Quotulatiousness

May 31, 2026

How Sports Illustrated devolved into AI slop

Filed under: Business, Media, Sports, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ted Gioia generously pulls an article out from behind the paywall for the benefit of cheapskates like me. It’s on the deliberate destruction of Sports Illustrated:

Imagine if sports journalism were like an actual sporting competition — and the best team wins.

In that kind of contest, could any periodical in history surpass this lineup:

  • William Faulkner reports on a hockey game.
  • Robert Frost covers baseball.
  • Carl Sandburg offers golfing tips.
  • John Steinbeck contributes a story about fishing.
  • Ernest Hemingway writes on bullfighting.

This sounds like an editor’s fantasy. But these are actual stories and bylines from Sports Illustrated.

For a period of fifty years, this magazine set the gold standard for sports journalism. Nobel and Pulitzer winners wrote for them. Sports Illustrated even convinced John F. Kennedy to write a freelance article. In fact, that was one of the first things JFK did after getting elected president.

How do you kill a brand as powerful as Sports Illustrated?

It’s easy, you can do it in one just one move. You just need to embrace the most exciting, futuristic technology of the 21st century.

That’s what Sports Illustrated did. The world’s most respected sports magazine gave up on Hemingway and Faulkner, and started publishing AI slop. The editors clearly wanted to hide this — they pretended that the articles were written by actual human beings. They even created fake bios with photos for the non-existent authors.

When a journalist from Futurism asked them about this, they quickly deleted everything.

But the damage was already done. The magazine’s reputation was on the mat, like those bloodied boxers it had covered over the decades.

Just 55 days later, Sports Illustrated announced that it was laying off most of its workforce. The media reported that Sports Illustrated would stop operations completely.

A few months later, a new publisher stepped in as savior. But there wasn’t much to save — at least as a journalism business.

The latest move happened yesterday. The new owner laid off 12% of its workforce, including several of the remaining skilled journalists from the pre-AI era. Some of them are in desperate shape.

Former SI journalist Jeff Pearlman now mocks the magazine as an “empty vessel for selling sh*t to idiots and for getting people to gamble away their money on sports”.

It’s now a brand name, he insists, with nothing behind it.

    That’s all Sports Illustrated is. It’s a name. It’s something to put on cruise ships. It’s something to put on clubs. It’s something to put on popcorn. Literally, there’s a Sports Illustrated popcorn.

May 28, 2026

“Seamen tend to be wary of authority, unless it is wisely exercised”

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

In UnHerd, Peter Hitchens considers the plight of the Royal Navy, much diminished from its years (centuries, actually) of greatness:

Our own Royal Navy is famous for its mutinies, in HMS Bounty in 1789, at Spithead and the Nore in 1797, and most recently at Invergordon in 1931. It is a curious organisation, its hammocks once filled by the cruel Press Gangs kidnapping innocent men and forcing them to sea and possible death, its discipline for many years enforced by the cruel cat o’ nine tails and the occasional shooting of an admiral to encourage the others. But it stood between us and the world, without trying to take over the state, and it was very beautiful, and many of us loved it. In London and the big seaport cities, bluejackets in their Edwardian uniforms were still a common sight in my childhood. They were reassuring, not overbearing. Since 1901, when horses failed at the task, Navy men have pulled the gun carriage on which Royal coffins (and Churchill’s) have rested at state funerals, an extraordinarily moving sight. These were our defenders, upon whom, as Charles II’s Articles of War first proclaimed, “under the Good Providence of God, the safety, honour and welfare of this realm do chiefly depend”.

In an era when soldiers were often despised, or even feared, sailors were not. Think of Kipling’s 1890 poem “Tommy”, intended to change the drunken delinquent reputation of Queen Victoria’s redcoats:

    For it’s “Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
    But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

In George Orwell’s perfect novel Coming Up for Air, Edwardian civilians are appalled when a young man signs up for the Army: “‘Well now! Listed for a soldier! Just think of it! A fine young fellow like that!’ It just shocked them. Listing for a soldier, in their eyes, was the exact equivalent of a girl’s going on the streets.”

“HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour”
Painting by Charles Edward Dixon (1872-1934) via Wikimedia Commons.

But sailors, possibly because they were at sea so much, were idealised as “hearts of oak” manning the wooden walls (and later the steel walls) of England. And the same was true for officers, credited above all with the great victory at Trafalgar in 1805, which secured national safety and prosperity for the rest of that century. They had a reputation for taciturnity and bluffness, which never does anyone any harm, and they often lived up to it. The fictional Jack Aubrey, in Patrick O’Brian’s witty and clever books about the Napoleonic wars, is a perfect rendering of this type. They tell terrible jokes. They don’t say much, just “Kiss me, Hardy” (Nelson as he died); “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today, Chatfield” (Beatty at Jutland, as British warships repeatedly blew up under German fire); and “Continue to engage the enemy” (Warburton-Lee at Narvik, dying on his bridge after smashing up Hitler’s destroyer fleet and so making a cross-Channel invasion impossible).

And so the word “Navy” had, for many years, a useful commercial magic if you were selling something a bit manly and bluff, such as Navy Cut tobacco and Navy Rum, or even Senior Service cigarettes. But it did not have the yelling, martinet character of the Army. I have never yet seen a naval officer’s uniform that fits properly, and when sailors are marched aboard their ships (does this still happen?), the drill is far from pernickety. Close contact with the Navy — both my parents were in it, and so were most of their friends, some of my schoolteachers and many of the parents of my schoolfellows — revealed a dry, faintly sarcastic view of the outside world which had never been to sea. Even my mother, an ocean-going snob who would die of shame if she heard me use the word “toilet”, had mastered the sarcasm of the fleet. More than once I jumped with surprise when I heard her icily remarking about some inadequate if feeble attempt at recompense. “Well, that’s damned nice of him”, she’d say, which, for a Fifties married middle-class woman in a respectable suburb, was going it a bit.

May 18, 2026

“Three Days in Toronto” (1959, 1960 & 1962)

Filed under: Cancon, History, Railways — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Transit Toronto Main Channel
Published 6 Oct 2025

Among the huge collection within Richard Glaze’s archive of 16mm film from the 60s and the 70s were a number of 400 foot reels from the 1950s. These were taken during trips Richard made to Toronto before he immigrated, and they show scenes that have not been witnessed in over sixty years. Now that we’ve moved to the new channel, we’ve taken the opportunity to spruce up this film and make some corrections and minor improvements. Enjoy!

Thanks to the dozens of individuals who raised the funds to digitize the first two-thirds of Richard Glaze’s collection.

Corrections:
12:17 – Caption refers to “Hillcrest Wye” when it should be “Hillside”
(more…)

May 4, 2026

Gentleman’s Relish (Patum Peperium) – Weird Stuff In A (Sort Of A) Can #142

Filed under: Britain, Food, History — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atomic Shrimp
Published 16 Aug 2020

Here’s something I have been meaning to feature on the channel for a little while — it’s a savoury anchovy paste that has been in continuous production in England since 1828 — the Georgian Era.

For more information about this product, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentlem…

The music for the spoon segment is called “Forever Yours” by Wayne Jones – from the YouTube Audio Library

May 3, 2026

Reasons people romanticize their college experience

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen responds to comments about people wanting the world to be like they remember their time at college:

People romanticize college because for four years of their lives they:

1. Had all the rights of adults but none of the responsibilities.

2. Lived in a closed community with sealed borders that kept out low IQs and anti-socials.

3. Were young, energetic, healthy, and attractive.

4. Were thrown together with a bunch of similar people who had no predefined power- or need-based relationship with them, which is how friendships form.

This last is the important one, especially as fertility rates decline.

People with children transition to making friends with other parents of children in the same age group, because events and networks centered around those children throw them together with other parents in the same way.

But childless people have few or no opportunities to make friends after college. So they are left with a slow dwindling circle of college based relationships, remembering the days when it was all easy, and they weren’t so isolated, and they didn’t have to work so hard.

Couple that with having to complete with infinity immigrants in the job market, so they can pay taxes to support infinity boomers and government bureaucrats, while being passed over for the best jobs and careers in favor of infinity DEI incompetents, who they also have to support …

Well, for a lot of people born into what was once the American middle class, college was their first and last experience of an adult life wherein they weren’t being systematically and deliberately routed into the formation of a new underclass.

A special form of underclass who are still expected to be productive enough to materially support all the non-producing people who were positioned as their social superiors despite being their intellectual inferiors.

So, yeah, they wish they could go back to college.

Is anyone surprised by this?

April 8, 2026

Architectural nostalgia in our hyper-bland modern world

Filed under: Architecture, History, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Freddie deBoer considers the all-too-frequent social media wave of real or performative nostalgia for the more appealing styles of older buildings followed by the inevitable anti-nostalgic backlash:

There’s a meme, of sorts, that pops up on Twitter from time to time: why don’t we build beautiful buildings anymore? The sentiment is associated with a more general yearning for the past, the kind that asserts that America or Western civilization or human culture are in decline. There certainly must be a lot of people who harbor similar concerns, as evidenced by how these tweets tend to rack up thousands of “likes”. They’ll share a picture of some beautiful old building — Art Deco classics like the Chrysler Building are common, but also Gothic buildings, and neoclassical, and others — and ask why we don’t, or can’t, or won’t make beautiful buildings anymore. They’ll point to the aesthetic qualities of older buildings, remind us that we have vastly more advanced technology and are far richer today than when those beautiful buildings were built, and wonder why we don’t build for beauty these days.

Why are so many new fancy buildings generic and forgettable works of brushed steel and glass? Why so many new ordinary buildings cookie-cutter rectilinear jobs, almost entirely free of embellishment or decoration, all flat roofs and sharp edges, and neutral in both color and effect? Why do they all look like … that? You know what I mean by “that”. Sometimes the style is referred to as Late International or The Glass Box Style, but perhaps the term Value-Engineered Modernism is more apt. Whatever you call it, this kind of building is the architectural equivalent of a default font, a soul-crushing assembly line of sterile glass monoliths that erases local identity in favor of the numbing, cookie-cutter uniformity of global bureaucracy. It’s the corporation in building form.

As is true with all social media phenomena, there is a counter-chorus, and it expresses itself in condescending, sighing, superior tones. Part of this is related to the fact that the accounts lamenting the death of public aesthetics are often right-coded; certainly a lot of the complaints are coming from Twitter users with Greek statues for profile pictures. And really, any sentiment that’s repeated often enough on social media will attract mockery in time. But a good deal of the derision comes from the online side of the YIMBY movement, which in the last decade or so has become something like the caricature mainstream Dems made of the Bernie Sanders online army back in 2016 — that is, snarky, self-righteous, and fundamentally concerned with achieving in-group status through the mechanism of arguing about politics. YIMBYs are an imperfect but important force in a country that desperately needs to build more housing and which has all manner of stupid and sclerotic zoning rules. It’s generically true, though, that the more online you get the less useful any given political movement becomes, and Twitter YIMBYs seem absolutely attached to representing all of the worst elements of that group — they’re incurious, rude, reductive, averse to basic best practices of messaging, and above all else, tribal. (Politics gets stupid when politics becomes a way to belong rather than a way to to do things.) And they’ll have you know that lamenting the death of beautiful buildings is dumb, lol lol lol lol.

The Twitter YIMBYs tend to treat concern for aesthetics as a decadent demand in a world where we need to JUST BUILD. And their particular tactic is to insist that we don’t build attractive buildings anymore because doing so is just too expensive, and really, what’s more important, the unconquerable human desire to live surrounded by beauty, or our need to put people in homes??? Case closed! But not really. It turns out that it’s simply not true that building stylish and ornamented buildings is relatively more expensive today than it was in eras past. Read all about it. Yes, Baumol’s cost disease is real, and construction is a manpower-intensive industry, but almost a century after the Empire State Building was erected, we’ve got the benefit of modern logistics and supply chains and automated production of essential parts and so on. The cost of labor cannot explain the death of decoration in modern building design. And increasingly, there seems to be an acknowledgment that it’s easier to move the public to accept new construction when said new construction is inspiring. King YIMBY Matt Yglesias had a good post on this recently; as he says, we can look at the premium people will pay to live in townhouse neighborhoods where most of the construction happened 100+ years ago as a clue to what people actually like. Housing is expensive in both Park Slope and Hudson Yards, but there’s no question that the former is an aspirational bourgie vision that has stood the test of time while the latter is barely tolerated. And aesthetics plays a large role in that.

We’re wired to pursue beauty. We are not, however, wired to pursue authenticity.

March 1, 2026

Generation Jones EXPLAINED: The Lost Generation Nobody Talks About

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

Wee Nips
Published 29 Jun 2025

Born between 1954 and 1965? You might be part of the forgotten generation — Generation Jones — wedged awkwardly between Boomers and Gen X.

In this video, we break down what it means to be a Joneser, why we’re all still jonesing for something better, and how our weird hybrid powers (like remembering phone numbers and setting up Wi-Fi) just might save the world.

If you’ve ever used aluminum foil on rabbit ears or fixed a TV by smacking it, this one’s for you.

February 15, 2026

QotD: The love of long-distance train travel

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

Why is it that I love, or used to love, trains so much? I thought about this often when I was effectively banned, by the virus, from my normal daily journey between Oxford and London, 63 miles each way. Even now, in bare modern trains systematically stripped of character and romance, there can be a glorious seclusion in a long-distance train that does not stop too much. The soft and distant landscape rolls by, and at any time I can look up and see a familiar hill, church, or stretch of woodland. I can name much of what I see, and have walked over a great deal of it, purposely seeking to know the land better. If I am traveling from the North of England to London, I always try to change at York, to the hourly nonstop train to the capital. The feeling of peace and irresponsibility that spreads through me as the train heaves itself out of the station is a special joy. For two hours nobody can bother me. For two hours I will not be disturbed. For two hours I will be enclosed in a warm and comfortable space, again passing through familiar towns and fields along the route so wonderfully described by Philip Larkin in “The Whitsun Weddings“, until the brakes tighten and I am in prosaic London. And it seems to me that everyone else on that train will be similarly calmed and soothed.

Of course, the accursed cell phone and the even more accursed smartphone have penetrated the seclusion. And alas, there are no more dining cars, a delight now almost completely abolished by spiteful managements, and available mainly on ridiculous super-luxury trains such as the pastiche Orient Express. Yet no restaurant meal I have ever had, including the pressed duck at the old Tour D’Argent in Paris (before it became a museum where you could eat the exhibits), has surpassed the breakfasts, lunches, teas, and dinners I have eaten in trains.

I think of the wonderful bacon and eggs, accompanied by soda bread, on the cross-border Belfast-to-Dublin flyer in Ireland; the vast plates of pork and dumplings accompanied by Pilsener beer on the somnolent Zapadny Express from Nuremberg to Prague; the fresh pancakes and maple syrup at breakfast on the California Limited, with antelopes fleeing from the train somewhere between Dodge City and Albuquerque; the first sip of tea from the samovar, served in a glass in an ornate silver holder, on the Red Star night sleeper from Moscow to Leningrad; the first glass of wine on a sunny September evening as the Rome Express, an hour out of Paris, clattered southward past the faintly minatory cathedral tower at Sens. Then there were the toasted teacakes near Grantham on the southbound Flying Scotsman, and the superb galley-cooked steak on the upper deck of the Chicago-bound Capitol Limited, as it climbed westward through the evening into the forests beyond Harper’s Ferry and up the Potomac valley.

Peter Hitchens, “Why I Love Trains”, First Things, 2020-07-16.

February 11, 2026

The rise and fall of the “Western” on TV and in movies

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

Ted Gioia reconsiders his childhood loathing of the TV western (because of massive over-exposure to the genre):

I hated cowboys when I was a youngster. Not real cowboys — I never met a single gunslinger, cowpoke, or desperado in in my urban neighborhood. My loathing was reserved for cowboys on TV.

And they were everywhere.

At one point, eight of the top ten shows on the flickering tube were westerns. And it got worse from there — Hollywood kept churning out more and more cowboy movies and TV series. I tried to avoid them, as did many of my buddies, but it was like dodging bullets in Dodge. There was nowhere to hide.

That’s because our parents loved these simple stories of frontier justice. They couldn’t get enough of them. And when they weren’t watching them on TV, they dragged us off to movie theaters to see The Magnificent Seven (128 minutes), The Alamo (138 minutes) or How the West Was Won (an excruciating 164 minutes).

In 1959, Warner Bros posed some of their TV cowboy stars in a single photo (Source)

[…]

Many aspects of these films still put me off. I struggle with the clichés and tired formulas. But I’ve gradually acquired an affection for the genre — or maybe an affection for the audiences of an earlier day who could put such trust and faith in a sheriff or US marshal or gunslinger for hire.

Do any of us have that kind of faith in any authority figure nowadays? I doubt it. But I wish we could. And that’s impressed powerfully on my mind when I see Gary Cooper take on outlaws in the deserted western street of High Noon. Or James Stewart confront the dangerous Liberty Valance. Or John Wayne battle with a gang of desperadoes in Rio Bravo.

So forget all the shootouts and cattle drives and fancy roping. The real foundation of the western genre was moral authority. And Hollywood never let you forget it — that’s why heroes wore white hats and villains dressed in black.

The audience didn’t even have to think about it.

[…]

Because that’s exactly what happened to the western. Just consider the unsettling film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly — which came out around the time the western genre died. Despite the movie’s title, it’s hard to identify any character in this film as good — instead they merely differ in their degrees of badness and ugliness.

And the same is true of The Wild Bunch or Once Upon a Time in the West and so many other films from that era. There are no heroes on display here, only various pathways into nihilism.

So long John Wayne. Hello Friedrich Nietzsche.

But this made perfect sense. The entire US of A was traumatized by the Vietnam War, and then Watergate — along with assassinations, riots, sex, drugs, and rock & roll. The moral sureness of the Eisenhower years, along with the complacent righteousness of so much of the public started to erode. At first it happened slowly, and then rapidly.

The classic western could not survive this.

January 23, 2026

The Rise and Fall of Watneys – human-created video versus AI slop

Filed under: Britain, Business, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

YouTuber Tweedy Misc released what he believed was the first attempt to discuss Watneys Red Barrel, the infamous British beer that triggered the founding of the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA). His video didn’t show up in my YouTube recommendations, but a later AI slop video that clearly used Tweedy’s video as fodder did get recommended and I even scheduled it for a later 2am post because it seemed to be the only one on the topic. I’m not a fan of clanker-generated content, but I was interested enough to set my prejudices aside for a treatment of something I found interesting. Tweedy’s reaction video, on the other hand, did appear in my recommendations a few weeks later, and I felt it deserved to take precedence over the slop:

And here’s the AI slop video if you’re interested:

Dear Old Blighty
Published Dec 20, 2025

Discover how Watneys Red Barrel went from Britain’s biggest-selling beer to its most hated pint in just a few short years. This video explores how corporate brewing, keg beer, and ruthless pub control nearly destroyed traditional British ale, sparked a nationwide consumer revolt, and gave birth to CAMRA. From Monty Python mockery to boycotts in local pubs, Watneys became a national punchline and a cautionary tale in business failure. Learn how one terrible beer accidentally saved British brewing culture, revived real ale, and reshaped how Britain drinks forever.

#Watneys #BritishBeer #UKNostalgia #RealAle #CAMRA #BritishPubs #RetroBritain #LostBrands #BeerHistory #DearOldBlighty

December 25, 2025

QotD: Christmas dinner

Filed under: Britain, Food, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

An advertisement in my Sunday paper sets forth in the form of a picture the four things that are needed for a successful Christmas. At the top of the picture is a roast turkey; below that, a Christmas pudding; below that, a dish of mince pies; and below that, a tin of —’s Liver Salt.

It is a simple recipe for happiness. First the meal, then the antidote, then another meal. The ancient Romans were the great masters of this technique. However, having just looked up the word vomitorium in the Latin dictionary, I find that after all it does not mean a place where you went to be sick after dinner. So perhaps this was not a normal feature of every Roman home, as is commonly believed.

Implied in the above-mentioned advertisement is the notion that a good meal means a meal at which you overeat yourself. In principle I agree. I only add in passing that when we gorge ourselves this Christmas, if we do get the chance to gorge ourselves, it is worth giving a thought to the thousand million human beings, or thereabouts, who will be doing no such thing. For in the long run our Christmas dinners would be safer if we could make sure that everyone else had a Christmas dinner as well. But I will come back to that presently.

The only reasonable motive for not overeating at Christmas would be that somebody else needs the food more than you do. A deliberately austere Christmas would be an absurdity. The whole point of Christmas is that it is a debauch — as it was probably long before the birth of Christ was arbitrarily fixed at that date. Children know this very well. From their point of view Christmas is not a day of temperate enjoyment, but of fierce pleasures which they are quite willing to pay for with a certain amount of pain. The awakening at about 4 a.m. to inspect your stockings; the quarrels over toys all through the morning, and the exciting whiffs of mincemeat and sage-and-onions escaping from the kitchen door; the battle with enormous platefuls of turkey, and the pulling of the wishbone; the darkening of the windows and the entry of the flaming plum pudding; the hurry to make sure that everyone has a piece on his plate while the brandy is still alight; the momentary panic when it is rumoured that Baby has swallowed the threepenny bit; the stupor all through the afternoon; the Christmas cake with almond icing an inch thick; the peevishness next morning and the castor oil on December 27th — it is an up-and-down business, by no means all pleasant, but well worth while for the sake of its more dramatic moments.

Teetotallers and vegetarians are always scandalized by this attitude. As they see it, the only rational objective is to avoid pain and to stay alive as long as possible. If you refrain from drinking alcohol, or eating meat, or whatever it is, you may expect to live an extra five years, while if you overeat or overdrink you will pay for it in acute physical pain on the following day. Surely it follows that all excesses, even a one-a-year outbreak such as Christmas, should be avoided as a matter of course?

Actually it doesn’t follow at all. One may decide, with full knowledge of what one is doing, that an occasional good time is worth the damage it inflicts on one’s liver. For health is not the only thing that matters: friendship, hospitality, and the heightened spirits and change of outlook that one gets by eating and drinking in good company are also valuable. I doubt whether, on balance, even outright drunkenness does harm, provided it is infrequent — twice a year, say. The whole experience, including the repentance afterwards, makes a sort of break in one’s mental routine, comparable to a week-end in a foreign country, which is probably beneficial.

George Orwell, “In praise of Christmas”, Tribune, 1946-12-20.

December 13, 2025

“Europe must prepare for ‘scale of war our grandparents’ endured”

Filed under: Europe, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, @InfantryDort responds to the NATO Secretary General’s announcement that Europe should gird its collective loins for combat on a scale similar to the World Wars:


Fighting Like Our Grandparents, Without Becoming Like Them?

What a strange moment it is to belong to the warrior culture in the West.

To watch your society fracture in real time. To see cohesion traded for comfort. And to be told to prepare for wars of national survival while the nation itself dissolves at home.

Europe, in particular, has already spent its strongest men. Bled out across the killing fields of the 20th century. Now it is warned to fight like its grandparents once did.

The warning is correct, but not in the way people think.

Violence, chaos, entropy … these are the default state. They pull on human societies the way gravity pulls on matter. Left alone, everything falls.

Function requires resistance. A rocket escapes gravity only by burning fuel. An exoskeleton works only by pushing back. Civilization is no different.

You cannot fight a war of national survival abroad when the nation no longer coheres at home. When families are exposed, trust is gone, and the social fabric has been cut to make the room feel larger.

It’s not strength. It is just removing load-bearing walls and mistaking openness for stability.

The lesson: Our grandparents didn’t just fight with weapons. They fought with unity, discipline, restraint, and shared purpose.

Without those, you don’t get their victories. You only inherit their destruction. And all without the moral scaffolding that survived it. Wars are not won by nostalgia. They are won by societies that still function.

TLDR: Few sane men will go off to war in a far away land when hordes of their previous battlefield opponents have moved into their neighborhoods.

Update, 13 December: On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, John Carter responds to Rutte’s speech:

These are just empty rituals indulged in by the clerisy of hermetically sealed institutions. They have no ability to mobilize for war. The financialized economies they preside over have been hollowed out by deindustrialization, over-regulation, and climate hysteria. The populations of their countries are deracinated, alienated, and ethnoculturally fragmented. They did all of this themselves, deliberately and systematically, over decades, because it benefited them to do so. It made the institutions stronger, and enriched them as a class. That it came at the expense of the viability of their societies didn’t bother them in the slightest.

Membership in the institutional theocracy is predicated on absolute alignment with internal narratives. Those narratives are simply whatever the theocracy needs to believe at any given moment to justify itself. At the moment, they need to believe that nothing fundamental has shifted in Western countries since the end of WWII, in particular that it is still in principle possible to mobilize a (non-existent) industrial base for wartime production, and that it is possible to motivate an alienated population to fight. They also need to believe that the loathing with which native populations regard them is inorganic, a function of narrative warfare from the troll farms of foreign adversaries, and that this resentment can be effectively curtailed with censorship and propaganda.

Internally they see themselves as very serious people, statesmen and generals, guardians of the moral order.

From the outside, they are clowns engaged in a pantomime.

December 7, 2025

“Anglofuturism” – slogan or beacon of hope?

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

At Without Diminishment, Robert King argues for Anglofuturism as the most hopeful path forward from the morass all of the Anglosphere seems to be bogged down in:

(From the Ministry of Space, created by Warren Ellis, 2004.)

Born in the digital backwaters of podcasts and Substacks, Anglofuturism has climbed into public view like a rocket nearing the King Charles III Space Station, gathering both attention and indignation as it ascends.

The New Statesman mutters about it being rooted in “nostalgia“, while the far-left activist group Hope Not Hate insists it is something deeply sinister. Yet their agitation merely confirms a familiar sequence. First, they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win.

At its essence, Anglofuturism is a project of civilisational renewal.

It begins with the conviction that Britain’s decline is not destiny but a decision, and the consequence of decades of political miscalculations that consider the national story to be over, Britain’s very own “end of history”.

Just turn on the news and you will see evidence for this everywhere. Strategic islands like the Chagos Islands surrendered to the vassals of hostile powers. A once-thriving energy sector crippled by the ritual self-flagellation of net zero policies, despite abundant North Sea oil resources.

The capital city of London, once envied for its composure, now deafened by the shrill chants of imported grievances, “From the river to the sea”. Britain was once a country whose streets were said to be paved with gold, according to the legend of Dick Whittington.

Today, they are paved with boarded banks, betting slips, and vape shops. The country’s future is already playing out in London, a place where the nation of Britain has faded into the idea of “the Yookay”. Britain is told that because it once colonised, it must now invite colonisation, that because it once conquered, it must now submit.

The result is a people bending ever lower in the hope of forgiveness from a self-appointed virtuous minority at home, and from the ever-growing numbers of strangers who now claim the country as their own.

Anglofuturism is the vanguard against this ideology. It insists that love of one’s civilisation is a duty, not a sin. It binds identity to optimism, and pride to ambition. It seeks to remind Britons that its best days may yet lie ahead, but only if it learns once more to have confidence in itself.

[…]

The policy of splendid isolation simply will not work for the twenty-first century.

Enter CANZUK, the proposed alliance of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Four constitutional monarchies, four democracies, and four maritime powers linked by law, language, and lineage. Together they would represent over 140 million people and a combined GDP exceeding $6 trillion. It would be a realm on which, once again, the sun would never set.

Our shared day of remembrance on November 11 is a reminder that we partake in traditions born of shared sacrifice.

Such a bloc would not be a re-creation of empire, but a confederation of equals who share the responsibilities of defence and trade, coordinating space and science, and projecting stability from north to south and east to west.

It could stand apart from American turbulence, Chinese authoritarianism, and European stagnation, and be a new civilisational pole rooted in innovation and freedom under common law. It could even be a new contender to lead the free world.

Britain is still a nation successful at exporting ideas like capitalism, liberalism, and, regrettably, Blairism. Anglofuturism could be its most powerful export to the Anglosphere yet.

For those of us at the edge of that world, in Cape Town, Perth, or Vancouver, the message of Anglofuturism is that our story is not over. Our civilisation may be weak, even fading, but it can be revived. Doing this will demand the same courage that built it, in the spirit of the pioneers and soldiers, the engineers and thinkers who shaped continents and defended freedom when it was under siege.

Like this, but better.

October 7, 2025

Big management shake-up at Cracker Barrel’s corporate HQ

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

Back in August, the US chain restaurant field saw a corporation decide that doing what their customers wanted was actually a pretty good strategy … after they’d tried the opposite and nearly gone the way of Bud Light:

Last week was the Red Wedding for Cracker Barrel.

Some senior people who were in the headquarters office last Monday weren’t there anymore as the weekend drew near, some old managers from an earlier corporate culture came back to rewind the clock, and the branding consultant that advised on the now-fatally-wounded rebranding effort was sent packing. The new logo departed. The redesigned stores were acknowledged as a failure and an embarrassment.

[…]

See what they said about the redesign? “We won’t continue with it”. The whole thing collapsed, a $700 million rebrand that slammed into a concrete wall and exploded.

It remains to be seen how much the rebranding of the rebranding will matter, and this is what Cracker Barrel stock looks like in the last month:

Now, a reminder: The New York Times columnist David French explained, just over a month ago, that the controversy over Cracker Barrel’s rebranding was an absurd fake crisis ginned up by right-wing idiots who were just pretending that something had gone wrong at the company. Along with the Sydney Sweeney thing, he concluded that we were watching some “completely frivolous and meaningless cultural disputes,” examples of the way “right-wing media both mobilizes its base and bends political reality”. If you believed that the Cracker Barrel rebranding was poorly done and would alienate the company’s customers, you were falling for an invented reality that was completely meaningless and frivolous.

Then Cracker Barrel fired a bunch of managers and its rebranding consultant, abandoned the rebranding, and apologized profusely, while its stock plummeted.

If you listened to David French, if you trusted the op-ed pages of the New York Times to explain the world to you, your understanding of the most basic outline of factual reality was flipped over, turned precisely upside down. He was only wrong about literally every single detail, completely missing what was happening, what it meant, and what would happen in the near future as a result of it. To listen to this idiot is to abuse your own mind, trapping yourself in the confines of an absurd house of ideological mirrors. He is inevitably wrong, completely wrong, reliably wrong to the point of absolute and unyielding madness.

September 9, 2025

QotD: The horrible 1970s

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

It should be noted, though, that it really was kind of gross to be alive during the ’70s. You can’t unsee all those hairdos, medallions, and Day-Glo typefaces. You just kind of have to put your head down like a shell-shocked veteran and stride your way grimly through a happier age.

Colby Cosh, “Cinema: recently seen”, ColbyCosh.com, 2005-08-19.

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