Quotulatiousness

October 9, 2025

Freedom Convoy 2022 – “… proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce”

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

In the National Post, Michael Higgins states the obvious fact that Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, and the rest of the Freedom Convoy protesters were never insurrectionists. Trudeau had decided in advance that the convoy was a maple-flavoured January 6th attempt to overthrow the government — if not an attempt to re-stage the storming of the Winter Palace — and merely waited for the violence to break out and/or the Parliament buildings to be stormed. But nobody other than a few particularly glowy federal provocateurs was interested … because they were there to protest government policy not to start a revolution:

Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister of the day, portrayed them as extremists intent on overthrowing the government.

“This so-called ‘freedom convoy’ called for the overthrow of the government. They called for the Governor General to unilaterally remove the Prime Minister from office,” Mendicino told a Commons parliamentary committee.

Indeed, the Office of the Secretary to the Governor General was inundated with calls and emails by protesters demanding then prime minister Justin Trudeau be fired.

But since the Governor General can’t just decide to sack a prime minister, these email-writing anarchists were particularly inept as well as being constitutionally illiterate.

It was Shakespearean farce, but Liberals like Mendicino were happy to play politics and paint the convoy protesters as lawless subversives bent on destroying democracy.

Although, to be fair, Trudeau only said they were a “small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” — more retrogrades than revolutionaries.

Meanwhile, Ottawa’s Keystone Kops had all the laws, rules and regulations needed to disband the convoy, they just lacked the leadership.

Days into the occupation, Ottawa Police Services chief, Peter Sloly, appeared to have thrown up his hands in resignation, stating, “There may not be a policing solution” to the crisis. Two weeks later, he quit.

In his report, the public inquiry commissioner Paul Rouleau would later criticize the “serious dysfunction within the OPS’s leadership”.

The government theatrics escalated with the imposition of the Emergencies Act, proving once again the Liberal mastery of combining high drama with low farce. Within days, police had cleared the convoy and several other blockades without incident.

This was less the power of the Emergencies Act and more to do with getting the police to just act.

October 6, 2025

Fatherland: Alternate History with a Point

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

Feral Historian
Published 11 Oct 2024

The 1992 novel by Robert Harris is a great example of the otherwise generally mediocre “Germany won WWII” alternate history premise. By removing the regime from its current almost mythologized status as a unique and singular evil, instead portraying it as merely a repressive state in a Cold War, Fatherland illustrates an uncomfortable truth about realpolitik and atrocities.

00:00 Intro
00:55 The Case
02:20 Out of Myth, into the Mundane
06:13 Detente and Bureaucracy
09:11 HBO’s Adaptation
10:01 Ignoring Inconvenient Truths

CORRECTION: Somehow I put up a picture of Bormann when I was talking about Buhler.

🔹 Patreon | patreon.com/FeralHistorian
🔹 Ko-Fi | ko-fi.com/feralhistorian

And my own book, not alternate history, Ninti’s Gate is available on kindle and in paperback,
🔹 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CYXH9BWD

September 26, 2025

“Create no-go zones for federal forces”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR responds to a comment about his three possible futures after the Charlie Kirk assassination (linked here):

    Mike Benz @MikeBenzCyber

    Antifa websites totally open to the public explicitly call to so utterly terrorize ICE that federal agents are physically afraid to enter a city. If the Proud Boys wrote this about the FBI how fast would every single person around that website be indicted by Merrick Garland.

“Create no-go zones for federal forces.’

In one of my previous analysis postings, I outlined three possible scenarios for the future after the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

This corresponds to scenario 3, the one where insurrection edges into a simmering civil war a la Bosnia. I caught some flak in my replies at the time from people who thought an insurrection based in urban areas isn’t practical under modern conditions.

Antifa thinks it is. It’s what they’re planning for.

One of the things I have to remind myself of occasionally is that most people know essentially nothing about Communist theory and Communist revolutionary tactics.

Antifa is running the classic Communist playbook. Make the enemy fight you where you are strong and they are weak — where you have support among the people and (when possible) cover from sympathetic local officials.

Historically that has usually meant fighting from rural areas where the reach of the government is weak. But the Russian Revolution was an exception, and the revolution Antifa is trying to fight is another. Their natural home ground is large coastal cities run by left-wing Democrats.

September 20, 2025

“[V]iolent crime [in Canada] had increased by 30% over the last decade”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

A lot of Canadians are noticing how much social peace has deteriorated in and near major cities, but police and local media increasingly are not sharing full information about suspects — often to avoid accusations of racism. It’s gotten bad but as James Pew points out … it’s just getting worse and worse:

Some of the 18 people charged with violent home invasions and carjackings in the Peel Region, July 2025.

Almost every day we hear new stories of violent crime in Canada. Many of us are shocked into speechlessness. Violent youth offences, home invasions, arsons and assaults are on the rise. The rate of car jackings in the York Region increased by 523% between the years 2019 and 2024. Home invasions in Canada are now a regular occurrence. Last year, Kiernan Green did some number crunching for The Hub. He found that violent crime had increased by 30% over the last decade. And Livio Di Matteo, of the Fraser Institute found that “while Canadian homicide rates remain lower than in the U.S., the Canadian rate has increased at a higher rate since 2014”. In the blink of an eye Canada went from a safe high trust society to a dangerous low trust society. Everything is upside down.

The swarming attack and murder of 59-year old homeless man Kenneth Lee of Toronto in December of 2022 was a somewhat early indication that something was dreadfully off. Eight girls, ranging in age from 13 to 16 attacked Lee, stabbing him with knives and small scissors multiple times. He later died in hospital. Initially charged with second degree murder, ultimately all eight girls had their charges reduced and were sentenced to probation only. The Mayor at the time, John Tory, referred to the judgment as “deeply disturbing.”

So far this year there have been thirteen cases in which youth offenders were charged with homicide in the Greater Toronto Area. The most recent involves a 12-year old who has been charged with murdering a 62-year old homeless man. He had been on a release order at the time of the murder. He was also accompanied by a 20-year-old man named Isaiah Byers. The two went on a spree of unprovoked violent attacks in downtown Toronto, targeting vulnerable individuals. Five in total were attacked with a hammer.

Frustrated with the city’s catch-and-release protocol, the Toronto Police Association recently took to X and asked, “Where are the judges who make these decisions?” And further, in a written statement the TPS pointed out, “Our members are held accountable for the decisions they make and the actions they take. Why isn’t anyone else?”

The Youth Criminal Justice Act (YCJA) is currently protecting the identities of youth offenders involved in shocking levels of violence across the GTA. On July 17th, a 14-year old boy, described as a black youth, was charged with fatally stabbing a 71-year-old woman, Shahnaz Pestonji, while attempting to rob her in a grocery store parking lot. The youth admitted later on a social media livestream that he “didn’t mean to kill the old lady” and was just trying to steal her car.

On August 16th, 8-year old Jahvai Roy was shot and killed by a stray bullet while at home sleeping in his mothers bed. Many bullets were shot that night by thugs outside the Roy home in North York, but tragically one of them passed through a window of Holly Roy’s bedroom and struck Jahvai. She wrote on Facebook, “My baby was preparing for one of his best friend’s birthday celebration. He was so excited he couldn’t sleep!” A 16-year old boy has been arrested, and two others are still being sought by police on Canada-wide warrants: 17-year old Ibrahim Ibrahim of Toronto, and 18-year old Amarii Lindner of Toronto.

On August 23rd a 16-year-old girl was charged with aggravated assault and assault with a weapon after stabbing a woman in her 80s in Scarborough, Ontario. Due to the YCJA, the name of the woman, who is suffering in hospital with life-threatening injuries, was not disclosed by the media. It was reported that the teen and the victim lived in the same residence. The story seems to have vanished. After August 23rd, there are no more media reports.

September 12, 2025

A primer on patterns in past political assassinations

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, ESR shares his observations on common patterns in political assassinations which may be relevant to the investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk:

The Salt Lake City FBI office released these photos of a “person of interest” in the Charlie Kirk assassination.

I don’t know anything other than public information about the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

However, a primer follows about patterns in past political assassinations. I will sketch what scenarios an intelligence analyst would come up with looking at this one.

The first and most important rule in this kind of investigation is: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras.

In political assassinations, as an ordinary murders, the correct suspect is usually the most obvious suspect. Airport-thriller-style convoluted plots and false-flag ops pulled off by unlikely people or organizations are rare in the real world.

Accordingly, when you’re trying to solve a political assassination, the right question to ask is “Who said they wanted him dead?”

Then, you infiltrate those organizations, or arrest a bunch of members, and do contact tracing. Usually you do in fact find your killer that way. It’s not very different from ordinary police work except for the stakes.

There are broadly speaking three different kinds of assassin: the nutter, the zealot, and the pro. They are not difficult to distinguish once you got your hands on them.

Nutters don’t have a coherent political ideology, though they may spout semi-random slogans that political actors can seize on to pretend that they do. They generally have quite an obvious history of mental illness

Before capture, given the kind of public evidence we have now in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, it’s difficult to tell the zealots from the pros by their MO. It used to be easier, but as I noted in a previous post sniper doctrine and technique have been leaking into popular culture for decades.

It’s easier to spot the nutters; they tend to have poor forward-planning capacity. A very obvious way this manifests is a weak or non-existent plan for exfiltrating after the hit. Thus, the nutter is very likely to get caught quite soon after the assassination, often at the site.

This also produces a false-prominence effect – people think political assassins are more likely to be nutters than is actually the case.

Pros – professional assassins working for intelligence agencies or militaries – are also rare. They do occasionally strike – as when, for example the Bulgarian secret service whacked Pope John Paul – but high-profile public assassinations carry a risk of diplomatic and political blowback the most nations are unwilling to assume.

Also, trained assassins are a scarce resource and exfiltrating in the hue and cry following a very public assassination is chancy. Usually you’re going to send them against more obscure targets like exiled dissidents that you think might still be dangerous, hoping not to trigger a full law-enforcement and counterintelligence response.

There’s been talk in some of the wackier corners of the Right that the Mossad did this one. No analyst would take this seriously; the blowback risk to the Israelis is far too high to justify any gain. Same goes for the Russians, though they have a higher risk tolerance than the Israelis and had a much higher tolerance in Soviet times.

In the case of Charlie Kirk it’s pretty high odds we’re looking at a zealot. That’s usually the way to bet, and in this case, the quality of his exfiltration plan and the fact that he has successfully disappeared raises the odds.

Given all these factors, LEOs are going to be looking for zealots associated with domestic organizations that said they wanted Charlie Kirk dead.

Yes, this seems boring and obvious. The main point I’m trying to drive home here is that the boring and obvious theory about a political assassination is usually the correct one.

Accordingly, the first place investigators of the assassination of Charlie Kirk are going to be looking is gun clubs associated with Antifa and the hard left, like the John Brown Gun Club and Redneck Revolt.

It’s not certain that Kirk’s assassin is a member of one of those groups, but if you had to place a bet that would be where to put it.

Update: while I was composing my analysis there was a leak from inside the ATF. They found a .30-06 with engravings expressing “anti-fascist” and transgender ideology.

As I said: When you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. The obvious suspect is usually the correct one.

And later, on the particulars of this particular assassin’s work:

PSA for those speculating about the sniper who killed Charlie Kirk:

No, the shot he made was not a difficult one, and does not constitute evidence that he was a professionally-trained sniper.

His choice of hide and the quality of his exfiltration plan was impressive. That could indicate pro-level training. Or, it could just mean he played the right videogames.

Information about sniper practice has been leaking into popular culture for decades. It used to be that good practice could enable you to make deductions about the background of the sniper, but that time is past.

Nothing has yet been released about what ammunition or weapon he used. It is highly likely that the bullet has been recovered and identified.

About the most we’re likely to be able to extract from the caliber is whether the sniper used an American traditional caliber like .30-06, NATO-standard 7.62, or Russian 7.62. The latter two cases may not be distinguishable if the bullet is deformed.

Knowing this won’t really tell us anything, as rifles in all plausible calibers are generally available in the United States. Furthermore, if this were a pro-level hit, misdirecting investigators by choosing an adversary or third party weapon is part of normal covert operations doctrine.

All in all, it is not possible to deduce anything of significance about the sniper from the publicly available information. Mistrust anyone who claims otherwise.

QotD: Modern riot-control gear

Filed under: Media, Military, Politics, Quotations, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What the well-dressed riot controller is wearing this year:

I’ve hinted already at my severe disenchantment with the riot control manual. Most of the following will tend to indicate some of why. Note that this is pretty military specific, but you all ought to know what’s happening, what should happen, and what isn’t happening with regards to riot control.

Head: Protection of the head involves also protection of the face, neck, and, especially, the eyes. The standard military issue Kevlar helmet is adequate for protecting the head from blunt force trauma and even some bullets . It does nothing for the face. There are shields that attach to the helmets to protect the face and which usually reach down enough for neck guard. However, after a cursory search or three for what’s on offer now, as with the old style ones I discussed previously, they can be blurred and ruined with solvents. Yes, this would seem to include polycarbonate as well; that’s how pieces of Lexan are glued together, actually. It’s a problem. Neither can I find a face shield that is glass over Lexan, though they may exist.

Moreover, while there are masks – nicely intimidating motorcycle rider masks, for example – that are black and which could have relatively cheap replaceable clear eyepieces made, they are close fitting, hence would interfere with donning the protective mask when it comes time to use RCA or when smoke from burning buildings gets to be a bit much. The only solution I can see is twofold: 1) Have a ready supply of extra face shields on hand, and 2) make the immediate penalty for attacking a mask with solvents a reasonably severe beating with some kicks and stomping.

Special Tip #1: If you’re using your issued helmets, troops and commanders, turn the camouflage band around so the rioters can’t see your name. This is for two reasons. One is to prevent personal retaliation against your men or their families. The other is to send a message the rioters will understand very clearly because they’re using anonymity for the same purpose, to stay out of court. In other words, the message you send is, “Get close enough to this soldier or policeman for him to hurt you and he will, all the more readily because you can’t identify him for civil suit or criminal complaint.

Chest: The current issue torso armor seems adequate for most threats it will encounter in riot control, but, at thirty-three pounds, strikes me as awfully heavy for an activity that is already about as physically intense as a battlefield, if not even more so. With an E-SAPI plate in front, that runs nearly to forty pounds, which is simply too damned much. There is room for some minor weight savings, as will be shown below, under “Protective Mask.”

There are lighter and quite likely better armor suites coming along or already on hand for the special operations folks, but if they are not available for a unit tasked for riot control, I’ll have to say, “Suck it up; wear the vests you have; keep about ten percent of your force in reserve, unarmored but ready and drilled to suit up in a hurry, to relieve people who become exhausted from the weight and heat retention.

Special Tip #2: You want the armor not only to protect your men, but also to protect them enough to keep them from losing their tempers and running wild. When they hurt somebody, it needs to be because the commander wants that somebody hurt, that the mission is advanced by that somebody being hurt, and not because of a breakdown in discipline.

Armament: For a number of reasons, I recommend against using bayoneted rifles. The downsides are numerous, so I’ll limit myself to a few. 1) They require both hands; this means that the riot controller cannot use a shield. 2) The act of fixing bayonets, all on its own, constitutes deadly force. Yeah, just fixing them. So you won’t be allowed to do it. 3) That means you end up with this bullshit:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Power_(photograph)

Instead, use batons. However, for that I have no less than two tips.

Special Tip #3: Grease the last eighteen inches or so of the batons with something non-water soluble, like Vaseline. No, this is not as an aid to anally raping the rioters with the batons, however tempting that may come to seem. Rather, it is to keep the rioters from snatching your batons away, which snatching encourages them to no end. If you don’t have petroleum jelly handy, thicker rifle lubricant, like LSA, can work, but spread it very thinly, so it doesn’t run.

Special Tip #4: Drive finishing nails into the ends of your batons and snip them off to leave about an inch sticking out. No need to sharpen the part sticking out; it’s sharp enough to penetrate and leave a painful puncture wound, whether directed at arms or torsos or thighs or groins (ouch!).

Shields: There are any number of makers of perfectly serviceable riot control shields, some of which are, although frightfully heavy, bullet proof. If you need bullet proof shields, I would suggest that you’re way past the point of suppressing a riot and already involved in a civil war. In that case, shoot back accordingly.

Assuming for discussion’s sake, however, that we aren’t quite at that point yet, the shields are extremely useful. They deflect rocks and bags of shit. They can cause a Molotov to go off somewhere other than on the riot controller or at his feet. They are, themselves, offensive weapons. As Suetonius said, just before kicking Boudicca’s Britannic ass: “Knock them down with your shields, then finish them off with your swords”.

The world being as it is, however, full of iniquity and injustice, when Battalion X of the YYth division gets alerted for riot control, the shields will probably not be available. A careful search by J4 will show that “They are either in Iraq or were left behind on Johnson Island, lest Greenpeace show up some day. Or maybe they were turned into a reef for some endangered fish. Who knows?” Hence, make your own. The example below was made by one of the handier troops of B-3/5 Infantry, Panama Canal Zone, in 1983. It’s just half inch plywood, 19 by 24 inches, though they can be cut larger to fit the larger troops, with arm straps cut from condemned nylon webbing and bolted on. The almost horizontal piece is one shoulder strap from the harness of nylon load bearing equipment, stapled on and serving as a shock pad for the arm. Yes, if you actually have to make something like these do not forget the shock pad. I’d recommend not painting them with unit insignia. We were, at the time, on testosterone overload and wanted people to know who was kicking their butts.

Note, a larger shield doesn’t necessarily protect more, it just moves more slowly to protect what needs protection. These shields are very light and, given the geometry of the matter, able to be moved very quickly indeed to protect any exposed part of the body, to include the thighs and crotch. Speaking of the …

Crotch: Move your/have the troops move their protective mask and carrier from the left hip to right in front of the family jewels. It won’t slow down donning the mask appreciably and it will save a little weight while providing adequate crotch coverage.

Tom Kratman, Twitter, 2025-06-09.

September 9, 2025

Uh-oh. It’s not a good sign to see your town’s name in Not the Bee

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Law — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

We’ve lived in Bowmanville for ten years and in that time the demographics have changed substantially. Some of those changes have been positive, but others have definitely been negative:

Video out of Bowmanville, Ontario, shows Southeast Asian men (do with that what you will) flipping salmon out of a small stream during the annual salmon run back to their spawning locations.

Early September is peak salmon-fishing season. Fisherman across the continent catch millions of fish as they return upriver to spawn.

But it is highly illegal to catch salmon near their actual spawning sites (especially with nets), which includes Bowmanville (upriver from Lake Ontario). It is also unsafe, as the fish die off in mass numbers after spawning, making the meat inedible.

Despite this, migrants have been seen poaching fish in the area for several years (at least).

In the comment section, some people shared stories of their own, including this anecdote from Port Hope, Ontario.

Over the summer, SE Asian men went viral in Muskoka, Ontario, for filming themselves shooting up a local bridge and river. Locals say they have reported such incidents for years, but despite the danger and the leftover environmental pollution, authorities have been slow to act.

September 8, 2025

“Down with this sort of thing!”

Filed under: Britain, Europe, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the free-to-cheapskates part of Ed West’s post on the Graham Linehan case in Britain, he identifies one of the reasons that Linehan’s Father Ted became so popular in the country it was situated in:

I don’t think I’d seen a “down with this sort of thing” placard in the flesh since I watched the Protest the Pope march back in September 2010. Those were the heady days of New Atheism, before the movement evolved into something more explicitly progressive.

The sign references an episode of the 1990s comedy Father Ted, in which the protagonist and his dim-witted sidekick Fr Dougal are forced to protest the screening of a blasphemous new film called The Passion of Saint Tibulus. Among the many catchphrases popularised by the comedy, back in 2010 this one suggested an ironic and gently mocking attitude to religion; that it was ridiculous, rather than evil.

This week, outside Westminster Magistrates’ Court in Marylebone Road, the sign appeared in a rather different context, carried by supporters of Father Ted co-creator Graham Linehan as he faced charges of harassment and criminal damage in an ongoing trial, following an incident at last year’s Battle of Ideas involving a young transgender activist.

Linehan had been bailed before trial, allowing him to travel to the United States to work on a new comedy project. When he arrived back at Heathrow on Monday, however, he was arrested by five armed police officers over three tweets he had posted back in April. The situation was as absurd and surreal as anything that had emerged from the writer’s fertile imagination.

As Linehan described it on his substack: “When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. ‘Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists’. The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.”

The incident is embarrassing to Britain as it faces increasing scrutiny in the US for its poor record on free speech, especially over the Lucy Connolly case. It was unfortunate timing that this arrest happened just as Nigel Farage was heading in the other direction to talk about this very issue in Washington. But Linehan’s ordeal is also part of a much longer and sadder story about the perils of the political meeting the personal.

Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan had worked on The Fast Show before renowned comedy producer Geoffrey Perkins had taken to one of their ideas, about a group of priests stuck on a remote Irish island, proposing that it be written as a six-part sitcom. It was brilliant, and hugely loved, and in its timing was significant.

Conor Fitzgerald wrote of Father Ted that, while well-loved in Britain, in Ireland it is more like “the national sitcom, a piece of light entertainment that nevertheless Says Something Meaningful About Us”. It also appeared at a crucial time in history.

    Not only was Father Ted one of the few successful TV representations of Ireland, it was made during Ireland’s version of the Swinging Sixties, our flux decade of the Nineties. The accelerating collapse of the Church and the exposure of longstanding political corruption coincided with the dawn of the Celtic Tiger years, lending peripheral Ireland a sense of self-conscious modernity. It was a unique national turning point, where our 19th-century past seemed to co-exist with our 21st-century future. In reflecting this upheaval, Father Ted has become not just a social historical document, but a portent of where Ireland stands today.

    When Ted was broadcast, the Church was formally still one of the central pillars of Irish life, but its authority rang hollow. Priests often felt like administrators of a vanished country. And on remote Craggy, Ted, Dougal and Jack mirror this directly. All good sitcoms feature characters who are trapped, but Ted is doubly so: first on his island; and second in an institution people are coming to see as irrelevant. He is still an essential member of the community, more than just a ceremonial functionary for weddings and funerals. But it’s just not clear what the essential thing he does is anymore, beyond being a common reference point that deserves token respect.

    Ted and Ted therefore stand at a crossroads, and capture the more fundamental social change in Ireland at this time: the collapse in respect for older establishment hierarchies generally.

Those establishment hierarchies collapsed across the West in the late 20th century, first in more secularised nations such as Britain and France and later, and more quickly, in places like Ireland and Spain where the Catholic Church still held on.

The Church lost its power to patrol its taboos, without which it became a sitting duck for satirists; the Passion of St Tibulus was influenced by the protest against Life of Brian, successfully banned in Ireland until 1987. As a teenager, Linehan had to join a film club to watch it, but such censorship was disappearing everywhere.

Father Ted was a work of genius, employing a surreal style of humour that has often been characteristic of Linehan and Mathews, and later seen in their under-appreciated sketch show Big Train – including the brilliantly bizarre sketch in which Beatles producer George Martin is kidnapped by Hezbollah.

The clerical comedy bequeathed numerous catchphrases. “I hear you’re a racist now, Father”, which features in an episode where Fr Ted is wrongly accused of anti-Chinese prejudice, is still a popular meme. Likewise, “These are small, but the ones out there are far away“, Ted’s explanation of perspective to his idiotic housemate, is still used to mock the gormless.

The show was also charming, and its treatment of religion was far from vicious. Rather than being a vitriolic attack on Church authority, Father Ted poked gentle fun at the absurdity of the old order, a kind of mockery which is perhaps a more dangerous threat to a belief system that relies on awe and fear. It was innocent, and many years later Linehan said he would find writing Father Ted much harder in light of the abuse scandal.

September 4, 2025

They can’t catch actual criminals, but they are quite capable of arresting social media users

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle hopes that the farcical performance by British police in sending five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan as he stepped off the plane will be a tipping point:

How many more controversies will it take? The arrest of comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers as he landed at Heathrow Airport has become an international news story because it so self-evidently tyrannical. The stress of the ordeal raised his blood pressure to an alarming degree and he was rushed to hospital. With the help of the Free Speech Union, Graham is now suing the Metropolitan Police. You can donate to his crowdfunder here.

It is reassuring to see that some action is being taken against such chilling state overreach, but when will our politicians follow suit? Many of us have been warning about this ongoing assault on liberty for many years, and at every watershed moment we’ve been led to believe that something will be done. Then, inevitably, the “blob” is activated and swallows up any potential for progress in its viscous and undulating folds.

So when Sir Mark Rowley, head of the Metropolitan Police, complains that the police are acting on unclear laws, and that the responsibility for the maltreatment of the likes of Graham lies with those in power, he’s overlooking the impact of the activist middlemen. Let’s not forget that the Home Office has twice instructed the College of Policing to stop the recording of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs) and has been ignored. Or that the chairman of the College of Policing, Lord Herbert, said the solution to the complaints about NCHIs might be to rename them. As though the public’s concerns about this brazen authoritarianism might be assuaged with a touch of rebranding.

Rowley’s buck-passing is likewise inadequate. He claimed that Graham’s arrest was necessary because officers “had reasonable grounds to believe an offence had been committed”, which is palpably untrue. He said: “I don’t believe we should be policing toxic culture wars debates and officers are currently in an impossible position”. He also made clear that police would continue to behave in this way “unless the law and guidance is changed or clarified”.

But this is precisely the problem. At present, a quango called the College of Policing trains officers in England and Wales. In my article for UnHerd about Graham’s arrest (which you can read here) I make the case that the College of Policing has become woefully unfit for purpose due to activist capture. For a long time, agitators within the system have reinterpreted and fudged the actual law in favour of what they would like it to be. This has led to some police acting in potentially criminal ways. Most egregiously, there is clear evidence of systemic bias against gender-critical individuals within the police force, and a reluctance to apply identical standards to trans activists who routinely post threats of death and rape and are rarely investigated for it.

In the wake of the Linehan arrest, Tom Knighton wonders why the US isn’t treating the UK as it would any other tyranny where free speech and other civil liberties are denied to the people on a whim or a suspicion:

The United States has a history of dealing with tyrannical governments, who oppose tyrannical governments we like even less. We worked with Saddam Hussein, for example, because he was at war with Iran.

But we never stopped pretending these weren’t tyrants.

So, it’s time we start treating the UK just the same.

The latest incident was a well-known comedian from the UK being arrested over a couple of jokes.

    Something odd happened before I even boarded the flight in Arizona. When I handed over my passport at the gate, the official told me I didn’t have a seat and had to be re-ticketed. At the time, I thought it was just the sort of innocent snafu that makes air travel such a joy. But in hindsight, it was clear I’d been flagged. Someone, somewhere, probably wearing unconvincing make-up and his sister/wife’s/mum’s underwear, had made a phone call.

    The moment I stepped off the plane at Heathrow, five armed police officers were waiting. Not one, not two—five. They escorted me to a private area and told me I was under arrest for three tweets. In a country where paedophiles escape sentencing, where knife crime is out of control, where women are assaulted and harassed every time they gather to speak, the state had mobilised five armed officers to arrest a comedy writer for this tweet (and no, I promise you, I am not making this up.

    … and then, a follow up to that one.

    When I first saw the cops, I actually laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “Don’t tell me! You’ve been sent by trans activists” The officers gave no reaction and this was the theme throughout most of the day. Among the rank-and-file, there was a sort of polite bafflement. Entirely professional and even kind, but most had absolutely no idea what any of this was about.

While the officers were kind, they still arrested him. They arrested him because he made some jokes. He spent time in a jail cell, was interviewed by detectives, and was treated like a criminal because he made some jokes.

They waited for him at the airport with five officers, something that would be a clear indication to others that he was truly dangerous, over some jokes.

The first one wasn’t a great joke, really, but that wasn’t the issue. This wasn’t that it wasn’t as funny as it should have been, but that it was made at all.

August 25, 2025

Defending your life against an intruder can get you charged in Canada

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Terry Burton‘s satire-that-is-too-close-to-being-true:

A Recent Case in Ontario

An Ontario man recently had the unthinkable happen: he defended his home. Unfortunately for him, this occurred in Canada, where the laws surrounding self-defence have taken a dive off the deep end of “wokeness”. The police, after deep reflection (and a healthy dose of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training), chose to charge the homeowner and not the intruder. Why?

Let’s break down the madness.

How a Home Invasion Might Go in 2025 Canada:

Homeowner (middle-class taxpayer, not currently oppressed):
“Hello, sir. You appear to have broken into my home and possess a 7-inch knife. May I inquire about your intentions?”

Intruder (career criminal with a social media following):
“I’m just here to grab some electronics, steal your monies, and stab someone if they resist my incursion. It depends on my mood. Don’t profile me.”

Homeowner:
“Of course. My apologies. Would you like a latte while you loot my home? Oat milk? Almond? I don’t want to assume.”

Intruder:
“You’re a colonialist bigot for offering me food.”

Homeowner:
“Understood. Legally, I’m only allowed to resist you in proportion to your level of violence — yet to be ascertained, as determined by a tribunal of academics who’ve never been in a fist fight. That means if you punch me, I can … maybe glare at you. Anything more, and I’m the criminal.”

But what if the homeowner fights back?

In this case, the homeowner managed to grab a knife and defend himself. The intruder was injured — tragically — during this altercation. So naturally, the police arrived and did what any reasonable, DEI officer was instructed s/he must do:

They charged the homeowner.

The intruder? Off to the hospital, flowers sent courtesy of the Canadian taxpayer, and full support from victim services (taxpayer funded). (Yes, really.)

Reasons Police and Prosecutors Declined to Charge the Intruder (some say over-the-top satirical conjecture by the author):

  1. Mental illness – A catch-all excuse for immunity.
  2. Homelessness – Makes all actions justifiable, including assault.
  3. Drug addiction – A disease, not a crime, apparently.
  4. Identifies as female – We must respect self-identification, even during felonies.
  5. Arrested 55 times, 20 for B&Es – Systemic failure, so we shouldn’t blame him again.
  6. Member of a marginalized group – Intersectionality shields all.
  7. Single-parent upbringing – Automatically voids criminal responsibility.
  8. Not yet a citizen – A conviction could hinder his application; we, the state machinery that is, must protect him.
  9. Linked to child porn – But not convicted, so hands off.
  10. Terrorist affiliations – Political beliefs are personal.
  11. Anti-Semitic – But it’s culturally complex, they say.
  12. Illegally entered Canada – A paperwork issue, not a crime.
  13. Gun and drug trafficking – He’s an entrepreneur, really.
  14. Anti-Christian – Expressing a valid worldview.
  15. Anti–Rule of Law – Which now appears to be mainstream.

The Verdict?

The homeowner is:

  • Charged with attempted murder.
  • Convicted of using “excessive force”.
  • Sued in civil court by the intruder.
  • Ordered to surrender his house and retirement savings.

The intruder is:

  • Awarded the home he broke into.
  • Given legal permission to rent the house back to the homeowner’s family.
  • Allowed to visit the property at will.
  • Celebrated in local media for “surviving trauma”.

What Happened to Common Sense?

It died somewhere between Bill C-18, Bill C-63, and the idea that your lived experience matters more than actual law. In a country where, in some jurisdictions, whistling at night is outlawed, but breaking into homes is a misunderstood cry for help, we’ve lost the thread entirely.

When defending your family is labelled aggression, and violating someone’s home is rebranded asocial protest, Canada ceases to be a democracy and becomes a farce.

August 24, 2025

QotD: Police culture

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

Cops live and operate within a strict hierarchy, usually with titles like “sergeant”, “lieutenant”, “captain”, and so forth. Most of them wear military-style uniforms, and an argument can be made that so-called “plainclothes” operations ought to be outlawed. Increasingly, they wear military battledress and carry military weapons.

Cops form a culture all to themselves, like professional soldiers, and usually have little to do with those who are not cops. They do call us “civilians”. […] They also call us “assholes” and say that the public just consists of criminals who haven’t been caught yet. I know because I was there at one time.

Yeah, I understand the theory that they’re civilians, too. I repeat that it’s bullshit. What they are, in fact, is an occupying military force, with strategic bases in every hamlet in the nation — which is why they and their hangers-on lie to us and possibly to themselves about being civilians, too.

They are the very standing army that the Founding Fathers were afraid of.

L. Neil Smith, “Letter from L. Neil Smith” Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-05-01.

August 16, 2025

Britain slides further down the free speech rankings

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At The Conservative Woman, Bruce Newsome reports on the parlous state of free speech in the United Kingdom:

SINCE 2021, the Index on Censorship has ranked Britain as “partially open” (the third tier). Britain ranks 20th for press freedom (worse than Trinidad and Tobago).

Just released: The US State Department concludes that in 2024, Britain’s human rights “worsened” and the British government is partial in protecting rights and freedoms: “Significant human rights issues included credible reports of serious restrictions on freedom of expression, including enforcement of or threat of criminal or civil laws in order to limit expression; and crimes, violence, or threats of violence motivated by antisemitism. The government sometimes took credible steps to identify and punish officials who committed human rights abuses, but prosecution and punishment for such abuses was inconsistent.”

There are three main categorical freedoms being routinely violated in Britain. In US Constitutional law, they are known as speech, assembly and press. British authorities need a reminder.

Let’s fully understand how this started, more than 25 years ago. In 1999, the Macpherson inquiry into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence recommended that police should record hateful incidents as a matter of intelligence, even if the incidents were not criminal. Quangos led by the College of Policing encouraged police forces to record non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs). Police took it upon themselves to visit the supposed haters, to “correct your thinking“, to intimidate them with warnings of escalation, and even to strong-arm them into taking thought-correction classes with the police, at cost.

The 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act criminalises hatred of protected characteristics. It was once sold as a protection against violence, but was soon wielded to criminalise speech.

Police make more than 30 arrests a day (more than 10,000 per year) for online speech and record 66 non-crime hate incidents per day.

Despite several administrations claiming to review and restrict the definitions of hate speech and NCHIs, the definitions remain too vague to prevent police from repressing speech they don’t like. In 2024, the Free Speech Union submitted freedom of information (FoI) requests to all 43 police forces in England and Wales to see if recording went down since a new code of practice of June 2023. The number has actually increased. This year the current government sneakily signalled its appreciation of NCHIs in response to a petition to abolish them.

The latest statute aimed at free speech came into force on July 25: the Online Safety Act. The Bill was marketed as a necessary legislation to protect minors from harmful material such as pornography, self-harm forums, and bullying towards suicide. Like the Hatred Act, the Online Safety Act is being used to suppress politically inconvenient content.

British public authorities (and social media) are suppressing speech and the press selectively with political, religious and ethnic prejudice.

July 27, 2025

I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him

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

It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:

July 8, 2025

The dangers of whiplash when “the narrative” suddenly changes

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

I’ve never been to Los Angeles, although I did spend a couple of weeks working in the San Francisco area a few decades back, so I’m inclined to think Chris Bray is reporting closer to the objective reality than most of the mainstream media are doing:

Federal agents raided MacArthur Park in Los Angeles today, and that’s shocking! It’s HORRIBLE! Why on earth would they do that?!?!?!? (MY GOD, THEY WERE EVEN ARMED!)

Also, here’s local NPR station KCRW, a very few months ago:

Opening paragraphs:

    For more than a century, MacArthur Park, just west of Downtown Los Angeles, has been an urban oasis for residents of the surrounding Westlake District and the wider city. But in recent years, MacArthur Park has also become synonymous with fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that can be 50 times more powerful than heroin. Open fentanyl abuse is now so common, the drug might as well be an unofficial symbol of the park.

    Scenes of fentanyl abuse, and what it does to the body and mind, are everywhere, with people passed out or staring dead-eyed as they clutch drug pipes and small containers of fentanyl residue.

More recently, the Los Angeles County DA’s office announced a bunch of felony indictments for an aggressive retail theft ring that used MacArthur Park to recruit and organize its army of professional thieves:

    LOS ANGELES — Los Angeles County District Attorney Nathan J. Hochman announced today that Blanca Escobar has been charged with receiving over $350,000 in stolen merchandise from retailers including Target, Macy’s, TJ Maxx, CVS, and Walgreens at her business near MacArthur Park.

    “This case is an important step toward cleaning up MacArthur Park, a community that has long struggled with crime and safety concerns,” District Attorney Hochman said. “Combating organized retail theft in close partnership with LAPD and other law enforcement is a priority for my administration. My office will vigorously prosecute this case and send an unmistakable message to criminals: Retail theft will not be tolerated under my watch.”

Note that the DA called the indictments “an important step toward cleaning up MacArthur Park”. Why? Why did prosecutors think MacArthur Park needs cleaning up?

June 26, 2025

NYC doubles down on Luxury Beliefs

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

New York City voters appear to have selected the ultimate “luxury beliefs” candidate as the presumptive next mayor of NYC in Zohran Mamdani:

The luxury belief class has just done the equivalent of plucking a random grad student from an Ivy League Hamas encampment and nominating them for mayor.

Take the New York City subway early in the morning from the outer boroughs and you’ll find it packed with cleaners, nannies, restaurant staff, hotel workers and construction workers coming off the night shift. Some are heading home. Some are just starting their day. It’s “the help” arriving and departing.

Like many other large cities, New York runs on a two-tier system. There’s the professional class clustered in the centre, and there are the people who keep the centre running but can’t afford to live in it.

And so they must endure long rides on public transportation to get to work. They keep their heads down and ignore the trash, the smell, the homeless men passed out across the seats. Working-class commuters see the sprawled-out bodies and try to make it through the ride without being harassed or stepping in puddles of urine.

Many politicians and media outlets act like the public disorder problem is overblown. But fare evasion, open drug use and serious mental illness on the subway are still part of daily life.

It’s in this polarised environment that the mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani has gained traction among the city’s richest voters. At only 33, Mamdani is one of the youngest people ever to run for mayor of America’s largest city. Mamdani, a self-proclaimed nepo baby who has spent four years as an Albany assemblyman and is described by The New York Times as a “a TikTok savant”, has virtually no experience for the job.

And yet, what’s really worrying about this candidate is that he’s a poster child for luxury beliefs.

“Luxury beliefs” — a term I coined years ago — means opinions that confer status on the upper class at little to no cost for them, while inflicting serious cost on the lower classes. And the very people who back Mamdani are the ones who most resemble him: affluent, overeducated, and eager to prove their virtue at someone else’s expense.

As is often true of those who embrace luxury beliefs, Mamdani purports to care most about the working class. He says he wants free buses, government-run grocery stores, and a freeze on rent increases.

But his platform would hurt the working classes a lot more than it would help them.

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