Quotulatiousness

June 19, 2026

US history is unique, it does not map onto the histories of other nations

Filed under: History, India, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve noticed this pattern myself, but I hadn’t considered that a lot of Americans don’t just use the patterns of their national history when looking at other western nations:

“Political Map of the Indian Empire, 1893” from Constable’s Hand Atlas of India, London: Archibald Constable and Sons, 1893. (via Wikimedia Commons)

Not every place in the world can be examined through the historical template of the United States.

One of the reasons conversations about India are so difficult for folks in the West to untangle is that many of the frameworks Americans use to understand power, intergroup dynamics, identity, and historical injustice do not map onto India. Not at all.

For Americans who have adopted a critical lens, the template derived from American history is fixed. A dominant demographic majority group seeks to preserve power while marginalized demographic minorities fight for recognition and inclusion. Because this template is so fixed in the imagination, there is a tendency to view and interpret dynamics and events in other countries in exactly the same way. I have seen it myself. “We’ve all seen how this works”, someone will say, and proceed to apply the American template to a different place.

And the history of the Americas (both North and South) is dominated by European (white) Christian colonization. As a result, Americans are familiar with the legacies of European empire and Christian missionary expansion. By contrast, the history of Islamic conquest and rule, which shaped large parts of Asia, Africa, and Europe for centuries, occupies far less space in the American imagination. So too does the contemporary influence of petrodollar-funded religious institutions, transnational Islamist movements, and the global circulation of Islamist narratives.

This does not mean these forces explain everything. It does mean that many Americans have little historical or conceptual framework for understanding how they might shape politics, memory, education, or intergroup relations in places like India.

India’s history is not the same as that of the Americas.

For centuries, India experienced successive waves of colonization. The first came through a series of Muslim invasions and dynasties, culminating in the Mughal Empire. The second came through British colonial rule, predated by British mercantile and missionary efforts. Yet unlike many colonized societies, the civilizational majority was never fully displaced, converted, or absorbed. Hindu traditions, practices, languages, stories, temples, and collective memories survived.

This is perhaps the single hardest aspect of India for many Americans to grasp because it has no real analogue in American history: the Hindu demographic majority is also the historically colonized population.

For many Western observers, this creates immediate suspicion because it violates the assumptions embedded within our familiar frameworks. The expectation is that majorities defend power while minorities challenge it.

As a result, contemporary debates about textbooks, public memory, historical figures, temples, and national identity are often seen and interpreted by folks in the West through frameworks that retrofit Indian history into contemporary American critical analysis through the reductive binaries of majority/minority, right/left, which are memeable and digestible, but obscure much more than they reveal about power, history, equity, policy, foreign influence, etc.

When Hindus argue that violent and painful aspects of Mughal conquest have been whitewashed in public education, they are frequently accused of attempting to rewrite history to justify the alleged “Hindu right wing” suppression of a minority group today. (Please do read my analysis of religious-based violence in India. It’s not what you think it is. Link.)

Yet Americans themselves are familiar with the process of revisiting historical narratives to advance truth and reconciliation. We have debated how slavery is taught, how Indigenous history is taught, how immigration is taught, and how women and minority groups have been represented in textbooks and in classrooms. We generally accept that historical narratives evolve as new evidence emerges and as previously marginalized perspectives are taken seriously.

What makes India different is that the group seeking rigorous reconsideration of historical narratives is often the majority population. For many Western observers, this creates immediate suspicion. The assumption is that majorities seek dominance while minorities seek justice.

But history does not always work that way.

The result is that efforts by Hindus to recover historical memory are often denounced as nationalism (which is falsely equated with white or Christian nationalism in the United States) before they are examined on their own terms. Questions about historical representation become questions about political motives. Efforts to revisit narratives become “evidence of extremism” or, even more bizarre, “anti-intellectualism”. And figures who have occupied a central place in Hindu memory for centuries are presented as newly invented symbols of contemporary political power.

The result is that the Indian voices most readily amplified in Western media are often those whose analyses are already legible within familiar Western frameworks. Their arguments are immediately understandable, which lends them “credibility”. Perspectives that do not fit those frameworks are frequently dismissed as “Hindu nationalist” before they are seriously considered.

One need not agree with every argument made in these debates to recognize that they are, in fact, debates. The question is not whether history should be examined. The question is whether everyone is permitted to participate in that examination without having their motives presumed in advance.

June 4, 2026

Bill C-9 is “what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa”

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

L. Wayne Mathison explains how the Canadian government persuaded itself to push a “hate speech” bill that will upend centuries of free speech practice and criminalize good-faith arguments. Like many such brainfarts, they cannot imagine what consciously evil people will do with these legal tools in hand:

AI-generated image by L. Wayne Mathison

If you want to see what happens when the Frankfurt School gets a government badge, a pension, and a corner office in Ottawa, look at Bill C-9.

This is not just another “hate speech” bill. It is a sign of a much bigger shift.

The old political arguments were about wages, factories, class, ownership, and the economy. That was the old Marxist world. Today’s politics is about language, symbols, identity, emotion, culture, and who gets to decide what “harm” means.

Parliament has stopped arguing about who owns the factory.

Now it wants to control the dictionary.

Bill C-9 reads like a critical theory seminar that escaped campus, found a suit, and got hired by the Department of Justice.

Under the older liberal model, the law punished actions. Assault someone? Crime. Vandalize property? Crime. Block access to a building? Crime. The state dealt with what you actually did.

But C-9 moves the centre of gravity from action to meaning.

What did your words mean?

What did your symbol represent?

What was your motive?

What cultural message did your expression create?

That is not law as a neutral referee. That is law as a cultural therapist with police powers.

The most revealing part is the proposed removal of the long-standing “good faith” religious defence for hate propaganda. That defence existed for a reason. It protected freedom of conscience. It recognized that in a free country, people may express religious beliefs that others find offensive, outdated, or wrong, as long as they are not wilfully promoting hatred or violence.

That was not a loophole.

It was a guardrail.

But to the modern ideological mind, an ancient religious text is not treated as a source of conscience. It is treated as an artifact of power. A legal protection for religious speech is no longer seen as freedom. It is seen as oppression wearing a church hat.

So the guardrail has to go.

And what does government offer instead?

Trust us.

Trust that prosecutors will be reasonable. Trust that judges will interpret the law narrowly. Trust that ordinary Canadians will not get dragged through the process for saying something unpopular, traditional, religious, or politically unfashionable.

Sorry, but that is not how liberty works.

Rights are not protected by hoping the state behaves itself. Rights are protected by limiting what the state is allowed to do in the first place.

That is what makes the Senate debate so revealing. The Senate was supposed to be sober second thought. The old establishment airbag. The place where bad laws were supposed to slow down before hitting the public at full speed.

But now even the Senate is wrestling with a bill built from an intellectual toolkit designed to dismantle the very traditions the Senate was created to preserve.

Bill C-9 does not build social cohesion. It does not repair trust. It does not ask why people are angry, alienated, or radicalized in the first place.

It does what modern bureaucratic progressivism always does.

It manages symptoms by expanding state power.

It turns culture into a compliance file. It treats offensive expression less like a social problem to be answered with argument, courage, and moral confidence, and more like a hazardous substance to be regulated by experts.

The Frankfurt School wrote in dense, foggy jargon to expose hidden systems of power.

The joke is on everyone.

The modern state did not reject those tools. It absorbed them, stripped out the revolutionary romance, bolted them onto the Criminal Code, and called it public safety.

Bill C-9 is what happens when cultural theory becomes administrative power.

It is what happens when the state stops protecting public order and starts managing public meaning.

And that should worry anyone who still thinks freedom means more than government-approved speech.

May 21, 2026

QotD: “Theory” in film interpretation

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[David G. Hughes] You often situate your ideas in reference to things like geography, the animal kingdom, sexuality, history, and tidbits of quirky detail — earthly, tangible things. It’s different from the dominant theoretical approach in film interpretation, and there’s humour. Would you describe your work as atheoretical, or even anti-theoretical?

[Camille Paglia] What has been called “theory” since the arrival of deconstruction in elite U.S. universities in the 1970s is in my view one of the most pointless and pretentious movements in modern cultural history. The catastrophic results should be obvious by now: the humanities are in ruin and have lost public respect and even internal support in academe, where budget reduction has come to the fore. I would refer those seeking greater specifics to my long attack on poststructuralism, Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Academe in the Hour of the Wolf, published by Arion in 1991. Seven years ago, I did a follow-up assessment of current “theory” when the Chronicle of Higher Education asked me to review three new academic books by women about the bondage and domination trend. My unhappy response was “Scholars in Bondage”, which laments the damage done to promising young professors by a tyrannical academic establishment still chained to the bleached-out corpse of “theory”.

My approach to art is grounded in the sensory. Art is not philosophy. Art by definition refracts meaning through some medium of the material world. Hence my interpretation of art is grounded in the five senses. Perhaps the only theorist who fully grasped this issue was Gaston Bachelard in his 1957 book, The Poetics of Space, animated by a phenomenology that partly aligns with my own practice. It is no coincidence that I have spent most of my teaching career at art schools, where the body remains front and center in most art forms. Digital genres are certainly spreading and flourishing, but dance, music, and theater remain grounded in physicality — which is partly why art schools are finding it so difficult to adapt to the harsh, distancing realities of the virus crisis.

“David G. Hughes talks to Professor Camille Paglia about her work on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) and much more”, Electric Ghost, 2020-05-28.

May 17, 2026

French contributions to the development of wokeness

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

Brivael Le Pogam offers an apology to the west for France being so significant in the philosophical and political effluvia of 1968 for setting the conditions in which wokeness was born:

Protesters gathered in the Place du Capitole in Toulouse, 11 or 12 June, 1968.
Photo by André Cros (1926-2021) via Wikimedia Commons.

I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).

We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.

We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality — everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.

Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.

For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.

Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.

That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.

It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.

I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.

What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them — that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.

So, forgive us. And back to work.

Auto-translated by the social media site formerly known as Twitter from the original French post.

May 8, 2026

National Indigenous History Month in Ontario schools

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

Igor Stravinsky outlines what Ontario schools will be focusing on this June instead of in addition to the normal provincial school curriculum:

Image from the Senate of Canada via Woke Watch Canada

50+ years ago, public schools in Ontario started the day with Bible readings and a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Critical Theory, the philosophical and pedagogical approach in force these days in schools is the new religion. It is based on the (unproven) premise that society is rife with power structures, inequalities, and oppression, and asserts that education is inherently political rather than neutral. “Marginalized” students (non-Whites, especially males, plus Whites who are not heterosexual or able-bodied) are to be “centered”. This supposedly promotes “Social Justice”, which is basically the absurd and asinine idea that every aspect of society should be represented by all conceivable identity groups in proportion to their numbers in the general population. It is equality of outcome, not opportunity.

As Indigenous people rank high on the pyramid of oppression, every day is a day of Indigenous recognition in most public schools in Ontario. Students are asked to stand quietly every morning to hear the Indigenous Land Acknowledgement, which is the same text day after day, just like the Lord’s Prayer used to be. But June is special. It is National Indigenous History Month.

During June, students can expect to get hit with an extra large dose of affirmation of their original social justice sin. If you can’t trace your ancestry back to a person who lived here before first contact between Europeans and Indigenous people, then you are a “settler colonist”. This technically means anyone, but of course the main targets of the social justice warriors are European descended people. Just immigrated from Poland last week? Start groveling. You’re White, and that’s that.

The themes of the month are really the same as the ones presented to students all year, just more intensively: Prior to contact with Europeans, Indigenous people lived in peace and harmony with each other and lived sustainably and in sync with nature. Settler ways are depicted as based on greed and a reckless plundering of the lands, along with utter disregard for the wise ways of living of the Indigenous people, who were to be forcibly assimilated into Western ways.

Of course, students in our schools should be learning about the history of Indigenous people, just as they should be learning about the conditions in which so many Indigenous people struggle and suffer today. But that is not the objective of Indigenous History Month or any of the other long list of Annual Indigenous Days of Significance. This year, National Indigenous Peoples day, June 21st, falls on Fathers Day. Luckily, it is a Sunday, so schools won’t be able to erase that. Social Justice warriors hate Fathers Day even more than Mothers Day. If there is one thing they can’t stand, it’s the nuclear family.

Also this year, the fifth anniversary of the false claim by the Kamloops Indian Band that the remains of 215 murdered residential school children had been confirmed in the apple orchard outside the former Kamloops Indian Residential School (May 27) will have just passed. Even the band itself now admits, on their website, that all that was discovered was soil “anomalies”. The technician who performed the ground penetrating radar survey told them there were 200 targets of interest and only excavations could confirm burials (she initially identified 215 but reduced that to 200 when she discovered, after the fact, the part of her survey area had already been excavated and no one had found any bodies there). Of course, even if you found burials, you would need forensic work to determine the identity of the bodies and the cause of death. The band has been paid over 12 million dollars to do that work but they haven’t done anything.

March 12, 2026

“It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause”

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

Many, many people have called attention to the incongruity — if not total absurdity — of progressives agitating and protesting for what appear to be thoroughly anti-progressive causes. And all of those people have discovered that most progressives are in accord with Emerson’s opinion that “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”. As Lorenzo Warby explains, “the issue is never the issue; the issue is the revolution”:

There is a common “culture war” sport where more conservatively-minded folk, and various liberal ones, point out how inconsistent it is for various ideological/identity groups to make a thing of supporting organisations and regimes which are very much against — even murderously against — the ideals those ideological/identity groups allegedly stand for.

Queers for Palestine, and feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, are particularly blatant examples of this. Hamas in Gaza and the Islamic regime in Iran literally kill homosexuals and violently repress women’s rights: they are religiously committed to women having less rights than men and being subordinate to them.

The inconsistency between who Hamas and the Islamic regime are, what they do, and the alleged ideals of Queers for Palestine and the feminists supporting Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran is obvious. Pointing out such inconsistency has, however, no purchase on Queers for Palestine, feminists for Hamas/Hezbollah/Iran, or similar groups.

On the contrary, pointing out the inconsistency brands one as not merely an outsider, but an enemy. It is precisely the embracing of such inconsistency that shows your commitment to the cause; to the shared political goals; to the shared politicised moralised status games. Doing all the required not-noticing, the required rationalisations, is a signal of commitment.

If they can make people ignore — or, even better, embrace — such inconsistency, that manifests their social and political dominance. The propensity of academics to be “risk averse“, and be conformist in various ways, has enabled motivated zealots to create the Critical Theory magisterium that has come to dominate more and more of Anglo-American academe.

As women are more risk averse and conformist than men, this has gathered steam as academe has feminised. This effect is all the stronger when they generate an accompanying elite status strategy based on “good people believe X”, turning beliefs into moralised cognitive assets. Assets to be defended — and defended together — as shared assets in a shared status game.

By attacking such inconsistency, one is simultaneously signalling one’s outsider status and attacking the signal they are using the show commitment to the cause; to the moral in-group.

As part of such signalling commitment, believers produce commentary shorn of all inconvenient context. We saw plenty of that in commentary blaming NATO and the US for the Russian attack on Ukraine. We are seeing plenty of the same on Iran.

Even more important than this—at least among the core believers — is that, at the foundational belief level, it is not inconsistent at all. The question is not what Hamas or Hezbollah or the Islamic Regime actually stands for: the question is, who they are enemies of.

March 5, 2026

“[I]nternational law is not law; it is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law”

Filed under: Government, Law, Middle East, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Lorenzo Warby discusses the charming illusion that “international law” is a real thing and must be treated as a real thing:

In domestic (“municipal”) law, questions of illegality arise. They arise because states have laws. They have laws because their laws come with remedies — consequences for breaking the law.

So, it is a genuine question whether President Trump is exceeding his constitutional authority in his attack on Iran. But that is a genuine question because the US has a Constitution that matters. The US is a rule-of-law state, no matter how much other common law jurisdictions may point and laugh at how politicised US law is.

Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72), Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers USS Michael Murphy (DDG 112) and USS Frank E. Petersen Jr. (DDG 121), Henry J. Kaiser-class fleet replenishment oiler USNS Henry J. Kaiser (T-AO-187), Lewis and Clark-class dry cargo ship USNS Carl Brashear (T-AKE 7) and U.S. Coast Guard Sentinel-class fast-response cutters USCG Robert Goldman (WPC-1142) and USCGC Clarence Sutphin. Jr. (WPC-1147) sail in formation in the Arabian Sea, Feb. 6, 2026. The Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group is deployed to the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations to support maritime security and stability in the Middle East.
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Jesse Monford via Wikimedia Commons.

In terms of the international order, however, there is no such thing as an illegal war, because (public) international law is not law. It is a set of rules and claims that pretends to be law. It only pretends to be law as it has no remedies — apart from declarative statements, which are not enough to make it law. (Private international law does have enforceable and enforced remedies, so is law.)

One of the consequences of this is that (public) international law, as an academic discipline, has no substantive reality-tests. There are no decisions by judges that are enforceable and enforced. This has led to academic international law being the vector by which the toxic ideas of the Critical Theory magisterium, that increasingly dominates Anglo-American universities, have infected Law Schools.

(Public) International law should not be taught at Law Schools, because it is not law. It should be taught in International Relations or Political Science Departments. A PhD in International Law should not qualify you to teach in Law Schools. Indeed, if you cannot tell the difference between actual law — with genuine remedies — and a simulacrum of law, you should not be teaching students at all.

Rules-based international order

When folk refer to the rules-based international order, they are not referring to nothing. There are various rules and conventions it is convenient for states, and other agents, to follow.

There is also a difference between the mercantile maritime order and continental anarchy. It is not an accident that the original international conventions pertained to sea travel and trade.

Within continental anarchy, it is relative power that matters. A war that depletes your resources and capacities, but depletes those of your neighbours more, is a winning proposition, within the state-geopolitics of continental anarchy. The geopolitics of continental anarchy leads states to seek weak or subordinate neighbours. The mercantile maritime order, on the other hand, is all about creating win-win interactions.

Russia, India and China are all continental Powers that live, at least to some extent, in a situation of continental anarchy. But they are also trading States that benefit from the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony. The tension between China as a trading nation becoming the biggest single beneficiary of the mercantile maritime order maintained by the US-and-allies maritime hegemony, and the interests of the CCP (the Chinese Communist Party), is the central strategic difficulty that CCP China faces.

Israel faces the strategic dilemma of operating in a region of continental anarchy but seeking support from states deeply embedded in the mercantile maritime order. Whether the Middle East has to be a region of continental anarchy, or can it become far more embedded in the mercantile maritime order, is precisely what is at stake in the latest conflict.

Any social order has to be enforced. This is even more true of international orders. As there is no such thing as international (public) law, enforcing an international order is not a matter of rules, it is a matter of those who actively support and enforce that order and those who seek to subvert it.

A vivid example of how central enforceability is to any international order is given by comparing the treatment of Germany after the two World Wars. Germany was treated far more harshly after the Second World War than after the First World War. The crucial difference was that the Versailles order was not enforceable by the victors and the Potsdam order was.

Update, 6 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 17, 2026

The three core false claims of wokeness

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

Lorenzo Warby analyzes the three claims that underpin the intellectual structure of all the sub-categories derived from Critical Theory:

Universities across Anglo-America, and across the West more broadly, have become increasingly dominated by a Critical Theory magisterium: a teaching authority that claims ultimate or trumping moral authority. This magisterium is based on Critical Theory and its derivatives — Critical Race Theory, Critical Pedagogy, Queer Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, Settler-Colonial Theory, and so on: which constitutes the Critical Social Justice matrix.

This magisterium has come to increasingly dominate academe for a range of reasons. It generates intolerant zealots, so benefits from the dynamics of an intolerant minority.

It offers a powerful shared status game — affirm beliefs X, Y, Z and that makes you A Good Person. This status game spreads a supporting censorious intolerance, for if affirming beliefs X, Y, Z and makes you A Good Person, then denying X, Y, or Z makes you A Bad Person.

This justifies shaming and shunning anyone who denies X, Y, Z, because they are Bad People and its shows your commitment to what makes someone A Good Person. It shows commitment to the shared status game. This status game generates moralised cognitive assets, and you protect the value of those assets by participating in — or at least going along with — the shaming and the shunning.

The status game generates moral projects that the central administrations of universities can use to expand their authority, range of action, and so resources. An opportunity they have enthusiastically embraced. An opportunity that corporate, non-profit and government bureaucracies have also enthusiastically embraced.

The emotions this status game attaches to those moralised cognitive assets — care, compassion, concern for the marginalised, if you affirm those beliefs, the opposite if you deny them — also plays into fears about threatening emotions (and safety through norm conformity) which are much stronger among men than women. Women are thus systematically more hostile to freedom of speech than men.

It is an exaggeration to claim that “wokery” is just the consequence of feminisation of institutions and occupations. It is, however, true that what works for — what is emotionally resonant in — increasingly feminised institutions and occupations has been selected for.

Source: data taken from this paper.

But the Critical Theory magisterium has expanded across academe — and beyond — due to the nature of its three foundational claims:

  • A blank slate view of human nature.
  • A view of social dynamics as dominated by conflict.
  • An activist relationship with information: that the trumping purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it.

The blank slate view of human nature — not merely that we are not born without inborn ideas, but that everything that forms us is social — means that any level of social transformation that can be conceived is attainable. Provided enough social power can be assembled—to move human action, speech and thought in the correct direction—the socially-transformative society free of oppression and alienation can be created.

The grander the conceived purpose, the more energising and motivating it is. But also the more it rhetorically trumps anyone who is willing to “settle” for less than complete human liberation. This then feeds back into energising and motivating, as it provides an endless sense of being moral trumps.

A recurring version of such blank slate claims is that our “true” nature has been obscured or repressed by oppressive forces. This might be the alienation via private property (Marx) or by patriarchy, or white supremacy, or heteronormativity or whatever.

The most dramatic statement of the “repressed true nature” claim is also the earliest, in the first sentence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s The Social Contract (1762):

    Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. (l’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.)

The view that oppressive forces are blocking our true nature goes naturally with the claim that social dynamics are dominated by conflict. This dominated-by-conflict claim was classically stated by Marx and Engels as the first sentence of the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:

    The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

If conflict dominates social dynamics, then the prosecution of such conflict so as to achieve human liberation becomes the ultimate moral good. Coordinating the fighters for human liberation becomes a moral urgency. To prosecute that struggle becomes the most important thing one can do.

Both of these claims naturally lead to, and gain strength from the claim, that the morally trumping thing to do with information is to prosecute the struggle for human liberation. Marx famously said:

    The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. Theses on Feuerbach, Thesis Eleven, 1845.

Max Horkheimer, in his seminal essay Traditional and Critical Theory (1937) tells us that:

    Critical thinking, on the contrary, is motivated today by the effort really to transcend the tension and to abolish the opposition between the individual’s purposefulness, spontaneity, and rationality, and those work-process relationships on which society is built. Critical thought has a concept of man as in conflict with himself until this opposition is removed. If activity governed by reason is proper to man, then existent social practice, which forms the individual’s life down to its least details, is inhuman, and this inhumanity affects everything that goes on in the society.

Critical Theory is activist Theory, aimed at human liberation from the unwanted constraints of existing society and epitomises the activist relationship with information. All scholarship is trumped by this aim and so the most authoritative scholarship is that which is most committed to this aim.

Source. Notice the delusional claim of the first listed article. The intrusion of such updated Lysenkoism into contemporary science and medicine is even more rampant with matters Trans.

November 26, 2025

QotD: Racism and social justice

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

A definitive proof of the evil of social “science” is that — faced with the real problem of racism — it has come up with the insane idea of racist post mortem justice; demanding that living white people compensate living black people for what some dead white people did to some dead black people. If you question the logic of this then — boom — you confirm the whole crooked theory because it’s your “privilege” that blinds you to its truth. It’s like the ducking stool as a test for witchcraft. Guilty or not, you’re done for. Oh and by the way, you can’t just ignore this piffle and quietly get on with your harmless life because “white silence is violence”.

This very American problem is poisoning the world through the dominance of US popular culture and the influence of the wealthy US universities. On this side of the Pond we have our own problems. We really don’t need a whole raft of America’s too. But white privilege is such a wonderful tool for creating and exploiting division that our leftists can’t leave it be. It’s a social A-bomb just lying there waiting to be detonated.

The Left is an immoral political movement. It seeks to divide. It seeks to promote hatred between classes and other groupings in society in order to create problems that can only be “solved” by employing legions of leftists with no otherwise marketable skills to direct us to the “correct” path. The extent to which it’s already achieved its real, unstated aim of creating a well-paid cadre of apparatchiks is visible in the present pandemic. The only jobs that are safe are of those employed by the state and rewarded by reference to almost anything other than economic contribution. Those thus paid for are “essential workers.” Those who pay for them are not. Anyone who points this scam out is monstered by a leisured army of social “scientists” and their graduates in the media — also paid for by us “inessential” saps.

Judge them by the outcomes of their policies and governance and the theorists and politicians of the Left are clear failures. The squalor in which poor black Americans live is almost invariably presided over by them just as a Labour council in Britain is a promise of continued poverty for all but its apparatchiks. If the poor are your voters, the more poverty the better. If the oppressed are your voters, the more (real or imagined) oppression the merrier.

The perfect symbol of Leftist politicians in this respect is the character of Senator Clay Davis in The Wire — perhaps the greatest TV show ever made and (among many other marvellous things) a searing indictment of American racial politics. It’s a show that couldn’t be made today because it reeks of white privilege. By the way, the fact that this concept would have prevented The Wire being made is by itself a small proof that it’s a wicked one.

Tom Paine, “Checking my privilege”, The Last Ditch, 2020-06-02.

October 2, 2025

The signature politics of the unaccountable classes

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

On his substack, Lorenzo Warby considers the origins of what we now call “woke” politics and how they became the predominant set of beliefs of the people who can’t be held accountable:

Western civilisation, over the last two centuries, has gone through the Emancipation Sequence whereby — taking the Anglosphere pattern — free people voted to liberate slaves, Christians to get rid of exclusions on Jews, Protestants to get rid of exclusions on Catholics, whites to get rid of exclusions on blacks, men to get rid of exclusions on women, straights to get rid of exclusions on gays and lesbians. We live in free societies of mass prosperity, yet we have highly motivated political networks that think nothing of casting our societies as marked by layers of oppression.

Yes, this is based on a monstrous (and self-serving) inflation of the concept of oppression. It also functions to channel the rage of downwardly mobile children of Western elites.

More important still, it is the signature politics of the unaccountable classes, of those paid to turn up — as distinct from the accountable classes whose income depends directly on their performance. The dominant politics of the unaccountable classes has acquired a name: it is woke politics, the politics of wokery or of being woke.

The technical name for wokery is Critical Constructivism. It is the popularisation of Critical Theory. I have labelled it Post-Enlightenment Progressivism, as it rests on critiques of The Enlightenment, and rejection of Enlightenment values, while orienting itself towards an imagined future — one where it is no longer true, as Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), that society is based:

    on the antagonism of oppressing and oppressed classes.

That is, of oppression as they define it.

Wokery is the currently dominant form of left-progressivism. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann defines “wokery” as:

    making sacred of historically marginalised race, gender and sexual minorities.

That is how the Oppressor/Oppressed template that Critical Theory takes from Marxism is popularised in a post civil rights world, using any differences in outcomes between groups as markers of oppression. The Oppressor/Oppressed template requires oppression to be pervasive in contemporary societies, hence psychologist Steven Pinker’s observation about progressives hating progress.1

What wokery also is, is lazy self-righteousness. The self-righteousness is obvious and pervasive. These folk really do act as if they own morality; as if they can withhold the moral grace of their presence from the wicked, from wrongthinkers; as if wrongthinkers are purveyors of moral pollution. This has much to do with the dwindling of the culture of public debate.

But it is also lazy, in that it massively economises on the use of information and intellectual effort. Much of the appeal of “wokery” comes from how remarkably little accurate knowledge it demands. All one has to do is to master the lingo, the linguistic signalling, involved; the pre-set talking points; which terms of moral abuse apply and when; and be willing to engage in any required level of rationalisation and mental gymnastics. Once you do so, the moralised status game of lazy self-righteousness is open for you, with approved positions lined up for one to adopt, all based on semblances of knowing.

This dynamic has much to do with why one side of US politics is far more conformist in its political opinions than the other.

The underlying blank slate views about humans means you don’t have to accept any constraints from evolutionary biology. If we are all blank slates, if there are no inherent differences between groups, then all inequalities between groups can be classed as malicious — as signs of oppression — so you do not have to bother exploring differences in traits, cultures, life-strategies, etc.

Lazy self-righteousness does not require any thinking about successful and unsuccessful life strategies, about what makes things work, or not work. It does not require much in the way of statistical or mathematical understanding. The most mathematical it gets is whether social outcomes are proportional to a group’s population share or not.

If a group is doing better than average, they are oppressors. If they are doing worse, they are oppressed. Viewing society through the oppressed/oppressor mindset always ends up looking for (and finding) kulaks.

It is a simple metric to adopt, with the self-righteous status game built-in of opposing oppression and supporting the marginalised. No further intellectual effort is required.

  1. Pinker’s observation that populism is a phenomenon of older voters has not worn well. Also, it is a sign how reflexive future-orientated judgements have become, that the voters with the most experience of the EU were most likely to vote against it in the 2016 Brexit referendum passes people by.

September 18, 2025

Stop calling it “Turtle Island”

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

At Woke Watch Canada, Igor Stravinsky strenuously objects to calling North America “Turtle Island” and all the other woke shibboleths of the modern progressive cant:

As another school year rolls out, we can hope a more honest and realistic portrait of Canadian history will start to take shape in our schools. Students have been brainwashed into believing that Canada was a racist state bent on the extermination of Indigenous people, who were peaceful and wise, living in harmony with nature and each other. But reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is only possible if we base policy and action on the truth, not fairy tales, hearsay, anecdotes, or ideologies. We need facts, evidence, and reasoned debate. A good start would be for people to stop referring to North America as “Turtle Island”.

Calling it that is essentially to call the current geopolitical organization of the world invalid. If Canada, the United States, and other Western countries are in fact illegitimate, then that means national and international laws are also null and void. So, unless you are the direct descendent of an aboriginal person who was alive before first contact with Europeans, you are just a guest here — a second-class citizen at best. Non-Indigenous Canadians will simply never accept that. Nor should they.

In any case, “Turtle Island” is a nonsensical name on several levels. Firstly, North America is a continent, not an island. It is connected to South America by the Isthmus of Panama, which means it is not even surrounded by water. In any case an island is defined as a land mass surrounded by water that is part of a tectonic plate such as Greenland which is part of the North American Plate, thus is not a continent.

Then there is the fact that Indigenous North Americans were oblivious to the geography of the vast continent on which they lived. Like people everywhere in the distant past, they only knew the area they lived in, which could be substantial in the case of nomads, but was still a tiny fraction of North America’s 20+ million square kilometers. Of course, they knew nothing about the geography of the world with its 7 continents and 5 oceans.

Most importantly, the Turtle Island creation story is a myth believed by a particular cultural group. There is nothing wrong with believing in myths: I personally believe in the myth of human rights, as most Canadians do (pre-contact Indigenous people certainly did not). Myths are powerful: Our common belief in human rights has helped to make the Western world contain the safest and most prosperous societies ever. But when our institutions subscribe to myths not shared by the majority of Canadians, they are choosing to elevate one culture’s belief system above all others.

In the past, the Christian religion was regarded as the one true religion in Canada by most people, and the spiritual beliefs of Indigenous people were often denigrated as primitive superstition. But elevating Indigenous spirituality in our secularized 21st century world by treating it as a knowledge acquisition system equivalent to (or superior to) the scientific method is an attempt to correct for that past ethnocentrism. This is Critical Theory in action: It always strives to alleviate past wrongs with present wrongs, a formula for social disaster if ever there was one.

September 14, 2025

QotD: Intersectionality theory

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

I don’t think that Intersectionality Theory is a type of conspiracy theory for one obvious reason: conspiracy theories always involve some element of secrecy and there is nothing secret about it! The people who practice this fatuous and polarizing set of ideas are only too happy to tell the world about their plans for taking over the academy and eventually the world with their ideology. They publish it in journals and books, pronounce it from podiums and lecterns, and scream it at protests.

More importantly, however, I do agree with Christina Hoff Sommers that Intersectionality Theory is dangerous for humanity, dissolving the complexity of human nature and culture down to an overly simple Manichean model of Oppressor and Oppressed, Them and Us, Good and Evil, and Black and White (literally and figuratively). It’s is another instantiation of Identity Politics and it is dangerous because it threatens to reverse everything that the Civil Rights movement fought to obtain, and it is the very opposite of what Dr Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about in his most famous speech:

    I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.

August 22, 2025

QotD: “White fragility”

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

White fragility is the sort of powerful notion that, once articulated, becomes easily recognizable and widely applicable … But stare at it a little longer and one realizes how slippery it is, too. As defined by [White Fragility author Robin] DiAngelo, white fragility is irrefutable; any alternative perspective or counterargument is defeated by the concept itself. Either white people admit their inherent and unending racism and vow to work on their white fragility, in which case DiAngelo was correct in her assessment, or they resist such categorizations or question the interpretation of a particular incident, in which case they are only proving her point. Any dissent from “White Fragility” is itself white fragility. From such circular logic do thought leaders and bestsellers arise. This book exists for white readers. “I am white and am addressing a common white dynamic,” DiAngelo explains. “I am mainly writing to a white audience; when I use the terms us and we, I am referring to the white collective”. It is always a collective, because DiAngelo regards individualism as an insidious ideology. “White people do not exist outside the system of white supremacy,” DiAngelo writes, a system “we either are unaware of or can never admit to ourselves”. … Progressive whites, those who consider themselves attuned to racial justice, are not exempt from DiAngelo’s analysis. If anything, they are more susceptible to it. “I believe that white progressives cause the most daily damage to people of color,” she writes. “[T]o the degree that we think we have arrived, we will put our energy into making sure that others see us as having arrived …” … It is a bleak view, one in which all political and moral beliefs are reduced to posturing and hypocrisy.

Carlos Lozada, “White fragility is real. But ‘White Fragility’ is flawed,” Washington Post, quoted by Ann Althouse, 2020-06-19.

August 13, 2025

QotD: The New York Times and their 1619 project

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

In a NYT town hall recently leaked to the press, a reporter asked the executive editor, Dean Baquet, why the Times doesn’t integrate the message of the 1619 Project into every single subject the paper covers: “I’m wondering to what extent you think that the fact of racism and white supremacy being sort of the foundation of this country should play into our reporting … I just feel like racism is in everything. It should be considered in our science reporting, in our culture reporting, in our national reporting. And so, to me, it’s less about the individual instances of racism, and sort of how we’re thinking about racism and white supremacy as the foundation of all of the systems in the country.”

It’s a good point, isn’t it? If you don’t believe in a liberal view of the world, if you hold the doctrines of critical race theory, and believe that “all of the systems in the country” whatever they may be, are defined by a belief in the sub-humanity of black Americans, why isn’t every issue covered that way? Baquet had no answer to this contradiction, except to say that the 1619 Project was a good start: “One reason we all signed off on the 1619 Project and made it so ambitious and expansive was to teach our readers to think a little bit more like that”. In other words, the objective was to get liberal readers to think a little bit more like neo-Marxists.

The New York Times, by its executive editor’s own admission, is increasingly engaged in a project of reporting everything through the prism of white supremacy and critical race theory, in order to “teach” its readers to think in these crudely reductionist and racial terms. That’s why this issue wasn’t called, say, “special issue”, but a “project”. It’s as much activism as journalism. And that’s the reason I’m dwelling on this a few weeks later. I’m constantly told that critical race theory is secluded on college campuses, and has no impact outside of them … and yet the newspaper of record, in a dizzyingly short space of time, is now captive to it. Its magazine covers the legacy of slavery not with a variety of scholars, or a diversity of views, but with critical race theory, espoused almost exclusively by black writers, as its sole interpretative mechanism.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview. (That view that “systems” determine human history and that the individual is a mere cog in those systems is what makes it neo-Marxist and anti-liberal.) But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity.

Andrew Sullivan, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism”, New York, 2019-09-13.

August 9, 2025

QotD: The New Newspeak

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

One of the core premises of critical theory — the academic project that undergirds much of today’s progressive politics — is that controlling language is essential. Since critical theorists suggest that there is not any objective reality, and that there are only narratives imposed by oppressors, changing the meaning of words is essential to gaining and maintaining power. After all, they sure don’t believe in open debate. Some of this is subtle. The New York Times, an institution now meaningfully captured by the doctrines of critical theory, will now capitalize “Black,” for example, but will not capitalize “white” or “brown”.

I’ve read their explanation a few times and it seems to boil down to the idea that all people of African descent all around the world are somehow one single identifiable entity, while white and brown people are too diverse and variegated to be treated the same way. (The Times explains: “We’ve decided to adopt the change and start using uppercase ‘Black’ to describe people and cultures of African origin, both in the United States and elsewhere.”)

Given the extraordinary diversity of the African continent, and the vast range of cultural, ethnic, religious, and tribal differences among Americans of African descent — new immigrants and descendants of slaves, East and West Africans, people from the Caribbean and South America, and the Middle East — this seems more than a little reductionist. As Times contributor Thomas Chatterton Williams has noted, there are “371 tribes in Nigeria alone. How can even all the immigrants from Nigeria, from Igbo to Yoruba, be said to constitute a single ethnicity? Let alone belong to the same ethnicity as tenth-generation descendants from Mississippi share-croppers?” The point, of course, is to ignore all these real-life differences in order to promote the narrative that critical race theory demands: All that matters is oppression.

Andrew Sullivan, “China Is a Genocidal Menace”, New York, 2020-07-03.

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