Quotulatiousness

February 7, 2026

Food hang-ups by generation

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

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”.

QotD: Stress in the post-lockdown world

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

I think emotion is something like the brain’s immune system. Just as you need to take your share of cuts and scrapes and bruises in order to get tough physically, you need to suffer the slings and arrows in your mind to get mentally tough. I might go so far as to relate it to the hysteria we see on social media — indeed, to hysteria in general. Consider the prevalence of bizarre allergies etc. that only hit once the helicopter parents started going all out to protect their kids from even the most minor cuts and scrapes. That can’t be a coincidence, any more than the huge uptick in behavioral problems like OCD can be.

Note that by “mentally tough” I don’t mean “carrying on like the Marlboro Man”, necessarily. Anonymous Conservative has a similar theory, that he relates to amygdala development, and maybe it’s that. I certainly saw a lot of incidents that look like what he calls “amygdala hijacks” back in my teaching days — kids would melt down and go catatonic, over the most inconsequential things. They’d never been faced with “failure” before, so not acing a silly little unit quiz hit them like the end of the world.

Just as I’d bet the cumulative retail price of all the shit we’ve sent to Ukraine that the triple-masked, lockdowns-forever covidiots are now getting floored by the kind of minor sniffles they’d have shrugged off three years ago — because they’ve maybe perma-fucked their immune systems, and that’s before all the side effects of the not-vaxx — so kids who have never been exposed to grief, frustration, and failure get floored by tiny bumps in the road. It’s total systemic shock, and I’m not joking — I’d bet long money that they actually break out in hives, get weird rashes, and so on, because the kind of stress chemicals that can turn a tough, healthy young soldier into a shell shock case will do all kinds of damage to someone totally unprepared.

I guess this is the tl;dr — I’m not a doctor, I don’t play one on tv, but I’m betting that those stress chemicals play an important role in ordinary cognition; they’re necessary for proper brain function. But they’re tough; your brain needs exercise in order to be able to handle those chemicals efficiently. If you don’t get it, your brain gets “fat”, in the same way your body gets fat if you load it up with too much of a good thing. And it’s recursive — those stress chemicals get stored in fat, too. So just as obesity is comorbid for just about everything — seriously, being fat is the absolute worst thing for your general health, bar none — so having a “fat brain” by not getting enough “exercise” totally destroys your ability to keep your head, to think clearly and logically.

Severian, “Quick Thoughts”, Founding Questions, 2022-04-28.

November 21, 2025

The “spat” between China and Japan is far more important than western media are reporting

Filed under: China, Japan, Media, Military, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Claire Berlinsky explains why we should be paying far more attention to what our media are treating as a minor diplomatic spat as Beijing reacts furiously to the new Japanese PM’s comments:

You need to see the Chinese media today to get a feel for this. Front pages of the relevant organs are devoted to frothing in fury at Japan. They’re rectifying bad thoughts like a house on fire.

Here’s why I’m worried by this. Both the Chinese- and Japanese-language press are treating this as a major diplomatic incident. (In English, it’s mostly being described as “a row” or “spat” — then back to Trump and Epstein.) Let me walk you through what it looks from Beijing and Tokyo, with help from ChatGPT on the translations.

The trigger was a comment in by the new Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi. She told a parliamentary committee that a Taiwan contingency involving the use of force might constitute a “sonritsu kiki jitai” (a “survival-threatening situation” — I think we’d use the phrase “existential threat”) for Japan under its 2015 security laws, and justify the exercise of collective self-defense, using Japan’s self-defense forces.

Beijing exploded. China summoned the Japanese ambassador in Beijing for a formal démarche, and it allowed the PRC consul general in Osaka, Xue Jian, to post a (now-deleted) tweet calling for her decapitation—”that dirty head that trespassed should be cut off, are you ready?” The Xue Jian post has, of course, become a media event of its own. Beijing issued a travel advisory urging Chinese citizens to avoid Japan, and told students to “carefully reconsider” study plans. It stepped up coast-guard activity near the Senkakus, and cancelled the Xi–Takaichi bilateral at the G20.

But this arid account doesn’t begin to convey the way the Chinese and Japanese media are talking about this. The Chinese coverage is nothing short of hysterical. To read the Party-line outlets, you’d think Takaichi had just ordered the immediate re-invasion of Manchuria. Her comment, they said, was an evidence of a “dangerous rightward turn” in Japanese politics. They’re calling it a “sky-collapsing opening“, accusing her of “reckless ranting” and tearing up the China-Japan relationship.

The headline in a widely circulated China Daily article:”If China and Japan go to war, Japan will be destroyed“. They found the inevitable panel of “peace-loving international friends” — including Okinawan peace activists and pro-PRC overseas Chinese — to denounce Takaichi as the reincarnation of “Japanese militarism”. The peace activists dutifully warned that the Japanese people would be “dragged into catastrophe” by their government. A CNR column accuses her of “brazen provocation”, and claims that “Taiwan compatriots are also outraged” at the prospect of Taiwan being turned into a battleground between China and a “militaristic” Japan.

The Party line: Taiwan is a “settled” internal issue; any talk of Japanese collective self-defense in the Strait is aggression and a “serious violation” of the post-1945 order. Takaichi represents “unrepentant militarism.” Chinese pieces quote her opponents at length to argue that “sober Japanese elites” are deploring her recklessness. Chinese-language coverage of the travel advisory is not treating it as a minor consular notice. They’re claiming it’s the first coercive step.

In Japan, this is front-page foreign policy news, not a minor gaffe. Mainichi ran an editorial saying, more or less, that Takaichi’s words were legally consistent with the 2015 security laws, but prime ministers should be more discrete about hypothetical military contingencies and show more prudence. Opposition figures are saying she “went too far” and threw the relationship into “a very grave state”. They called it “frivolous” for a commander-in-chief to talk so specifically about use-of-force scenarios.

On the other hand, there’s clearly a domestic constituency that sees this as long overdue. Some in her party see any hint of retraction as “weakness toward China”, and they’re praising her for drawing a firm line on Taiwan. (The coverage about whether to expel Xue Jian is divided: His post was a death threat, obviously, but the Foreign Ministry seems reluctant to escalate this further.)

TV explainers are reminding viewers that the 2015 security legislation already contemplated a Taiwan contingency — what’s new is that the prime minister has now said this out loud. And a prime minister with an openly revisionist profile — that’s definitely new.

So there’s a lot of signaling going on. Beijing is signaling to its own public: “We’ll never again let Japanese militarism threaten China. The Party is the bulwark against a repeat of the 1930s.” To Tokyo: “We’ll punish any step toward military involvement in the Strait, first with economic coercion — then worse. We are not kidding about this.” To the wider region and Washington: “Japan is a destabilizer — this woman isn’t right in the head. If things go wrong in the Taiwan Strait, blame Tokyo. Remember Pearl Harbor.”

Update, 23 November: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

October 11, 2025

Toddler politics – don’t discuss, just shriek and cry and hit

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

At Woke Watch Canada, T.G. Kelemen illustrates the difficulty of trying to have a logical discussion with someone who refuses to engage intellectually as an adult and instead pours everything into the kind of emotional incontinence toddlers indulge in:

Source: Frances Widdowson, Facebook

It’s 2025.

Ask a question, get a tantrum. Make a point, get a protest.

And if you’re unlucky enough to be a calm, middle-aged academic like Frances Widdowson, who dared to speak plainly about a hoax everyone else is pretending is holy scripture, you don’t get debate.

You get a mob.

You get walls pounded. Doors blocked. Students shrieking like toddlers in a sugar crash. And who’s leading it?

Not war-hardened political activists. Not deep-thinking men of conscience.

No — it’s women. Grown women. Educated. Empowered. Enraged.

But not enlightened.

Welcome to the “regressive” West, where a large and growing portion of womanhood has been educated not to argue, but to erupt. To scream instead of speak. To censor instead of counter. To “feel”, and then enforce those feelings on everyone else.

What used to be a bad breakup is now a political position.

What used to be a mood swing is now being proposed as legislation.

Kamloops: Hysteria and Mass Psychosis

Let’s rewind. Canada. 2021. The Kamloops Indian Residential School story breaks. “Unmarked mass graves”, they say. “215 children”, they whisper. Every outlet repeats it. Politicians take a knee. Flags at half-mast. Even the Pope apologizes, having already formally done so twice, with countless statements of regret.

No bodies are found. No evidence. No excavation. One inconclusive radar scan and a theory.

And still: nothing.

But the narrative’s already set. When Frances Widdowson says, when she suggests maybe we need evidence before enshrining national guilt into law, she’s hounded. Not with counter-arguments. Not with facts.

With a toddler’s unhinged rage.

The women who confronted Widdowson aren’t showing the understandable, righteous anger mature people show in response to obvious injustice. No. What we have is full-grown girl-children who aren’t getting their way throwing their emotional and psychological scat in her face. Why? Simply for disagreeing with them.

In February 2023, invited to speak at the University of Lethbridge, Widdowson faced similar militant protest. The lecture was shut down. Protesters, mostly female, banged on walls, wailed through the halls, and demanded she be de-platformed. One group called her a “residential school denier”. Another called her “unsafe”. Some students cried in interviews, claiming trauma.

Trauma? From a talk you didn’t even attend?

That’s the playbook now. You don’t have to hear the words. Just say you were harmed. The more you feel, the more you’re right. Welcome to emotional absolutism where logic is violence and hysteria is virtue.

Can modern women handle the responsibility their suffrage and freedom demands? Judging their own behavior, the answer is a resounding no.

August 21, 2025

Most of us learned the “pull my finger” gag around grade 2, so why are so many of us still gullible about “scientists warn”?

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

At Watts Up With That?, Willis Eschenbach warns us yet again about believing headlines that say things like “Scientists Warn!”

Only a journalist truly committed to the ancient art of panic-clickbait could squeeze all the world’s existential dread into a headline like, “A Giant, Destructive Volcanic Eruption Is Set to Shake the World in the Coming Months, Bringing About the End of Mankind, Scientists Warn“. They’ve accompanied it with the following graphic, in case you weren’t adequately terrified.

The dead giveaway? “Scientists Warn“. Whenever you see those two words sandwiched together above the fold, you know you’re about to step into a wonderland of wild extrapolation, qualified maybes, and models run so far into the future they boomerang back with “robots take over” as the y-axis.

They start out as follows:

    A detailed geophysical study published in Nature in by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has refined our understanding of the Yellowstone supervolcano, uncovering new insights into its subsurface magma dynamics. Concurrently, climatological assessments by researchers such as Markus Stoffel (University of Geneva) have renewed discourse around the global systemic risks posed by a potential super-eruption — not only at Yellowstone, but at several other active volcanic complexes worldwide.

There’s an oddity here to start with. They’ve pushed together into one paragraph an actual scientific study of the Yellowstone caldera, and a paywalled puff piece by some random guy trying to frighten people about future eruptions. Unless you’re watching very closely to see which walnut the pea is under, it’s likely to be successful in making you think “Wow, a predicted super-eruption at Yellowstone, and the odds are high in other locations as well“.

Which does sound scary. So keep that thought in mind while we look at the first of the two parts they’ve pushed into one paragraph — the actual Yellowstone scientific study.

It’s the latest USGS study published in Nature under the very boring title “The progression of basaltic–rhyolitic melt storage at Yellowstone Caldera“. It gives us an upgraded, high-res CAT scan of Yellowstone’s magma plumbing. Instead of a giant pool of liquid doom sloshing under Wyoming, the new imaging shows a club sandwich: scattered blobs of partially molten rock, unevenly distributed, with most of the melt sitting in the northeast sector. The scale is impressive — 400–500 cubic kilometers of rhyolitic magma waiting for its cosmic moment. The heat just keeps bubbling up from below, slow and relentless, and with enough time, these melt zones might even hook up into a larger reservoir. But spoiler: no scientist anywhere is claiming that’s on tomorrow’s chore list.

Which brings us to the great, headline-grabbing “16% chance (one in six) of apocalypse by 2100” further down in the popular reports — a number that, if ever printed on a lottery ticket, would bankrupt Las Vegas. From the article:

    Still, climatologist Markus Stoffel and affiliated risk researchers estimate a ~16% probability of a VEI 7 or higher eruption occurring globally before the year 2100.

Except that particular prediction is not referred to by the scientists of the actual Yellowstone study, and has nothing to do with the Yellowstone study.

It comes from a some gentleman yclept Markus Stoffel. And he’s not even talking about Yellowstone. He’s talking about the entire planet. Nothing to do with Yellowstone.

And who is Markus when he’s at home? Is he a member of the team of authors of the Yellowstone study?

Nope.

Well, is he a vulcanologist?

Nope again.

He’s a climate professor at the University of Geneva. He’s published a lot, almost entirely regarding the effects of “climate change” on glaciers, mountain landslides, and mountain lakes.

August 10, 2025

“Believe all women” especially when they imagine (or hallucinate) offense

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

An excerpt from a work-in-progress by James Pew, from an incident during the heydey of #MeToo hysteria in the Toronto media community:

Steve Paikin is a Canadian journalist and author, and the host of TVOntario’s acclaimed flagship program, The Agenda With Steve Paikin. In his brush with #MeToo infamy, Paikin was accused of asking for, or possibly suggesting sex with a woman (who had previously appeared on his show), while at a business lunch with her at Grano restaurant in Toronto. The woman, a former Toronto Mayoral candidate who has a record of previous unsubstantiated claims against former Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, claims to have “politely” declined Paikin’s request, but said she was not invited back on his show because of her refusal to have sex with him.

The Paikin scandal was different from others which had unfolded in the hazardous year of 2018. This was a #MeToo story where the public appeared interested in both sides. Were chinks in the #MeToo armour beginning to appear? As Joe O’Conner wrote in the pages of the National Post, there was “an accusation and a vociferous denial”.1 But similar to other #MeToo narratives, the accuser was reaching deep into the past. According to Sarah Thomson, Paikin’s unwanted proposition for sex occurred in 2010.

Defending himself on Facebook, Paikin called the allegations a “complete fiction”. He wrote: “To be clear, I did not have sex, suggest, request, imply, or joke about having sex with you (Sarah Thomson)”.

Paikin had been a supporter of #MeToo. He wrote that “The #MeToo movement is too important to be undermined by spurious allegations”. Did he not realize that #MeToo means “believe all women”? Aren’t spurious allegations the type we are not supposed to believe? Wouldn’t that mean that women don’t (or can’t) make spurious allegations, but only the type of allegations that must be believed unquestioningly? Didn’t Paikin realize the contradiction in thinking that #MeToo was important, but in his case it was acceptable to cast off its intrinsic blanket credulity concerning the abuse claims of women? Paikin wrote:

    Sadly, in this day and age, too many people are going to believe the lie, especially when it comes to this subject. I am mortified that in many peoples’ eyes, I have lost the presumption of innocence that I’ve previously enjoyed. But I did not do these things. There is simply no truth to these allegations.2

Surprisingly, TVO did not remove Paikin, but launched an investigation instead. In a piece published in the Globe and Mail called “The Humiliation of Steve Paikin”, Margaret Wente wrote, “Mr. Paikin was lucky not to be suspended, people say. Some luck. His name is in the headlines, generally on the same page as all the other #MeToo stories that now dominate the news. I imagine that most people who know him don’t believe a word of it. Others will think, ‘These days you never know’.”3 A fair assessment. Wente later points out “Women (just like men) lie for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that they are unbalanced or unhinged.” However, it should be pointed out that in the #MeToo era and since, women do not get cancelled and humiliated because a man (or men) made unsubstantiated allegations against them.

The most suspicious part of the story is that Thomson’s assistant was present at the lunch meeting when Paikin supposedly propositioned her. Who would do such a thing as Paikin was accused in the presence of other people? Thomson did not provide the name of her assistant, and no investigative journalists were able to find out who she was. A critical detail appeared to go uncorroborated. However, the independent investigator tracked her down and conducted an interview. Her testimony was essential to clearing Paikin, although she chose to remain anonymous.

By April of 2018, the independent investigation into the allegations against Paikin was complete. It was found that while Thomson genuinely believed that Paikin had propositioned her “the evidence brought forward by Thomson and others (did) not support her account of what happened”.4 Rachel Turnpenney, the lawyer who conducted the investigation, referred to Thomson’s former assistant as “Witness J” – whose testimony contradicted Thomson’s account. Witness J told investigators that Paikin did not proposition Thomson or make any inappropriate sexual comments during the lunch.

But even if the allegations were true, was what Paikin alleged to have done really so bad? Aren’t men taught to ask for consent? Isn’t that what “propositioning” Thomson would have been? It could be argued, had the allegations turned out to be true, that Paikin demonstrated inappropriate, perhaps insensitive conduct. Clearly it would have been poor judgement, but should a man like Paikin be fired for a slip in judgement where no crime occurred? In hypothetical defense of a mis-step that never occurred, is it not possible to argue that a man might misread body language or other signs from a woman, and interpret them as mutual sexual interest? Getting this wrong can be embarrassing for both parties involved, but does it meet the severity of a cancellable offense? As Margret Wente wrote, “The truth is that not all men are guilty of what they’ve been accused of, and others aren’t that guilty of very much”.

But the social justice contingent is obsessed with power dynamics. According to them, any man who holds a professional position elevated over a woman he is attracted to, will automatically use his power to coerce the woman for sexual favours. In spite of the high-profile example in figures such as former American movie mogul Harvey Weinstein, it is insane to assume this is the default position of successful men, or men in places of authority or influence, just as it is insane to believe all women unconditionally.

Turnpenney felt that while Paikin’s testimony was consistent and credible, Thomson made “leaps without sufficient evidence to do so and she linked evidence together without factual foundation. Thomson’s evidence also veered toward being exaggerated and untrue.” Even though Paikin was ultimately exonerated, he was humiliated by the experience. In the initial statement he made defending himself, he characterized Thomson’s actions as defamatory. However, lucky for Thomson, Paikin chose not to sue. Thomson paid no penalty for all the trouble she caused, and most people felt Paikin was fortunate to have dodged a #MeToo bullet. As of this writing, Steve Paikin is still the host of The Agenda.

August 8, 2025

QotD: Accelerating back towards bicamerality

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Bicamerality [Wiki] is the human ground state; we always “want” to return to it; in the absence of the actual gods, the blinking smartphone screen is the next best thing.

This hypothesis seems to explain a few huge, otherwise perplexing facts of Leftist behavior. First: The further Left a person is, the more desperate xzhey are to put everyone else into one, and only one, category. Starting, of course, with themselves — I often joke that they’re trying to get their own bespoke “sexuality” so refined that no one else in the world could possibly share it. That would relieve them from the burden of ever actually having to be intimate — sexually or otherwise — with anyone. They can sit in the dark in their masks, eating bugs and watching Netflix, totally alone, forever.

I’m joking, but I’m not kidding. They really do seem to want that. And bicamerality explains it. I’ve also frequently likened them to the “zooanthrops” from The Book of the New Sun, from whence my stupid nom de blog comes. In that book, the literal end of the world was just around the corner — the sun, long expanded into a cool red giant, was about to go out, possibly within the current generation’s lifetime. Because of that, some people decided to “lay the burden of consciousness down” — they had themselves lobotomized and dumped in the woods.

Again, I’m joking, but I’m not kidding: Doesn’t that seem to be what so many on the Left really want? To be relieved of the burden of thought?

It applies even more so when they’re forced to interact with the world. We’ve all seen how desperate they are to shove people into one, and only one, box. Actually “desperate” is too mild a word — nothing frightens them more than the fact that a person can look one way, but actually be another way. It’s why they’re such slaves to fashion — literal fashion, not just fads trending on Twitter. Even before Der Hamsterkauf you could tell a Leftist just by looking at them, pretty much 100% of the time. Afterwards … well, we’ve all advanced a lot of explanations for why they’re so bizarrely insistent on the mask, especially for children: It’s their new purity ritual. They’re all chicks, and that’s the ultimate chick herd behavior. They’re just sadists. And so on.

But what if it’s as simple as The Mask relieves them, as nothing else can, from a significant source of interpersonal stress? “Interpersonal” again is too mild a word. They don’t want to “get to know you”. They don’t even want to talk to you. Hell, they don’t even want to share the same air with you, and do you see what I mean? Their “lives” would be so much better if we all had to wear colored patches on our jumpsuits, Dachau-style, telling everyone exactly what we are (exactly and only). Barring that, they’d love to reimpose some of the old medieval sumptuary laws — again, you will eat the bugs, because that’s what you deserve, peasant! But it’s not just that. It’s also a huge stress relief for them, to be able to tell a person’s social status at a glance.

Consider further (just briefly) how much a non-victim Victim fries their circuits. A gay conservative, say, or a pro-life woman, or a black “acting White” (your average liberal makes your average rapper look like a paragon of tolerance when it comes to that particular sin, though of course the liberal dresses it up in a thousand syllables of fugly jargon). Even though “the sex you’re attracted to” has no possible relationship to “your stance on the tax code”, the Left has made it so — first as a cynical political maneuver, but now because it minimizes their “interpersonal” (again, for lack of a better word) stress.

The tl;dr here is that your typical Leftist seems to spend all xzheir time in xzheir own head — always labeling, cataloging, frantically shoving everyone and everything into its own little box. But they do this, I think, because they know subconsciously that once they’ve got everything shoved into one and only box, forever, they’ll never have to think again … and that’s what they really want. A life of perfect unconscious bliss, where any “decision” that needs to get made comes from the blinking box.

Severian, “Striving Towards Bicamerality”, Founding Questions, 2022-03-20.

May 21, 2025

Canadian voters got fooled again

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

Roxanne Halverson on Canadian voter gullibility that Mark Carney and the Liberals took full advantage of in the election campaign:

Offer not applicable in Canada, apparently.

Liberals voters on your elbows up crusade — do you feel foolish, do you feel shamed? Are you ready to admit that you were duped? That you were played like the fiddle in the Devil went down to Georgia. How does it feel to know that you fell for Mark Carney’s fear mongering fabricated crisis that made him Prime Minister. Or is your Trump Derangement Syndrome so severe that you cannot recognize how the Liberals used it and used you to win an election they didn’t deserve to win. It wouldn’t be so bad if only you had to pay the price, but unlike the phony COVID mantra, of we’re all in this together, we really are all in this nightmare together for another possible four years of Liberal rule and corruption, and we’re all going to pay the price. That includes those of us who didn’t get fooled again, but most of us are the same ones who also didn’t get fooled in the last three elections that gave the country the Liberals under Justin Trudeau for a decade of destruction.

Did you see the interview Prime Minister Mark Carney did with Sky News Australia?

You really should watch it. Because in it he admits what those of us who didn’t vote for him knew, and what he, himself also knew. There was never any real threat from Trump to annex Canada. And when pushed on it by the Sky News interviewer Samantha Washington who asks if he inflated the threat as political tool to inflame voters who hated Donald Trump, Carney dances around it saying one minute it wasn’t a threat and the next minute, well he thought it was and so did the Canadian people and well maybe he did use it to kind of stir them up. Essentially he was trying to dodge the fact that he lied and knew all along that Trump wasn’t really going to make Canada the 51st state.

So, let’s begin with the Trump threat — the existential threat to the existence of our country! According to Carney, Trump “wanted to take Canada, he wanted to break it“. But when asked by Washington about that ‘existential threat’, Carney walked it back. In his words, “No the existence is not at stake, it was more of economic crisis, and had a heavy element of national security comes with it, the extent to which we will be cooperating with others, particularly with the United States“.

Now wait a minute, Carney told voters — the elbows uppers — that Canada’s existence was at stake. And now he’s adding in a national security element? I don’t recall Trump ever saying anything about invading Canada or threatening our national security, in fact it was quite the opposite, he said the United States would always protect Canada for any foreign threat. His interest in national security had to do with Canada’s porous border and the fentanyl trade that the Liberals chose to ignore. This response is a typical Carney word salad dancing around answering the question. Something he seems to have in common with his predecessor Justin Trudeau. But at its core, he says, no Canada’s existence was never in danger.

Yet, he repeatedly told crowds at rallies that the US wanted to break us, when it was really just an economic crisis — something Canada has faced many times before, often due to bad Liberal policies.

But that’s what Mark Carney, with the help of his cartel media echo chamber, drummed into the heads of the elbows up crowd during his leadership campaign and during his entire election campaign. Trump was going to come and take our country — “he wants our resources, he wants our land, and he wants our water“.

Now here’s another word salad, walking back the ‘threat’ from Trump. When Washington asked him why he met with Trump when he was still disrespecting Canada by talking about making it the 51st state, even during their meeting in the Oval Office, which he said it, as she described it, “right to your face“. According to Carney this was ‘different’, and then he delivers another word salad because apparently, “Trump was expressing a desire … he had shifted from an expectation to a desire for that to happen. He was also coming from a place where he recognized that that wasn’t going to happen. I made it clear to him in that context.”

May 11, 2025

The devastating toll of Trump’s reckless plan to dismiss transgendered members of the armed forces

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

Chris Bray called this to our attention back in November, as President-elect Donald Trump foolishly planned to purge the US military of transgendered troops, regardless of the vast impact it was predicted to have on military readiness:

We’ll practically have no military left! It would be like a whole infantry division suddenly just vanishing: 15,000-plus transgendered service members.

You’re going to see this number a lot in the weeks ahead. The New Republic, today: “Donald Trump’s plan to ban transgender people from the military would have a devastating effect: At least 15,000 members would be forced to leave.”

That number comes from a 2018 report by the now-defunct Palm Center, a pro-LGBT independent research institute in California, which reached this conclusion: “Transgender troops make up 0.7% (seven-tenths of one percent) of the military (Active Component and Selected Reserve)”. Their best guess about a total number: 14,707. The media is just rounding that number up to the next thousand.

And … Chris Bray follows up on his November post, documenting the huge, unimaginable scale of long-term damage to US military preparedness:

As the new Trump administration prepared to issue an order forbidding transgender people to serve in the armed forces, a bunch of profoundly stupid news stories issued panicked warnings that military readiness would DEVASTATED by a giant purge of at least 15,000 transgender servicemembers, the very core of our military strength. Warplanes grounded! Ships trapped in port as all their trans sailors were tossed out! Whole artillery batteries sitting silent! […]

The removal of trans servicemembers would inflict such a ghastly crisis on the armed forces that it would take twenty years to recover our military strength! Destruction and ruin and crisis and collapse!

[…]

Now the removal of transgender troops is actually underway, and guess what?

The number is “up to” 1,000. It’s in the hundreds.

So. When — quite recently! — dozens of panicked news stories reported as fact that 15,000-plus transgender servicemembers were about to be purged, the news was frankly and nakedly a complete invention. They made it up. They sold an invented panic. The “news” was entirely fake.

Remember that, and apply that lesson widely.

March 22, 2025

“Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol”

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

The accelerating downfall of the academic-political complex is the subject of John Carter’s most recent post at Postcards from Barsoom:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

Look. In any given case, for any given scientist working inside the university system, there are exactly two possibilities.

One: they embraced all of this with cheerful, delirious, evangelical enthusiasm. Religious devotees of the unholy cause of converting every institution to the One False Faith of Decay, Envy, and Incompetence, they have spent the last decade or more enforcing campus speech codes, demanding inclusive changes to hiring policies, watering down curricular requirements to improve retention of underrepresented (because underperforming) equity-seeking demographics, forcing their research collaborations to adopt codes of conduct, and mobbing any of their colleagues who voiced the mildest protest against any of this intellectual and organizational vandalism.

Two: they had reservations, but went along with it all anyhow because what were they to do? They needed jobs; they needed funding; and anyhow they didn’t go into STEM to fight culture wars. As the article says, “They’d prefer to just get back to the science,” and the easiest way to get back to the science was to just go along with whatever the crazies were demanding. Even if the crazies were demanding that they abandon any pretense of doing actual science.

The first group are enemies.

The second are cowards.

Both deserve everything they get.

And I am going to enjoy every moment of them getting it.

Look, I am going to vent here a bit, okay? Because the mewling in this article succeeded in getting under my skin.

Not long ago I was considered a promising early career scientist, with an excellent publication record for my field, a decent enough teaching record, and all the rest of it. After several years as a semi-nomadic postdoc – which had followed several years as a semi-nomadic graduate student – it was time to start looking for faculty positions. My bad luck: Fentanyl Floyd couldn’t breathe, and the networked hive consciousness of eggless harpies infesting the institutions was driven into paroxysms of preening performative para-empathy.

What this meant was two things. First, more or less every single university started demanding ‘diversity statements’ be included in faculty application packages, alongside the standard research statements, teaching statements, curriculum vitae, and publication list. The purpose of the diversity statement was to enable the zampolit in HR and the faculty hiring committee to evaluate the candidate’s level of understanding of critical race theory, gender theory, intersectionality, and all the rest of the cultural Marxist anti-knowledge; to identify candidates who had already made contributions to advancing diversity; and to identify candidates who had well-thought-out ten-point plans to help advance the department’s new core principle and overriding purpose, that being: diversity.

The second thing it meant was that hiring policies now implicitly – in the United States – and explictly (in Canada) mandated diversity as an overriding concern in hiring. As everyone knows, this means that if you’re a heterosexual cisgendered fucking white male, you are not getting hired.

In other words, I was now expected to write paeans praising the very ideology that had erected itself as an essentially impermeable barrier to my own employment, pledging to uphold this ideology myself and enforce it against others who look like me. “Humiliate yourself before us,” I was being told, “And we still won’t hire you, lol.”

Having some modicum of self-respect, I refused to go along with this. This meant that I simply could not apply for something like 90% of the available positions. And when I did apply to positions that didn’t require a diversity statement, and successfully got an interview, guess what? One of the first questions out of the mouth of one of hiring committee members would be “what will you do for diversity”, or “I see you didn’t mention diversity in your teaching statement …” See, even if it isn’t mandated by the administration, that doesn’t stop the imposter-syndrome-having activist ladyprofs from insinuating the diversity test on their own initiative. I once had a dean, a middle-aged Hispanic woman, tell me “women in science are very important to me” right at the beginning of the interview; I very nearly got that job, because everyone on the committee wanted me, but later – after they inexplicably ghosted – found out that she’d nixed it. They just didn’t hire anyone.

Right around the same time, of course, we were in the thick of the COVID-19 scamdemic. You remember, the one that was just the flu, bro, until it became the new Black Death that definitely did not come from a laboratory shut up you conspiracy theorist; which couldn’t be stopped by masks so don’t be silly until suddenly masks were the only thing that could save you; which led to us all being locked in our houses for a year because some idiot wrote a Medium article called “the dance of the hammer with your soft skull” or whatever which then went viral inside the hysterosphere; which motivated the accelerated development of a novel mRNA treatment that no one was going to get because you couldn’t trust the Evil Orange Man’s bad sloppy science until suddenly it was safe and effective and then overnight absolutely mandatory and anyone who refused to take it should be sent to a camp.

Yeah, remember that?

I guarantee you that every single credentialed scientist in that article was on board for all of it.

How do I know this?

Because they all were.

December 21, 2024

German democracy tottering on the brink (again) after latest attack by Elon Musk!

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

Germany is, yet again, convulsed with political unrest as politicians react strongly to foreign interference in German affairs by … dun-dun-duuuuuun … Elon Musk:

“German flag” by fdecomite is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

German democracy, which has existed undeterred since 1949 but is somehow always shaken to its foundations whenever anybody sings the wrong song or holds a televised debate with the wrong person, is once again on life support.

Christian Lindner, head of the market-liberal Free Democrats, did much to trigger the present catastrophe on 1 December, when said that the Free Republic should “dare more Milei and more Musk“. Because there is little distinction between praising Milei and Musk and demanding the return of National Socialism, there ensued a brief period of establishment hyperventilation.

Less than a week later, CDU chief and probable future German chancellor Friedrich Merz, did his part to denounce Lindner’s political wrongthink in a statement to Deutschlandfunk:

    So neither the Argentinian president nor, how shall I put it, the American entrepreneur Elon Musk – let’s put it plainly – are role models for German politics in my view. I don’t see where we can find similarities in German politics. What Christian Lindner meant will probably remain his secret.

The next day, Merz repeated the same denunciations, only more harshly, explaining to one of our extremely adult and far-sighted pantsuit talkshow hosts that “To be honest, I was completely appalled that Christian Lindner made that comparison“. Milei, Merz said, is “really trampling on the people there”.

Yesterday, all of this came to the notice of the (honestly rather tiresome) influencer Naomi Seibt, who posted a video statement to X rehearsing all of this old news to her largely American audience:

Elon Musk then brought down the hammer on the German democratic order, retweeting Seibt’s video and remarking that “Only the AfD can save Germany“.

Today a lot of very important and influential people got out of bed and took to their keyboards to denounce Musk’s election interference. His statement might be illegal, at any rate it is very likely fascist and certainly it is beyond the pale for an American to voice an opinion about German politics. Germans absolutely never, ever, utter the slightest word about American politics and certainly would never advance negative opinions about the American president in the middle of an election campaign. Our Foreign Office would never try to fact-check an American presidential debate! Our journalists would never depict President Donald Trump dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member or offering the Hitler salute or decapitating the Statue of Liberty! That’s just not done!

Like a great stream of green diarrhoea, the outrage is pouring fourth. Matthias Gebauer, who writes for Der Spiegel, observes that “Elon Musk … is openly promoting the AfD” and concludes that “Putin is not the only one who loves this party”. Erik Marquardt, head of the Green faction in the European Parliament, says that “The EU Commission and EU member states should no longer stand by and watch as billionaires misuse media and algorithms to influence elections and strengthen and normalise right-wing extremists”. This “is an attack on democracy”, and “has nothing to do with freedom of expression”. Dennis Radtke, CDU representative in the European Parliament, concludes that “Musk … is declaring war on democracy” and that “the man is a menace”. We are also under siege via “interference from Putin”; “the erosion of our democracy is being fuelled from both within and without”. Julian Röpcke, who writes for BILD, believes that “This is interference in the German election campaign by a tech billionaire who uses algorithms to decide what gets heard”. If Germany does not “respond with penalties, there will be no help for our eroding democracy”.

December 9, 2024

“… liberalism has become a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses”

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

Freddie deBoer patiently explains why outrageous over-the-top emoting isn’t a useful or productive way to argue for your political views:

I’ve written several times about the phenomenon of adolescent women on TikTok pretending to have dissociative identity disorder for social media clout and attention. I’ve focused on it not because I necessarily think the issue itself is particularly important, but rather because it’s so emblematic of what liberalism has become: a political ideology that is utterly incapable of policing itself for its own worst excesses, a collection of well-intentioned people who mistake the responsibility to fight discrimination for a broad, vague duty to shield certain groups of people from any criticism.

For the book I’m currently writing, I’m talking to a ton of people in the broad world of mental health — psychiatrists, therapists, researchers, policymakers, journalists, fellow patients — and I’ve brought up the TikTok DID community over and over again. Remarkably, not one person defends the phenomenon as a true expression of genuine illness, not even a few disability rights activists I’ve talked to, who usually have an ethic of never questioning a disability claim. Countless normie liberals I’ve chatter with, over the past several years, have also accepted my basic position that these young women don’t actually have dissociative identity disorder. But, also, almost no one is willing to affirmatively say anything about this dynamic themselves. Indeed, The Verge reported that many experts have decided that the costs of speaking out about that whole culture just aren’t worth it. And so you have a set of behaviors that no one defends but that no one feels comfortable criticizing, thanks to the pathologies of 21st century liberalism and online rage. That’s what I’m really here to talk to you about today.

I don’t, of course, want to be too harsh on the individual young women who have turned a debilitating and controversial disorder into an opportunity to put on vertical video fashion shows; they’re just kids and kids do stupid shit, sometimes even genuinely offensive shit. What you usually have, or used to have, is the ability to tell someone doing stupid shit to knock it off. Not oppress anyone, not humiliate anyone, not permanently shun anyone. But just to say, “You don’t have dissociative identity disorder, pretending you do is unhealthy and offensive towards people who actually have serious mental illnesses, knock it off“. I find that very easy to say. But clearly a lot of people don’t, and the reasons are fairly obvious. First, despite whatever vibe shift we may be living through, it remains the case that in progressive discursive spaces, saying the wrong thing is still very fraught and can result in accusations of bigotry that are personally and professionally damaging. Second, liberals have trained themselves to avoid any position at all that might be construed as siding with the enemy, as a matter of in-group identification. Take it from me: “A lot of people in Gen Z appear to be lacking in emotional resilience, in a way that’s unhealthy for them” has become, in the internet-soaked mind, “Gen Z is a bunch of snowflakes”, and so a ton of liberals recoil at that idea. Can’t appear to make a concession to the enemy! I’m afraid we do not have a vocabulary for critical solidarity anymore.

All of this is bad, and you only have to look at how incredibly harsh certain slices of “queer fandom” can be to see what I’m talking about.

November 27, 2024

Trump’s plan to dismiss transgender troops will apparently “gut” the US military

Filed under: Government, Health, Military, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As if the US military services hadn’t suffered enough from their own government, it’s now being widely asserted in the media that Trump’s declared plan to get rid of all current transgender service members will be a desperately hard blow to an already over-stressed military structure:

The news media is calmly warning that Donald Trump is planning to ban transgender servicemembers from the American military, which will absolutely gut the armed forces.

Sample claim, from Newsweek, quoting the leader of an LGBT advocacy nonprofit:

    Abruptly discharging 15,000-plus service members, especially given that the military’s recruiting targets fell short by 41,000 recruits last year, adds administrative burdens to war fighting units.

    There would be a significant financial cost, as well as a loss of experience and leadership that will take possibly 20 years and billions of dollars to replace.

We’ll practically have no military left! It would be like a whole infantry division suddenly just vanishing: 15,000-plus transgendered service members.

You’re going to see this number a lot in the weeks ahead. The New Republic, today: “Donald Trump’s plan to ban transgender people from the military would have a devastating effect: At least 15,000 members would be forced to leave.”

That number comes from a 2018 report by the now-defunct Palm Center, a pro-LGBT independent research institute in California, which reached this conclusion: “Transgender troops make up 0.7% (seven-tenths of one percent) of the military (Active Component and Selected Reserve)”. Their best guess about a total number: 14,707. The media is just rounding that number up to the next thousand.

The Palm Center … extrapolated a lot, let’s say, in good part by multiplying their guess about a percentage, derived from a grossly inadequate survey of a select number of active duty troops, times the total number of servicemembers. Page 4:

    Assuming that the distribution of transgender men and women is roughly equivalent in the Active and Selected Reserve Components, it is possible to derive an estimate of the number of transgender troops in the Selected Reserve as follows. The number of transgender women is .0066 x 652,623 = 4,307 and the number of transgender men is .0091 x 156,080 = 1,420. The total number of transgender members of the Selected Reserve is 4,307 + 1,420 = 5,727. And, the total number of transgender troops is 8,980 (active) + 5,727 (reserve) = 14,707.

Assuming the distribution, it is possible to derive an estimate. That’s the basis of the 15,000 number that you’ll see in news stories. Remember that language.

Similarly, a 2016 RAND study offered these findings (among others), and note the remarkable thing that happens between the first and second paragraph:

    It is difficult to estimate the number of transgender personnel in the military due to current policies and a lack of empirical data. Applying a range of prevalence estimates, combining data from multiple surveys, and adjusting for the male/female distribution in the military provided a midrange estimate of around 2,450 transgender personnel in the active component (out of a total number of approximately 1.3 million active-component service members) and 1,510 in the Selected Reserve.

    Only a subset will seek gender transition–related treatment. Estimates derived from survey data and private health insurance claims data indicate that, each year, between 29 and 129 service members in the active component will seek transition-related care that could disrupt their ability to deploy.

So studies indicate that there are 3,960 transgendered servicemembers, and also that there are 14,707 transgendered servicemembers, and “between 29 and 129 service members in the active component” who will actively seek gender transition services in a typical year.

So it’s definitely somewhere between 29 and 15,000.

October 9, 2024

QotD: The hijacking of the Canadian identity

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

The anniversary of that first May 27, 2021 unmarked-graves announcement came and went a few weeks ago, with barely a peep from prominent figures in the Canadian progressive firmament. And the same Trudeau who’d recently served up lurid sermons about our status as a blood-stained genocide state has now switched into proto-campaign mode, gushing manically about the Liberal horn of plenty set to deluge this nation with riches. According to the latest Liberal agitprop, in fact, patriotic Trudeauvian boosterism isn’t merely permissible — why, it’s obligatory. So light up those Canada Day backyard barbecues. Canuck Yom Kippur is finally over.

But before we dismiss this three-year interregnum as a dystopian fever dream, it’s worth asking how our collective Canadian identity could be hijacked — even temporarily — in such a radicalized manner. And the truth is that it isn’t just progressive ideologues who bear responsibility; but also their counterparts on all parts of the political spectrum, few of whom exhibited any inclination to offer pushback while these falsehoods took root in the media. Even many writers at this newspaper, generally held to be a right-leaning outlet, greeted the unmarked-graves claims by heaping shame on their country.

In every other comparably advanced society, there exists a natural tension between conservative nationalists who reverentially sentimentalize their history, and the progressive critics who reflexively denounce it. And it is from out of that tension that something approaching the historical truth emerges. Or, at least something close enough to the historical truth that it provides a stable and coherent basis upon which a society can confidently pin its collectively embraced national identity.

What we learned in 2021 is that this necessary tension doesn’t exist in Canada, because traditionalists can no longer describe their nation’s history in a way that gives voice to their emotionally felt patriotism without attracting claims of racism and neocolonialism. As a result, our marketplace of ideas lacks the checks and balances required to inure us against — oh, gee, I don’t know, let’s take a crazy example — apocalyptic medieval fables in which legions of Indigenous children are thrown into furnaces and shallow graves by cackling nuns and diabolical priests.

So yes, shame on Trudeau for lowering the Canadian flag on federal buildings for half a year to honour victims entombed in non-existent mass graves. But shame on the rest of us for staring at our shoes while this blood libel was being signal-boosted. And now that Trudeau seems on his way out — and, with him, the maudlin, tear-soaked, bent-knee political shtick that accompanied this descent into hysteria — we might turn our attention toward developing a national self-identity sufficiently robust that it doesn’t fall to pieces the next time someone claims to have found genocide’s residue under an old tetherball court.

Jonathan Kay, “Don’t let politicians misinform you. Learn about Canada’s true history for yourself”, National Post, 2024-07-01.

September 28, 2024

QotD: Doom! Doom! And more Doom!

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

Monty used to use this image at Ace of Spades H.Q., and I certainly think it’s appropriate to include it here.

Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?

In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.

So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.

But you see, I am so very tired of all the genuflecting and bowing to the doom du jour, as well as the market distortions, worsening of problems and outright damage to people and deaths or grievous arm (not to mention not being born) while trying to avoid largely imaginary dangers and issues.

What do I mean? Well, how many people had no children because they were pounded about the face and head with the impending doom of “overpopulation”? How many of those people, now nearing their last decades, bitterly regret the childlessness? Worse, how many people in how many third world countries were encouraged to be sterilized due to both the “coming doom” of overpopulation, and the horrific mid-century misapprehension that children caused poverty? How many women in China were forcibly aborted? How many toddlers confined to dying rooms? How many women in India were strongly persuaded to abort female children, or expose unwanted ones newly born? (Yes, I know it might have happened anyway, but the westerners were encouraging people to have fewer and fewer children, which only fed that nonsense.)

Other dooms? So many dooms, so little time to catalogue them. When I was little, I knew I’d probably starve or die of thirst due to overpopulation. What was worse, it was overpopulation far away, since most people near me couldn’t afford more than one or two kids, if they ever hoped to live a middle class life. (Spoiler: it was taxes, requiring work from both parents that caused poverty, not an excess of children.) I also expected to freeze in the coming ice age, caused by all the pollution, from people making things in factories, having cars, and using electrical light. Also, as it happened, in the seventies we were told fossil fuels were running out, so while we were freezing, we wouldn’t even be able to take a flight somewhere warmer, to escape the advancing glaciers. But that was all right, because we were all going to die in a nuclear exchange that would happen any day now, in a conflagration between the USSR and the US, whom we were assured were absolutely equal in morality, and both just wanted supremacy for … no reason really.

Of course, the things urged to stop all of this ranged from criminal — the aforementioned forced abortions and killing of children — to the merely dangerous — urging the nuclear disarmament of the West (mostly propaganda from the Soviet Union, mind) which we were assured would bring about peace and not world communism (which in the way of such things would shortly after be followed by world famine and world depopulation.)

By the time the Gaia cultists flipped from a fear of freezing to a fear of boiling, I only half went along, and only until I realized once more it made no sense whatsoever.

Sarah Hoyt, “Doom Doom Doom!”, According to Hoyt, 2024-06-26.

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