Quotulatiousness

July 27, 2025

“[T]he wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “‘hate has no home here'”

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

Chris Bray looks at the kind of people who supported the lockdowns during the pandemic and heartily condemned those lesser folks whose careers and livelihoods were threatened and how they hope for examples to be made of the “leaders” of the Freedom Convoy back in 2022:

Let’s start with a comparison to the good people in Canada, the wonderful warm kind progressives, the Maple Leaf edition of “hate has no home here”. Cheri DiNovo is, let me put this very gently, an instantly recognizable social type, “one of Canada’s best-known and most ardent queer ministers and an Ontario politician who would help pass some of the province’s most integral LGBTQ2S+ policy”. You already know her by her facial expression:

slay, girlboss

As the leaders of the Freedom Convoy face sentencing in court, DiNovo has this to say about their monstrous cruelty:

The Freedom Convoy: white supremacist homophobes who harassed and brutalized LGBTQ+ people and immigrants and the disabled, lashing out in a stunning wave of public cruelty. It was like a NUREMBERG RALLY with trucks, obviously. Here, look at some of the monstrous acts of public brutality committed at this mass expression of hate and rage:

YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DANCED TOGETHER THINK ABOUT IT

Rupa Subramanya, a journalist who uses the old and mostly forgotten technique of talking to people, wandered the crowds in Ottawa (in her own neighborhood) and reported that Freedom Convoy protesters mostly talked about their desire to recover a sense of hope. Their grievances were clear, thoroughly explained, and entirely defensible. Here’s a sample paragraph, a discussion with one of the VICIOUS WHITE SUPREMACISTS:

    Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”

See this clearly against Cheri DiNovo’s framing, and remember it:

The white supremacist protesters who hate immigrants; for example, Kamal Pannu, a Sikh immigrant and trucker.

In fact, Sikhs make up a substantial share of the trucking industry in Canada, and so had a significant presence at the Freedom Convoy:

See the WHITE SUPREMACISTS saying that they HATE IMMIGRANTS!?!?!? Because Cheri DiNovo does. She thinks categorically: good people who support the Liberal Party, Literally Adolf Hitler who doesn’t. She has no capacity for seeing the thing itself, as it was on the ground, in physical reality. Literally nothing, no evidence or substance of any kind, could ever have prevented her from saying that a protest against Justin Trudeau’s government was white supremacist and homophobic. She’s out of her fucking mind. She has no connection to any form of reality, at all, in any way, ever. She doesn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. She’s ignorant noise and infinite sanctimony, with a pair of legs to carry it around.

This is “left” politics in the Anglosphere. Symbol symbol symbol, you NAZI! It doesn’t connect. It’s all chanting and performance and status-signaling, and it never leaves the house. It left reality behind ten years ago, and now it’s out there sailing past Pluto. For adherents of the Manichean religion of wokeism, categorical thinking covers all bases. People who don’t get mRNA injections are misogynistic racist bigots, obviously.

Update: Fixed broken link.

I’m sure I would never have heard of Sean Feucht until they tried to silence him

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

It’s hard to believe how Canadian municipal and provincial authorities deal so gently with disruptive pro-Hamas protests that regularly threaten the lives and property of Canadian Jews compared with the positively authoritarian way they are reacting to “MAGA” Christian performer Sean Feucht‘s concerts:

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 17, 2025

A renewed push to ban AfD from contesting elections in Germany

Filed under: Germany, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

eugyppius updates us on the state of play as the various smaller parties in Germany try to ban Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) which had risen from fringe status to being the most popular political party after the last federal election:

I’m far from a sensationalist, and I’ve repeatedly discounted the likelihood of an AfD ban – not least because the German establishment and the left in particular have good reasons to keep the AfD around. Lately, however, I’ve begun to appreciate that there are deeper, systemic forces working against the AfD in this case. These forces are beyond anybody’s control and if nobody does anything, they may well end in political catastrophe that is much bigger than any single party.

Since the end of the Merkel era, the German left has become thematically scattered, and so they have retreated to the only coordinating issue the German left has ever had, which is hating the right. As climatism started to fade, the social welfare state exceeded its limits and mass migration went sour, AfD bashing became the sole unifying principle for much of the SPD, Die Linke and the Greens. Hating the right is particularly important because it keeps leftist politicians and their activist class on the same page. Without a crusade against the right, a great chasm opens between the antifa thugs who want to smash the state and destroy capitalism on the one hand and the schoolmarm leftoid establishment functionaries in the Bundestag who want to mandate gender-neutral language for the civil service on the other hand. What is more, the firewall against the AfD splits the right and keeps the shrinking left in government. It is a win-win for leftoids everywhere.

Recent events, however, show why things cannot continue as they are now indefinitely. Over time, our Constitutional Court will begin to fill with leftist justices supported by the left parties, who like the rest of the left will also want to ban the AfD. Brosius-Gersdorf and Kaufhold are omens here. Right now the system is held in perfect balance; the left talks a big game about wanting to stamp out the AfD, but they can always justify their hesitation by saying the outcome of ban proceedings is too uncertain. When the necessary judicial majority for an AfD ban is finally secured in Karlsruhe, everything changes. At that point, there will be no excuse for not proceeding with a ban. The activists and the NGOs will take to the streets if their political masters in Berlin don’t begin the process. The CDU will be brought around by media smear campaigns and antifa intimidation.

Keep in mind that this is not about the AfD, but about imperatives within the left itself. No amount of moderation, polite messaging or triangulation on the part of the AfD can get the left to stop or pursue other goals. Unless some exogenous force introduces a new unifying obsession for the left parties and their activists, they will never stop gnawing on this particular chew toy.

Practically, this probably means that the AfD has an expiration date. If they can’t get into government at the federal level and if nothing else changes, they will find themselves facing ban proceedings before a court stacked with leftists who hate them in the next 10 or 15 years. The federal elections in 2029 seem like the last opportunity to normalise the AfD before this final escalation.

People in the CDU need to realise how serious this is, because their fate hangs in the balance as much as the fate of the populist opposition to the right of them. It is absolutely necessary that they break the firewall and enter some kind of arrangement with the AfD before it is too late. It doesn’t matter how much the press freaks out. It doesn’t matter how many violent antifa thugs take to the streets. It doesn’t matter how many party headquarters the leftists invade and vandalise. The firewall will fail in one direction or the other, and if it fails with an AfD ban, we are all in very deep shit.

June 24, 2025

Political violence increases as the power of the state increases

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

Many people note that they don’t remember political conflicts being quite so nasty in years past as they are now, but the more power that accretes to the state the higher the perceived — and actual — risk of allowing the state to fall into the hands of your opponents. We’d be far better off if partisans would consider the possibility that the latest addition to state power they support will be used by their political opponents after the next partisan shift in electoral fortunes … if you fear this power in the hands of a Trump, you shouldn’t put it in the hands of a Biden.

As should be obvious to anybody following news about riots, assassinations, and arson attacks, politics have become far too important in America. With government large, growing, and reaching into every nook and cranny of our lives, Americans perceive politics as too much of a high-stakes game to lose. And so, they have divided into hostile camps to make sure their side comes out on top — and some turn ideological conflict into literal war.

A Surge in Political Violence

That point came home to me after Israel launched its preemptive attacks against Iran’s nuclear facilities. My wife’s rabbi (she’s Jewish and I’m not) called me and asked if I was willing to work security during services on Saturday. “No Kings” protests were planned across the country for the day, with the potential to turn nasty at the hands of people who insist anybody wearing a Star of David bears responsibility for the Israeli government’s actions. Tensions were already high after the Molotov cocktail attack on Jews in Boulder, the murder of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., and the firebombing of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s official residence on the first night of Passover.

So, I spent much of Saturday standing in front of the synagogue, wearing a ballistic vest, with a pistol holstered on one hip and pepper spray on the other.

Underlining the point was that two Minnesota state lawmakers were targeted by an assassin the same Saturday — fatally in the case of one legislator and her husband. The day’s protests were predominantly, but not entirely, peaceful. That’s better than we’ve seen at recent protests against immigration enforcement that turned violent in Los Angeles and Portland, and at some pro-Palestine demonstrations.

That’s all recent. If we go back in time just a little, there’s the bombing of a fertility clinic by an “anti-natalist”; attacks on Tesla cars, dealerships, chargers, and owners by people opposed to Elon Musk’s temporary role in the Trump administration; and, notably, the murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The alleged assassin, Luigi Mangione, has become something of a celebrity.

“Targeted violence is becoming normalized online and in the real world,” warned a December 2024 report from the Network Contagion Research Institute, affiliated with Rutgers University. “Memes, viral content, gamification and the lionization of Luigi Mangione are constructing frameworks that endorse and legitimize violence, encouraging harassment and further acts of violence against corporate figures.”

The report added that “the spread and scope of justifications for murder have significantly eroded what was once a barrier between mainstream society and fringe online communities that supported violence and glorified killers.”

May 10, 2025

“Train how you fight” – British plod edition

Filed under: Britain, Government, India, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

At Restoration, Connor Tomlinson looks at how British police forces are training and what it tells us about who they think they’ll be fighting:

Britain’s police aren’t training to stop riots—they’re preparing to crush the public.

One of the infamous quotes from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever”. He forgot to add, “on TikTok”. Last Thursday, the Metropolitan Police posted a montage of officers at the Metropolitan Police Specialist Training Centre in Kent, undergoing riot training. The caption read, “Bricks, bottles and fire bombs – our officers prepare for every eventuality at the Met’s elite training centre in Gravesend so they can keep you safe. Stronger tactics means safer communities.” It seems they had one specific “eventuality” in mind, as the mock rioters were wearing the Union flag. There wasn’t a keffiyeh or “Only good TERF is a dead TERF” sign in sight.

But fear not. The same Met Police who defended now-proscribed group Hizb ut-Tahrir’s demonstration after October 7th, saying “The word jihad has a number of meanings“, now insist that “The fact one of the t-shirts has a union flag on it is entirely coincidental”. Well, that’s me convinced. In fact, the Met are exhausted by your conspiracy theories, writing that “It’s disappointing we are increasingly having to challenge this sort of misinformation which only serves to increase divisions and tensions”. But the plummeting public trust in Britain’s police and justice system are of its own making. Britain’s security state is setting itself in opposition to the largely law-abiding indigenous host majority, while gaslighting them about the non-existence of a two-tier justice system that favors tribal minorities.

One might think, as Sam Bidwell suggests, the police should preoccupy themselves with preventing street conflicts not between Britain’s indigenous host and immigrant populations, but between its Indian diaspora and Pakistani enclaves. On April 22, Pakistani Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba killed 26 and injured 20 more in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Both nations cancelled the other’s visas, and are in the process of expelling foreign nationals before they expire. Pakistan has suspended all trade with and air travel from India. Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Modi has warned, “India will identify, track and punish every terrorist, their handlers and their backers, [and] we will pursue them to the ends of the earth.”

Thanks to decades of mass immigration and multiculturalism, Britain is home to powerful Indian and Pakistani ethno-political lobbies. Around 3 million Indians and 1.9 million Pakistanis live legally in the UK. They are substantially younger than the white British host population, and already brought Leicester to an ungovernable standstill in 2022 when Muslims and Hindus rioted for a month over a cricket match. Last Friday, both factions gathered outside the Pakistani Embassy in London for a mixture of a protest and a dance-off, replete with Indian, Pakistani, Israeli, and Palestinian flags. Most alarming was when Colonel Taimur Rahat of the Pakistani military appeared to make a throat-slitting gesture toward Indian protestors.

Both subcontinental factions have sympathetic politicians. They weaponize domestic antidiscrimination law to pursue foreign policy goals: for example, listing the denial of an independent Palestine and Kashmir as an example of Islamophobia, in guidance adopted by local councils. Conservative-party candidates committed to a Hindu Manifesto at the last general election, promising to further liberalize visa rules for dependents and elderly parents of Hindus already in Britain. Indian-heritage cabinet ministers, like Priti Patel and Rishi Sunak, instigated an unprecedented rise in Indian migration after Brexit. Patel described these migrants as “living bridges”, using Prime Minister Modi’s term.

May 9, 2025

The growing problem of antisemitism in Canada

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

In The Free Press, Casey Babb considers the growing risks to Jews on the streets of Canadian cities after the October 2024 terror attack and resulting Israeli military reaction:

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

Late last year I sat down to breakfast in Ottawa, Ontario, with Dr. Einat Wilf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had come to Canada’s capital to speak about the war in Israel, what Palestinians really want, and the future of a possible two-state solution. Near the end of our chat, I asked if she had seen any of the “pro-Palestinian” rallies that had become a weekly occurrence in the city. “One of them went by my hotel last night,” Wilf said. “There’s a very dark energy to them. Serious pre-pogrom vibes.”

The word pogrom is the Yiddish word for “devastation” or “destruction”. What it refers to, historically, are the mob attacks that were a regular feature of life for Jews in the 19th and early 20th centuries — attacks that most often were passively or openly supported by the state.

Wilf chose it deliberately.

In the roughly six months since we sat down together, the situation in Ottawa and across the country has only worsened. Canada has become one of the most antisemitic countries in the Western world.

If you doubt that assertion, it’s important to note that’s how others have described it, too.

In a report released on May 6 by Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism, it states that from October 7, 2023 through the end of 2024, antisemitism in Canada skyrocketed an astounding 670 percent. Further, between October 7, 2023 and October 7, 2024, there were 1,500 pro-Palestinian rallies in Toronto alone. That’s over four a day — every day — for a year straight.

While the outbreak of antisemitism throughout the West has been precipitous in virtually every country — the tenor, violence, and extremist nature of Jew-hatred in Canada has ratcheted up in a way few other places on Earth have experienced.

Consider the following — much of which has gotten scant media attention.

Targeting Jews in Their Backyards

  • In September 2024 protesters sympathetic to Hamas and the “resistance” jubilantly rallied outside a Jewish retirement facility in Ottawa where several Holocaust survivors live, and where 60 percent of the residents suffer from dementia. Chants of “Go back to Europe” and “We want bullets and missiles!” in Arabic could be heard from their bedrooms.
  • On Remembrance Day in 2024 at Sir Robert Borden public school in Ottawa, where there is a large Jewish student body, a Palestinian protest song was the only song played during an event to honor Canadian soldiers. When pressed on the choice of music, Principal Aaron Hobbs said it was chosen to add some diversity and inclusion to a day usually about “a white guy who has done something related to the military”.
  • There have been numerous instances where, in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods, protesters have dressed up like Palestinian terrorists, including the October 7 mastermind Yahya Sinwar.
  • Hundreds of pro-Palestinian protests surrounded the Holocaust Museum in Montreal in March 2024, where they shouted, “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews”.
  • At a softball game for teenage girls between Canada and Israel as part of last year’s Canada Cup Women’s International Softball Championship in Surrey, British Columbia, protesters stood on the sidelines wearing keffiyehs, holding signs that read “Israel is a genocidal state”, with another equating Israel with Nazi Germany.
  • In April, a pro-Hamas rally was staged in Winnipeg, just steps from a Jewish community center where children attend school and day care.
  • During Israel’s official day of remembrance for fallen soldiers and victims of terrorism on April 29, protesters stood in front of Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda Synagogue in Toronto waving Palestinian flags. One man wore a sweater that read “Palestinian Holocaust: Never Again Is Now”.
  • Earlier this month in Montreal, protesters were filmed chanting “All the Zionists are racists” through megaphones at a school for students ages 4 to 16 with intellectual disabilities and autism-spectrum disorders.

These activities aren’t normal protests. They aren’t in front of the Israeli embassy in Ottawa or the Israeli consulate in Toronto. They aren’t directed toward a specific Israeli policy, law, regulation, or act, and they certainly make no mention of Hamas, Hezbollah, or any other terrorist organization that has brought immense death and destruction upon the Palestinians. These are belligerent acts of aggression designed to intimidate Canada’s Jewish community, to coerce them into silence, and ultimately, to extinguish their public presence.

March 22, 2025

Fundraising is much tougher for Democrats right now … and they’re not coping well

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

It’s not just Canadian politicians getting driven completely insane by the Bad Orange Man’s antics — he’s even doing it to his domestic opponents in the Democratic party as well:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee.

Kansas City Star:

    Democrats Suffer Blow Ahead of Senate Elections

It’s a goddamn slide show, but as it might be amusing I shall wade in. The things I do for you people …

    Sen. Jeanne Shaheen’s retirement is expected to significantly impact the Democratic Party’s prospects for the upcoming Senate elections, amplifying pressure on Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY). The party’s challenges ahead have heightened with the departures of Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) and Sen. Tina Smith (D-MN). Democrats must regain four seats to reclaim the majority.

It sure looks like the Donks are planning to get clobbered in 2026. Or, more likely, they anticipate a series of bruising primary fights as the old grift-and-grin Democrats are challenged by True Believers, because as HGG has taught us — credit where it’s due — SJWs always double down. Batshit insanity is the hill they’ve chosen to die on — Trump keeps handing them 80/20 issues, and they keep jumping on the 20 with both feet.

    CNN’s Chris Cillizza recently noted the Party’s challenges in the upcoming Senate elections. With the need for a net gain of four seats, Cillizza expressed concern over potential financial limitations that may hinder effective campaigning.

Yes. “Financial limitations”. Democrat donors are stupid — if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be Democrats — but even they can see that 80 is way, way bigger than 20.

Oh, and also: It doesn’t help that you’re openly, gleefully endorsing no-shit terrorism against Tesla dealerships — and drivers! — calling for Musk’s assassination, and so on. It’s a bad look in general, and a bad look in particular, because now the guys with the big checkbooks are wondering if that kind of thing won’t happen to them if they get crosswise with the most lunatic members of the lunatic fringe (hint: It will. As the scorpion said to the frog: can’t be ‘elped, mate, it’s me nature).

    Cillizza said, “The money that gets spent there playing defense, just to hold Democratic seats, means money that doesn’t get spent playing offense in, let’s say, a state like Ohio, where Democrats are trying to recruit Sherrod Brown, the former senator, to take on John Huston, the appointed Republican senator.”

Yes, a dwindling asset pool forces those kinds of choices. It also doesn’t help that you keep going back to the well like that. One assumes there’s a reason Sherrod Brown is a former senator. Do you have no one else?

Haha, just kidding, obviously you don’t have anyone else. That’s one of the biggest problems with gerontocracy — the Groovy Fossils are going to have to be carried out at room temperature, so anyone with anything on the ball has been giving Government a pass since the 1980s. Trump went around the Official GOP for lots of reasons, but not the least of them was: he had to. They have the same gerontocracy problem as the other side of the Uniparty. It’s turtles all the way down.

    Cillizza concluded, “I just do not see it. I don’t see the money there. I don’t see the energy there. I don’t see the candidates there to expand the playing field”.

It won’t be for lack of trying, though. You’ve still got The Media in your pocket, and they can still do some damage. You’ll never get to the 80 side of those 80/20 issues, but you might get it to 50/50 — as has been done with abortion, gay “marriage”, and so on. On the other hand, those took 40, 50 years, and The Media hadn’t totally pissed away all its credibility back then. It’s a real corner you’ve backed yourselves into, guys gals persyns.

It also doesn’t help that you’re stupid:

    Democrats have identified potential pickup opportunities in Maine and North Carolina, targeting Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC).

Holy breakdancing Buddha, why would you target them? Thom Tillis is the very definition of “RINO”; Collins is a Leftist, full stop. The next time they vote against the Democrats on any issue of substance will be the first time they’ve ever done it. It’s as predictable as sunrise, so much so that it’s a joke to anyone right of Mao — the GOP officially has X number of seats, minus Collins and Murkowski.

    Vulnerabilities among current incumbents, especially Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), have added to the party’s challenges.

    Oh, don’t worry about it — the GOP will find some way to throw it. Georgia, Georgia … hey, what’s Herschel Walker up to these days? Think he’s up for another run? Why not parachute in Alan Keyes or Ben Carson? They’re still alive, right? What about “Nikki” “Haley”? She’s gotta keep her arm loose for the 2028 primaries …

      Some Democrats have remained optimistic despite the hurdles. Discussions have included potential candidates such as Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and State Sen. Mallory McMorrow (D-MI) for key races. New Hampshire Democrats have prepared for competitive primaries, with Rep. Chris Pappas (D-NH) considering a bid for Shaheen’s seat.

    As we know, when it comes to crime 13 does 50. When it comes to Leftism, though, it’s more like 20 does 100, and there’s no better illustration than New Hampshire. It should be the reddest state in the union, and people who live there tell me it really is… except for their Congresscritters, because the good people of New Hampshire didn’t shoot every Masshole they could catch. The fine folks in Oregon, Colorado, and (soon enough) Texas know what I mean — y’all didn’t introduce migrating Californians to wood chippers when you had the chance.

March 7, 2025

“The Resistance” achieves lame nirvana

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

President Donald Trump is a boisterous, noisy distraction in so many ways and rubs a heck of a lot of people the wrong way in everything he does … and yet the politicians who oppose him seem to be engaged in a scientific experiment to discover just how cringeworthy they can be:

“REMINDER: It Is Offensive And Possibly Illegal To Photoshop Anything On These Democrats’ Signs That Would Make Them Look Foolish.
The Babylon Bee, https://x.com/TheBabylonBee/status/1897140039777239181/photo/1

Remember when the phrase “the Resistance” would conjure up visions of sexy French youths in berets battling actual Nazis? Now all it brings to mind is ageing dullards in pink suits holding up signs saying “This is not normal” while sporting the most turbo-smug look on their faces. As US president Donald Trump spoke to a joint session of Congress last night, “across the aisle the Resistance was stirring”, gushed the Guardian‘s DC reporter. His piece was illustrated with a pic of some congresswoman in pearls and a balding Democrat looking aghast as Trump talked. Seriously, if this is “the Resistance”, the world’s tyrants can rest easy.

Yesterday’s “Democrat fightback” and “resistance to Trump’s rhetoric” – journalists are literally calling it that – was next-level cringe. It occurred during Trump’s 100-minute speech, the longest Congress talk in 60 years. As Trump bashed Joe Biden and bigged up Elon Musk, the Dems came over all soixante-huitard. Fury coursed through their ranks. Then the revolt started. The Squad’s Rashida Tlaib held up a scrawled sign saying “That’s a lie!”. Dem representative Al Green “shook his cane and pointed his finger” and cried “You have no mandate” to cut Medicaid. How the regime must have quaked at the sight of this revolution!

The way some hacks are talking about this tantrum masquerading as a protest you’d think it was a modern-day storming of the Bastille. The Dems’ “stirring” acts of rebellion will have “given hope to the Resistance” and sent a message to “the world”, said the Guardian. Nurse! Even leftists who’ve been disappointed with the Dem establishment seemed to get a moral kick from this political pantomime. So far, the “resistance” to the Trumpist tyranny has been “splintered”, but now we know it’s “getting better”, fawned Vox. Perhaps, it said, we’ll soon see the “aggressive resistance” we really need.

Can these people hear themselves? Overpaid politicians holding up mass-produced black placards with hackneyed complaints like “False” and “Liar” are not “the Resistance” – they’re the establishment cosplaying as campus radicals for likes and headlines. In one especially squirming scene, some Dems “removed their outer business wear” to reveal black t-shirts with the word “RESIST” in “bold white letters”. Their delusions of radicalism are off the scale. Resistance is when young Iranian women rip off their hijabs or Kurdish revolutionaries fight the neo-fascists of ISIS, not when politicians on $174,000 a year put on a t-shirt their stressed intern ordered from some hip printer on 7th Street.

February 25, 2025

Likely trajectories of the victims of DOGE

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Bruce Ivar Godmundsson identifies the most probably career dislocations of civil servants winkled out of their expected life sinecures by the minions of Elon:

To put things another way, the status deprivation experienced by erstwhile feeders at the Federal trough will eventually lead to a great deal of radicalization. After all, if history is any guide, it is not the victims of sustained oppression who raise the banner of revolt, but those who lost advantages that they had earlier expected to enjoy for the rest of their days. (It was not, after all, agricultural laborers, let alone vagabonds, who enlisted in the machine-smashing armies of General Ludd, but practitioners of “decent trades” who had previously occupied lucrative bottlenecks in supply chains.)

As they LARP as extras in the street fighting scene of Les Misérables, the outcasts will find, standing beside them on the barricades, youngsters who, as recently as the autumn of 2024, had expected to parley their ability to paraphrase (or, at the very least, parrot) the Party Line into an internship with an agency, a poorly paid (but prestigious) place in an NGO, or, for those especially adept at symbolic manipulation, a job with a name-brand consulting firm.

Leaving aside the cinematic metaphors, some of the dispossessed will, no doubt, resort to rioting. More will ride the protest circuit, which will do for them what comic-book conventions do for fancy-dressed fans of manga and anime. Most, however, will do little more than haunt the margins of the middle class, muttering about their masters degrees in public policy as they wait for the next command to appear on the screens above their grills.

Repeated encounters with the fallen may drive the final nail into the coffin of the assumption, once central to the world view of so many Americans, that possession of a sheepskin entitled its holder to a desk job. No longer will parents dining at McDonalds whisper to their children “if you don’t go to college, you’ll end up like that”. Rather, they will point to the technician repairing a self-service kiosk and say “that’s the sort of thing that you want to do”.

February 14, 2025

“Over half of all Germans now find themselves on ‘the right’ and urgently require democratic reeducation”

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

Ah, poor German democracy … you guessed it, once again it’s hanging by a thread as protests against the extremely extreme extreme right (the AfD) have now grown to include protests against the merely extreme extreme right (the CDU and CSU):

“We are the cordon sanitaire – no cooperation with the AfD”: the banner leading the Berlin protest against AfD and CDU on 2 February, which was financed in part by the German taxpayer and arranged by semi-affiliated apron organisations of the governing Green and Social Democrat parties of Germany.

All the activists are out in force.

Every day there are new protests “against the right”, and by “the right” they do not merely mean Alternative für Deutschland and the one-in-five Germans who vote for them, as was the case last year at this time. Since Friedrich Merz stepped over the cordon sanitaire at the beginning of this month, “the right” now also includes the centre-right CDU and CSU parties. Over half of all Germans now find themselves on “the right” and urgently require democratic reeducation. What is worse, it is not just crazy pink-haired activists and septum-pierced Antifa who want to do the reeducating, oh no. It is the government itself; the activists are merely their agents.

According to taz, 500,000 right-thinking Germans took to the streets this past weekend to combat the out-of-bounds radical views held by 52% of everybody. Perhaps 200,000 or 250,000 or 320,000 turned out for the massive “Democracy Needs You” protest in Munich on Saturday. A further 35,000 people “warned against a shift to the right” in Bremen, the absurd “Grannies against the Right” brought 24,000 people to the streets of Hannover, and another 14,000 denounced “right-wing extremism” in Marburg. There were also protests throughout Nordrhein-Westfalen, in Wuppertal, Aachen, Duisburg, Gütersloh, Gummersbach and Euskirchen. Yesterday 15,000 showed up to protest an AfD event in Freiburg; they were less than peaceful. And that is just what I found by scanning a few headlines. I could easily expand this paragraph into an entire post because they are protesting everywhere and all the time “against the right” these days.

I must emphasise again the extremely expansive notion of “the right” that is in play at these protests. Basically everyone who is not on the left – and particularly everyone who does not vote for the Greens or the Social Democrats (SPD) – presently attracts the activists’ ire. That is very interesting, because we are in the final stages of an election campaign and the Greens and the SPD are the only parties in government. Could it be that the Greens and the SPD are using the substantial resources of the German state to call forth massive street protests against all the Germans who are not planning to vote for them?

Yes, in fact that is exactly how it could be:

    When 160,000 demonstrators turned out to protest on behalf of the cordon sanitaire on the first weekend in February, and organisers projected the words “All Berlin hates the CDU” onto the Victory Column, the red-green federal government provided financial support. The rally was co-sponsored from the coffers of the federal budget … indirectly and in two ways. As in many German cities, the organiser was the association Campact. Campact itself does not receive government funds. Yet they are the primary stakeholder of the nonprofit HateAid, which receives funds from the Ministry for Family Affairs. Since 2020, HateAid has received a total of almost 2.5 million Euros from the “Live Democracy” project, and their funding has just been extended. According to the Ministry for Family Affairs, HateAid can expect 424,823 Euros this year for its work against online hate speech.

    Thousands also took to the streets in Dresden and Leipzig to protest CDU plans for migration policy. In both cities, the SPD and the Greens indirectly sponsored the rallies with taxpayer money, this time through the Workers’ Welfare Association (AWO). This association enjoys the favour of the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Family Affairs. The AWO received tens of thousands of Euros … in 2024. In Saxony-Anhalt, the AWO state association received 90,043 Euros from the Ministry of Family Affairs in 2025, among other things from the ‘Live Democracy’ project …

    Paus’s ministry also provides financial support to many of the organisers of demonstrations in Schleswig-Holstein. This year, a total of 1.525 million Euros will flow … The municipalities divide the money equally among themselves, with each receiving 140,000 Euros to form local “partnerships for democracy”. Many of the sponsored organisations have sponsored demonstrations on behalf of the cordon sanitaire. In Kiel, the Green-financed “Central Education and Advice Centre for Migrants” … called for a protest in front of the CDU headquarters, in Lübeck the “Lübeck Refugee Forum” did the same …

All of this is to varying degrees illegal. Non-profit organisations, which receive tax-deductible contributions from supporters, are bound to political neutrality. Nor can the government finance (directly or otherwise) campaign events against the political opposition. Since 2021, however, in the name of defending democracy, the traffic light coalition have called into being an absolute jungle of NGOs to intimidate voters, censor the internet and riot on the streets against parliamentary votes. Their semi-affiliated activist cadres police German politics and redefine as right-wing and forbidden whatever it is our rulers happen to disagree with at the moment.

January 22, 2025

“Do not give institutional power to activists” or “moral projects to bureaucrats”, but “Progressivism systematically does both”

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

Lorenzo Warby on the dangers of enabling totalitarians and suffering the useful idiots in any political system:

The overthrow of Robespierre in the National Convention on 27 July 1794, Max Adamo (1870),
Wikimedia Commons.

Do not give institutional power to activists, as activism — being power without responsibility that readily lauds bad behaviour — attracts manipulative “Cluster B” personalities. Moreover, activism degrades realms of human action by imposing pre-conceived outcomes and constraints on them. We can see this is in all the entertainment franchises whose internal logics of story and canon have been debauched in the service of political messaging.1

Do not give moral projects to bureaucrats, as such projects elevate the authority of the bureaucrats who become moral masters, devaluing the authority of the citizens turned into moral subjects, and so undermines any ethic of service to said citizenry. Such projects also frustrate accountability, as the grand intentions can, and will, be used to shield the bureaucrats from scrutiny. Indeed, moral projects rapidly become moralised projects, whose grand intentions protects, even aggrandise, the self-interest of the bureaucrats.2

Progressivism systematically does both — give institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats. Hence progressivism has so often proved disastrous for human flourishing. Indeed, it has a powerful tendency to use the grandeur of its moral intentions to free itself from moral constraints: to be moralised, rather than moral.

As various folk “walk away” from what left-progressivism has become, a common sentiment is some version of “this is not the Left I remember” or “this is not what the Left used to stand for”. Yet, one of the striking things about Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (aka “wokery”) within contemporary societies is how thoroughly it is replicating mechanisms of social control familiar to any student of Communism, of Marxist Party-states.

This “not the Left I joined” is typically a notion of “the Left” that does not include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu … So it is an historically illiterate, “wouldn’t-it-be-nice”, Leftism. Yet it is precisely the Left that does include Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Mengistu, Ceausescu and so on whose echoes are being played out in our societies.

When we look around our contemporary societies, we have commissars/political officers (aka DEI officers, intimacy consultants, sensitivity readers, bias response teams, etc); Zhdanovism, in the remarkable ideological conformism in the arts, entertainment and gaming (usefully discussed here); Lysenkoism in science journals, especially the genderwoo sex-is-non-binary nonsense, though genetics research and male-female differences also have aspects of it; and censorship that was originally paraded as stopping “hate speech”, now being purveyed as anti-dis/mis/mal-information. Critical Pedagogy — which has become influential in Education Faculties and teacher training — is explicitly about replicating Mao’s Cultural Revolution model of permanent revolution. We have the same, disastrous, patterns of institutional power to activists and moral projects to bureaucrats.

    1. There is a large difference from the “we want to be included, we want a say” activism that abolished first the slave trade and then slavery, that abolished laws against Jews and Catholics, that gave us universal male and then female suffrage — what I have called the Emancipation Sequence. Such political movements included previously excluded folk in freedoms and political processes that already existed. They did not give institutional power to activists nor moral projects to bureaucrats.

    2. The institutional shrinkage of the Church has not abolished the meaning-and-morality role it used to play, it has just shifted it into academe and the welfare state apparat, making both simultaneously more arrogant and less functional.

November 21, 2024

“If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly … then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In The Line, Josh Dehaas explains why Justice Mosley’s Federal Court decision earlier in 2024 didn’t go far enough to protect Canadians’ rights, specifically their right to assemble in large numbers where the government claims to think that things might get violent:

Arms of the Federal Court of Canada

Earlier this year, Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was illegal.

There was a lot to like in that ruling, not least of which because it agreed with the official position of my organization, the Canadian Constitution Foundation.

First, Mosley agreed that the definitions of “national emergency” and “threats to the security of Canada” weren’t met by the federal government, thus invalidating their use of the Emergencies Act. Second, the Justice agreed that freezing bank accounts without a warrant violated the Charter right against unreasonable searches. Third, he agreed that the regulations that banned travelling to, participating in, and funding certain assemblies under threat of up to five years in prison violated freedom of expression.

But not all of Mosley’s ruling was commendable, from our point of view. What we didn’t like was a finding that the same regulations that violated expression because they banned a person from “merely going onto Parliament Hill waving a placard” regardless of whether that person had blockaded or breached the peace, didn’t also violate the Charter guarantee of freedom of peaceful assembly. How could that be? The CCF is asking the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn that finding when it hears the government’s appeal, most likely in early 2025.

This week, we got the government’s stunning and frankly, disturbing, response to that very point of contention. We expected the government to argue that the limitations to individuals’ rights to peaceful assembly were reasonable, given the need to deal with the protest writ large. That wasn’t their only claim.

Instead, the government pulled out an entirely novel line of reasoning, arguing that the Charter doesn’t protect assemblies if they might turn violent or breach the peace. If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly — establishing a new precedent on when Charter freedoms can be subject to limits — then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest. The federal government’s view that assemblies are not Charter-protected and can be blocked in advance if someone in the crowd might reasonably be expected to breach the peace cannot stand if we’re to have any meaningful right to peaceful assembly at all.

October 26, 2024

The coming Hundred Days (?)

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

In spite of everything, I still lean toward optimism, so I can’t say that I agree with Kulak’s take here:

January 6th, 2021 — A protest that got out of hand or the worst act of insurrection since 1861, depending on your political preference.

    There are decades when weeks happens, and weeks in which decades happen
    – Variously attributed to Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Robespierre, Napoleon, and Steve Bannon

As of writing it is 18 days to the election on Nov 5th, and 94 days to Inauguration Day on Jan 20th.

Maybe the most knowledgeable meta-historian/Commentator alive today, whatifalthist, has predicted a civil conflict in which over 1000 Americans die will begin in this period …

And I’d put the odds of “A Conflict” in which over 1 million die involving the US overlapping with this period at something like 70-80%. If it doesn’t happen then Biden will have somehow played the perfect drunken master and embodied the Trifecta of God favouring “fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”.

That is a major American conflict: beginning, continuing, or dramatically ending within this period.

Civil War or “Troubles” is still slightly below a 50% likelihood … But that’s because I think The Ukraine or Israel wars going nuclear, a hot war with Iran, A Chinese move towards Taiwan, or what’s increasingly looking like a possible foreign backed Cartel-War on US soil (see Aurora) … might suck the oxygen out of a final domestic reckoning between America’s two political factions (Trump and Swamp) … at least until 2028 or 2032.

However America’s domestic instability is what’s driving the risk of escalation, miscalculation and uncertainty everywhere else and that will be the focus of this piece …

I am unprepared for what I think is coming … I’ve maybe thought about such an outcome for a decade now, I lived through 2020 and the Canadian Lockdowns with outrage and totalitarian anxiety (remember Canada was the testing ground for what they wanted to everywhere else, we got what Alex Jones only prophesied), and I’ve been a amateur and semi-professional war and preparedness commentator for 2 and a half years now … and it’s hit me how unprepared I am.

I’m more prepared than most, but, setting aside the political implications, I would trade A LOT for another 4 year election cycle of 2023 conditions to make money, network, buy kit, develop skills, read books, write articles, prepare, plot …

I’m doubtful I’ll get it.

I’m also painfully aware that a very large percentage of people and institutions would not financially or morally survive a long Biden “normalcy” … and that that desperation is driving a lot of the instability.

But ya, I’m already starting to intuitively anticipate/feel that hard times — things moving too fast — reactive loss of initiative feeling that I’ve only really felt when a relationship was imploding, during that one very rough exam season in Uni, at the height of the 2020 election-2021 Canadian Lockdowns, or those months when the doctors discussed amputation as an possibility …

And depending on who you are and your personal situation, you’re either keenly feeling that as well or blissfully unaware.

October 24, 2024

Did the Media Lose the Vietnam War?

Filed under: Asia, History, Media, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Real Time History
Published Jun 21, 2024

In late April 1975, dramatic images from Saigon are beamed across the world. North Vietnamese troops proclaimed final victory. Just how did the US lose the Vietnam War?
(more…)

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