Quotulatiousness

August 3, 2025

20th century advertising alchemy rediscovered

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

Much sound and fury has been devoted to the ritual denunciations of American Eagle and their new ad campaign featuring blatant Nazi ideology and imagery, er, I mean Sydney Sweeney:

Whenever I endure a sentence which trespasses into a jibe about whiteness or men or some other illusory bugbear, I stop reading and launch the laptop through the window. This week, I’ve cleaned out eBay. As one delivery driver lugs a fresh laptop to my front door, another scoops up the last to fall from the sky.

Those all-too-common laments about skin colour or genitalia are the scarlet letter imprinted on the chest of the thoughtless bore. It’s a mind virus without antidote. Screeching “whiteness!” upon snapping one’s shoelace betrays sound psychological health.

Take Sydney Sweeney, an American actress blessed with a merciless, unfair genetic inheritance. This week, Sydney broke the internet. Her crime? She’s rather attractive. Worse yet, Sydney flaunts her icy, Scandinavian beauty.

In an advert for American Eagle, the dewy, lissom blonde squeezes her gymnastic body into a pair of denim jeans. Smouldering before the camera, Sydney flutters her “great genes”.

Those great genes sashay around a classic Mustang — 400 horses of unapologetic masculine energy. Sydney pats her hypnotic behind. She fires up that climate-melting engine. The infernal marriage of masculine-feminine consummates as she roars off into the distance.

Advertisers know what they did. Diana, Roman goddess and huntress of men. Her chariot, the male appendage made steel and exploding gasoline. A combination to light our monkey brains on fire. The symbolism hijacks our amygdala: buy these jeans, and she’s yours. Or, for the other sex, buy these and manipulate them.

I’m sorry to be so blunt, reader. Those claims, as primitive as they may appear, are the animating spirit of advertising. Back in the 1920s, Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, transplanted Uncle Siggy’s theories into the advertising business. Out went staid adverts praising a product’s utility. In went adverts selling visions of your unconscious, insatiable self. Bernays transformed the public relations and advertising worlds. He sold products that stirred the galloping herds of the subconscious mind.

Take cigarettes. Before Bernays, smoking was a decidedly male pursuit. Tobacco giants, keen to double their potential customer pool, turned to him. Bernays transformed smoking from a vulgar, unladylike pastime into a symbol of freedom and female empowerment. Men buy Patek Phillipe watches for the same reason. As Dave Chappelle put it: “If a man could fuck a woman in a cardboard box, he wouldn’t buy a house”.

In just a few moments, Sweeney’s serpentine hips lulled advertising away from overt wokeness to its subliminal witchcraft. It worked. American Eagle’s stock surged fifteen percent.

For research, I studied the ad twenty-seven times. Your humble narrator bought thirty-seven pairs of jeans and then signed over his entire inheritance to Ms Sweeney.

The reaction on the identitarian left authored five additional chapters to the upcoming edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

By teasing the words “genes” and “jeans”, Sweeney called for the annexation of Poland and the Sudetenland. MSNBC excelled itself, even birthing a new pidgin English indecipherable to 97 percent of native speakers:

“Sydney Sweeney’s ad shows an unbridled cultural shift towards whiteness”.

Well, that’s one way to think about it.

QotD: Undermining cultural taboos

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

One of the longest running debates on this side of the great divide is about how best to work through the thicket of taboos created and maintained by the ruling class. Because so much of observable reality is now off limits, it is nearly impossible to contradict the prevailing orthodoxy and maintain a position in the public square. For example, there can be nothing interesting said about crime, because no one is allowed to discuss the demographic reality of crime. The facts themselves are taboo.

One side of the debate argues that the only way to break a taboo is to break a taboo, so the only way forward to is to talk frankly about these things. In the case of crime, for example, the dissident must always interject the demographic facts about crime into the debate, even if it makes the beautiful people shriek. Since most people know the facts, the shrieking by the beautiful people actually advances the cause. This line of reasoning is extended to all taboo subjects universally.

The other side of the debate points out that the taboo breakers always end up in exile or condemned to some ghetto. In fact, their deliberate breaking of taboos ends up reinforcing the taboo, as no one wants to end up like the heretics. Instead, this camp argues the dissident must come up with clever language that subtly mocks the taboos, but narrowly adheres to the rules. The recent use of the word “jogger” is an example of complying with the taboo, while undermining it.

The taboo breakers counter that this just results in an endless search for approved language to hint at unapproved things. It is just a form of self-deception, where the clever think they are in revolt when in reality they are just asking permission. The optics guys counter this by pointing out the obvious. The taboo breakers are removed from the process, so in reality their tactic is just quitting the game. Rather than take on the system in a meaningful way, they mutter epithets in their ghetto.

The Z Man, “Strategy, Tactics & Discipline”, The Z Blog, 2020-05-19.

July 31, 2025

“You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray looks north to the Dysfunctional Dominion and our governments’ inability to deal with the narrative of the Residential Schools and the lack of actual evidence to support that narrative:

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

Frances Widdowson is a cantankerous career academic, an evidence-first Canadian scholar who doesn’t suffer fools. Her personal disregard for sanctimonious performativity has gotten her in some trouble, and now she’s a former professor, though her termination was found to be improper. A few months ago, the CBC interviewed her for a story about how mean she is, because Widdowson has questioned the much-chanted sacred story about the dead children at Kamloops.

If you don’t know the Kamloops story, an anthropologist used ground-penetrating radar to supposedly identify the location of a secret burial ground for 215 dead children near the site of the long-defunct Kamloops Indian Residential School, uncovering evidence of what has been constantly called a hidden genocide. But no human remains have ever been recovered at the site, and the radar evidence of disturbed earth aligns well with the path of an old septic trench. More detailed background here.

Widdowson recorded the entire interview, so we can hear the inner workings of the sausage factory.

Throughout the discussion, CBC reporter Jordan Tucker, speaking with the obligatory vocal fry and upspeak, keeps warning Widdowson to stop shouting at her, which Widdowson obviously isn’t doing, and to watch her tone. She’s presumptively pre-outraged by the existence of a Very Bad Person, conducting an outrage-performance in the form of asking questions.

But then Widdowson flips the script. You can hear this excerpted two-minute high point here. Tucker argues that government officials say there are bodies buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops, so is Widdowson somehow making the outrageous claim that government officials might be wrong? “Are all those different governments lying? Are all those different people just not telling the truth, or they’re going along with these stories imagined by people, by indigenous people?”

Government says, but still Widdowson doesn’t concede. You can see what a monster this very dangerous person is. “How is it that all these government officials have been so connived?” Tucker asks, obviously flabbergasted.

Widdowson responds with an argument about evidence, and about the standards of evidence for the claim. What do we know? What have we seen? What would we need to see to prove a claim of this type? Who has the burden of proof?

And then: “As a journalist, are you satisfied with the evidence?”

The response to this question — just past the 1:30 mark in the excerpted video linked above — is remarkably telling. It produces, first, a short silence, and then a long burst of stammering and high-pitched incredulity: “I am. Of course I am.”

Widdowson, sharpening the direct question: “You think there’s 215 children buried in the apple orchard at Kamloops?”

Listen to Tucker’s shaking voice. This question is a threat. It makes her extremely nervous. “I think that, at this point, there has been enough documentation, there have been enough — there’s enough social and archaeological consensus to say that, to say that, we can just believe indigenous people, and move on with trying to do our best by them as a society.”

So two people are arguing about truth. What is true? How can we know what is true? One person keeps asking what is the evidence. The other person keeps deflecting to identity, authority, and social status. The government says so, there is social consensus, “believe indigenous people”. No human remains have been found, but there are human remains, because government officials and indigenous people say so, and other people with the status to matter say that they agree. Truth is consensus. Defaulting to evidence is cruel. Why would you do such a horrible thing?

  • What’s the evidence?
  • Are you refusing to submit to the narrative consensus?
  • Yes, what’s the evidence?
  • (shocked gasping and trembling voice)

This is the mechanism of woke narrative control: It has been said that this is true. The people who say it possess authority — they are officials — or they possess privileged identities. It is now disinformation to say that government plus indigenous people might not be correct, and an act of dangerous extremism to mention questions of evidence.

July 30, 2025

“The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skilfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended”

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

On Substack, Johann Kurtz provides a great example of Bastiat’s insight (quoted in the title), as debaters ineptly defend the whole notion of masculinity, particularly how boys are victimized for being boys:

“End Toxic Masculinity” by labnusantara is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

We’re failing our boys.

Two-thirds of young men feel that “no one really knows” them. Their real wages have been falling since the 1970s. They’re dropping out of education and the workforce in growing numbers. They die deaths of despair at almost three times the rate of women. Even their physical strength is collapsing.

Terrible solutions are proposed. No matter how much traditional masculinity is undermined, powerful voices continue to insist that the real problem is that it hasn’t been destroyed altogether. “Only then will boys be happy”.

My thesis for this series is that there is a need to defend true masculinity on its own terms, not on the implicit terms of progressives who either don’t understand it or actively hate it.

Take, for example, this debate at the Oxford Union on traditional masculinity. The opening argument of the opposition — who are supposed to be defending traditional masculinity — starts with asserting the need for a “contemporary and inclusive” masculinity which is accessible to anyone “of any race, sexuality, or other identity“.

The best defence that this speaker can mount on this anaemic foundation is an argument that masculinity is useful for activism and community building like the “Movember Foundation”. After this slightly pathetic case she goes back to conceding “being forced to conform to a set of expectations is uncomfortable and even dangerous. We should allow people to access the gender expressions that make them feel like their truest self.”

The next speaker for the defence of traditional masculinity continues the grovelling: “In 2019, you know, we should not be honouring and obeying men — those times have gone.” This talk is a little better — you get the sense that he actually likes men, and notes that it’s overwhelmingly men who die in wars and dangerous jobs — before collapsing back at the end: “We should look at new ways of being a man. I would love to get more men involved in teaching, in nursing — make it ‘cool to care’. I’ve been around Scandinavia talking to stay-at-home dads … These are progressive, beautiful men.”

The final speaker — who, again, is supposed to be defending traditional masculinity — takes the stage and begins: “Some of the most beautiful moments I’ve watched in young men’s lives are when we’re alone in a room — and maybe a brother who’s been struggling with his sexuality comes out in front of a hundred other brothers, and he’s crying, and his other brothers are crying with him“. You can imagine the rest.

None of this has anything to do with traditional masculinity. In this series I will advocate for the cultivation in boys of all of the aspects of masculinity that these “advocates” were afraid to defend: strength, aggression, dominance, stoicism, and risk-taking.

July 24, 2025

When tolerance becomes a fatal flaw

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

At The Crescent and the Guillotine, Paul Friesen explains why too much tolerance leads to the eventual collapse of social order and perhaps even the culture itself:

It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.

It was Karl Popper who warned that a tolerant society must be intolerant of intolerance, or it would cease to be tolerant at all.1 A delicious paradox, too often quoted and too rarely heeded. For we have taken the first half of the dictum — the imperative to tolerate — and chiseled it into law, into policy, into university mission statements and NGO pamphlets. But the second half — the requirement to draw a line, to say “no further” — has been treated like garlic in a vampire movie: an antique, anathema, unfashionable.

And so, the paradox has become pathology.

Our courts allow sharia arbitration councils to function in British cities, adjudicating matters of family and inheritance with standards that would make a 12th-century canon lawyer flinch. Our schools include faith-based curricula that require hijabs for seven-year-olds and teach that homosexuality is satanic filth. Our public broadcasters will air a documentary about the importance of free speech, followed immediately by a segment about why cartoons of Muhammad are “unhelpful”.

This is not multiculturalism. It is masochism. It is the belief that liberalism must be so open-minded that its own brains are spilled onto the prayer mat. It is the fetishization of identity at the expense of liberty. It is the ideological pacifism of a society too terrified to assert its own values, lest it be accused of “racism” by those who mistake ideology for ethnicity.

We have enshrined the rights of the theocrat while criminalizing the instincts of the secularist. The result is not harmony — it is humiliation.

[…]

The West’s greatest achievement is not democracy, nor capitalism, nor even the separation of powers. It is the separation of truth from tribalism — the idea that individuals are not to be judged by their creeds, but by their conduct. That women are not property. That speech is not violence. That blasphemy is a right, not a crime.

These are not Western values. They are universal values, discovered in the West by accident of history and preserved through blood, rebellion, and satire. They are the principles that allowed Jews, heretics, atheists, and apostates to live not just safely, but freely. And they are now under threat — from within.

The real problem is not Islam. It is the Western inability to demand anything of those who import their gods and their grievances into liberal society. We treat every imported superstition as sacrosanct and every local tradition as suspect. We require ex-Muslims to whisper their fears while we amplify the complaints of veiled Islamists who denounce our culture from our own podiums.

We are not being pluralistic. We are being duped.

And the cost of this self-deception is measured not just in freedoms surrendered, but in lives lost.

Lives like that of Yameen Rasheed, the secular Maldivian blogger who thought he could use satire to push back against theocracy — stabbed to death in his own hallway. Lives like that of Farkhunda Malikzada, beaten and burned in the streets of Kabul by a mob of men — because someone thought she burned a Qur’an. Lives like that of Samuel Paty, beheaded outside a French school by a refugee he welcomed — because he dared to show a cartoon in a civics class.

These are not random tragedies. They are the predictable outcomes of an ideological toxin given immunity in the bloodstream of liberal society.

What do all these victims have in common? They did not die at the hands of misunderstood minorities or “oppressed voices” who simply needed better integration programs. They died at the hands of men who were indoctrinated — sometimes abroad, often at home — with the idea that God’s honor is more valuable than human life, and that dissent is not to be debated but extinguished.

And more damning still: they died in environments that should have protected them. Environments that instead prioritized sensitivity over security, dialogue over clarity, understanding over justice. Environments where the ever-watchful eye of diversity officers and DEI consultants was trained, not on the assailants, but on the tone of the victims.

We have created a culture where courage is pathologized, clarity is punished, and moral equivalence is the new orthodoxy. When Islamist mobs swarm the streets chanting slogans that would make the Inquisition blush, we are told to “listen to their anger”. When feminists protest the veiling of children, they are told to “respect cultural differences”. When Jews complain about chants of “From the River to the Sea”, they are informed that they are “overreacting”, “weaponizing trauma”, or — most insultingly of all — “confusing Zionism with antisemitism”.

This is not inclusivity. It is assisted suicide.

    1. I refer here to Karl Popper’s 1945 work The Open Society and Its Enemies, specifically in Volume 1: The Spell of Plato, Note 4 to Chapter 7. Here’s the relevant passage, paraphrased for clarity:

    “Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant … then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

    Popper argues that a tolerant society has the right — not to suppress opinions — but to defend itself against those who would destroy tolerance itself, especially if such groups refuse to engage in rational discourse and instead promote violence or coercion. It’s often called “the paradox of tolerance“.

July 22, 2025

Bitter reality is coming for the laptop class

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

Spaceman Spiff foretells the end of the managed paradise of the “unsophisticated sophisticates” of the privileged laptop class who have been able to keep their dream alive at the expense of everyone outside their rarefied and protected bubbles:

There seems to be a section of society populated with gullible conformists who believe many of the manufactured narratives designed to manage society.

Most are the credentialed products of universities. The laptop class of professionals who operate the corporations, institutions and key organizations.

Their worldview is comprised of stories which are downloaded and stored as mental models. Adhering to these narratives can then devolve into belief systems that are placed beyond criticism. This in turn can easily degenerate into a kind of fanaticism.

Ideas like mass migration and the destruction of reliable energy sources are crazy and yet they are primarily in existence thanks to the efforts of this layer of society, the professionals who implement policies desired by the ruling class.

While some among them are cynically exploiting today’s fads for their own ends, many seem to be true believers.

How can they believe these things so completely? What is going on?

Rebels searching for causes

Most of today’s great crusades seem to have the same characteristics. They are easily downloaded and consumed, they are socially rewarded within some circles, and they are not immediately obvious as issues at all.

The most popular are pre-prepared to an almost comical degree and thoroughly focus-grouped to ensure minimal friction among their consumers.

Many even come with slogans attached. Diversity is our strength is every bit as artificial as two weeks to flatten the curve, but it goes down easily with no thought required, which is the point.

The ideas that stick are the ones most useful to demonstrate virtue. Showing off to your peers you are non-sexist, non-racist and non-homophobic helps secure your place in many professional hierarchies where visible in-group membership matters.

The most prized causes appear to be non-obvious where the conclusions are not reachable with the evidence available.

This confusing aspect makes many question some new idea or policy, but in the laptop class often triggers a sense of smugness that they see beyond the obvious to the obscure thanks to their impressive intellects. Criticism can then be dismissed as simplistic providing a rewarding sense of superiority.

Much of the above is evident in the belief systems of today’s professional classes.

[…]

What to make of all this?

Does any of this matter? Yes it does. It is this section of society that ultimately puts in place the ruinous ideas of the ruling class.

They are in the corporate offices, the local councils and the schools. They are running the television stations and the publishing houses. They are captured by groupthink. Everyone they know thinks as they do. All criticism is easily dismissed.

Very little can penetrate this bubble. Except one thing.

Over time reality intrudes. Models should be updated to accommodate new findings and observations, but that is challenging when they have been uncritically downloaded to satisfy psychological needs.

Contrary evidence threatens one’s sense of self so scrutiny is avoided. When these avoidances ultimately fail some dig even deeper. Magical thinking seems to be everywhere.

The ultimate effect is either a reassessment of one’s worldview, or a psychotic break from reality. We see examples of the latter; Trump Derangement Syndrome is one well known borderline psychosis but there are others.

July 19, 2025

No issue is so important that we can’t have a proper debate on the merits

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

On Substack, Lorenzo Warby refutes the claim that some issues are just too important/too urgent/already decided:

One of the features of the “progressive” politics of the unaccountable classes — those who are just paid for turning up — is the demand that there be “No Debate” about various issues. The most obvious instances are “No Debate” about Trans and “No Debate” about climate change — hence demands that climate scepticism be outlawed.

All such “No Debate” claims are crap. First, any “No Debate” claim is presumptive evidence that what you are pushing is either not true or, slightly more subtly, is a mountain of bullshit erected on a molehill of truth. Robust cases for claims about the world are not afraid of debate.

Various moral urgency claims are mounted to support such “No Debate” claims. How do we determine moral urgency? From the evidence. If the evidence is clear, debate will not threaten that alleged urgency. On the contrary, it will reveal the urgency more clearly.

The underlying philosophical dynamic underlying “No Debate” claims is Critical Constructivism — the claim that reality is socially constructed; that all statements and knowledge claims are, in fact power claims; and that the righteousness of a claim can be determined by their (alleged) effects on (morally differentiated) social groups.

The underlying social dynamic is the use of affirmed beliefs to determine and display righteousness. If affirming X shows one to be one of the righteous, then not believing X shows one to be of the unrighteous. This is typically expressed in various terms of moral abuse (racist, Transphobe, Islamophobe, etc) whose use in media and academe has soared since 2014.

This is not because Western societies have become more bigoted — on any reasonable measure they have become far less so over time — but because the politics of Righteous Affirmed Belief has dramatically surged and so has therefore the stigmatisation of dissent.

To claim that affirming X shows ultimate moral propriety requires stigmatising not-X. For something is morally proper — indeed morally trumping — only if the opposite is morally improper. Thus is moral propriety is enforced by stigmatisation. Hence silence is violence — one must profess righteousness. Hence also words are violence — if affirmation of belief is the ultimate marker of righteousness then expressed disbelief becomes the ultimate marker of abusive malevolence. These dynamics lead to a great deal of preference falsification — people publicly affirming, or at least not opposing, claims that they do not privately believe.

July 15, 2025

What the CBC calls a “360-degree view of a story”

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

On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Harrison Lowman provides a detailed example of how the CBC prefers to present stories to Canadians — which signally fail to present a “360-degree view” because the CBC actively avoids including actual disagreement on any given topic:

THREAD: When you make complaints about patterns of bias or skewed reporting on the CBC, you are often met by CBC supporters who proceed to demand a list of examples.

When they don’t receive it immediately from you, they proceed to tell you you’re the biased one …. that “it’s in your head”. It feels like a bit of gaslighting to be honest.

So let me, as someone who has worked at the CBC, provide you a prime example of CBC coverage I think is glaringly biased and you can tell me what you think:
/1

Earlier this summer, the CBC published this radio/TV story. The webpage version is headlined “Supervised drug site at Kingston prison has only had one visitor despite being open since 2023”

The story details a trial project where prisoners at a Kingston-area prison have been given the ability to inject, snort, or swallow the drugs they’ve smuggled into their cells under the supervision of a nurse.

The news hook is that only ONE inmate has visited the site since its inception more than a YEAR ago.

https://cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6802851
/2

The CBC journalist then proceeds to interview three people: 1. someone running the program, 2. a retired academic expert sympathetic to the program wanting it expanded, and 3. a former inmate who was not in jail when the program started. All sources appear generally in approval of the pilot program.

In the story:
– At no time does the journalist speak to someone who sees this pilot program as the wrong approach. Keep in mind a recent Abacus poll shows a mere 19% of Canadians support expanding safe injection sites. (You’re literally ignoring the vast majority of the population here.)

– At no time does the journalist reveal the cost of said program: a whopping $517,000 taxpayer dollars so that a SINGLE inmate could get high.

– Nor do they speak to someone who says (as many in the public would rightly ask) if given the cost and almost non-existent use, whether it’s worth continuing the program, or whether there’s a better way to spend this money within the corrections system- rehabilitation etc.

/3

Instead the CBC journalist exclusively focusses on the “barriers” to using the jail drug program, implying this all that can change- ie. look at making it easier for the inmates to use drugs.

The coverage, highlighting barriers:
– implies that they should operate at night, because it’s current hours “don’t line up with when inmates want to get high.”;
-In the written version of the article: source: “They’d prefer to take drugs during their free time after supper.”

– That prisoners need to be allowed to smoke crystal meth as part of the program.

– That prisons need to make it so using the program won’t mean users getting unwanted attention from fellow inmates, officers…etc.
/4

Last week, CBC News’ general manager and editor in chief Brodie Fenlon said:

“The job of a CBC News journalist is to report facts, to proportionately surface the variety of viewpoints that exist about those facts, to provide context and counter narratives where they exist, and to ensure credible analysis is in the mix. The goal is to give you a 360-degree view of a story so you can draw your own conclusions.”

“… We don’t shy away from contrarian views or perspectives that challenge orthodoxy.” “The best journalism often involves facts and viewpoints that challenge our own worldview.”

In what world is this a 360 degree view of this story? In what world is this a story that challenges orthodoxy?

Instead, this coverage appears to tell viewers the CBC approves of safe injection sites … for criminals, and doesn’t prioritize taxpayer $ waste in its coverage.

With this story, CBC is just clearly not meeting their own journalistic standards, and are failing to adequately inform the public.

There’s your example. Tell me I’m wrong.

The CBC must do better.

I plan to launch a complaint with the CBC ombudsman. It won’t be my first.

https://cbc.ca/news/editorsblog/cbc-news-platforming-1.7580219

Among the responses was this one from Andrew Kirsch:

I wrote the 1st ever memoir about being a Canadian spy. It was a National bestseller but largely positive about the org. I desperately tried to get on CBC (and TVO) to promote it. They weren’t interested. A while later my ex-colleague wrote a memoir about her career with a focus on institutional racism at CSIS. She was interviewed and her book was featured all over the website. I don’t want to take anything away from the other book. I just felt like mine was also a Canadian story worth telling.

July 13, 2025

QotD: The ever-elusive perfect future (maybe we can get there with more blood spilled…)

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

What the modern hard left wants is the same they’ve wanted since the French Revolution: claim the present in the name of the future, repudiate the past, then own the past, redefine it to their terms, then make it off limits for discussion unless you keep within the lines they’ve defined. Discussion of the past outside of the boundaries is counter-revolutionary, and proper consciousness has to be displayed at all times.

James Lileks, The Bleat, 2020-06-15.

July 12, 2025

G.K. Chesterton on the dangers of cultural surrender

Filed under: Books, Britain, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Andrew Doyle on Chesterton’s novel The Flying Inn (1914) which warned against the risks of unfettered immigration and what came to be known as “multiculturalism”:

The creed of multiculturalism has made it difficult to discuss the impact of unfettered immigration. The far right have always opposed it on the basis of racial prejudice and ethno-jingoism. Yet there are authentically liberal concerns to be raised about the problem of political Islam and how all discussions are stifled through accusations of “Islamophobia”. What happens when an essentially anti-democratic ideology is allowed to flourish within a society that otherwise depends upon democratic norms?

To help illuminate the troubles of our time, and in particular the perverted form of liberalism that ensures its own undoing, we might return to G. K. Chesterton’s The Flying Inn (1914), a whimsical novel about a future Islamic England. With today’s proliferation of sharia courts and the government’s determination to criminalise blasphemy against Islam by legislative stealth, one might call Chesterton’s novel prescient.

The key figure is Lord Ivywood, a politician who becomes enamoured of Misysra Ammon, an Islamic cleric who styles himself as the “Prophet of the Moon”. Ivywood is an exemplar of the zealotry of the progressive reformer, a prototype of the virtue-signaller, one who “did not care for dogs” but “cared for the Cause of Dogs”. He first introduces Ammon at a private event at the “Society of Simple Souls”, where he is able to preach his creed to the gullible bons vivants of the upper middle-class. The collective thrill of the crowd is pure orientalism, and they are easily mesmerised by Ivywood’s panegyrics.

Inevitably, Ivywood’s submission to Islam is framed in syncretic terms; not so much surrender as a beautiful fusion. “The East and the West are one”, Ivywood says. “The East is no longer East nor the West West; for a small isthmus has been broken, and the Atlantic and Pacific are a single sea.” Islam, he claims, is the “religion of progress”, a phrase that anticipates today’s oft-echoed slogan of Islam as the “religion of peace”.

This kind of doublespeak is ubiquitous among those activists who routinely strive to force the square peg of Islamic doctrine into the round hole of woke politics. This is exemplified by articles such as “Prophet Muhammed was an intersectional feminist” in Muslim Girl magazine, a piece that includes the inane claim that the founder of the religion “wanted to generate as much inclusivity as possible”. In similarly convoluted terms, Ammon in The Flying Inn argues that there is nothing more feminist than a harem. “What is the common objection our worthy enemies make against our polygamy?” he asks. “That it is disdainful of the womanhood. But how can this be so, my friends, when it allows the womanhood to be present in so large numbers?”

Today’s readers will recognise Chesterton’s depiction of the tendency of liberal politicians to kowtow to the demands of Islamic clerics in a bid to avoid causing offence. At one point, Ivywood explains that he has tabled the “Ballot Paper Amendment Act” in parliament to allow citizens to vote with a mark resembling a crescent rather than the traditional cross.

    If we are to give Moslem Britain representative government, we must not make the mistake we made about the Hindoos and military organization — which led to the Mutiny. We must not ask them to make a cross on their ballot papers; for though it seems a small thing, it may offend them. So I brought in a little bill to make it optional between the old-fashioned cross and an upward curved mark that might stand for a crescent — and as it’s rather easier to make, I believe it will be generally adopted.

The main plot of The Flying Inn revolves around the innkeeper Humphrey Pump and the Irish sailor Captain Patrick Dalroy, who take it upon themselves to sell alcohol in spite of the new Islamic prohibitions in England. They find a loophole in the law that permits them to conduct their business so long as they first erect an official inn sign. And so we follow the pair as they dash from location to location, with their barrel of rum and a wheel of cheese on a donkey’s back, planting their portable sign wherever refreshment is needed.

July 5, 2025

NYC selects its own Justin Trudeau clone

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

The winner of the Democratic primary is almost always subsequently elected as the mayor of New York City, so it’s fair to assume that Zohran Mamdani is going to be NYC’s next mayor. And he’s an American version of ultra-progressive former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau:

New York State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani photographed in Assembly District 36, 10 February 2024.
Photo by Kara McCurdy via Wikimedia Commons.

American politics often seem to balance themselves out in the worst possible way. Even as the GOP sheds its last vestiges of affection for limited government and free markets, the opposition Democrats openly embrace bigotry and crazy economic nostrums. Case in point: the rise in New York City of Zohran Mamdani, an avowed socialist who flirts with antisemitism, to represent the Democratic Party in this year’s mayoral election.

The primary race in New York was a snapshot of the Democratic Party’s woes. Despite the presence of other candidates seeking the mayoral nomination, the race ultimately came down to two candidates: Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York.

Before resigning over allegations of sexual harassment, Cuomo, the 67-year-old son of another former governor, was best known for a “controversial directive that told nursing homes they couldn’t deny patients coming from hospitals admission based on a COVID-19 diagnosis”, according to StatNews. He then covered up the large number of ensuing deaths. He was the favoured candidate of the Democratic establishment and the early front-runner for the nomination.

Standing out from the pack of political hopefuls facing Cuomo was Zohran Mamdani, the 34-year-old son of an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and a Columbia University political science professor. Before being elected to the state legislature as a Democrat and a socialist, Mamdani tried his hand as a government employee and a rapper. His musical output included the song “Salaam”, which, as The Independent put it, “praised the ‘Holy Land Five’ — five men convicted in 2008 of donating over $12 million to Hamas”.

To say that New Yorkers are tired of Cuomo is a wild understatement. Like most Americans, New Yorkers are deeply sick of the old party establishment that rallied around Cuomo as well as the man himself. Yet, he was expected to walk away with the nomination and then cruise to victory in a largely one-party city.

But Mamdani sweetened the pot in the expensive metropolis with promises to freeze rent, make buses free, offer no-cost childcare, lower grocery prices with city-owned grocery stores, and use “public dollars” to build 200,000 apartments. He swears that he “knows exactly how to pay for it, too” with higher taxes on those making more than $1 million per year. Not explicitly part of his campaign, but on the record as his intention, is “the end goal of seizing the means of production”.

In the 2021 recording in which he advocated seizing the means of production, Mamdani endorsed BDS as an issue “that we firmly believe in”. The BDS movement — shorthand for “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” — aims to economically pressure Israel into withdrawing from so-called “occupied territories” and allowing Palestinians to settle throughout Israel. At its extremes, BDS seeks to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority state. It’s inspired by the movement against South Africa’s old apartheid regime.

July 3, 2025

QotD: Why Marxists turned away from space exploration and colonization

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

Devon Eriksen recently pointed out that today’s Marxists are hostile to space flight and off-world colonization. But in Cold War times, Marxists who ran countries were aggressively futuristic about space, treating it as the empire of their dreams.

What caused this turnaround?

To understand this, it’s helpful that to notice that spaceflight is not the only technology about which Marxist attitudes have done a 180. Nuclear power is another. More generally, where Marxists used to be pro-growth and celebrate industrialization and material progress, they’re now loudly for degrowth and renunciation.

But the history of western Marxism is more interesting than that. Western Marxists flipped to strident anti-futurism in the late 1960s and early 1970s while futurist propaganda in the Communist bloc did not end until its post-1989 collapse.

That 20-year-long disjunct was particularly strong about nuclear power, with the Soviets providing ideological support and funding to the foundation of European Green parties and the US’s anti-nuclear-power movement at the same time as they were pouring resources into nuclearizing their own power grid.

And that’s your clue. Domestic Marxism favored making power cheap and abundant, while their Western proxies pushed to keep it expensive and scarce and preached degrowth rather than expansion. Futurism vs. anti-futurism: why?

We don’t need to theorize about this. Yuri Bezmenov, a former gear in the Soviet propaganda machine, told us the answer starting in the early 1980s. Fewer people listened than should have.

Bezmenov explained that unlike Marxism in the Sino-Soviet bloc, Western Marxism was a mind virus, a memetic weapon designed to weaken and degrade its host societies from within, softening them up for totalitarianism and an eventual Soviet takeover. The West was to be denied power, both in a literal and figurative sense.

Ever wonder why today’s Marxists are so quick to make alliances with radical religious Islamists? This shouldn’t happen. According to Marxist theory, Islamism is a regression to an earlier stage of the dialectic than capitalism, and today’s Marxists ought to fear and hate it as a counter-ideology more than capitalism. But they don’t, because to them Islam is a tool to be used for nihilistic ends.

That nihilism is the actual purpose of Western Marxism and all its offshoots, including “woke”. One sign of this is how fervently it embraces the sexual mutilation of children.

The Soviets are gone but their program is still running autonomously in the brains of people who were infected by their Cold-War-era proxies and the successors of those proxies. And that program is nihilism all the way down.

Yuri Bezmenov should have been heeded. There is no simpler theory that fits the observed facts.

Eric S. Raymond, Twitter, 2024-05-14.

June 30, 2025

“This is not toxic empathy, it’s psychotic empathy”

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

Elizabeth Nickson suggests that we’re well past peak political feminism:

Last week, no month, there have been cries from the heights of official culture begging men to come back. I joked on Facebook that they are all at my house, hiding out with someone who doesn’t hate them, which is sort of true; my immediate family is all male, and Christmases are a bro-fest with me in the kitchen. I exaggerate. No. Yes. I don’t know. Of course they help but I do wish for one daughter/sister in law to keep the chaos down. My father once said, “women civilize men, that’s their job”. I don’t think he meant harangue, demand, prosecute and imprison.

In any case, I started the first feminist theatre in Canada. I know this because a grad student did her master’s thesis on Feminist Theatre in Canada (poor thing) and called to interview me. I was 22, and dumb as a rock. But eager to tell the world its faults (plus ca change). My artistic director Svetlana — who was in the MFA program — and I decided that we would only hire women, do women’s plays, etc.

Problem was there were no plays. Aphra Behn was the only one we could find that wasn’t trivial, and she lived 250 years ago. That was when I discovered I loved writing because we had to write our own. Now, of course, there is a massive, over the top, gold-platinum-diamond-and rubies Renaissance in women’s art, and my silly self was as usual so far ahead of the game I didn’t profit from it. Well, I did, it helped my college expenses no end.

So I got a couple of grants, and we collected box office, and ran “plays” and workshops on how to have difficult feminist conversations, one memorably at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where the wife of a famous poet told us that all this guff was going to be forgotten once the estrus cycle kicked in. Svetlana telegraphed ignorance at me, and I back; no one had any idea what she meant. We 22 year olds argued her down, she clung to her thesis and, guess what, turned out she was right. Everyone “met” someone, got pregnant, built marriages and families, but Svetlana who decided she was gay (at the time we worked together she was married), and died young from alcoholism. Is that my fault? It was my idea.

Feminism marched on. To this:

I repent here and now. What feminism has become is anathema. I am actually scared of women. I am afraid of their anger, and I am afraid of their cruelty, their harshness, and I see it everywhere. Luckily through my work I have met women who think like me and we are friends and I am not afraid of them. But I shrink from all other friendships. Female friendships today are built on one thing: are you on side? Are you for abortion, against the patriarchy, for Hamas and most recently, the Mullahs, celebrate female politician wins as long as they are on side, ally with the LBGTZQ+ community, etc.? I am none of these things, so were I to venture into ‘women’s spaces’ eventually the furies would plot revenge. I would be cast afloat, thrown into the wild to fend for myself, as an uppity woman would have been in clan or tribal times, to which we are reverting.

In business, conform or be ruined. Think like us or we cancel your dates, your performance, your promotion. Even the mega-famous:

Therefore I now avoid the friendship of women, in which I used to luxuriate. So if I can’t even spend time in their presence, how the hell are men supposed to marry them?

This is how stupid political women have become. This was last weekend in Germany, and, well, everywhere these women breathe, and that means everywhere in the west.

This is not toxic empathy, it’s psychotic empathy.

June 27, 2025

RAF Brize Norton apparently had almost no security for its planes at all

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

Domestic terrorists got into RAF Brize Norton, one of Britain’s main airbases, last week and committed damage that may range into the tens of millions of pounds … and were in and out with the RAF none the wiser:

So this was a serious attack; it’s also an intensely embarrassing one. The terrorists got in and out completely undetected; it appears nobody at Brize Norton was aware of the attack until the perpetrators had already escaped. This would be bad enough if they’d been Spetsnaz-trained infiltrators, flitting silently from shadow to shadow towards their targets. In fact, however, they were a couple of unwashed hippies from Palestine Action, and they “infiltrated” the base on electric motorbikes. It is absolutely staggering that they were able to get in, attack two valuable aircraft and then get out again without being intercepted.

Or maybe it isn’t. This is the station commander of RAF Brize Norton:

Gp Capt Henton appears to have spent her entire career in non-operational roles. She also seems to have some very strange ideas about concepts such as masculinity and even patriotism. In a paper she wrote (which is available online) Henton appears strongly critical of traditional military culture, particularly that in the combat units she has never been part of. Is it just coincidence that, under the command of someone who is effectively an HR manager in a uniform, traditional military concerns such as security appear to have been badly neglected?

It’s undeniable that security at Brize Norton was neglected. One of the things I was trained in, as an Intelligence Corps operator, was protective security. We tended to focus on the protection of classified information, but the same principles apply to the protection of anything else (for example aircraft), and one of those principles is that if the security around an asset is weak in one respect — for example, physical barriers like fences — you can plug that gap by deploying other assets — for example, guards.

I used Google Street View to do a perimeter recce of Brize Norton, and took this screenshot looking from Station Road at the eastern end of the base’s runway:

This shot is taken from a public road, outside the base. The only perimeter security is a simple, easily climbed wooden fence less than six feet high. For a long stretch it has no “topping” — security jargon for razor wire or other anti-climb obstacles. There is also no perimeter security lighting along this section of the road. There aren’t even streetlights on the road itself. This is a massive weakness in physical security, which any terrorist can easily identify using open-source tools like Google Street View. The red ellipse I have drawn on the image highlights aircraft — seven of them, a mix of Voyagers and A400M transports — parked on the apron. They are less than three-fifths of a mile (900m in new money) from the perimeter fence, a distance that an electric scooter can cover in around 90 seconds. This level of physical security is completely unacceptable for the protection of such valuable assets, so it should have been supplemented with armed guards. It wouldn’t take all that many. A twelve-man guard under the command of a corporal could easily supply a pair of two-man prowler patrols, one on the apron and one randomly checking vulnerable points around the perimeter. That would have been enough to intercept and stop this attack.

The fading Boomer Laurentianus

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

Last week in The Critic, Charles Kirwin described the people who saddled us with three terms of Justin Trudeau and hope to continue their reign of error by supporting Mark Carney with his Europhile whims and intolerance for dissent:

Boomer Laurentianus is a Canadian subspecies of Boomerus Senectus, so named because he models himself on the so-called Laurentian Elite, Canada’s governing class that inhabit the “Laurentian corridor”, the narrow strip of land along the Saint Laurence river between Montreal and Toronto that, for a certain kind of Canadian, is the only bit of the country that matters.

In spirit, he is a child of the sixties and still believes he is a radical at heart. Despite this he expects to be treated with the deference reserved for those awarded the Victoria Cross, despite his closest experience to combat being glancing longingly at pictures of the cancelled Avro Arrow or campaigning to defend the local parking lot from being turned into affordable houses.

Like his British and American cousin, he supports progressive policies like safe supply of drugs, lenient sentences and bail conditions for criminals, and whatever economic policies keep his pension fund high and his property values increasing. Naturally, he lives in neighbourhoods untouched by the crime and addiction that are the direct result of the policies he supports.

It is important to note that while his modes of thinking and beliefs are those of the Laurentian Elite, his mind is shaped by the institutions of the Laurentian Elite: The Canada Council for the Arts, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Governor General’s Literary Award, various other high-minded organisations that form the intellectual life of Laurentian Canada, Boomerus Laurentianus is not necessarily “of” them.

Molson Canadian is the spirit of his patriotism. In 2000, Molson released a beer advertisement in which a typical Canadian played by actor Jeff Douglas shouts into a microphone to an audience of Americans, dismissing various Canadian stereotypes (we say aboot, drive dogsleds, are all lumberjacks and fur traders et cetera) and notes some of the differences that make Canada not the US. “I have a Prime Minister not a President … I believe in Peacekeeping not policing … I can proudly sew my country’s flag on my backpack while travelling”. The advertisement is something of a cult hit in Canada and has been parodied by just about everyone including William Shatner.

This one-minute advertisement swells at the heart of the Boomer Laurentianus view of his country. It is both superficial and, in places, factually incorrect (the equivalent of the US president is not the Prime Minister but the King or Queen of Canada). But he has built his entire sense of nationalism around myths such as peacekeeping or being liked by foreigners more than Americans. This last point is sacred to his sense of identity.

Boomerus Laurentianus exists in a superposition state usually reserved for Schrödinger’s cat wherein he is both completely American and not American at all. It was often claimed of Rhodesians that they were “More British than the British”. Boomer Laurentianus is more Yank than the Yanks. Despite his reverence for the CBC, he gets his recipes from the New York Times and his opinions from CNN. He watches American television, travels to the US frequently, may even own a second home there. He can almost convince himself that they are the same country, sometimes to the point of putting up signs supporting, Democratic political candidates, seemingly unaware that he cannot vote in foreign elections.

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