 75% of our exports go south of the border, our economy will for sure be very negatively impacted by this.

The stupidest thing our government can do however to deal with this crisis is to impose the same kind of tariffs “dollar for dollar” against US imports.

The US economy is ten times bigger than ours, much less reliant on trade than ours, and much less dependent on our market than we are on theirs.

Not only would retaliatory tariffs have much less impact on American exporters, they would immediately impoverish Canadian consumers forced to pay more for imported goods, as well as destabilize Canadian businesses that need inputs from the US in their production processes. It would more than double the harm of the US tariffs to our economy.

Trade wars are bad for everyone, but they are much worse for a small country with fewer options. We simply cannot win a trade war with the US. It’s very unlikely that Trump will back down. All we will do is provoke a massive economic crisis in Canada, until we are forced to capitulate.

Another self-destructive thing to do would be to set up giant “pandemic-level” bailout plans to support everyone affected by this trade war. This will simply bankrupt our governments even more than they already are and make us even weaker.

So what should we do?

1. Double down on efforts to control our border, crack down on fentanyl dealers, deport all illegals, and impose a complete moratorium on immigration, to answer Trump’s immediate concerns about Canada.

2. Tell the US administration that we are ready to renegotiate North American free trade and put dairy supply management and other contentious issues on the table.

3. Wait and see to what extent Trump is willing to keep tariffs in place despite the harm it does to the US economy. Despite his pretenses that Americans don’t need our stuff, the reality is that on the contrary they have few other options for crucial resources like oil, lumber, uranium and other minerals, etc. He will stop acting like a bully when he sees that he can get more results by sitting down and negotiating.

3. To reduce our dependence on the US market, immediately implement an ambitious plan to tear down interprovincial trade barriers and help our impacted exporting industries find alternative markets in other countries.

4. Immediately implement a series of bold reforms to make our economy more productive, including: reduce corporate and personal taxes, abolish the capital gains tax, abolish all corporate subsidies, get rid of excessive regulation, remove impediments to the exploitation and export of natural resources, drastically cut government spending, mandate the Bank of Canada to stop printing money and start accumulating a gold reserve to prepare for the global monetary reset (which is likely part of Trump’s plan).

In short, instead of adopting a suicidal strategy to confront Trump, we must do what we should have done a long time ago to strengthen our economy and our bargaining position. The transition will be rough, but not as much as complete bankruptcy and disintegration.

My strong suspicion is that Trump’s extended tantrum directed at Canada is actually a way to provide pressure against other future tantrum targets … “if he’d do that to friendly neighbour Canada, what won’t he do to us?” An updated version of Voltaire’s quip that Britain needed to shoot an admiral every now and again pour encourager les autres.

Coyote Blog facepalms over Trump’s self-sabotage of the US economy:

Trump’s first few weeks have been a mix of good and bad for this libertarian, all against a backdrop of horror at how Imperial the presidency has become. […] Because we are all tired of those fentanyl-toting Canadians crossing the border illegally. I mean, we all saw the Proposal and know how all those Canadians are trying to cheat US immigration law.

Seriously, this is beyond awful — and not just because of the threat of retaliation, though that is real. Even if all the affected countries roll over and accept these modified tariffs without response, this is still a terrible step for the US. No matter how Trump and his very very small group of protectionist economist friends sell this, this is a tax on 300 million US consumers to benefit a small group of producers. I don’t have time right now to give an updated lesson on free trade — that will have to wait for when I am not on vacation. But I will offer a few ironies:

  • After campaigning hard on inflation, Trump is slapping a 10-25% consumption tax on foreign goods. That is a straight up consumer price increase for a variety of key products including much of the lumber we use to build homes, a lot of our oil and gas, a lot of our grain and beef, and many of our cars and appliances.
  • Much of this inflation is going to disproportionately hurt Trump’s base. No one is going to care much if a Hollywood actor has the fair trade coffee they buy at Whole Foods go up in price, but Trump voters are going to see a direct effect of this on prices at Wal-Mart.
  • Republicans have spent 4 years (rightly) condemning Federal and State governments for the economic disruptions of COVID lockdowns and restrictions. While some of the inflation of the last 4 years was due to ridiculously high government deficits, another major cause was the COVID supply chain disruptions. And now Trump is voluntarily recreating them.

The only small hope I have is that Trump is steeped from his business career in a certain style of brinksmanship bargaining that consists of taking an entirely destructive and irrational position in hopes that they folks on the other side of the table will back down and give him more than he should. My son won poker tournaments like this because he would do so much crazy stuff that no one at the table wanted to challenge him. I have always said that I don’t think Trump is a particularly good business person — he has run business after business that has failed. But he is a good negotiator, and has exited numerous bankruptcies with his creditors giving him far more than one would think was necessary.

January 31, 2025

“… and 10% for the Big Guy”

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

In the New English Review, Bruce Bawer reviews Miranda Devine’s new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America:

Even now, roughly half of Americans seem to believe that all the attention that’s been paid to Hunter Biden and his laptop has to do with his love of prostitutes and drugs rather than with high crimes and misdemeanors committed by him on behalf of his dad and other members of the clan. Even now, many Americans seem to be blithely unaware of the mountains of evidence showing that Hunter has long been fleecing foreign firms on Daddy’s behalf. For some reason those clueless Americans, even if capable of accepting that Hunter was up to no good, simply can’t believe that his pop – good old Lunchpail Joe – has ever been guilty of anything. (These same people, of course, are convinced that Donald Trump is the most corrupt politician ever to come down the pike.)

This blindness to facts – or stubborn refusal to pay attention to them – is immensely frustrating. And it must be especially frustrating for Miranda Devine, the Australian-American New York Post journalist who, in Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide (2021), detailed the contents (by turns sordid and criminal) of Hunter’s celebrated computer, the story of which her newspaper broke 20 days before the 2020 presidential election, and who in her new book, The Big Guy: How a President and His Son Sold Out America, focuses on the cover-up.

To say that Devine tells her story in impressive detail would be an understatement. Like War and Peace, The Big Guy opens with a long list of the main players, just in case you lose track of who’s who. And you will. Reading this book isn’t just like reading War and Peace – it’s like reading War and Peace at the same time as One Hundred Years of Solitude. You have to remember a slew of foreign-sounding names, many of which sound very much alike, all the while following an exceedingly labyrinthine narrative.

To be sure, this tale also involves plenty of Americans, some of them public officials who, when they scented the heady whiff of corruption in the Biden circle, actually did their jobs by digging into the facts and gathering evidence. Others, alas, are people who also held positions of authority but who did their damnedest to put up “roadblocks” or “obstructions” or “delays” or “logjams” – to use some of the many synonyms that Devine uses to describe efforts to keep the public in the dark.

And boy, was there a lot to cover up. Among the expenses that Hunter tried to write off on his taxes – not that he was quick to pay them, mind you – were disbursements to prostitutes and drug dealers and memberships in sex clubs. During one “crack and hooker bender” in 2018, he spent $8,000 on a single sex worker, $140,000 on a stay in Las Vegas, and $34,000 on a sojourn at the Chateau Marmont in L.A. The Chateau Marmont is legendary for playing host to celebrities on drug binges, but Hunter caused so much damage to his room that he was banned from the place thereafter, which even he suspected was a first.

Part of the reason why Hunter was able to go through a small fortune so quickly was that he had a “sugar daddy” by the name of Kevin Morris, who for reasons that still remain a mystery chose to give him millions of dollars over the years to save him from financial crises (such as the ones posed by the relatively modest monetary demands of Hunter’s baby mama in Arkansas). A 2019 book contract with Simon & Schuster also netted Hunter a $750,000 advance, even though the book (surprise!) ended up selling so few copies that it made back only a tiny fraction of that sum. Then there were his paintings, which brought in at least $1.5 million. People laughed when Hunter first revealed his artworks to the world in 2020, but I didn’t: they’re no worse than a hell of a lot of contemporary art – and, after all, the art market these days is as much about laundering money than it is about aesthetics.

But Hunter’s main sources of mazuma were foreign companies. One of them was Barisma in Ukraine. Another, in Russia, was run by a man named Zlochevsky who said that Hunter, whom Joe Biden had called the smartest man he knew, was in fact stupider than Zlochevsky’s dog. A third was the Chinese energy company CEFC, a leading promoter of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. CEFC put Hunter on its board – and paid him millions – in exchange for his promise to use his father’s name to “open … doors around the world” for the firm.

Collecting loot from all these sources and funneling some of it to family members involved a complex network of bank accounts and shell companies that was designed to make the moolah tough to trace. To illustrate the process, Devine follows the path of a single $5 million payment by a CEFC affiliate to one of Hunter’s firms, HWIII. Over time, Hunter transferred most of that $5 million to another firm of his, Owasco; in addition, he wired some of it to his uncle Jim’s company, after which Jim’s wife, Sara, withdrew a fraction of that sum and deposited it in the couple’s personal account and dispatched a $40,000 check to Joe Biden.

January 28, 2025

What Britain desperately needs is common-sense pointy stick controls

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Britain’s gun laws make Canada look like the wild west, yet the government still wants far greater control over objects that can be used as weapons. The conviction of the Southport murderer, who used a knife obtained through Amazon, seems to have given the British government under Kurt Stürmer Keir Starmer an excuse to crack down even further on any kind of device with a sharpened blade rather than the criminals who wield them:

Southport murderer Axel Rudakubana.
Photo released by Merseyside Police.

“Time and again, as a child, the Southport murderer carried knives. Time and again, he showed clear intent to use them,” U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer wrote in a piece for The Sun about Axel Rudakubana, who admitted murdering three girls and injuring others at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class last year. “And yet tragically, he was still able to order the murder weapon off of the internet without any checks or barriers. A two-click killer. This cannot continue. The technology is there to set up age-verification checks, even for kitchen knives ordered online.”

What Starmer mentioned but glossed over is that Rudakubana was three times referred to a program intended to divert people from radicalization and terrorism before authorities lost interest in him. At the time of his arrest, he had a copy of an Al Qaeda training manual, which led him to being charged and sentenced for terrorism. He also possessed the deadly poison ricin that he’d manufactured himself in sufficient quantity to conduct a mass attack.

Rudakubana was a human bomb waiting to go off. But Starmer focused not on officials’ failure to pay attention, but on knives — edged tools that are among humans’ earliest and most important creations.

“Online retailers will be required to ask for two types of ID from anyone seeking to buy a knife under plans being considered by ministers to combat under-age sales after the Southport murders,” reports Charles Hymas of The Telegraph. “Buyers would have to submit an ID document to an online retailer and then record a live video or selfie to prove their age.”

It’s difficult to see how an ID check is going to stand between those planning mayhem and tools first crafted 2.6 million years ago in their most primitive form and still used by people every day. My dentist forges knives in his backyard for fun. One of my nephews turns files into knives on a grinding wheel. Scraping an appropriate material against a stone will give you an edge and a point. ID checks don’t seem like a barrier to people with bad intentions and the ability to make ricin in their bedrooms.

A Case History in Ridiculously Restrictive Policies

This is why the U.K. strikes many Americans as the reductio ad absurdum of policies that demonize objects rather than targeting bad actors. Opponents of authoritarian laws ask: What will the authorities do once they’ve made firearms difficult to legally acquire, and crime continues? Will they ban knives?

The answer from the U.K., which already has restrictive gun laws, is yes, they will ban knives — or at least impose access and carry restrictions and consider forbidding blades to have points. The result has been a black market in smuggled and illicitly manufactured firearms that will inevitably extend to knives. Harmless people are now arrested for having Swiss Army knives in car glove compartment or for possessing locking knives on the way home from jobs that require them. And the country’s crime problems continue to grow.

That’s bad enough, but U.K. authorities, like those elsewhere, also prefer to surveil the entire population to detect anything they could call a danger to public order, rather than focusing on specific individuals harming others.

“There are now said to be over 5.2 million CCTV cameras in the UK,” according to Politics.co.uk. “Surveillance footage forms a key component of UK crime prevention strategy,” but “the proliferation of CCTV in public places has fueled unease about the erosion of civil liberties and individual human rights, raising concerns of an Orwellian ‘big brother’ culture.”

The British government also monitors online activity to an extent that Edward Snowden deemed it “the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy.”

That surveillance turns up comments, jokes, and rants authorities just don’t like. “Think before you post,” the government warns people. “Content that incites violence or hatred isn’t just harmful – it can be illegal.” But the authorities enforce a broad definition of unacceptable material. People have been arrested for dressing as terrorists for Halloween, for making intemperate online remarks, and for just getting things wrong when posting on the internet (they’ll need a big paddy wagon for that one).

January 27, 2025

Davos is so over, even the high-priced escort girls are giving it a miss this year

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

Elizabeth Nickson enjoys a nice, rich dish of schadenfreude as the “elite” of the Davos gab-fest dimly begin to realize that their high times are over:

It was a great ride while it lasted, hey, lefties? But it’s over now. You have been left in the screech forward of history. That stink? It’s the burning wreckage of your “ideas”. All you weasely little people like the slender tight-mouthed beta-males at the Biden White House, or the cross-dressing central banker Mark Carney who is laughably trying to be Prime Minister of Canada after bankrupting not one but TWO countries, are history. Like Rory Stewart, the regime apologist in the U.K., who says things like “there’s something really dark and nasty behind the right“. Like Macron, Jacinta Ardern, Trudeau, like the nasty little snake people at Davos right now trying to extract yet more blood and treasure from us. KNEEL and take your SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS OR YOU ARE RACIST.

You sold your birthright for power. You sold us for power. You sold the future for power. When you get to heaven this is what you should say: I failed, I ruined three generations. I need to be broken down into my component parts and remade into a new being, with a new soul. The old one is stained with the killing of innocents. Like the thousands dead from your obsession with psychopathic primitive Muslims, like the child migrants in cartel sex slavery.

All your projects are in ruins. All your toys lie broken. Your failure is one for the Ages. It will be discussed in heaven and hell for millennia. You have bankrupted the world. Even the freaking oligarchs abandoned you. Even the central bankers decided they badly needed growth or they and their heirs will be living underground for the next five hundred years, hunted like the ghastly little demons they worship. Trump means growth. Big big growth.

You probably don’t know who Rory Stewart is, but he is useful as an example. Not for him, the careful measured sentimental meaningless pap that comes out of every leftie politician’s mouth. Nope, he’s a gabber. He loves attention, in fact, he never ever shuts up, so he is their interlocutor, their dark shrunken snobbish soul.

Stewart is a “writer” and a Westminster gadfly, “much loved” in the British way of saying, “he’s so cute”. He advises, he hangs out with Afghan warlords, he speaks at gatherings of the great and the good. He runs for office, he writes editorials. He is a product of the British elite educational system, and the administrative left, which is to say the outfit that until Monday ran the world. And he has an ego the size of his big stretchy mouth.

This is what he had to say about Trump on Monday. Imagine a rich spoiled debutante drawling this and you’ll get his character.

“He’s so lowering.” By which he means he brings down the tone. Like for instance, the interviewer says Trump tweeted at Gavin Newsom they day after the fires, “Congratulations Gavin New Scum.”

Now, of course, that is how I think of Newscum.

[…]

“We need ideas”

“We need a plan for growth”

“We need to explain how we’re going to sort out the economy”

“and society”.

Buddy, your lot has been in power since Thatcher.

Someone said recently that the reason the English do absolutely NOTHING about those raped, sodomized, beaten little girls is that the upper classes view the lower as less than human, so they don’t care. They don’t care about the freezing old ladies in council houses, the fact that women can’t walk down streets safely, or the farmers not being able to feed people.

For these benevolent rulers protected in their rural retreats and policed neighbourhoods, the multicultural ideal is more important than their fellow citizens.

These are the people who have taken the ideas of Marxism, merged them with predatory capitalism, and from their offices and through countless conferences and meetings a year, try to distribute goods “fairly”, as they determine. Which country shall rise, which shall be invaded, whose resources do we want next? What delicious war shall we start?

That’s what they mean when they say “our democracy”. It’s theirs and nobody else’s.

For more than half a century they have focused on impoverishing middle America. Not the upper middle class, no, they’re fine. Like western Europe, they were broken early and are happy servants, mouthing legacy media propaganda like good little serfs with nice houses and a chance for their children to join the betas taking their orders from the grim oligarchs behind the scenes.

January 26, 2025

German democracy under further threat from extremely extreme extreme right

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

German voters seem to be under the misapprehension that their votes should have something to do with the composition of the government. Because the voters increasingly cast their votes for the extreme right, government in Germany finds itself under incredible pressure to actually pay attention to the pestiferous voters:

This is a potentially huge story. It could be the beginning of a sea-change in German politics, that is how big it is. At the same time, it could be also be nothing. We’ll have to wait and see.

For those who don’t want to read my ramblings (this will be a longer post), I offer this TL;DR: The cordon sanitaire against Alternative für Deutschland is showing signs of serious rupture. The centre-right CDU are suddenly – without warning – reconsidering their long-standing tabu against cooperating with the “extreme right” opposition. It is this singular tabu that has kept the traditional German party system frozen in amber despite a massive rightward political shift across the West. Should the cordon sanitaire crack even a little, its days are numbered. The simple arithmetic of parliamentary majorities would sooner or later make the most noxious political fixtures of current-year Germany, like the Green Party, broadly irrelevant at the federal level. The German left would be deprived at once of almost all their power.

I am sceptical that this can really be happening. Yesterday, I would’ve expected a change like this in 2029 at the earliest. Many are saying (justifiably) that the CDU should not be trusted, that they will say anything to get elected and that nothing will come of their promises. All that may well be true. Words, however, matter all by themselves: In 2019, tacit cooperation in Thüringen between the CDU and the AfD unleashed an entire national scandal; the press hyperventilated for weeks. Now the federal leadership of the CDU is openly pledging to pass legislation with AfD votes in the Bundestag, and major CDU-adjacent journalists are writing long opinion pieces about why this is just the right thing to do.

This development arises directly from the pressure of mass migration, and specifically from the four recent deadly migrant attacks I have covered in the past year:

  • On 31 May 2024, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Sulaiman Ataee killed the policeman Rouven Laur and severely wounded five others in a knife attack in Mannheim.
  • On 23 August 2024, at a “Festival of Diversity” in Solingen, a Syrian migrant to Germany named Issa al Hasan killed three people and wounded eight in an apparently Islamist attack for which the Islamic State claimed responsibility.
  • On 20 December 2024, a Saudi migrant to Germany named Taleb al-Abdulmohsen drove a rented BMW through the Christmas Market in Magdeburg, killing 6 people and wounding 299.
  • On 22 January 2025, an Afghan migrant to Germany named Enamullah Omarzai killed two people and wounded three in a knife attack in Aschaffenburg.

Mannheim, Solingen, Magdeburg and now Aschaffenburg: That is the catalogue of migrant terror pounding like remorseless waves on the brittle outdated politics of the Federal Republic.

These attacks have become a symbol for the entire mess migrationism has wrought. The dead and the wounded count for a lot in themselves, but they have also come to represent the dwindling social cohesion, the stretched financial resources and the erosion of domestic security that accepting entire foreign populations into one’s nation entails. All of it is for nothing, nobody has any solutions and there is no end in sight.

In liberal democracies, policies have to be normie-friendly, and mass migrationism was normie-friendly only until enough migrants crossed our borders to make their presence felt socially and culturally. Mass migration isn’t normie-friendly anymore. It’s become a foul political poison.

Mass migration is also a very hard nut to crack. We have outsourced a great part of our border security and migration policy to highly bureaucratised international authorities and a tangle of high-minded humanitarian legislation that leaves us little room to manouevre. Solving mass migration will require a great deal of political resolve and a willingness to pick fights with globaloid EU pencil-pushers. All of this meant that, until Mannheim, Alternative für Deutschland had a near-monopoly on hardline anti-migration politics. The unrelenting series of attacks by people who have no business being in Germany, together with the collapse of the government and the impending early elections in February, have left the centre-right CDU desperate to stake their own claim to this increasingly central political space. That, and perhaps a healthy dash of the Trump Effect, are the forces currently pushing the traditional party system of the Federal Republic to the brink.

January 25, 2025

The stabbings will continue until morale improves

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

Sebastian Wang discusses the stabbing attacks in Southport, Merseyside last year:

On the 29th July 2024, a man went on a stabbing spree in Southport, Merseyside, killing three children and injuring ten others. The attacker, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, the son of Rwandan immigrants, was arrested at the scene. By all accounts, the attack was shocking not only in its savagery, but in its attendant circumstances. Witnesses report that Mr Rudakubana shouted slogans as he killed that suggested he was an Islamic terrorist. Almost at once, social media was filled with questions and with speculation. Also, protests began in several northern cities – Manchester, Leeds, and Bradford, for example – where demonstrators blamed the Government and the ruling class for immigration policies that had made the killings both possible and likely.

Instead of considering these protests and promising to address the causes of the crime, the British Government and the legacy media focussed on managing the narrative and silencing comment on the immigration policies that had allowed Mr Rudakubana’s family into the country. Keir Starmer, the new Prime Minister, seemed more worried about potential “violence against Muslims” than the actual brutality of Mr Rudakubana’s attack on English people. “For the Muslim community I will take every step possible to keep you safe,” he said in his first public statement on the killings. On the protests he added: “It is not protesting, it is not legitimate, it is crime. We will put a stop to it“. His focus was not on the victims, but on ensuring that no one questioned the system that had allowed this to happen.

In the days after the attack, several men were arrested for spreading what the government called “misinformation” online. Their crime? Posting details about Mr Rudakubana’s background and motivations — details that turned out to be broadly correct. Despite being right, these men were prosecuted and imprisoned under Britain’s hate speech laws. The most recently convicted, Andrew McIntyre, was sentenced earlier this month to seven and a half years in prison for postings on social media. Peter Lynch, a man of 61, was sent to prison last August for two years and eight months for the crime of shouting “scum” and “child killers” at the police. Last October, he hanged himself in prison. I am told he was seriously “mistreated” in prison. British prisons for many years have been overcrowded. Room was found for these prisoners of conscience after the Government began releasing violent criminals.

The injustice of this is glaring. These men were punished not because they lied, but because they spoke approximate truths the government wanted to suppress. Their imprisonment sends a clear message: in modern Britain, it’s better to be wrong on the side of the Government than right and against it.

A Carefully Managed Narrative

The media played its part in the cover up. At first, Mr Rudakubana was described, without name, as “originally from Cardiff“. It took days before we were told he was a child of asylum seekers from Rwanda. Even then, the coverage was carefully balanced by a picture of him as a respectable schoolboy – not at the beast in human form shown by more recent photographs.

Only much later, when the story had faded from the headlines, did the real facts emerge. Mr Rudakubana was not just a troubled individual. His phone contained materials linked to terrorism and genocide, and his actions appeared to have an ideological motivation. Yet by the time these details came out, they barely caused a ripple. The public had been moved on to the next distraction.

It’s hard not to assume that the British media was fully in on gaslighting the public about the accused murderer, when you compare the photo that almost universally was used in the time before the trial and a more recent image:

Mark Steyn:

Say what you like about Axel Rudakubana, the slaughterer of three English girls under ten years old, but — unlike the British Prime Minister, the Home Secretary, the Liverpool Police and most of the court eunuchs in the UK media — he appears to be an honest man:

    It’s a good thing those children are dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

He has always been entirely upfront about such things, telephoning Britain’s so-called “Childline” and asking them:

    What should I do if I want to kill somebody?

Judging from his many interactions with “the authorities” (including with the laughably misnamed “Prevent” programme), the British state’s response boiled down to: Go right ahead!

It seems likely that the perpetrator of Wednesday’s Diversity Stabbing of the Day — the Afghan “asylum seeker” who killed a two-year-old boy and seriously wounded other infants in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg — is also “so happy”. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” deliberately targeted a gathering of the very young — in this case, a kindergarten group playing in a municipal park. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” did not just deliver sufficient stab wounds to kill: he plunged his knife into each target dozens and dozens of times. Like Mr Rudakubana, the “asylum seeker” was well known to the authorities: he had been detained for “violence” at least thrice.

Did these guys also enjoy it? From our pal Leilani Dowding:

For the benefit of American readers, being stabbed in Asda, Argus and Sainsbury’s is like being stabbed in Kroger, Costco and Wegman’s. As you may recall, a DC jury awarded climate mullah Michael E Mann a million bucks because someone unknown gave him a mean look in Wegman’s supermarket. No one stabbed in a UK supermarket will get a seven-figure sum: it’s increasingly a routine feature of daily life — per Sir Sadiq Khan, part of what it means to live in a great world city.

Sir Keir Stürmer and every outpost of the corrupt British state have lied to the public about every aspect of the Southport mass murder since the very first statements by the Liverpool chief constable passing off the killer as a “Cardiff man”. Her officers knew within hours that the Welsh boyo who loved male-voice choirs was, back in the real world, an observant Muslim in possession of the Al-Qaeda handbook and enough ricin to kill twelve thousand of his fellow Welshmen. But they did not disclose this information for months — not until freeborn Britons minded to disagree with Keir Stürmer’s Official Lies by suggesting that this seemed pretty obviously merely the umpteenth case of Islamostabbing had been rounded up, fast-tracked through Keir’s kangaroo courts, gaoled for longer than Muslim child rapists, and in at least one case driven to his death. Does Sir Keir feel bad about the late Peter Lynch? Or does he take the same relaxed attitude to his victims as Axel Rudakubana?

    It’s a good thing that that far-right extremist is dead … I am so glad … I am so happy.

Even now, six months on, the organs of the state are still lying — although, with all the previous lies being no longer operative, Stürmer & Co have had the wit to introduce a few new ones. For example:

    ‘A total disgrace’ that Southport killer could buy a knife on Amazon aged 17, says Cooper

That would be Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary — which is the equivalent of what Continental governments usually call the Minister of the Interior, because that’s where the knives penetrate.

January 20, 2025

“You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes”

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kat Rosenfield shares her concerns about what the accusations against Neil Gaiman indicate about the problems with allowing women to be legally unreliable narrators:

There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. “I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,” he writes.

“It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies.

Except: she doesn’t mean it. We know this because Lila Shapiro, the author of the piece, breaks in to tell us as much:

    Pavlovich remembers her palms sweating, hot coils in her stomach. She was terrified of upsetting Gaiman. “I was disconnected from everybody else at that point in my life,” she tells me. She rushed to reassure him.

But also, we know this because she didn’t mean it is sort of an ongoing theme, here. And that’s what I want to talk about.

By this point in the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent. “Sexual abuse is one of the most confusing forms of violence that a person can experience. The majority of people who have endured it do not immediately recognize it as such; some never do,” Shapiro writes in one section. In another, she explains that it doesn’t matter if the women played along with Gaiman when he asked them to call him “master” or eat their own feces because “BDSM is a culture with a set of long-standing norms” to which Gaiman didn’t strictly adhere (as the meme goes, it’s only BDSM if it comes from the BDSM region of France, otherwise it’s just sparkling feces-eating sadomasochism.)

Shapiro spends a lot of time thumbing the scale like this, and for good reason: without the repeated reminders that sexual abuse is so confusing and hard to recognize, to the point where some victims go their whole lives mistaking a violent act for a consensual one, most readers would look at Pavlovich’s behavior (including the “it was wonderful” text message as well as her repeated and often aggressive sexual overtures toward Gaiman) and conclude that however she felt about the relationship later, her desire for him was genuine at the time — or at least, that Gaiman could be forgiven for thinking it was. To make Pavlovich a more sympathetic protagonist (and Gaiman a more persuasive villain), the article has to assert that her seemingly self-contradictory behavior is not just understandable but reasonable. Normal. Typical. If Pavlovich lied and said a violent act was consensual (and wonderful), that’s just because women do be like that sometimes.

Obviously, this paradigm imposes a very weird, circular trap on men (#BelieveWomen, except the ones who say they want to sleep with you, in which case you should commence a Poirot-style interrogation until she breaks down and confesses that she actually finds you repulsive.) But I’m more interested in what happens to women when they’re cast in this role of society’s unreliable narrators: so vulnerable to coercion, and so socialized to please, that even the slightest hint of pressure causes the instantaneous and irretrievable loss of their agency.

The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.

January 16, 2025

The allegations against author Neil Gaiman

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

I haven’t read the article in question, but it certainly looks ugly if even a few of the allegations turn out to be true:

New York magazine has just published a very long investigative piece on alleged sexual misconduct by the author Neil Gaiman, both contextualizing previously-known allegations and introducing new ones. Writer Lila Shapiro, who clearly did an awful lot of legwork, found several new women who allege various forms of bad sexual behavior against Gaiman. It’s all very serious and disturbing, obviously. I have nothing to contribute and no one cares what I think about such things, so we can leave that story there.

But I’m afraid that Shapiro’s piece does again force me to think about New York‘s story last year about Andrew Huberman. You could be forgiven for thinking “New York‘s SIMILAR story last year about Andrew Huberman,” but this would not be a correct characterization; where Gaiman is accused of many acts that, if true, rise to the level of sexual misconduct, including rape, the Huberman piece contains no such allegations. Huberman is accused of dating multiple women at the same time without the knowledge of all involved, of infidelity generally, and there’s a bizarre fixation on his regular tardiness. It is not a MeTooing piece. And the trouble, I’m afraid, is that the piece was written, edited, packaged, and promoted in a way that inevitably gave audiences the impression that such allegations were included — that Andrew Huberman had been MeToo’d.

The fact that the piece contains no allegations of that type, but seems to have been very deliberately associated by New York, its author Kerry Howley, the magazine’s social media channels, and their many media kaffeeklatsch allies with MeToo stories, was a terrible error in editorial judgment. The Gaiman story helps underline why: this shit is so serious that we can’t afford to play around with these types of narratives. The Rolling Stone University of Virginia gang rape fraternity initiation story, a narrative that fell apart under the barest scrutiny and should never have survived even an amateur journalistic investigation, did a lot of damage in our ongoing efforts to take sexual assault on campus seriously. There’s a higher bar to clear with this stuff for that reason, and the Huberman story utterly failed to clear it.

The story’s presentation in the magazine was draped with innuendo, with as many leading terms and dark implications as can be stuffed in. The image on the cover is styled and colored to make him look sinister. People associated with New York tweeted about the piece as if it was a nuclear bomb, using the kind of language that we’ve grown accustomed to when a MeToo story is published and kills a career. I would argue that the story is deliberately written in the slow-burn reveal style that is typically deployed in MeToo stories — that’s deployed, in fact, in the Gaiman story. (There it makes sense, because the slow burn leads to actual accusations.) At every opportunity, the story exaggerates the implication of a man who, yes, was a shithead to some women he dated. The article is forever presenting quotidian-if-unfortunate behaviors and acting as though we should interpret those behaviors as worthy of the kind of censure that has been brought to bear by men guilty of sexual misconduct in the MeToo era. “I experienced his rage,” says one of Huberman’s exes, suggesting some sort of domestic violence situation, when in fact that’s a reference to a verbal argument — again, maybe unfortunate, but simply not in the world of misconduct.

The magazine’s internal references to the piece, and their social media, played up the usual teasing manner of such publicity, broadly hinting at bad behavior in the realm of sex and romance. The repeated phrase used was “manipulative behavior, deceit, and numerous affairs”. I don’t need to tell you that many people, trained by six-plus years of reading about sexual misconduct, are going to assume that a vast cover story in one of the country’s biggest magazines about a man’s bad behavior and deceit towards his partners is going to be a MeToo story. As many would go on to say, the fanfare and length and publicity about the piece themselves implied that it was a MeTooing. After all, what else would justify that level of attention?

January 13, 2025

The Writings of Cicero – Cicero and the Power of the Spoken Word

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

seangabb
Published 25 Aug 2024

This lecture is taken from a course I delivered in July 2024 on the Life and Writings of Cicero. It covers these topics:

• Introduction – 00:00:00
• The Deficiencies of Modern Oratory – 00:01:20
• The Greeks and Oratory – 00:06:38
• Athens: Government by Lottery and Referendum – 00:08:10
• The Power of the Greek Language – 00:17:41
• The General Illiteracy of the Ancients – 00:21:06
• Greek Oratory: Lysias, Gorgias, Demosthenes – 00:28:38
• Macaulay as Speaker – 00:34:44
• Attic and Asianic Oratory – 00:36:56
• The Greek Conquest of Rome – 00:39:26
• Roman Oratory – 00:43:23
• Cicero: Early Life – 00:43:23
• Cicero in Greece – 00:46:03
• Cicero: Early Legal Career – 00:46:03
• Cicero: Defence of Roscius – 00:47:49
• Cicero as Orator (Sean Reads Latin) – 00:54:45
• Government of the Roman Empire – 01:01:16
• The Government of Sicily – 01:03:58
• Verres in Sicily – 01:06:54
• The Prosecution of Verres – 01:11:20
• Reading List – 01:24:28
(more…)

January 11, 2025

Euphemizing organized gang rapes of children as “grooming” won’t work much longer

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

It’s possible that the current upswell of anger about the decade-long cover-up of organized child rape gangs in English towns and cities may come to nothing … or it could result in a complete breakdown of law and order:

Like professional basketball, those accused of being members of “grooming gangs” tend to be monocultural.

The grooming gang thing has really blown up in the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure wholly why myself but a couple of guesses.

One is that the media really couldn’t report all that much — and for the same reason that Tommy Robinson got jailed one time around. Because there have been multiple ongoing cases and full reporting of one could — and probably would too — prejudice a jury in subsequent cases. So, those ongoing cases mean that the subject is more or less sub judice and can’t, in volume or detail, be talked about.

Thus things like Guardian reporting. Where you get the news that a gang has been tried, found guilty, sent off to jail. And no comment on who they were. Well, except for a list of names all of which are, shall we say, less than Anglo Saxon or even Viking in origin. We all draw our own conclusions at that point.

[…]

The number of abused — which means children raped, recall, arses blown up with pumps so that adult dicks can multiply penetrate to be detailed — starts to be counted up into the thousands. The tens of thousands perhaps.

There’s a point there at which I don’t think that normal societal agreement to allow the authorities to handle things works any more. At some point along that spectrum then significant civil violence breaks out.

Which brings me to the two questions. What is that number which, when known, leads to actual riots? And no, I don’t mean 15 meatheads lobbing half bricks at the police. Actual real and sustained loss of civilian authority control. The second, obviously, is are we going to reach that number?

In short, what is the level of betrayal of these girls that leaves the mob triumphant over law and order?

What really worries me is that I have a horrible — even if still slight at this point — suspicion that there was enough vileness done to enough young girls that we’re going to find out.

On Substack, Francis Turner shares concerns about the mass rapes of children and young women over too many years:

The scandal has been going on for at least 25 years and probably a decade more. That means that every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs.

Every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs

There are roughly 300,000 girls of each year cohort in the UK so that means one in around 300 girls of any age group has been gang-raped. Given that there are large chunks of the UK which are not places where the ~50 identified rape gangs have operated and indeed are places without residents of the relevant ethnicity (primarily Pakistani and Somali in a couple of cases) that means that the number goes way up in those areas. It seems likely that in one those 50 areas the ratio of new victims to their year group is more like 1 in 100 or 1%, especially when you remove the Pakistani girls that probably weren’t targeted even if some of them were in fact abused at home.

In places like Telford if you see a school year group photo for any year in a Comprehensive school in the last 30+ years at least one of the girls in that photo was being gang-raped

If successful steps had been taken in ~2010 to stop the abuse then about 15,000 girls would not have been gang-raped.

The Tory party and civil service disgust of Tommy Robinson has had the result that about 5000 girls were gang raped between when Tommy Robinson started going about the issue in around 2018 and 2023 when Sunak finally set up the national Grooming Gangs Taskforce.

If Substack would let me do a table this would be easier. However here is a summary of girls gang-raped under the prime ministers of this century based on a simple linear model

Starmer: 500 (to date)
Sunak: 1700
Truss: <100
Johnson: 3000+
May: 3000
Cameron: 6000+
Brown: 3000-
Blair: 10,000

Probably half of Blair’s 10,000 was before anyone was aware that this was a systemic problem, but it was known to be a potential problem by at least 2004 when

    [a] Channel 4 documentary about claims young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex by Asian abusers is delayed as police forces warn it could inflame racial tensions. It was finally shown three months later.

If the UK had got serious about stopping grooming gangs back in 2004 then over half of the gang rape victims could have been saved from such a terrible experience.

Take that 35,000 number a different way. There are roughly 35 million women in the UK. So one in a 1000 women in the UK have been gang-raped over the decades.

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