Caldwell’s account is indispensable — especially for liberals — in understanding how those resentments grew until they finally exploded under Barack Obama. The Tea Party was the first real movement of this sort; the collapse of immigration reform proposals under George W. Bush and then under Obama revealed how powerful these feelings were; Trump managed to wrap them all up into a populist fervor that was distributed geographically enough to give him a win in the Electoral College. Liberals, increasingly ensconced in their own economic and social bubble, were shocked.
Caldwell’s book is far too nuanced and expansive to cover here. But he identifies key moments and key changes. The 1965 Immigration Act was the beginning of a huge experiment in human history. It was complemented by open bipartisan-elite toleration of mass undocumented immigration across the southern border. And civil rights became something other than ending racial discrimination by the state: It became a regime of ending discrimination by individuals in economic and social life; then it begot affirmative action, in which race played an explicit part in an individual’s chance of getting into college; and it culminated in the social-justice agenda, which would meaningfully do away with the American concept of individual rights and see it replaced by a concept of racial group rights. Caldwell sees the last 50 years as a battle between two rival constitutions: one dedicated to freedom, the other to equality of outcomes, or “equity.” And I think he is right to see the former as worth fighting for.
But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.
So much of Caldwell’s polemical history is fresh air; but the bleakness of its reactionary mood reveals how tribal Caldwell has become. He can barely eke out a few sentences reluctantly acknowledging some of the good things that the last 50 years have brought — in the lives of many women, in the prospects for African-Americans, in the dignity of homosexuals. He never acknowledges that Obama actually stood a chance of healing racial divides, if the GOP hadn’t demonized him from the start. And as an old friend of Chris’s, I know him to be a more gracious and humane person than this polemic might, at times, suggest. But that such a good man has gotten caught up in polarization and tribalism and such a brilliant man sees no hope for a peaceful resolution merely reveals how deep our problem is.
I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus”. This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.
Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?
Andrew Sullivan, “America Needs A Miracle”, New York, 2020-01-31.
November 21, 2024
November 18, 2024
“The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve ‘always been multicultural'”
Fortissax thinks that the rest of Canada has lessons to be learned from Quebec:
If you are a Canadian born at any point in the Post-WWII era, you have been subjected to varying degrees of liberal “Cultural Mosaic” propaganda. This narrative exploits the historic presence of three British Isles ethnic groups (which had already been intermixing for millennia) and the predominantly Norman French settlers to justify the unprecedented mass migration of people from the Third World into Canada. This process only began in earnest in the 1990s before accelerating rapidly in the 2010s.
The Great Canadian Lie is the claim that we’ve “always been multicultural”, as though the extremely small and inconsequential presence of “Black Loyalists” or the historically hostile Indigenous groups (making up only 1% of the population at Canada’s founding in 1867) played any serious role in shaping the Canadian nation, its identity, institutions, or culture. Inspired by Dr. Ricardo Duchesne’s book Canada in Decay: Mass Immigration, Diversity, and the Ethnocide of Euro-Canadians (2017), which chronicled the emergence of two ethnic groups uniquely born of the New World, I delved into the 2021 Census data collected by the Canadian government to explore the ethnic breakdown of White Canadians in greater detail
The evidence is clear. In 2021, just four years ago, 72.7% of the entire Canadian population was not just White, but Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian, representing an overwhelming presence compared to visible minorities and other White ethnic groups, such as the small populations of Germans and Ukrainians.
In the space last night, I highlighted this historical fact and explained to the audience the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Canadian and its significance. While we all recognize that the Québécois are a homogeneous group descended predominantly from Norman French settlers — such as the Filles du Roi and Samuel de Champlain’s 1608 expedition, which established Quebec City with a single-minded purpose — the Anglo-Canadian story also deserves similar recognition for its role in shaping Canada’s identity.
But what is less known is that Anglo-Canadians are just as ethnically homogeneous as the Québécois, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia. Anglo-Canadian identity emerged from Loyalist Americans in the 1750s, beginning with the New England Planters in Nova Scotia — “continentals” with a culture distinct from both England and the emergent Americans. After the American Revolutionary War, they marched north with indomitable purpose, like Aeneas and the Trojans, to rebuild their Dominion. Author Carl Berger, in his influential work The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, demonstrates that the descendants of Loyalists were the one ethnic group that nurtured “an indigenous British Canadian feeling.” The following passage from Berger’s work is worth citing:
The centennial arrival of the loyalists in Ontario coincided with the fiftieth anniversary of the incorporation of the City of Toronto and, during a week filled with various exhibitions, July 3 was set aside as “Loyalist Day”. On the morning of that day the platform erected at the Horticultural Pavilion was crowded with civic and ecclesiastical dignitaries and on one wall hung the old flag presented in 1813 to the York Militia by the ladies of the county. Between stirring orations on the significance of the loyalist legacy, injunctions to remain faithful to their principles, and tirades against the ancient foe, patriotic anthems were sung and nationalist poetry recited. “Rule Britannia” and “If England to Herself Be True” were rendered “in splendid style” and evoked “great enthusiasm”. “A Loyalist Song”, “Loyalist Days”, and “The Maple Leaf Forever”, were all beautifully sung
The 60,000 Loyalist Americans, who arrived in two significant waves, were soon bolstered by mass settlement from the British Isles. However, British settlers assimilated into the Loyalist American culture rather than imposing a British identity on the new Canadians. The first major wave of British settlers after the Loyalists primarily consisted of the Irish. Before Confederation in 1867, approximately 850,000 Irish immigrants settled in Canada. Between 1790 and 1815, an estimated 6,000 to 10,000 settlers, mainly from the Scottish Highlands and Ireland, also made their way to Canada.
Another large-scale migration occurred between 1815 and 1867, bringing approximately 1 million settlers from Britain to Canada, specifically to Ontario, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick. New Brunswick was carved out from the larger province of Nova Scotia to make room for the influx of Loyalists. During this time, settlers from England, Scotland, and Ireland intermingled and assimilated into the growing Anglo-Canadian culture. Scottish immigrants, who constituted 10–15% of this wave, primarily spoke Gaelic upon arrival but adopted English as they integrated.
All settlers from the British Isles spoke English (small numbers spoke Gaelic in case of Scots), were ethnically and culturally similar, and had much more in common with each other than with their continental European counterparts.
Settlement would slow down in the years immediately preceding Confederation in 1867 but surged again during the period between 1896 and 1914, with an estimated 1.25 million settlers yet again from Britain moving to Canada as part of internal migration within the British Empire. These settlers predominantly also [went] to Ontario and the Maritimes, further forging the Anglo-Canadian identity.
A common misconception among Canadians is that Canada “was a colony” of Britain, subordinate to, or a “vassal state”. This is wrong. Canadians were the British, in North America. There were no restrictions on what Canadians could or could not do in their own Dominion. From the first wave of Loyalists onward, Canadians were regularly involved in politics and governance, actively participating in shaping the nation.
Like the ethnogenesis of the English, which saw Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians converge into a new people and ethnicity (the Anglo-Saxons), Anglo-Canadians are a combination of 1.9 million English, 850,000 Irish (from both Northern and Southern Ireland), and 200,000 Scots, converging with 60,000 Loyalist Americans from the 13 Colonies. These distinct yet similar ethnic groups no longer exist as separate peoples in Canada. Anglo-Canadians are the fusion of the entire British Isles. The Arms of Canada, the favourite symbol of Canadian nationalists today, represents this new ethnic group with the inclusion of the French:
Arms of England, Scotland, Ireland and France in that order.
It’s no coincidence that, once rediscovered, the Arms of Canada exploded in popularity as the emblem of Canadian nationalists. Unlike more controversial symbols that appeal to pan-White racial unity, such as the Sonnenrad or Celtic cross, the Arms of Canada resonate as a distinctly Canadian icon, deeply rooted in the nation’s true heritage and history — a heritage that cannot be bought, sold, or traded away. This is an immutable bloodline stretching into the ancient past. If culture is downstream from race, and deeper still, ethnicity, then Canadian culture, values, and identity are fundamentally tied not just its race, but its ethnic composition. The ethnos defines the ethos. Canadians are not as receptive to the abstract idea of White nationalism for the same reason Europeans aren’t — because they possess a cohesive ethnic identity, unlike most White Americans.
November 12, 2024
Canada in the news … for all the wrong reasons
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper explains why your non-Canadian friends may be finding their opinions on the dysfunctional Dominion getting more and more sour in recent years:
… within just the last few years, multiple foreign outlets have profiled Canada for the singular purpose of asking what happened to it, and worrying if Canada’s ills will soon be their own. What’s more, these articles are not limited to a single topic; so much is going sideways in Canada right now that everything from our assisted-suicide regime to our economy to our internet legislation is attracting overseas notice like never before.
Below, a cursory guide to some of them. If you’re noticing that your non-Canadian friends suddenly have a darker picture of your home country than they used to, here’s a clue as to why.
“Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream”
Ever since the 2019 federal election, The Economist‘s coverage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has usually followed a general theme of noting that the bloom is off the rose of his photogenic ascendancy to power in 2015. But in a trio of articles published last month, the publication laid into the Canadian leader as an icon of what not to do.
Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream, published on Oct. 14. Canada’s Trudeau trap, published on Oct. 17. And then, just for good measure, Justin Trudeau is paying for solar panels in the cold, dark Arctic.
[…]
“Canada Is Disintegrating”
The Telegraph in the U.K. ran an entire series of essays last week on the topic of Canada taking it to the limit on progressive laws covering everything from drugs to national identity.
[…]
“Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech”
The June tabling of the Online Harms Act prompted a wave of foreign coverage unlike few pieces of Canadian legislation. Although virtually every non-U.S. country has legislated controls on extreme speech, the Online Harms Act went noticeably farther than its peer countries in two respects: It prescribes a life sentence for the speech crime of “advocating or promoting genocide”, and it authorizes pre-emptive custody for anyone suspected of committing hate speech in future.
November 3, 2024
Kemi Badenoch replaces Rishi Sunak as UK Conservative leader
In the National Post, Michael Murphy discusses the new British Tory leader and why she could be a viable challenger to Two-tier Keir’s Labour government:
… in July, the Tories were ousted by Labour after 14 years in power, limping on with only 121 seats in the 650 seat House of Commons. But the honeymoon period for Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government ended almost immediately, as its popularity plummeted faster than that of any administration in recent memory. This has made the Tories interesting once again at precisely the moment when they’ve chosen a new leader: Kemi Badenoch.
The Nigerian-raised mother of three, elected today to lead the Conservative party, threatens to be kryptonite for a Labour party wedded to identity politics. A black, female immigrant at the dispatch box is apt to leave Labour frontbenchers — particularly Sir Keir, a one-time BLM kneeler — somewhat stumped. To make matters worse, Badenoch is a persuasive speaker, commanding a charisma and eloquence that Sir Keir — a dull, po-faced lawyer — does not possess.
These qualities have given Badenoch cross-party appeal within the Tories, rallying endorsements from both the left and right. By endorsing her, however, the party has effectively signed a blank cheque, as Badenoch, unlike her opponents, has made few specific pledges. She has chosen instead to reflect on the election loss and the party’s ideological roots; she is prepared to play the long game, hoping this will allow the Tories to “earn back trust”.
On some issues, though, Badenoch is clear. “The government is doing far too much and it is not doing any of it well — and it is growing and growing,” she declared recently. “The state is too big; we need to make sure there is more personal responsibility.” These ideas are common fare among Conservatives, especially in bloated welfare states like Britain — but her zeal for them evokes, for many, memories of Margaret Thatcher. As the political commentator Simon Heffer wrote, “Mrs Badenoch is the politician who most reminds me of Mrs Thatcher since I last saw Mrs Thatcher”. He noted both women’s hard-mindedness, “deep principles”, and grasp of the “art of the possible”.
Badenoch’s Conservatism can be traced, as the writer Tom Mctague has argued elsewhere, to her beginnings in Africa. Having fled Nigeria during a 1996 military coup, she has a keen, outsider’s appreciation for Britain’s core ideals — not least the rule of law and policing by consent. She is therefore a champion of Britain, of both “the good” and “bad” of its former empire, at a time when it is fashionable to denigrate it, precisely because of her first hand experience that these norms are rare and fragile.
Like Thatcher, Badenoch studied a hard science (computing), marking them out in a Parliament filled with lawyers and humanities graduates. And the swift rise of both women, from modest beginnings through the ranks of the Conservative party, suggests that the “art of the possible” is indeed etched into their stars.
The Armchair General has a few suggestions for Badenoch’s agenda to turn the British economy around:
The new leader of the Conservative Party (image: www.kemibadenoch.org.uk)
My one reservation [about Badenoch] was that, being a software engineer, instead of espousing liberty or slashing laws and regulations, Kemi might reach for more tinkering technocratic solutions — and your humble General is surely not alone in his opinion that we have had quite enough, thank you, of technocratic governments.
However, the more that I consider the severe problems that afflict this country, the more I believe that a process-driven leader, who can focus on the details, might make the biggest difference in the short to medium term.
The immigration issue
As we know, uncontrolled immigration has seized the public imagination greatly — and, indeed, Jenrick centred his campaign around leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). We should almost certainly do this anyway — simply because, like the Americans, we should refuse to sign any treaties that raises foreign courts above our own Parliament.
But leaving that aside, the stated problems with mass immigration can largely be divided into two halves:
- cultural differences — these are not insignificant, and it is claimed that they lead to an increase in crime (especially sexual crimes) and an undermining of our high-trust society;
- economic issues — the evidence shows that a massive net influx of low-skilled immigrants depresses wages at the lower end, puts a strain on public services (which cannot expand swiftly enough to accommodate the increase in demand), raises the demand for houses (of which there is a shortage) and thus pushes up prices, and, ultimately, only increases nominal GDP whilst per capita GDP has barely shifted in a decade and a half.
For the purposes of this post, I shall address only the latter issue; given where we are right now, the former is a much thornier problem — at least politically — and probably cannot be solved without radical (and some might say “authoritarian”) action.
The second problem is easier to solve because it is caused, essentially, by the single biggest drag on our economy — our planning system.
[…]
Planning: the Conservatives’ political agenda
The core of the new Conservative manifesto must be a growth agenda; it needs to set out the following core principles:
- if we carry on the current trajectory, the British government will be effectively bankrupt in the next 50 years — so something needs to change;
- therefore, in order to pay for all the goodies that we have promised ourselves (now and in the future), we need to massively accelerate economic growth;
- unless we can build the roads, railways, power stations, research labs, data centres, and homes that we need, then our economy will not grow at the required rate — and spending will need to be cut to the bone;
- given the above, the only way to grow is to reform planning laws;
- removing the barriers to building will lead to greater investment, lower energy prices (leading to even greater investment), greater social mobility, regeneration of all the regions (so-called “levelling up”), and vast increases in per capita GDP;
- where the state invests in infrastructure, then it will cost considerably less than it does currently — meaning that not only will those projects undertaken provide more value for money, but also that many more projects will be viable;
- this prosperity and increased mobility will remove even the perceived need for immigrants to perform low-wage jobs (including in our public services), and remove the economic pressures of those that we have already taken in;1
- if we do it right, then we will also be able to cut taxes without drastically cutting the size of the state.2
The argument needs to be as stark and inevitable as that.
What this means is that the Conservatives need not stand on a platform of slashing state spending — thus addressing the huge numbers of people in this country who, incredibly, still believe in the benevolent state.
Except for one caveat, there really is no downside to adopting Foundations [discussed here], in full, as the core of the next Conservative manifesto (although it should not be the full extent of said manifesto — there are many other areas that need to be addressed, which I shall write about later).
1. As I say, the cultural issues are for another time.
2. Obviously, as a classical liberal, I believe that the size of the state should be drastically cut — but this is not a popular argument in a country that has been raised and educated on socialist doctrine for decades.
November 2, 2024
Maxime Bernier on Canada’s immigration crisis
This article has been posted at the Telegraph in the UK and mailed out by the PPC here in Canada, so I guess it’s okay to share it here:
Newsflash: Canada is in the process of falling apart.
No, it’s not because Quebec is once again threatening to hold a referendum on separation, although this may happen again in the coming years.
Our country is experiencing a series of crises because of the deliberate policy of mass immigration instigated by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government soon after its election in 2015.
Last year, Canada’s population increased by almost 1.3 million people, or 3.2 per cent. This was the fastest annual population growth rate since the post-war years. The difference however is that this was not caused by a baby boom, since 97 per cent of the growth was due to international migration, mostly from Asia and Africa.
This includes not only immigrants per se – or “permanent residents” – but also so-called temporary foreign workers, foreign students, and asylum seekers. Although supposed to be temporary, the last categories have in fact become pathways to seek permanent residency.
Because of this, housing in Canada has now become completely unaffordable. Young couples who want to have children just cannot afford to buy a home with a nice backyard where they can raise them any more, with the result that our birth rate has dropped dramatically.
Our hospitals, social services, and infrastructures are being overburdened by this massive demographic tsunami.
Immigration is often justified by its supposed positive impact on the economy. But productivity and wages have been stagnant for a decade in Canada, as cheap immigrant labour is favoured by employers over capital investment and automation.
Canadian politics has been mired for months in scandals over foreign interference, in particular China and India. India has been the largest source of immigrants to Canada for several years. Last week, Canada and India expelled diplomats over allegations by the Trudeau government that Indian diplomats have been involved in attacks against Khalistani militants in our country, including the murder last year of one that India considers a terrorist.
Because of mass immigration, Canadian politics is more and more focused not on actual Canadian issues, but on ethnic, religious, and foreign issues and wars, with establishment politicians spending an extraordinary amount of time courting the votes of minority ethnic groups in suburban marginal ridings.
The third most important national party, the New Democratic Party that has kept the Trudeau minority government in power, is headed by Jagmeet Singh. A Sikh by background, he initially declined to condemn Talwinder Singh Parmar, the mastermind responsible for the 1985 bombing of an Air India plane in which hundreds of Canadians were killed. However Singh did change his stance when a Canadian inquiry concluded that Parmar was definitely behind the outrage.
For his part, the leader of the Conservative Party and very likely our next prime minister, Pierre Poilievre, is known for donning national or religious dress as he panders to members of various communities.
In 2018, as a then Conservative Member of Parliament, I posted a series of tweets that denounced what I called Trudeau’s “cult of diversity” which, I contended, would lead to the Balkanisation of Canadian society, and potentially to violence.
Almost daily scenes of Muslims attacking Jewish institutions, Sikhs burning the Indian flag, and Ethiopian factions fighting each other in the streets of our cities, have proven me right.
Publicly attacking these woke dogmas wasn’t allowed at the time in Canada though, and it provoked a huge outcry. Even my leader and colleagues in the Conservative Party denounced me, which led me to resign and launch a populist right-wing party which is broadly the Canadian equivalent of Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.
If you believe that more diversity is always good and always enriches your society, then it’s logical and inevitable that you will end up importing lots of people with incompatible values and attitudes from around the world, including religious fanatics and even terrorists, who can’t possibly integrate in a country with a European, secular Christian heritage.
That’s what we’ve been doing for years, and that’s why everything that historically made Canada what it was is rapidly being destroyed. I know there has been a similar trend in the UK and other European countries, but Canada went way further down this road.
Canada’s demise started when what was already a very diverse country (with Indigenous, French and British founding peoples, and many different regional cultures) fell for this radical version of multiculturalism instead of tempering it with a focus on shared values and attitudes, pride in our history, and in the achievements of Western civilisation.
Now, not only are our democratic institutions, our economy, and our social peace and cohesion, falling apart, but so are our very identity and reason to exist as a country.
All these trends are so overwhelming that, unable to deny the reality any more, the Trudeau government finally announced last week that they would be gradually lowering their immigration targets in the coming years instead of continuing to increase them.
Although this is a massive U-turn for this government, it is far from being a sufficient reduction, and a lot more will need to be done to repair the damage. Otherwise, I don’t believe Canada will survive the 21st century.
October 31, 2024
Riley Donovan – “October 24th was a tragic day …”
Riley Donovan enumerates some of the most notable losers from the federal government’s belated realization that cutting immigration numbers was politically necessary:
A billboard in Toronto in 2019, showing Maxime Bernier and an official-looking PPC message. The PPC has been the only federal party against mass immigration from its founding.
Photo from The Province
October 24th was a tragic day for real estate developers, speculators, cheap labour employers, business lobbyists, slumlords, corrupt immigration consultants, and strip mall diploma mill operators. On that day, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reluctantly caved to public opinion and announced that the Liberal government will slash permanent resident levels by 21%.
Less than one week before the October 24th announcement, an Abacus poll revealed that support for immigration restriction has reached 72% – a statistical supermajority. This includes a majority of all four major political parties and every age group. A month before the announcement, a Leger poll found that majorities of both white and non-white Canadians want lower immigration.
It is now impossible to find even one demographic subset of Canadians that registers majority support for high immigration – except perhaps if you exclusively surveyed CEOs, bank presidents, or woke university professors (politics makes for strange bedfellows).
There is no prominent, well-funded immigration restriction lobby in this country – in fact, there is a prominent, well-funded pro-immigration lobby. Columnists – with the exception of yours truly – almost never wrote the word “immigration” before the summer of 2023. The Canadian public was not goaded by public figures into opposing mass immigration by a margin of three to one; this trend was entirely grassroots.
The shift in public attitudes was the result of countless private conversations in which regular people shared worries about job lines full of international students that stretched around the block, Canadian youth outcompeted by foreign workers for positions at Tim Horton’s, seniors living in RVs because of sky-high rent, and hospitals overcrowded by an annual inflow of 1.3 million newcomers.
October 14, 2024
The reviews are in for this season of The West and it’s as bad as you think
Spaceman Spiff has been a longstanding fan of The West, but the current season is doing much more than giving him the sadz:
The current season of The West is a disappointing mishmash of bad writing, wooden acting and implausible plot lines.
Critics have known the show has been in decline for years although have been reluctant to say openly.
But with cancellation rumours growing it is difficult to see how it can survive. If the current season is any measure they simply don’t have the writers even if the producers hadn’t lost their minds.
The plot thickens
The West has always been known for its compelling plots. Epoch-defining inventions, new technologies and globe-spanning empires. Even grand moral crusades no one else would consider such as ending slavery or elevating women to equal status.
Just some of the storylines they said would never work and yet we were glued to our screens as they unfolded.
Unfortunately, more recent seasons have shown none of the flair of the past.
The latest drama is the threat of another plague. It is difficult to know how this got the go ahead so soon after the Covid storyline.
The original pandemic idea got off to a roaring start since it was then a novel idea. But as the drama unfolded the plot became increasingly contrived. The writers became carried away and eventually struggled to get out of the hole they had dug themselves.
It ended in absurdity with obvious conflicts between the original lockdown plot and the later mask and vaccine subplots.
It was almost as if different teams of writers were competing with each other instead of cooperating on the story arc, exactly the kind of mistake audiences are increasingly complaining about.
The latest version is a species-jumping virus and is already facing criticism for lazy writing and reheating ideas from last time. Audiences are unimpressed. Time will tell if they can pull it off again.
The second plot they seem to be exploring is even more implausible, war with China.
After the last few seasons mired in the Ukraine storyline it beggars belief the writers went in this direction.
There were rumours of production overruns and expensive reshoots as the Ukraine storyline dragged on. We will never know the full extent of their production woes but tough decisions were clearly made as well as a shakeup of the production team.
Critics had warned wars were rarely popular. People like the drama of course, but audiences quickly get bored. None of this stopped the producers and the writers dutifully did as asked.
Now it is China.
Many are saying this is just a sign the producers have been there too long. It is time for another clear out.
At least war is exciting. But after numerous attempts to sell immigration storylines they are trying it again despite its unpopularity.
Previous attempts to promote immigration plots failed to resonate with audiences although it has always been popular with a small, loud minority.
Most found it too farfetched, millions of young foreign men just wandering into Western nations as if no one would stop them. The critics had a field day.
But this season they are going with climate migration. People moving around because of the weather.
This is partly to shore up their failing climate plot. It was obvious several seasons ago this long running theme, a strong favourite with the showrunners, was no longer popular.
September 21, 2024
Statistics Canada notes significant decline in life satisfaction and hope for the future
In one sense, we should be quite used to Statistics Canada giving us unwelcome economic news, given the state of the Canadian economy over the last decade. What seems less in character is that they’re connecting the dots between our obvious national financial decline and showing how directly it has impacted ordinary Canadians’ views about life in Canada and what they expect in the future:
Life satisfaction among Canadians is on the decline. Based on data from the Canadian Social Survey, levels of life satisfaction have been tracking downward since the summer of 2021, when quarterly monitoring of key Quality of Life indicators began. Less than half (48.6%) of Canadians aged 15 years and older were feeling highly satisfied with their lives in 2024, down from 54.0% three years earlier.
Not only is life satisfaction down, but so is hopefulness about the future, which dropped from 65.0% to 59.7% from 2021 to 2024. These results are based on a new study released today, “Charting change: How time-series data provides insights on Canadian well-being”, which sheds light on changes in overall life satisfaction, hopeful feelings about the future and financial well-being. It examines differences and trends across various dimensions, such as age, gender, racialized and non-racialized populations, and 2SLGBTQ+ populations.
Decline in life satisfaction more common among young adults and racialized Canadians
Life satisfaction can be considered a pulse check on Canadians’ overall well-being. While this indicator of subjective well-being has been declining for the past few years, there is nonetheless substantive variation in life satisfaction across different demographic groups. Younger adults (aged 25 to 34) had notable declines in their life satisfaction in 2024, with their proportions declining an average of 3.9 percentage points per year since 2021. By 2024, fewer than 4 in 10 (36.9%) of these adults were highly satisfied with their lives.
Meanwhile, seniors (aged 65 and older) maintained their high level of satisfaction, with 61.5% being happy with their lives in 2024. This measure of subjective well-being has remained relatively stable among senior Canadians since 2021.
In addition, racialized Canadians, who are younger on average than non-racialized Canadians, saw greater drops in life satisfaction than their non-racialized counterparts. The proportion of racialized Canadians reporting high levels of life satisfaction fell from 52.7% in 2021 to 40.6% in 2024. This decline was more than five times higher than the decrease observed for non-racialized Canadians, who experienced a decline in life satisfaction of 0.8 percentage points per year from 2021 to 2024. In 2024, over half (51.5%) of non-racialized Canadians were happy with their lives.
It really is a bad sign when the largest province in Confederation is also becoming the most disheartened by its economic prospects:
September 19, 2024
German opinions are changing on the migration question
On of our key European commentators is back from a brief internet vacation and reports on recent changes in official German views on mass immigration:
There are other matters too, but before I can get to any of them, I must get this piece on the changing politics of mass migration in Germany off my chest. This is the most important issue facing Europe right now – more important than the folly of the energy transition, more crucial even than the fading memory of pandemic repression.
For nearly ten years, migration has felt like one of the most intractable problems in our entire political system. However crazy the policies, however contradictory and irrational, there was always only the towering mute wall of establishment indifference. It felt like the borders would be open forever, that we would have to sing vapid rainbow hymns to the virtues of diversity and inclusivity for the rest of our lives.
Suddenly, it no longer feels like that. Over the past weeks, a perfect storm of escalating migrant violence and electoral upsets in East Germany have changed the discourse utterly.
The cynical among you will say that none of this matters, that the migrants are still coming, that our borders are still open, and of course that’s true – as far as it goes. But it’s also true that there’s an order of operations here. A lot of things have to happen before we can turn return to a regime of normal border security, and I suspect they have to happen in a specific sequence: 1) Migrationist political parties have to feel electoral pressure and taste defeat at the ballot box first of all. 2) Then, as the establishment realises they are up against the limits of their ability to manipulate public opinion, the discourse around mass migration will have to shift, to deprive opposition parties of Alternative für Deutschland of their political advantage. Specifically, the lunatic oblivious press must begin to question the wisdom of allowing millions of unidentified foreigners to take up residence in our countries. This will then open the way for 3) the judiciary to revise their understanding of asylum policies and begin to interpret our laws in more rational, sustainable ways.
In Thüringen and Saxony, we have already had the electoral defeat of 1), and we will soon have more of it in Brandenburg. As a consequence of 1), we are now seeing some powerful glimmerings of 2). This is very important, because as the press expands the realm of acceptable discourse, a great many heretofore tabu thoughts and opinions are becoming irreversibly and indelibly conceivable.
Ten years ago, diversity was our strength, infinity refugees were our moral obligation and there were no limits to how many asylees we could absorb. Since August, not only Alternative für Deutschland but also that offshoot from the Left Party known as the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, the centre-right Christian Democrats, a substantial centrist faction of the Social Democrats, and many others beyond whatever “the extreme right” is supposed to be, agree that migration is in fact an enormous problem. They also agree that our moral obligations to the world’s poor and disadvantaged are finite, and that there are indeed clear limits to the number of asylees Germany can support. What is more, they are saying all of these things in the open.
August 30, 2024
Two-Tier Keir’s “mask off” moment(s)
Millennial Woes presents a disturbingly long summary of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s responses to popular non-violent protests:
The situation in Britain now is so perverse that, if you could convey it to people from a century ago, I think they, after getting over the disbelief and astonishment and accepting that this really was true, would assume it could not possibly have come about by chance. Whatever their complaints about the Britain of 1900, they wouldn’t have believed it capable — on its own — of the degeneration we have seen. They would insist that it must have been wickedly subverted, every failsafe removed, and entire systems of governance, culture and morality repurposed, made to achieve the opposite of their purported function.
I hardly need list the symptoms of this, but for the sake of posterity …
- The control nexus (of which the government is merely one node) ships massive numbers of unassimilable foreigners into the country against the repeatedly expressed wishes of the natives, and in clear violation of their best interests.
- Natives who complain about this are hounded, doxed, demonised, made unemployable, and often imprisoned.
- Their children are systematically indoctrinated by fiction media to accept their dispossession. They are encouraged to despise the “bigoted” attitudes of their parents and grandparents, and to loathe their nation’s history. The boys are encouraged to idolise non-native men. The girls are encouraged to race-mix with them.
- Teachers deliver the same indoctrination in the classroom — in every classroom. You won’t be allowed to become a teacher unless you voice enthusiasm for such things. Alternative views have been eradicated from the classroom and the lecture hall.
- Natives are systematically disadvantaged in numerous sectors of education and employment.
- Natives are demonised in fiction and news media while non-natives are made to look wonderful.
- The mass sexual abuse of native children by non-natives is systematically down-played by news media, who shift discussion to false “equivalents”.
- Natives’ history is systematically distorted in education and fiction media.
- The very existence of the natives, as a group, and their ownership of their homeland, are systematically denied by education, fiction media, news media, and phoney “science”.
- The police do whatever they are told to do, kneeling for the participants in one riot, hunting down the participants in a different riot.
- Judges pass obviously outrageous prison sentences upon certain people, for blatantly political reasons. These people are denied bail and pressured to plead guilty for fear of sentences even more outrageous. All of this is to send a message to other people: “don’t dare complain or the same will happen to you”.
- The media rushes to concoct fake narratives about events, to keep the public misinformed.
- A so-called “charity”, which is heavily linked to the government and the civil service, seeks to indoctrinate the young and ruin the lives of “troublemakers”, and actively aids the government in concocting fake narratives in order to control public thought and direct events.
- Fake news from such Establishment agents is forgiven, fake news from the Establishment’s enemies is answered with threats of prosecution.
- The media “memory hole” stories of appalling violence by non-natives, explain away such incidents with talk of mental illness, tell natives “don’t look back in anger”, and at all costs defend the suicidal ideologies that make such incidents possible.
- The prisons are emptied of rapists, child molesters and murderers so that troublesome natives can be assigned their cells. They are placed alongside non-natives who might well be violent to them, and journalists gloat about it.
- The slaughtering of three little girls by a non-native is dismissed by the Prime Minister, who says “it doesn’t matter” that the rioting was a response to this outrageous crime, which was enabled by the outrageous government policies that the natives have been complaining about for decades. Their shock, their trauma, their resentment, their dignity, their pain… “doesn’t matter”. This is in stark contrast with how he reacted to Black people rioting several years before.
- The natives’ freedom of speech is continually undermined, one government after another actively seeking to erode it further.
- Not one single organisation is fighting for the wellbeing, rights or interests of the natives.
- Any political party that would do anything about any of this is refused the right to stand in elections, debanked, demonised and, in most cases, destroyed.
Any one of these examples would, in itself, be cause for great alarm. The whole lot together indicate a society that is not just largely, not just fundamentally, but wholly opposed to the continued existence of its native population. To underline: British society is actively perpetrating the destruction of the native British people.
It has been said that the ruthless authoritarian response of the fledgling Starmer government to this summer’s (White) riots is a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party. Others have called it a “mask off” moment for the British Establishment, which transcends the particular party in office. Indeed, things that didn’t happen under the Conservatives have suddenly happened under Labour; things that one would more neatly associate with the former have instead happened under the latter. That can only mean either that the Labour Party has utterly lost its sense of itself, or that the particular party in office simply doesn’t matter, because the Establishment abides.
I think, in fact, all of these statements are true. It has been a “mask off” moment for the Labour Party, and for Keir Starmer himself, and for the Establishment which enables and directs them. The Labour Party has lost its sense of itself — or, to put it less romantically, has been completely repurposed. And the Establishment does abide; no matter which party is in office, things only ever evolve in one direction. And after all, while Starmer’s behaviour casts a bad light on him, he is only Prime Minister in the first place because the Establishment wanted him, not someone who might have reacted to these riots in a different manner. (Boris Johnson is good at stoking war abroad, but not so willing to stoke it at home.)
But in the end it doesn’t really matter. We don’t need to pin the blame on Starmer, Labour, the British Establishment or Davos; they are all one and the same miasma. Yes, the Conservative Party might have reacted differently to the riots, so to some extent we can blame Labour’s ideology or Starmer’s personality, but the pendulum is kept swinging for a reason. One empty suit is shifted out, another is shifted in. Each one might be enthusiastically on-board with the agenda or compelled to go along with it, this being the only variance. And thus the Establishment abides, always getting what it wants against the wishes of the natives, and always degrading and dispossessing them.
August 15, 2024
“The Establishment … are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration”
Spaceman Spiff risks getting the full power and majesty of the British legal system arrayed against him for offering an opinion critical of the authorities and the ongoing immigration policies of this and previous British governments:
Britain is experiencing civil unrest in response to the recent murders of three young girls at the hands of an individual whose family was allowed to enter Britain from Africa and settle in Wales.
The Establishment response is similar to comparable European states like Ireland or Germany. They are indifferent to the deaths of the girls, but visibly outraged at protests and calls to end immigration.
Vocal rejection of multiculturalism and evidence of its failure in Britain is treated as a hate crime, a subject that cannot be discussed.
This has done nothing to quell discomfort and has done little more than show us Britain’s elites are lost in a bubble that is increasingly divorced from reality.
Mass immigration is deeply unpopular
Immigration has been an issue since the 1950s. Since the 1990s it has featured as one of the key issues in every election, often the top issue for most.
Conversely it has been summarily ignored by the educated classes who run the country. Immigration is here to stay, and Britain must change to accommodate it.
The elite section of society promoting immigration is especially indifferent to those most affected, low wage workers. There is also a strong cultural component beyond the economic arguments, an understanding the drive is to make Britain less white with very vocal attempts to champion non-natives in every area of life.
For many decades the educated classes have viewed notions of patriotism or national loyalty with suspicion. Many fancy themselves as internationalists more in tune with the educated in foreign nations than their working-class compatriots.
Now, after decades of immigration, whole communities have been displaced. Some areas of Britain have no Europeans living there. Some tourists complain parts of London do not look English.
[…]
It is the height of arrogance to believe we can somehow circumvent the wisdom accumulated throughout history. And the price being paid is by the British people who are losing their homeland.
Those behind our utopian schemes are working harder and harder to shore them up. Not just mixing cultures but expensive climate initiatives, radical feminism and fractional reserve banking to name only a few of today’s fads. None of them were ever going to work and now they are obviously failing.
The announcements represent the beginning of the end of bad ideas that were doomed from the start. A sane government would take note and begin a plan to reset Britain starting with listening to concerns about mass immigration.
Instead our ruling elite are digging in, and that will probably mean increased civil disturbance as more and more recognize they have no voice and no say.
Given who we are, who we really are under the political correctness and the good manners, this is absolute insanity on their part. Perhaps just the latest decision in a long line of bad ideas unable to accommodate reality. The distortions within their bubble are strong and they are becoming impossible to hide.
The end is nigh for the believers in Western liberalism.
August 12, 2024
Lions, foxes and wolves
N.S. Lyons tries to explain how Britain has gotten into its current social and political plight by recalling the works of Niccolò Machiavelli:
Portrait of Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito (1536-1603)
Via Wikimedia Commons.
The riots that have recently wracked the streets of the UK reflect decades of pent up public frustration with the country’s governing elite, especially their total refusal to control mass immigration despite vote after vote demanding they do exactly that. The pot has now boiled over. But the ongoing back-and-forth of ethnic violence also represents a signal that the British elite’s whole broader strategy of governing – one based in the fundamental personality of the ruling class itself – may be beginning to break down. And that carries some significant implications.
To understand why, however, we need to take a brief detour back about five centuries to Niccolò Machiavelli. He identified two archetypical psychological profiles of people who become leaders: the cunning but weak fox, who can outmaneuver his opponents but is “defenseless against wolves”; and the strong and brave lion, who likes to fight and who can scare off wolves but who is “defenseless against traps”. Machiavelli argued that a true statesman must embody both personalities, or risk destruction.
A distant student of Machiavelli, fellow Italian political theorist Vilfredo Pareto, would later expand the metaphor further. Observing history, he noted that the rise and fall of states and civilizations could be matched to a cyclical pattern in the collective personality of their ruling classes.
Nations are founded by lions, who are a society’s natural warrior class – its jocks, so to speak. They establish and expand a kingdom’s borders at the point of a sword, pacifying external enemies. Like Sparta’s Lycurgus or Rome’s Augustus, their firm hand often also puts an end to internal strife and establishes (or re-establishes) the rule of law. Their authority can be dictatorial, but it is relatively honest and straightforward in nature. They value directness and the clarity of combat. They are comfortable with the use of raw force, and open about their willingness to use it, whether against criminals or their own enemies. They have a firm sense of the distinction between enemies and friends in general – of who is part of the family and who is a prowling wolf to be guarded against. The security and stability they establish is what allows the nation to grow into prosperity.
Security and prosperity produce a proliferation of foxes. Foxes are unsuited to and deeply uncomfortable with the employment of force; they prefer intellectual and rhetorical combat, because they’re nerds. They seek to overcome obstacles through clever persuasion or the manipulation of people, information, narratives, and formal processes. If they have to use physical force they will, but prefer to disguise its nature and are prone to use it ineptly. The brainy and cosmopolitan foxes have talents the lions don’t, however: they are good at managing complexity and scale, navigating the nuances of diplomatic alliances, or extracting profits from an extensive empire.
As long as peace prevails, civilizations come increasingly to morally prize the indirect and diplomatic methods of foxes and to avoid and indeed abhor the strength and violence of lions. And as states grow larger and more complex, establishing new layers of bureaucracy, law, and procedure, this quickly favors the byzantine organizing and scheming of foxes. In comparison lions are inarticulate and unprepared for the traps of more underhanded mammals. So eventually a wholesale replacement of the elite occurs: the lions who founded the nation are pushed out of its leadership, marginalized and excluded by a class of foxes who see them as brutish relics of a barbaric age.
But a curious thing then happens, Pareto observed: the instability of societies overly dominated by foxes begins to increase relentlessly. The foxes, reluctant to properly distinguish and identify real threats, or to openly employ force even when necessary, find themselves defenseless against wolves both internal and external. When faced with escalating challenges, the foxes tend to resort to doubling down on their preferred strategy of misdirection, manipulation, and attempting to bury or buy off threats rather than confront them directly. This does nothing to solve problems that require the firm use of force, or the threat of it, such as keeping packs of wolves on the other side of the borders. Eventually, when things get bad enough, foxes may desperately lash out with violence, but do so indecisively, ham-fistedly, or in entirely the wrong direction. The wolves, for their part, can instinctively smell weakness and just keep coming.
Like the rest of the West, Britain has been ruled for decades now by an effete managerial elite whose system of technocratic control is absolutely characteristic of foxes. There could be no better example of this than how the government has attempted to manage immigration and the ethnic tensions it has brought to unhappily multi-cultural Britain. It has sought to control public perception of the problem, and indeed has strived mightily to pretend the entire problem simply doesn’t exist.
It has done so, in classic foxlike fashion, through careful control of media and online information, engaging in an effort to downplay inconvenient facts, obscure the identity of terrorists and violent criminals, memory-hole potentially divisive events, and censor counter-narratives. Those who have continued to speak out on the issue are smeared with reputation-destroying labels like “racist”, “xenophobic”, or “far right” in order to deflect others from listening to them. This reflects foxes’ consistent instinct to turn first and foremost to information warfare and narrative manipulation over direct confrontation. Hence the ruling elite’s immediate reaction to the latest riots: blaming them on “misinformation” and “unregulated social media” – the implication being that nothing at all would be amiss if the information common people had access to could just be better suppressed.
August 9, 2024
Domicidal maniacs in charge
Lorenzo Warby provides an oh-so-useful word to accurately capture what the diversity-at-all-costs elites running most western countries these days are actually up to:
Domicide is the destruction of home. It comes in the “hard” version — the physical destruction of houses and infrastructure.
Domicide also comes in a “soft” version — flooding localities with new people, separating people from, and otherwise degrading, their heritage. When folk say Britain is becoming “unrecognisable”, it is the domicidal effect of mass migration they are referring to.
The UK is suffering from a domicidal elite, one that uses mass migration to break up working-class communities; asymmetric multiculturalism to elevate incoming cultures over those of native English (the Celtic fringe get minority brownie points); favours non-“white” faces in advertising; asymmetric race-swapping in entertainment against the native English; denigration of British history as racist, white supremacist, imperialist, colonialist, etc.
Much of this is insulting virtue-signalling allied to, or presenting, cartoonish (simplified) and caricature (distorted) history. It all undermines social cohesion. But it is the use of migration policy as a systematic weapon against the resident working class which does the most damage. Though two-tier policing — obviously treating Muslims in particular with a deference not shown to the natives, especially when it comes to policing speech — is also highly corrosive of social cohesion.
Many working-class communities in Britain were already fairly dysfunctional — though the British state is not innocent in those dysfunctions1 — and sections of the British working class are very far from admirable. None of this justifies the use of mass migration to make things worse for such folk, however much it may help to explain the moralised class contempt that underlies so much of modern progressivism and modern managerialism.
To improve such things, to “level up”, requires a strong sense of how to create and maintain social order. Modern progressivism is strongly antipathetic to such understanding. To “level up” also requires a strong sense of custodianship, which managerialism typically lacks: particularly progressivist managerialism.
Indeed, modern feminist, progressivist, managerialism—in its lack of custodianship; lack of social solidarity;2 in its antipathy to taking the problems of social order seriously — is running the British state into the ground. The post-medieval British aristocratic and mercantile elite did a much better job of state management. But those elites had mechanisms — such as duelling, that forced men to defend their reputation at the risk of their life, and grand country houses, that turned into expensive investments in social isolation if you behaved badly — that selected for character.
Nowadays, the British elite only selects for capacity and even that is being degraded by DEI undermining the signals of competence. It turns out, over the longer term, character matters more than capacity. For capacity without character selects for manipulative, anti-social personalities that degrade institutions over time.
1. For a particularly brutal depiction in fiction of the dysfunctional British welfare state — especially its school system — see Christopher Nuttall’s Mystic Albion series, especially the first book.
2. Feminisation of institutions and discourse has tended to degrade social solidarity, see Benenson et al, 2009. The most conspicuous example of this in the UK is how uncouth it is in elite circles to mention the systematic rape and sexual exploitation of underage working class girls by overwhelmingly Muslim gangs.
August 6, 2024
Britain’s immigration debate turns violent
At The Last Ditch, Tom discusses how the immigration issue has become the issue in modern Britain:
Protest and counter-protest in Middlesbrough over the weekend of August 3-4.
Margaret Thatcher famously quoted Kipling’s Norman and Saxon to President Mitterand of France in an EU meeting;
The Saxon is not like us Normans. His manners are not so polite.
But he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.
When he stands like an ox in the furrow – with his sullen set eyes on your own,
And grumbles, “This isn’t fair dealing”, my son, leave the Saxon alone.She was trying, perhaps not as delicately as her diplomats would have wished, to explain how the apparently calm British will react – eventually – to being wronged.
I spent twenty years in three other countries and worked closely in business with people from many more. I have often smiled to myself since returning when I hear British people speak of our unique sense of fair play. It’s not unique at all. Everyone has it. We do not own fairness. We do not own tolerance.
We do, however, traditionally pride ourselves on both and the way we see ourselves has shaped our reactions over the last twenty-five years as we welcomed more immigrants than in the previous two millennia. A few years ago I listened quietly to a Bangladeshi friend – a would-be human rights lawyer – talk about racism in our country. I asked her where in the world was a better place to live as a member of an ethnic minority. On reflection, she agreed with me that there is nowhere.
I am not saying we couldn’t treat each other better. Of course we could and should try. But let’s take a moment, as our streets burn and our elites condemn us as far-right racists, to be proud of how we’ve behaved in general towards so many new arrivals in such a short time.
[…]
One day history may reveal which politician in the capital of an old European empire realised there was a ready supply of workers in the former colonies. People who spoke our languages and were familiar with our systems of government – because both had been forced on their ancestors. It was a perilous idea that may yet prove to be the end of European civilisation but he must have looked like a genius to his peers.
The doors were opened and cheap labour flooded in. From the lofty heights where the elites survey us, it looked like a perfect solution. On the ground, not always so much. Mostly we’ve been welcoming, accepting and tolerant. We’ve sometimes even gone beyond tolerance and flattered our new arrivals that they’ve enhanced our magnificent old culture with their jerk chicken and curries.
Yet already when I was a youngster practising criminal law problems had begun to emerge. A custody sergeant with whom I used to chat when waiting to see clients in the cells told me suicide rates among Muslim girls in our Midlands city were disturbingly high. Asked why that was, he said they were not suicides, but honour killings – the first time I’d heard that phrase. No-one, he said, commits suicide by pouring paraffin over themselves and setting themselves alight. It’s just too painful. Muslim men were killing their daughters and sisters. Asked why there were no prosecutions, he said senior police officers made it clear to their subordinates that it was “racist” to suggest the dead girls’ families’ stories of suicide were untrue.
Fresh out of my university law faculty, I sneered that his bosses were right and he was a racist. I will never forget the last words he said to me;
Young man, then you’re part of the problem.
And I was. In that moment, I’d turned away from murdered women to preserve my smug world view. Just as, decades later, council staff and police officers in cities all over Britain turned away from young girls groomed and raped by Muslim men, for fear of being called bad names.
Gary Fouse in the New English Review asks whatever happened to Merry Olde England:
If you have been following the news out of England for the past week, you might think that the country has all but fallen into civil war. Riots and various forms of violent protests and counterprotests have broken out in cities all over the country in reaction to a shocking murder that occurred in the town of Southport last week. On July 29, a group of little schoolgirls were attending some sort of Taylor Swift-themed dancing class when a 17-year-old son of Rwandan immigrants (who was born in England) attacked them with a knife. Three of the schoolgirls (ages 6. 7, and 9) have died and eight others went to the hospital with serious knife wounds.
The entire nation has erupted in shock and anger. Obviously, the anger is being directed at immigrants in general — given the country’s out of control migration situation and long-simmering tensions with the largely-radicalized Muslim communities. It seems that now-finally — the people have had enough. At least one migrant shelter has been attacked, and several Muslim young men are showing up to counter-protest and do battle with young white men. Now the cops in several cities are trying to keep the two sides apart.
I should state at this point that I will not condone the violence and destruction that is taking place and the objects being thrown at police who are trying to keep order. While I do not condone the violence, I think I can understand why it is taking place. I recall back in the 1960s when there were many riots in inner city areas of the US during the Civil Rights era and in response to the murders of black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Medgar Evers. Many responsible black leaders condemned the violence but also added that they could understand the reasons for it. It was a different era then in America, and in the South, segregation had the force of local laws behind it. Many blacks felt that the government was not responding to their grievances.
[…]
The fact is that far too many nations in the West, including ours, have suffered from bad political leadership. We see it in our cities, we see it in our state capitals, and we see it in Washington DC. Bad political leadership results in bad cities, bad states, and a bad country. The fish rots from the head, and what we need to do-in England-in France, in America, etc is elect responsible people who recognize that their government’s number one duty is to protect the citizens. When a government fails to do so, eventually what happens is what we see in England today.
August 3, 2024
“Multiculturalism is when yummy food”
Fortissax pours scorn on the defenders of multiculturalism-at-all-costs for one of the most common arguments in favour:
“Multiculturalism is when yummy food” is a real position people take. If you ask them what benefits of multiculturalism are, they’re going to say food and nothing else. Westerners don’t watch Bollywood films, they don’t listen to Desi music, they don’t watch cartoonishly bad Latin American dramas, usually for Hispanic abuelas still living in Mexico where every actor is suspiciously fairer-featured than everyone in their whole family. People can’t say “I love the food, the music, the culture” because they don’t engage in any of this. Salsa isn’t even popular; it hit its peak at the end of the 1990s because white boomer Americans approached an intensely Anglicised, sanitised form of Latin-American culture as introduced to them through the likes of Enrique Iglesias and other English-speaking Latin pop artists.
I don’t believe all leftists say this out of sincerity. It’s a knee-jerk reaction to any criticism of multiculturalism. They don’t put a lot of thought into it. The justification is usually related to how “bad” that “white people food” is. This follows the same thread of accusations that “white people can’t dance”, “white people can’t jump”, “white people can’t fight”, and “white people can’t fuck”. It’s another lib-coded tract to bash English-speaking white Americans over the head with, to justify demographic displacement by portraying them as boring, ugly, weird, or uncool. On some level, they probably know food isn’t worth human lives, but they have to reinforce their moral view or the whole thing collapses, and they have to admit fault for doing things and promoting ideas that are so destructive that people would want to unalive them. If they give up now, it’s over. It’s sunk cost fallacy.
For the rest who’re wholly sincere: it’s just straight up bullshit. Foreign restaurants serve you a Westernized version of their slop. Their bulk food suppliers are Western, the ingredients are Western-derived, but they sell it as “authentic” when it isn’t. That crab rangoon you just spent $40 on Doordash was bulk bought at Costco during a last ditch grocery run. They’re selling you the experience. A sampling of the real thing, deliberately fitted to your people’s general dietary preferences. All of these “ethnic”, “exotic” restaurants do this. Everyone knows about “secret menus” at Chinese or Indian restaurants. Anybody who works in culinary, hell, anybody whose watched the UK version of Hell’s Kitchen where Gordan Ramsay tries to rescue failing restaurants owned by small business owners can tell you most of these people aren’t using fresh or original ingredients. You go to any “Japanese” restaurant in North America, the staff are a random assortment of Asian, or sometimes Korean or Chinese, or maybe even Filipino but it doesn’t matter because they look Asian enough to boomers, correctly guessing people can’t tell the difference at a passing glance.
