Quotulatiousness

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.

August 5, 2026

Canada decides to treat online opinions as matters for police enforcement

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s never a good sign when my region features in a news story, like this post from Exiled Mountie, discussing Canada’s Bill C-9 and the way it encourages local police forces to treat lawful online speech as a matter for police involvement:

As I watch the reaction to Bill C-9 unfold in real time on social media, I cannot help but think that another important line has been crossed in Canada.

Most of us saw the writing on the wall months ago and tried to warn others by screaming it from the rooftops. But as with Covid, nobody listened, and we were probably called racists for doing so. So here we are, another important battle lost.

From a legal point of view, we are now becoming almost indistinguishable from the system in the UK, and that’s a frightening thought.

In the UK, police have recorded non-crime “hate” incidents against schoolchildren for classroom insults, despite no criminal offence having taken place. The system finally became so absurd that the British government recently announced that it would scrap the practice in order to stop police wasting their time on petty arguments. Just imagine the absurdity of this: police resources being tied up over petty squabbles in the schoolyard!

We have now entered a time where the government has extreme control of our speech.

So much so, that we’re even being warned that criticizing or boycotting a company based on moral or ethical reasons can be treated as a hate incident, even when police openly acknowledge that no criminal offence has occurred. From there, the matter can still be reported and subjected to further police investigation to determine if the elements of a hate crime are met.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the twilight zone. We have arrived in the progressive future the Left has been pushing for so long, and it sucks.

The danger here is not only what will eventually result in charges. It is that police are inviting complaints and opening the door to police attention over expression that is not criminal at all.

Durham Police openly acknowledges that these so-called hate or bias incidents are not criminal offences. Yet it still encourages people to report them and even uses the lawful boycott of companies supporting the 2SLGBTQI+ community as an example.

August 3, 2026

The Ceuta invasion as a tipping point

Filed under: Africa, Europe, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

On Substack, el gato malo suggests that the “refugee” invastion of Ceuta is a “bridge too far” for the EU:

peruvian strongman oscar benavides famously said “for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law”.

once, such a thing might have provided a succinct summation of the practice of privilege in its literal sense of “private law”. there were laws for the aristocrats and others for the commoners and still others for non-citizens and slaves.

such ideas date back to time out of mind before stone was placed upon stone in giza and stood as absolute expectation and norm in most of the world until quite recently (and pertain in many parts of the world even today). the idea that “all people should be equal under the law” was a radical alteration to social order, a repudiation of the divine right of kings and aristocrats and their monopolies on property and on violence. the literal idea that land could be owned by a commoner was an astonishing upheaval of established orders. it was also the freeing move that allowed for the west to rise and flourish and prosper, unlocking its vast human potential. one might think that people would be happy about this and cherish and protect this most foundational idea that serves as cornerstone to civilizations of liberty and plenty.

lol.

you must be new here.

[…]

spain looks to be in real danger of falling as a nation. they created a mass amnesty for illegal immigrants from places that do not believe in spain but only in tribe and who do not believe in rights but only in who may dominate whom. if one seeks to be a wrecker, it’s a brilliant incentive. pardon a million and give them access to your social safety networks and welfare payments which fund a lifestyle far in excess of where they came from (and the right to vote for more) and the next wave is already packing its bags to come. spread enough jam and you can attract infinity ants.

the US was well on its way to running this playbook (and likely has ~40 million illegals to show for it) before it was stopped. the astonishing bit was how easy it was to shut this off. you just cut off the incentives. no more free stuff, no more amnesty, no more “path to stay”, and no more “catch and release until our overwhelmed court system can have a hearing years from now”. it’s really that simple.

due process becomes rounding you up and sending you home, not giving you a nice place to live for the 3 years until your case is heard.

and it ALL comes down to prosecutors, courts, and agencies. immigration law became irrelevant not because the law changed but because enforcement did. the spectacle of american judges sneaking illegals out of courthouses to avoid their apprehension by ICE was really pretty astonishing. so too were the massive levels of entitlement fraud, literal government funded flights to needed voting districts, and the astonishing refusal to arrest or hold accountable any among them because “marginalized”. europe is worse.

the NGO bond villian insidious complex has been running the table on the west for 20 years.

and they are moving into overdrive now before the populist right forces they are giving reflexive rise to can take control.

[…]

the media is, predictably, either ignoring this or pretending it’s a humanitarian crisis of families and babies. it’s not. this is damn near all men.

and they are not behaving well.

some are claiming that many of these are criminals freed by morocco and bused to the border as a deliberate act. (this same tactic was used by central and south american regimes to dump their gangs in the US.) images of robbery, rape, and of murder are cropping up.

just what a town of 80k is supposed to do with 80k invaders and how they might be fed or sheltered or controlled remains an open question.

meanwhile, EU commission president ursula von doom has moved to action.

“we have sent a bureaucrat to monitor the situation. if this continues, they will tell people to ‘stop’. if that fails, they will say ‘stop’ again, perhaps in a firmer voice.”

to call this air and nonsense would be charitable. it’s an admission of helplessness. the EC relied upon a soft power it no longer possesses because it now faces people who believe only in hard power which the EC never had.

bluff called.

it’s over.

the EC was fine to govern the sort of citizens who yell at tourists for crossing an empty street against the light. it is wholly unsuited for this and like many an ill fated magician’s apprentice before them, they have now summoned that which they have no hope of controling and will eat them alive.

but here’s the part i really loved: “the images from ceuta are unacceptable”.

talk about saying the quiet part out loud. not the events. not the crisis. the images. even now, for her it’s all perception. you want to understand why they want to mandate ID to use the internet/social media and why they so desperately demand the right to censor it (once more using courts and agencies to enforce their whim)? this is why.

“for my friends, speech, for my enemies censorship and gulag”.

what they are doing cannot survive these images.

On Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes reacts to the progressives’ response to the Ceuta situation:

I often wonder about the open borders, “migrants welcome” people and I can’t square it.

I am traditionally a left leaning person from a mixed background who has travelled extensively.

To the current progressive mind this ought to make me automatically cheering on the levels of mass migration we are living with.

But it’s the opposite.

The well travelled “anywhere” cosmopolitans should surely be the most aware of cultural differences and that it’s precisely the concept that nations are “particular” and unique from one another, that makes travelling such a fascinating and sometimes challenging thing to do.

[…]

Travelling gave me a fresh and new appreciation of little things (that actually turned out to be important things) about Britain that I had taken for granted before.

The fact that these muppets think that any form of patriotism or nationalism leads to Hitler is absolutely moronic.

And of course they celebrate it everywhere else. It’s just us who are the baddies for wanting to hold onto our traditions, customs and culture.

Why are we uniquely expected to live by different rules? Surely that in itself is kind of exceptionalist?

A progressive travelling in India wouldn’t think twice about a Mumbai taxi driver having an Indian flag hanging on his rearview mirror.

Or a Thai guesthouse having a shrine to the Thai royal family.

When you travel, people are proud of their countries and towns. They want to show you around. They tell you their country is the best proudly.

Of course, I will be here all day pointing out progressive double standards.

But this one is a biggy!

Update, 4 August: 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.

August 2, 2026

The hubristic disaster of good intentions in Llantwit Major

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

On Substack, Mark Collett recounts the sad tale of good intentions leading to very unwelcome results in a little Welsh town that was determined to welcome in foreign refugees:

“Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.”

This phrase does not have a single, definitive creator but it is instead a modern English phrasing of an ancient Greek concept that evolved over thousands of years. The core meaning of the phrase comes from the classical Greek concept of Atë, which is an infatuation or moral blindness sent by the gods to punish human hubris. The earliest recorded variation appears in Sophocles’ tragedy Antigone (c. 441 BC), where a chorus remarks that evil eventually seems good to a man whose mind a god is leading to ruin. Sophocles noted even then that it was an old and famous maxim – possibly existing for hundreds of years before he used the term. However, the phrase finally took its exact, modern-day form in 19th-century American literature with the Reverend William Anderson Scott publishing the phrase exactly as it is written today in his book Daniel, a Model for Young Men, which was published in 1854, he called it a “heathen proverb”.

[…]

There is probably no better modern application for this “heathen proverb” than as a means to describe white liberals. These champions of social justice are so desperate to endorse a progressive ideology and to embrace people from other racial and cultural groups, that it often leads to their downfall. So convinced are white liberals not only of the nobility of their cause, but they are also totally sure that when their beliefs and theories are applied in the real world that they will result in the establishment of a rainbow utopia in which all people will live in blissful harmony. This is why the truth to these people is like garlic to a vampire. As such, no amount of facts, figures or even real-world examples of the potential pitfalls that could result from enacting the policies they support can dissuade the white liberal from their political path. And often, the hubris of white liberals can lead to their downfall, and sometimes, this affects more than a lone individual, sometimes, this hubris leads to the downfall of an entire community.

Photo from Mark Collett

And on the South Coast of Wales, in a small seaside town named Llantwit Major, it could be said that the residents became the living embodiment of this “heathen proverb”, that they went “mad” – however this madness was definitely not the work of the gods. The madness that had taken over the minds of the people of Llantwit Major was a form of suicidal hubris that sprang forth from their misplaced beliefs in tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism. And it was their faith in these beliefs that caused them to embrace their own demise in a desperate attempt to prove how progressive and open minded they were. This is the story of a small Welsh town of less than 10,000 people who willingly and enthusiastically welcomed a swamping number of migrants into their community and how their overwhelming arrogance resulted in a migrant camp being built in the very centre of their tiny, and previously homogenous, Welsh community.

But this wasn’t just a case of blind virtue signalling – it was possibly the most glaring example of liberal hubris on a group level that has been witnessed in recent years. The residents of Llantwit were warned of their impending fate, but not only did they ignore these warnings, but they besmirched and attacked those who they should have heeded. When it was announced that migrants would be headed to Llantwit, many nationalists were eager to help the town’s residents, and plans were made to arrange a demonstration in the area in order to assist the locals in pushing back against the proposals. But the hubris of the townsfolk caused them to reject this generous offer of help, and instead, those who wished to warn local residents of the dangers posed by such a scheme were met with resistance. This local resistance was so strong that the BBC ran a glowing article praising the people of Llantwit titled: “Patriotic Alternative: The town fighting the far-right with Welsh cakes”.

July 30, 2026

Intramural conflict in the progressive “big tent”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, L. Wayne Mathison identifies some of the major fault lines among the temporary coalition-of-convenience on “the left”:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

The modern woke worldview keeps colliding with reality because it sorts people into fixed moral categories: oppressed people are presumed good, while designated oppressors are presumed guilty. Once that framework takes hold, facts become secondary.

That is why some progressives can condemn “Christian nationalism” before breakfast, then struggle to name radical Islam when an Islamist attacks the very people they claim to defend.

The contradiction is obvious. Radical Islam is deeply hostile to homosexuality, women’s equality, free expression and secular liberalism. Pretending otherwise does not make anyone tolerant. It makes society dishonest and vulnerable.

This does not mean every Muslim is dangerous, nor does it justify collective blame. It means an ideology should be judged by what it teaches, what its extremists do, and whether its institutions openly confront the problem. The same standard should apply to every religion and political movement.

The woke response is usually predictable: redirect attention toward the far right, blame Western society, or accuse anyone raising the issue of hatred.

That protects the ideology, but it does nothing to protect ordinary people. Compassion without boundaries becomes negligence.

A healthy society needs openness, but openness is not the absence of judgment. Immigration, asylum and multiculturalism require enforceable limits, cultural confidence and a clear expectation that newcomers accept the laws and basic freedoms of the country receiving them.

You cannot build social trust by demanding that citizens ignore obvious conflicts. You cannot defend gay people while excusing movements that despise them. You cannot defend women while tolerating misogyny from politically protected groups.

Reality does not care which side has the approved slogans. Eventually, contradictions collect a human cost.

July 29, 2026

The American Deep State’s biggest experimental laboratory

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

On Substack, John Carter links to the latest of kulak’s fascinating-and-unsettling Anarchonomicon posts with this introduction:

Kulak’s thesis here is that English Canada generally, and Toronto specifically, is ground zero for a lot of the more insane gay race communism trends because America has been using Canada as a testing ground for psychological operations since the 1950s.

That sounds kind of nuts but he makes a plausible case. Since Canada is technically a foreign country, intelligence agencies don’t face the same limitations they do at home. Since Canada is almost culturally identical to the US, what works in Canada will generally work domestically (and all the GAE psyops are ultimately aimed at America’s domestic tax cattle).

Kulak also brings the receipts here, showing how things like MeToo and GamerGate seem to have been prefigured by similar movements in Canada a couple years before.

One thing he misses is land acknowledgements, which began spreading in Canada in 2013 or so, and have since started appearing at American and Australian universities. I don’t know for sure that they started in Canada, all I can say is that it was Canada where I first noticed them, and where they have become ubiquitous.

Multiculturalism is another Canadian export, developed here in the 60s and rapidly introduced all over the Western world. The prime ministers who introduced it were American puppets, and the ideology itself has a very broadly American “nation of immigrants” feel to it.

Anyhow, you motherfuckers, two can play this game.

On the land acknowledgements, the first time I encountered it was at my son’s university graduation ceremony, but his university had a big First Nations specialization so it didn’t seem too outlandish at the time. Since then, of course, pretty much every event in urban Canada seems to feature a land acknowledgement and they don’t appear to be optional any more.

Anyway, on to kulak’s post on “The Battle for the Mind of North America”:

The Land of Mind-Rape and Honey

Canada is/was a nice enough place to visit or grow up … several large nice cities surrounded by tons and tons of quaint and cute functional “Mainstreet USA” style quirky little towns.

The “Rape” refers to Rapeseed, the primary ingredient in Canola Oil, the unhealthy seed-oil. (they named it “Canada Oil” because “Rape Oil” might make people hesitate)

But when you scratch at the surface there’s something profoundly deeply wrong with Canada. You can feel it. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work … when you go to church … when you pay your taxes.

and the Canadians are quite pleased to tell you just what that thing is:

America.

Funnily though, when you ask what Americans have done to them or what is wrong with America, they’ll tell you things about moral degeneracy and perfidy of Americans … no different than what the American elite and the US Government expresses about its own populace.

For reference: Canada is a vassal of the US.

It has been since the 1960s when the British lost the Suez Crisis and the American Deep State backed “Multiculturalism”, an end to “God Save the Queen”, legalized sodomy, ended prayer in public schools, demilitarized Canadian education (which til the 60s included rifle practice, marching, and survival training) … and oh ya a new flag.

The Canadian flag, adopted in 1964 … which the very year should be a “red flag”. Is in fact, an American flag. It is the symbol of America’s diplomatic and espionage victories over the British Empire and its final conquest of Canada.

Canada’s entire culture, defined by being British, Imperial, warlike, frontier militiamen (Indeed Canada’s 1950s culture in many ways resembled Washington’s and Jefferson’s colonial American culture more than America did) … was ripped out in the course of a decade … quite intentionally and by design.

Indeed Canada was the testing ground for the Global American Empire’s psychological cultural program.

To get a feel for just HOW aggressively Canadian culture was purposefully ripped apart … I encourage you to flip through the various programs for “Empire day in the Schools of Ontario” up on archive to see English Canada’s actual natural culture. (I will be writing about this in more detail in another piece.)

And Please Note: The British did nothing comparable … the “Narnia” age of Canada coexisted with The Fabians, George Bernard Shaw, and the basically open communist treason of the actual British Aristocracy.

The mottoes on the posters: “Obey/ the Law/ Follow/ Duty”, “One God/ One King/ One Flag/ One Fleet”, “Love God and Honour the King”

This was immediately ripped out by State Department’s assets like Pearson and Trudeau in the 60s and 70s in favour of “Multiculturalism”.

How does the one Canada: Royalist, Militaristic, Patriotic as Can Be, defined by the three institutions of Church, Militia Armoury, and the old-style High School ruthlessly enforcing standards … More akin to Cadia from 40k than a 21st century country … How did it transform into the modern Canada within living memory?

How do you destroy the entire culture of a country and replace it with an entirely new culture in front of its population’s very eyes … without resistance and without protest?

Well that’s the problem that was solved here.

Canada was the testing ground for all of the American Government’s cultural occupational weapons it would go on to use on Europe and on its own people.

Terms like “melting pot”, “racism”, “tolerance”, “the open society” … These of course has all been coined by American Jewish and Communist activists (“Racism” specifically is a Trotskyist doctrinal term of art propagated by Trotsky’s personal pamphlets, and you should call any “Conservative” who ever uses the term a Communist traitor).

However it was in Canada that top down US foreign policy institutions first applied the current model to a country which they had conquered without a war.

Indeed when one looks into “Denazification” in Germany or the US occupations of France, Italy, or Japan you find little to no overlap between the language, structure, and even values of the “Democratic”, “antifascist”, and “Peaceful” occupational ideology and modern Globohomo.

“Monument to Multiculturalism”. Toronto. Erected 1985. (The “Monument” can be interpreted two ways … the man and doves working together to build a unified world … or the man is unwittingly cooperating in his own caging and enslavement)

Whereas in Canada the US occupational ideology EXACTLY resembles modern globohomo. From the outset.

Pierre Trudeau’s first major political moment was the 1967 decriminalization of homosexuality.

July 26, 2026

QotD: Progressives know they’re on the “right side of history”

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

You want to know why the Left is so awful? They have no sense of history. Total ignorance would be sufficient, but the Left, as always, really goes the extra mile (so long as “going the extra mile” entails “patting yourself on the back”) — they think they have an exquisite knowledge of history. This is partly a holdover from Karl Marx, who thought his sub-Hegelian junk philosophy was not just a science, but THE Science — The Science of History. More than that, they’re certain that History is moral, that it has “sides”, and they’re on The Right Side of History.

Whatever happens, then, happens either exactly as they foretold — even if they never bothered to actually prophesy, or to even think about it at all until just this second — or is a temporary victory by the forces of evil, a temporarily successful holding action against the inevitable Triumph of Progress.

It’s a fascinating chicken-and-egg conundrum: Did the Left take to Marxism because they’re so invincibly self-righteous, or does their sanctimoniousness come from their dedication to Marxism? It doesn’t really matter, because the practical effect is the same either way: Their consciences are completely short-circuited. They can do the most awful stuff with a smile on their faces, because “awful” is relative, comrade – as you’d know if you had the proper proletarian consciousness; if you understood things from History’s perspective, as they do.

Severian, “Escriva Ch.8: Examination of Conscience”, Founding Questions, 2022-06-26.

July 25, 2026

Modern careers – the permanent protest class

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

Although L. Wayne Mathison mentions this as a Canadian phenomenon, I believe it’s endemic to the Anglosphere and probably all of the former “first world” democracies:

“Free Palestine/Anti-Israel protest” by Can Pac Swire is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

After watching this, my takeaway is simple: Canada has developed a small, permanent protest class that moves from cause to cause, looking for confrontation, attention and social-media status.

These people are not trying to persuade anyone. They want to control the space, silence opponents and punish anyone who records what they are doing. The cause changes. The tactics do not.

There are extremists on both sides, but the organized activist left has become especially comfortable deciding who is allowed to speak, report or even stand in a public place. Too often, well-funded NGOs and unions provide the money, organization, legitimacy and political cover that keep this protest machine running.

Politicians, journalists and institutions then excuse the behaviour because they sympathize with the slogan on the sign.

A democracy cannot survive on selective free speech. Protest is a right. Intimidation, harassment and mob rule are not.

July 18, 2026

QotD: Britain’s National Trust wants to eliminate the “outdated mansion experience”

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

Think of the National Trust, and what probably comes to mind is an image of a middle-aged, middle-class couple pottering round a neo-classical pile built at vast expense by a spendthrift earl in the 18th century, and then surrendered to the Nation in lieu of inheritance tax sometime in the late 1940s. After all, its purpose is surely to preserve historically significant houses and gardens for the enjoyment and education of the general public.

Well, it seems not. Seek out the National Trust’s Strategy to 2025, and the first words you read are: “Our 21st-century ambition is to meet the needs of an environment under pressure, and the challenges and expectations of a fast-moving world … Underpinning this is our renewed commitment to diversity and inclusion and playing our part to create a fair, equal society, free from discrimination.”

In their “10-year Vision”, written in the same hideous identikit jargon, they talk about a “revolutionary” move away from the “outdated mansion experience”. The Trust provides little evidence that stately homes are becoming less popular; reading between the lines the main problem that the Vision’s authors seem to have with the English country house is that it is old and traditional and popular with comfortably-off white people.

I don’t particularly want to get stuck into the National Trust. But they do provide a particularly interesting example of a problem afflicting institutions in modern Britain, namely the relentless politicisation of parts of life which should represent an escape from politics.

Niall Gooch, “What is the point of the National Trust?”, UnHerd, 2020-10-19.

July 16, 2026

“Banned” book library in a Portuguese bookshop

Filed under: Books, Europe, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Most people are at least a bit uncomfortable with censorship, at least when the censors get into the swing of things and start banning ordinary books and authors. I had to check Wikipedia to find out who Dua Lipa might be as I hadn’t heard of her before, so the name popping up in headlines about her bold anti-censorship actions didn’t tell me much. I think I’m safe in assuming that Ms. Lipa is fully read-in on all the fashionable concerns of the celebrity set, so it’ll be easy to predict the works her library will feature:

The moment I heard Dua Lipa was curating a list of “banned” books, the first thing I knew for certain was that these books would definitely not be, in fact, banned.

For a start it’s a tautology to point out that if they were banned she couldn’t easily get hold of them and display them in a famous bookshop (Livraria Lello in Porto).

Secondly, there’s zero chance a famous mainstream pop star would decide to obliterate her career with anything genuinely controversial. “The Dua Lipa David Irving Collection” would make a funny meme — as when dense and edgy political viewpoints are jokingly attributed online to Sydney Sweeney or Lana Del Rey — but it would likely not be much of a career boost.

And thirdly, I am dimly aware of similarly-named sections in high street bookshops, which invariably contain the least banned books on the planet.

Hence I was able to guess much of Lipa’s list without even seeing it (A Clockwork Orange, 1984 etc.), yet it turned out to be even more mainstream than I imagined. These are books I studied at school (The Handmaid’s Tale) and university (Invisible Man, Things Fall Apart).

Which doesn’t mean they’re all bad, nor do I really mind that they weren’t all literally banned. As Vogue Adria explains: “The collection also includes books that may never have been formally banned but have nevertheless questioned existing structures of power or the suppression of individual and collective voices.”

What I do mind is that the list borrows the cachet of works that are bold artistic achievements, some published in genuinely hostile circumstances, and segues into books that uphold the current ideological orthodoxy.

This is most notable in the “Voice” section, which, we’re told, “amplifies voices that have historically or systematically been marginalised, excluded or underrepresented”.

Here we have Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, but also works like Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi. Thus Lipa, or whoever has helped her come up with this list, attempts a sleight of hand. The implication is that the liberal era of individual genius and freedom of expression leads naturally to the woke era of radical Leftism, aggressive conformity and cancel culture.

Of course there are postliberal thinkers who would agree with this, but they would mean it in the negative sense that liberalism’s inherent logic guaranteed its own demise in the form of Woke. Others, like Andrew Doyle, believe Woke is a hard break with liberalism — a hostile force attacking it from the outside.

And as the “banned” book library is in Portugal, I’m including Larry Correia’s comments on the issue (he still counts as “Portuguese”, right?)

Since I’m still getting barked at by pearl clutching weirdos about my comment yesterday about “banned books” everybody with a functioning brain knows that just because parents don’t want to spend their tax dollars subsidizing liberal authors to stock public school libraries with torture porn, and the book is still legally available literally everywhere else books are sold, means that book is not “banned”.

And most “banned” book displays are just left wing virtue signaling for marketing purposes. Like most liberal causes its a fake ass moralizing narrative disconnected from reality where they get to play the victim and the rest of us are bullies.

Manhattan publishing LOVES when the school board in Somnambulant Iowa says they don’t want to spend their limited budget buying copies of The Illustrated Guide To Fisting for Trans Middle Schoolers, because that’s great marketing and all the blue haired weirdos are now religiously mandated to go buy a copy to stick it to the chuds.

Libs tried their best to get writers like me booted out of everything, but it’ll be a cold day in hell before you see any of us showing up on any of these banned books displays, and we all know it.

Stephen King was lying his ass off about how that particular novella collection was all about “friendship” or WTF ever he claimed. The friendship story has prison rape as a subplot, but the real issue was the story about an escaped Nazi war criminal teaching an American teenager about the joys of rape, torture, and murder.

As you can imagine some parents get hesitant about giving stuff like that to their kids … just like Stephen King himself did when he banned his own school shooting book, Rage. But it was okay when he did it.

If a school board said they didn’t want to buy one of my books because they thought it was too violent for kids, I’d say, okay, cool. Not being a dishonest histrionic dork, I recognize that’s their choice, and not being in that one collection does not in any way make my book “banned”.

The book in question is still available in every store, can be ordered online, and is in most public library systems. No law is broken if you possess it or share it. But to a liberal NOT buying their shit with tax dollars to give to children (even if their parents think it is inappropriate) is the gravest sin imaginable and you are all basically nazis.

Well, except for Graham Platner obviously. Stephen King says he’s alright.

This is why so many of the kids are not “alright”

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

An interesting discussion at the social media site formerly known as Twitter, as Devon Eriksen responds to a comment from Stephen Fleming:

But don’t you understand?

There was a way. There was always a way.

We had it within our grasp, because we had already grasped it. The childhoods that you and your daughter had were available because you and your daughter had them.

All that the Boomers, and their parents, the eldest of the post WW2 generations, had to do was …

Nothing.

Just live in the paradise that their ancestors won for them, and make the minimum, the bare minimum, of effort that would have been required to actually sustain it.

That’s all.

Just keep things the way they were.

But they couldn’t handle that. Their fathers and grandfathers, the heroes that won WW2, made them jealous.

They wanted to be heroes, too.

So, for the sake of their own egos, they had to become Social Justice Warriors. They had to be Champions of Progress and Change.

They had to see the world they inherited as a pile of problems to be solved, rather than a pile of solutions to be cherished and preserved.

So they could feel like they were doing something important.

Almost all of the elder generations, even the ones who call themselves conservative and vote republican, are, in truth, socialist liberal progressives. Because they looked at paradise, and wanted to fix it instead of protect it.

That’s why the “republican” option was Reagan, the gun-ban guy, the social-welfare guy, the kiss-up-to-the-commies guy, the amnesty-for-foreign-invaders guy.

Reagan, the Hollywood liberal, the Obama of the 80s, instead of Joe McCarthy, Barry Goldwater, and Pat Buchanan.

Teens can’t have a summer job because elders had to be Third-World Compassion Heroes, and give us Hart-Cellar and eleventy-billion barbarians who don’t care about civilization, but will work cheap.

Teens can’t have a car because elders had to be Climate Emergency Heroes and give us emissions control laws and Cash for Clunkers.

Teens can’t have safe schools to learn at, because elders had to Anti-Racist Heroes and made it illegal to exclude violent thugs from our school districts. Just because those thugs generally come color-coded for your convenience.

Teens can’t have safe public spaces to hang out in, because elders had to be Compassion for the Underclass Heroes, and release violent savages into society, again and again, with a lecture and a slap on the wrist.

Teens can’t have a healthy economy to inherit, because elders had to be Equality Heroes and make sure every corporation that actually did anything useful was punished for not being Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive enough to suit the ideal universe that exists only in their heads.

Teens can’t have dates, because elders had to be Anti-Sexist Heroes, and let feminists spend forty years diminishing the social value of men, until you had to a be a billionaire rockstar adventurer to avoid being an unsexy loser by default.

Teens can’t even be fit, healthy, and pretty, because elders had to be Sex Equality Heroes, and move women into the corporate workforce in droves, leaving children to be fed by corporate industrial slop factories.

Teens can’t have sane, well-adjusted, unspoiled girlfriends and wives, because elders had to be Champions of Sexual Freedom, and normalize unlimited female promiscuity, all in exchange for the largely unfulfilled promise of a little unshaven free-love yeti snatch.

And worst, of all, the crowning irony, the final dead hamster in the water pipe, is that all of this would be fixable, perhaps in three to five election cycles …

Except.

Except the elders don’t understand that any of this of this is happening.

They haven’t had a child in the household since 1997. They haven’t looked for an entry-level job since 1973. They haven’t gone on a date since 1981. They haven’t been laid off … ever.

They are safe with their paid-off houses and their investments and their pensions from 45 years at the same company and their social security and their medical plans.

It’s affecting the youngest generations first and worst. While the elders sit on their cruise ship, surveying the short with binoculars, wondering who all these ragged distressed looking people standing on the shore are.

And why they are holding signs that say “HELP”, “THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT”, and “YOU STOLE THE LIFE I WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE”.

Then they shrug, conclude that these must be the whiny losers, and everyone further inland is probably just fine, and everything is fine, because they fixed everything and they are all heroes, and the Summer of Love was the end of the Problematic Era of History and the beginning of the Great Enlightenment.

And when I am 74 years old, and the elders are all safely tucked into their cemetery plots, I will be torn apart by an angry mob for having white hair, and therefore being “one of them”.

And the mob will not care that I didn’t get to cast a vote until 1992, for the Man Who Predicted All Of This.

He called it the “giant sucking sound”.

Which is apt because it’s why everything sucks now.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress