Quotulatiousness

August 30, 2026

The unspoken dividing line between “BCE” and “CE”

Filed under: History, Religion — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’m not a trained historian, so I don’t know if it’s a guild requirement for modern historians to ostentatiously avoid using traditional “BC” and “AD” to denote historical dates or if it’s just another sop to the easily offended like so many other things:

An Olmec head, By Marshall Astor (Life on the Edge), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19349056

Although I work primarily as a computer programmer, my college degree is in History. Over the years, I have retained a high level of interest in history, both recent and ancient.

A few months ago I listened to a Great Courses presentation about the Olmecs — one of the lesser known Central American civilizations — given by Dr. Ed Barnhart. The course lived up to its name and taught much about the history and society, as well as the giant heads, of the Olmecs. However, one thing bothered me about Dr. Barnhart’s presentation.

Dr. Barnhart generally uses CE and BCE for dates. CE stands for “common era” and BCE stands for “before common era”. Other than that fact, CE perfectly coincides with the previous AD and BCE perfectly coincides with BC.

Perhaps Dr. Barnhart should not be singled out. He is not alone in the use of these terms. In fact, the majority of historical presentations these days employ CE and BCE. And it may be that using these terms is not a personal decision; rather, it may be that a department-wide or even university-wide convention.

However, in my view, using CE and BCE instead of AD and BC is not okay. As an (amateur) historian, I believe that it’s bad for history. And as a Christian, I find it a bit offensive. I will probably never have the opportunity to tell Dr. Barnhart why he should not use CE/BCE, but if I did, here’s what I would tell him:

1) The prime commitment of a historian should be to history. A historian should be careful that the information presented is the most accurate, the most complete, and most contextually grounded. CE/BCE fails to be most accurate because it takes an obviously true historical fact — that the currently used Julian/Gregorian calendar is based on the birth of Christ — and obscures that fact. It is not the most complete because there is no way on its own to understand that CE/BCE means to present the same system as AD/BC. To truly understand the system, the AD/BC system would need to be explained. The AD/BC system can stand on its own, but the CE/BCE can only be understood along with AD/BC.

And it lacks context because the terms “common era” and “before common era” give no indication as to what exactly is the demarcation between the two eras. Since CE/BCE gives no referent, a student could reasonably conclude that the dating system is entirely arbitrary. For these reasons, using CE/BCE leaves students or listeners knowing less than they should and perhaps even having a wrong understanding of the dating system. AD/BC preserves important historical information. CE/BCE does not. On the basis of that alone, CE/BCE should not be used by historians who want to be as accurate and complete as possible.

2) Using AD/BC does not require anyone to profess Christianity. Some might say that AD/BC unfairly burdens non-Christians, but the terms Anno Domini and Before Christ are clearly not confessional statements. There is no serious historical dispute that Jesus Christ existed in approximately the time and place given in the Scriptures, and AD/BC merely recognizes that this is the basis for the year numbering system. Anno Domini, or year of the Lord, doesn’t require the user to say “my Lord” or otherwise confess Christianity, just to recognize that the calendar was created by people who did confess Christianity. That is an important fact, not something to be hidden.

The fact is that every calendar starts dating from something, generally from an important event. Some examples are:

  • Roman dating: years counted from the traditional founding of Rome, Ab Urbe Condita, conventionally placed in 753 BC.
  • Hebrew calendar: years are traditionally counted from a calculated date for the creation of the world.
  • Islamic calendar: years are counted from the Hijra, Muhammad’s journey from Mecca to Medina in AD 622.
  • French Republican calendar: years were counted from the establishment of the French Republic in AD 1792.

To use a particular calendar says nothing about one’s religious beliefs.

August 24, 2026

It’s no wonder that people have lost trust in formerly prestigious institutions

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

Lorenzo Warby on the two cases that are currently front-and-centre with the terminally online left, one a recently deceased academic grifter and another a confessed multiple murderer (of her own children):

We are currently observing attempts to turn the late Jason Arday — a fabulist who produced nothing of intellectual merit — and Lindsay Clancy, a woman who murdered her three children, into moral heroes. The former is allegedly a martyr for the cause of anti-racism and care for the neurodivergent/autistic, the latter for motherhood — or at least postpartum depression and psychosis. Both are construed as victims.

There is a real push to put the truly awful into Affluent White Female Urban Liberal. It’s almost as if there are some issues with feminisation. On the other hand, a woman being an open supporter of Lindsay Clancy is an excellent negative signal for men.

Just when you think progressivist purity spirals can’t get any worse, they do. Thus, we not only get the above hagiographical elevations of the grotesquely unworthy, we also see the physical mutilations of trans-surgery used to rehabilitate female genital mutilation.

But, of course, any such surprise is having far too contemporary a focus. Left-progressivism has a long history of elevating some of history’s most appalling monsters, most tyrannical mass murderers — Lenin, Stalin, Mao — as heroes of world-history and human liberation.

The use and abuse of moral mascots

The worse a group or individual behaves, the more progressives like them. If a group is noted for high levels of violence or various social dysfunctions, left-progressives adopt them as moral mascots.

The concept of such mascots comes from economist Thomas Sowell. Mascots are people or individuals that “the Anointed” — those who see themselves as at forefront of human liberation — adopt to be extolled and defended. This is connected to Thomas Sowell’s analysis of Constrained and Unconstrained political visions.

The Constrained Vision says there are no complete solutions, there are just trade-offs, all the way down. Human nature is one of those constraints. Biologist E.O. Wilson‘s famous observation about Communism — great idea, wrong species — is a pithy expression of the Constrained Vision.

In the Constrained Vision, history is an enormous memory well where we learn about ourselves. This is because the humans who made history are just like us. Their experience, their triumphs and failures, even their mundanities, are lessons for us.

History is contingent, it has no particular direction. The Constrained Vision finds it easy to take people’s choices as having authority because there is no direction of historical travel to which they must conform.

The Unconstrained Vision denies that human nature is a constraint in that way, so it’s possible to create a society of transformative human liberation. History is not a source of lessons, but a record of failures to achieve that liberation — a record of corruption and sin.

Moreover, history has a proper direction — towards transformative human liberation or another, related telos. Hence, choices that support that direction are legitimate, those that go against it are not. The politics of the Unconstrained Vision turns elections into legitimating rituals: citizens’ votes are blocked from overturning any of the policies the Anointed have decided represent history’s proper direction.

The Anointed evince what writer Wesley Yang labels the non-electoral politics of institutional capture. If you want to see that in its most complete form among the Western democracies, PM Tony Blair’s debauching of Britain’s constitutional order through quangoes, human rights legislation that empowered judges over elected ministers, and devolving decision-making to the EU — thereby massively increasing the degree to which elections became legitimating rituals that change remarkably little — is the current gold standard case. However, all Western democracies face similar pressures, albeit to considerably differing degrees.

The commitment of The Anointed to this vision of human liberation gives them such a sense of trumping moral authority that they see themselves as owning morality. They have the right-to-decide what is moral and then to impose their decisions on everyone else.

August 22, 2026

The WEF – first up against the wall come the revolution

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski considers just how the lizard people of the World Economic Forum came to be “The People Who Decided They Should Run Everything”:

Every year in January, the most important people in the world travel to Davos, Switzerland — a ski resort — to discuss the problems facing humanity. They arrive on private jets. They stay in five-star hotels. They are protected by five thousand soldiers and police. They eat very well. They talk about inequality, climate change, and the need for ordinary people to consume less. Then they fly home on private jets.

This is not satire. This is the schedule.

1. Klaus Schwab founded the World Economic Forum in 1971 – a German professor who decided that the solution to the world’s problems was to get the people who ran the world’s largest corporations into a room with the people who ran the world’s governments, and have them agree on things before anyone elected them to agree on things. If you control the conversation before the democratic process begins, you control the outcome without being subject to it. Davos is where the agenda is set. Everything after is implementation.

2. The Young Global Leaders program is the masterpiece. Founded in 2004, with its predecessor, Global Leaders for Tomorrow, running since 1993. Together the programs have formed: Justin Trudeau, Emmanuel Macron, Jacinda Ardern, Mark Zuckerberg, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, and the health ministers who designed most of the Western world’s COVID response. The pipeline runs continuously. The list is published on the WEF website. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is an alumni directory.

3. The program works because it operates before power, not after. By the time a Young Global Leader becomes a prime minister or finance minister, they have already spent years in the same rooms, sharing the same assumptions, networking with the same people. They don’t need to be told what to do. They already know – because they were formed together, in Davos, before anyone gave them the job. The Fabian Society permeates institutions over generations. The WEF does it in a long weekend, with better catering.

4. The Great Reset — announced in 2020 with timing that should give everyone pause — is the program stated plainly. “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” Build Back Better. The Fourth Industrial Revolution. The language is always the language of inevitability: this is happening, the question is only how to manage it. The managed future, designed by the people in the ski resort, for the people who were not invited.

5. The irony is structural. The people most loudly “concerned about inequality” meet in one of the most expensive places on earth. Those most “concerned about climate change” arrive by private jet. Those most “concerned about democracy” design systems insulating them from democratic accountability. The gap between the speech and the life is visible from orbit. They don’t notice it. Or they notice and calculate, correctly, that nobody who matters will say so.

6. What Davos actually produces is “consensus” – the consensus of people who have implicitly agreed before arriving, because people who disagree don’t get invited. Climate policy, AI regulation, tax harmonization, digital currency – these are not debated at Davos. They are shaped there. The debate happens later, when implementation is already underway.

7. The Young Global Leaders are the tell. A program that identifies, selects, and forms the next generation of leaders before they become leaders is not a networking event. It is a formation pipeline. The Jesuits understood that if you form a person before they have power, you own what they do with the power. The WEF understood the same thing and built it into a global institution.

The question is simple:

Who decided Klaus Schwab should select the world’s next generation of leaders?

Nobody.

He just started doing it.

And the people who run things let him – because increasingly, the people who run things were people he had already formed.

Did you choose them?

August 20, 2026

The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century

Filed under: Books, Education, Europe, Germany, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:

Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.

The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.

The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.

1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.

2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.

3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.

4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.

5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.

6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.

7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.

The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.

The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.

Prove it wrong.

Tell the truth, have courage, and build.

“It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand”

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

On his Substack, Andrew Doyle discusses the fine art of writing libellous things about someone without quite giving enough legally actionable material for the victim to have a chance to retaliate successfully:

Simon Edge on GB News.
Screencap from Andrew Doyle

How does one libel an opponent and get away with it? I’ve lost count of the number of people online who’ve made false accusations against me. Sometimes I’m a fascist, other times a communist. Sometimes I’m a homophobe, other times a degenerate sodomite. Some have branded me a “racist” for supporting Martin Luther King’s ideal of a colour-blind society. White supremacists have denounced me as a traitor for my opposition to racism.

It’s all noise, of course, and best filtered out. These aren’t serious people, and no serious person would believe their smears. However, last week an author called Simon Edge, well-known in gender-critical circles, published a blog post about me that I can only describe as defamatory. He’s very lucky that I’ve no appetite for litigation, but I think it’s worth discussing the nature of his smearing technique because it’s become so common among activists of the more mendacious ilk.

It’s a form of libel by sleight-of-hand. Perhaps we should call it prestidefamation. Here’s how it works. You take a series of unremarkable facts, out-of-context quotations and tenuous associations, arrange them in a suggestive manner, omit any contrary evidence, invite the reader to draw the worst possible conclusion and then congratulate them for drawing it.

Edge has done precisely this. I have a long and well-documented record of opposing fascism and the far right. I’ve written books and articles about it, spoken about it endlessly on television, radio and podcasts. My latest book The End of Woke makes the case against all forms of authoritarianism, and opens with an epigraph explicitly attacking Nazi ideology. Yet Edge has managed to write an article insinuating that I support Nazis. It would be like writing a piece about Oscar Wilde’s robust and unwavering heterosexuality.

Here’s how he did it. Recently, it was announced on X that Oldspeak Books, which bills itself as “Britain’s only centre-right bookshop”, has closed its doors. The manager posted a message on social media to explain.

    Over time, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a welcoming environment due to the constant hostility I experienced. The uncertainty around which customers were genuine, made it hard for me to greet everyone warmly, and my customer service suffered.

This looked like a clear case of cancel culture to me and, since Oldspeak had been kind enough to stock my books, I reposted her message with a comment to the effect that it was a shame that she had been pressurised into closing her shop. This was, according to Edge, my first foray into the murky world of fascist apologism. Who knew it could be so easy?

August 16, 2026

Understanding Canadian politics

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

To an outsider, the ins and outs of Canadian politics must seem quite illogical — and for lots of good reasons — but L. Wayne Mathison offers an explanation that may help:

I think the “constraints” framework explains a surprising amount of Canadian politics.

Canada increasingly governs as though good intentions can overrule physical and economic limits.

We want more housing, but often ignore land-use rules, permitting delays, skilled-trade shortages, infrastructure capacity and construction costs.

We want better health care, but governments can promise “universal access” far more easily than they can produce doctors, nurses, operating rooms, diagnostic machines and hours in the day.

We want rapid population growth, while pretending housing, roads, schools and hospitals will expand at the same speed.

We want reliable electricity while making major generation and transmission projects harder to build.

We want higher wages and stronger public services while giving far less attention to productivity, capital investment and the businesses that ultimately generate the income being taxed.

This is where I think the constrained versus unconstrained distinction is useful.

Politics often treats shortages as failures of compassion or policy design. But sometimes the problem is much simpler: you cannot legislate resources into existence.

I learned that farming. You could have the best plan in the world, but weather, machinery, labour, soil, interest rates and time still had the final vote. Reality didn’t care how sincere you were.

Government faces the same rule.

This doesn’t mean government is useless, and it doesn’t mean every left-wing idea ignores constraints or every conservative understands them. Plenty don’t. But Canadian policy would improve dramatically if every proposal had to answer one basic question:

What are the real-world bottlenecks, and what happens when we hit them?

You can redistribute money. You can rewrite regulations. You can announce targets.

You cannot redistribute houses that haven’t been built, doctors who don’t exist, electricity that hasn’t been generated or productivity that hasn’t been created.

Eventually the physical world collects its bill.

August 15, 2026

QotD: “The progressive is a walking paradox”

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Economics, Europe, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In economics, we cut through noise with a concept called “Revealed Preference”.

If I loudly claim to love vanilla ice cream, yet every time I return from the Mr Whippy van I’m holding a choc-ice, my revealed preference is evidently for chocolate — not vanilla.

Thus the truth of a person’s preferences is revealed through their actual choices and behaviour, not by what they claim to prefer.

It’s unfortunate we can’t simply listen to their words, but they are so oriented toward the external, the aesthetic, and the performative (“Theater Kid Progressivism”) that we must instead look at their proximal behaviours — where they actually choose to live and raise their families, for example, to extrapolate backwards their true feelings on mass migration and its consequences.

This is the lens through which we should try to understand our Progressive class.

The bitterest irony, the irony of ironies, is this: progressives, especially those who voted for it, self-evidently do not feel at home in the societies they helped create.

If they were genuine believers, they would live contentedly amidst their new friends.

Instead, they scuttle off into the countryside, the leafy suburbs, or gated enclaves, abandoning the very demographic transformation they imposed on others.

It is often said that if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any at all, but while this is very funny (and true), there’s more to it.

It reveals a profound non-confluence between their stated attitudes and their actual behaviours, indicative of extreme cognitive distortion.

They protest performatively that open borders and rapid demographic change are a universal good, even moral imperatives and (admittedly less often nowadays) sources of strength.

Yet when it comes to their most intimate revealed preference — where they opt to live and raise their families — they consistently prioritise homogeneity, good schools, and cultural familiarity.

They lobby and vote without end for policies that maximise immigration into lower- and middle class neighbourhoods, then abandon those very communities for pastures anew, safely insulated by postcodes and house prices.

Their revealed preference is that do not want to live in the Canada (or Britain, or America, or Europe) they are busily helping to construct.

They enjoy the vibes, the moral status, the Instagram aesthetics, while quietly falling back to the leafy, high-trust environments their grandparents took for granted.

Progressives love to speak of taboos (indeed if there is a pastime more alluring and intoxicating to the progressive than “breaking taboos”, I am yet to come across it, but I digress) yet is the greatest taboo of all right in front of us after all, carrying a basket of organic fruit and veg from Waitrose?

To interrupt the Progressive in the midst of his communal dream state, to turn our collective eye away from the brave new world they are building for us and to instead look inwards, to look the Liberal cuckoo directly in the eye and put words to the disparity between their words and their actions …

The subject of lawful and legal deportations is increasingly mainstream, yet what of urban renewal and rewilding by means of progressive importations?

The Progressive is a walking paradox, he is both the centre of attention and the ghost at the feast all at once.

Æthelstan, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-14.

August 13, 2026

“Defund the police!” from around day five onwards

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

A grim joke I’ve seen many times on various social media sites features the kind of people who’d agree to defund the police, but not because they want to take it easy on criminals … but because if there are no police enforcing the laws, there’d be no police limiting “bag counts”. With no police to make arrests (and likely no jails or courts to provide some kind of due process), the victims of crime will either surrender to the perps, or get as fully armed as they can manage. You can’t maintain a civil society if everyone has to take on the policing role for themselves everywhere and at all times.

“Defund the Police” by Taymaz Valley – CC BY 2.0

I always laughed at “defunding the police”, because I know how that would go. The people who advocate it are incapable of thinking beyond first-order consequences.

So, let’s suppose major American city X fully defunds its police. How will this play out?

For a short time, criminals will have a field day. They will shoplift, rob, mug, and invade homes to their hearts’ content. Because who’s going to arrest them?

But then their victims are going to arm up. Homeowners, shopkeepers, and ordinary citizens will start open-carrying and shooting criminals. Because who’s going to arrest them?

So far, so good.

Now, here’s the part that isn’t obvious. 60% of index crimes are committed by Black people. Once the shooting phase starts, Black criminals are going to form gangs (if they haven’t already) so they can overwhelm individual targets.

Once Black gang predation becomes routine, the rational strategy for whites and Hispanics and Asians becomes to simply start gunning down groups of multiple Blacks on sight. Because who’s going to arrest them?

The same dynamic applies to any minority with a higher criminal propensity than white people. Which is basically all of them except for Northeast Asians.

Innocents will not be spared. If there are any left — it’s a statistical fact, for, example, that Black women have a higher rate of criminal violence than white men.

The eventual result would be a white nationalist’s wet dream. Minorities dead or keeping very, very quiet in order not to get shot. They might be able to hold mono-ethnic enclaves in the short term, but venturing outside them would be asking for death.

I’m pretty sure this is not what advocates of defunding the police want to happen. But these are the same people who were all gung-ho for police bodycams, and we all know how that turned out.

Update: You can always count on the Babylon Bee to provide timely and informative context for any issues we face in today’s complex world – What If We Abolished Prisons and Defunded the Police?

QotD: Marx was right about “class consciousness”

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

Marx thought the Proletariat would develop class consciousness — that is, solidarity based on their mutual exploitation by the “capitalists” and “bourgeoisie” — and from that all else would flow. Lenin modified that, arguing that The Proletariat would never achieve class consciousness without a “Vanguard Party”. That’s why it’s Marxism-Leninism to this day. Lenin was closer to correct, but with this crucial difference: Instead of leading the Laboring Masses to Socialism, the Vanguard Party has decided “hey fuck the Laboring Masses, we’re getting ours“.

Marx called religion “the opiate of the masses” for a reason — by dulling their pain, it prevented them from realizing their true class position, thus achieving class consciousness, thus sparking The Revolution. What religion really does, of course, is satisfy a deep yearning in the human soul. There is more to life than shit, shoes, and bread. Karl Marx didn’t want to hear that, because his religious yearning was satisfied by his substitute god, Dialectical Materialism, and the half-assed (but very real) ceremonial it produced. Again, there’s a reason every Leftwinger practically from the French Revolution looked like [this]

I don’t know how you say “fake and gay” in Russian, but every single thing in that photograph is fake and gay. A pose. An affectation. And as with their look, so with their behavior. Leftwingers are, and always have been, famously boorish. They have no idea how longshoremen actually act, but they sure think they know, and so that’s how they act — like the worst caricature of a crude, illiterate, drunken longshoreman.

(I don’t know any longshoremen either, but I do know some folks who make a living from the sweat of their brows, and they’d turn Lenin’s head around for him if he came to their neighborhood and started acting like that. The Laboring Masses might indeed be “rude mechanicals” in Shakespeare’s sense — meaning, without too much formal education — but they’re surely not rude in the behavioral sense, because in their world, running your mouth gets you punched in it).

Dressing and acting like that is, quite literally, a religious ceremony for them … and ceremonial can only take place in a designated space, a liminal space that the community respects. A priest can indeed hold a mass on a street corner, but only if the passersby have enough residual respect for the institution of religion not to beat and rob the worshipers while their backs are turned.

The intelligentsia never understood that consciously. They sure as hell understood it unconsciously, though, which is why they immediately self-segregated — getting “sent down to the countryside, to reconnect with the laboring masses” was one of the worst punishments Mao’s boys could dish out to one of their mandarins, and again, there’s a reason for that. The upshot is, the intelligentsia, the Apparat, the Cloud People, whatever you want to call them, are the only ones who developed “class consciousness” in the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary sense …

… and their class consciousness is entirely oppositional. They are not us. That’s their sole criterion for virtue. Whatever we like, they dislike. Whatever we do, they must not do; and whatever we eschew, they must embrace.

Severian, “On Losing the Cold War”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-02.

August 11, 2026

Cambridge has turned into a “Quality Learing Centre”

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

Even as I typed Sunday’s headline, I knew the fallout from the Jason Arday affair wasn’t going to be over quickly: it’s too high profile and gores far too many sacred cows to just fade out of the headlines. On his Substack, Francis Turner remembers what a Cambridge education used to mean and what progressive racists have turned it into now:

Once upon a time I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Back in the day when men were real men, women were real women and Cambridge’s contribution to the national sense of humour were people like John Cleese, Tom Sharpe and Douglas Adams. Cambridge students were well aware that we were at the top of the intellectual tree and generally proud of the fact. In fact for many of us (e.g. your humble correspondent) coming to Cambridge was where we discovered that there were people far far smarter than we were for pretty much the first time in our lives. It was humbling. And once we got over that, exhilarating. You could have discussions about quantum mechanics or code optimizations or whatever with people who understood the concepts at least as well as you did. You could be lectured by professors who had Fields Medals or Nobel Prizes; often they had literally written the standard text book in the field. Sometimes they would drop digs about colleagues or rivals and you had to know that “Tony” was Tony Hoare who was in charge of Computer Science at the slightly inferior other place. And so on. Yes it was elitist. I’d say it was proudly so. Yes there were concerns about there being too many Old Etonians and other “public school”1 students compared to those from state schools but the solution was seen as going out to state schools and ruthlessly headhunting the top students rather than putting a cap on the number of privately educated students.

Some forty years later it seems that Cambridge no longer aspires to such intellectual heights — at least not for some areas of study. It is true that back then we generally held the Education Department and the associated students of Homerton College to be at a slightly lower level of intellect — and since they were mostly of the female persuasion many male chauvinist jokes were made at their expense. Also those of us reading for the more challenging degrees also disparaged some of the less challenging ones (sociology, land economy …) but even the most elitist MCPs agreed that even the ladies of Homerton had some intellectual assets to go along with what John Cleese might have called their attractive large tracts of land. However I doubt that even the ladies studying education back then would have put up with the quality of tuition offered today by professors such as J Arday, PhD.

However it isn’t just that the quality has gone down, what has also happened is that the racism, sexism and disableism has gone up at the same time as a deliberate part of the process. What do I mean by the racism etc. has risen?

Start with this excellent substack by Katy Barnett

You should read the whole thing because it is truly excellent, but the most relevant bit is this:

    Arday’s appointment might make Arday’s enablers feel a righteous glow in the short term — “Look at how wonderful we are, we appointed a Black, disabled scholar!” — but when the web of falsehood disintegrates, it leads people to doubt the worth of all Black or disabled scholars more generally. It also does a disservice to all scholars and students at an institution. From what I have seen on social media, several former Cambridge graduates who had come from less advantaged backgrounds, and had worked exceptionally hard to be admitted, felt particularly betrayed.

    I can understand this: they must feel that their hard work has been mocked. Instead of working so hard, why did they not embroider a story of sadness and use that instead? I, too, have felt this bitterness. Am I fool for not using my disadvantage?

    If you want to know my “lived experience” before you think I’m worth listening to, you can have it. I have suffered from cerebral palsy since birth, because I was born at 29 weeks — and yes, I have proof of this! — but I do not think that this is relevant to my academic work. […]

    I do not think my disability is a reason to promote me, nor do I think it is a reason why I am better than other people. It is certainly not a reason why I am more worth listening to on questions of private law. […]

    Just presuming that someone is worthwhile simply because he is Black and disabled and from a disadvantaged background is patronising. But so, too, is dismissing someone simply because he is Black and disabled and from a disadvantaged background. These two positions are two sides of the one coin: using a simple, superficial heuristic to decide worth, without looking at the reality.

    The sole relevant consideration is does this person produce good work, and can they do what is needed? I worry that the coin may flip in society, and we’ll go to a position where women and those from minority or disadvantaged backgrounds are presumed to be worthless. If the academy continues on this path, they will produce the very thing they fear: a backlash against minorities.

This is bit at the end is exactly the problem. If you promote incompetents to positions they are not suited for because of their gender, race etc. then you inspire everyone to look at other people with the same gender, race etc. and wonder if they too are incompetent. This is not a philosophical point, it is a real practical issue. I know people, some of whom read this substack, who make a conscious choice of choosing the older, white, male doctor if they can because they can be sure that this doctor was not given a helping hand due to his gender, race etc. and that therefore he will be more likely to give correct medical treatment.

Medicine is far from the only field where this is the case. You may recall the DC crash in early 2025 where a female helicopter pilot collided with a jet. There was a lot of commentary wondering whether (or outright saying that) she was unqualified and only got the job because she was a woman of the right (i.e. left) political leaning. I don’t know whether that is true or not — from what I recall at least some of the so-called evidence against her turned out to be rubbish — but the fact that such commentary sounds plausible and the responses are mostly of the form “Sexist!!!” with no evidence provided makes my point. Likewise the Florida university bridge collapse where the primary engineering firm was all female and (IIRC) Hispanic.

The fact that the phrase “DEI hire” exists and that everyone knows that a DEI hire is known to be less capable is the result of this racist behavior. And I do in fact mean racist. To quote Katy again:

    In fact, their attitude strikes me as profoundly racist and not in the least “progressive”. The subtext is, “Black and disabled people can’t manage it, let’s turn a blind eye to any flaws and let this guy in anyway, so we can look good.”

This is the soft bigotry of low expectations.

  1. i.e. private, boarding school

August 9, 2026

Hopefully the last word on “L’affaire Arday”

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

On her Substack, Helen Dale discusses the recently resigned Cambridge professor Jason Arday, the people who positioned him to fail, and what their motivations were in doing so:

Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.

Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off.

Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair.

Oceans of ink have been spilt already on this issue, so I’m not going to relitigate the main background. Instead, I want to make four observations, in no particular order.

1. Oh, the humanities (and social sciences)

The problems across these two large disciplinary areas long predate the idiotic wokery that got Jason Arday appointed to a professorial chair at Britain’s second oldest, second most famous university. Yes, wokery has made them worse, chiefly because the theoretical frameworks animating it — which Lorenzo Warby has written about both here and at his own place — deny the possibility of truth outside that of personal experience. This means people don’t just get their own opinions, they also get their own facts.

[…]

2. Nathan Cofnas is not racist

There are two distinct things going on in the background to the Arday appointment(s). The first is that he was appointed despite being a complete doofus and as dumb as a stump. The second is that while there probably are black candidates out there qualified to be a Cambridge professor, there won’t be many, and they are highly unlikely to be the descendants of slaves (from the Caribbean, the United States, or South America). They’re much more likely to be from a posh Nigerian background, and a particular Nigerian tribe (Igbo).

In the words of computer scientist Eric S. Raymond:

    This is completely predictable to anyone who has spent 10 minutes reviewing the data on racial differences in mean IQ and knows what that implies for the right end of the bell curve.

    The intersection set of people with predominantly sub-Saharan African ancestry with people sufficiently bright to deserve a university professorship is not empty, but it’s vanishingly small. The demand greatly exceeds the supply.

    Which is why we’ve seen this movie many times before, and will again. They can’t help it. Corrupted academia would rather hire thousands of other incompetents than let go of its “anti-racism” to hire on merit alone.

The refusal to grapple with the black-white average IQ gap is astounding, and while the (mostly) white people responsible for appointing Arday look like absolute fools, the black intellectuals who refuse to accept an established fact look both truculent and dishonest. They don’t have to accept it’s genetic. They do have to accept that it’s real. As far as I’m aware, only one major black intellectual, Wilfred Reilly, accepts the existence of the gap (disclosure: I have been a guest on Wilfred’s podcast). If there are others, I would be delighted to know their names.

Two issues fall out of this. The first is that Nathan Cofnas is not racist for pointing it out. Facts are not racist. The second is that if people disagree with Cofnas’s secondary argument that the reason for the gap is primarily genetic, then yelling racist! at him does not prove him wrong. Evidence is what you need if you want to prove someone wrong, not moral abuse.

3. It’s the rule of law, Jim, but not as we know it

The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights — coupled with social preferment — over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.

Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people — and especially humanities and social science academics — think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists — albeit in limited form — in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.

[…]

4. Enter Carter-Ruck, or Journalism v. Law v. a bloke with a blog

It’s been widely — and accurately — reported that junior academic Nathan Cofnas broke the Jason Arday story on his personal blog. However, it shouldn’t have been his job to do. The same (or very similar) research had been done separately by both a retired academic (John Harris) and a journalist with Times Higher Education — an outlet dedicated to the tertiary education sector and owned, ultimately, by Rupert Murdoch. In response to both sets of revelations, either Cambridge or Arday or perhaps both in concert (this is unclear on the facts available to me) instructed Carter-Ruck, the most famous — and aggressive — specialist defamation law firm in the United Kingdom. Historically, Private Eye magazine (often a victim of their attention) referred to them as “Carter-Fuck” and, more recently, “Farter-Fuck”.

Despite the fact that the THE has libel insurance and Murdoch generally defends his publications, the magazine backed down. Jack Grove is the reporter who had his story spiked. I have it on good authority that several Cambridge academics — and perhaps people from other universities — then approached Cofnas with the material that they (and possibly the THE) had collated. Cofnas — being young & junior — is what lawyers call “a man of straw”. Suing him in defamation would benefit no-one, least of all Carter-Ruck. He published, scooping Jack Grove.

August 8, 2026

Larry Correia’s A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia reposts his talking point guide on the issue of gun control:

Looks like it is time to once again post my A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points!

A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.

B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.

C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.

D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.

E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.

F. No matter how trained you are, it is never enough for the hypothetical attacker they make up. Sure, your concealed handgun might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh? Huh? (we call this the Dracula Riding Godzilla rule)

G. If the anti-gun vulture was ever in the military, this makes them a Military Trained Expert. Even though most of the time this means they got to put 20 rounds through an M-16 once in 1992.

H. No matter how many certified MMA bad asses or combat vets go “lol wut, dork? I’d rather have a gun.” the anti-gun Twitter vulture will remain undeterred.

I. Goldilocks Rules apply. No matter how much you know about guns, you’re either too ignorant and dangerous, or you know too much and that makes you dangerous. Whatever amount the anti-gun zealot knows is Just Right.

K. Whatever stats they pull out of their ass are sacrosanct. If you cite any numbers they reflexively scream “SOURCE?!” and then have some reason they won’t accept that source when provided. “The actual FBI Crime Statistics? LAME!”

L. At some point they’ll need to talk about how big our penises are, because guns are for compensation. Obviously the female gun owners are compensating for their tiny uteruses.

M. “I believe in the Second Amendment BUUUUUUUUT-” (insert statist bullshit here)

N. If you insist on using terms correctly and words having actual definitions, clearly this demonstrates you are a fanatic. Words mean whatever they need to mean in that moment, especially legal ones.

O. “Castle Doctrine” is a secret right wing code word that means that you can just shoot whoever you want.

P. Get ready for a history lesson about “what the founders really intended” from some dumb motherfucker who was stoned through every history class in high school.

Q. Everybody knows big blue cities are way safer than the scary red state flyover country.

R. Gun control isn’t racist! Sure, historical gun control was all about keeping guns out of the hands of the “undesirables” like freed slaves, Indians, and the Irish, but that’s totally different now!

S. AR-15s are the most dangerous gun that’s ever existed. It can fire ten thousand ultra deadly murder bullets a second and each one can explode a moose from a thousand yards away. There is nothing this miracle death machine can’t do.

T. lol your AR-15s are utterly useless against a tyrannical government.

U. The NRA is an all-powerful, super evil entity which has tricked innocent Americans into wanting ultra deadly assault rifles, to satisfy their incessant blood lust. They do this through their ultra powerful marketing, like giving out free hats.

V. Anti-gun organizations are all totally innocent grass roots movements made up of moms, orphans, and kittens, funded entirely by bake sales, who just want the best for all Americans.

W. “I grew up around guns” makes you an unassailable subject matter expert on the topic.

X. The gun industry is made up of giant soulless mega corporations who make trillions of dollars off of selling Glocks to preschoolers. This message was brought to you by benevolent small businesses like the six companies that own most of the world’s media.

Y. Even though everything the anti-gunner proposes is ass backwards and would just make the problems they are crying about worse, and everywhere they get their way good people are disarmed while evil doers are empowered…they CARE HARDER than we do. So we’re the real bad guys.

Z. “You sound angry.”

August 6, 2026

More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory

Filed under: Britain, Education, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:

Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle

Cambridge Knew in 2023

On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)

On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.

That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.

In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)

Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.

He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.

[…]

The Claims, Laid Out Together

Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:

  • Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
  • Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
  • Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
  • Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
  • A mother with five degrees.
  • A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
  • Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
  • Deaf in one ear.
  • Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
  • Covered 300 miles in three days.
  • Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
  • Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
  • Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
  • Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
  • Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
  • Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
  • Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
  • Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
  • Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
  • Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
  • Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
  • Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
  • Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.

This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.

That is the real failure.

In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?

Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.

The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.

Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.

It was not enough. And it never should have been.

Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.

Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.

In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.

“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”

The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:

Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.

Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:

The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.

We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.

Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”

It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.

Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.

    As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.

You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.

The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.

The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?

They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.

Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.

The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.

The Goddess That Failed by Janice Fiamengo

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

On her Substack, Janice Fiamengo shares the foreword to her new book, The Goddess That Failed: Feminism’s Unending War Against Men, Families, and Civilization Itself:

Feminism poses a threat to everything good in western culture, perhaps especially to women’s capacity to love, reason, and exercise self-restraint.

I was an adherent of feminism before I became a critic. I have felt its euphoric exultation and its self-flattering conviction of moral purity. Later, I recognized its hubris and moral hollowness.

I am familiar with feminism’s core texts, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Mary Anne Franks, having studied them and believed in them for years. I understand the psychology and the history of the movement because I lived inside it for many years.

Unlike others who have criticized feminism’s excesses, I contend that although there are some moderate feminists, there was never a moderate feminism inspired by reasonable goals and untainted by anti-male fanaticism. Feminism did not go wrong at some point in history, whether after the Second Wave or before, whether in anti-sex or pro-sex zeal. It was always rooted in resentment and envy, warped by utopian longings and false notions of female moral superiority.

Decades of feminist grievance-mongering and accusation have led inevitably to our present time of ceaseless complaints, anti-western causes, hysterical accusation, rampant divorce, a declining birthrate, millions of abortions, and anti-male cruelty. Feminism has undermined and will continue to undermine the stability and viability of all western societies.

From the first occasions when I began to speak and write about feminism in 2012 and 2013, I encountered the same response from feminists: “What you are describing is not real feminism” or “Those feminists do not speak for all feminists”, and so on.

I am regularly accused of hating myself, of hating other women, and/or of seeking male approval. I am accused, by those who have never studied feminism, of not understanding feminism.

It’s true that not all feminists are as fervid as an Andrea Dworkin or a Sally Miller Gearhart. They do not all fantasize, as Gearhart did (to much congratulation and gushing praise), about how much better life would be if the number of males could be reduced to 10% of the human population. They do not rhapsodize, as Mary Daly did, about a decontamination of the earth through such a reduction. They do not make jokes about killing men as a public service, as Mona Eltahawy did.

But it’s also true that such vicious women, and the many others who have lent their malign energies to the movement, have never been disavowed by other feminist leaders. In fact, feminists’ lack of shame before bloodthirsty feminist pronouncements is remarkably consistent.

True, there are many varieties of feminism, not all of them agreeing on every point: radical feminism, socialist feminism, lesbian feminism, post-colonial feminism, intersectional feminism, eco-feminism, animal rights feminism, abolitionist feminism, trans-inclusive feminism, feminism for sex-based rights, maternal feminism, and even (most bizarrely) conservative or reactionary feminism. Some extend their compassion to victim groups other than women, such as trans women, illegal immigrants, Palestinians, or the environment.

Such distinctions do not concern me because none makes a real difference.

None escapes the victim mentality: the belief that the history of humanity up until the present moment has been a history of (privileged, white) men oppressing women and other innocent victims; and that because of their alleged greater suffering and moral innocence, particular care and attention must be paid to women and to their unique capacity for empathy and social justice.

No version of feminism escapes the binary logic whereby the world is divided up into (sometimes intricate, overlapping) categories of oppressor and oppressed, victim and victimizer, to be treated differently and valued differently according to their identity category.

Because it thinks in terms of groups and divides the world into innocent and guilty, feminism is incapable of devising universal principles or pursuing individual fairness or freedom. It is distorted by its victim thinking, incapable of extending empathy to those feminists see as oppressors, and incapable of demanding accountability from those feminists see as victims.

Extreme political polarization

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski sees the current extreme polarization of political views as being no longer merely ideological:

The Left and the Right are not two different ideologies. They have grown apart to become two different civilizations.

What characterizes a civilization is its relation to morality, to truth, to beauty, to wealth – and the relation of people to power and to reality itself. By this measure, the division is not political. It is civilizational. And Feliks Koneczny — the Polish scholar who mapped civilizational systems with greater precision than anyone before or since — described exactly this architecture a century ago.

The Right represents what remains of Western Latin civilization – the tradition that inherits Roman law, Greek philosophy, and Christian morality, and from that inheritance builds: individual liberty, equality before the law, orderly competition between individuals, free speech, private property, subsidiarity, classical beauty, monogamous marriage, the dual system of private and public law, and — most fundamentally — the primacy of morality over law. Not that law is the codification of morality, but that law must be consistent with morality. Power is not above ethics. What is wrong for the individual is wrong for the state.

The Left represents an amalgamation of what Koneczny called Byzantine, Turanian, and other eastern civilizational systems – characterized by centralism, the omnipotent state, the fusion of law and morality into a single power, and the subordination of the individual to the collective. In these systems, whatever power decrees becomes moral by definition. There is no external moral standard against which power can be judged. Hence the centralism, the bureaucracy, the etatism, the social justice that replaces individual justice, the family defined by the state rather than preceding it. And hence the violence, the lies, the censorship – because in a system where power is morality, opposition is not merely wrong. It is evil.

The most fundamental difference: in the Latin civilization, morality stands above law. In the Byzantine-Turanian systems of the left, there is only one law — which is simultaneously the moral code — and it is whatever the ruler decides. This is not a difference of policy. It is a difference of civilizational architecture. It runs all the way down.

Some will say a balance is needed – a yin-yang between order and creative destruction, between conservatism and progress. This was once true. It is no longer. The Left has ceased to be a force of renewal within Western civilization and has become a force for its demolition – operating not within our civilizational framework but against it, with incompatible rules and incompatible values. Different civilizations do not compete like tennis players who accept the same rules. They fight for power with no rules and all available means – violence, lies, and morally incompatible systems. Bringing a gun to a tennis match is not competition. It is conquest.

The good news: most people are not ideologically committed to either side. They are attached to prosperity, to safety, to beauty, to the life that Western civilization actually produces – and they can be brought back to it, once they understand what they are being asked to abandon. The civilizational argument, clearly made, is the most powerful argument available. Not left versus right. Not conservative versus progressive. Latin civilization versus its opponents. Freedom, morality above power, and the individual who cannot be reduced to a subject – versus the state that decides everything, including what is moral.

The good life versus the state oppression.

Once you see the civilizational map, the political map becomes legible. And once the political map is legible, the choice is not difficult.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress