Quotulatiousness

May 23, 2025

“‘[D]isrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”

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

William M. Briggs uses the most recent installation of a statue of a black woman in highly public spaces to explore the idea that even black people “have Black Fatigue”:

Statues of fat ugly lumpen surly ill-kempt statues of black women, all in poses to accentuate their quarrelsome uselessness, are being placed in prominent places in the West. The Latest, rising like a creature in a 1960s Japanese monster movie, is in Times Square. The person who created these blots of bad taste said they were “a way of ‘disrupting traditional ideas’ of what a ‘triumphant figure’ is”.

He’s right. These figures do represent triumph. DIE requires elevating the least and representing them as the best, and forcing all to pretend the charade is real. Indeed, it is difficult to think of a more perfect representation of the true spirit of DIE than these misshapen piles of metal. They demand you say they are equivalent to great men whose statues we are no longer allowed to have.

If it were only statues, there would be no story. But everybody knows that bad black behavior of all kind is being ignored, excused or outright celebrated.

One example will suffice. After the lifelong thug and criminal lowlife George Floyd met his expected end — poisoning himself with drugs and engaging in all manner of misbehavior — our rulers and “elites” fell to their knees, even in Congress itself, to show their adoration of black criminality. Not to mention Floyd’s own statues which cropped up like poisonous mushrooms, each encouraging emulation of Floyd’s exasperating antics.

It’s so bad now that parents of white kids murdered by blacks rush out to forgive or excuse the killers, lest anybody dare to think they would condemn bad black behavior.

The question is why.

Before you answer, understand this is not only your “racist” Uncle Sergeant Briggs asking this question. Blacks themselves are asking.

There is an entire growing genre of YouTube videos of blacks telling us they grow weary of the constant misadventure of “ratchet blacks” (their word, not mine) and our culture’s welcoming attitude toward them. Take “Why Black Fatigue Is On The Rise“. Black fatigue is the natural exhaustion from having to deal routinely with with misbehaving blacks, where “dealing with” means having to pretend, while in polite society, we are not seeing what we are all seeing.

Watch just the first two minutes if you haven’t the time for more. The man in the inset quite rightly points out that blacks are now, as everybody always wanted, being judged by the content of their character, and not the color of their skin. The problem is the content of their character, or at least the character of those who are celebrated for misdeeds. As one commenter to the video said, the problem are blacks who are “Offended by everything. Ashamed of nothing. Entitled to everything. Responsible for nothing.”

The natural desire for separation, and to be with ones’ own, leads blacks to label blacks not confirming to expected behavior as “acting white”. The natural solution would be a formal separation: you go your way, we go ours. That, of course, would never be countenanced, and is anyway not desired by the majority. One thing absolutely demanded by our elites is “diversity”, by which they mean strict uniformity of belief. Our betters weep fake tears over things like colonization, which we know are fake because when we ask them to let us go our own way they say no.

If we can’t separate, then we have to find a way to get along with each other. Whatever this way is, it can’t have a basis in transparent lies.

May 14, 2025

We welcome (almost) all refugees

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

Mark Steyn notes the odd situation of rabid pro-refugee organizations suddenly finding that there are some refugees they don’t want to come to the United States after all:

We are told, relentlessly, that “diversity is our strength”. But it’s a delicate balance, isn’t it? After Biden’s untold millions of drug mules and sex fiends, just fifty-nine whites from South Africa could completely destroy all the multiculti harmony:

I confess to mixed feelings about those scenes myself. When I was a kid, the Boers had a reputation, unlovely as they might be in certain aspects, as the toughest buggers on the planet. In Britain and Canada, it was not uncommon to hear fellows, depressed at how their own countries were going, talk breezily about emigrating to South Africa. Yet in the end they folded in nothing flat — and the country’s new masters don’t want them and they have to find somewhere to go. Gee, it’s almost like that might be a lesson of more general application in the year ahead.

So it’s interesting to see the American left tiptoe all the way up to making the real purpose of “diversity” explicit: We’re in favour of open borders … except for whites. Rather than sully their hands with fifty-nine Afrikaners, the Episcopal Church has declared it’s willing to forego the moolah from the federal “refugee resettlement” racket. The spousal-abusing MS-13 gangbanger may be the quintessential “Maryland man”, but these white guys never can be.

Watching hoity-toity upper-class whites like NBC’s Andrea Mitchell finger-wagging from the anchor chair about their anti-whiteness is instructive. They assume that they will never have to face the consequences of their virtue-signalling. But the chasm between Eliteworld and Reality yawns wider with every day, and it will one day consume most of the west’s high-status “progressives” too. There are limits to kingly power. That’s the lesson Canute tried to teach his courtiers when he took them to the water’s edge and commanded the tide to lay off his loafers. But King Canute would never have ordered his staff to tell the peasantry to eat crickets on a bed of cockroach coulis. Because that would be too ridiculous.

For that we had to wait until Justin Trudeau, sinking bazillions of dollars into bug farms as part of the masterplan: that’s not just a bug, it’s an indispensable feature. Because at the World Economic Forum all the clever guys decided that, in the interests of saving the world from “climate change”, our rulers had to do to our own farmers what the mob is doing to white South Africans: destroy their farms, kill all the cows and sheep, and ensure that nothing grazes there ever again.

There are few things sadder than a post-developed society. If you walk around South African towns at the end of the day, you will notice in high-rise buildings the absence of lights on the upper floors: the inability to maintain skyscrapers is one of the first signs of a society in decline. It starts at the heights and then sinks to the basement, whether those heights are Boeing or bug farms. If you’re in on the racket, you can still live high off the hog-simulating scorpions … for a while. But the people who make the running in the western world are mad, and their fever dreams are boundless.

May 12, 2025

Hiding Sir John A. from the woke mob

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

Woke iconoclasm swept across the country, but the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald outside the Ontario Legislature in Queen’s Park was hidden away inside a plywood box. James Pew catches up on the situation inside Queen’s Park Crescent:

“Free John” spray painted on the plywood boards covering the statue of Sir John A. MacDonald in Queen’s Park Toronto.

It’s not just historical content distorted by bad actors, it is the entire way history is thought about, taught, and used to legitimize all sorts of nefarious agendas, which forms a broader set of concerns. For instance, a Toronto man recently found himself in trouble over a meaningful act of non-destructive civil disobedience involving a monument to a beloved and needlessly contentious Canadian historical figure. Daniel Tate is an ardent patriot and founder of a civic advocacy group called IntegrityTO, who describe themselves as “a coalition of concerned citizens who want to restore integrity-driven leadership so that Toronto can be a great city once again”. In a minor act of public vandalism, and in a moment of frustration over the disrespect shown to Canada’s boxed up father of confederation, Tate spray painted “Free John” on the plywood hoarding covering the statue of Sir John A. Macdonald at Queen’s Park in Toronto. No paint touched the statue itself, just the plywood that hides it away from the public, and protects it from the angry and destructive social justice mob.

Sir John A’s Queen’s Park statue initially became the unseen centerpiece of the current unsightly plywood enclosure after an incident which took place in 2020; three radical social justice activists splashed it with pink paint. It is worth pointing out that this cherished monument to the father of confederation was first installed in 1894. And although Black Lives Matter activists Daniel Gooch, Danielle Smith, and Jenna Reid initially found themselves in hot water over their costly and disrespectful acts of public vandalism (they also painted statues of Egerton Ryerson and King Edward VII Equestrian), all charges were withdrawn in 2021. In their statement to the media the group said, “along with a coalition of artists, the group artistically disrupted statues of slaveholders and monuments to colonialism at Ryerson University and at Queen’s Park”. One would think Daniel Tate should be extended the same leniency for his “artistic disruption”.

Image of Black Lives Matter activists vandalizing the Queen’s Park statue of Sir John A. MacDonald, (via CBC)

As it stands, Tate has been criminally charged with mischief under $5000 which carries a maximum penalty of two years in prison. Still in the preliminary stages, his next court appearance is scheduled for June 30.

Last month Tate appeared on AM 640’s The Oakley Show where he remarked, “The sad irony of it, people were defacing and vandalizing national monuments with impunity … four or five years ago. No Charges. We were all watching aghast at how this was all happening. And, it was acceptable somehow. And here I am five years later. I didn’t even deface a statue or a monument, it was literally a piece of plywood – the cheapest plywood you could find. And now I’m clogging the criminal justice system with this completely frivolous charge.”

While covering Tate’s case, independent journalist Daniel Bordman said, “This is a great example of 2-Tier policing because if he wrote Free Palestine instead he’d probably be given the key to the city”. And journalist Anthony Furey posted the following on X: “There has been so much lawlessness and disorder on Toronto streets in recent years that goes totally unchecked … But if you write FREE JOHN on a boarded up statue of Sir John A, police handcuff and arrest you on the spot – which is what happened to Daniel Tate the other week”.

This begs the question, if security was on-site to arrest Tate in the immediate moments that followed his minor spray paint transgression, why does Sir John A. need to be boxed up at all? One security guard around the clock would suffice. Does the Queen’s Park premises not already have security? It appears they keep a close eye on Sir John A’s unfortunate wooden container. So, why not free John? Beef up security a little if necessary, but let our first Prime Minister once again be visible and unadulterated in his rightful place of honour. For the sake of our blessed Holy Peter, it’s been five bloody years!

May 9, 2025

They keep saying the quiet part out loud – democracy is a threat to the establishment

Filed under: Americas, Britain, Cancon, Europe, France, Germany, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

N.S. Lyons went to Barad-dûr Ottawa earlier this month to speak at the 2025 Civitas Canada Conference, and posted his remarks on his Substack:

The 2022 Freedom Convoy induced a state of panic in the Canadian federal government, yet the elected representatives proved completely unwilling to even talk to anyone from the protests. The government clearly persuaded itself that this was an actual insurrection, and waited for the violence to break out … and there was no violence, other than that provided by the police and a few paid actors.
A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen! It’s a pleasure to visit the North and get a glimpse behind the new Iron Curtain …

As it happens, the official theme of this conference is “Freedom and its Discontents: Liberal Democracy at a Crossroads”. That is a timely theme indeed. Because I think it isn’t too extreme to say that, all around the Western world today, democracy is under assault — even that it risks extinction. It risks extinction because the authorities that run our societies seem to find the practice, values, and very spirit of democracy to be increasingly intolerable.

In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.

In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.

In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary”, is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.

One gets the sense that the honest view of our exasperated political elites is as captured in a Bloomberg News headline from last year which read: “2024 is a year of elections, and that’s a threat to democracy”.

In country after country, governments are moving to desperately tighten their grip over the people they rule, sharply curtailing freedom of speech and access to information, and using alleged threats to security and stability to justify granting themselves emergency powers, weaponizing the law, criminalizing dissent, and suppressing any meaningful political opposition.

In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.

In Brazil, a single Supreme Court judge, in alliance with the country’s leftist president, has effectively established a judicial dictatorship, locking up political rivals by decree, silencing the speech of opposition figures, and utilizing state leverage over the financial system to punish political enemies by banishing them from public economic life.

But of course Brazil’s authorities learned these tactics by observation. Observation of Canada, to be precise, where Justin Trudeau’s government first employed debanking — along with a little brute force — as a tool to crush peaceful protest of his draconian and disastrous pandemic lockdown policies.

Today, the Canadian government’s weaponization of the legal system and public institutions, including state-funded media, to impose a quasi-totalitarian progressive ideological regime, censor and jail dissenters, and effectively transform Canada into a one-party state, has, I’m afraid, won your country a real measure of global infamy. Many Canadians here may not be aware of just how your government appears from the outside, but I’m afraid it’s not a good look at all. Unfortunately I must report that when many of us look at Canada what we see is a global leader in progressive authoritarianism, out-of-control migration, growing anarcho-tyranny, foreign subversion, and ideologically-induced economic stagnation.

But then, what we might realistically call the liberal-authoritarian model is, sadly, the new normal in the West, where many hyphenated liberal-democracies seem to have concluded that they must now begin to cast off the democratic half of that historical compact.

It may seem that this hardening of control is a response to the rise of so-called populism, which has swept the Western world. Certainly many authoritarian measures have been justified, without any sense of irony, as necessary to defend “our democracy” (so-called) against the dissatisfaction of the actual demos. And it’s true that fear of populism — which is really fear of genuine democracy — does seem to consistently provoke a spiral of ham-fisted reactions by our increasingly authoritarian states. But the reality is that populism is itself a reaction, an organic immune response to the particularly unresponsive and anti-democratic new form of governance that has visibly overtaken the West in recent decades.

April 27, 2025

“[T]he practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party”

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

Mark Steyn on the steady leftward march of pretty much every western nation that never, ever stops and only rarely slows down:

A ratchet allows rotation in one direction, but prevents rotation in the other direction. That’s been a common explanation of most western governments for decades … leftward motion occurs, but can only be stopped, never reversed.

In a shrewd assessment of the current campaign Down Under, Paul Collits cites a certain “niche Canadian”:

    Mark Steyn says that we cannot vote our way out of the Western mess. The 2025 Australian election is living proof of the truth of his claim. Whoever wins here will inherit an unholy mess, and will not have the will to address it.

Of course, he could be talking about next week’s Canadian election or last month’s German election. As we have noted, Fred Merz, the incoming chancellor in Berlin, has yet to take office but what Americans call the honeymoon is over before the coalition has been officially pronounced man and wife. Hermann Binkert, head honcho of Germany’s INSA polling agency, says the country has never seen loss of approval on this scale between the election and the formation of the government. The so-called “far-right” AfD is now leading in multiple polls. Which would be super-exciting if voting hadn’t already taken place.

In America, the new administration certainly has the “will to address” the “unholy mess” but the Trumpian Gulliver is beset on all sides by District Court Lilliputians whose position is that what a Democrat president has done cannot “lawfully” be undone. This is a pseudo-“constitutional” recognition of the practical reality of electoral politics throughout the west: the choice is between a Leftward Ho! party and a Ratchet party. If the Left wins, they dissolve the border and trannify your kids. If the “Right” wins (Stephen Harper, Scott Morrison), they may pause some of the more obviously crazy stuff but they never actually reverse the direction of travel. Unless they’re the UK Tories (Cameron, May, Johnson, Sunak), in which case they stay in the leftie lane without even shifting down to third gear.

So “politics”, as increasingly narrowly defined, is less and less likely to save you. Because the gap between “politics” and reality grows ever wider. Consider the instructive example of one Hashem Abedi. Mr Abedi and his brother plotted the Ariana Grande concert bombing in Manchester. It was, from the Abedi viewpoint, a huge success: twenty-two dead, half of them kids, plus a thousand injured. It was a big deal at the time: lots of flowers, teddy bears, and heart-rending renditions of “Don’t Look Back in Anger”.

So you’d have thought even the British state would have at least pretended to take it seriously. Hashem Abedi was detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure, and under one of the three supposedly toughest prison regimes in England and Wales. Nevertheless, on April 12th he put three of his guards in hospital with what were described as “life-threatening injuries“. A fortnight later, two are still there. How did a maximum-security prisoner manage to do that? Well, he used boiling cooking oil and weaponised kitchen utensils.

So how did he get hold of boiling cooking oil? Was he a finalist for Maximum Security Masterchef? Ah, well. The details remain vague, and as usual the worthless UK media has shown not the slightest curiosity in how the Ariana Grande perp came close to bulking up his death toll by fifteen per cent.

April 26, 2025

QotD: “Woke”

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

… over the past few years the term has been appropriated and sloganised by the cult of social justice. “Woke” is no longer simply a matter of standing up to racism, but is irrevocably connected to the authoritarian mindset of the identitarian left. Rather than confront bad ideas through discussion, debate, ridicule and protest, those who self-identify as “woke” would sooner intimidate their detractors into silence through what has become known as “cancel culture”. More insidiously, they have sought to empower the state and strengthen hate-speech laws, which curb individual freedom. They do all this in the belief that theirs is a righteous cause, but their illiberal actions ultimately bolster the very ideas they purport to despise.

Moreover, this monomaniacal need to expose an ever-expanding set of “phobias” in society means that they end up detecting prejudice even where it does not exist. In the absence of evidence of racism the woke have a habit of simply concocting it; hence the continual emphasis on “unconscious bias”, “white privilege” and “institutional power structures”. Such ideas have germinated over many years in academia – particularly in the postmodern branches of critical theory – and have since seeped into the mainstream.

This is why the public is routinely confronted with absurd articles in the media grounded in an extreme form of intersectionality. One, for instance, claims that white women are “evil”, another that white DNA is an “abomination”. Barely a day goes by without some frenzied denunciation of a movie or a television series for its lack of diversity and positive representation, as though the function of the arts is to send a message that accords with identitarian values.

Few members of the public are entirely familiar with the jargon (“cisgender”, “mansplaining”, “toxic masculinity”), but are assured nonetheless that the premises are indisputable. There’s a very good reason why the Catholic Church resisted translating the Bible into the vernacular for so long. Those in power are always threatened when the plebeians start thinking for themselves and asking difficult questions.

Some commentators have recently raised concerns that “woke” has been weaponised by the far right as a slur against anti-racist campaigners. Afua Hirsch, for instance, has claimed in the Guardian that anyone using the word is “likely to be a right-wing culture warrior angry at a phenomenon that lives mainly in their imagination”. This strikes me as particularly odd, given the Guardian‘s own frequent use of the word, including in headlines such as “Can a woke makeover win Barbie and Monopoly new fans?” and “My search for Mr Woke: a dating diary”. Perhaps Hirsch’s colleagues are further to the right than is generally supposed.

Andrew Doyle, “Why I’m anti-woke”, Spiked, 2020-02-04.

April 17, 2025

QotD: Explaining mid-century American support of Chiang Kai-Shek and the Republic of China

Filed under: China, History, Military, Quotations, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[A question I posed on Founding Questions kindly answered by Pickle Rick:] Can anyone explain, in simple easy words, just exactly why the US State Department and/or other US government functionaries had such a mad pash for Chiang? Was it the Sun-Yat-Sen connection? Did he have inside info on the white slave trade in [Washington, DC]? Was it the opium smuggled in through diplomatic pouches? What in the Fu Manchu made Chiang of all the options the Juggalo pick of the litter? Every time I try to figure this out for myself, I end up in the same place … either [the Imperial Japanese Army] or the little red book fanatics couldn’t possibly have made a worse job of effing up what was left of Imperial China, so why Chiang of all the warlords?

PR: Because the missionaries in China had decided that it was going to become their great project, channeling that global do gooder impulse that had lain dormant since the end of the Civil War as their Great Cause — the missionaries were the grandchildren of the abolitionists and they took their fanaticism straight from that movement. China was to be “saved” from paganism, Catholicism and colonialism and they formed some kind of proto-NGO, ensuring that their views were made the policy of the government. It is not a coincidence that both Chaing and his wife were Protestant Christian converts (at least nominally) That impulse to “nation build” China into a facsimile of Progresssive Christian America (excluding, of course, the Old Confederacy) is the source of the drive to make their fantasy real, like that Utopian impulse we described the other day that is a bedrock of the Juggalo mindset. To find the roots of the China obsession you have to understand the power of the missionary movement. Nothing to me sums it up better than Kenneth Wherry, who became a big player in the China Lobby, with his mix of naivety, pathological altruism, and religious fervor-

    With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City …

[…]

That’s an important point — the Protestants never had the same fervor to make Vietnam or Cuba or even the Philippines (even though it was OUR colony) into Kansas City, because they were either already Catholic or had a minority Catholic elite. China, however, gave them that sweet Protestant fix in making a new China with the “right” kind of Christianity. It’s also why they hated Japan so — Japan had slammed the door on Protestant missionaries pretty hard and their Christian minority (in Nagasaki, ironically) was Catholic.

From the comment thread on “WNF: A Twofer”, Founding Questions, 2025-01-15.

April 16, 2025

The “medicalization” or “syndromization” of aspects of the normal human condition

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

On his Substack, Freddie deBoer wonders why we can’t be honest about the rise of bespoke “mental disorders” that look remarkably like typical human reaction to stimuli:

I just found a cost-free way to farm sympathy and attention 😊

I will never not be fascinated by those issues or arguments or perspectives that are studiously ignored by the media generally and the New York Times in particular. I’ve whinged about this many times when it comes to education, as the NYT is simply not going to consider the notion that different individual people have fundamentally different levels of academic potential in its pages, not even in an attempt to rebut the idea. I suppose that notion is just too challenging to the elite meritocratic liberalism that the Times epitomizes; the idea that we are all ultimately capable of achieving academic and professional greatness flatters the high-achievers who read and write the paper, and the “anyone can be anything” ethos is pleasant and unchallenging. It’s also destructive, which is the point. Bad ideas grow like weeds in the shade, or whatever the saying is. Disability issues are another place where the Grey Lady is very picky about what ideas to consider, and as usual they set the rhythm for many other publications.

This weekend the Times released a long piece looking at the ever-escalating rates of ADHD diagnoses and what exactly they tell us. What’s in the piece is fine — of course, the ADHD activist class doesn’t like it — but what’s remarkable is what isn’t in it. Once again, there’s just about zero consideration of ADHD as a social contagion, any recognition that there is now a vast and deeply annoying ADHD culture online that acts as a kind of evangelical movement for a neurodevelopment disorder. There are millions of people on ADHD TikTok and ADHD Tumblr and ADHD Twitter. There’s a vast universe of facile memes, dubious statistics, and self-flattering nostrums about ADHD floating around out there, and increasingly they’re penetrating into broader internet culture. (I am genuinely unaware of a subculture that is more directly and shamelessly self-celebrating than the online ADHD community, and I’ve read the comments at LessWrong.) Unsurprisingly, a big subsidiary industry has sprung up, with all kinds of products and services for sale, books and apparel and tchotchkes and conferences and boutique forms of therapy and exclusive members-only Discords … Whether neurodevelopmental disorders should have merch is an open question. What’s not subject to questioning is that this is happening. Five minutes of cursory searching would reveal the remarkable scope of online ADHD culture.

And yet the piece’s author, Paul Tough, is just about totally silent on this glaring reality. I find it genuinely bizarre. In a long and rambling (in a good way) piece where he kicks the various rocks of ADHD and asks good-faith questions about how diagnostic rules and social perception of the disorder influence medical practice, he still somehow fails to ever refer to the large, influential, and growing online movement that has raised the profile of the disorder even beyond its prior notoriety and in doing so injected a ton of money into the equation. You can dismiss that community as an online sideshow if you choose, but of course the online world has become profoundly influential on real life, and in other contexts neither the New York Times specifically nor the elite media generally has any problem acknowledging that fact. Why not here?

This tendency extends beyond ADHD. Recently Holden Thorp, editor in chief of the prestigious journal Science, wrote an essay for the NYT that explores the rise of autism diagnoses, which have expanded at truly ludicrous rates. To the extent that it’s referenced at all, the idea of social contagion is dismissed without argument. A couple years ago the Times published a piece by Azeen Ghorayshi about the absurd case of Tourette’s spreading (or “spreading”) among too-online adolescent girls via TikTok; though Ghorayshi is admirably clear that those young women did not in fact have Tourette’s, her piece is also slavishly, almost comically sympathetic to them, never bothering to suggest that maybe these were just bored teenagers who engaged in a frivolous and offensive bit of minstrelsy. (Imagine, judging teenagers for doing something stupid!) The idea that anyone could ever have unserious and wrongheaded motivations for adopting a disability seems to be one of those stories that the New York Times absolutely refuses to tell.

But why? People make up fake illnesses all the time, both consciously and unconsciously. Factitious disorders are real; we have references to what we might now call psychosomatic illnesses that stretch back to antiquity. Munchausen by internet is real. Hypochondria, factitious illness, Munchausen’s, the worried well … these have represented a major challenge for psychiatry for as long as the field has been formalized and integrated into the larger medical project. Why does no one ever talk about this stuff in our stuffy elite publications? Why do so many people in our media dance and shuffle rather than ask direct questions like “How many of these diagnoses are fundamentally faulty?” Why can’t anyone point out that saying you have a medical disorder is a shortcut to getting sympathy and attention, and that human beings crave sympathy and attention the way they crave water and air? We’ve lived through something like a “vibe shift,” and previously-unchallengeable social justice pieties are increasingly challenged, in good ways and bad. Yet under the broad umbrella of disability rhetoric, it’s always 2018, with both traditional and social media operating under a cloud of fear of giving offense. As I’ve said many times, the number of people who privately agree with me about all this is legion. The number who are willing to say so publicly are very few indeed. Nobody wants to paint that target on their back, I suppose. But why do these issues make people feel like targets at all?

April 15, 2025

What is it with the progressives’ love for (some) brutal murderers?

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

I’ve managed to avoid watching any of the interview, but Taylor Lorenz was on CNN, where utter inhumanity is apparently the flavour of the month for all right-thinking progressives:

Former New York Times and Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, speaking about accused killer Luigi Mangione on CNN MisinfoNation with Donnie O’Sullivan:

    To see these millionaire media pundits on TV clutching their pearls about someone stanning a murderer when this is the United States of America. As if we don’t lionize criminals … There’s a huge disconnect between the narratives and the angles that mainstream media pushes and what the American public feels … You’re going to see women especially that feel like, “Oh my God”, right? Like, “Here’s this man who’s revolutionary, who’s famous, who’s handsome, who is young, who’s smart”. He’s a person that seems like this morally good man, which is hard to find.

I know Lorenz is a human bug-zapper whose purpose is luring people to doom by drawing them to the glow of the impossibly stupid online utterance, but even by her standards this is nuts. For one thing, Lorenz is a leading advocate for dumbed-all-the-way-down media like her “beloved” Vine, which featured six-second-max videos. If someone handed her a hardcover book, she’d be a serious threat to bite it. Her invoking Flannery O’Connor and A Good Man is Hard to Find in the context of Luigi Mangione is high comedy. Regarding America “stanning” murderers because “we give them Netflix shows,” which does she mean? Americans may be fascinated by O.J. and Bundy and Phil Spector, but we don’t gush cartoon hearts at them over cable, we watch them in lurid docudramas.

As Jim Treacher puts it:

The thing I like most about journalism is the moral authority.

Journos are better human beings than the rest of us — morally, ethically, and intellectually — and they’re not shy about saying so. Their views are the correct views, after all. Their political opinions are the North Star. And if you disagree with anything they know to be true about the world, you’re the enemy and they don’t care what happens to you.

Hell, if you’re on their literal hit list, they’ll openly laugh and swoon over anyone who hurts you. If you don’t believe it, just watch the following clip from a cable news network.

Dramatis Personae:

  • Donie O’Sullivan is a “senior correspondent” for CNN.
  • Taylor Lorenz is a reporter who has worked for the New York Times and the Washington Post.
  • Luigi Mangione, the heir to a wealthy Baltimore family, shot a health insurance executive named Brian Thompson in the back as he was walking to work in Manhattan.

And now, here are O’Sullivan and Lorenz celebrating the murder on national television.

April 13, 2025

QotD: The 15-minute city

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Take, for example, the 15-minute city, which is a radical proposal that people should be able to get pretty much anywhere they need to go within fifteen minutes and ideally without needing a car. It’s a lovely idea, and the parts of residential America that are like that — most of them former suburbs — are insanely desirable and therefore insanely expensive. If it were easy to make more of them, you’d think the market would have figured out how! And if I had any confidence whatsoever that anyone involved in municipal planning could produce more neighborhoods like that — leafy green places full of parks, libraries, schools, and shops — or even that they wanted to have safe, clean, and reliable transit options, I’d be all for it. But these are the same people who are gutting public safety in the cities while failing to maintain or enforce order on existing transit. These are the same people who imposed draconian Covid mitigation policies like Zoom kindergarten, padlocked churches, and old people dying alone with nothing but a glove full of warm water to mimic human touch, all of which were meant to buy time for … something (human challenge trials? nationalized N95 production?) that never happened. It’s easy to ban things; it’s hard to do things. So you’ll excuse my doubts about their ability to build a 15-minute city that looks like Jane Jacobs’s ideal mixed-use development, with safe, orderly streets and a neighborhood feel. One rather suspects they would find it far more within their wheelhouse to simply abolish single-family zoning or imposing restrictions on who can go where, when.

Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Wizard and the Prophet, by Charles C. Mann”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2024-01-22.

April 11, 2025

Critical Trade Theory

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

A discussion at the amusingly named Handwaving Freakoutery on the ongoing wave of tariff activity under the Trump II administration, characterizing them as “woke” tariffs:

The great argument playing out in the media right now about the relative value and ethical implications of reciprocal tariffs is not relevant. It is not relevant because these tariffs are not reciprocal tariffs in any measurable way. They aren’t reciprocal, they aren’t sensible, and the justification for them is Woke in every sense of the word. Let’s take a close look at what we might call Critical Trade Theory, back our way into an understanding of what a woke tariff is and how this is definitely that, and close with a quick word about how political realignments portend doom for the left even though the right is really screwing this up. Then we’ll all buy mop handle futures.

Awokening

The Great Awokening of the prior decade was founded in part on the False Cause Fallacy. Our major institutions for the better part of the last ten years were operated by wokerists, who used an Intersectional Matrix of Culturally Encouraged Race and Gender Prejudice to counteract what they viewed as hidden unmeasurable forces such as “systemic racism”. They couldn’t point to the systemic racism, but they knew it must be there because of the imbalance in socioeconomic metrics, and they denied any other possible explanation for the imbalance. Once the False Cause was in place, the devout wokerist was forced to fight the hidden prejudice with overt reverse prejudice, because they couldn’t conceive any other cause.

For example, if black folks have a hard time getting into Harvard or UNC, it must be because society is systemically racist against black people, and no other reason, therefore we should redirect admission slots from Asians who earned them to blacks who didn’t, for race balancing.

Harvard did exactly that, for exactly that reason, and admitted it, and it was sent to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court banned it, and then Harvard kept doing it and is still doing it using different words.

Some of our other institutions are still running this wokery program, although the Trump Administration purged much of it from the halls of federal power this year under their DEI ban, and many other institutions used Trump as cover to independently purge it from theirs. But this same smooth-brained thinking wiggled its way right into Trump’s tariff plan last week, through an equation that looks fancy but is something my middle school son could figure out.

[…]

The media thinks these woke tariffs are going to bomb the economy back to the stone age, but when I make the abhorrent choice to read the graphs myself it looks more like January 2024. A 20% tariff on Chinese goods is rough. Adding 34% more to it is rougher. But a 54% tariff on Chinese goods is nothing compared to Shenzhen closing its entire manufacturing sector down because they found a germ, and probably not significantly worse than the Fed turning off the free money spigot in 2022.

These tariffs are going to do goofy shit to the economy. I don’t like the goofy shit they’re likely to do. I think that trade balancing through tariffs is an idea so stupid that only Rust Belt union workers could come up with it, which is why they probably did come up with it, and also probably why Trump won the election by flipping the Rust Belt.

April 10, 2025

Late onset Trump Derangement Syndrome

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

Ed West diagnoses himself with a raging case of late onset TDS:

What has caused this late-onset TDS, however, is not Trump’s behaviour, but the relative silence of his critics. During Trump’s first term, everyone in the American establishment seemed to be calling him the next Hitler, and this included not just the usual academics and journalists but many major corporations; companies like Nike, Heineken and Airbnb were at the forefront of the “resistance” against the president, a trend labelled “CEO Activism”. It was quite obviously self-interested and performative, because if everyone in your country is calling its leader a fascist dictator, then you probably don’t live in a fascist dictatorship.

I have no idea where I saw this meme, but it makes me laugh

That is not the case this time around, and that is more troubling. I recall from my time volunteering for first aid training that, when you arrive at the scene of an accident, you don’t go to the person screaming in pain, but the individual lying on the ground in stony silence. Similarly, the fact that people working for large corporations now keep quiet about Trump, even as he embarks on the most reckless economic policy in recent years, should probably concern us. The reason they keep quiet — and this is something I have heard from the horse’s mouth — is because they feel that there is a real risk of punitive action if they speak out.

One of the things more moderate folks used to warn the far left activists about using any and all tools to “get” their enemies is that it can — and in this case has — unleashed exactly the same kind of retribution when their former target now has the power to do so. “Muh norms!” indeed.

The constant evocation of fascism is not just mistaken in my view, but neurotic. Western civilisation is emotionally scarred by the violent racial supremacism of the Nazi regime and in particular the Holocaust, the worst crime in history, yet people have a tendency to fight the last war and this isn’t the danger that Trump represents. He is not a white supremacist and not especially motivated by ethnic nationalism. He is, however, authoritarian in nature, prone to be vengeful to those who cross him while also surrounding himself with yes-men, and he does seem to have territorial ambitions, even if they concern a frozen wasteland. Those things are all bad enough in themselves.

Rather than being a new Hitler, a more realistic concern is that Trump represents the 19th century spectre of Caesarism, a man who uses democracy in order to establish himself as an imperial figure. The fear of a Caesar always haunted the founders of the Republic, obsessed with Roman history as they were and sceptical of democracy and mobs.

Trump as a modern Louis Napoleon? A case could certainly be made for it.

Caesars do not come out of nowhere, and the progressivism of the last few years has been deeply illiberal, hostile to freedom of speech and even more so to freedom of association. Jonathan Haidt talked of “decentralized totalitarianism” and it was the chaotic nature of woke progressivism that made it so disconcerting and caused many people, including those same corporate leaders, to stay silent.

Many of the things Trump is now doing are not entirely dissimilar to what radical progressives did when the opportunity arose, in particular the determination that institutions are cleared of their opponents. It is bitterly ironic, for instance, to have the Left accuse Trump of “rewriting history” for ideological reasons (gosh, imagine!). Yet there is something quite different about people scared of online mobs and being scared of the government. Activists, though loud and hysterical, could be ignored if people only had the courage to face them (which they usually didn’t); the state can make your life very difficult indeed. Already the Trump regime has punished law firms which oppose their leader; foreign nationals who’ve expressed criticism of the regime have been detained. These are not good signs.

I’ve sneered at the American critics who worked themselves up into hysterical rages about Trump, not just because of their puritanical piety but because of the lack of awareness about their own behaviour, in particular the conspiracies about Russia and the dishonest, partisan nature of American journalism (Trump is probably the most dishonest president in US history, but it may also be true that he is the most lied about). In the modern liberal imagination, in part because so many people read far more fiction than history, Trumpian figures tend to be opposed by a courageous “resistance”, whereas in reality most dictatorial leaders arise because there are no moderate alternatives, and the opposition is similarly extreme and unpalatable. There were no real goodies in the Spanish Civil War, nor in Syria, nor even in much of central-eastern Europe in the mid-20th century, where fascists fought communists for control of the streets.

April 9, 2025

“South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable”

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

Niccolo Soldo’s weekend roundup includes some quotes from Lawrence Thomas on what he terms a “racketeer party state“, what the “Rainbow Nation” of South Africa has degenerated into since the end of Apartheid:

South Africa is what happens when a country becomes ungovernable. From endemic sexual crime to farm murders, rolling blackouts, and expropriation, the rest is just the details. What has come to be termed “South Africanization” is not the failed development of a Third-World nation such as Afghanistan or Somalia, but the structural de-development of a once fully modern state that had its own nuclear weapons program. President Trump’s support of Afrikaner farmers has brought global attention to the decaying state of the country and is perhaps the most high-level recognition yet that the 1990s “Rainbow Nation” dream is dead. What’s strange about it all is how much of it happened on purpose.

What may be worse is that the very system of law and government itself has become an instrument to be captured and used to further the mass looting of the country. South Africans of all races inherit a Western political culture and economy. The average South African experiences a strong civic identity, highly active political parties, popular national media networks, a market economy, and a parliamentary constitutional order. The last thirty years saw a coalition of political actors, patronage networks, and organized criminal gangs seize control of and use all the infrastructure of modern government for their own ends.

[…]

While songs like “Kill the Boer” at rallies tend to grab headlines, the most consequential development of late is the passing of expropriation without compensation into law by the supposedly moderate President Cyril Ramaphosa. In addition to further eroding property rights, it emboldens a widespread movement that sees land redistribution as the sole resolution to the country’s racial conflict and views the presence of any white population as fundamentally illegitimate. The radicalization of race politics is the means through which political fights are won, since it plays on the country’s major divides and wins over those who feel left out of the spoils.

On the ground, reports tell of ANC officials tacitly allowing invasions of private and public land by squatters. Occupations of this sort have sometimes preceded the farm murders which have gained media attention internationally, and squatters have now begun to invoke the Expropriation Act. Such groups become the shock troops of political pressure: they can harass and pressure the occupants of the lands they occupy, or worse, while becoming a media story about the “landless oppressed” used to justify broader government action. The broad facilitation of ground-level conflict and crime by those with political power is the defining feature of South Africanization.

[…]

In other words, decay is a burden without benefit. There is no “rock bottom”. Business, political organization, social fabric, and all other forms of Western cultural life just face increasing costs. Some are direct, while others are opportunity costs: how much doesn’t happen because almost no one can guarantee electricity? In a relatively developed country, there’s still much more to break down and expropriate.

The combination of social progressivism with an economic model of managed decline has become orthodoxy in many establishment parties across the developed world. South Africa is a study of the political phenomenon in its advanced stage and a demonstration of what is at stake in defeating it in the rest of the Western world. Flip Buys, leader of the Afrikaner trade union Solidariteit, was likely prophetic when he foresaw that South Africa would become home to the “first large grouping of Westerners living in a post-Western country”.

Emphasis from Niccolo’s excerpts.

April 8, 2025

QotD: The sad plight of the modern day “radical”

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

Many are opposed to faith, family, industrious habits, common decency and public order. The “radical” will not be able to articulate reasons for his bitter opposition, but one look at his face should make everything clear. Here in Parkdale, we have a lot of Leftists. Perhaps they had unhappy childhoods. I hope gentle reader will not think me a bigot, but I have noticed that they are almost all white people.

Whatever the cause, they cannot “smoak a jest”, recognize other forms of humour, or distinguish the parts of speech. This makes them appear batty (in the old sense, when it would have attracted institutional attention). They are frequently convulsed with anger, then sullen when they have exhausted themselves. Alas, they cannot be left in normal company, for they will immediately and raucously demand a “safe space”, and then not go away. They will accuse the normal person of “racism”, “fascism”, “sexism”, and “microaggressions”. Their spittle represents a health hazard.

It is hard to know what to do with these people, in the absence of the traditional arrangements. When world markets open again, we could sell them into slavery. But in the meantime, I suppose, we must keep them in group homes, ideally under armed guard. Maybe feed them okra; surely there is a surplus, and I’m told it has calming properties.

But that’s just me, always looking for solutions.

David Warren, “Keeping one’s peace”, Essays in Idleness, 2020-04-18.

April 7, 2025

Those brave, rare contrarians willing to risk everything by … criticizing Trump?

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

Chris Bray is deeply concerned that a free society seems unable to produce even a mild array of differing political opinions these days:

I was at a small independent bookstore today, the exact kind of place that’s supposed to curate a culture of argument and criticism. The prominently displayed books about politics and current events were Timothy Snyder’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, Jason Stanley’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, Anne Applebaum’s book about the terrifying rise of American fascism under that monster Trump, and a bunch of other books by prominent journalists and professors about … okay, try to guess.

On the other side of that exchange, the books by public intellectuals offering a favorable or even neutral view of Trump and the Trump era were … not there? Maybe I just missed them. So every prominent figure moving to the cultural foreground from academia and “mainstream” journalism — every brave contrarian, every freethinking intellectual warrior rising against the prevailing fascist sentiment of the age to speak in his own voice as a free person — thinks and says the same things, the same ways, with the same evidence and the same framing and the same tone and in the same state of mind. They’re so free and brave and iconoclastic that they’re essentially identical, chanting in intellectual unison.

Forget Trump for a moment and answer this question in general: If you’re living through an era in which every prominent journalist and academic and artist says exactly the same fucking thing all the time, what kind of moment are you living in? Would you call people who all chant in unison the resistance?

Any engagement with these books reveals their emptiness. Snyder, Stanley, Applebaum, whatever: pick a book, then pick a page. See if it makes sense. Here, I spent a few nauseating minutes today with brave Jason Stanley’s book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them. Here’s a paragraph from the introduction to the paperback edition:

ICE is novel: It was created after 9/11, by the same law that created a bureau tasked with border protection: a “special force, created in an anti-democratic moment”.

I can’t calibrate the degree to which this person is a fool or a liar, but let’s go with both. The Border Patrol was created in 1924, and was itself the successor agency to a different organization that was created in 1904. You can read that history here. The post-9/11 organization that supposedly created this novel American institution merely reorganized a century-old American institution, making it not the least bit novel. Before ICE, we had INS. Yes, we had a border before 2003, and we policed it. This isn’t a novel concept at all, as it has operated in any form of practice.

You can go through that single amazing paragraph sentence by sentence and tear every last bit of it apart, at the lowest, simplest factual level. The argument isn’t wrong: all of it is wrong, every layer of fact and interpretation. This man is an absolutely enormous jackass. And he’s … important. An important public intellectual, you see.

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