Quotulatiousness

October 31, 2026

Carney’s EU dreams hit a rough patch

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

Canada’s propaganda outlets are doing everything they can to hide the fact that Carney’s EU love affair is going badly.

Although Canadian voters weren’t given any advance notice, the clear goal of Prime Minister Mark Carney is to move Canada deep into the orbit of the European Union. While I think this is a terrible idea, it’s very attractive to the urban managerial class in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver … they tend to think of the rest of Canada as being knuckle-dragging, low IQ chuds anyway, and already consider themselves to be simpatico with the Eurobureaucratic elites. Fulfilling Carney’s dream would go down well with those folks (who are already disproportionally Liberal voters). On Substack Notes, GJS links to an article on the attempt to Europeanize Canada saying:

Urban sophisticates are intoxicated by the idea of Canada “becoming more European” because they envision themselves lolling away the hours swilling café au laits and Beaujolais in quaint city squares, debating the meaning of life and whether Parmigiano Reggiano is superior to Le Gruyère. Tim Hortons, trucks and SUVs, and brutish blue collar workers will all instantly evaporate into the sky, and there’ll be no more talk of crude and barbaric matters like hockey, natural resource extraction, or Nickelback. Don Cherry and Stephen Harper will be erased from our history and we’ll ride bicycles with baguettes tucked under our arms.

At Haultain Research, Marco Navarro-Génie discusses eight things that make Carney’s EU dreams unrealistic and unlikely to come true:

How does a country become more sovereign by joining a union that makes rules but cannot vote on them? Prime Minister Mark Carney told the European Parliament this week that Canada will.

Ursula von der Leyen offered the title of “first associate member” the day before, and he welcomed it, then said at his press conference that the term was hers. But the term has no substance yet. No treaty article defines an associate member, no text sets out what Canada would take on or give up, and the two sides have agreed only to “define together” what the words mean. The sovereignty he promised rests, for now, on an aspiration with a name. The question is how it could ever work.

Start with what nobody disputes. Canada sells roughly seven of every ten export dollars to one customer, and that customer has spent almost two years proving it will use the fact against us. Albertans have been saying this since Quebec and BC blocked new pipelines to tidewater. Ottawa treated the complaint as a regional grievance, killed Northern Gateway, let Energy East die, and bought Trans Mountain only after its owner gave up. If the federal government has finally discovered that Canada needs more customers, the West welcomes the conversion, however late. Closer ties with Europe are part of any sensible answer; Europe is wealthy, democratic, and already bound to us by a trade agreement. Its future, however, is questionable.

The argument rests on emotional primacy and the claim that a closer embrace makes Canada freer.

Eight things about that claim do not add up.

The first is the use of the word sovereignty. Mark Carney used it six times in Strasbourg. He defined it as a country’s ability to make its own choices without being dictated to. Then he listed what he wants from Europe: common standards for artificial intelligence, pooled computing power, an integrated market for financial services, membership in European research and student programmes, alignment on energy and digital rules. How much of that requires Canada to follow rules made by institutions in which it has no seat and no vote? Members surrender powers and get a vote in return. A non-member who follows the rules gets the obligations without the empowering vote.

At Davos in January, Carney had a phrase for accommodating a hegemon. He called it “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.” Everyone understood which hegemon he meant. The sentence today fits Brussels without changing a word.

The second is the title. Ursula von der Leyen offered Canada the chance to become “the first associate member of the EU.” Carney said that the substance matters; the substance has a name. The Union’s treaty provides, in Article 217, for agreements “establishing an association” with outside countries. Turkey has had one since 1963 and is still in the antechamber; nobody with an association agreement is a member. The adjective in von der Leyen’s sentence is inaccurate. It describes an old arrangement.

The third is where the word associate comes from. Official Canada has spent a decade repudiating colonialism: the 2008 parliamentary apology, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Justin Trudeau accepting the word genocide, a new citizenship oath, the Vimy Memorial removed from the passport, Canada Day cancelled in city halls, names changed, and statues pulled down.

Now the same official Canada seeks its independence in the embrace of a project founded by colonial powers, with the development of their colonies written into its birth certificate. The Treaty of Rome of 1957 devoted a whole chapter, Part Four, to “the Association of Overseas Countries and Territories“, meaning the colonies of France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands, from the Congo to Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, twenty-five kilometres off Newfoundland.

That chapter is where the word “association” enters the Union’s law. It survives as Articles 198 to 204, and its annex still lists Greenland and Saint-Pierre. Canada would be the third North American party to an association with Brussels; the other two hold the word under the colonial chapter.

On Sunday (September 20) the Prime Minister flies to Saint-Pierre, French colonial territory a short boat ride from the Burin Peninsula, to affirm sovereignty beside President Macron, whose country, let me remind you again, has not ratified CETA. Nobody in Ottawa seems to have looked up St.-Pierre’s address.

Ottawa claims to fight second-hand colonialism at home but embraces it in the splendour of colonial metropoleis.

October 30, 2026

Neo-kremlinologists still find value in The E-Communist, er, I mean The Economist

Filed under: Britain, Business, Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

In The Critic, Chris Bayliss explains how the once-great Economist can still have uses in its much decayed pro-managerialist guise:

Despite what people say, The Economist is still worth reading. This is true for two reasons — firstly whilst the depth of its analysis is not what it once was, it still covers the domestic affairs of a range of developing countries that would be too obscure for other news outlets. Secondly, it is because its editorial line can give fascinating hints about the tectonic movements of managerial elite opinion. Gauging a group of people whose view of the world is driven entirely by consensus is generally a very predictable game — until the moment it isn’t. And it is The Economist we can sometimes look to for the early signs of a change of course.

For us neo-kremlinologists, the magazine has been unduly generous in the last week, providing two interesting snapshots into the neuroses and instincts of the lumpenintelligentsia at the present moment. Before I go any further, it is important to add that these people are not uniformly specious or slow on the uptake — like the Soviet intelligentsia in the 1970s, it includes many highly intelligent and perceptive people, who may be thoughtful or even forthright about the crises that beset us, but only discreetly and on an individual basis. In the atmosphere of stultifying intellectual conformity that they inhabit, what matters is what they feel comfortable discussing and admitting to one another in public, because it is that which shapes the direction of policy. And it is on that that the Economist‘s cachet can be helpful, by virtue of the freedom it lends its unbylined writers to think aloud.

It was the more recent of the two articles that has garnered the most attention. An article titled “Do immigrants from some countries commit more sex crimes?” on 25th October admitted that, yes, they do. The piece was accompanied by a graphic showing — on a logarithmic scale — the rate at which immigrants in Britain were convicted of sexual crimes, by nationality, relative to that of British nationals. The graphic showed very clearly that nationals of countries in non-EU Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East were substantially more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes than British nationals, with people from Afghanistan way out ahead of any other group. EU nationals, meanwhile, were slightly less likely to be convicted of such offences, and East Asians and Australasians even more underrepresented in the statistics. People from the Americans and the Caribbean were, on average, roughly equal to British nationals in their prolificness.

On social media, it was the graphic which prompted the most voluble response; particularly the use of the log scale which, visually, seemed to minimise the scale of the sevenfold disparity between the Afghan rate of sex crime conviction, and the British average. This seemed to hark back to arguments that took place during the Covid pandemic in which the use of log scales for graphs showing the number of new infections or deaths flattened the lines on the graphs and, critics claimed, made the scale of the pandemic seem less severe than it was. But whereas the use of log scales for naturally exponential processes such as viral transmission is in line with standard scientific practice, it is usually considered less appropriate — or even misleading — when the point of narrative interest is the additive difference between two figures, rather than multiplicative growth. Nevertheless, it is perfectly possible that the decision to use a log scale was made in good faith, in the interests of conserving page space.

Arguments about the x-axis notwithstanding, it is still a big deal that The Economist would print this. The fact that certain groups of migrants — especially illegal arrivals and asylum seekers from highly unstable countries — are disproportionately likely to commit rape or sexual assault has been one of the most powerful anti-immigration arguments in recent years. It is a point that defenders of the status quo have often been highly sensitive about. In polite and liberal circles, the idea of even looking for a link between national and ethnic origins and sex crimes has hitherto been considered inherently racist and demagogic. In September 2025, an open letter titled “Women against the Far Right” — which was signed by a long list of prominent leftish politicians and celebrities — included the statement that “there is no evidence that people seeking refuge are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence”. This was an easily verifiable or falsifiable objective claim, which they clearly took no effort to verify or falsify, on the reasonable-enough grounds that such data ought to be extremely hard to come by in Britain.

Update, 31 October: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.

There are useful idiots and then there are extremely useful idiots

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre recounts the efforts of Noam Chomsky to minimize the atrocities happening in Cambodia because he strongly preferred to blame the west for all of the wrongs in the world:

Noam Chomsky, the “Father of modern linguistics”, looked at evidence of industrial-scale murder and decided the real problem was Western media bias.

By 1977, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge had already killed roughly 1.7 million Cambodians through execution, forced starvation, and slave labor. Chomsky, writing with Edward Herman in “Distortions at Fourth Hand”, treated survivor testimony and refugee accounts as State Department fabrications, preferring the far lower body counts published in sympathetic leftist sources.

The intellectual gymnastics required to reach that conclusion were extraordinary. Chomsky dismissed Father Ponchaud’s firsthand reporting, questioned Francois Ponchaud’s credibility directly, and leaned on a 1977 State Department document to suggest deaths numbered in the thousands, not hundreds of thousands. He applied maximum skepticism to anti-communist sources and near-zero skepticism to anything that cut against American foreign policy narratives. The methodology was selective to the point of being fraudulent.

Chomsky was not a fringe figure typing in a basement. He held an MIT professorship and commanded enormous intellectual authority among Western leftists. When he cast doubt on Cambodian atrocity reports, journalists and academics listened. Real people died while influential intellectuals debated whether their deaths were sufficiently well-sourced.

Collectivist ideology requires enemies to function. When the Khmer Rouge built their agrarian utopia by emptying Phnom Penh at gunpoint and executing anyone wearing glasses, Chomsky’s instinct was to protect the ideological project by attacking the messengers. Ideology over corpses.

October 27, 2026

“Originalism” doesn’t mean freezing rights to the technology of the Founding Fathers

Filed under: Government, History, Law, Liberty, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Have you ever been in a conversation with an intelligent-but-undereducated youngster? They’re likely to come up with highly original takes on issues, like “the US Bill of Rights only applies to the kind of guns they had at the time it was written“:

An 1829 printing press. The Founders clearly didn’t intend the freedom of the press to only apply to the printing technology of their era.
Woodcut by George Baxter, Public Domain.

Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate candidate, is the latest politician to suggest that the Second Amendment might shield the right to bear arms, but only those that existed at the time that it was adopted: namely, flintlock muskets. It’s a not-so-clever way of trimming back the Constitution’s protections. The argument’s flaws should be clear: the U.S. Supreme Court has already dismissed that line of reasoning, and a world in which the Bill of Rights applies only to 18th century technology would be one where freedom exists only in museum exhibits.

“Everyone Should Have Equal Rights to a Musket”

“I’m gonna swear an oath to the Constitution. The Constitution has a Second Amendment in it, but the Second Amendment, just so we all are clear, even the most conservative folks, they hew to this idea called originalism, and originalism is the idea that you should interpret the Constitution in the context in which the Constitution was written”, El-Sayed insisted at a campaign rally. “When they promised the right to bear arms, they had muskets. So, yeah, everyone should have equal rights to a musket.”

So clever. The Bill of Rights passed in the 1780s, so it must only apply to 1780s things. Except that the courts have thoroughly dismissed that ridiculous line of reasoning.

“Some have made the argument, bordering on the frivolous, that only those arms in existence in the 18th century are protected by the Second Amendment”, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). “We do not interpret constitutional rights that way. Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications … and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search … the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.”

The Founders Lived in a Time of Rapid Innovation

The reason for this should be obvious. The founders were not unaware of progress. Many of them were scholars and innovators. They were certainly aware of (and enthusiastic about) continuing advancements in technology. During the then-recent revolution, American troops had faced off against a small unit of redcoats armed with Ferguson breech-loading rifles. A decade before the Bill of Rights was adopted, the 22-shot Girandoni repeating air rifle was introduced, one of which was later sent along on the Lewis and Clark expedition. And Kalthoff and Lorenzoni repeating flintlock firearms had existed for well over a century.

Not to mention, the founders made extensive use of printing presses to distribute pamphlets and official government documents, including the new Constitution, rather than having them hand-copied as they would have been a few centuries earlier. Technology marches on.

That last point illustrates the foolishness of the only-1780s-tech argument, as Scalia pointed out. What use is a First Amendment that applies only to hand-cranked printing presses and unamplified voices? That would leave the internet, television, radio, telephones, and all post-revolutionary means of communications unprotected from government censorship.

October 26, 2026

“Christofascism” seen as harmful

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

I must not hang out in the progressive cool kids’ areas of the internet, as I’d only occasionally heard the term “Christofascism” and I’d never encountered even a vague definition of what the pejorative might mean. Copernican to the rescue with an extended discussion on that very thing (it’s a long piece, these excerpts just skim the surface):

Image from Seeking Always the Horizon

Long has the progressive movement decried “ChristoFascism”, representing it as the greatest threat to Western civilization. The alphabet-soup squad has mostly moved on. Like most words uttered by the progressive mind, the term is used entirely for the reaction it elicits, and has nothing to do with describing the real world. Christofascism was just another word in their toolbox, like “nazism” or “racist” or (now) the ever-popular “if you date a girl two years younger than you, you’re a pedophile”.

All these are words uttered merely to enforce the progressive’s bizarre form of destructive totalitarian thought-control.1

While the [CURRENT THING] horde has moved on from accusations of Christofascism, I have not. There’s something archaically elegant in that formulation of words and the compound thought-form they represent. Hiding in the spiteful accusation is a memetic complex that deserves further investigation. Christofascism was a mere combination of “bad things” that the Left hates … but that doesn’t mean it should be taken as mere braindead progressive gurgling.

It may well be far more than that. There’s a new cultural theology hidden in there.

[…]

ChristoFascism

Individuals like Kulak identify modern (what I’d call “liberal”) Christianity as a fundamental inhibitor to the people of the West.2 That analysis is not entirely wrong. Christianity in its modern incarnation developed alongside the fall of Rome, the High Medieval Period, and then through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Christianity was a governance apparatus for regional tribal conflicts and the occasional crusade. It was the centerpiece of the Holy Roman Empire, but the theological framework has a great deal of trouble squaring with modernity.

Simultaneously, all of the alternatives, the materialist religions of the 20th century, have been absolute disasters ending in nihilism, hedonism, or cruelty. The human collective unconscious is not a static thing.3 It’s frothing with new ideas, particularly during times of great change and turmoil. The Hegelian dialectic.

Notably, the Hegelian dialectic ends in the creation of a new thesis. The original Thesis is the Universalist heritage of the West. That would be Christianity from 300 AD up until the 19th century. Then there is the antithesis, the materialist religions that seized the zeitgeist in the 20th.

[…]

A Christofascist cultural foundation must express:

  • The moral recognition of a higher power and that it is the duty of the state to nurture a heroic righteousness in its own people, granting Duties, and Guidance in addition to liberty.4
  • A masculine Will to Power in the development of its own practices, heritage, and promotion of its own cultural ideals to the exclusion of hostile, foreign, or corrosive ones.
  • That the State, and the individuals who make up the State, are responsible for adhering to higher moral standards. One cannot simply blame “the voters” for the evil actions of the state. The leadership of the state holds personal responsibility for imposed policies.
  • An intense sense of national exceptionalism, particularly in the eyes of God. As a spiritually exceptional state, the people of the nation uphold a higher scientific and spiritual ideal as individuals, families, and citizens.
  • A recognition of other similar nations as being siblings seeking the same ultimate goals through alternative means, rather than pawns in a game of Great Powers.
  • Paternalism with God as father to the nation’s people, and the nation’s people not beholden to the operational state but being the actuators of it. A father that expresses temperance in governance.
  1. I think that John Carter wrote the best analysis of this phenomenon in his work on “Homo Umbrans“. The product of man willingly handing over sapience in exchange for the reprieve from intellectual rigor. To very roughly summarize one of the best articles on Substack: if you feel like you’re under psychic attack when trying to communicate with a progressive, it’s because you are. The Leftist attempts to annul the meaning of words required for thought to render sapient cognition and abstract reasoning impossible.
  2. Here’s a direct link to some of the work that Kulak has done. This one is of particular interest to those in the proverbial Pagan camp. Here’s an article that was written by Millennial Woes on the same topic. A great article that I would recommend regarding this perpetual confrontation within the Spiritual Right.
  3. Here’s my own article on how best to conceptualize the collective unconscious.
  4. We will assume a Christian higher power, it’s in the name after all.

Reality refuting the beliefs of the gun-grabbers

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

The shooting in Bend, Oregon is turning out to not follow the gun-grabbers’ narrative even a little bit. It’s getting noticed:

I was told by anti-gun extremists that any “Good Guy with a Gun,” would be mistaken for the bad guy and immediately shot by the police, after he was easily shot by the bad guy because the Good Guy with a Gun wouldn’t know how to use his own gun …

What happened in Bend, Oregon? None of that happened …

ESR responds:

Yes, I’ve been thinking that the Bend shooting turned into the graboids’ worst nightmare, and it keeps getting more so as people process it.

Oregon has an A- rating from Giffords. That means its laws were already doing almost everything that the graboids claim should prevent mass shootings. But obviously didn’t.

Giamfranco is soft spoken, articulate, and photogenic. There’s no dismissing him as a scary redneck. And he’s not a veteran or a hunter or anything, just an ordinary family guy who stepped up.

He popped the bad guy with surgical precision. He didn’t hit a bystander, and he didn’t get shot himself either by the bad guy or the cops. Of course this is usually the way it goes, but most people who aren’t gun-culture themselves don’t know that.

The obvious questions is raises are: if gun control didn’t work in Bend, why would it work anywhere? And if an ordinary chill dude can step up to save lives when the laws failed, what kind of idiot do you have to be to want to stop that from happening?

What is it the kids say nowadays? Ah, yes. Cope, seethe, and mald, graboids. This intervention was everything you hate, and that’s good news for the rest of us.

October 25, 2026

“This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme“

Filed under: France, Media, Politics, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

After an earlier post of his went viral, Maarten Boudry revisits the same topic but this time with references and footnotes that he regretted not including in the original:

This was not a carefully argued analysis, but an impassioned cry from the heart, dashed off in the heat of the moment after watching the horrific scenes of wanton destruction in France. To my surprise, the post blew up: it received thousands of likes and reposts, was translated into multiple languages and was cited in several newspapers. I was flooded with interview requests, which I declined because I’m still working on my book.

As a sometime academic, however, I felt a bit embarrassed that my little rant contained no sources and little in the way of actual argumentation. A dereliction of duty! So, to make it up to you, I want to elaborate on one of its underlying ideas: that “useful idiots” on the left have been marching alongside Islamists, and that the Palestinian flag has become the joint symbol of hatred for Western civilization. This alliance between Islamist and left-wing forces is known in France as islamo-gauchisme (Islamo-leftism), and elsewhere as the Red-Green alliance. Does it really exist, and in what sense? Is it an orchestrated plot, or more of a rapprochement of convenience?1 And are the warm feelings mutual?

Come to think of it, I happen to have some academic expertise on the topic.

Photo from Maarten Boudry’s Substack

A conspiracy theory?

If we are to believe the vast majority of academics and journalists, Islamo-leftism is nothing but a “conspiracy theory” — a far-right fever dream in the same category as the Great Replacement or Judeo-Bolshevism. In 2021, more than 600 academics said as much in an open letter in Le Monde. As someone who has written several academic papers on conspiracy theories, I’m here to tell you: not only are these people clueless, they are part of the problem. They are abusing the valuable concept of “conspiracy theory” to shut down debate, much like the premature dismissal of the lab-leak hypothesis during the pandemic.

A conspiracy theory, in the pejorative sense, is an unproven and speculative hypothesis about a secret and sinister plot hatched by a relatively small group of people. Typically, the very lack of hard evidence for the conspiracy is taken as proof that the conspirators are fiendishly clever and have covered their tracks. In my academic work, I have dubbed such self-sealing theories the intellectual equivalent of a black hole: once you’ve dived in, it’s hard to claw your way back out.

The rapprochement between parts of the left and Islam is none of these things. It is hiding in plain sight and has been extensively documented. Granted, some of the leftist romance with Islam may stem from secret funding by Qatar and Iran — which would qualify as a genuine “conspiracy”2 — but by and large these factors are incidental. The Red-Green alliance does not rest on covert coordination behind the scenes, but on ideological kinship, a shared enemy (Western civilization, modernity and capitalism) and a hefty dose of naivety on one side.

  1. See Rob Henderson’s interview with Franziska Sittig, co-author of the 2025 book Intellectual Self-Destruction: How the West Gambles Away Its Future (the book is on my to-read pile)
  2. See this shocking piece by Ella Kenan about the secret plans of the Muslim Brotherhood and Qatar, which amount to an actual conspiracy.

The generational difference in how young right wingers see the left

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Christian Heiens says that there’s a signficant difference in how older and younger conservatives view their opponents on the left:

You need to understand how Right-wing people under 40 view the Left.

When we think of Leftists, we do not think of Barack Obama or Ezra Klein. Yes, these guys are on the Left, but younger Millennials and Zoomers on the Right do not think of Leftists in their own age bracket as polished technocrats.

These are not the sort of people that make up our Left-wing counterparts that we grew up with, went to school with, or work with.

When we think of Leftists, the first thing that pops into our head are a bunch of disgusting, depraved, spiteful mutants who want to destroy everything around them as payback for the crime of being born.

We think of Discord troons that invaded our hobbies, Reddit mods who are drunk on the most insignificant power imaginable, that one girl from high school or college who became a literal Communist, and that friend or family member who cut off all contact because we refused to treat their mental illness like a status symbol.

We think of people who, if they ever became a majority of the country and actually managed to possess political power, would inevitably kill tens of millions of people out of blind envy and petty cruelty.

Younger people on the Right come across as impatient and anxious in their mindset and mannerisms because they understand what will eventually happen when these people succeed their Gen X and Boomer predecessors in the Democratic Party.

They know what is to come if their own generational cohorts on the Left actually take power, and they feel incredibly exasperated that it seems like none of their parents or grandparents understand just how late the hour truly is.

A few days later, he also commented:

This blew up because people realize the age of discourse is coming to a close.

Discourse itself is meaningless at this point because discourse requires moral alignment, which is precisely the thing we are now fighting over.

Every other question has already been answered and there is nothing more to debate. The only thing left to do is to act, or be destroyed.

October 20, 2026

QotD: What is “hate speech”?

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

What is “hate-speech”? It’s speech the authorities hate. No doubt, it is often worth hating. It may be speech that every right-thinking person ought to hate, but it is also, by definition, speech that falls short of unlawful or tortuous speech — i.e., speech that’s fraudulent, defamatory, seditious, conspiratorial — for which a person could be either sued or charged criminally. Hate-speech legislation seeks to regulate speech that is not against any law — logically, since unlawful speech doesn’t need to be outlawed. Here’s the paradox. Hate-speech legislation can only ban free speech. Prohibited speech is already banned. People often say that freedoms aren’t absolutes and they’re right. Free expression is anything but “absolute” in free societies. It’s hemmed in by strictures against slander, official secrets, perjury, fraud, incitement to riot, and so on. The question is, should laws go beyond these strictures? And if they do, won’t they suppress opinion and creed in the end?

The answer is yes. There is nothing else for them to suppress. Repressive positions are difficult to defend for those who wish to keep their liberal credentials intact. They usually do so by quoting bits of pernicious nonsense from the kind of speech they would ban to illustrate how worthless and abhorrent it is. But pointing to the abhorrent nature of despised speech is insufficient because no speech is legislated against unless it’s abhorrent to some. Nobody outlaws Mary Poppins, not even the Human Rights Commissions (though this could be famous last words).

If suppressing opinion breaches axioms of liberalism, can it be justified by utility? Canadian defenders of hate-speech laws rarely offer any examples, other than the dubious benefit of distinguishing ourselves from Americans (one Human Rights-type called free speech an American concept in a recent court case) but one suggestion is that such laws would have stopped a Hitler. The problem is, the Weimar Republic had such laws. It used them freely against the Nazis. Far from stopping Hitler, they only made his day when he became Chancellor. They enabled Hitler to confront Social Democratic Party chairman Otto Wels, who stood up in the Reichstag to protest Nazi suspension of civil liberties, with a quotation from the poet Friedrich Schiller: “‘Late you come, but still you come'”, Hitler pointed at the hapless deputy. “You should have recognized the value of criticism during the years we were in opposition [when] our press was forbidden, our meetings were forbidden, and we were forbidden to speak for years on end.”

The Nazis would have been just as repressive without this excuse, but being able to offer it made Hitler’s task easier. Like Canadian supporters of hate-speech legislation, supporters of the Weimar Republic thought that their groups and causes would occupy all seats of authority and set all social and legal agendas forever. Shades of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association or the Canadian Jewish Congress! They couldn’t envisage the guns of their own laws being turned around to point at them one day. Eradicating hateful ideas through free discourse is liberal; trying to eradicate them through legislation is illiberal. “There is always a chance that he who sets himself up as his brother’s keeper”, wrote Eric Hoffer, “will end up by being his jail keeper”.

Another thing: “Banned in Boston” sells tickets. As Victor Hugo put it: “The writer doubles and trebles the power of his writing when a ruler imposes silence on the people”. I’d think twice before banning neo-Nazis for this reason alone.

George Jonas, “Regulating speech that is not against any law”, CanWest Publications, 2008-04-02.

October 19, 2026

“If alternative energy is a ‘lower-cost’ solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

John Robson points out that words do have meanings and calling expensive things “cheap” and cheap things “expensive” doesn’t actually change their economic or environmental value in the real world:

Martian fighting machines striding over Horsell Common … no, wait, these are actually wind turbines on Wolfe Island, near Kingston, Ontario.

When it comes to the alleged green energy transition and its flood of cheap power and paradisaically green, lucrative and fulfilling jobs, those with even fairly short historical memories will recall that the “Green New Deal” legislative package was meant to do for the US economy what Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” had supposedly done in the 1930s. Those of us who think the main achievement of the “New Deal” was to extend a sharp recession into a decade-long depression through a massive set of taxes and regulations driven by inane economic theory, for instance plowing crops under to fight hunger under the AAA, didn’t even find that claim appealing. But others sure did, and with about as much to show for it.

As Wikipedia put it, after tracing uses of the term back to 2007:

    The 2019 United States congressional resolution Recognizing the duty of the Federal Government to create a Green New Deal introduced by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey advocated a ‘just transition’, counteracting previous systemic injustices that had disproportionally hurt vulnerable communities. A ‘just transition’ relies on increasing social and economic equity and access to opportunity which are crucial components of the Green New Deal and principles of environmental and social justice.

For these hyper adherents to Thomas Sowell’s “unconstrained vision”, just saving the planet isn’t enough. You also have to save the economy, eliminate injustice and after lunch world peace.

In Canada, where we pride ourselves so fiercely on our “elbows up” independence from the United States that we call our system of socialized medicine brought in back in 1966 “Medicare” after um uh the American program from 1964, there are calls for “A Green New Deal for Canadian Sovereignty” which appears to be the US version with maple syrup:

    This will allow us to quickly transition from an economy excessively reliant on serving the United States and based on exploitation and the burning of fossil fuels, to one that is more self-reliant, driven by dignified work, clean renewable energy, more equitable and with efficient public services for all.

Oh. Just that? Who knew giving up oil and gas in a cold northern country could fix government health care? Well, Greenpeace Canada, for one, with their 2019 infographic that includes “Create a plan for 1 million good green jobs” (shades of Mole from Pogo exclaiming “A plan! You’re right! I’ll need a plan!”). And with this one, wait, you also get “Indigenous rights” and “proportional representation” and “BETTER LIFE FOR ALL” and “Build clean industries”. Oh and “Grant personhood protections to forests and bodies of water”. And interfaith harmony and a guy in a wheelchair and all that there.

Mind you, the bit where you “Build clean industries” still appears to face a few minor hurdles, like building clean industries. And why just 1 million good green jobs? Why not 5 million, or 53 million, or 628 billion? Since climate transition enthusiasts don’t do practical well.

For instance Canary Media just launched a publication “California Wire” dedicated to telling you the transition that failed in California worked in California:

    I’m launching this newsletter at an intriguing moment in California politics. Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom – who everyone knows is eyeing a run for the White House – has one last chance to show his true colors on energy and climate change. Rising electricity costs are a major issue in California, and Newsom must decide by the end of this month whether to sign a host of bills that could help cut utility rates while also advancing the state’s clean energy transition. What message does he want to send to Californians and the rest of the country?

Dude, he already “sent a message” that this GND is pie in the sky and energy gets more expensive not less. And not because he hid his “true colors on energy and climate change” but because he waved them in everyone’s face while shouting about the subject. So now all he needs to do is wave his pen? Yup:

    a few bills on his desk now could at least start the long slog of reforms that experts say will help make power more affordable.

Oh wait. Experts say. But long slog? Help make it more affordable? Why the Dickens isn’t it already more affordable since these kinds of people keep telling us wind and solar are now cheaper than oil and gas, and let’s not even mention coal, and Newsom’s true colours are wind and solar?

Indeed, he calls for:

    a precursor to setting up regulations that could steer them [utilities] toward prioritizing lower-cost solutions over expensive grid upgrades.

Talk about leaping into verbiage. And also error, since if alternative energy is a “lower-cost” solution they shouldn’t need prodding from a wise and benevolent state, and if they’re not, you’re just making things worse by persisting in your delusion.

October 14, 2026

Star Trek: Yesterday’s Progressivism

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

Feral Historian
Published 12 Jun 2026

Star Trek has always been a progressive cultural phenomenon, but that was in the last century. Now, Star Trek is older than most of its fan base and in some ways has started to look fairly conservative. This not only reminds us how relative those terms are, but also makes us ask, is Star Trek still relevant? Or perhaps more relevant than it ever was?

00:00 Intro
01:42 TNG, Discovery, and the Orville
04:16 Auroville
06:52 History Didn’t End
08:59 Social Cohesion as Technology
13:40 Step Back to Go Forward

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October 13, 2026

No wonder the wokies hate J.K. Rowling

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

The Harry Potter books used to be sacred lore to the woke generation until the author committed the unforgivable crime of defending the rights of women against the encroachment of trans-women. Yet, it doesn’t take a very close reading of the texts to discover so many things that appear to have slipped under the notice of the progressives and form the core beliefs of the fictional world she created:

Amelia crossing paths with Harry Potter and the gang seems much more appropriate than it might have in the past

    Potential is largely hereditary, family is most important, the media are lying parasites, the state can’t be trusted with education, and children should be taught armed self-defense.

These are not subversive readings. These are the plot.

The Harry Potter series was the most successful publishing phenomenon of the late twentieth century. It sold half a billion copies. Progressive parents handed it to their children as a parable about tolerance and the courage to stand against prejudice. The movies grossed eight billion dollars. The author became an icon of liberal cultural production and then, by a process that remains opaque to the people who made her famous, a figure of political villainy for holding positions indistinguishable from mainstream liberal feminism circa 2005.

Set aside the author. The books exist independently of whatever J.K. Rowling believes or is believed to believe. Read them for what they actually say. The worldview encoded in the narrative structure, the plot logic, and the moral arc is not the worldview the books were marketed as containing. It is considerably more interesting.

Blood Will Tell

Magic is inherited. This is the foundational premise of the entire fictional world and the premise from which everything else follows.

You are either born a witch or wizard, or you are not. No amount of study, effort, practice, or desire will make a Muggle magical. The reverse is also true: Squibs, born to magical families but lacking the gift, cannot acquire it. They are defective members of magical lineages, pitied and often hidden. Argus Filch, the Hogwarts caretaker, is a Squib. His bitterness and cruelty toward the students is the bitterness of a man who can see the gift in others but will never have it himself.

[…]

Family Carries Everything

Harry survives Voldemort’s killing curse because his mother died to protect him. Not a metaphor. A literal magical mechanism. Lily Potter’s sacrificial love created a protection charm encoded in Harry’s blood that made him impossible for Voldemort to kill directly.

[…]

The Press Are the Enemy

The Daily Prophet is introduced early and is corrupt throughout.

[…]

The State Cannot Be Trusted to Educate Your Children

Dolores Umbridge is a government administrator appointed by the Ministry of Magic to reform Hogwarts.

Her arrival at Hogwarts in Order of the Phoenix is the politicization of education made literal. The Ministry does not trust Dumbledore. The Ministry does not want students to learn Defense Against the Dark Arts. A student body trained in combat magic is a student body that might resist. Umbridge’s curriculum is therefore purely theoretical: no spellcasting, no practical application, only reading approved texts about defensive magic that the students are forbidden to practice.

[…]

The books contain other lessons that the progressive readership tended not to discuss.

House-elves are slaves. They are hereditary servants bound to magical families, forbidden to disobey direct orders, and conditioned to punish themselves for disloyalty. Dobby is freed and becomes a hero. But Dobby is the exception. Most house-elves, including the Hogwarts house-elves, do not want freedom. Hermione’s Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare is played for laughs. The elves reject her knitted hats. They are offended by the offer of liberation. Dobby is a weirdo.

The narrative does not resolve this. The house-elves are not freed after Voldemort falls. The epilogue does not mention them. The implication is that hereditary servitude is acceptable if the servants are happy, and these servants are happy. Whatever else this is, it is not an abolitionist text.

[…]

What The Books Actually Taught

The Harry Potter series is a fundamentally reactionary conservative text dressed in the aesthetic of liberal tolerance.

It teaches that ability is inherited and the argument is only about whether pedigree or demonstrated ability should determine status. It teaches that family is the highest loyalty and the source of the most powerful magic. It teaches that the press serves power and the only response is to route around it. It teaches that the state will capture education to produce compliant subjects and that the answer is to arm the children. It teaches that some people are born for greatness and others are born for service, and the main thing is to get the sorting right.

None of this requires reading against the grain. It requires only reading.

QotD: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wokester avant la lettre

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

He invented it. Every premise of contemporary progressive ideology traces directly back to one man who had never met a “noble savage”, never raised a child, and never lived according to a single principle he preached.

1. His foundational claim: man is naturally good and civilization corrupts. This sounds compassionate. It is the most dangerous idea in Western political thought. Because if man is naturally good, then every failure, every crime, every inequality is caused by the system – never by the individual. Responsibility evaporates. The oppressor is always external. The victim is always pure. This is the complete architecture of Woke in one sentence, written in 1755.

2. The “Noble Savage” is Rousseau’s Form – his version of Plato’s ideal. The uncorrupted man, untouched by property, competition, and civilization, living in natural harmony. Rousseau had never met one. He invented him from an armchair in Paris, extrapolating from travel accounts of peoples he had never visited. The Noble Savage is not an anthropological observation. He is a political weapon – a club to beat civilization with, wielded by someone living comfortably inside it.

3. The “General Will” is the most dangerous concept in modern political philosophy. Not the actual expressed will of actual people – but the deeper will, the will people would have if they were “properly enlightened”. Whoever claims to know it can do anything in its name. Robespierre knew it. Every revolutionary vanguard since has known it. Today’s progressive institutions know it – which is why they can override democratic majorities, suppress dissent, and compel speech, all while insisting they represent the people’s true interests. The General Will is the intellectual license for every tyranny that calls itself a liberation.

4. The chain from Rousseau to today is unbroken. Rousseau to Robespierre and the Terror. Robespierre to Marx, who secularized the General Will into historical necessity. Marx to every “liberation” movement that ended in a gulag. And today: replace civilization with white supremacy, replace the Noble Savage with the marginalized community, replace the General Will with lived experience – and you have the complete operating system of contemporary progressivism. The software is the same.

5. Voltaire, his contemporary and rival, saw him quite clearly: Rousseau made primitivism intellectually respectable. He gave the comfortable classes of every generation a way to signal virtue by denouncing the civilization that produced them, from inside it, without cost. The French Left Bank intellectual denouncing capitalism from a café. The Harvard professor deconstructing Western civilization from a tenured chair. The hedge fund billionaire funding the abolition of meritocracy. All of them are living in Rousseau’s armchair.

6. He sent all five of his illegitimate children to a Paris orphanage. Then wrote Émile – one of the most influential books on education in Western history, a detailed guide on how to raise a virtuous child in harmony with nature. He did not find this contradictory. This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense – this is obłuda [hypocrisy] (remember the obłuda of communism👇🏻). The defining structural feature of the ideology he invented: the sermon is inversely proportional to the practice. The performance of virtue replaces the exercise of it. Naming the oppressor substitutes for personal accountability. Rousseau didn’t just invent Woke – he lived it, in every detail, before anyone had the word.

7. The original Woke was woke about a fiction he invented – and spent his life performing outrage about a civilization he depended on and never left. Two and a half centuries later, the performance is the same. The noble savages have been updated. The General Will has new names. The orphanages are metaphorical. But the man who sends his children away and then lectures everyone else on how to raise theirs – that man is everywhere.

Krzysztof Szczawinski, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-10. (Auto-translated from the original Polish by X)

October 12, 2026

QotD: Blame the “Silent generation” for The Sixties™, not the Boomers

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

I’ve written many times that the real culprits here aren’t the Boomers, but the Silents. Pick any obnoxious “Boomer” who did whatever in The Sixties™, and it’s Build Back Brandon to one that the “Boomer” in question was born in the 1930s. Which makes sense for a lot of historical reasons, but simple chronology will do: If we take as read that The Sixties™ started with the Port Huron Statement, then The Sixties™ started in 1962. The Baby Boom started in 1945, meaning that the very oldest Boomers were still in high school in 1962. They might’ve enthusiastically embraced every word — then again, they might not — but they surely didn’t write one letter of it.

Further, what could they really do? The voting age was 21 until 1971, and as hard as this is to hear, voting was just as pointless back then as it is now. St. Kennedy only won through massive voter fraud, and that was 1960. As John Derbyshire used to say, if the American People had been consulted on anything of importance since then, the USA would still be a White Christian nation … and yet, here we are.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee put on a better show back in the days, but the Uniparty was still the Uniparty. America’s ruling caste caught religion back in the 1920s, and on the long view, you could make a pretty robust argument that Mustache Guy and the Anime Club actually did us a huge fucking favor — left to his own devices, President-for-Life Roosevelt would’ve ushered in the USSA by the late 1930s, with the enthusiastic support of all the Beautiful People on both sides of the Uniparty.

… hats off to you [Isoroku Yamamoto] — you and your dipshit friends bought us a few decades. Decades we squandered, of course, but that’s not your fault. It’s not anyone’s fault, unless you think the boys on the Higgins boats should’ve shot their officers, turned the ships around, and conducted a massive air, land, and sea invasion of every faculty lounge and radio station in America … and even if you do think that, what are you going to do about it?

As for Gen X, we were no better. I can’t blame the Boomers for running with it, any more than I can blame myself for running with our thing. I spent most of college, for instance, getting drunk and chasing tail. Chasing tail is bad, full stop — I should’ve been saving it for marriage, with all that implies — and while getting drunk isn’t bad every now and again, I didn’t do it every now and again. I lived a life as dissolute as any Boomer’s, and while I was equally powerless to change anything in the broader culture, I could’ve been a much better person … but I wasn’t.

Severian, “Friday Mailbag”, Founding Questions, 2022-09-23.

October 11, 2026

QotD: The history of New Harmony, Indiana

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

Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.

Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.

In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.

It collapsed almost immediately.

The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?

Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.

American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country’s earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: “The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity”. The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.

When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.

Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality”.

Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different.

Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse.

His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall”. He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.

Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons.

Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair.

Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-09.

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