Quotulatiousness

January 15, 2026

“The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation”

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

At Always the Horizon, Copernican discusses the progressive mindset and its complete inability to cope with barbarians (literal and figurative):

In light of recent events, it is important to recognize that a rules-based system can exist only as long as there exists someone to enforce the rules. For a long time, White Westerners have been brow-beaten with an imagined consensus morality where those who are historically hierarchically powerful are also inherently evil. “Those misogynist White rednecks”, etc. That was, according to the rules, the acceptable position to hold.

The rules are enforced by consuming den-mothers who have built around themselves fortresses of bureaucracy and perceived cultural alignment. You have to follow the rules, or you’re a bad person.

Historically, Christianity managed these ideals through Europe and the Holy Roman Empire, where they were considered a moral standard. Enforced through the social order of the time. Having previously attacked Christianity in the late 20th century, the modern Left has proceeded to annihilate that moral grounding. Replacing it with a vague sense of moral relativism and platitudes:

“We think these behaviors and rules are good because everyone agrees, and everyone agrees because we’ve made them as these behaviors and rules are good.”

The tautology of liberal thought. Moral relativism with appeal-to-majority and appeal-to-consensus stacked atop one another. Recent events have demonstrated that even classically liberal political positions cannot be maintained without a strong underlying social and moral framework. Lacking that, liberalism (again, as recently demonstrated) defaults to meaningless tautologies and a feminine urge to “not harm” people who in many circumstances damn well need to be harmed.

The result of this social decay is, of course, a default to basics.

The Barbarians Veto

    Your village or apartment block has been put to flame. Your son is dead, your wife and daughter are being hauled off to god knows where, and a giant of a man with a bloody axe stands before you. Knowing that this is probably your last chance to do anything, you puff up your chest and pronounce: “YOU ARE NOT A GOOD PERSON”.

    The man looks at you like you’re retarded, and then messily separates your prefrontal cortex and cerebellum. The Barbarian doesn’t give a shit what you consider a “good person” to be. He couldn’t care less. What he knows is that the only thing separating the two of you is that he is strong and you are weak. The reason why it is he standing with a bloodied axe and not you, is simply a matter of prowess and luck. If you were strong, you would be doing the same thing to him.

    Do unto others before they do unto you. Do it fast. Do it first. And do it effectively.

The political Left has built its entire philosophical core on minimizing harm and playing the role of victim. The Left is thus completely blind to the barbarians veto. The Left believes there’s some inherent nobility in having your home burnt to the ground and your family murdered. That’s why they pursue with suicidal ideation the opportunity to die for their psychotic religion. Better yet, they zealously pursue the opportunity to get other people to die for their psychotic religion. Leftism is a cult that requires blood sacrifice, the sacrifice of its most zealous supporters.

They fear the strength of the Barbarian, uncompromising, not willing to sacrifice himself, but entirely willing to sacrifice hordes of his unthinking enemies. He does not see himself as a “good person”, but the barbarian sees himself as a “surviving person”. He survives by killing his enemies. His bloodline survives by impregnating his women, whether they want it or not. The Left has no answer to the barbarian, but to submit to his will, and then demand you do so as well.

That’s why they love murderers, cartels, and foreigners, but demand that their own men and sons die bloodily in self-sacrifice to their own cultural enemies. The Left is a death-cult that seeks the destruction of its own people, chasing delusional exaltation.

Update, 16 January: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

January 7, 2026

Red Star: The Dawn of Soviet Sci-Fi

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Russia — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 15 Aug 2025

Soviet science fiction is a long winding road and it starts with Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star. Let’s start down that road.

00:00 Intro
03:15 Introducing Martian Socialism
06:35 Tektology
10:03 Crafting Communism
15:08 Mars Has Problems
19:06 Old Man of the Mountain
20:32 The Engineer Menni
(more…)

December 28, 2025

QotD: The Middle Ages saw rebellions but no revolutions

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At some point in this space, we discussed the difference between a rebellion and a revolution. Drawing on Michael Walzer’s key work The Revolution of the Saints, I argued that a true revolution requires ideology, as it’s an attempt to fundamentally change society’s structure.

Therefore there were no revolutions in the Middle Ages or the Ancient World, only rebellions — even a nasty series of civil wars like The Wars of the Roses were merely bloody attempts to replace one set of rulers with another, without comment on the underlying structure. A medieval usurpation couldn’t help but raise questions about “political theory” in the broadest sense — how can God’s anointed monarch be overthrown? — but medieval usurpers understood this: They always presented the new boss as the true, legitimate king by blood. I forget how e.g. Henry IV did it — Wiki’s not clear — but he did, shoehorning himself into the royal succession somehow.

Combine that with Henry’s obvious competence, Richard II’s manifest in-competence, and Henry’s brilliant manipulation of the rituals of kingship, and that was good enough; his strong pimp hand took care of the rest. Henry IV was a legitimate king because he acted like a legitimate king.

A revolution, by contrast, aims to change fundamental social relations. That’s why medieval peasant rebellions always failed. Wat Tyler had as many, and as legitimate, gripes against Richard II as Henry Bolingbroke did, but unlike Henry’s, Tyler’s gripes couldn’t really be addressed by a change of leadership — they were structural. 200 years later, and the rebels were now revolutionaries, willing to give structural change a go.

Severian, “¡Viva la Revolución!”, Founding Questions, 2025-02-27.

December 5, 2025

Censorship and “cancel culture” are symptoms of a cultural sickness

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

A guest post at Woke Watch Canada by C.C. Harvey lays out the evidence that our culture — and most of the western world — is struggling with a spiritual sickness and that arbitrary cancellations and formal censorship of dissenting views are symptoms of that ailment:

When a society begins to suppress intellectual and spiritual searching and dreaming — by punishing speech, regulating thought, discouraging questions, denying the existence of spiritual reality — it is not only a political decline, but a sign of deep unwellness.

Where populations lose respect for liberty of conscience, inquiry, and discourse, society becomes nasty and brutish. Truth-seeking, spiritual health, and peace are inexorably linked. Across formerly open, stable, safe western societies, censorship and repression have been rising as safety, cohesion, and quality of civic life decline.

We must resist cancel culture and speech codes for the following reasons:

  1. Suppressing Truth-Seeking Violates a Fundamental Human Impulse

    2. Across religious and knowledge traditions, truth-seeking is expressed as a moral duty. When authorities obstruct honest questioning, they interfere with something built into the human spirit.

  2. Fear Becomes the Organizing Principle

    3. Where dissent is forbidden, fear takes the place of reason. Fear diminishes moral clarity, discourages integrity, and pushes people toward silence rather than responsibility. A fearful society cannot become a virtuous society.

  3. Conscience Is Treated as a Threat Instead of a Gift

    4. In every major tradition — religious or philosophical — conscience is seen as a source of moral insight. When institutions punish people for following their conscience, they reveal a belief that the individual soul has no intrinsic worth, only value as a compliant unit.

  4. Dialogue Is Replaced With Dogma

    5. Healthy societies debate, persuade, and refine ideas through open conversation. Unhealthy ones replace discussion with mandatory narratives and speech codes. Leaders who fear questions fear the truth those questions might uncover. Dogma can be secular or religious. It is ideologically rigid, generally not truth-seeking.

  5. Collective Identity Replaces Individual Worth

    6. Authoritarian systems elevate the group above the person: the party, the ideology, the movement, the “community”. When people are valued only as members of a group rather than as individuals, conscience becomes irrelevant and conformity becomes the main civic expectation. This is materialism, and denial of spiritual reality.

  6. Repentance and Correction Become Impossible

    7. A culture that silences criticism cannot correct its own errors. Without the freedom to point out problems, there can be no course correction, no growth, and no accountability. Mistakes multiply because they are protected by enforced silence.

  7. The Vulnerable Are Punished First

    8. Censorship and ideological enforcement nearly always fall hardest on those with the least power — dissidents, researchers, students, teachers, and ordinary citizens. When moral pressure is used to intimidate rather than uplift, society reveals a deeply inverted understanding of justice.

  8. Curiosity and Creativity Decline

    9. When questions become dangerous, people stop asking. When our human body, spirit, and intellect work in tandem without fear, we are capable of incredible scientific, artistic, and intellectual discovery and achievement. A society that punishes inquiry slowly starves itself of spirit in the form of innovation and insight.

  9. Tribal Narratives Replace Shared Reality

    10. When open debate disappears, competing ideological factions manufacture their own “truths”. Without a shared standard for evidence or meaning, society fragments into groups that can no longer communicate across boundaries. This is a recipe for distrust, polarization, and alienation … in dogmatically religious societies: a recipe for holy war and violent oppression.

  10. A Culture That Punishes Dissent Is Living by Avoidance, Not Truth

    11. Suppressing dissent is always a sign that an ideology cannot withstand scrutiny. Societies that silence critics pretend confidence but are insecure. The greater the fear of open conversation, diverse thought, and public debate, the greater the underlying instability and spiritual decay.

  11. Each Soul’s Journey Is Sacred — And Faith Must Be Chosen, Not Forced

    12. Across traditions, genuine belief is understood as something voluntary:

    • Love and faith cannot be coerced.
    • Insight cannot be mandated.
    • Moral understanding cannot be imposed through fear.

A society that tries to control belief tries to destroy the inner space where thought, reflection, and integrity develop. Coerced belief is not belief; it is compliance. An individual’s free relationship with God is sacred. No human rightfully owns another’s body, mind, or soul.

Update, 7 December: 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 17, 2025

QotD: Wickermanism

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

“What do you call your ideology”

I’m a Wickermanist.

Conservative? Classical Liberal? Libertarian? Anarcho-Capitalist?

All of these got immediately diluted by moderates and blackmail curious boomer compromisers.

Conservative … “but leave the blackmailed pedos alone.”

Classical Liberal … “but let us just have totalitarian surveillance.”

Libertarian … “but what do you mean ‘taxation is theft’ and IRS agents should die in work camps … We’re Socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”

Anarcho-Capitalists … “But like private violence to enforce natural law doesn’t mean YOU should shoot criminals and state enforcers.”

I’m a Wickermanist.

I’m naming my ideology after the execution method I want to see practiced annually either by governing entities, private paramilitaries, or radicalized individuals.

Pedos. Corrupt politicians. Traitors to foreign governments. Would-be tyrants. I want them burnt alive in giant Wickermen every year.

Not one time during the revolution, not once everyone agrees, but irrespective of any institutional authority save the match lighter. That ongoingly every year to appease the sun or whatever.

If it’s formalized and good governance is actually achieved and they didn’t find suitably corrupt politicians one year, they can draw lots or an extra old one can volunteer and be remembered as a hero. but I want wickermen burning.

I’m tired of having to constantly rebrand as somehow every ideology becomes “Pay your taxes, don’t ask about Epstein, don’t enact private vengeance no matter how precedented or implied by the ideology or demanded by the founders and the entire western cannon.”

Even “Nazi” has become something Elon, Trump and Grok are …

“MechaHitler” is a popular product by a Fortune 500 and somehow IT got lame within 24 hours.

I’m naming my ideology after an execution method so you moderate losers can’t poison it.

“But muh mass appeal!?”

Democracy is old women and the hormonal equivalent, who can’t commit violence, betraying their kinsmen who can so that the enemies of their nation will tell them their opinions matter.

No change that has ever mattered has been spearheaded by the Median voter, and no great person in history has ever paid them any note.

The only tragedy is that there is neither the time nor the lumber to burn the average voter.

Kulak, Substack Notes, 2025-07-12.

September 14, 2025

QotD: Intersectionality theory

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

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

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

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

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

August 20, 2025

QotD: Most “mass movements” really do need that “vanguard” to start moving

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

Let us stipulate that Socialism’s appeal to the proles is “I offer you a good time”. Orwell takes this as read, but it also follows from the premises laid out earlier in the essay. Orwell equates “ease, security and avoidance of pain” with “comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense”. The Commies explicitly promise the proles those things; he could’ve lifted that phrase straight from the Webbs’ most doe-eyed propaganda leaflet.

And yet, as Orwell knows better than anyone, the proles can’t do it on their own. You really do need a vanguard of the proletariat. As Orwell himself notes, Hitler was backed by the big industrialists, and if you really want to needle the eggheads in your life, point out how quickly and thoroughly the German professors knuckled under […] They couldn’t wait to lick his jackboots, any more than his British and American colleagues could wait to kiss Stalin’s ass. They called themselves a “workers’ party”, but in the early days [German fascists] were almost exclusively found among the dueling fraternities – and professors! — of the German university system.

In other words, maybe the proles don’t need nothin’ but a good time, like the old song says, but though the proles are the “mass” of “mass movement”, the “movement” part gets started considerably higher up the social ladder … that is, with guys like Orwell. Guys who know, deep in their bones, that there’s more to life than hygiene, short working hours, birth control, etc. Because he’s one of the great prose stylists, it’s not as apparent in Orwell, but in lesser hands than his you can smell the contempt dripping off every sentence an egghead writes about the proles …

It’s not that the proles want hygiene, birth control, etc. It’s what they need. What they deserve, when you come right down to it, because that’s what you do with livestock — keep ’em clean and well fed, and of course control their breeding. You could take the most purple passage of “animal rights” eco-lunacy and set it side by side with the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization, and see no difference at all. Sure, every aspect of our lives is managed for us by Our Betters, but at least we’re free range!

Severian, “Bonfire of the Vanities II”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-29.

July 15, 2025

“A Cloak of Anarchy”: Gradations of Statelessness

Filed under: Books, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Feral Historian
Published 21 Feb 2025

“A Cloak of Anarchy”, written by Larry Niven and published in 1972, is a simple story. But it offers us an entry to examine the basic ideas of Anarchism without diving head-first into the political theorizing of the big anarchist philosophers. This one is a 3-minute look at a simple short story wrapped in a 20-minute attempt to cast aside the most basic misunderstandings of what anarchism is.

I don’t consider myself to be an anarchist, but by most standards I’m damn close. Take what I say here in that light.

00:00 Intro
01:00 Cops-Eyes
03:09 Absence of Rulers
06:37 AnComs and AnCaps
10:07 Is Anarchism Leftist?
11:30 Practical Considerations
16:17 Anarchism and Environmentalism
19:00 Closing Ramble

July 3, 2025

QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, Russia, Space, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Devon Eriksen recently pointed out that today’s Marxists are hostile to space flight and off-world colonization. But in Cold War times, Marxists who ran countries were aggressively futuristic about space, treating it as the empire of their dreams.

What caused this turnaround?

To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.

But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.

That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.

And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?

We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.

Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.

Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.

That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.

The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.

Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.

June 7, 2025

QotD: The decline and fall of the Soviet experiment

Filed under: Economics, History, Quotations, Russia — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the most remarkable and perhaps most relevant aspects of communism is how it regressed from an idealistic and inspirational world view to nothing more than a deeply flawed engineering project. Communism started out as a set of beliefs about liberating mankind to reach its full potential. It was not about material goods or political power, but human accomplishment. By the time the Soviet empire collapsed at the end of the 20th century, it was about making enough toilet paper and boots.

The early communists, including Marx, looked at work and the pursuit of material goods as a burden on mankind. Capitalism turned men into slaves to their own desires for wealth and property. This crude desire for material goods made them easy to exploit by the capital class. The point of overthrowing the capitalist system and replacing it with communism was to free man from that burden. The resulting material prosperity of communism would allow mankind to reach its full creative potential.

The Soviet empire that emerged from the Second World War was noticeably short on talk about mankind reaching its full potential. The practical necessity of feeding, housing and clothing its people consumed the regime. The great dream of a post-scarcity world of mankind united in brotherhood had given way to figuring out how to produce enough necessities to prevent rebellion. The last half of the 20th century was communism trying to keep pace with capitalism in the production of consumer goods.

The Z Man, “Human Progress”, The Z Blog, 2020-04-27.

March 20, 2025

QotD: “[T]here is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it”

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

I had an acquaintance in college who was a dedicated leftist and who also believed in substantial group differences in average IQ.1 One day she was fretting at me that advances in data science, genetics, etc. were going to make this unpalatable reality impossible to ignore, with detrimental consequences for both racial justice and social harmony. Facts and logic were going to explode the noble lie, oh no!

Obviously I had to physically restrain myself from laughing at her. Assuming for the sake of argument that such differences exist and are easily measurable, only somebody totally autistic would think that mere scientific evidence for them would cause them to be acknowledged.2 Just look at all the ridiculous “sky is green” type beliefs that society already successfully forces everybody to internalize. You mentioned biological and cognitive differences between men and women, which are far more obvious and noticeable than those between populations, but which we successfully force everybody to pretend do not exist. And that’s far from the silliest thing everybody pretends to believe, in our society or in others.

Put it another way: there is no such thing as a secular society, every country has a state religion, and you won’t get very far opposing it. Were there people in Tenochtitlan who secretly believed that blood pouring down the sides of the great step pyramid day and night wasn’t actually necessary to placate the gods? Yeah probably, but if any of them had tried to point that out, they would have been laughed at (and sacrificed). Were there people in the Soviet Union who privately doubted whether dialectical materialism was the true engine of history? Probably, yes, but everybody besides Leonid Kantorovich was smart enough not to mention it.

What are the religious precepts on which our society is founded? There are a few, but a belief in absolute racial equality is clearly one of them, and that view is now enshrined in the “real” constitution (civil rights caselaw and its downstream effects on corporate HR). Anything which contradicts that precept is just a total nonstarter. If a few nerds somewhere found irrefutable evidence of important differences between groups, they would quietly hide it, and if some among them were like Reich too autistic or principled to do that, they would be ignored, shouted down, or persecuted. Possibly this would even be a good thing — every society needs its orthodoxies, and sometimes those who corrupt the youth need to drink the hemlock.

We’ve gotten far afield, though. As an inveterate shape-rotator, my favorite part of the book was Reich’s description of the statistical and mathematical techniques that can be used to determine when population bottlenecks occurred, how recently two populations shared a common ancestor, and when various mixing events occurred.

Jane Psmith and John Psmith, “JOINT REVIEW: Who We Are and How We Got Here, by David Reich”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-29.

    1. Not to get all “Dems are the real racists”, but anecdotally this view does seem slightly more prevalent among my left-wing friends than my right-wing friends, though that seems to currently be changing.

    2. Somebody totally autistic or somebody who had already drunk the kool-aid on literally every other ridiculous official viewpoint imposed by our society. In her case it was probably the latter. As I said she was a leftist, and women in general are much less likely to be autistic but much more likely to value social conformity.

March 15, 2025

Eliminating “environmental justice” from the EPA

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

J.D. Tuccille suggests that you not take the New York Times coverage too literally as they wail about the Trump administration’s plans for the Environmental Protection Agency:

If you were to believe reporting from The New York Times — which is an increasingly unwise idea — the Trump administration is diverting the attention of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from poor and minority communities that face “disproportionately high levels of pollution”. But if you scratch the surface even a bit, you find that what’s really being eliminated are “environmental justice” offices that infuse identitarian ideology into EPA enforcement efforts. Americans should welcome efforts to strip racial obsessions from the armory of regulators who already wield too much power.

Competing Takes on “Environmental Justice”

“The Trump administration intends to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, according to a memo from Lee Zeldin, the agency administrator,” Lisa Friedman wrote for the Times. She added that the memo directed the reorganization and elimination of “offices of environmental justice at all 10 E.P.A. regional offices as well as the one in Washington”.

Contrast that with a press release from the EPA, which states “that EPA will immediately revise National Enforcement and Compliance Initiatives to ensure that enforcement does not discriminate based on race and socioeconomic status (as it has under environmental justice initiatives) or shut down energy production and that it focuses on the most pressing health and safety issues”.

Whatever you think of the Trump administration in general, EPA Administrator Zeldin is on the right side of this debate. As I wrote in 2022 when the Biden administration formally introduced “environmental justice” concerns to the EPA, the term refers to “a decades-old school of thought that seeks to graft identitarian politics onto environmental concerns. That allows practitioners to wield civil rights law in addition to traditional environmental laws against perceived malefactors. It also makes it possible to slam offenders as ‘bigots’ if their actions affect one community more than another.”

There’s no need to read between the lines to figure out what is meant by “environmental justice” — its advocates are quite clear about their meaning. In 2021, the Northeastern University School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs published A User’s Guide to Environmental Justice: Theory, Policy, & Practice by Ken Kimmell, Alaina Boyle, Yutong Si, and Marisa Sotolongo.

The Ideology’s History of Racial Obsessions

“The demand for ‘environmental justice’ (EJ) has gained substantial traction in the last few years, as well it should,” the authors wrote in their introduction. “A key pillar in EJ will be widespread, community-designed and community-supported investment in neighborhoods that have been economically and environmentally burdened by a long history of racist government and industry decisions.”

“The environmental justice movement has evolved in parallel with and in response to traditional environmentalism to focus on the unequal distribution of environmental harms among different people and communities,” the authors add in summarizing the history of the movement. “Research revealing the whiteness of the environmental community elevated concerns that social justice and racial justice were not prioritized in mainstream environmentalism.”

“Applying the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color, or national origin … frontline communities and others began to use the term ‘environmental racism’ to focus on the unequal (social and spatial) distribution of environmental burdens,” they continue.

March 6, 2025

Passionate belief in historical untruths

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

As mentioned in earlier posts, one of the most toxic exports from Australia to the rest of the Anglosphere has been the academic indulgence in believing that “settler colonialism” explains everything about the history of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and anywhere else the British diaspora touched:

Welby in Zanzibar

Throughout the English-speaking world elites are falling over themselves to believe the very worst of their own countries.

In Britain, the Church of England has committed itself to spend an initial £100 million on slavery-reparations in response to the discovery that its endowment had “links” with African enslavement. “The immense wealth accrued by the Church … has always been interwoven with the history of African chattel enslavement”, a document explains. “African chattel enslavement was central to the growth of the British economy of the 18th and 19th centuries and the nation’s wealth thereafter”. And this has “continuing toxic consequences”.

Yet almost none of this is true. The evidence shows that the Church’s endowment fund was hardly involved in the evil of slave-trading at all. Most economic historians reckon the contribution of slave-trading and slavery to Britain’s economic development as somewhere between marginal and modest. And between abolition in 1834 and the present, multiple causes have intervened to diminish slavery’s effects.

Consonant with his church’s policy, the (then) Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby preached a sermon in Christ Church Cathedral, Zanzibar last year, in which he criticised Christian missionaries for treating Africans as inferior and confessed that “we [British] must repent and look at what we did in Zanzibar”.

Really? What the British did in Zanzibar during the second half of the 19th century was to force the Sultan to end the slave-trade. Indeed, the cathedral in which the archbishop was preaching was built over the former slave-market. And here’s what the pioneering missionary David Livingstone wrote about black Africans in 1871: “I have no prejudice against [the Africans’] colour; indeed, anyone who lives long among them forgets they are black and feels that they are just fellow men…. If a comparison were instituted, … I should like to take my place among [them], on the principle of preferring the company of my betters”.

[…]

St. John Baptiste church was one of many local churches to go up in flames during Justin Trudeau’s performative national guilt trip over “unmarked mass graves” at former Residential Schools across Canada.

Which bring us to Canada. The May 2021 claim by a Kamloops Indian band to have discovered the remains of 215 “missing children” of an Indian Residential School was quickly sexed up by the media into a story ‘mass graves’, with all its connotation of murderous atrocity. The Toronto Globe and Mail published an article under the title, “The discovery of a mass gravesite at a former residential school in Kamloops is just the tip of the iceberg”, in which a professor of law at UBC wrote: “It is horrific … a too-common unearthing of the legacy, and enduring reality, of colonialism in Canada”. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau ordered Canadian flags to be flown at half-mast on all federal buildings to honour the murdered children. Because the Kamloops school had been run by Roman Catholics, some zealous citizens took to burning and vandalising churches, 112 of them to date. The dreadful tale was eagerly broadcast worldwide by Al Jazeera.

Yet, four years later, not a single set of remains of a murdered Indian child in an unmarked grave has been found anywhere in Canada. Judging by the evidence collected by Chris Champion and Tom Flanagan in their best-selling 2023 book, Grave Error: How the Media Misled us (and the Truth about the Residential Schools), it looks increasingly probable that the whole, incendiary story is a myth.

So, prime ministers, archbishops, academics, editors, and public broadcasters are all in the business of exaggerating the colonial sins of their own countries against noble (not-so-very) savages — from London to Sydney to Toronto. Why?

February 18, 2025

Canadian academic life now entails mandatory indoctrination about “settler colonialism”

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

In Quillette, Jon Kay talks about the pervasive indoctrination of Canadian university students in that invasive intellectual weed from Australia, “settler colonialism”:

Last month, I received a tip from a nursing student at University of Alberta who’d been required to take a course called Indigenous Health in Canada. It’s a “worthwhile subject”, my correspondent (correctly) noted, “but it won’t surprise you to learn [that the course consists of] four months of self-flagellation led by a white woman. One of our assignments, worth 30%, is a land acknowledgement, and instructions include to ‘commit to concrete actions to disrupt settler colonialism’ … This feels like a religious ritual to me.”

Canadian universities are now full of courses like this — which are supposed to teach students about Indigenous issues, but instead consist of little more than ideologically programmed call-and-response sessions. As I wrote on social media, this University of Alberta course offers a particularly appalling specimen of the genre, especially in regard to the instructor’s use of repetitive academic jargon, and the explicit blurring of boundaries between legitimate academic instruction and cultish struggle session.

Students are instructed, for instance, to “commit to concrete actions that disrupt the perpetuation of settler colonialism and articulate pathways that embrace decolonial futures”, and are asked to probe their consciences for actions that “perpetuate settler colonial futurity”. In the land-acknowledgement exercise, students pledge to engage in the act of “reclaiming history” through “nurturing … relationships within the living realities of Indigenous sovereignties”.

My source had no idea what any of this nonsense meant. It seems unlikely the professor knew either. And University of Alberta is not an outlier: For years now, whole legions of Canadian university students across the country have been required to robotically mumble similarly fatuous platitudes as a condition of graduation. It’s effectively become Canada’s national liturgy.

After my tweet went viral, I was contacted by a US-based publication called The College Fix, which covers post-secondary education from a (typically) conservative perspective. Like many observers from outside Canada, reporter Samantha Swenson couldn’t understand why Canadian students were being subjected to this kind of indoctrination session. “I hope you can answer,” she wrote: “Why do schools make mandatory classes like these?”

I sent Swenson a long 13-paragraph answer — which, at the time, felt like a waste of my time: I assumed the reporter would pluck a sentence or two from my lengthy ramble, and the rest of my words would fall down a memory hole.

So when her article did come out — under the title, Mandatory ‘Indigenous Health’ class for U. Alberta nursing students teaches ‘systemic racism’ — I was pleased to see that I’d been quoted at length. I especially appreciated the fact that Swenson had kept in my point that educating Canadians (especially students in the medical field) about Indigenous issues is important work; and that courses such as Indigenous Health in Canada would provide value if they actually served up useful facts and information, instead of self-parodic faculty-lounge gibberish about “decolonized futurities”.

February 13, 2025

Australia’s most toxic export (so far) – “Settler-colonial ideology”

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

Helen Dale explains how a lunatic fringe Australian notion has grown to be a major ideology in most of the Anglosphere and even as far afield as Israel:

Despite a great efflorescence of literature and especially film about the mafia, it’s a truism to say that it isn’t very good for Sicily. It also hasn’t been very good when exported to other countries, either, spreading violence, corruption, and lawlessness. Well, Australia is to settler-colonial ideology as Sicily is to mafia, and our poisonous gift to the world is, like Sicily’s mafia, one of those things about us that really isn’t for export.

“Settler-colonial ideology” seems a mouthful, but if I describe bits of it to you, you’ll recognise it. Heard Australia Day called “Invasion Day”? You’ve encountered settler-colonial ideology. Been called racist for voting NO in the 2023 Voice Referendum? You’ve encountered settler-colonial ideology. Noticed Aboriginal academics get hired with obviously inadequate qualifications? You’ve encountered settler-colonial ideology.

Many Australians — including me — first encountered settler-colonial ideology at university. Back then, it was a theoretical and foreign concern, and largely in languages other than English (mainly French and Arabic). I do remember one of the “post-colonial literatures” (note the s, the s is important) obsessives trying to convince me that Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country wasn’t a “legitimate book” because its author was white, but back then, this was still a niche view.

Like other Australians confronted with daft academic ideas, I blamed the US or France and ignored my own country’s contribution. Australians aren’t noted for their theoretical acumen, which made this easier. Critical race theory and affirmative action are all-American, while US academics have often executed hostile takeovers of French nonsense like postmodernism or queer theory early on in proceedings. It gets easy to blame America and France.

Easy, but unfair.

I realised how mistaken I’d been when, in October last year, I returned to Australia for a stint. While I was there, I read Adam Kirsch’s On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence and Justice. I did so in part because October 2024 was the one-year anniversary of two important events. Both concerned what Kirsch calls “the ideology of settler-colonialism”.

Kirsch documents a process whereby the French- and Arabic-speaking theorists of post WWII decolonial conflicts — particularly Frantz Fanon — had their ideas grafted (very, very awkwardly) onto dissimilar Australian history and conditions by Australian intellectuals. These were then exported throughout the English-speaking world, likely through academic conferences. This explains how cringeworthy Australian nonsense like land acknowledgments managed to spread first to Canada and then the US in a reversal of the usual process whereby America sneezes and so gives its Hat a cold.

Fanon was a Marxist and a Freudian. His writing seethes with angry bloodthirstiness and pseudoscientific psychodrama, but he was responding to a vicious war of independence and incipient civil conflict. Kirsch notices a pattern where Australian scholars borrow bits of Fanon to give a sanguinary rhetorical garnish to their writing. “Fanon’s praise of violence is a large part of his appeal for Western intellectuals,” he notes. “Many of the sentiments expressed in The Wretched of the Earth, coming from a European or American writer, would immediately be identified as fascistic.”

Australia’s intervention changed the ideology, in some ways making it more destructive. Fanon is shorn of most of his Marxism, for example (can’t have that, won’t be able to recruit rich minorities to the boss class otherwise). The key Australian shift coalesces around an oft-quoted aphorism from historian Patrick Wolfe: “invasion is a structure, not an event”. That is, colonisation trauma is constantly renewed because “settler” is a heritable identity. “Every inhabitant of a settler colonial society who is not descended from the original indigenous population,” Kirsch points out, “is, and always will be, a settler”.

“Settler” here includes people transported to both America and Australia in chains — slaves and convicts. Once it became acceptable to construe one group of people conveyed against their will across thousands of miles of ocean in dreadful conditions as providentially lucky (and genocidal) settlers, it became possible to extend the reasoning to other, similar groups. After all, the only difference between a convict and a slave is the presence or absence of a criminal conviction.

Kirsch’s attempt to explain how Australia was analogised with Fanon’s Algeria and then how Israel was analogised with Wolfe’s Australia is heroic, in part because the casuistry he seeks to unpick is so convoluted. Filtering Fanon through Australian academia and its claim that “settler” is a heritable identity did have the effect of making Jewish Israelis look more like non-indigenous Australians or Americans, however, especially when attention was focussed on European Jewish immigrants to Israel.

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