Quotulatiousness

October 25, 2026

The generational difference in how young right wingers see the left

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens says that there’s a signficant difference in how older and younger conservatives view their opponents on the left:

You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.

When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.

These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.

When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.

We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.

We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.

Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.

They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.

A few days later, he also commented:

This blew up because people realize the age of discourse is coming to a close.

Discourse itself is meaningless at this point because discourse requires moral alignment, which is precisely the thing we are now fighting over.

Every other question has already been answered and there is nothing more to debate. The only thing left to do is to act, or be destroyed.

October 23, 2026

Faint signs of civilizational hope: “The Great Un-Karening”

Filed under: Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

It’s become old hat for Generation Jones and Generation X grizzled grognards to moan on about the almost-unsupervised “come back when the streetlights come on” childhood they remember in comparison to the over-scheduled, over-organized, over-computerized, hyper-supervised situation too many children now find themselves in. But there’s an occasional glimmer that things are changing:

The Great Un-Karening has begun, and decades of cultural engineering have finally run into something their architects cannot fucking control: human nature.

A seven-year-old conquers El Capitan, breaking his older brother’s record, and some sanctimonious busybody responds by reporting his father to Child Protective Services. Apparently, raising children capable of extraordinary achievements now qualifies as suspicious parenting.

And that tells you everything about the suffocating bullshit we’ve allowed to masquerade as progress.

For years, the helicopter-parenting crowd, DEI bureaucrats, ideological school administrators, and professional grievance merchants have worked to remake childhood in their own miserable image. Courage became recklessness. Masculinity became toxic. Independence became neglect. Every hurt feeling became an emergency, and every whining control freak acquired a fresh excuse to interfere.

They built entire systems around rewarding fragility, policing behavior, and teaching children to view the world through the narrow lens of identity, victimhood, and institutional permission.

And now the machinery is encountering resistance.

Kids are reportedly refusing school Pride Day activities. Parents are defending their children’s right to adventure. Twenty to forty neighborhood kids organized their own nighttime pursuit game, complete with strategies, head starts, and a mile-long course. Some neighborhood hall monitor called security.

The kids kept playing.

Fucking beautiful.

There’s the nightmare for the self-appointed guardians of acceptable behavior: children discovering they can organize their own lives without a diversity consultant, a school psychologist, or some miserable asshole clutching a rulebook.

And every independent decision chips away at the authority these people spent years accumulating.

The Karens can scream. The bureaucrats can threaten. The ideological busybodies can keep issuing commandments from their increasingly ridiculous little thrones.

The generation they expected to mold into obedient, perpetually offended dependents is discovering the exhilarating pleasure of telling them to piss off.

They tried to rewrite normalcy.

Now they’re watching the next generation reclaim it without asking their fucking permission.

October 13, 2026

The Un-Coupling of Gen Z

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

One of the most obvious demographic shifts in recent years has been the ongoing decline in the birth rate in pretty much the entire western world. But it isn’t surprising in one respect: Gen Z people aren’t forming relationships at the rate of earlier generations and have fewer (if any) sexual partners:

Why are so many Americans not getting married — or not even dating, in the first place?

The share of 40-year-olds who have never been hitched has quadrupled since 1980, as Americans get married later, or not at all.

It’s not just marriage that’s declining but rather all forms of cohabitation. An analysis by John Burn-Murdoch found that “coupling” has declined steadily in both the UK and the U.S., especially for those without a college degree. The declining popularity of dating apps suggests that these trends are likely to continue.

I care about the decline of coupling and marriage not because I consider myself a strict evangelist of matrimony — I think people should do what they can to enjoy themselves without hurting others — but rather because I think it bears on two of the most important questions about the future: (1) How many people exist, and (2) how happy are they? The relationship between romance and births is practically linear. Since 1990, Burn-Murdoch has shown, the decline of births traces the decline of relationship formation across many countries. Fewer relationships mean fewer people, and accelerating population declines around the world are, somewhat like climate change, a slowly accumulating phenomenon that will almost certainly shape the future of economics, technology, and the texture of human existence.

Then, there’s the mushy yet momentous question of whether people actually enjoy their existence. Self-reported happiness is declining in the west, and particularly in the U.S. Reviewing several decades of General Social Survey data, the economist Sam Peltzman came to the conclusion that “most of the overall downturn [in life satisfaction] is attributable to decline in marriage post-2000”. Reviewing Peltzman’s work, The Atlantic‘s Olga Khazan provided some useful context:

    One paper alone might be easy enough to dismiss, but this is a fairly consistent finding dating back decades in social-science research: Married people are happier. Period.

If the decline of coupling is upstream of both falling births and falling happiness, then the most important question is what’s happening at the source. In his new book Generation Uncoupled, Daniel Cox, a public opinion researcher and director of the Survey Center on American Life, considers a range of causes that span technology, culture, media, economics, and politics.

October 2, 2026

Generational incomprehension

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes expresses the frustration a lot of Gen X/Generation Jones folks have felt in their dealings with Millennial and Gen Z co-workers, supervisors, and managers:

Experience tells me that I need to add an eye-catching graphic to every non-video post, but finding appropriate images is sometimes difficult. I hope GenX Anecdotes won’t mind me using yet another meme instead of something more sober and appropriate to her point.

One of the things people tell you when you are young about getting old is how quickly it sneaks up on you.

What they don’t tell you, is that it’s not linear or obvious. It’s not like you have a specific moment where you think “OK. NOW I am middle aged”. It doesn’t work like that. You remain “you”.

You might change your outlook over time. You might get wiser (hopefully) and more content with who you are. You might have more serious responsibilities. More experiences and memories to draw upon. But you’re still YOU.

For me, I don’t really feel like I’m that much “older” going about my day-to-day business doing my thing. I actually still feel quite young in myself in many ways.

It’s how the world greets you that’s different. And that’s when little things will remind you. It gives you a kind of shocking “jolt”.

Being around younger people is what really brings it home. And I don’t mean kids or young teens. I mean young adults. Or even adults in their 30s who tell you they feel “old”.

I am in my mid 50s.

When someone in their late 20s or 30s tells me what year they were born it blows my mind.

When they were born in a year that I clearly remember, feels like last month to me, and when I was well into adulthood, that’s when it really hits home.

Also, it’s how younger people view you and act around you.

In my last job, most people were in their 20s and 30s.

I won’t lie. Some of them treated me like garbage. Like I didn’t exist.

I was a bit of a “cute” novelty to them. Like “aaawww bless her”.

I had the misfortune of being “trained” in one of my part-time jobs I had when my daughter was in junior school, by a 20 something. The job was a local convenient place holder during school hours.

What she was showing me was very “basic” and tedious. But if I questioned anything about it like “why can’t we just do this instead? Surely that would make more sense?”

She looked at me, not like someone who had 30 plus years experience working in different industries who might have a point. But someone “old” and passed it, who didn’t understand.

Like a silly backwards old woman who had no idea.

The amount of times I would say “Yeah. I DO get it. I am just wondering why it’s done this way? It seems a bit impractical?”

She looked at me blankly. Like I was asking her why water is wet …

I learned to just shut up and do the bloody tedious thing in the convoluted, dumb way. Because … because … that’s how it’s done.

Then I knew all those 20/30 year olds just saw me as an annoying old relic who “didn’t understand” how things worked.

I was there about a year before moving house.

I couldn’t wait to leave.

One of the HR women hauled me in at one point to give me an “appraisal”. There I was with a 20 something asking me if I was “happy at work” and going through other annoying questions on her ipad.

She obviously was irritated that I wasn’t taking the whole fake charade “seriously” enough. She wanted me to give her bullshit standard answers that she could tick a box to.

But I kept saying things that weren’t “tick box” worthy.

And that just signified further to her that “I didn’t understand” what was going on.

Oh I understood.

I just didn’t want to play along.

And just to emphasise how insane this whole scenario felt.

She still lived with her Mum and Dad and had soft toys on her desk.

That’s what getting “old” feels like.

September 7, 2026

The New Dark Ages by James Marriot

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

Ed West reviews James Marriot’s The New Dark Ages, which covers issues that are certainly of deep concern to parents as GenZ and Gen Alpha appear to have almost completely abandoned literacy in any written form:

I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: “I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos” or “I cemented a microwave to my head”. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky.

Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening.

Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week.

I wouldn’t call the book “urgent” because I usually take that to mean “worthy scolding by an ideological ally”; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us.

James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have been to Alfred the Great.

    Literature was our religion: the way we explained and interpreted our lives. As a child I quickly learned that every possible event — from a major bereavement to a minor playground contretemps — could be cross-referenced against a novel by Thomas Hardy or a poem by Philip Larkin. There was a quote for everything. I was dragged off to Shakespeare plays at what now strikes me as a rather cruelly young age (“if you’re not enjoying it”, I remember my dad telling me, “you can just read your book instead”). We worshipped pretty much all the canonical English poets but in our pantheon of literary saints, Shakespeare was Jesus or, more probably, God.

    We celebrated his birthday every year with a homemade cake and in the holidays we were taken on solemn pilgrimages to Stratford-upon-Avon. I recall that I was once presented with a Shakespeare-themed stuffed bear (it was wearing a t-shirt with a quotation from Hamlet).

Such a veneration for the written word naturally made him sensitive to disturbing stories about declining literacy that began circulating around the turn of the decade. “The first rumours that something important was happening reached me via friends working in universities”, he writes: “I came close to going into academia myself (though I don’t think the world is a poorer place for the loss of my proposed PhD on landscape imagery in post-war British poetry)”.

Anecdotes were soon backed up by data, showing significant declines in reading comprehension among students, as well as an even sharper drop in the number of adults and children reading for pleasure. The chief suspect seemed obvious: it’s the phones. (Everything’s “the phones”). Yet the more Marriott looked into it, the more he came to believe that the real transformation came with television, as Neil Postman had warned in his 1985 polemic Amusing Ourselves to Death.

“Postman believed that the rise of TV — with its bias towards triviality and charismatic personalities — was beginning to undermine the kinds of reasoned and productive public discourse on which a civilised democracy depends. He was dismissed by some of his critics as a crank and a Luddite. The passing of time has revealed that he was a prophet.”

An “exit tax”? What next, internal passports?

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Government, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A few months back, there was a brief online reaction to the Liberal Party idea of imposing a ridiculously high “exit tax” on young Canadians taking jobs in other countries — and by “other countries” they really only meant the United States. I dismissed it at the time as just someone letting their Liberal freak flag fly … but:

Jesus Christ. These boomer leaflibs, man.

It doesn’t occur to him to ask why highly trained Canadian engineers would rather work in the US. Actually no, he tacitly admits this: they get paid more. Why is that? Why can’t they get paid well in Canada, putting their skills to work here, developing innovative, world-leading technologies right at home in Canada?

The answer is obvious. Because there is no opportunity in Canada. It’s all but impossible to develop high tech industry here. The regulations are too thick, and all the available investment capital gets sucked up into real estate development.

Maybe Canada should try and fix that, so that Canada is actually an attractive country for talented young Canadians?

But nah fuck those kids, we should just charge them a half million dollar exit tax so if they can’t pay that they can just let their dreams die and get a job at BMO.

Oh and at the same time we should flood Canada with “world leading talent” (from Calcutta), in order to make it that much more impossible for Canadian engineers to find employment in their fields at home.

September 4, 2026

QotD: My generation

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

We talk a lot about generations and what defines them — Boomers and Xers and Millennials and Zs — but ultimately a generation is just a scene. It is about who and what you claim as your own, but this is something that is determined largely in retrospect. You only know what was yours once something comes along that is clearly alien and you realize that the culture was something you shared, that you made for one another. Eventually the whole scene moves on.

That’s why one of the weirdest things about getting older is realizing just how much of what you took for granted as part of the permanent furniture of the world was actually highly transient: The Iron Curtain. Guitar rock. Your own hopes and dreams and ambitions. Sometimes they all come wrapped together like a package deal, and failing at one makes it seem like you’ve failed at it all.

Andrew Potter, “Eddie Van Halen, Bill and Ted, and mourning a generation”, The Line, 2020-10-14.

July 16, 2026

This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”

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

An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:

But don’t you understand?

There was a way. There was always a way.

We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.

All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …

Nothing.

Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.

That’s all.

Just keep things the way they were.

But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.

They wanted to be heroes, too.

So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.

They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.

So they could feel like they were doing something important.

Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.

That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.

Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.

Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.

Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.

Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.

Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.

Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.

Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.

Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.

Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.

And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …

Except.

Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.

They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.

They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.

It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.

And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.

Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.

And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.

And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.

He called it the “giant sucking sound”.

Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.

June 18, 2026

Rules for you young plebs, but not rules for us

Filed under: Education, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The generation that defined itself as “the youth generation”, “the hippies”, etc., are now nailing down every possible way to have fun so that youngsters can’t do what they loudly and proudly did at the same age:

Part of the crowd on the first day of the Woodstock Festival, 15 August, 1969.
Photo by Derek Redmond and Paul Campbell via Wikimedia Commons.

We’re banning raves, because we don’t want you having fun where we can’t watch you. By the way let me tell you about Woodstock.

We’re cracking down on underage drinking. It’s bad for you. Yeah of course we hit up the pubs at your age it was great.

We’re banning smoking, but just for you — the smoking age will go up one year every year. Oh yes of course, we used to be able to smoke inside everywhere, it was great really.

We’re banning flavored vapes. We don’t have any evidence they’re bad for you, you just like them too much.

We’re banning dodgeball during recess, someone might get hurt. Yeah we really enjoyed dodgeball too.

We’re banning flirting, because it might make the girls uncomfortable.

We’re locking you in your room for the next two years. Yes we know you’re in no danger from the virus, but we’re worried that you’ll get us sick. By the way you have to take this needle if you want to leave your room again. Yes, twice. Well there will be boosters too. No, we aren’t worried about side effects, that doesn’t effect us at all.

We’re closing the frat houses, because we don’t want you having fun without our permission. Please join these officially sanctioned university clubs instead.

We’re bringing in labor from the third world to work the service jobs, so you can’t have a summer job.

You need to go to university to get a good job. By the way we’re raising the price of tuition. Oh look we’re raising it again. Don’t worry there are loans. At interest.

Actually we’re giving the good jobs to the foreigners we just imported, to make up for our racist past. We are very good people. No of course we aren’t sacrificing anything. You just have to take one for the team.

Also, we’re giving the foreigners the houses. We needed to increase real estate prices. For our pensions, you see. Sadly no, you’ll probably never be able to afford one yourself. By the way don’t forget to pay your taxes. Need to support those pensions somehow! Eh? No, we’re giving ourselves tax breaks of course. Seniors discount you know.

Oh by the way, that one thing you still have, now that we’ve banned joy and kicked every ladder out from under you? That social media stuff you kids like? You guessed it! We’re banning that too! Just for you though, we’re still going to watch AI videos on Facebook. It’s for your safety, you see. We’ve noticed that you’re all getting rather irate, and we think it would be better for your mental health if you shut up for a while. Why don’t you just go outside?

Eh? No of course we aren’t going to stop Ahmed and his twelve illiterate cousins from raping your sister, that would be culturally insensitive, which would make us feel very bad, and we can’t have that.

Update: Added missing URL.

June 13, 2026

QotD: Ecce BCG

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

Seriously, you’re wondering if a young lady in your life is a BCG? Let’s go over the diagnostic criteria. Fully acknowledging that some folks don’t photograph well, appearing to be 10-15 years older than your chronological age is a strong tell. BCGs live hard, on a steady diet of half-caff pumpkin spice mocha latte frappucinos and cock. […]

Of course BCG stands for “Basic College Girl”, and thus she can be found at any institution of “higher” “learning”, but the most Basic ones of all go to colleges you’ve never heard of. Jonah Goldberg is a good example, and while I know he’s technically male, his act is classic BCG. He famously — or infamously — went to Goucher College, which is the kind of school that likes to pretend it’s a mini-Ivy, when in fact it’s the kind of school bright-enough but directionless young nouveau riche kids go to when they just can’t kick that drug habit.

[…]

Achieving shockingly high rank right out of the gate is another tell, and I know what you’re thinking, because of course I thought it too: Mark Meadows is 63 years old, and in the world we grew up in, there’s only one way for a straight-out-of-college girl to become a “close confidante” of a 63 year old man. In my experience, though, BCGs aren’t socially savvy enough to figure that out.

Yeah yeah, I know, but y’all, as primal as that is, these BCGs are just weird. They have no social skills whatsoever. Two data points. First, from Hutchinson’s wiki page:

    Identified as a “White House legislative aide”, Hutchinson was the subject of a nationally-syndicated AP photograph in which she was shown dancing to the song “Y.M.C.A.” alongside White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany at the end of Trump’s September 21, 2020, campaign rally in Swanton, Ohio.

That is not grownup behavior. No woman who ever hoped to be taken seriously in politics would be caught dead doing that, as recently as 15 years ago. They have absolutely zero idea how they come off to other people.

Second data point: I once taught a night class in one of my Flyover State tours. I had this girl there who was just dying to get to Capitol Hill. She was involved in every possible Poli Sci club, the pre-law club, the Young Legislators (or whatever FNG shit it was), and so on. She emailed me once to say she’d be coming to class late, because she was representing Student Senate (or whatever) in some big to-do the college was hosting for the Governor.

When she shows up to my class, she’s wearing this tight red cocktail dress that would’ve looked trashy on a Vegas waitress. It was slit at the sides and back. and at the midriff. It had sequins, I shit you not. It was all I could do not to bust out laughing. You went to a reception. With the Governor. Wearing that.

They have no savvy at all, y’all. None whatsoever. The invitation she got read “formal attire”, so she wore what she wore to the sorority formal. You could practically still see Chad Thundercock’s handprints on her ass.

And that’s the fourth and most diagnostic criterion: utter, complete, hilarious fucking cluelessness. About everything.

Severian, “Alt Thread: Diagnosing the BCG”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-30.

June 11, 2026

“That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West; everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer”

Filed under: History, Military, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Devon Eriksen responds to a fairly common boomer-ish post:

I don’t know if @ArbitrageAndy1 is a Boomer, but here he gives us a mashup of two classics from the Boomers’ greatest hits, “Younger Generations Suck”, and “The Television Never Lies to Me”.

It’s a jaunty little tune, and you can sing in it the shower, but the lyrics don’t actually make much sense.

Back in the real world, which younger generations actually have to live in, and where the television seldom tells the truth, WW2 was fought, on both sides, by guys even younger than 26.

And they were terrified.

The stress of combat against a peer adversary is overwhelming. It’s unendurable. But you endure anyway, because there you are, it’s happening to you, and you’re not getting out of it.

So you actually do have those little moments that Boomers would describe as stress meltdowns if they happened at work. You have them, and you do what you need to do anyway. Sometimes at the very same moment while you are melting down.

When you’re in this kind of war, there’s something terrible in front of you. In reality, that terrible thing is just as young and scared and overwhelmed as you are, but it sure doesn’t feel that way to you.

However, you also have something behind you, and something around you.

Behind you, you have a tribe that accepts and appreciates you. They know they sent you to hell, but they did it because hell was necessary, not because hell was fine. No one is gaslighting you pretending that everything is okay and that any problems you have are personal character flaws.

Around you, you have bros. They’re exactly where you are, doing exactly what you are doing, and they know how much it sucks. You’ve entrusted your lives to each other, and carried each other through things you don’t wanna talk about in your letters home.

Under intense stress and fear and exhaustion, your horizons shrink. You might have signed up for duty and patriotism and high ideals, but when you’re fighting, you fight to save the man next to you. And he fights to save you.

This is a very different experience than being isolated in a society that’s turned against young people, especially young men, especially young White men.

I won’t pretend it’s as difficult as fighting the Waffen SS. But young men fought the Waffen SS together.

They have to face the dissolution of the West alone.

That’s why they are anxious. Everything around them is not just going to shit.

It’s being systematically and deliberately turned into shit by powerful people who want them dead and replaced by someone else who will work cheaper and doesn’t expect to have a share of political power and a nice house and a retirement pension.

But I suppose Andy can still go ahead and dunk on them for clicks and a twenty-three dollar check from Twitter. That’s the fun thing about the fall of the West. Everybody gets a swing of the sledgehammer.

The Course of Empire – Destruction by Thomas Cole, 1836.
From the New York Historical Society collection via Wikimedia Commons.

June 7, 2026

QotD: Undergrad writing

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

The other problem undergrads typically have is a concern with “style”. That’s almost harder to break than any other habit, because the fix sounds so robotic: Subject-verb-object; five sentences per paragraph; five paragraphs per paper. Back when I first started teaching, I had a lot of students just back from the Sandbox, giving college a try on the GI Bill. I enjoyed having them in class for lots of reasons, but a big one was that the military at that time still taught the basic five-paragraph essay (maybe they still do). Your basic After Action Report ain’t great literature, but it does exactly what it’s supposed to do, efficiently.

I would always tell students who genuinely wanted to improve that nobody is ever going to fail your term paper for style. Unless you really want to be a novelist — and you don’t; we wouldn’t be having this conversation if you did — pretty much all the writing you’re ever going to do is about efficient communication. Fuck literature, fuck all the tropes of rhetoric. Just lay it out there. Who cares if it’s not a page-turner?

But the few things students are taught about writing in grade school are not just useless, they’re counterproductive, because they focus – for some unfathomable reason — on style. So you end up with crap like this:

    This article was very thought provoking and caused me to thoroughly evaluate the idea of gender and the role it plays in our society.

Duuuuuuude … far out!!! It’s not quite as “cosmic” as some of the intro sentences I’ve gotten over the years (one kid said something like “Throughout history, there have been many historic events”), but it’s just filler, very obvious filler, and that’s the very first thing your reader sees. Give me Militarese any day: “At 0500 hours, patrolling near Checkpoint Bravo, 1st platoon encountered an enemy force of approximately platoon strength …” But back in sophomore English, Teacher said that all papers must have a Thesis Statement, and since xzhey never bothered to define “Thesis Statement” I keep getting stuff like this.

Same way with the other crap they teach. There’s the one about never using the same word twice, so I’d get papers with half the thesaurus cut-and-pasted. There’s stuff about alliteration and parallelism and metaphors and passive voice, oh God, the passive voice. I swear, I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Passive voice on fire off the shoulder of Orion. Botched alliteration glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All these moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain, after I’ve had enough beers to endure grading another batch of midterms …

Yeah, you see what I did there. It’s all so, so unnecessary. The point of writing is communication, and in this instance what you are trying to communicate, above all else, is that you have read and understood the assignment. Every sentence I have to read about how deeply thought provoking you found the article is another moment of my life gone, like tears in the rain. The funny thing is, except for the far-out intro, this girl mostly doesn’t have the “style” problem. Her sentences are short and to the point, and most of them are in that nice subject-verb-object pattern that makes me suspect AI, especially coming from a Current Year undergrad.

In my experience, the Kids These Days either give you tweets — often literal bullet points, to the point where some colleagues actually had to specify complete sentences in their essay prompts — or these long, byzantine things that look like really bad parodies of Alexander Pope. If she really does write like that, good! I can work with that. Outline your response next time, making sure that each paragraph contains at least one direct citation from the assignment, and you’ll be fine.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2025-12-05.

June 4, 2026

Sci-Fi and the WWII Mythos Part II : The Political Element

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 16 Jan 2026

Last time I was focused on cultural aspects, but what about the direct political manifestations today? Is there a resurgence of neo-nazi attitudes or is just an artifact of the ubiquity of digital media preserving everything? Why might those ideas resonate with the young, and how does it fit with my argument that the old myths are breaking down?

00:00 Intro
01:42 Right, Left, and Gen-Z
02:56 Patterns of Force
04:25 Rambling about Economics
05:48 Efficient? No.
06:39 Bifurcation
08:00 Loss of Perspective

This one is a direct result of a conversation on the Talking History program on KSMU (I’ll link the episode when goes up) and covers something that came up but wasn’t really addressed well.
(more…)

May 27, 2026

The boomers don’t hate you, they just prioritize feeling good about themselves

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

This is something I see very clearly in Canadian baby boomers — most of whom support Mark Carney and the Liberals because they feel that’s what nice people do, and boomers want to think of themselves as nice people above all else. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to a meme expressing later generations’ view of the boomers:

On the surface, it sounds like Boomers hate you. Or like they have the attention span and logical thinking skills of a goldfish.

Neither one of these is true.

Their complete dismissal of any of your concerns, and their total refusal to understand your situation or worldview, is actually quite sensible in light of one key fact about them.

They’re not hateful. They’re not dumb. They just have an incredibly low emotional pain threshold.

They cannot stand to feel bad about themselves for any reason, even for a moment.

When you create a meme like this, or you tell the story of how you are forty years old and can’t afford a house because you trained for three different careers and got rugpulled by work visas and offshoring every time …

… then they don’t even think about it as a worldview or a perspective or an experience that you have. They don’t think about you at all.

They think only about the effect on their own self-esteem, which must be parried.

You have, you see, told a tale of playing life on hard mode, which implies that they were playing life on easy mode, which implies that they are not wizards of insight and paragons of virtue.

That’s why they will immediately respond with these incoherent lines about whining and bootstraps and firm handshakes and avocado toast. Of course they don’t make sense. They don’t have to make sense. The goal isn’t to persuade you of anything or engage with you at all.

The goal is simply to have an excuse to avoid thinking about something which might make them feel bad.

These Boomerisms are magic talismans used to ward off emotional discomfort, in much the same fashion as all the species of plants they smoked their way through when they were your age.

I don’t see a solution to this.

I don’t know any way to tell Boomers that Hart-Cellar, CRA1964, DEI, open borders, social welfare programs, anti-racism, gay marriage, gun control, the sexual revolution, etc, were massive mistakes and need to be stopped, while hiding the obvious implication they were the ones who made those mistakes.

If we wish to save Western civilization, to make things good enough again that actual Americans can manage to have homes and marriages and children, then we’re going to have to find a way to work around the Boomers, because they’re never going to get on board.

May 26, 2026

“She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism”

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

Millennial Woes on having sympathy for the Midwit:

In August 2022 I stumbled upon this video of a young female teacher in Utah. She is what we would once have called an SJW. She describes how she has equipped her fourth-grade classroom in a way that she expects will annoy the parents of her (aged 9-10) pupils: all of the materials have been vetted by her to ensure that they include no images whatsoever of White people — “not a single White face there”.

Even though she knows the school is majority White (over 85%), she has designed her classroom, in her own words, “for non-white students”. To be fair, this could be simply because she is bringing materials from her previous school, which was much more diverse. But even then, you would think the sensible thing would be to buy materials more fitting for her new school. She does not.

So the woke attitude goes far beyond merely accommodating non-white people, and beyond even the absurdity of giving them equal prominence in our ancestral society, but actually to giving them precedence over us there.

What I found striking about this video, apart from the mindboggling fact that this is someone presumably vocated to help people yet doing something that will clearly harm her pupils, is how she delights in the fact that what she has done will annoy parents. To be precise, it will annoy parents who, whether conscious of it or not, are “racist”. After all, if they really “don’t see race”, then how can they possibly care about this? Thus, they cannot argue that their kids should see representations of their racial kin without outing themselves as “racist”, which in turn will make them very vulnerable. So this younger teacher feels not just morally sound, but bulletproof against reprisals, and very clever.

There is also a social class element to this. She specifies that these will be “posh White parents”. Despite appearing to be all of 23 and only having taught in very diverse schools, she alludes to experience in dealing with such upper-class White parents before. She is hoping to disturb them in their privilege and veiled racism.

She also clearly assumes that, if any parents do complain, she will be safe. The institution — not just her school but the entire education sector, including all of the academics and every university department that sustains them — will be on her side. If and when the parents complain (having navigated their way through the minefield of realising they are “racist” and painstakingly forming some lame argument to hopefully avoid that accusation) they will find that she is protected not just by her employer but by an entire segment of society. They, the parents, might get some small local newspaper to back them, or more likely to report the story impartially, but in all likelihood they will find themselves shamed by some much bigger newspaper. That is what she was clearly expecting when she made this video.

[…]

What I find troubling about this story is that it illuminates both the viciousness and the vulnerability of the midwit. It wouldn’t be worth fretting over, except that there are many millions of these people about. Every one of them is bright enough to grasp the drivel at teacher training college, but not bright enough to realise that it is drivel. Every one of them is vicious enough to harm children and take pleasure in disturbing the parents and sadistically putting them in an impossible position … but every one of them is literally just doing what they have been told to do, and is spreading the ideas they have been trained to believe are good, healthy, and crucially needed.

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