That’s why it might work. Young people’s lives are simpler; it’s one of the great things about being young. That’s not me, the old guy, knocking the kids; it’s just the way it is. If that’s the way they decide to go — Jungvolk uber Alles — then that’s how they’re going to have to do it. Mamdani, the young, vigorous, exotic, foreign-born socialist weirdo — you know, a Barack Obama for The New Generation.
Which is why I’m tempted to write it off. After all, Obama was just a Bill Clinton for The New Generation. Who was just a JFK for The New Generation. Who — we forget this — was just FDR for The New Generation. Most of the idiot Boomers who voted for Bill Clinton as “the New JFK” barely remembered JFK. Nor did JFK himself win “the youth vote” by all that much — or at all — because “the youth vote” wasn’t a thing back then. For one thing, the voting age was still 21. I’m in History, not math, but even I can do Historian math, and 1960 – 21 = 1939. Most of JFK’s voters had clear memories of The Depression; even his youngest voters remembered the tail end of WWII. JFK sounded like an East Coast patrician, just like FDR did, and as opposed to that young parvenu from California, Richard Nixon.
That’s just a wee bit different from “the Youth Vote” Bill Clinton appealed to. To say nothing of the later freaks.
I’m tempted to write it off, but I’m not going to. For one thing, Obama, Clinton … they all won, and look at the incalculable damage they did. More importantly, I want to return to an issue we tabled earlier: The fact that there’s no “middle age” cohort in the Donk Party. They really are the Volkssturm — kids and oldsters. Or, if you prefer, they’re the Bolsheviks — having shot all their “technical intelligentsia” during The Revolution, they have to go out there and reinvent everything. All their accumulated experience is gone, so their rookies don’t just make rookie mistakes, they make the kind of mistakes that anyone with the tiniest shred of experience could see coming.
You know, those “hmmmm, I wonder what this big red button does?” types of mistakes.
You see it in the business world. Z Man, may he rest in peace, used to talk about this all the time. The Boomers were retiring, the kids were just so epically clueless, and all the thousands of workarounds and jimmy-rigged stuff that makes any operation go were seizing up, for lack of maintenance. And even the smart, ambitious kids were having a hell of a time getting up to speed, because they were looking for a Policies and Procedures manual that simply doesn’t exist. There’s no Official Manual for jimmy-rigged workarounds.
Say what you will about the Boomers, they’re competent. They might well be the last competent generation …
… maybe the older, smarter half of Gen X, but a) there were never that many of us, and b) in politics, as in so much else, the Groovy Fossils just would. NOT. leave, and so the competent among Gen X had to go do their own thing, if they ever wanted a chance to move up. This leaves your big Legacy Systems — you know, like the Apparat — in one hell of a bind. The Groovy Fossils don’t want to leave, but eventually they have to — 90 may be the new 30, but dead is dead. And they’re the only ones who know how to operate the Legacy Systems, because there are two, three “generations” of people who, if they had anything on the ball, had to go their own way.
Those who stayed had no choice, and all they know how to do is push buttons and fill in blanks. Look at Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Anyone 50 or older looks at her with horror, because we’ve all had to deal with that kind of kid. That’s the kind of person who has filled up every layer of the Apparat below Top Management. If they had anything at all on the ball, they’d be somewhere else … but they don’t, so now they’re all in Senior Management, because somebody’s got to do it, and they were better at pushing buttons and filling in blanks than anyone else who was available at the time.
But note that I’ve just been talking about candidates, politicians. The VOTERS are like that, too. See what I mean? That’s why it’s so dangerous … and very likely to succeed.
Severian, “Groovy, Baby!!”, Founding Questions, 2025-11-10.
February 13, 2026
February 7, 2026
Food hang-ups by generation
Around the early to mid-80s, I started to notice trends in the kind of health information being pushed by the mainstream media. One of the big topics of the day was the dangers of … eggs. Eggs were so dangerous that “experts” were warning adults to avoid eating more than one or two per week. Three was the absolute limit and you were dicing with death if you went over that “healthy” limit. Then, a few years later, eggs were “the perfect food” and we weren’t eating enough of these formerly abominated death pills. A few years after that, OMG! Apples, people, apples! Danger, danger, danger! That was around the time I stopped putting any credence into health reporting in the media. However, as Lisa De Pasquale points out, food issues have been an ongoing struggle for each succeeding generation:
In the ’80s, the ultimate healthy Boomer breakfast was a bran muffin. There were also various cereals like Grape-Nuts and Raisin Bran. There definitely wasn’t room for their parents’ bacon and eggs unless you had a death wish. Boomers settled on eggs as the devil’s snack when the American Heart Association warned in the 1960s that people shouldn’t consume more than three eggs per week. Like social distancing six feet from others during COVID and eight 8oz glasses of water per day, the recommendation wasn’t based on science, but on being a simple number Americans could remember.
Thanks, but this Gen Xer will stick to getting my 8,675,309 steps per year as my guiding fitness principle.
[…]
The Millennial Food Pyramid
Level One: Genetically Modified Organism and Nonorganic Foods — Use Sparingly
While Gen X was at ground zero in doubting Big Food’s pyramid, our Millennial colleagues and kids really continued the battle. Like luxury logos, they seek out the organic and non-GMO labels. It’s a virtue signal of both their values and what they can afford. Erewhon smoothies, anyone?
Level Two: Various Overpriced Coffee Drinks — Two to Three Servings
Gen Xers link coffee to work and responsibility; caffeine is a tool to get through the morning. Millennials view coffee drinks as self-care. It’s about treating themselves to dessert any time of day — a major win for marketing executives.
Level Three: Charcuterie Boards, Wine, Hard Seltzers, Craft Beers — Three to Five Servings
Millennials love to entertain. Nothing shows sophistication and “adulting” in your 30s and early 40s like a charcuterie board. Lunchables upgraded! They came of drinking age at the same time as small-batch beers, American boutique wineries, and hard seltzers.
Level Four: Instagram-Worthy Food — Six to Eleven Servings
Camera phones leveled up the entertainment value of food consumption. Like organic labels, what Millennials eat signals their open-mindedness. As they get older, they straddle the line of wanting to be in on the trends (avocado toast and açai bowls) and the dive you haven’t heard of with authentic phở.
The Generation Z and Generation Alpha Food Pyramid
Level One: Real Meat, Dairy, and Peanuts — Use Sparingly
The Gen X and Millennial generations dabbled in veggie burgers, but Gen Z and Gen Alpha went whole lab-created hog into plant-based meats and milks, to the point that meat and milk no longer have a meaning until a company gets sued for using the words. To be fair, they are also embracing biohacking trends and ditching seed oils. Due to the growing prevalence of allergies, peanuts are a universal no-no food in public spaces.
Level Two: TikTok Recipes — Two to Three Servings
The term “recipe” is used loosely. I’ve come across a TikTok video for making a cream sauce from a block of cream cheese, water, and dried pasta. There is a positive aspect of trying these TikTok recipes, though: it prepares them for trying new things and for failure when a recipe doesn’t come out right.
Level Three: Food Delivery Service Meals — Three to Five Servings
Postmates, Uber Eats, Grubhub, and DoorDash are staples at mealtime. Following their surge during the COVID era as restaurants struggled to stay in business, accounts linked to their parents’ bank accounts became as common as sharing a cell phone plan.
Level Four: Gamer Food and Drinks — Six to Eleven Servings
Living next to a park has taught me one thing about Gen Z and Gen Alpha — they’re all inside. I mostly see neighborhood kids on Halloween, and every year, I recognize fewer and fewer costumes because they’re dressed as video game characters. Their snacks are manufactured for their attention span: quick hits of spicy, sour, or sweet while on pause. The gamer culture and H Mart remove barriers as Japanese snacks dominate.
So, where does this leave Gen X? We’re not immune to the powers of Big Food. In fact, recent research shows that ultra-processed food addiction began with us thanks to the explosion and availability of ultra palatable foods with added refined carbs and fats. StudyFinds reported researchers from the University of Michigan said, “Individuals who are now older adults were in developmentally sensitive stages during the 1970s and 1980s, precisely when tobacco-owned food manufacturers were shaping the market with addictive ultra-processed foods”.
January 28, 2026
QotD: 21st century generation gap
Niccolo Soldo, “Saturday Commentary and Review #197”, Fisted by Foucault, 2025-10-25.
January 7, 2026
More anti-anti-boomer discussion from Scott Alexander
I linked to Scott’s original article last month and thanks to the interest it generated (and perhaps my clickbait-y headline) it got linked at Instapundit thanks to Sarah Hoyt. Scott got a lot of feedback on his post and shares some of that here:
“… Millennials and Generation Z have more money (adjusted for inflation ie cost-of-living, and compared at the same age) than their Boomer parents, to about the same degree that the Boomers exceeded their own parents. This is good and how it should be. The Boomers have successfully passed on a better life to their children”
First, I wish I’d been more careful to differentiate the following claims:
- Boomers had it much easier than later generations.
- The political system unfairly prioritizes Boomers over other generations.
- Boomers are uniquely bad on some axis like narcissism, selfishness, short-termism, or willingness to defect on the social contract.
Anti-Boomerism conflates all three of these positions, and in arguing against it, I tried to argue against all three of these positions — I think with varying degrees of success. But these are separate claims that could stand or fall separately, and I think a true argument against anti-Boomerists would demand they declare explicitly which ones they support — rather than letting them switch among them as convenient — then arguing against whichever ones they say are key to their position.
Second, I wish I’d highlighted how much of this discussion centers around disagreements over which policies are natural/unmarked vs. unnatural/marked.
Nobody is passing laws that literally say “confiscate wealth from Generation A and give it to Generation B”. We’re mostly discussing tax policy, where Tax Policy 1 is more favorable to old people, and Tax Policy 2 is more favorable to young people. If you’re young, you might feel like Tax Policy 1 is a declaration of intergenerational warfare where the old are enriching themselves at young people’s expense. But if you’re old, you might feel like reversing Tax Policy 1 and switching to Tax Policy 2 would be intergenerational warfare confiscating your stuff. But in fact, they’re just two different tax policies and it’s not obvious which one a fair society with no “intergenerational warfare” would have, even assuming there was such a thing. We’ll see this most clearly in the section on housing, but I’ll try to highlight it whenever it comes up.
I’m in a fighty frame of mind here and probably defend the Boomers (and myself) in these responses more than I would in an ideal world.
[…]
1: Top Comments I Especially Want To Highlight
…
Sokow writes:
[The anti-Boomer] take has been imported in part from the EU + the UK where the pension system is not the same. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Pension_(United_Kingdom)#Pensions_Act_2007
There is a lot of similar things in France that I could dig up, such as all attempts to tax benefits being defeated.
Many Europeans chimed in to say this, including people whose opinions I trust.
I find this pretty interesting. We all know stories of American opinions infecting Europeans, like how they’re obsessed about anti-black racism, but rarely worry about anti-Roma racism which is much more prevalent there. I’d never heard anyone argue the opposite — that the European discourse is infecting Americans with ideas that don’t apply to our context — but it makes sense that this should happen. I might write a post on this.
Kevin Munger (Never Met A Science) writes:
Hating Boomers (and talking about hating Boomers) is uninteresting and I agree morally dubious.
But it is *emphatically* false that “Boomers were a perfectly normal American generation”. They have served far more terms in Congress than any generation before or since (and we currently have the oldest average age of elected officials in a legislative body IN THE WORLD other than apparently Cambodia), they have dominated the presidency (look up the birthdate of every major party candidate since the 2000 presidential election…), they controlled the commanding heights of major companies, cultural institutions (especially academica).
They are a historically *unique* generation, for three intersecting reasons: 1. They are a uniquely large generation 2. they came of age as the country and its institutions were maturing 3. they are sticking around because of increased longevity. These are analytical facts, and they produce what I call “Boomer Ballast” — a concentration of our societies resources in one, older generation that increases the tension we are experiencing from technological innovation. Our demography is pulling us towards the past, the internet is pulling us into the future, and this I think is the major source of the anti-Boomer frustration.
On the specifics of social security and why we might think Boomers have played things to their advantage (not bc they’re specifically evil but bc they have the political power to do so) — the key thing is that they have prevented forward-thinking politicians from fixing the inevitable hole in social security that comes from our demographic pyramid. It would have been relatively painless to increase the rate or incidence of the social security payroll tax at any point in the past 25 years, the looming demographic cliff was obvious and the increased burden could’ve been shared more equally. Instead, they prevented reforms and all of the fiscal pain from demographic shifts will be borne by younger generations.
I agree this is a strong argument, and part of why I think it’s helpful to separate the three points I mentioned at the beginning.
RH writes:
We [Boomers] did [vote for ourselves to pay higher taxes and get fewer benefits]. My lifetime SS benefits will be 20-25 percent less than they would have been under previous law, and I voted for that. My SS tax rate went up itself, and has been well over 15% since the changes took effect, and the cap on earned income subject to that went up a lot. And I voted to accept all that because it was projected to be sufficient.
Then the immigrant haters decided we needed fewer workers in the country, or at least fewer paying SS taxes, so they slowed legal immigration and pushed illegals into the underground economy, so they don’t pay taxes to support social security. And social security is going to get whacked again, plus the evils the SS system was intended to alleviate — people too old to work and too poor to live — will return.
I think this says something profound about politics. The problem is less that there’s some group of people who don’t believe in fairness, but that fairness is very hard to calculate.
Suppose RH is right (I haven’t checked), and that Social Security would be sustainable with lots of immigration. Then whether Boomers are paying “their fair share” or not depends on whether immigration is good or bad (a hard question!), and on whether we think of high vs. low immigration as the natural unmarked state of the universe (such that immigration opponents must “own” closed borders and compensate the losers), and on what kind of compensation the losers from closed borders deserve.
Someone else commented by saying we could solve all of these problems without inconveniencing either the Boomers or the young by just increasing taxes on a few ultra-rich people. The ultra-rich could reasonably say they didn’t create this problem and it’s unfair to tax them for it. But so could the Boomers and the young! So whose “fair share” is it?
November 23, 2025
Do older Canadians really hate their children and grandchildren? The fiscal evidence says “yes”
As I posted a few days back, the real political divide in Canada is no longer the left versus the right: it’s the old financially parasitizing the younger generations. At The Line, Ben Woodfinden discusses how the smug, comfortable boomers are being confronted by, for lack of a better term, a “new right” of far less comfortable younger voters:
eLbOwS uP!
The specific complaints from people like d’Entremont and other grumbling voices are less about ideology and more the tone and style of Pierre Poilievre (though perhaps the two are connected). Poilievre’s temperament and style rubs certain people, including some Conservatives, the wrong way. Now, full disclosure, I worked for Poilievre for a few years, and I can confirm he’s a demanding boss. But so is the prime minister, reportedly. And Poilievre is also in my experience the hardest working person I’ve ever met.
The tone battle is not a revival of Red vs. Blue. It’s not clear those terms are even relevant today. “Red Tory” is often used pejoratively to describe a “Liberal Lite” voter who identifies as a conservative but is indistinguishable from a Liberal — those who fit the “social progressive, fiscal conservative” moniker. This is not what Red Toryism historically meant; it’s actually the opposite of this. Red Toryism is a distinctly Canadian tradition of conservatism that was focused on the preservation of Canada contra a liberal United States, and emphasized the role of the state in this. It blended conservatism and elements of socialism in a distinctly anti-liberal synthesis that rejected radical individualism — that’s what the “red” part actually means, not liberalism but socialism. This kind of Toryism — “conservatism with a conscience” — is committed to public institutions and is pro-market but not entirely libertarian.
But Red Toryism is no longer a dominant force in Canadian conservatism; today it’s a remnant, largely in Atlantic Canada. What we’re really looking at here is a generational fault line that cuts right through the heart of Canadian conservatism.
Many older Canadians are conservative, and these older Tories are (in general) fairly well off. They are retired, or well advanced into their careers. They own homes that are paid off, or will be in the near future, and worth a lot more than what they paid for them. Many of them have been able to help their children get started in their own careers, or with down payments on homes of their own. They value stability — it is essential if they are to continue enjoying their prosperous lives. These people have long enough memories to remember the political battles that led to the creation of the modern Conservative Party of Canada in 2003 — some of them were no doubt even participants, and may still identify with one faction or the other.
Now contrast this with many of the leading voices on the other side of the debate. They call themselves “the new right”. In the absence of a better term, I’ll use that. Canada’s new right tends to be younger, and this matters not just because the old PC/Reform divide means very little to them, it matters because they are much angrier with our general state of affairs, and for good reason.
The emerging flagship publication for this collection of young conservatives is the Substack Without Diminishment. In some ways, the emerging conservative opposition in Ontario to Premier Doug Ford centred around an organization called Project Ontario (discussed in last week’s On The Line podcast here) is also a good representation of it.
The voices and figures involved in this movement are younger, often very online, and eager to pick fights with this older generation of conservatives. For some of the writers at Without Diminishment, the archnemesis of their conservatism is Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne. He represents, for them, an outdated kind of “Boomer conservatism” that does not speak to them or the issues they care about. New conservatives have also recently written, after Ford ran ads featuring Ronald Reagan in America, that it’s time for “the gatekeepers of the Canadian right … to move on from 1984” — namely Reagan-era conservatism.
Twenty years ago, I’d often quote Andrew Coyne’s columns, but at some point he had a significant change of heart and one of the first Without Diminishment articles I linked to was what I characterized as “The Anti-Coynist Manifesto“.
November 18, 2025
Canada’s divide isn’t left versus right, it’s old versus young
Older Canadians seem to be taking joy in sticking up their elbows and robbing younger Canadians of opportunities, jobs, and hope. It’s quite literally un-Canadian, but the Boomers have always been a generation apart and this is merely the latest manifestation of their self-centred worldview. Alexander Brown wonders if this divide can be fixed before the country itself is ruined:
“eLbOwS uP!”
“Talk to your parents,” the host of an event for Pierre Poilievre joked on Saturday in Vancouver — an event I happened to attend. “But be patient. Be kind.” And he’s right.
The cross-talk, the rock’em sock’em robots, the continued slap-fight between warring consultant tribes, it isn’t getting us anywhere, clearly. When the present iteration of the party of the status quo wedges a nation against itself, and denies a reform election after a decade of haphazard redistribution, non-growth, and abject decline, you get a traditional voter-demographic breakdown flipped entirely on its head.
The party of seemingly endless opposition dominated with youth, held strong with the 35-54s, but found itself walloped 52% to 34% among those aged 55+. Since then, those 55+ numbers have only widened, as the “safe” choice, that more stately actor (when he’s not radicalizing those who don’t know any better with claims of false invasion) can do little wrong, even coming out of “middling” budget heading to a vote Monday, and with a nation remaining pessimistic about its future prospects.
If the Liberals are voted down Monday, they would likely relish that opportunity to seize on a majority. The spin is already built in.
The Conservatives don’t want to stand up against Trump!
At a time like this, when we should be coming together, it’s un-Canadian …
We’re supposed to be one Team Canada right now (offer void in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec), we can’t afford Pierre Poilievre’s divisive Trumpiness.
On and on. Yada and yada.
Nowhere in that comms exercise, drummed up by those who spend more time in America or the Arab Emirates, or meeting with Chinese proxies than they’d publicly care to admit, would there be a defence of younger Canadians, of those still on the launch pad, worried about, say, supposed ‘fixes’ to immigration riddled with creative accounting and more of the same.
Nowhere would they address housing, set to get much, much worse, under both the federal Liberals and targets they’re admitting they won’t come close to hitting, and Ontario’s ‘Conservative’ premier who leads the galaxy in not getting off his ass to get out of the way on starts and lowering punitive development costs.
Nowhere would one find a stout defence against “deconstruction“, or the daily humiliation ritual of flags flying that aren’t our own, or imagined and inflated woke excess meant to sully the memory of our war dead and marginalize normal people.
Following recent debates sparked by Without Diminishment, where we’ve argued a version of “it’s not just the economy, stupid,” when it comes to what’s animating young people and young conservatives — actually talk to them, and half of them are trending towards fascism with how alienated they feel by a lack of upward social mobility, or a society without rules or those willing to enforce them — it’s been easier for some serving in established camps to mischaracterize these conversations as focusing too much on culture, or, ridiculously, “blood and soil nationalism”. But we’re not. If one is dealing in good faith, it’s plain to see we’re trying to talk about both.
Of course, the Liberals survived Monday’s budget vote … for now:
When I saw Elizabeth May stand up and ask Mark Carney what looks like a completely planted question, I assumed the budget would pass and I was correct. Planted questions normally come from government MPs and are a soft way for the government to push their agenda.
This time, it wasn’t a Liberal MP, well at least not a Liberal MP in name and fact. Instead it was Green leader, or deputy leader, or let’s be honest the lonely lady in the corner who is the only Green MP asking the question.
That statement put the Liberals one vote closer to passing their budget and of course May later confirmed ahead of the vote that she would back the budget. This was after saying couldn’t back the budget, might back the budget, would probably back the budget, definitely wouldn’t back the budget and finally would back the budget.
How anyone can take Elizabeth May seriously is beyond me.
How the other votes went…
Ahead of the vote there were lots of questions about how things would go. Would all MPs show up or be able to vote online? Would people abstain? Would MPs vote for the budget without crossing the floor?
In the end, the budget passed 170 to 168 with two NDPers abstaining. That leaves five votes not accounted for and we will figure out.
Here is how the vote went.
Now, some members who were not in their seats did vote electronically. I didn’t see Matt Jeneroux vote electronically and I’m told that he is in British Columbia with is family. Also not voting, Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs.
Conservatives Andrew Scheer and Scott Reid both voted no but only in the time that is allowed for MPs voted electronically to claim tech problems. They were both in the House, so why were didn’t they vote in person?
Regardless, the NDP rushed out to say they voted against the budget but also made sure that it passed with their two abstensions.
As for all this talk of a Christmas election, had the government lost this vote and the PM gone to see the Governor General tomorrow, the earliest election date would have been December 25.
A Christmas election.
November 13, 2025
Blue Hairster Cult: (Do Fear) The Zoomers
In the free-to-cheapskates portion of this post, Ed West explains why the Boomers and even the Millennials should fear the Zoomers:
“To understand the man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty”. I’ve thought about that quote, sometimes attributed to Napoleon, a fair bit recently. I suppose for my generation, 9/11 was the formative event, which signalled the end of the triumphalist Nineties — although the extent to which it affected us is questionable. Perhaps of far greater importance was the financial crisis which unfolded towards the very end of the Bush-Blair era.
What about those born around the turn of the millennium, the so-called “Zoomers”? I suppose it would be the experience of being locked down for a year in order to protect an older generation whose wealth they can never hope to emulate. An already bitter and disillusioned cohort, denied their patrimony by house price inflation, came to adulthood with a period of deliberate social isolation with only the internet at hand — a lockdown that was punctuated by weeks of millennial hysteria over racism.
The intelligent ones would have seen the hysteria for it was — a wild distortion, and realised that the media regularly distorts all sorts of things, and it’s the intelligent ones I worry about. Indeed, when I read the thoughts and worldview of that generation, I feel a sense of dread about what’s coming; perhaps even more so when it comes from the Right.
I only watched a Nick Fuentes video for the first time this summer, an amusingly edited version of a talk in which he rails against Israeli military success. It had been sent by a Jewish friend with strong Zionist sympathies, and it’s very funny — Fuentes is very funny. If I were 20 years old, I might have watched his show, one of many aspects of life in 2025 which I thank God wasn’t around in my adolescence.
After all, most of the things I watched on television – five channels, kids, in fact more like four and half, as the Channel 5 reception wasn’t very good – liked to poke fun at the prevailing morality of the older generation. My favourite comic, Viz, would laugh at the old people whose fault it was that Eddie Murphy’s swearing had to be dubbed over with “freak you, monkeyfeather”. Today it’s only natural that young men should wish to offend woke scolds.
But then, of course, something darker might also be happening. Rod Dreher recalls a fascinating, and disturbing, account of his conversations with young Republican activists this week, writing that: “Not every DC Zoomercon who identifies with Fuentes agrees with everything he says, or the way he says it. What they like most of all is his rage, and willingness to violate taboos. I asked one astute Zoomer what the Groypers actually wanted (meaning, what were their demands). He said, ‘They don’t have any. They just want to tear everything down’.”
There is certainly polling to suggest that younger voters in the US are moving to extremes, if you believe polls. One found that “explicit antisemitic attitudes are now much more common among young voters”, who are five times more likely to have an “unfavourable view of the Jewish people than 65 year olds”. Since 2018, the percentage of American boys who believe in gender equality has shrunk. Far more worrying is that younger Americans are also much more likely to support political violence. and this is more of a problem on the left.
November 7, 2025
“BookTok on its own sounds innocent enough”
I’ve seen occasional references to BookTok on other platforms but as it seemed to be as female-coded as an online community can be, I’d never bothered to pay close attention to it. If Zoomertea is to be believed, it’s a weird and disturbing space for the unprepared to visit:
Image from “The Female Gooner Epidemic” at Zoomertea
If you’re smart enough to have never downloaded TikTok, then you’ve probably never heard of BookTok and the resulting epidemic of female gooners (a term borrowed from porn culture to describe obsessive arousal and fixation). BookTok on its own sounds innocent enough, women rediscovering the joys of reading, romanticising cozy nights in, or even joining a book club. In theory, what could be more wholesome? However, the reality is more concerning. It turns out the bookish girls have traded the likes of Pride and Prejudice for highly pornographic dark fantasy erotica, stories that make Fifty Shades of Grey seem tame.
Women have always enjoyed a flair for romance. Once it was the slow burn longing of Romeo & Juliet or Wuthering Heights – the stories weren’t explicit, yet still roused deep, passionate feelings. By the 2000s, romance had evolved into “chick lit” – breezy novels about friendship, love and self-discovery. Books like Bridget Jones and the Devil Wears Prada swapped tragic love for witty realism, capturing the struggles of modern women navigating careers, dating, and independence. It seems like in all aspects of modern culture, people have been pushing for the “reliability factor” – they wanted to see themselves in the characters and storylines. But somewhere along the way, the realism and reliability factor lost its appeal.
During the pandemic, while the virus spread and the world stayed home, TikTok spread too, surpassing 2 billion downloads by mid-2020. With endless free time, people picked up new hobbies: some tried Chloe Ting’s “Get Abs in 2 Weeks” workouts, others turned to BookTok and rediscovered their love for literature. Booktok isn’t just for explicit romantasy novels, however it’s become synonymous with women who obsessively consume dark romance. On BookTok, desire isn’t intimate anymore; it’s performed.
While Fifty Shades of Grey, a book very explicitly about sex, came almost ten years before BookTok, it wasn’t exposed to the algorithmic amplification loop we see today. Although its release did shock readers and spark feminist critiques about patriarchal relationships and sexual themes, it still felt more like a dirty secret. Its eroticism was discussed privately, even sheepishly. It was a book club secret, not a TikTok performance. Now, even the most unassuming women are flocking to BookTok and demanding books with a maximum “spice rating”, without an ounce of shame. But how did this happen?
Somewhere between the isolation and scrolling, the lines between fantasy and reality began to blur. The algorithm on TikTok can be very dangerous for enforcing unhealthy habits on its users. When a woman watches or likes just one “spicy book” video, even just out of curiosity, TikTok interprets it as interest in similar content. Without the user’s knowledge, suddenly their ForYou page is filled with similar videos, “books with a max spice rating”, “extreme taboo book recommendations” or “Top five dark romance recs”. The more they see, the more they engage, the more the algo pushes darker more extreme content. Essentially, the algorithm learns: You like desire, here’s more. Louder. Darker
October 31, 2025
QotD: The Zoomers as human Giant Pandas
Not just “breed in captivity”, mind you. Breed in general. Apparently panda lovin’ is like nerds on date night — the conditions must be perfect, it’s incredibly awkward, it takes massive effort, and even the tiniest misstep can throw the whole thing off forever. Your average MGTOW gets more poony than your average panda … all of which prompted in me the very uncharitable thought: Are you sure God doesn’t want it to be dead?
Which — black pill incoming — is pretty much what I feel about the human race right now.
Take a gander at this. The “aki no kure” guy has a lot of issues, no doubt, but when he’s on he’s a very useful read. If for no other reason than that he keeps up with the Kids These Days, and I just can’t, y’all, I just can’t. And here’s why:
Well, if Zoomers never leave the home (something they all make self-deprecating jokes about), then you *are* watching their daily lives as they sit in a chair in front of a computer set-up. Their whole lives are online and virtual, not IRL. Their daily activities are not going to the store and running into neighbors who they share funny stories with, it’s scrolling their timeline and engaging with its content. So you are watching them go through all sorts of daily activities — checking their subreddit, uploading pictures to Instagram, clapping back to haters on Twitter, reacting to other streamers’ video clips, sending text messages, and so on and so forth. And the other characters in their online lives are also entirely online — other accounts who they interact with, although every once in awhile they make an IRL guest appearance.
That right there is my definition of hell. Seriously, if that’s “life” in the Worker’s Paradise, I’m punching out. But: That’s what so many people, not just “Zoomers”, seem to want. See “Every single thing about the Holocough, 2020-present”. If that’s what Western Civ has come to, then let me complete my transformation into the goofiest hippie on campus circa 1992: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
Severian, “Giant Pandas”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-28.
October 7, 2025
An unexpected Gen Z “influencer” – Shakespeare
Ted Gioia describes the plight of a young man who had to move home after college and falls into a state of depression thanks to his hopeless situation and his dysfunctional home and social life. His name is Hamlet:
This was long thought to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare that had any claim to have been painted from life, until another possible life portrait, the Cobbe portrait, was revealed in 2009. The portrait is known as the “Chandos portrait” after a previous owner, James Brydges, 1st Duke of Chandos. It was the first portrait to be acquired by the National Portrait Gallery in 1856. The artist may be by a painter called John Taylor who was an important member of the Painter-Stainers’ Company.
National Portrait Gallery image via Wikimedia Commons.
It’s almost uncanny how relevant it feels right now.
So if I were directing Hamlet in the current moment, I’d give the title character an iPhone and game console. I’d have the characters onstage share photos on Instagram — and put up a big screen so the audience could see them posted in real time.
Hamlet could add pithy captions to his social media images. What a piece of work is a man! or maybe The lady doth protest too much!
Yes, Hamlet is many things, but one of them is, perhaps, a failed influencer.
Along the way, we may have answered the classic question about this play. For generations, critics have wondered why Hamlet wastes so much time, and can’t be bothered to take action.
Maybe he’s just too busy gaming and scrolling.
Okay, it sounds ridiculous. But is it really? Shakespeare possessed tremendous insight into the human condition — perhaps more than any author in history. So maybe he really did grasp the dominant personality types of our own time.
The Prince of Denmark still walks in our midst. And maybe — just maybe — careful attention to this play might help us, in some small degree, to heal the Hamlets all around us. Their number is legion.
Of course, the larger reality is that Shakespeare has proven himself relevant to every time and place. We can see that easily be examining how other generations viewed this same play.
Hamlet‘s original audience, four hundred years ago, clearly enjoyed the spectacle of violence and adultery. Nine key characters die during the course of the play — most of them murdered. Audiences loved these kinds of dramas back then, and Shakespeare always knew how to please the crowd.
But more sophisticated viewers, circa 1600, would have seen Hamlet as a political commentary — a reflection of all the tensions and rivalries of Elizabethan England. Nobody knew better than Shakespeare that monarchy is a dangerous game, and he always looked for opportunities to refer to current events in roundabout ways.
But two hundred years later, the Romanticists were in ascendancy, and they saw Hamlet as a very different kind of play. They ditched the politics, and embraced the Prince of Denmark for his pathos and personality. They tapped into the intense emotional currents of Shakespeare’s heroes — and the plays seemed perfectly suited for this kind of interpretation.
It’s no exaggeration to say that Hamlet continued to change for each new generation. He always feels timely and relevant.
A hundred years ago, critics began grappling with psychology and the unconscious — and Hamlet was a perfect character for these kinds of interests. In his 1900 book The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud focused on Hamlet as a case study in repression.
And who could disagree?
But fifty years later, Hamlet changed again. It now was the perfect play for those who had survived World War II. Jan Kott insists, in his book Shakespeare, Our Contemporary, that these old plays were more relevant than ever during the Cold War — just as timely as Beckett or Sartre or Brecht or Ionesco.
September 29, 2025
Screen addiction – “No drug cartel makes as much money as the screen-and-app companies”
Ted Gioia on the eight things about screen addiction that David Foster Wallace tried to warn us about before he took his own life in 2008:
Those same youngsters are now showing up on college campuses, and we can begin to gauge the societal impact of a screen-driven life. It ain’t pretty.
So this is a good time to revisit what Wallace tried to warn us about thirty years ago. He was ahead of his time in the worst possible way, experiencing firsthand all the debilitating symptoms that now plague millions.
That’s why his writings feel so eerily contemporary. They read like commentaries on what’s happening right now.
Of course, Wallace knew very little about the Internet — he deliberately avoided it. He also refused to own a television. He understood how susceptible he was to screen addiction, and took drastic steps to reduce his exposure to all screens.
But he wrote about it — most tellingly in his huge novel Infinite Jest. The title refers to a film that is so addictive that people who watch it can’t stop. They literally watch it to death. It’s an infinite diversion, much like the endless scrolls on today’s social media apps.
He returned to the topic in his final book The Pale King, and also discussed it in interviews and essays. I’ve read through all of these including more than thirty interviews with the author. These allow me to put together a point-by-point summary of what Wallace tried to tell us.
We ignore his warnings at great risk.
(1) Screen technology will cause a crisis of loneliness, especially among young people.
In almost every interview, Wallace eventually talks about loneliness. It was a looming crisis, he insisted. But he was one of the first to link this to the ways we divert ourselves via screens. […](2) This will lead to widespread depression.
Wallace also knew this firsthand. He suffered intensely from depression. His inability to find a suitable treatment led to his suicide in 2008. […](3) This will also happen at a larger scale. Society will grow more fragmented and disconnected.
As each person falls into an isolated relationship with a screen, larger communities begin to fray. Wallace anticipated a “new vision of the U.S.A. as an atomized mass of watchers and appearers”. […](4) Screen technology promises to liberate us, but the reality is that it controls us for the benefit of others.
The most dangerous part of the screen entertainment is the illusion that it serves us. But the reality is that we actually serve tech platforms and their advertisers. […](5) The people who control the technology work to hide their purposes and goals.
“They’re trying to lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption,” Wallace told Larry McCaffery in 1993. “This is McLuhan right? ‘The medium is the message’ and all that? But notice that TV’s mediated message is never that the medium is the message.” […](6) Our survival will depend on our ability to remain independent of these forces.
If we abandon ourselves completely to the tech (as many now do), we become pawns in the corporate agenda to monetize us — at a tremendous cost in loneliness, depression, and social disconnection. […](7) We don’t have many tools, but kindness and compassion will be the starting point.
We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism — which have contributed to our self-debasement — with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds. […](8) Art can help us heal.
He wrote his big books with the hope that they would help us find a way back to a more caring and connected world — but connected via people, not screens. […]
September 12, 2025
Canada’s temporary foreign worker programs
At Acceptable Views, Alexander Brown calls for the end to the Canadian federal temporary immigration scam programs:
It’s not hyperbole to say that Canada has built an entire economy on exploiting cheap, foreign labour through TWFP, as well as the International Mobility Program (IMP). These are two slightly different programs that allow foreign nationals to work in Canada, with most going to Ontario. But contrary to its name, there is nothing “temporary” about the TFWP. Its original purpose was to remedy proven labour shortages while Canadians were hired and trained to eventually do the jobs in question. Meanwhile, the IMP allows international students to work—with or without a proven labour shortage—while they’re studying in Canada.
Between 2019 and 2023, the TFWP increased by 88 percent and the IMP increased 126 percent. They account for close to 1.58 million work permit holders, equal to roughly 7 percent of Canada’s labour force.
Taken together, the results of the TFWP and IMP are deplorable. The TFWP allows foreign nationals to be recruited abroad in vast numbers, brought to Canada, housed in degrading conditions, paid the minimum wage, forced to work long hours, pressured into not joining a union, and required to work for only one employer. Yes, the IMP is more flexible, but it’s more pernicious because it does not even pretend to address labour shortages.
Both schemes are also of course bad for Canadians themselves. The problem is especially grievous for young Canadians trying to get started in the labour market. Canada lost 40,800 jobs this past July, the unemployment rate is now 6.9 percent, and youth unemployment (those between 15 and 24 years old) is now 14.6 percent.
Both the TFWP and IMP are used as business models. Hiring foreign nationals at minimum wage keeps prices low and profits high—most notoriously in the hospitality and trucking sectors, but no industry seems untouched now.
Addicted to cheap foreign labour
The use of the TFWP in the healthcare sector, for example, has grown by an appalling 1,700 percent since 2000. That dramatic rise has no doubt been abetted by the absence of uniform standards and credential recognition among Canadian provinces. If medical personnel could move easily from one province to another, shortages could be filled by Canadians. But historically this has not been possible, and so medical institutions have had to turn to the TFWP. Ontario’s recent determination to solve this problem by speeding up recognition of 50 “in-demand” professions from other provinces is a step in the right direction, and hopefully not too little too late.
Meanwhile, the IMP is a vehicle for outright fraud, ranging from fake acceptance letters from bogus “colleges” to elaborate human-trafficking schemes. Not long ago, nearly 50,000 holders of foreign student visas were working and attempting to settle here, rather than studying at any Canadian university or college. Most were migrants from India, and some were trying to cross the border illegally into the United States. The RCMP is now working with Indian law-enforcement to investigate alleged links between dozens of “colleges” in Canada and two “entities” in India allegedly facilitating passage into the U.S. When we reflect that an astounding 4.9 million temporary visas are set to expire this year, we have reason to believe that this abuse, exploitation, and fraud are on a much larger scale that we understand.
The consequences for young Canadians
Both the TFWP and the IMP serve to keep wages artificially low and profits high, and to price Canadians out of the job market. It wouldn’t be wrong to view these programs as distortionary government subsidies or welfare for unproductive businesses. The effects disproportionately harm younger Canadians who are priced out of the labour market, given that temporary workers overwhelmingly earn less than the median wage. And yet, we’re constantly hectored about labour shortages, Canadians’ “unwillingness” to do certain jobs, and the need for foreign workers.
It shouldn’t take much intellectual effort to see that the use of foreign labour and the difficulties of employing younger Canadians are two sides of the same ugly coin. Foreign workers are more cooperative because they are bound to their employers like serfs. They face normally insurmountable barriers to joining unions and have no attachment to the community in which they’re expected to work. In comparison, the domestic population is generally better educated and rooted in the local community.
Young Canadians can afford to be discriminating and should rightly expect higher wages than foreign nationals. Employers should instead work harder to invest in and reward their domestic workforce. In any other era, this would have been obvious. But now there is little incentive for businesses to look beyond cheap, foreign labour.
To get an idea of the magnitude of our collective failure here, consider the following fact. A 2024 study by RBC Economics revealed that Canadian businesses are sitting on a stockpile of cash worth almost a third of our country’s GDP. In other words, Canadian companies have the means to invest in hiring and training Canadians, but simply refuse to do so. The results of this refusal are stagnant wages, structural unemployment, and a de-skilling of the domestic population.
September 9, 2025
Employers insist that there are lots of high-paying “entry level” jobs that Canadians won’t do
Canada’s insanely out-of-control temporary foreign worker program hinges on employers being honest about the jobs on offer being impossible to fill with Canadian citizens or legal immigrants. The huge numbers of these jobs — often listed at much higher than minimum wage in areas with very high unemployment — strongly implies that employers are systematically gaming the system:
A selection of jobs subject to active Labour Market Impact Assessments (LMIA), meaning that an employer has applied for a temporary foreign worker on the grounds that no Canadian is available to fill the position.
Photo by Government of Canada Job Bank.
If public sentiment is turning against the TFW system, it’s partially because of a greater awareness of the conditions under which employers are claiming they cannot find Canadians for their jobs.
Any hiring of a temporary foreign worker has to first be preceded by a “Labour Market Impact Assessment”. It’s effectively a job posting laying out the basic details of the position, and carrying the disclaimer “the employer could not find a Canadian worker for this job and applied for a Labour Market Impact Assessment (LMIA) to hire a temporary foreign worker”.
What’s made many of these LMIAs so controversial is that they often describe quite desirable jobs with minimal qualifications. There are also noticeably high numbers of them being submitted in cities with high unemployment.
Last year, a viral Reddit post featured a heat map of all the Toronto-area employers who had been approved for temporary foreign workers after claiming to find no Canadian applicants. More recently, the website JobWatchCanada has launched a searchable database of active LMIAs, complete with interactive maps and guides to which employers are the heaviest users.
What really bothers a lot of Canadians about the program is the high number of jobs posted with few or no qualifications at well-above market rates at the same time that young Canadians are finding it impossible to get hired no matter how many positions they apply for:
In June, a Calgary auto shop submitted an LMIA for a “motor vehicle mechanic helper”. The job is to essentially act as a “gofer”. The starting wage for the helper job is $36.50 per hour, the employer promises to cover relocation costs, and the “experience” category contains only the words “will train”.
A Langley, B.C., drywall contractor said it can’t find any Canadian drywall installers at $36.75 per hour. A vape shop in Lloydminster, Sask., has filed an LMIA to fill a $36.05 per hour shift supervisor job in which the educational requirement is a high school diploma.
In Woodbridge, Ont., a homeowner filed an LMIA for a $38 per hour housekeeper in which the only qualification is that the applicant has to speak English. “No degree, certificate or diploma”, is listed in the space for educational requirements, and the requirement for work experience is just “will train”.
The useful site fakejobs.ca currently shows three LMIA positions in my small town each paying at least $35 per hour that supposedly can’t be filled by local applicants. The jobs — two food service supervisors and a marketing co-ordinator — can’t possibly have such exotic required qualifications that nobody in the area can match, which is why I strongly suspect they’re fakes.
September 6, 2025
The federal government’s foreign worker program is set up for abuse
Dan Knight discusses Canada’s deliberately two-track job system, which severely disadvantages unemployed Canadians and favours temporary foreign workers instead:
Canada now has a two-track employment system. On one track, you’ve got over 1.6 million Canadians unemployed the official rate just jumped to 7.1%, the worst since 2016 outside the COVID crash. Youth joblessness? 14.5%. Alberta, supposedly an economic engine, bleeding at 8.4% unemployment. And those folks are drawing EI, funded by your tax dollars.
On the other track? The Temporary Foreign Worker pipeline. In 2024 alone, Ottawa issued over 162,000 TFW permits by October. And they’ve already budgeted another 82,000 entries in 2025. Think about that: while Canadians are struggling to find work, Ottawa is busy handing out golden tickets to foreign workers.
And let’s be honest about how this program actually works. It’s sold as a way to “fill labor shortages”. In practice, it often looks like a backdoor family reunification scheme. Business owner Abdul suddenly needs a “specialized” worker conveniently, his cousin in India just happens to fit the bill. So instead of waiting in line under the normal visa system, he comes in the side door through the TFW program. Legal? Sure. Exploitative? Absolutely. It undercuts the immigration rules that everyone else has to follow, and it keeps wages low for Canadians who should be first in line.
Here’s the part that makes you wonder if Ottawa is even trying: we’ve got two federal departments, Employment and Social Development Canada (who runs EI) and Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (who runs TFW permits). Wouldn’t a functioning government have these two agencies talk to each other? One department says, “Hey, we’ve got 1.6 million people sitting on EI“. The other says, “We’ve got 162,000 employers asking for TFWs“. The obvious solution? Connect the dots. Fill Canadian jobs with Canadian workers first.
But that would require coordination and “coordination” is a foreign concept in Ottawa. These are the same geniuses who can’t keep escalators running in Parliament Hill without a three-year feasibility study. You expect them to line up two departments, EI and Immigration … and have a five-minute conversation? Forget it. Imagine the radical idea: one arm of government saying, “Hey, we’ve got 1.6 million Canadians unemployed and drawing EI …” and the other saying, “Oh great, we’ve got 162,000 employers begging for workers. Maybe, just maybe, we could match those two groups up“. That’s not rocket science. That’s not even science. That’s called basic competence. And Ottawa can’t even spell it.
Using the fakejobs.ca website, I found three LMIA postings in my small town on the edge of the GTA … all paying well over median for pretty ordinary retail management jobs.
September 5, 2025
End the “temporary” foreign worker scam!
In the National Post, Chris Selley explains why Pierre Poilievre and the federal Conservatives should be hammering their demand to eliminate the much-abused temporary foreign worker program:
Youth unemployment stands at 14.6 per cent, according to Statistics Canada’s latest release. That’s the highest non-pandemic July figure since 2009 (15.9 per cent), at the nadir of the Great Recession. It makes nothing but good sense that Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre would position himself, as he did on Wednesday, foursquare athwart bringing in any more temporary foreign workers to fill positions that certain employers swear blind they cannot fill with younger Canadians at any conceivable price.
“Why is (the government) shutting our own youth out of jobs and replacing them with low-wage temporary foreign workers from poor countries who are ultimately being exploited?” Poilievre asked, rhetorically, on Wednesday. By rights it ought to be a solid populist pitch to Canadians, and no-brainer policy besides.
Companies who use TFWs will insist it’s not about finding “cheaper” help, but about finding any help. Tim Hortons defended itself Wednesday noting that less than five per cent of its national workforce were TFWs — which seems like a very high number, right? It’s not just me? — and those hires tended to be clustered “in small towns and communities where local candidates are not available”.
But an odd sort of small town or community, surely, that can’t live without a Timmy’s, but that doesn’t have enough people to work at it. And it’s an odd sort of remedial program, surely, to bring in employees not from other parts of Canada but rather from halfway around the world. Especially since groups like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) swear blind they’re not after an hourly wage discount, just anyone who’s willing and able to fill the position. It was certainly a very odd kind of fishing resort, it struck me, that claimed this summer it couldn’t find any Canadian employees and needed the TFW program instead.
Didn’t kids used to flock en masse cross-country to take outdoorsy jobs every summer? Have I not read 150 tiresome baby-boomer op-eds on the topic?
The special pleading sometimes beggars belief. And unemployed young Canadians aren’t free to you and me, after all — whoever’s fault it is, if anyone’s, they’re an anchor on the economy. A Deloitte study commissioned by the King’s Trust Canada, published in November, estimated “that under the right conditions, overall real GDP could increase by $18.5 billion by 2034 — more than Canada’s entire arts, entertainment and recreation sector — and (Canada could) add an additional 228,000 jobs in the process” if “youth engagement in the workforce” significantly increased.
